The Night Season (10 page)

CHAPTER

18

Susan hunched over
her computer at the
Herald
, yawned, and tried to focus on her monitor. Never take Chinese uppers on an empty stomach. This was what Susan’s mother, Bliss, had told her. It wasn’t even real speed. It was just some herb in gel caps in a bottle with Chinese characters on it. Bliss had gotten it from her acupuncturist, and given it to Susan before she’d gone on her yoga cruise. It was just like Bliss to head off on a three-week yoga cruise through the Caribbean days before the flood of the century. She was lucky that way. The ship had a media blackout policy, for “cleansing” purposes. Bliss had no idea what was going on back in Portland. This left Susan in charge of the goat and the compost pile and the leaky basement.

Susan had moved back into her childhood home eight months before. It was supposed to be temporary. Then it was supposed to be just until she saved up enough for a down payment on a loft in one of those redeveloped warehouses in the Pearl District.

Living with Bliss had its pros and cons. Susan’s mother wore her hair bleached and dreadlocked, boycotted anything plastic, and had recently gotten a medical marijuana card for unspecified “anxiety.” But Susan could live there for free. And if you liked brown rice, a lot, Bliss made a pretty good meal. What Susan didn’t like to admit was that, after what she’d been through over the last year, as crazy as it was, home felt safe.

She shouldn’t have taken the Chinese uppers. But it was two in the morning. And Ian was demanding copy. He’d already gone ballistic on her for staying at the hospital with Henry and Archie rather than hightailing it back to the paper. She had really pissed him off this time. He wouldn’t even pay for the cab.

“That’s it?” Ian blustered. He’d been eating sour-cream-and-onion potato chips from the vending machine. Susan could smell them on his breath. He sat down on the edge of her desk, nearly knocking her purse onto the floor. She emphatically moved the purse to the other side of her keyboard. “You write a two-thousand-word column on some old skeleton they found at a dog park, and I get three hundred words on a half-murdered cop?” Ian said.

“Derek already wrote the news story.”

“You were there when he was found. I want to know what he looked like. I want to feel him dying on the page.”

“He’s my friend,” Susan said.

“You’re a journalist. Act like one. I want a rewrite in twenty minutes.”

“No.”

“I can fire you.”

Susan ignored him.

Ian threw his hands in the air. “You know what?” He sputtered for a few seconds and then pointed at her. “You’re fired.”

Susan looked at him sideways. Was he kidding? “You can’t do that.”

“Ian,” Derek said.

Ian jabbed his thumb at Derek. “I can buy two of him to replace one of you,” Ian said to Susan. “You’re not that special.” He smoothed his ponytail back into place. “Pack a box,” he said. “I’m calling HR.” And he walked away.

He was serious.

This wasn’t happening. This was all a Chinese-speed-induced hallucination. This was why people shouldn’t do drugs.

She moved her purse onto her lap and held it there.

“Do you want me to help you find a box?” Derek asked.

CHAPTER

19

“Tetrodotoxin,” Robbins said.

Archie had no idea what that was, but Robbins had been right—he didn’t like the sound of it. Chief Eaton evidently didn’t, either, because he immediately put a hand on Robbins’s shoulder, motioned for Archie with the other, and steered them both away from the others, back toward the mobile command center. Up close it looked even bigger and newer, not a scratch on its shiny black paint job. Eaton led them around the back of the vehicle. Archie had never been inside. But he imagined rows of flat-screen monitors and red telephones. Lights surrounded the trailer, like it was for sale as part of some showroom display. But at least they could see each other.

Eaton lowered his voice: “Tetro-what?” he asked Robbins.

The truck was idling and diesel fumes were thick in the air. Eaton coughed and loosened his tie.

Bioterrorism. Archie knew that’s what the chief was thinking. It’s where the mind went these days. Archie didn’t know what tetrodotoxin was, and he didn’t care. They’d identified it. They’d found what was poisoning Henry. Now they could help him.

“Tetrodotoxin,” Robbins said. “It’s a neurotoxin produced by a bacteria. TTX for short.”

Neurotoxin. That didn’t sound good.

“What are we talking about here?” Archie asked.

Robbins hesitated, then reached inside his jacket, retrieved a folded piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to Archie. Archie recognized the format. It was a Wikipedia page.

Archie scanned the headers: Classification, Behavior, Feeding, Breeding, Venom. An image to the right showed a fleshy spade-shaped creature with soft tentacles. It was beige, and spotted with incredibly bright blue rings. Eaton leaned close, squinting to see the page over Archie’s shoulder.

“What is it?” Eaton asked.

Archie looked up at Robbins. Was this a joke? Robbins met Archie’s gaze without a trace of levity.

“A blue-ringed octopus,” Robbins said.

“An octopus,” Archie repeated. It sounded as ridiculous said aloud as it did when he said it in his head.

No one spoke for a moment. There was noise. Voices around them, idling diesel engines, radios crackling, orders being barked, the constant hum of the rain, the rushing river—but it was also oddly silent, the noises that were supposed to surround them absent. The Burnside Bridge was up, so there were no cars driving overhead. Naito Parkway, which ran parallel to the park, was closed to all but emergency personnel. No squawk of birds or kids laughing or dogs barking.

“Detective Sobol was attacked by an octopus?” Eaton said. There was no judgment to it; just a man in charge repeating information he’d been given by an expert. Archie could see why the guy had been promoted.

Robbins leaned close to them, his face tense. “Not just Henry—the three other victims, too. All tested positive for TTX.”

It made one thing make sense. “The puncture wounds on the palms,” Archie said. “But couldn’t someone have isolated the poison? Be injecting it with a syringe?”

“The point of entry on the palms is from a beak, not a needle,” Robbins said. “A blue-ring delivers venom by puncturing its prey with its beak. But let me be clear, this isn’t accidental. This thing is being used as a weapon.”

“So what’s the antivenom?” Archie asked.

“There is no antivenom.”

Which meant there was no cure. Which meant that Henry was still dying. Archie felt a wave of nausea rush over him, and he reached out and steadied himself on the back of the trailer.

“The treatment is palliative care,” Robbins said quickly. “Keeping him breathing. Keeping his heart beating. He’s lucky Claire and Susan found him when they did. If he can make it twenty-four hours, odds are he’ll recover.”

Eaton pulled some more at his tie, and looked around them at the National Guard, the cops, the massive sandbag effort that had drawn thousands of volunteers to the river’s edge. He didn’t look so calm anymore. “Wait a minute, son,” he said to Robbins. “You’re saying that there’s some sort of deadly octopi in the water?”

Archie could see Robbins bristle at “son.”

“Octopuses,” Robbins said. “‘Octopi’ would only be correct for a second-declension Latin noun. ‘Octopus’ is a Greek third-declension masculine. And no, that’s not what I’m saying.”

Archie was doing math. He had last talked to Henry at six. It was now nearly three
A.M.
Nine hours had passed. That left fifteen to go. Fifteen hours between life and death. It didn’t used to seem like such a long time. You could drive from Portland to Los Angeles in fifteen hours. Now it seemed like a lifetime. For Henry, it might be.

Three people had been murdered.

Archie coughed, the taste of diesel a paste in his mouth.

“The water’s rising,” Eaton said. “If there’s something deadly in there, we need to warn people.”

They weren’t in the water. The chief hadn’t made the leap yet.

“Octopuses live in the ocean,” Archie said. He scanned the Wikipedia paragraph on habitat, the page already soft and damp in his hand. “These blue-ringed octopuses, their habitat is temperate salt water. They wouldn’t last more than a few minutes in the Willamette.”

Eaton’s phone rang. He didn’t pick it up. He put his hand to his upper belly, like it hurt. “So where are these people picking them up?” he asked. “Off the sidewalk?”

Archie thought about it. “Maybe someone hands the thing to them.”

“What?” Robbins said dryly. “Like, ‘Here, hold my octopus.’”

Archie’s mind was working now. He didn’t feel cold anymore. It was like everything else fell away and the world narrowed to this one task, this one job—find the answer. It’s what made him good at being a detective, and bad at being a husband. “Where do you get these things? Besides Australia?”

“You can buy them on eBay,” Robbins said. “I checked.”

Eaton shook his head slowly. “Some nut is using a goddamn fish to kill people?”

“Not a fish,” Robbins said. “A cephalopod.”

Archie remembered the empty plastic bag they’d found at the Japanese American Plaza.

“How big are these things?” Archie asked Robbins.

“Roughly?” Robbins said with a shrug. “The size of a golf ball, maybe.”

Archie stepped away from the back of the idling command center and peered around to where Heil, Ngyun, and Flannigan were standing, waiting for news of Henry and the toxin. All three rolled up on the balls of their feet when they saw Archie look their way.

“Heil,” Archie called. “Get that bag tested for traces of salt water.”

Archie gazed past the chief, past Robbins, past the sandbaggers and the National Guard, past the seawall, and over the river. The Eastbank Esplanade was made up of a series of promenades and floating docks, metal-grated overpasses and dark underpasses—it had already started to flood. The lights that usually lit the walkway at night had shorted out. Parts of the esplanade were reportedly already underwater. It was dark and wet and cold.

Someone had to have seen something.

“What are you thinking?” Robbins asked.

Archie looked down at his wrong shoes, and wrong jacket, and wrong pants. He sneezed. Then he looked back across the dark Willamette.

It wasn’t like he was going to get any sleep anyway.

“That I want to move to the desert,” Archie said.

CHAPTER

20

Susan had taken
her flowers with her. It had taken six trips. Seven, including the box with all her desk crap in it. A Hooters mug. A ceramic phrenology head.
The Dictionary of American Slang
. Two bottles of unopened red wine. These things took up room.

What kind of person fires someone in the middle of the night? In the rain?

She couldn’t sleep. Too many Chinese uppers. So she poured herself her fourth glass of red wine, leaned back on the couch, and wondered at what point drinking late at night became drinking in the morning. If she went to bed, she’d just lie there obsessing anyway. She’d been fired. Terminated. Axed. Canned. Told to take a long walk off a short pier.

It was for the best, she decided. Getting the pink slip. Getting shown the door. This whole thing. She had money saved up. And it wasn’t like she had to pay rent. Now she was free to write what she wanted. She was free of carpet off-gassing and fluorescent lights and people who rode the elevator one floor instead of taking the stairs. She was free of the lobby receptionists who always pretended to never remember who she was. She was free of Ian.

There were too many bouquets in the living room. What had she been thinking? It smelled like the bathroom of a fancy restaurant in there—all orchidy and oppressively sweet.

She got up and sniffed around the room until she found the most egregious offenders. Easter lilies. She’d always thought that lilies kind of stank. Who wanted a flower you could smell from upstairs? The Romans believed that lilies were created when Juno was nursing Hercules, and milk fell from the sky. Old breast milk. That’s what lilies were.

Susan grabbed the lilies out of the earthenware vase she’d put them in and, holding them at arm’s length, headed for the back door. It was still raining. It was going to rain for the rest of her life. She could hear it out there, falling in torrents off the overflowing gutters of her mother’s crumbling Victorian house. Susan put on her rubber boots and the Mexican poncho Bliss kept on a hook by the back door, flipped on the back porch light, and headed out into the backyard with the bouquet.

The compost pile was in the back corner of the yard. Her mother had not upgraded to the big black plastic-lidded barrels that everyone else in Portland seemed to have. People in Portland were increasingly obsessed with composting. Even fast-food joints did it, at least the locally owned ones. You went to bus your tray and it took ten minutes to figure out which of the five categories your trash fit into. But Bliss was old school. She still had the giant wood-and-chicken-wire corral that Susan’s father had built before he’d started dying. You had to pull bricks off the tarp that covered it, stuff in what you wanted to compost, and then stir the compost with a rusty pitchfork that would send most people running for a tetanus shot.

Susan tromped through the mud, chin down against the rain. The bricks were wet and the tarp was slimy, but she managed to jam the lilies into the bin and then replace the cover.

It felt good.

Not as good as having a job.

But good.

She was headed back into the house when she heard the goat. It made a little goat sound.

“Oh, come on,” Susan said.

The goat was standing in the rain, looking at her. It whined again.

“Go into your house,” Susan said, pointing to the big wooden doghouse that Bliss had painted to look like a psychedelic Tudor cottage. The goat was tethered to a stake, but it had plenty of room to get around.

The goat just stood there getting wet.

Maybe it was the wine, but Susan suddenly found herself feeling very bad for the goat. Out there all alone in the pitch-black. Trapped in an urban backyard. Did that goat dream of farms? Of green pastures and kids?

“You’re lonely, aren’t you?” Susan asked.

The goat bayed.

Susan walked over and unclipped the goat’s tether, and led it by the collar up the back porch steps and into the kitchen. The goat did a little dance on the wood floor. Susan thought it looked happy.

She slipped off her muddy boots, took off the wet poncho, and opened another bottle of wine. Then she dried the goat off with a dish towel and led it into the living room.

The goat walked around in a circle a couple of times like a cat, and then fell asleep on the carpet. It smelled a little, but it was better than the lilies.