by Robin Cook
“I do what you say,” Carlos said.
“Just don’t screw up this time,” Shanahan said. “I’ve gone out on a limb for you, and I don’t want to be embarrassed again.”
“No problem!” Carlos said with emphasis. “Tonight I keeelll him!”
SEVENTEEN
Monday night, January 26th
Straightening up with a groan, Kim stretched his back. Abandoning his heavy wooden-handled mop, he put his hands on his hips to get maximum extension.
Kim was by himself mopping the front hall, starting from the reception area. He’d had his earphone in for the last ten minutes, complaining to Tracy how exhausted he was. Tracy was sympathetic.
The cleaning had been extensive. The whole crew had started with high-pressure steam hoses on the kill floor. It was backbreaking work, since the hoses weighed several hundred pounds and had to be hauled up onto the catwalks.
After the kill floor, they had moved into the boning rooms. Cleaning them had taken the rest of the shift up until the dinner break at six. At that time Kim had gone back out to the car and even had had the stomach for some of the lunch he and Tracy had packed that morning.
After the dinner break, Kim had been sent out on his own on various jobs around the plant. As the others had slowed down, he’d volunteered to mop the front hall.
“I’m never going to complain about surgery being hard work again,” he said into his microphone.
“After all this experience, I’ll hire you to do my house,” Tracy quipped. “Do you do windows?”
“What time is it?” Kim asked. He was in no mood for humor.
“It’s a little after ten,” Tracy said. “Less than an hour to go. Are you going to make it?”
“I’ll make it, all right,” Kim said. “I haven’t seen any of my cleaning colleagues for the last hour. It’s time for the record room.”
“Be quick!” Tracy urged. “Your being in there is going to make me anxious all over again, and I don’t think I can take too much more.”
Kim stuck the heavy-duty mop into his bucket and pushed the contraption down the hall to the record room door. Its broken central panel was covered by a piece of thin plywood.
Kim tried the door. It opened with ease. He reached in and turned on the light. Except for a larger sheet of the same plywood over the sashless window facing the parking lot, the room looked entirely normal. The broken glass and the rock he’d tossed in had all been taken away.
The left side of the room had a long line of file cabinets. At random, Kim yanked out the nearest drawer. It was jammed full of files so tightly that not another sheet of paper could have been added.
“Gosh,” Kim said. “They sure do have a lot of paperwork. This isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.”
• • •
The end of an El Producto cigar burned brightly for a few moments and then faded. Elmer Conrad held the resulting smoke in his mouth for a few pleasurable moments and then blew it contentedly at the ceiling.
Elmer was the three-to-eleven cleaning crew supervisor. He’d held the job for eight years. His idea of work was to sweat like crazy for the first half of the shift and then coast. At that moment he was in the coasting mode, watching a Sony Watchman in the lunchroom with his feet up on a table.
“You wanted to see me, boss?” Harry Pearlmuter asked, poking his head into the lunchroom from the back hall. Harry was one of Elmer’s underlings.
“Yeah,” Elmer said. “Where’s that queer-looking temp guy?”
“I think he’s out in the front hall mopping,” Harry said. “At least that’s what he said he was going to do.”
“Do you think he cleaned those two bathrooms out there?” Elmer asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Harry said. “You want me to check?”
Elmer let his heavy feet fall to the floor with a thump. He pushed himself up to his full height. He was over six-feet-five and weighed two hundred forty pounds.
“Thanks, but I’ll do it myself,” Elmer said. “I told him twice he had to clean those heads before eleven. If he hasn’t done them, he will! He’s not leaving here until they’re done.”
Elmer put down his cigar, took a swig of coffee, and set out to find Kim. What was motivating him was that he’d received specific instructions from the front office that Kim was to clean the bathrooms in question, and he was to clean them alone. Elmer had no idea why he’d gotten such an order, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was that it was carried out.
“This isn’t going to be so hard after all,” Kim said into his microphone. “I found a whole drawer of Process Deficiency Reports. They go from nineteen eighty-eight to the present. Now, all I have to do is find January ninth.”
“Hurry up, Kim,” Tracy said. “I’m starting to get nervous again.”
“Relax, Trace,” Kim said. “I told you I haven’t seen a soul in an hour. I think they’re all back in the lunchroom watching a ball game. . . . Ah, here we are, January ninth. Hmmm. The folder’s jammed full.”
Kim pulled a clutch of papers from the folder. He turned around and put them down on the library table.
“Pay dirt!” Kim said happily. “It’s the whole group of papers Marsha talked about.” Kim spread the papers out so that he could see them all. “Here’s the purchase invoice from Bart Winslow for what must have been a sick cow.”
Kim glanced through the other papers, finally picking one up. “Here’s what I’m looking for. It’s a Process Deficiency Report on the same cow.”
“What does it say?” Tracy asked.
“I’m reading it,” Kim said. After a moment he added: “Well, the mystery has been solved. The last cow’s head fell off the rail onto the floor. Of course, I know what that means after the work I’ve been doing today. It probably fell in its own manure and then went in to be butchered for hamburger meat. This cow could have been infected with the E. coli. That’s consistent with what you found out from Sherring Labs this afternoon indicating that the patty made from the meat butchered on January ninth was heavily contaminated.”
In the next instant, Kim was startled enough to let out a whimper. To his utter shock the Process Deficiency Report was ripped from his hands. He spun around to find himself facing Elmer Conrad. While he’d been talking, he’d not heard the man come into the room.
“What the hell are you doing with these papers?” Elmer demanded. His broad face had become beet-red.
Kim felt his heart race. Not only had he been caught looking at confidential documents, but he had the microphone in his right ear. To try to keep the wire out of Elmer’s line of sight, he kept his head turned to the right, looking at Elmer out of the corner of his eye.
“You better answer me, boy,” Elmer growled.
“They were on the floor,” Kim said, desperately trying to think of something. “I was trying to put them back.”
Elmer glanced at the open drawer to the file cabinet, then back at Kim. “Who were you talking to?”
“Was I talking?” Kim asked innocently.
“Don’t mess with me, boy,” Elmer warned.
Kim put his hand on his head then gestured ineffectually at Elmer, but no words came out of his mouth. He was trying to think of something clever to say but couldn’t.
“Tell him you were talking to yourself,” Tracy whispered.
“Okay,” Kim said. “I was talking to myself.”
Elmer looked askance at Kim, almost the same way Kim was looking at Elmer.
“You sounded like you were having a goddamn conversation,” Elmer said.
“I was,” Kim offered. “Just with myself. I do it all the time when I’m alone.”
“You’re one weird dude,” Elmer said. “What’s wrong with your neck?”
Kim rubbed the left side of his neck with his left hand. “It’s a little stiff,” he said. “Too much mopping, I guess.”
“Well, you got some more to do,” Elmer said. “Remember those two restrooms next door here. Remember I told you that
you had to clean them.”
“I guess that did slip my mind,” Kim said. “Sorry, but I can get right to it.”
“I don’t want you doing a crappy job,” Elmer said. “So take your time even if you have to work past eleven. Understand?”
“They’ll be pristine,” Kim promised.
Elmer tossed the Process Deficiency Report onto the table and roughly pushed all the papers together. While he was occupied, Kim pulled the earphone out of his ear and tucked it under his shirt. It felt good to straighten his neck out.
“We’ll leave these papers for the secretaries to deal with,” Elmer said. He reached over to the file cabinet and pushed the open drawer shut. “Now get the hell out of here. You’re not supposed to be in here in the first place.”
Kim preceded Elmer out of the room. Elmer hesitated at the door to look around one final time. Only then did he put out the light and close the door. Taking out a large ring of keys, he locked it.
Kim was busy rinsing out his mop when Elmer turned to him. “I’m going to keep my eye on you, boy,” Elmer warned. “And I’m going to come back and inspect these two restrooms after you’re done. So don’t cut corners.”
“I’ll do my best,” Kim said.
Elmer gave him one final disapproving look before heading back toward the lunchroom.
Kim slipped his earphone back into his ear as soon as Elmer disappeared from view.
“Did you hear that whole exchange?” Kim asked.
“Of course I heard it,” Tracy said. “Have you had enough of this nonsense now? Come on out!”
“No, I want to try to get those papers,” Kim said. “The problem is the bum locked the door.”
“Why do you want them?” Tracy asked with exasperation.
“It’s something more to show Kelly Anderson,” Kim said.
“We already have the results from the lab,” Tracy said. “That should be enough for Kelly Anderson to make a case for a recall. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Kim said. “At a minimum, Mercer Meats’ entire January twelfth production has to be recalled. But those papers also show how the industry is willing to buy sick cows, avoid inspection, and then allow a grossly soiled cow head to continue in production.”
“Do you think that was how Becky got sick?” Tracy asked emotionally.
“There’s a good chance,” Kim said with equal emotion. “That and the fact that her burger wasn’t cooked through.”
“It makes you realize how tenuous life is that it could be snuffed out by something so trivial as a cow’s head falling on the floor and a hamburger not cooked enough.”
“It also underlines the importance of what we’re doing here,” Kim said.
“How do you think you can get the papers now that the record-room door is locked?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Kim admitted. “But the door has a thin piece of plywood covering a hole. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to knock it off. But it will have to wait until I make a stab at these two restrooms. I expect Elmer to wander back here in a few minutes, so I better get busy.”
Kim looked at the two doors. They faced each other across the hall. He pushed open the men’s room door. Careful to avoid tipping over his bucket, he maneuvered it over the raised threshold and onto the tile. He gave it a shove into the room and let the door close behind him.
The room was a generous size with two toilet stalls and two urinals on the right and two sinks with mirrors over them to the left. There was a series of coat hooks just inside the door. The only other objects in the room were two paper towel dispensers and a trash container.
In the middle of the far wall was a window that looked out onto the parking lot.
“At least this men’s room isn’t very dirty,” Kim said. “I had fears that it was going to look like the one on the kill floor.”
“I wish I could come in there and help,” Tracy said.
“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” Kim said.
Kim grabbed the handle of the mop. Stepping on the wringer’s foot pedal, he wrung out the mop head. Then he walked over to the window and started mopping.
The door to the bathroom burst open with enough force for its knob to crack the wall tile. The sound and the movement shocked Kim, and his head shot up. To his utter dismay he now found himself staring at the man who had attacked him previously. Once again the man was brandishing a kill-floor knife.
The man’s lips slowly curled back into a cruel smile. “We meet again, Doctor. Only this time there will be no police and no woman to help you.”
“Who are you?” Kim demanded, eager for the man to continue talking. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“My name is Carlos. I’ve come to kill you.”
“Kim, Kim!” Tracy shouted in Kim’s ear. “What’s going on?”
To help him think, Kim tore the earphone from his ear. Now Tracy’s frantic voice sounded as if she were yelling from a great distance.
Carlos took a step into the room, while holding up the knife so that Kim could appreciate its size and curving shape. The abused door swung shut.
Kim had a hold of the mop and he instinctively raised it.
Carlos laughed. To him the idea of a mop against a kill-floor knife was ludicrous.
With no other alternative, Kim dashed into one of the open toilet stalls and bolted the door. Carlos lunged forward and kicked the door fiercely. The stall shuddered under the impact, but the door held. Kim frantically backed up and straddled the toilet. Beneath the stall door, he could see Carlo’s feet as he prepared to kick the door again.
Tracy panicked. She fumbled with the ignition key before getting the car started. Throwing the vehicle into gear, she stomped on the accelerator. The car shot forward with enough speed to press her into the seat. The antenna she’d balanced on top skidded off the back of the car and bounced along the pavement on its wire tether.
Tracy fought with the steering wheel to bring the speeding car around a tight turn. Misjudging the closeness of a neighboring vehicle, she ricocheted off its side, throwing her own car up onto two wheels for a split second. The car thudded to earth and with squealing tires rocketed along the front of Higgins and Hancock.
Tracy had no plan initially. Her only thought was to try to get to the men’s room where Kim was cornered, apparently by the same man who’d been in Kim’s house the night before. She knew she had little time. She could see the man’s horrid face in her mind’s eye as he’d tried to force his way into her shower stall with his knife.
For a moment Tracy contemplated crashing her car into the front entrance of the building, but she decided it wouldn’t necessarily do the trick. She had to get into the men’s room itself. That was when she remembered the gun and swore at Kim for not having kept it with him.
Slamming on the brakes, Tracy brought her car to a shuddering halt just opposite the window to the record room. She reached down onto the floor and snatched up the gun. Clutching it in her hand, she jumped from the car and ran over to the record-room window.
Remembering how Kim had gained entry, she put down the gun and picked up one of the rocks edging the pavement. Using both hands, she threw it against the plywood. It took two smacks, but she succeeded in knocking the plywood free of its temporary nails. Then she yanked it off.
Tracy snatched up the gun and tossed it through the window. Then she followed it headfirst. Once inside the dark room, she had to grope around for the gun on her hands and knees. As she searched she could hear intermittent thumps behind the wall to the right as if a metal partition was being kicked repeatedly. The noise increased her frenzy.
Her fingers finally brushed up against the weapon where it had come to rest at the base of a table leg. She seized it and then moved as fast as the darkness would allow to the vaguely illuminated door to the hall.
Tracy unlocked the door. From having listened to the conversation between Kim and Elmer she knew the men’s room had to be close to the record
room. She decided to follow the sound of the thumping. She made a right. After running only a few steps, she saw the men’s room sign.
Without a second’s hesitation, Tracy crashed through the door using her shoulder. She had the gun clasped in both hands and pointed it into the depths of the room.
She’d had no idea what to expect. What she saw was Carlos less than ten feet away with one leg raised in preparation for kicking a toilet stall door in. The door was already bent.
As soon as he spotted her, Carlos made a flying leap for Tracy. Like the night before, he had a large knife clasped in his hand.
Tracy had no time to think. Closing her eyes against the hurling figure she pulled the trigger in quick succession. Two shots rang out before Carlos careened into her, slamming her against the door and knocking the gun from her hand. She felt a stabbing pain in her chest as she crumbled beneath the man’s weight.
Tracy desperately tried to breathe and to wriggle free as the man’s weight settled on top of her. But he had her easily pinned.
To Tracy’s surprise the killer moved off her. She looked up, expecting to see him standing over her with his knife raised for a deadly stab. Instead she was looking at Kim’s distraught face.
“Oh, God!” Kim cried. “Tracy!” He’d pulled the killer off her and had thrown him aside as if the man were no more than a sack of potatoes. Frantic over the amount of blood spreading across Tracy’s chest, he dropped to his knees and ripped open her blouse. As a thoracic surgeon, he’d treated stab wounds to the chest, and he knew what to expect. But what he found was a blood-soaked bra; Tracy’s skin was intact. There was no sucking chest wound with air rushing in as he’d feared.
Kim leaned closer to Tracy’s face. She was still struggling to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her.
“Are you all right?” Kim demanded.
Tracy nodded but still couldn’t speak.
Kim turned his attention to the killer. The man was writhing and groaning and had managed to turn himself over on his stomach. Kim rolled him back over and recoiled.
