by Robin Cook
Beth pulled open the door and entered. Immediately she was enveloped by the moist, warm air. The temperature was kept close to body temperature, at 98.6° Fahrenheit. Many bacteria and viruses, especially those that affected humans, had understandably evolved to grow best at human body temperature.
The door behind Beth closed automatically to seal in the heat. The compartment was about eight by ten. The lighting came from two bulbs covered with wire mesh mounted on the ceiling. The shelving was perforated stainless steel. It extended floor to ceiling on both walls, along the back, and down the center, creating two narrow aisles.
Beth made her way to the rear of the compartment. There were stainless-steel boxes back there that she’d seen on numerous occasions but had never examined.
Grasping one of the boxes with both hands, Beth slid it out from its shelf and put it on the floor. It was about the size of a shoe box. When she tried to open it, she realized it had a latch that was secured with a miniature padlock!
Beth was amazed and instantly suspicious. Few things in the lab were kept under lock and key. Picking the box up, Beth slid it back into place. Moving along the shelf, she reached around each box in turn. Every one of them had the same type of lock.
Bending down, Beth did the same on the lower shelf. The condition of the fifth box was different. As Beth stuck her hand around its back, she could feel that the padlock’s clasp had not been closed.
Insinuating her fingers between the unlocked box and its neighbors, Beth was able to slide it out. As she lifted it, she could tell it wasn’t quite as heavy as the first locked box; she feared it would be empty. But it wasn’t. As she lifted its cover, she saw that it contained a few petri dishes. She also noted that the petri dishes did not bear the customary label that was used in the lab. Instead they only had grease-pencil alphanumeric designators.
Beth gingerly reached into the box and lifted out a petri dish labeled A-81. She lifted the top and looked in at expanding bacterial colonies. They were transparent and mucoid and they were growing on a medium she recognized as chocolate agar.
A sharp mechanical click of the insulated door opening startled Beth. Her pulse raced. Like a child caught in a forbidden act, she frantically tried to get the petri dish back in the box and the box back on the shelf before whoever was entering saw what she was doing.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time. She’d only had a chance to close the box and pick it up before she found herself face-to-face with Dr. Martin Cheveau. Ironically, he was at that moment carrying a box identical to the one she was holding.
“What are you doing?” he snarled.
“I’m…” Beth voiced, but that was all she could say. Under the pressure of the circumstance, no potential explanation came to mind.
Dr. Cheveau noisily stashed his box on one of the shelves, then grabbed Beth’s away from her. He looked at the open latch.
“Where’s the lock?” he growled.
Beth extended her hand and then opened it. In her palm was the open padlock. Martin snatched it and examined it.
“How did you get it open?” he demanded.
“It was open,” Beth asserted.
“You’re lying,” Martin snapped.
“I’m not,” Beth said. “Honest. It was open and it made me curious.”
“Likely story,” Martin yelled. His voice reverberated around the confined space.
“I didn’t disturb anything,” Beth said.
“How do you know you didn’t disturb anything?” Martin said. He opened the box and glanced inside. Seemingly satisfied, he closed it and locked it. He tested the lock. It held.
“I only lifted the cover and looked at one culture dish,” Beth said. She was beginning to regain some composure, although her pulse was still racing.
Martin slipped the box into its position. Then he counted them all. When he was finished, he ordered her out of the incubator.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said after Martin had closed the insulated door behind them. “I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to touch those boxes.”
At that moment Richard appeared in the doorway. Martin ordered him over, then angrily related how he’d caught Beth handling his research cultures.
Richard acted as upset as Martin when he heard. Turning to Beth, he demanded to know why she would do such a thing. He wondered whether they weren’t giving her enough work to do.
“No one told me not to touch them,” Beth protested. She was again close to tears. She hated confrontations and had already weathered a previous one only hours earlier.
“No one told you to handle them either,” Richard snapped.
“Did that Dr. Stapleton put you up to this?” Martin demanded.
Beth hesitated, not knowing how to respond. As far as Martin was concerned her hesitation was incriminating. “I thought as much,” he snapped. “He probably even told you about his preposterous idea that the plague cases and the others were started on purpose.”
“I told him I wasn’t supposed to talk with him,” Beth cried.
“But talk he did,” Martin said. “And obviously you listened. Well, I’m not going to stand for it. You are fired, Miss Holderness. Take your things and get out. I don’t want to see your face again.”
Beth sputtered a protest and with it came tears.
“Crying is not going to get you anywhere,” Martin spat out. “Nor are excuses. You made your choice, now live with the consequences. Get out.”
Twin reached across the scarred desk and hung up the phone. His real name was Marvin Thomas. He’d gotten the nickname “Twin” because he’d had an identical twin. No one had been able to tell the two of them apart until one of them got killed in a protracted disagreement between the Black Kings and a gang from the East Village over crack territories.
Twin looked across the desk at Phil. Phil was tall and skinny and hardly imposing, but he had brains. It had been his brains, not his bravado or muscles, that had caused Twin to elevate him to number-two man in the gang. He had been the only person to know what to do with all the drug money they’d been raking in. Up until Phil took over, they’d been burying the greenbacks in PVC pipe in the basement of Twin’s tenement.
“I don’t understand these people,” Twin said. “Apparently that honky doctor didn’t get our message, and he’s been out doing just what he damned well pleases. Can you believe it? I hit that sucker with just about everything I got, and three days later he’s giving us the finger. I don’t call that respect, no way.”
“The people want us to talk to him again?” Phil asked. He’d been on the visit to Jack’s apartment and witnessed how hard Twin had hit the man.
“Better than that,” Twin said. “They want us to ice the bastard. Why they didn’t have us do it the first time is anybody’s guess. They’re offering us five big ones.” Twin laughed. “Funny thing is, I would have done it for nothing. We can’t have people ignoring us. We’d be out of business.”
“Should we send Reginald?” Phil asked.
“Who else?” Twin questioned. “This is the kind of activity he loves.”
Phil got to his feet and ground out his cigarette. He left the office and walked down the litter-strewn hallway to the front room, where a half dozen members were playing cards. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.
“Hey, Reginald,” Phil called out. “You up for some action?”
Reginald glanced up from his cards. He adjusted the toothpick protruding from his mouth. “It depends,” he said.
“I think you’d like this one,” Phil said. “Five big ones to do away with the doctor whose bike you got.”
“Hey, man, I’ll do it,” BJ said. BJ was the nickname for Bruce Jefferson. He was a stocky fellow with thighs as thick as Phil’s waist. He’d also been on the visit to Jack’s.
“Twin wants Reginald,” Phil said.
Reginald stood up and tossed his cards on the table. “I had a crap hand anyway,” he said. He followed Phil back to the office.
&nbs
p; “Did Phil tell you the story?” Twin asked when they entered.
“Just that the doctor goes,” Phil said. “And five big ones for us. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Twin said. “You gotta do a white chick too. Might as well do her first. Here’s the address.”
Twin handed over a scrap of paper with Beth Holderness’s name and address written on it.
“You care how I do these honkies?” Reginald asked.
“I couldn’t care less,” Twin said. “Just be sure you get rid of them.”
“I’d like to use the new machine pistol,” Reginald said. He smiled with the toothpick still stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“It’ll be good to see if it’s worth the money we paid for it,” Twin said. Twin opened up one of the desk drawers and withdrew a new Tec pistol. It still had some packing grease on the handle. He gave the gun a shove across the desk. Reginald snapped it up before it got to the edge. “Enjoy yourself,” Twin added.
“I intend to,” Reginald said.
Reginald made it a point never to show any emotion, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. As he walked out of the building, his mood was soaring. He loved this kind of work.
He unlocked the driver’s-side door of his jet-black Camaro and slipped in behind the wheel. He put the Tec pistol on the passenger seat and covered it with a newspaper. As soon as the motor was humming, he turned on his tape deck and pushed in his current favorite rap cassette. The car had a sound system that was the envy of the gang. It had enough subwoofer power to loosen ceramic tile in whatever neighborhood Reginald cruised.
With one last glance at Beth Holderness’s address and with his head bobbing with the music, Reginald pulled away from the curb and headed uptown.
Beth hadn’t gone directly home. In her distressed state, she needed to talk with someone. She’d stopped at a friend’s house and even had had a glass of wine. After talking the situation over, she felt somewhat better, but was still depressed. She couldn’t believe she’d been fired. There was also the gnawing possibility that she’d stumbled onto something significant in the incubator.
Beth lived in a five-story tenement on East Eighty-third Street between First and Second avenues. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, but it wasn’t bad either. The only problem was that her building was not one of the best. The landlord did the least possible in terms of repair, and there was always trouble with something. As Beth arrived, she saw there was a new problem. The outer front door had been sprung open with a crowbar. Beth sighed. It had happened before and it had taken three months for the landlord to fix it.
For several months Beth had been intending to move out of the building, and had been saving her money for a deposit on a new apartment. Now that she was out of work, she’d have to dip into her savings. She probably couldn’t move, at least not for the foreseeable future.
As she climbed the last flight of stairs she told herself that as bad as things seemed, they could be worse. She reminded herself that at least she was healthy.
Outside of her door, Beth fumbled with the clutter in the depths of her purse to find her apartment key, which she kept separate from the building key. Her idea was that if she lost one, she wouldn’t necessarily lose the other.
Finally coming up with the key, she let herself into her apartment. She closed and locked the door, as was her habit. After taking off her coat and hanging it up, Beth again searched through her purse for Jack Stapleton’s card. When she found it, she sat on the couch and gave him a call.
Although it was after seven, Beth called the medical examiner’s office. An operator told her that Dr. Stapleton had left for the day. Turning the card over, she tried Jack’s home number. She got his answering machine.
“Dr. Stapleton,” Beth said after Jack’s beep sounded. “This is Beth Holderness. I have something to tell you.” Beth choked back tears from a sudden surge of emotion. She considered hanging up to collect herself, but instead she cleared her throat and continued haltingly: “I have to talk with you. I did find something. Unfortunately I was also fired. So please call.”
Beth depressed the disconnect and then hung up the phone. For a second she debated calling back to describe what she found, but she decided against it. She’d wait for Jack to call her.
Beth was about to stand up when a tremendous crash shocked her into complete immobility. The door to her apartment had burst open, and it slammed back against the wall hard enough to drive the doorknob into the plaster. The deadbolt that she’d felt so secure about had splintered the doorjamb as if the jamb had been made of balsa wood.
A figure stood on the threshold like a magician appearing out of a cloud of smoke. He was dressed from head to foot in black leather. He glanced at Beth, then turned and yanked the door closed. Quiet returned to the apartment with the same suddenness as the explosive crash. At the moment only the muffled sound of a TV in a neighboring apartment could be heard.
If Beth could have envisioned this situation she would have thought she’d scream or flee or both, but she didn’t do either.
She’d been paralyzed. She’d even been holding her breath, which she now let out with an audible sigh.
The man advanced toward her. His face was expressionless. A toothpick jauntily stuck out of his mouth. In his left hand he brandished the largest pistol Beth had ever seen. Its ammunition clip protruded down almost a foot.
The man stopped directly in front of Beth. He didn’t say a word. Instead he slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. Beth closed her eyes…
Jack exited the subway at 103rd Street and jogged north. The weather was fine and the temperature reasonable. He expected a big turnout at the playground, and he wasn’t disappointed. Warren saw him through the chain-link fence and told him to get his ass in gear and get over there.
Jack jogged the rest of the way home. As he approached his building, thoughts of Friday night and his uninvited visitors unwelcomely entered his mind. Having been at the General that day and having been discovered, Jack thought it was very possible that the Black Kings would be back. If they were, Jack wanted to know about it.
Instead of going in the front door, Jack descended a few steps and walked down a dank tunnel that connected the front and the back of his building. It reeked of urine. He emerged in the backyard, which looked like a junkyard. In the half-light he could make out the twisted remains of discarded bedsprings, broken baby carriages, bald car tires, and other unwanted trash.
Against the back of the building was a fire escape. It didn’t descend all the way to the ground. The last segment was a metal ladder with a cement counterweight. By turning over a garbage can and standing on its base, Jack was able to reach up and grab the lowest rung. As soon as he put his weight on it, it came down with a clatter.
Jack climbed up the ladder. When he stepped off onto the grate of the first landing, the ladder retracted to its original position with equal clamor. Jack stood still for a few minutes to be sure that the din didn’t disturb anyone. When no one stuck their head out of a window to complain, Jack continued climbing.
On each floor Jack had ample opportunity to glance in at the various domestic scenes, but he assiduously avoided doing so. It wasn’t pretty. When he saw it close-up, Jack found true poverty enervating. Jack also kept his eyes elevated to avoid looking down. He’d always been afraid of heights, and climbing the fire escape was a test of his fortitude.
As Jack approached his own floor he slowed down. The fire escape serviced both his kitchen window and his bedroom window, both of which were ablaze with light. When he’d left that morning, he’d left all the lights on.
Jack sidled up to the kitchen window first and peered in. The room was empty. A grouping of fruit he’d left on the table was undisturbed. From where he was standing he could also see through to his door to the common hall. His repair was still in place. The door had not been forced open.
Moving to the second window, Jack made sure that the bedroom was as he’d lef
t it. Satisfied, he opened the window and climbed in. He knew he’d been taking a chance leaving the bedroom window unlocked, but he thought it worth the risk. Once inside his apartment, he made a rapid final check. It was empty with no sign of any unexpected visitors having been there.
Jack quickly changed into his basketball gear and exited the same way he’d entered. Given his acrophobia, descent was more difficult than ascent, but Jack forced himself to do it. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t wild about stepping out of his front door unprotected.
When Jack got to the street end of the tunnel, he paused in the shadows to view the area immediately in front of his building. He was particularly concerned about seeing any groups of men sitting in cars. When he was reasonably confident there were no hostile gang members waiting for him, he jogged down to the playground.
Unfortunately, during the time he’d taken to climb up and down the fire escape and change clothes the crowd at the playground had swelled. It took Jack even longer than usual to get into the game, and when he did, he ended up on a comparatively poor team.
Although Jack’s shot was on, particularly his long jumper, his teammates’ weren’t. The game was a rout, to Warren’s delight; his team had been winning all night.
Disgusted with his luck, Jack went to the sidelines and picked up his sweatshirt. Pulling it over his head, he started for the gate.
“Hey, man, you leaving already?” Warren called out. “Come on, stick around. We’ll let you win one of these days.” Warren guffawed. He wasn’t being a bad sport; ridiculing the defeated was part of the accepted playground behavior. Everybody did it and everybody expected it.
“I don’t mind getting whipped if it’s by a decent team,” Jack shot back. “But losing to a bunch of pansies is embarrassing.”
“Ohhhh,” Warren’s teammates crooned. Jack’s retort had been a good one.
Warren strutted over to Jack and stuck his index finger into Jack’s chest. “Pansies, huh?” he said. “I tell you what. My five would devastate any five you could put together right now! You pick, we play.”
