by Susan Dunlap
“I don’t know, Resty, not exactly. Whatever they do here they keep dead quiet. Maybe it’s testing—weapons, bombs, chemicals, who knows. But lately there’s been a rumor of something in the air—”
“Germ warfare?”
“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. They know there are people downwind over in Utah.”
“That didn’t stop the government in the past.”
“I’m not saying our government’s into chemical warfare,” Simkin raced on. “They’re not testing anything like VX or sarin, the stuff the terrorist tossed in the Tokyo subway. No, I don’t think it’s anything like that.”
Adcock almost smacked into the car, an old tan Ford, before he saw it. Before Simkin could open the driver’s door, he caught his arm. “You’re telling me what the navy’s not doing. But they’re into something that’s making them nervous about visitors. What is it?”
Simkin hunched his shoulders over his barrel chest and lowered his chin as if to protect his words. “I don’t know for sure, but whatever they’re tossing up in the air, they’re making damned sure no one gets east of them. I got a friend in Public Health who’s always going on about the navy. He thinks they’re testing vaccines against biological weapons, like anthrax, or worse—if there’s anything worse than anthrax. They say a suitcase of that could wipe out Vegas. Biological and Chemical Agent Detection program, he says. Says they shoot these biological agents that maybe the Arabs will use against our guys the next time we invade Kuwait, shoot ’em up over the desert and then see how long it takes to identify them.”
The operation was top secret, but Adcock had heard crazy talk about it from one of the docs he met at the Carson Club. “Sim,” he said disgustedly, “they shoot up simulants, not the real stuff. We don’t have kamikazes in this country. Who’d they get to collect the real stuff?”
“The guys they tested the vaccines on. That’s the whole point. Come on, Resty, do you think they would trust sending the entire navy, army, air force and marines where they’d be exposed to viruses or germs or whatever when the vaccines they gave the guys were tested only against simulants? All those guys with their billions of dollars’ of materiel? You think they learned zip from Kuwait?”
Adcock said nothing. There was nothing to say to that.
Simkin let a beat pass. Enjoying his little victory, Adcock figured. “Like I said, Resty, whatever they’re blasting up into the air, they’re very prickly about anyone getting downwind of it. Guy I had working on my cars last week drove down to the Breadfruit Park Saturday and it was closed. And that’s this side of the testing ground. Upwind.”
“Winds change.”
“Yeah. My guy said it wasn’t closed the week before. He saw a family going in there to picnic. But now the navy’s all hot to seal it off. Who knows what they got in the air there. Now, maybe they wouldn’t care about us here—we’re more’n five miles west of the park—but we’d be smart not to hang around to find out.”
“Right.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the Ford truck and waited till Simkin got in beside him. “I’ll drop you off on the highway.”
CHAPTER 35
KIERNAN SQUINTED THROUGH THE dirt-glazed glass trying to make out the road from the desert on either side. Desert that could hide another abandoned mine. Her nose was nearly against the windshield. In all directions the land was the same, a waterless nubby broadloom carpet leading to nowhere. The truck strained in first gear, jerking and coughing. If it were a person, she thought, I’d be calling for a priest.
She crested the hill. The headlights shone down the steep decline. The emptiness was immense, the hillside like great Brillo pads packed one against another. By now Connie could have looped back to town on an unseen road and be headed to bed. There could be nothing down this arid hill but scrub pines and sunbaked bones.
Or Connie could be in a cabin somewhere down there, feet up, drink in hand, smug little grin on her face. Kiernan stepped on the gas. Halfway down the hill a dirt road led off to the right and disappeared in the night shadows. She hesitated, checked the gas tank—quarter full—and turned right onto a narrow rutted path.
The engine sputtered and halted momentarily like a snorer waking himself up with the noise and affording himself a moment of silence in which he eased back into raucous sleep. In that silent moment she could hear the wind snapping the tough branches of the scrub pines and feel it battering the truck as she hit a curve.
The edge of the canyon was longer than it had appeared in the dark. The road slashed back and forth, turning suddenly, sharply.
Abruptly a driveway cut right, into a pocket invisible from the road. Now, close, she could make out a high wooden skeleton of a mining building. It and two other crumbling buildings stood around an open area. Even in the dark she could see between the burned-out roof beams of the nearest one.
She looked around for a pit, but there was none. The whole place looked as if it had been deserted for decades.
She cut the engine, got out, and made her way into the compound. Here the wind was not so sharp, but the cold more chilling. The dry, sharp scrabble crackled under her feet. No car was visible, and looking down, she could make out no tire tracks. She rarely carried a gun; she’d seen the devastation bullets caused in too many postmortems. But here, in this deserted spot, a piece in hand would have comforted her.
She moved off the loose scrabble. Sky showed through the burned-out beams of the nearest house.
The second place, probably once a miners’ bunkhouse, was burned as badly. A rusted metal bed frame hung off the porch on three legs.
When she approached the last house, she sighed. Burned to a shell. Could she have been wrong about this mine? Maybe it was not a marvelous semblance of a deserted mine but was in fact a deserted mine.
Something gave under her foot. She looked down, saw nothing, bent down, and fingered a fuzzy, faded green tennis ball. A shot of longing went through her as she imagined Ezra bounding down the beach corralling his ball with his feet in the wet sand.
Leaving the ball on the ground, she stood, turned around very slowly till she made out a dark spot on the far side of the compound. No light shone, but unlike the other burned-out buildings this one was solid. No sky was visible between its beams.
She knocked. “Open up. You know I’m here.”
Connie opened the door. The spiky gray hair that had looked so adventurous in the Gattozzi saloon, was matted back as if from sweaty hands drawn through it again and again. In the flickering light her chiseled features looked sepulchral and her caramel-colored eyes shone. She was holding a pistol.
Kiernan smacked it out of her hand. The gun sailed across the porch. Connie dove toward her, but Kiernan was already halfway to the wall scooping up the gun. It was an old, long-barreled revolver and it felt heavy in her hand. She stood and glared down at Connie. “Stay right there on the ground. I could have died out there in that mine pit!”
“You should have thought about that before you screwed Jeff.” Connie had landed on an elbow, and it was already swelling visibly, but she made no move to coddle it.
“You think I—”
“Now I don’t care who Jeff sleeps with. But when he went off to Africa, I wasn’t thirty years old, and it mattered.”
Kiernan took a breath, acutely aware of the cold wind blowing across her back. She stared down at the tough, wiry woman now sitting up, back to the wall. “You’re Jeff’s wife? I don’t remember—”
“Don’t remember me from his med-school years? There’s a surprise. Those were the four most isolated years of my life.” It had been over a decade since then, but her anger sounded fresh and triumphant, as if she had always known this moment of vindication would come. Her face was flushed and her eyes moist, and in that moment she bore no resemblance to the no-nonsense woman in the saloon.
Kiernan waited till she caught her eye. “For that you were willing to kill me?”
“Kill you?”
“You led me into a mine hole.”
“I didn’t lead you anywhere.”
“You didn’t come back when my headlights disappeared. No one does that on an isolated mountain road.”
“You’ve been here less than a day and you’re giving forth the commandments for mountain driving?” The vulnerability was gone from her face now.
Kiernan shook her head. She couldn’t tell what was behind Connie’s sarcasm—guilt or just anger. There would never be any proof of her intentions. She would never know whether Connie Tremaine would have let her die. Motioning the woman up, she said, “Jeff may have had affairs, but they weren’t with me.”
“Please. You go to med school together, you go to Africa together. It doesn’t take scientific deduction to come to a conclusion.”
“The wrong conclusion.” It would have been easy to tell her about Hope Mkema, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “I’m not speaking of what Jeff did in Africa, or after. But I was there for less than a month and so sick I had to be airlifted out.”
“But you went there to be where Jeff was, didn’t you?”
“Look, here’s the truth. I didn’t like your husband in med school—he was a bore. I wasn’t pleased to find him in Africa, where he’d become an officious bore. And I certainly wouldn’t have come flying out in the wilds here for anything less than the threat of massive contagion that an officious bore wasn’t about to report to the health department. I don’t know what you and Jeff and the sheriff and God knows who else is involved in, but—”
“Jeff and I, we are not involved in anything together. All we share is a name.”
“You were worried enough about him to find me a car and point me out of town. Jeff is missing. You’ve got a safe house here. Where else would he be?”
“I don’t know. That’s my whole point.” She seemed to deflate back against the porch railing. “I don’t love Jeff anymore. Love can be a flimsy commodity in a small town with few choices. But I’ve been around him all my life and I know him. Jeff never went anywhere without leaving word with his receptionist. But today he did. He’s just gone, and for all I know he’s dead.”
Kiernan could see her shivering. “Let’s go inside.”
Inside, the first thing that hit her was the heat; it seemed to steam off the floor, off the threadbare Oriental carpet, from the tapestries that curtained the doors and windows, from the smiling nineteenth-century faces in huge gilded frames above antique love seats, inlaid mahogany, and pink marble tables. The wavering light of the oil lamps made the room almost alive. But if this was a safe house, the guests had cleared out any evidence.
“I’m going to believe you,” Connie said, flexing her arm and eyeing her swollen elbow. In jeans and a heavy sweater, she looked as if she’d broken into this bastion of gentility.
“Do or don’t. Your choice.” The hastily stacked magazines on the marble tables and the streaked ashtrays announced a frantic cleanup. How many frightened, confused women were beyond the closed parlor door? She didn’t ask. The less she knew about the safe house, or who Connie was sheltering at the moment, the less danger she would be to them. Jeff Tremaine was not here, that she did accept.
The sofa beckoned. Suddenly Kiernan realized how exhausted she was. The troubled sleep last night after Tchernak’s outburst seemed years ago. And now the soft cushions …She chose the one hard chair next to a marble table and lay the gun at her side.
Connie disappeared through a narrow doorway and returned with a bottle. “Drink? We could both use one.”
“You go ahead.” She wasn’t that sure of Connie. “Just tell me what’s going on here. Start with the dead woman.”
Connie perched on the arm of the brocade sofa. Her free hand tapped hard and quick on her thigh. Her mouth tightened, and the lines around her eyes deepened as she studied Kiernan.
“I thought you said you’d decided to trust me.”
“To believe you. Trust is too much to ask on a couple hours’ acquaintance.”
“I trusted you when I bought the truck.”
“And look where that got you!” Connie laughed, and the fragility of that sound said more about her precarious state than had anything before.
“I didn’t have any choice, Connie. And neither do you. I know you’ve got a safe house here. I don’t want to endanger it, as long as it has nothing to do with the dead woman in Gattozzi.”
Momentarily her jaw tightened, then she sighed. “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on that too. The truth is I need to know what you’ve found out. If I don’t figure out who that woman is, someone from the county or the state is going to start nosing around—”
“What do you mean? She was one of your—”
“No, Kiernan, she wasn’t. That’s the whole point If a guest of mine had come down with a condition as horrifying as that woman’s, I would have had her medevacked to Las Vegas even if it meant every reporter in the state crawling all over this place. No way would I endanger everyone here and in Gattozzi. I grew up in Gattozzi; I’ve known those people all my life. No way would I—”
“Then who the hell is she and how did she get into the morgue?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Surely you know if Jeff—”
Connie lifted the brandy glass to her mouth and sipped pensively. “I don’t know anything about Jeff Tremaine anymore. He lives in town; I live here. Oh, sometimes I stay in his house there for appearance’s sake, so people don’t wonder where I live. But it’s a big house.”
“So the dead woman could be someone he knew,” Kiernan said. “But why is the sheriff involved?”
“Don’t know.”
“What about the naval installation off Route Ninety-three, the Admiralty of the Sands? Does Jeff have old navy buddies there?”
Connie laughed again. “One thing you can count on with Jeffrey Tremaine is that he has no naval buddies. Jeff was thrown out of the navy after a year.”
“On what grounds?” Kiernan asked, amazed. “The military wasn’t meting out general discharges for fraternization back then. Drugs?”
“Insubordination.”
“Really?”
“You’re that shocked? Insubordination—you can’t believe he had it in him, can you? Poor Jeff would be so insulted.”
“Well, no,” Kiernan admitted. “Jeff Tremaine in med school wouldn’t dare to have questioned authority.”
“There he never got the chance. He was a middle-of-the-road kid in a very liberal environment. There was always someone else eager to leap first into the fray.”
Kiernan nodded slowly. Her picture of Jeff Tremaine was still the stiff kid in med school. She assumed Africa was an aberration in his life. But the man Connie was describing fit the doctor in Africa, who had been stopped by neither rules nor customs. There, Jeff hadn’t stepped aside for anyone. “Between med school and Africa Jeff was so insubordinate he got himself thrown out of the navy?” she said, still amazed. “Insubordinate about what?”
“Secrecy. He wasn’t about to administer unproven drugs to unsuspecting sailors. Gulf War kind of thing.”
“So, then it’s a safe guess he’s not involved with the local navy?”
Connie picked up her glass and started to the kitchen. “There’s very little I would swear to about Jeff. Maybe that he’ll always be sneaking off to some woman. Surprisingly, that he’s a good doctor. And definitely that he’s not in league with anyone in the navy. Hundreds of acres of land right next to his town being off-limits and the government refusing to say what’s going on there—it bugs the hell out of him.”
“Does Jeff think they’ve got nuclear waste there?”
“Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s top secret, and the navy’s got more influence over what goes on around here than it should.”
“By which you mean … ?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how Jeff put it. It’s like a battleship that gets separated from the fleet so long, the admiral forgets he’s part of the country and starts thinking of himself
as head of his own floating empire. Then any boat that comes near is the enemy.”
“So you think—”
“Steer clear of it. You don’t have time to get hassled. Believe me.”
Kiernan followed her to the kitchen doorway. “Okay, but answer me this, then—the reason Jeff brought me to Gattozzi was to get me to take responsibility for the body, right? Was that because he was afraid of the sheriff?”
Connie’s glass was in one hand, and a washrag hung suspended in the other. She turned and leaned back against the sink, oblivious of the precious drops of water splatting onto the floor. “I’m the last one to make excuses for Jeff. It probably doesn’t look to you as if Jeff has much of a career, but he’s active in the state medical association, the state committee on historic cities, the Carson Club, the Nevada Environmental League, the Anti-Nuclear Alliance, and who knows what else. This is his state and he’s concerned about it. But the sheriff is another thing. And yes, Jeff’s afraid of him.”
CHAPTER 36
THE ROAD WAS BLACK: black macadam, blackness on either side. To his right, the Weasel knew, was Lake Mead, built by the WPA to create Hoover Dam and the zillions of kilowatts that made Vegas possible. He had been to the lake, had to tail a visiting Jersey punk there once. He’d had himself a good laugh watching the Hoboken hood staring at the lake shore. “Like they turned on the tap in a brown tub.” That was one thing the little hood had been right about, there was no beach, no trees or shrubs or even grass, just rock, dirt, and water, and marinas every few dozen miles. But deep, and useful, as the late Jersey punk had discovered.
Now the lake was miles to the left, with nothing but turnoff signs to say it was there at all. And on the road, nothing else. Not so much as taillights. McGuire’d never admit it, but he didn’t like empty roads. A nice red set of taillights ahead would have comforted him. A couple sets, on vehicles maybe weaving in and out, would have gone a long way to telling him he wasn’t headed off the edge of the earth. Way in the distance behind he could see white dots. Made him uneasy.
