No Immunity

by Susan Dunlap

  Just as quickly the picture of Juan and Carlos was back in her mind. The symptoms they presented were close to Lassa, but—Louisa shook her head—her guess was designer virus. She knew viruses; in her residency she had learned enough to know she wanted nothing to do with them. She could have applied to CDC or the military program. She had gone a hundred eighty degrees away, to family practice.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Bright lights burst out of the dark. The Doll’s House. She slowed, checking the parking area for Grady’s truck. Not there, as far as she could tell.

  She pictured the boys’ feverish faces. Anything could be happening to them. The thug figured they were in Gattozzi. But Grady could have met someone at the Doll’s House and passed them on, abandoning them up here like he did in Vegas. They could be dead already. She pressed harder on the gas pedal. She was already speeding, not that it mattered on this road. She had to get to the boys.

  Abruptly she braked. She was losing it. She’d driven two hours and now she was just guessing. Pull yourself together, Larson! The little thug does know something’s happening in Gattozzi. How far behind would he be by now, half an hour? She could sit here by the side of the road in the cold and dark and wait. Or turn around and go back to the Doll’s House. With that clunker of his he’d be rolling in to the pumps on fumes.

  Reston Adcock pulled off 93 five miles north of the Doll’s House. The unpaved road paralleled the highway and would take him right up to its back door.

  The car bounced into a pothole. Adcock held the wheel steady and let the car slow. His headlights looked like beacons in the dark. If he’d been more than a few miles away from the Doll’s House, he’d have been pissed, but this he could handle, and it was worth it for the cover it gave him.

  He was real tempted to cut back onto 93 and assure himself that that do-nothing Tchernak’s boss was speeding south. All he needed now was her to deal with. The Weasel could handle Tchernak. Tchernak was twice his size, but that’s what weapons were for. Could he count on McGuire to take out a woman? One thing you learned in the oil-exploration business was you do what you have to.

  Cecil McGuire had had ample time to contemplate Grady Hummacher and Reston Adcock as his Barracuda moved steadily up 93. The car had picked up speed on the straightaway. He was almost at the Doll’s House now. He didn’t know what he’d find in the next few hours, but he’d been around enough to know it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Cecil McGuire, the Weasel, had come to a very satisfying conclusion. Ten thousand dollars was hardly a substantial total payment for what this job was turning into. Reston Adcock needed him. When he got to this place, he’d make it clear to Adcock that ten thou couldn’t be the total payment, it was just the opening bid. This case was the chance of a lifetime. Only a fool turns his back on a jackpot. Once Adcock saw his work, he’d realize the danger of saying no.

  He peered into the distance. Those red lights could be taillights, but more likely they came from the Doll’s House.

  CHAPTER 39

  RIGHT FOOT ON GAS, left playing the clutch, Kiernan barreled down the narrow mountain road above Gattozzi as it followed the whims of the black hills.

  Tchernak could be anywhere, following any kind of lead. He had insisted he could second-guess Hummacher. Maybe. As for figuring Tchernak, well, no one knew him like she did.

  The road dead-ended. The truck quivered madly and for a moment she thought it was going to stall and die at this elbow between hill and town. She sat catching her breath, checking the darkness, thinking again of Tchernak.

  He had met with Adcock, then begun the search for the oil explorer, Hummacher. He’d have called BakDat about Hummacher, and if he’d learned anything at all in his time working for her, about Adcock too. He’d have ordered those backgrounds before he left La Jolla. And favored child that he was with Persis, he’d probably have had the results as soon as he could find a fax in McCarran Airport.

  She turned left and started up an unlit residential street. Tchernak would have checked Hummacher’s house or apartment, the neighbors, and, well, gone on from there. But first he’d have—he should have—cornered Adcock and gotten the skinny on that meeting that Hummacher didn’t make. How much money was riding on that? How much could Hummacher sell his knowledge for? And who were the likely buyers? What did the two Panamanian seismic aides know that was so vital, he had to whisk them out of their country?

  The first right turn was Main Street. She slowed almost to a stop, peering in both directions for the waiting sheriff’s department car. The street was empty. Too good to be true. Uneasily she turned, hoping to get out of Gattozzi unnoticed. The highway was a quarter of a mile away. Restraining the urge to speed to it, she kept her foot steady and checked the rearview mirror. And when she came to the highway, she headed south with a relief unwarranted by common sense. She wasn’t freer, she reminded herself, just moving faster in the cage.

  What kind of boss was Adcock? Bad enough to create the notorious “disgruntled employee”? Had Tchernak gotten an employee list? The names of the recently resigned or fired? Surely, yes. Would he have spotted a telltale blink or twitch in Adcock’s face when he spoke to him? Had he coerced him into full truth—as she would have done by what she thought of as refusal to come up empty and what Tchernak called pain-in-the-assedness? A spike of fear shot down her back. Investigating was like being an all-pro lineman; it took more than raw talent, it took years of training. Training Tchernak had barely begun.

  The highway was flat and empty, lulling drivers into complacency, luring them off into rolls and crashes. She glanced at the speedometer and lifted her foot till it settled back to eighty. No need to give them an excuse. Oh, shit, she was beginning to think like Tchernak!

  She turned on the radio, forced herself to listen through the static. Her reward was bits of the same report she had picked up earlier, the tale of casinos rising faster than the dawn. And how much would it benefit a local sheriff to destroy the evidence of epidemic? She snapped off the radio, grabbed for the cell phone, and dialed BakDat.

  “BakDat, the professional search network. Thorough, fast, reliable. Leave a message, and one of our many investigators will get right back to you!”

  “Persis, this is Kiernan O’Shaughnessy,” she said, relieved that the call had gone through. “I’m calling for Tchernak.”

  No response.

  “Persis, pick up. Open your eyes and reach the hand of all your many investigators to the phone. This is important!”

  Still no response. For Tchernak she would have flown out of the bed and had the computer up and running already.

  “Tchernak is missing.”

  Still no response. Maybe Persis really was out, or really asleep. More likely she was just lying on her bed in an orange muumuu, fingering thin, dry dyed-red hair, listening to the phone and laughing.

  “Okay. Listen. I’m on the move. I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to call you. In the meantime get me whatever he wanted from you in the last day. And Persis, if anything happens to Tchernak, you’ve got only yourself to blame.”

  Dammit, she could not charge into Adcock’s office empty-handed. Without leverage all she was doing was wasting time. She could get Hummacher’s address—probably listed—and see if Tchernak was there. What car was he driving? Had to be a rental. There were a dozen rental companies. If she had to call every one of them …

  No, that was the wrong end of the snake. “Start with the end you can put your hand on,” that’s what she’d told Tchernak each time she’d given him a lead to track down. Her own hand was nowhere near slimy scales. But if she were to make a grab?

  She’d grab on to Tchernak’s modus operandi. What would he do after his initial call to Adcock? Make plane reservations … on Southwest, just as she had.

  Headlights came up behind her fast. She was doing eighty-five, pedal to floorboards, but the lights had to be doing over a hundred. No red flashers, though. As the lights came closer, she could make o
ut their height—truck lights on an eighteen-wheeler. She let out a great sigh as the truck pulled out around her and swept by. She dialed information, and then Southwest. “Listen, we’ve got this rental car we booked through you guys and we left all the papers in the motel yesterday morning. We’ve been driving all day, and, well, this is embarrassing, but we can’t remember where to return the car. You’ve got some record of this, right?”

  “I can’t give you directions, but you could call Budget direct for that.”

  So far so good. But she was holding her breath. Now for another way of asking, “What am I driving?” With Tchernak it wasn’t likely to be a compact. Or a midsized. At the client’s expense? “Just one more question. I think they said they had a special drop-off for off-road vehicles. Can you check on that?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  It was a minute before the voice came back on the line to tell her he didn’t know.

  She slowed and dialed.

  “Budget Rental Cars.”

  “What kind off-road vehicles do you have in Las Vegas?”

  “Jeeps.”

  “What colors?”

  “Gold, white, and blue. Which would you like?”

  “Thanks.” She hung up, checked the road, and redialed.

  “Budget Rental Cars.”

  “Listen, I am really embarrassed to be calling you about this. If my husband back in the hotel room knew this, he’d never let me out alone in Vegas again. But the thing is I went to the casino, you know the big green one?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Well, you know it’s got a parking lot the size of Dallas, and it’s not like I had anything to drink, I just got caught up in the quarter machines and wandering around and buying those cute little dog magnets, the ones you put on the fridge door? And I was playing different machines after that, and well, I got all turned around, and now I can’t remember where I left the Jeep Brad and I rented from you. Hell, I couldn’t even swear what color the damned thing is. I wanted the white, but you didn’t have that.”

  “Do you have the license number?”

  “Oh, jeez, no. All the papers are in the car. But you have the paperwork on file, right? Bradley Tchernak. We just got the car yesterday morning. We told you we might even turn it in last night, which we would have done if Brad hadn’t gotten lucky and we figured ‘go with it.’ And that was right. He’s three hundred and forty dollars up. ’Course he spent a good bit of that celebrating, which is why he’s sacked out in the hotel room right now. Not bad, huh? At least not bad if I can find your Jeep. But, listen—”

  “It’s gold, Mrs. Tchernak. A gold Jeep, Grand Cherokee Laredo.”

  As she turned off the phone, she wondered if he would have given her the license number, too, just to stanch the flow of chatter.

  Coming at her, headlights grew fast and were gone before she had time to guess the make of the car. Not the sheriff. Where was the sheriff? What was pressing enough to drag him away from the woman who could tell the world about Gattozzi fever? Questions better considered across the Clark County line in Las Vegas.

  She checked the speedometer—eighty—and stepped on the gas.

  CHAPTER 40

  TCHERNAK CAME OVER A hill and there it was! After the hours of unbroken darkness the burst of bright lights ahead could have been the Emerald City, except that they were red and yellow. As he drew closer, he could differentiate between the glowing square of red and yellow dots atop a tall pole, the yellow dots in the bed of white that might indicate gas pumps, the yellow against yellow around the big square blur he figured was a building. Was this the great mecca of Gattozzi? He had slowed for a couple of modest signs to towns miles off the road, but for over an hour there had been no mention of Gattozzi. If he hadn’t seen the highway sign when he first turned onto 93, he’d have wondered if Adcock had been shitting him. But Gattozzi or not, this was the only place open in the middle of the night, and he was damn well stopping here. If this was the gateway to Gattozzi, it didn’t bode well.

  He slowed, now able to see the light-blurred windows in a cafe, a couple of vehicles parked in front. To the right stood a motel. The whole prefab affair looked like a group of giant cardboard boxes that had been dropped on the hard, bare ground one morning and opened for trade by dinnertime. Motel 4, or maybe 3 ½.

  Tchernak saw the taillights and slammed on the brakes before he took in what was happening. Idiot flying out of the parking lot, that was what was happening. A bit too far away to clip the bumper of the gold Grand Cherokee Laredo, but it wasn’t like the guy slowed down to check on unimportant minutia like other vehicles. How desperate was he to get away? Probably some jerk who’d got chucked out of bed by a girlfriend who’d had enough. Or hadn’t.

  Tchernak flicked on his blinker before making the right turn into the sprawling parking area, even though his was the only vehicle moving now. He looked around at the buildings and the dust swirling in his headlights and suddenly felt the weight of the long day. The place was just a motel and cafe, not Gattozzi. His first case and not only could he not find the missing person, he couldn’t even locate the proper town to look in. What he had located was just another opportunity for bad coffee.

  But somebody in there would know where Gattozzi was. The weight eased off his shoulders and he aimed the Jeep toward the cafe. While he was asking directions, he could get a piece of pie, maybe apple. Probably be awful. For an instant the memory of the cherry-kumquat tart he’d made for dinner Thursday was so real, the sweet and sharp smell wafted by his nose. He’d gotten the out-of-season cherries from a hothouse outside of Olympia, and the kumquats …Was that only three days ago? He shrugged off the question and focused on the cafe sign: Doll’s House. In a spot like this there was always the chance of home cooking. Apple was the safest.

  Unbidden, he found himself glancing at the motel and thinking of the asshole who’d almost taken off his fender. Fight with a girlfriend? Guy that pissed could have left her with a jaw broken in eight pieces. He half expected to see a tiny, bloodied woman staggering out of one of the units. But it was none of his business. Still, he found himself turning not left to the cafe but right to swing past the motel doors. He hadn’t realized at first that there were two prefab rectangles, one behind the other, both with doors facing the road.

  Not a car in sight. No light coming from a window. Maybe he had been wrong about the fight, maybe the rubber-burner was the night cook at the end of shift, or some local who had dumped trash and fled, or—

  He almost missed the six-inch opening in the doorway of the last unit.

  It was none of his business, and he had a pressing case that needed to be solved.

  Or maybe it was his business. Long shot, but still …

  He pulled up by the motel room, got out, and eased the Jeep’s door shut. The wind slapped his jean legs against his shins, pulled his shirt out from his chest. “You okay in there?” he called through the dark doorway.

  The light didn’t go on, but he could hear something inside. “Excuse me?” He leaned closer to the doorway, scrunching his ear, but it was no use. On this desert the wind came too crisply, splattering sand and dirt, rattling all the corners of fixtures, smacking detritus left from who knew what against the tinny motel walls.

  “Look, I just want to help. I can call a doctor if you need one. If you’re okay, that’s great. Just tell me and I won’t bug you.”

  Still no words came back at him, but now he had factored in the wind and, leaning so close his head was almost into the doorway, he heard an irregular sound. Water. Not dripping. Running. And the smell—he couldn’t place it, wasn’t sure this kind of stench was coming from inside the room or was being carried on the wind from some unseen farmyard. But the water? You don’t leave the tap open like that, not in the desert, of all places. “I’m just going to come in and make sure you’re okay.”

  Tchernak slipped his hand around the side of the door. The chain jangled. The chain had been snapped.

  Tchernak stepped to
the side of the door and reached in till he felt the light switch. The light stung his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, then staying clear of the doorway, pushed the door hard and waited.

  Seconds later he eased his head into the doorway. And stared. He was looking at a nightmare. He couldn’t tell what color the room had been; it was blotched with the most disgusting colors, with gut-wrenching smells. It looked like a body had been turned inside out and splattered all the hell over.

  A full minute passed before he noticed Grady Hummacher’s body lying half off the bed.

  CHAPTER 41

  “YOU DON’T GET PICKED up for speeding in Nevada,” Kiernan said aloud. Two hours and she would be in Vegas, the sun would be coming up, she’d be on the phone to the CDC and ready to beard Reston Adcock.

  Two hours. Suddenly it seemed an eon, and the straight, dark road, a soporific. She recalled the lines of birds, dead beneath the power lines. How many nocturnal drivers joined them? As she came over a rise, yellow and red lights glowed in the distance. CAFE, the yellow sign shrieked. Did she dare stop? Just for the bathroom? And food. Food! How long would it take to grab a Hershey’s?

  Long enough.

  She could see the cafe more clearly now—and the motel beside it. Even at this distance she could tell it was not exactly four-star. But still, the urge to turn in to the comforting light, to sit among normal people, where the biggest decision to be made was cherry or pecan pie—it was almost more than she could resist.

  Suddenly she realized why she hadn’t smacked into the sheriff on the winding up-country roads or the corner of First Street in Gattozzi. Fox didn’t need to watch those spots. The Doll’s House was the place she had to pass to reach Las Vegas. A sheriff, of all people, would know the allure of the only twenty-four-hour cafe in hundreds of miles. No need for Fox to chill his derriere surveilling First Street when he could park it by the Doll’s House’s warm, fogged window and check out the half-dozen vehicles that passed. And if he was in the middle of a burger when she passed, well, plenty of time for a fine-tuned patrol car to catch the rickety truck before Vegas.