A large sign in block letters hung beside the east gate:
NO CHILDREN ALLOWED
WITHOUT A SUPERVISING ADULT
Caroline, Lily, and Mink stepped one at a time through the two detectors, then were patted down by a woman street soldier who smiled and chattered aimlessly about the weather, Caroline’s shirt, Mink’s hair, and the stench of the garbage. Then the three of them stepped through the main entrance and into the playground.
When Caroline had been a child, her parents had brought her here to this playground several times over the years, when they’d been in the neighborhood visiting friends. Back then, the place had been overgrown with lush plants surrounding the swings and slides and jungle bars, stands of bamboo had lined the perimeter, and an island of trees, shrubs, blooming flowers, and thick grasses had stood in the middle of it all, the island surrounded by a shallow lake of water that the children waded through, splashed and played in. You could buy ice cream bars or Sno-Kones, hot dogs and soda pop and misty ices. You could have a picnic on the island.
Several years earlier, however, the playground had been the site of a major skirmish in the Summer Polk Riots. The place had been strafed with defoliants and cratered by mortars, the few remaining plants burned by kerosene fires. The playground had been rebuilt, the equipment repaired or replaced, a few benches installed, the metal-sheet fencing erected around the entire grounds, and the Polk Corridor street soldiers had taken it over. The playground existed, but it wasn’t the same.
And yet, the dry, bleached-out prospect bothered the children a lot less than it did Caroline. The playground was full of running, shouting, jumping, swinging, and laughing children who were having a great time. Mink stayed close to her mom until they reached an empty bench facing the denuded island that had once been nearly overgrown. Now the island was covered in sand, with several swing sets, a couple of twisting slides, and a large, multilevel maze of wire-mesh cages; it was still surrounded by a shallow, water-filled moat. Lily and Caroline sat on the bench. Mink stood beside them for a minute or two, watching the kids on the island, and those walking barefoot through the moat; then she ventured away from the bench and walked toward the small footbridge that spanned the water. She crossed the bridge, and tentatively approached the swing sets.
“She won’t play for too long,” Lily said. “She gets tired pretty fast.”
“What does she have?” Caroline asked. She’d avoided the topic before this because Mink had always been present. “Leukemia.”
Caroline was surprised. She’d expected something more exotic, one of the newly discovered or newly resurgent diseases, little understood and untreatable. She’d thought leukemia in children was fairly simple to treat these days, with a high rate of success. She said as much to Lily.
Lily shrugged. “She didn’t respond well to chemotherapy. Two courses of treatment, and it came right back both times. Another round was out of the question, because the chemo itself was almost killing her. The doctor said her only real chance was a bone marrow transplant, or replacement with artificial marrow.” She shook her head, traces of a sad smile tucking up the corners of her mouth. “Maybe if my own marrow was compatible… but it isn’t. People don’t donate marrow, they sell it. The artificial marrow’s even more expensive. Not to mention the operation, the follow-ups, the drugs, all that stuff. No money, no insurance…” She turned to look at Caroline. “No transplant, no replacement. Mink’s going to die.”
Caroline didn’t know what to say. She felt even more depressed. “Is there a father?” she asked.
Lily snorted. “Sure there’s a father. Had to be, right? One way or another. But who knows where the hell he is, if he’s even alive.” She sighed heavily. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in six years.”
Caroline looked back across the water at the island. One of the swings became available and Mink climbed onto the wide fabric strap, grabbing the thick chains. From a standstill, she pumped her legs and pulled back and forth on the chains, and quickly got herself going. The arcs got bigger and bigger, and she let go with one hand, waved at Lily and Caroline with a big smile. The women waved back.
“How long does she have?” Caroline asked.
“Two months. Maybe three.” Lily shook her head again. “No one really knows.”
It was all so unfair. But then there was nothing new about that, and nothing Caroline could do to change it. She put her hand over Lily’s and squeezed. Lily squeezed back, and the two women remained there on the bench, holding hands, and watching Mink play.
Caroline met her father in the lobby of one of the city’s holding morgues. He looked more tired than usual, drawn and distracted, but he smiled and hugged her when she walked in. The lobby was cooler and darker than outside, but she suspected it was going to get even colder.
“You sure you want to look at him?” her father said. “You said you wanted to make sure it was Tito.”
“Well, he was chipped. And I could show you pictures. He doesn’t look good. He looks pretty bad.”
She smiled to herself. He wasn’t completely sure how to act around her in this situation; half father, half cop. A woman in uniform sat behind a desk in the back corner, watching them with a bored and sleepy expression; otherwise the room was empty of people and furniture. Even the walls were completely blank, a depressing industrial gray.
“I want to see him,” Caroline finally said. It was one of those things that was partially true, and partially untrue.
Her father nodded to the woman at the desk, who fiddled with the console in front of her. The door beside her clicked, and she said, “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
He led the way through the door, along a narrow corridor, down a flight of steps, along another short corridor, then finally through a heavy, solid metal door and into a large room brightly lit by fluorescents. Two gurneys stood near the center of the room, one empty, the other with a covered body. There was an old metal utility sink attached to one wall, and two walls were racked with refrigerated lockers. Caroline wondered how many bodies were being stored here right now.
Her father went to the head of the occupied gurney and waited for her. He put on a pair of surgical gloves he’d taken from his jacket pocket, then took hold of the cloth covering by one corner, and looked at her. She nodded, and he carefully folded back the cloth, exposing the head.
She didn’t look down at first. She kept her gaze on her father, the exposed face in the lower edges of her vision. A faint, unfamiliar smell rose, a chemical smell. Some kind of preservative, she imagined. Or would that have been used yet? Maybe something else. Maybe she was imagining the smell.
She tried to remember whether she had ever seen a dead person before, up close like this. There was her grandmother’s funeral when she was quite young, seven or eight, but she could not remember if there had been an open casket; if there had been, would she have been allowed to see her dead grandmother? There were simply no images from that funeral in her mind. She’d been older, fifteen, when her grandfather had died, but the casket had been closed, she remembered that distinctly; her grandfather had lost so much weight in the course of his illness that, according to her father, he was almost unrecognizable. He and his sister had decided that no one should remember their father that way.
Caroline finally looked down. It was Tito. Yes, it was Tito, but he almost didn’t look real. His lips were purple, his skin was strangely pale, like brown ash, covered with raw, red, purplish patches, and his open eyes looked like glass marbles. She felt a chill emanating from him, but she didn’t know if that was real or imagined.
“Is it Tito?”
She looked up at her father, looked back at Tito, and nodded. So many times in the past few months he had been so sick that she’d thought he would be better off if he died soon, ended his suffering, but looking down at him now, now that he was dead, she was no longer so sure. She only knew that she was already beginning to miss him, and the pain of that was growing slowly, but steadily.
Her father gently pulled the cover back over Tito’s face, adjusted the cloth so it hung smoothly across the skin.
“I expected it to be colder in here,” she said. Even as she spoke, it seemed to her a strange thing to say, but it just came out. “So the bodies won’t decompose.”
“He won’t be out here long,” her father replied. “He’ll go back into one of the lockers as soon as we leave.”
She nodded and reached out, laid her hand over Tito’s chest. The cold seeped through the cloth and into her skin, even her bones, but she left her hand there, certain that it was important for her to feel that cold, to know what it was like. As though some crucial understanding would come from it. She would be that cold one day, and that day might not be that far in the future.
“What do I do to make funeral arrangements?” she asked.
“Nothing, for now.”
She looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“It could be a while.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We need to have an autopsy done.” He seemed ill at ease, which was so unlike him. “But it’s a low priority, so it could be a while.”
“Why an autopsy? He had AIDS.”
Her father shook his head. “Yes, but that’s not why he died.” He was reluctant to go on. “Something else killed him.”
“What?”
“No idea. That’s why the autopsy.”
“What the hell is going on here?”
Her father looked increasingly uncomfortable. “I really don’t know, Caroline. It’s complicated, especially because I really don’t know much right now. But there might be a connection to another case I have right now.”
“What kind of connection?”
This time her father hesitated a long time. But if he knew her at all, he would realize that she would not let this go. He would realize he had to tell her.
“Cancer Cell,” he finally said.
“So Mouse was right.”
“Maybe. And maybe about the Core, too. Tito died in a street clinic in the Tenderloin, half a block from the Core.”
“What happened, Papa?”
Apparently he did know her well enough, because he eventually gave her the whole story. He started with putting out the department tracers, and getting a hit after the street clinic checked Tito’s identity chip. He told her about going out to the RadioLand Street Clinic and finding that Tito had already died. And he told her about meeting Cage, and
Cage’s concern about an infectious disease with some kind of connection to Cancer Cell.
“And there’s a connection between that and another case you have?”
Her father nodded. “A murder case,” he said. “Cancer Cell has come up in that case as well. But it could be a coincidence.”
“You don’t think so, though.”
He sighed. “I really don’t know, Caroline. I’ve got a lot of nothing on that case right now, so I’m following up every possibility. And in the meantime, Cage wants me to have Tito autopsied, see if we can’t get some idea of what killed him. Maybe it won’t be anything.”
Caroline pulled her frigid hand back from the cloth over Tito, and stared at it.
“It’s all right,” her father said. “The cloth is impermeable.”
But her hand was so cold, and she continued to stare at it, searching for some sign that no contagion had rubbed off onto it.
“Are you okay?” her father asked her.
She hurried over to the sink, turned on the tap with her elbows, and scrubbed her hands with large quantities of dispenser soap, the water as hot as she could stand it. Her father removed the surgical gloves and disposed of them in the wall bin beside the sink. Caroline continued scrubbing until her hands were red and painfully raw. She dried them with paper towels, tossed the towels into the bin, then turned to her father.
“I want to go now,” she said.
CHAPTER 13
Cage was dreaming of a giant anteater. The anteater, which appeared to be six or seven feet high at the shoulder and close to fifteen feet long, wandered slowly along the deserted streets of San Francisco, snuffling through tall, tropical ferns and dripping wet broad-leafed plants that grew everywhere.
Cage was standing alone at the second-floor window of an abandoned building, watching the anteater amble through the city. A phone began ringing somewhere. The anteater stopped, tilted its head, and looked at Cage. The phone kept ringing, the dream shook apart and darkened, and Cage shakily came awake.
The phone continued to ring, quietly chirping beside him. He hated that sound. The room was dark, almost quiet except for the phone. He glanced at the pulsing blue clock beside the bed: 4:43. He hadn’t been asleep much more than an hour.
He finally reached for the phone, rolled onto his back, and put the receiver to his head. It rang once more, right in his ear. Cage pressed the answer button.
“Cage? Sorry to wake you.” It was Paul’s voice, which wasn’t really a voice he wanted to hear right now. Actually, he didn’t want to hear anyone’s voice. “I’ve got a problem here.”
Here had to be the clinic, which of course was only three floors below him. Which was not always a good thing, being that close.
“You need me to come down there and help out?” He could hardly imagine getting out of bed right now, let alone treating patients. He was exhausted after working two double shifts at the clinic in the past three days while squeezing in a full day of image enhancements at the Pacific Heights Aesthetic Modeling Center.
“Yes,” Paul answered. “But not what you think. You know a guy named Tiger?”
That helped get Cage alert and awake. He pushed himself up into a sitting position.
“Yeah, I know Tiger. Is he there?”
“He’s here, all right. And he’s hysterical, demanding to see you, demanding to be given some pills or a shot, says he’s sick with some deadly disease. He’s scared, Cage. Don’t know what he’s scared of, and he doesn’t seem to actually be sick, but he said you would know.”
Christ. He knew, all right. “Okay, I’ll be right down. Try to calm him down. Tell him I said he’s fine, and I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Calm him down,” Paul said. “Sure thing. He wants a shot, I’ll give him one. Sedate his ass.”
“Just hang on, Paul, and I’ll be right down.”
“All right. But make it quick.” Paul broke the connection.
Cage nodded to himself. Yeah, make it quick. He swung his legs out from under the sheet and over the side of the bed, and sat there for a few moments, trying to will himself awake. But his body and mind kept trying to shut down. If he lay back right now, he’d go out, he knew it.
He took a brief, cold shower and got dressed. He thought about making a quick cup of coffee, but decided he’d better get downstairs right away and see Tiger. Coffee probably wouldn’t do him much good anyway; he was beyond the help of caffeine.
Outside it was still fairly dark, but already warm. The day was going to be hot, and he wondered if they were heading into their first big heat wave of the year. The first one was always a killer; people would be dropping in the streets.
The clinic entrance was just ten feet down from the apartment lobby. There were only three people in the waiting room two older men sitting together, and a young pregnant woman. Mike Wilkerson looked up as Cage approached the desk and nodded toward the left hallway. “Cardenas is with someone in Exam Two,” he said. “Your man Tiger is in Four.”
“We got any fresh coffee?” Cage asked.
Mike nodded. “Just made a pot five minutes ago. Want me to get you some?”
Cage shook his head. “I’ll 11 get it myself. Exam Four, you said?”
“That’s it.”
He started back toward the staff room, but pulled up when someone began banging on one of the exam room doors and yelling. From the inside. He turned back to Mike.
“Is that my guy?”
Mike nodded, laughing. “Paul locked h
im in. He kept jumping out into the hall and shouting for help.”
“Christ. I guess the coffee’ll wait.” He reversed direction, came around the counter, then headed up the left hallway and down toward Exam Four. Tiger was still pounding on the door when he reached it.
“Hey!” Cage shouted. “Jam it in there, will you?” Silence for a moment. Then, “Dr. Cage?”
“Yeah.” He took the chart and clipboard off the wall hook, glanced at it. Paul had started the chart, but hadn’t written anything except: Tiger. Diagnosis: MADMAN! Cage unlocked the door and opened it. Tiger stepped back and let Cage inside.
Tiger immediately began pacing and talking at the same time. “Oh, man, you gotta help me. He’s dead… goddamn, he’s dead… and you gotta…” Tiger was flushed and sweating, rubbing at his head with one hand while wiping the other hand up and down on his thigh. “I think I’m sick… I must be sick… he’s fucking dead!”
“Tiger!” Cage barked it at him.
Tiger stopped pacing and blinked stupidly at Cage. “What?”
“Sit down, for Christ’s sake. Just calm down a minute, and sit.”
Tiger didn’t move for a few moments, still staring at Cage as if he didn’t know where the hell he was. Then he looked around and sat in the chair by the tiny window that opened out into the alley. Cage remained standing.
“Okay,” Cage said. “Who’s dead? Stinger?”
“Yeah, fucking Stinger. And he died a mess. He was vomiting blood everywhere and screaming and his skin was peeling off, and then he just died.”
“You saw this?”
Tiger shook his head. “No, I told you. They were keeping him away from everyone, in some kind of isolation room, in some building somewhere, I don’t know. But a woman I know, one of the people I was helping carry him that time, she’s got better connections than I do. She knows someone who was there, who saw him die. She says everyone’s really worried. She said Stinger’s not the first one to die like that.”
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