Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  Vero leaned back. He used his hand to wipe tears from his eyes, pink spittle from his lips, snot and blood from his nose. His breathing was labored, deep, chest-moving breaths. Heavily bloodshot eyes locked on Donnelley’s. He said, “I’m sorry. I—”

  Donnelley stopped him. “We’ve got to get you someplace safe. You need medical attention, and you’ve got to tell your story.” He touched the wad of napkins at his side. Again, it had become a sopping mess. Good thing the injury was in a part of the body that gave up its blood reluctantly; if it had been a head or chest wound, blood loss would have laid him out by now. He checked his watch and wondered if he was placing too much reliance on the SATD to lead Julia to them.

  He surveyed the bar and slid out of the booth. “I’ll be right back.”

  Vero grabbed his arm.

  “I don’t want to use my cell phone, in case someone’s watching for it,” Donnelley said. “Julia shouldn’t use hers, either, but I can’t contact her any other way. I’m going to call her from that phone over there.”

  Vero cranked his head to see the phone booth, how close it was to the door.

  Donnelley leaned down to whisper. “Look, I know you’ve been through hell. You tell me you’re dying and a lot of innocent people may die because the guy you’re running from is neck and neck with Satan in the evil department, and I guess he is. You want to do what’s right and tell someone about it. I appreciate that, okay? I’m going to get you to where you need to go; that’s my job.” He touched Vero’s shoulder. “I don’t disappear when things get hairy. You believe me?”

  Vero stared into his eyes. Slowly he nodded.

  “You can come with me if you want.”

  Vero smiled dully. “I trust you.”

  Donnelley concentrated on walking as steadily and normally as he could, ignoring a wave of nausea and spasms of pain. At least they weren’t as bad as the lightning bolts he’d felt before. The phone was in an old-fashioned booth tucked into a dark corner by the front door. He slipped in and pulled the bifold door shut. In the ceiling, a fluorescent tube sputtered to half-life and continued to flicker after it should have given up; that and its brightness made his eyes ache. He backed the door open a few inches until the light went out.

  He looked out at the mostly empty bar and the back of Vero’s head. Not the where and who he’d prefer right now. His left arm had grown numb, so he let the handset hang from its metal braided cord while he punched in his long-distance calling card number, the area code, and his home phone number.

  After five rings, his wife’s voice came on.

  “Hello!”

  His heart jumped at hearing her, then sank when he recognized their outgoing voice mail message.

  “You’ve reached Jodi…”

  His own voice: “Goody …”

  Brice, trying to sound older than his ten years: “Brice!”

  And the sweet voice of his six-year-old: “Barrett!”

  All of them: “Leave a message and we’ll call you back,” followed by uncontrollable laughter and beeeeep.

  “Hey, guys. Just wanted to say hi. You must be out. Hope you’re having fun. I’ll see you soon.” He raised the handset to the cradle, then brought it back. “I… I love you, Barrett. I love you, Brice. You be good now, okay? Honey … thank you for being so good to me. I love you. Bye.”

  He dropped the handset and held the disconnect button down for a few seconds, then dialed the calling card number and Julia’s mobile phone. After two rings, he disconnected, then dialed again.

  She picked up instantly.

  “Goody!”

  “Yeah, let’s talk fast: unsecured line. I thought you’d be here by now. I’m hurt, kid. Real bad.”

  “Goody, listen to me.” Her voice was higher-pitched and more panicked than he had ever heard it. “I don’t have the signal. Someone else does. Do you hear? Turn off the tracking device, Goody! Do it now!”

  “You don’t—hold on.” He fished the memory chip and transmitter out of his pocket. He used a fingernail to turn the slot in its side to the “0” position.

  He closed his eyes to catch hold of his convulsing thoughts. If someone else was tracking them, this thing was bigger than he’d imagined. It boggled his mind to think of the equipment and covert intelligence necessary to intercept the SATD signal. It confirmed for him that someone inside CDC-LED, the FBI, or another federal agency was involved. And people like that didn’t let their muscles relax once they had them pumped up; they’d be coming after Vero and him soon; they could be watching the bar even now. Still holding the memory chip, he scanned the confines of the dark booth. Laying the handset on top of the phone, he pushed up on the milky plastic panel that covered the fluorescent tube overhead. It rose about an inch. He pushed the chip and transmitter into the open space, but then the panel wouldn’t lay flush.

  He could hear Julia frantically calling his name. “Hold on,” he said, loud enough to reach the handset. He felt around the perimeter of the telephone itself. Nothing. He leaned over and felt under the small wooden seat positioned in one corner. His hand slid over several clumps of old gum, then he found what he was looking for: a thin space between the seat and one of its supports. He transferred the chip to his other hand, then wedged it into the space, flat against the seat bottom.

  Julia was ranting when he put the phone back up to his ear. He cut her off.

  “Hey! Hey! It’s your turn to listen to me, kid. I’m in the phone booth. In the phone booth.”

  “I understand that the line is not secure. Okay?”

  He could tell she was absolutely panicked that he had not understood her before.

  This time she spoke each word with painful deliberation: “Did … you … turn … off! … the … tracking … device?”

  “It’s off, it’s off,” he said. “How—”

  “I don’t know how, but you have to get away from there. Go now, Goody. Your location is compromised. Call me from somewhere else.”

  “I need to contact Casey, Julia. He’s at Earl’s place in Chattanooga. Understand?

  “No, I…”

  Come on, kid, Donnelley thought, you have to remember.

  “Yes! I understand. But Chattanooga?” She swore. “I was just there. I’m about twenty miles south now. You got Vero?”

  “I got him. And he’s talking about some kind of bio-attack that may already be under way. I think there’s a list somewhere of the cities they’re hitting, something to do with a virus—”

  “Tell me later, Goody. Just get outta there now.”

  “Look, if something happens to me and—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen if you get your butt out of there. Now go!”

  “What’s your ETA?”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “You’ve got ten,” he said and hung up.

  He was turning from the phone when he saw them: two men in black knee-length coats. He couldn’t think of all the reasons a person would wear such a thing in warm weather, but he knew of one—to conceal weapons. They had already passed the phone booth. He couldn’t see their faces, but he would have bet his pension one of them had two shiners from a broken nose. They were heading directly for Vero in the second-to-last booth.

  He pulled out his gun.

  For Donnelley, the next seven seconds moved in excruciatingly slow motion.

  Shouldering open the bifold door, he lunged through, pushing a scream out of his lungs.

  The men spun. One raised a shotgun—something exotic, Donnelley thought. The other, the one on his right, had something smaller pulled up close to his torso: a submachine gun. Donnelley shot him. A red rose bloomed in the center of the man’s chest, and he staggered back, dazed but not down. Donnelley pulled the trigger again, realizing his mistake even as he made it. He should have nailed each assassin with a double-tap before putting more holes in them. The shooter on the left was the one he had recognized, the Serpico for DEA. The guy brought his shotgun around, and Donnelley understood t
hat the split-second decision to fire twice at the first one would cost him his life.

  He was falling, one foot remaining in the phone booth. He had swung his pistol three-quarters of the distance to the other shooter when the shotgun boomed, hurling flames and dozens of razor-sharp disks directly at him. He caught a brief glimpse of the shooter’s scowl, twisted into a perverted hybrid of man and demon.

  When he was a kid, he had imagined that a sweet fragrance was the first evidence that heaven had opened its doors to receive you. But now the acidic odor of cordite from gunpowder stung his nostrils, and he thought, Not sweet at all—it smells like death.

  He saw the sparkling of stars—disks catching the light—and behind them, the shotgun barrel’s smoking black hole. Then the disks tore into him.

  Not sweet at all.

  Blackness.

  eleven

  The bartender’s name was Johnny. He’d been doing

  this job for … he forgot how many years, maybe twelve. He liked the gig, because women liked bartenders. They especially dug a “mixologist” guy who’d perform for them, flipping bottles in the air and pouring a shot from way up high and catching it in a glass balanced on his foot, all the while wiggling his fanny to music Johnny thought had not survived the eighties. He wasn’t one of

  those

  guys—though, truth be told, he broke a few bottles and spilled a paycheck’s worth of booze on the floor seeing if he

  could

  be one of those guys when his uncle, who owned the joint, first hired him on.

  Nah, he was the kind of bartender ladies liked second best. If they were nice to him, he gave them free drinks; the nicer they were, the more they could imbibe on the house. He hadn’t wanted for a date since he’d started, though he had learned early on that you couldn’t be too picky when your dates were more interested in Johnnie Walker than Johnny the Bartender. And it wasn’t as if the work could ever be classified hard labor. In fact, Johnny couldn’t remember a time when he’d broken a sweat on behalf of Babylon Bar, not even mopping the floor.

  Until now. Drops rolled off his head and into his eyes, as if he were taking a shower. He wiped them away and peered around the edge of the bar, where he’d clambered when the shooting started. He’d decided long ago, if something like this ever went down, he wouldn’t get stuck behind the bar like a fish in a barrel. He saw a Tarantino film where the bartender got it just because, and he’d been an easy target in that all-too-much-like-a-shooting-range space behind the bar. So that’s why he was where he was, on the outside edge of the counter, farthest from the action without being seen and a screaming ten paces from the back office door, should the need arise to make a break.

  He’d had his eyes on the two strangers pushing through the door, striding in like kingpins, when the guy who said he was from detox sprang out of the phone booth, gun blazing. As if he’d been waiting for them. Johnny had been on all fours and halfway to safety when he heard a big boom!—not the crack of the guy’s pistol.

  Coming around the bar, he’d had a straight view of the other detox dude in the booth—the one he’d heard called Desperado or something like that. Desperado had about jumped onto the table apparently, and when Johnny saw him, he was pushing off it and away from the shooters—still in the booth, but now where the other guy had been sitting. Desperado’s mouth and eyes were as wide as any Johnny had seen, and he’d been trying to say something but couldn’t get anything out except stammering sounds.

  Johnny wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and peered around the edge of the bar.

  One of the strangers was down. Looked as though he’d crashed against an empty table flipped facedown onto the floor. The guy from the phone booth was down too. Lots of glistening red—on him, around him, seeping out of him. The standing shooter was aiming a wicked-looking gun at him and seemed ready to pull the trigger again. Johnny didn’t want to see it and pulled his head back. When the expected roar didn’t come, he looked again. The gunman had turned and was now facing Desperado, his big gun pointed at the man. Without turning his eyes away, he jabbed an index finger at Cheryl, who was—God bless her—still sitting on the stool where she’d

  planted her butt two hours before. Like pushing a button, the shooter’s finger quieted her screaming, screaming Johnny hadn’t realized she was doing until she stopped. He must have thought the sound was ringing in his ears from the gunshots. The shooter held his finger on her a few seconds longer, a warning not to start up again, Johnny thought. Then the shooter pointed at the two guys who’d been swigging watered-down Coors since opening time. They hadn’t been screaming, just sort of gaping at the scene. The finger got their hands in the air as if they were being robbed. Maybe they were.

  Then the man pointed at Johnny, right at him, peering around the bar, and Johnny thought maybe his bladder leaked a little. Just a little.

  The shooter reached around to the small of his back and produced a chrome O. He threw it across the room at Desperado. It hit the table, slid off, bounced against the booth padding, and clattered to the floor. Johnny could see better now—two Os connected by a short chain: handcuffs.

  The shooter nodded at Desperado. “Nice and easy,” he said. “Put them on and—”

  A blaze of sunlight exploded behind the shooter, and Johnny realized the front door had burst open. A silhouette quavered between the radiance and the shooter, who was turning, yelling, “What the—?”

  The door swung shut again, cutting off the blinding light. A tall, muscular man—Buddy Holly glasses with dark polarized lenses, light jacket, gloves, mussed-up hair—was two strides from the shooter. His fist came around and crashed into the shooter’s head. From Johnny’s vantage point, the head appeared to crumple under the blow like a melon. The body collapsed in a heap. The new killer’s fist dripped with blood. Something stringy, clumpy, dangled from his knuckles. Johnny realized that what he thought was a glove was hard and black, with spikes, some sort of newfangled brass knuckles or—yes, now that he thought about it—a gauntlet. A knight’s gauntlet, only black.

  Cheryl was screaming again, whooping like a car alarm. Didn’t seem to bother the newcomer, though. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a pistol with a long barrel. A red light shot out of it. Laser sighting—Johnny had seen it in a dozen movies. The man extended the gun toward Desperado. A red bead of light appeared on the man’s forehead, followed immediately by a black hole and the sudden appearance of spattered brains and skull fragments on the wall behind him.

  Johnny had no time to turn away. His bladder emptied. He dropped his head, gulping in breaths that seemed to lack the oxygen his lungs required. He heard sirens approaching. Someone must have heard the shots. Over time—he didn’t know how long—his breathing relaxed. When he looked up again, the killer was gone. And so was the body of the guy he’d seen get shot in the head.

  twelve

  Julia dashed through the automatic sliding doors of Erlanger Hospital’s emergency entrance, half expecting to see Donnelley, Vero, and a group of hit men stretched out unconscious and bleeding on identical gurneys in the hall. Instead, unfamiliar faces, miserably attached to a variety of injured and ill bodies, turned toward her from rows of plastic chairs. Keypad locks prevented her from getting to the treatment rooms. She stepped up to the nurses’ station.

  “I’m looking for a man—Goody … Goodwin Donnelley. He would have come in within the past ten minutes or so. Injured, probably a gunshot wound, shotgun maybe … a car crash … I don’t know!”

  The nurse, a stern-looking blonde who apparently saw no use for cosmetics, stared at her impassively. “Are you family?” she asked.

  “No … I …” She showed the woman her law enforcement credentials.

  After examining the ID for several moments, the nurse spoke slowly, as though dealing with a deranged person. “Ma’am,” she said, “no one with injuries like that has come in, but I can—”

  “He said here!” Julia interrupted. “He said to meet him at Erlang
er!”

  That was what he meant, wasn’t it? Over a year ago, she had spent a pleasant afternoon with Goody and his family in his backyard. After charbroiled burgers and dogs, the boys had run off with friends, and she, Goody, and Jodi had sat around the picnic table sipping Chianti and chatting. Somehow they’d gotten on the topic of TV medical dramas. Jodi had said that one in particular boasted the cutest doctors, to which Julia had replied that none of the current offerings could match Vince Edwards playing Dr. Ben Casey. She’d had the biggest crush on him, watching reruns as a kid. Despite Goody’s and Jodi’s lists of other candidates for TV’s hunkiest docs, she hadn’t budged. Ben Casey represented the perfect physician.

  So when Goody had said that he needed to contact “Casey,” she’d understood that to mean he needed a doctor. And when he’d said that Casey was at “Earl’s place,” certainly he’d meant Erlanger, Chattanooga’s biggest hospital. At the time, she’d been positive that she had decoded his cryptogram. Could she have misunderstood?

  Divulging his whereabouts with what seemed an easily deciphered code over an unsecured line told her his injuries were serious. He’d want the kind of immediate attention only emergency rooms offered. That such places were usually bright and busy was also an asset, though she doubted that killers who attempted assassinations in hotel restaurants and on crowded highways would think twice about blasting their way through an ER.

  It dawned on her that he hadn’t gone directly to the hospital; he had waited for her to find him. When she hadn’t shown, he’d called to give her directions. He had wanted her with him enough to delay treatment and to risk exposure. He had wanted protection. Was he waiting outside for her, maybe passed out in a car? She started for the parking lot. A local cop in uniform passed her and keyed in the code that opened the doors into the treatment area. She followed him in, found a floor nurse, and asked about Goody.

  “An ambulance is bringing in a gunshot victim now,” the nurse explained. “They called it in a few minutes ago. Should be here in about two minutes.”