Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  The Muzak segued ironically to a stringy sweet version of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

  “Well, sir, this isn’t the Korean missile information you were expecting,” Parker explained. “This is data on that guy who killed Huweiler. Field Intelligence turned him up.”

  “The Huweiler assassination, huh?” Wolfe perked up at this, sensing this might be the case he’d been looking for. If this new assassin turned out to be as good as rumors indicated and Wolfe could bring him into the Company, that would be his ticket. A story like this could nudge Le Carre and Clancy and Grisham right off the best-seller list.

  “That was some top-notch work from what I hear,” Wolfe said. “What’s this guy’s background; who the hell is he?”

  “Don’t know yet, sir, he just crawled out of the woodwork.” Parker glanced at the fax, then handed it to Wolfe. “His name’s Bob Dillon.”

  Wolfe looked surprised. “Bob Dylan? Like the singer?”

  “It’s spelled different,” Parker said.

  The fax in question was the photograph of Bob, looking dangerous in his exterminator cap while seated at Freddie’s bar. The portrait was now a bit blurred, being a third-generation fax transmission of the picture. (One might imagine that Marcel’s fashionable assistant, Jean, had sent this in exchange for a little clothes money.) Wolfe looked at the picture, then pointed something out for the less-experienced agent. “Look at the eyes. They always give away a killer.”

  “He looks drunk to me,” replied the greenhorn.

  Wolfe shook his head disdainfully, then returned his gaze to the fax. “That’s because you’re a rookie and you’ve come to rely on all that damn technology. No, once you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you learn to spot a killer.” Wolfe thumped the fax with his index finger. “And this guy’s a killer.” He headed for his office to make some calls. “Get me everything you can on this guy. I want the entire Dillon catalogue on my desk this afternoon. And I want hard copies of everything, none of this E-mail shit,” he said technophobically.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m thinking that Huweiler job looked a lot like that unclaimed kill in Istanbul last month. We might just have to add this Dillon character to the top ten list.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Stress washed Mary’s face as she scrubbed the dishes. The rent was still overdue and several other bills were outstanding. The “reminder” notices were quickly becoming outright threatening; promising to deny her family the basic utilities—phone, gas, electricity, and cable.

  Mary had long prided herself in maintaining a perfect credit rating, and the fear that her record would be defiled gnawed at her relentlessly. If her degree in business administration had taught Mary nothing else, it taught her that people were judged not by their character but by their credit ratings.

  While Mary fretted about financial problems, Katy sat at the table in her Girl Scout uniform counting money from a piggy bank. “I got twenty-four dollars from selling cookies,” Katy said thoughtfully. “Would that help Daddy start his business?”

  Touched, Mary turned and looked at Katy. “Sweetie, that money’s for your troop, it’s not yours to spend, but thanks. Your dad will find a way to start his business.”

  “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t offer.”

  As it turned out, Bob was on the other side of the kitchen door listening. He had been on his way to tell Mary some good news when he saw the five-segmented maxillary palpi of a Silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) disappear under the edge of the rug. It was an unusual sighting for daytime and especially disturbing to Bob because silverfish tended to eat the bindings of his bug books.

  He applied the sum of his weight onto the spot of the rug where he expected the little bristletail was hiding. While he did this, he listened with both pride and guilt as his daughter offered her hard-earned money to help him.

  Here he was, he thought, a perfectly capable man with a family to support, yet he wasn’t providing. He was suddenly face-to-face with the fact that his daughter, a second-year Girl Scout, was considering embezzlement in order to help him get his business started. It had come to this.

  Snap out of it, Bob thought. There was no need to feel sorry for himself. Things were looking up! He had good news and that’s what he was going to tell Mary.

  Satisfied that he had squashed the glistening silverfish, Bob gathered himself and quietly entered the kitchen, shushing Katy, who immediately became a willing conspirator. He crept up behind Mary and put his arms around her waist, causing her to scream and throw a plate into the air. Inevitably, it crashed to the floor, which Katy thought was pretty cool.

  “Jesus, Bob, you scared the crap out of me!”

  “Sorry, hon. Why so tense?” Bob asked, sounding like a bad television commercial for decaffeinated coffee.

  “Why shouldn’t I be tense?” Mary snapped. “My husband’s out of work, I make three bucks an hour plus tips in a city of six percent tippers, our daughter has more money than the two of us combined, and we owe the landlord 320 bucks.”

  “Oh, that,” Bob said with a sly smile. “Well, would it help you to know I got a job?”

  “You got a what?”

  “Well, you know Mr. Silverstein? The guy with all the buildings? I finally got him on the phone.”

  “You got the job?”

  “Well, not yet, but it’s a great lead. He wants a demonstration. So I’m going to start working on that tomorrow.”

  Mary deflated for a moment before Bob continued, toying dangerously with her emotions. “But remember the French restaurant? Maison Henri?”

  “You got that? Please tell me you got that!”

  Bob swaggered a bit to convey his affirmative response. Mary hugged him vigorously before asking the critical question. “How much?”

  Bob held out a check for her inspection. Mary’s eyes nearly popped out of her head, which Katy also would have thought was pretty cool.

  “Five hundred dollars!?” Mary could hardly believe it. Katy was impressed too. “Wow! Can we get a color TV?”

  Mary hugged Bob again. “Honey, this is wonderful! Oh, I can hardly believe this. Let’s celebrate! Let’s go crazy, do something completely extravagant.”

  Bob pushed the deflate button again. He folded the check and put it into his pocket. “We can’t spend this just yet, sweetheart. I gotta be sure I can get rid of the bugs.”

  Mary surprised Bob when she grabbed him firmly by the lapels and pulled him close like a testy loan shark. “Promise me one thing,” Mary said forcefully. “Promise you won’t even think about trying your natural method. You haven’t got those bugs figured out yet, Bob. For now, use poison. Strychnine, arsenic, parathion, use enough to drop a charging wildebeest! Kill the bugs, Bob. We need that money!”

  Bob was dismayed by Mary’s lust for money and freewheeling prescription of organo-chlorines and organophosphates. “Yeah, sure, okay, honey,” Bob said. “I promise.”

  He hoped only that he could keep his promise, for this was a perfect opportunity to test one of the hybrid Assassin Bugs. And, obviously, the more strains he eliminated, the closer he would be to perfecting his all-natural method and, therefore, the closer he would be to getting his family out of New York and starting a better life for all of them.

  Perhaps there was a loophole somewhere in his promise. He made a mental note to look.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Pratt was on his tenth beer. When he saw the globule of brown spittle and tobacco floating in the small moat circling the top of the can, he lifted it to his lips and slurped it up. He peeled back the stained aquamarine curtains of his living room and looked across the street to Bob’s house.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, Doris,” Pratt yelled to the interior of his house, “that scumbag Dillon has pushed me far enough with this late rent routine! That
maggot is got a goddamn room full of friggin’ bugs over there! What the hell’s up with that? Doris? You listenin’ to me? You better be listenin’, ’cause you know what happens when you don’t listen.” Pratt balled up a little fist and shook it in the air. “I’m not kiddin’. I don’t care if you like that deadbeat’s wife or not, I’m gonna take the bum to court on these friggin’ bugs, I swear on my mother’s grave!”

  He tilted the can upright, drained it, then licked at the moat for the remaining brown juice.

  “Goddammit, Doris, get off your lazy fat ass, and bring me another beer before I have to come in there and smack you again.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mary urged the exhausted Pinto along Central Park South through the tolerable Sunday morning traffic, as it belched enough smoke to kill the inhabitants of a large African termite mound. The magnetic sign on the car door read “Bob’s All-Natural Pest Control.” Mary wheeled the advertisement through Columbus Circle and headed up Central Park West the few blocks to Sixty-Fourth. At the green awning of Maison Henri, she pulled to the curb.

  Bob, wearing tan coveralls and his exterminator cap, removed himself from the passenger side and unloaded a cache of deadly-looking extermination equipment from the back, arranging it carefully on the sidewalk.

  “Thanks, hon. I’ll get the train home,” he said. “Probably be back by six.”

  “Remember,” Mary reminded Bob over her shoulder, “use poison. Lots and lots of poison.”

  Bob smiled agreeably into the rearview mirror as he shut the hatch. He knew what she really meant was, above all else, he had to be sure to kill the bugs; no matter how he did it.

  As Bob leaned in the passenger window to kiss Mary goodbye, a crusty-looking panhandler approached and spoke in a hoarse voice. “Hey, Romeo, got any spare change?”

  Startled, Bob turned, feeling at his pockets. “Uh, no, sorry.”

  Bob could smell the guy from several yards away, and he wondered if the stench would function as an insect repellent.

  The pungent panhandler kept approaching and, in violation of all non-aggressive panhandling laws, violently shoved Bob aside. The man leaned in the window toward Mary.

  “How ‘bout you, sweetmeat? Whaddya got for a hungry and homeless veteran?” He reached across Mary and grabbed her purse. She tried to take it back, but the panhandler’s scent wasn’t the only thing that was strong. He ripped it from Mary’s grip and began rifling through the purse, right there on the hood of the car.

  Bob scrambled to his feet. “Hey! Gimme that!”

  The panhandler whirled and punched Bob smack in the face, sprawling him onto the sidewalk. In a twinkling, the man produced a sharpened screwdriver and pounced on Bob. He held the sharpened edge flat against Bob’s terrified face, just under his eye, pushing skin against bone and threatening to slice through with the next increase in pressure. “Want me to cut you a new asshole, asshole?” the man asked.

  The natives passing by acted as if they didn’t see what was happening. Kitty Genovese lived, so to speak.

  Before Bob could answer the panhandler’s presumably rhetorical question, the Pinto’s door blew open and dented the side of the panhandler’s smelly head. WHACK! The screwdriver rolled into a sewer grate.

  Mary leapt from the car, grabbed her purse, and pounced on the now-senseless beggar. She punctuated her words by pounding his head against the sidewalk, “I…don’t…have…a…dollar…to…my…name…you…son…of…a…bitch!”

  Bob struggled to his feet and pulled Mary off the stunned man, who sat up, wide-eyed. “Jesus, lady, you gotta problem!”

  “Damn right I do! You wanna fight about it?”

  Bob held Mary like a rabid dog pulling hard on her leash. He threatened the beggar. “Better leave before I let her go.”

  Confident they wouldn’t actually have to intervene or otherwise get involved, passersby gathered to watch. Someone from the crowd yelled, “Let her go!” Another voice put 20 bucks on the woman to win. There were no takers.

  The panhandler gathered himself and rose from the sidewalk. “She’s an animal! I feel sorry for you mister!”

  “Don’t. She eats less than a Rottweiler,” Bob said.

  The panhandler stumbled away. The crowd, disappointed they didn’t get to see some sidewalk justice, dispersed.

  Mary was a jangle of nerves.

  “Are you okay, honey?” Bob asked as he smoothed her hair.

  “Yeah, I guess. How about you?”

  “Yeah, I’m alright.” he said as he rubbed his head.

  Bob and Mary looked at each other, shook their heads, and simultaneously repeated what had become their mantra, “God, I hate this city.”

  Down the street, the panhandler looked back toward Bob and Mary mumbling, “Man, I hate this town.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Katy had the television on in the Bug Room and was watching a gratuitously violent program involving a desperate and horrible struggle between a shotgun-wielding dimwit with a speech impediment, and a burrowing, old-world mammal of the hare family. “I’ve had it with you, you siwwy wabbit!” the deranged hunter screeched before leveling a twelve-gauge at his victim.

  Katy was taking a break from a school project while Bob and Mary were out.

  The siwwy wabbit anthropomorphically stuck his finger into the end of the shotgun as the demented sportsman squeezed the trigger. BAM! Katy laughed at the blackened face of Mr. Fudd.

  Two days earlier, Katy’s teacher had assigned a different animal to each student and asked for a report on Monday. As soon as Looney Tunes were over, Katy would get right back to work on it.

  As her teacher meted out the animals, Katy hoped for something dangerous like an alligator or a shark. At first she was disappointed when her teacher assigned her the Honeybee (Apis mellifera), but then she remembered the hive of “Abelhas assassinas” that lived in the white box in the window of the Bug Room. They were not only honeybees, but KILLER honeybees!

  Katy became even more excited about the assignment when she found a book called The Killer Bees by Anthony Potter.

  The book was about the African Honeybees (Apis mellifera adansonnii) Dr. Warwick Kerr transported to Brazil in 1956.

  Katy’s telling of the story involved a greedy old scientist who brought these really mean African bees to Brazil because they made more honey than Brazilian bees, and more honey meant more money. One day, somebody who had to be a real bonehead let the African queen bees out of the hives and they spread all over South America and killed everyone in sight.

  Katy thought it was very cool, in a gross kind of way, that the killer bees attacked in huge swarms, and when the victims screamed the bees flew into their mouths and during autopsies on the victims they found dozens of bees in their stomachs! Wow!

  She also thought it was pretty neat that African bee venom was twice as potent as American bee venom and that it had a neurotoxin that boring old American bee venom didn’t have. The worst American bees could do was mess up your respiratory system, which was easily treated with antihistamines and adrenaline. But nerve damages. Wow! That’s cool!

  African bee venom was so powerful the U.S. Army experimented with the stuff at their Chemical-Biological Warfare Center at Edgewood Arsenal, even though they denied it. They had even isolated one component of the venom, something called Phospholipase A, which was also found in cobra, coral snake, and rattlesnake venom—so you knew it had to be good.

  Katy’s informative, if partially fictionalized, research paper would end with a somewhat overstated conclusion that soon millions of Americans would be found dead and bloated in the Southwest desert from thousands of bee stings with lots of bees still buzzing in their stomachs.

  As the teacher would be expecting Katy’s report to focus more on honey production and the use of bees as crop pollinators, she wo
uld doubtless send Katy to the school psychologist, who, after the usual battery of tests, would pronounce that Katy was okay, but desensitized from watching too much televised violence. “You siwwy psykawagist!” BAM! Ha, ha, ha.

  During a commercial break, Katy looked into the bugquarium with the Western Corsairs (Rasahus thoracicus), another species of Assassin Bug that was part of Bob’s experiment.

  The Western Corsair was a remorseless killer with an uncanny instinct for ferreting out concealed quarry. Its head elongated past the eyes and sported two curious beaded antennae. When not in use, its curved rostrum was tucked neatly underneath in a cross-ridged groove between the forelegs; at killing time, the rostrum flicked into action like an angry, sucking switchblade.

  Its amber-colored thorax was powerful and squatty; at the abdomen it widened slightly and darkened to a rich golden brown, rounding nicely at its bristly cercus. The Western Corsair was important to Bob’s research because it attacked not only adult pests but also savored eggs and larvae of various destructive insects. Bob hoped to cross-breed this trait to a roach killer.

  Katy tapped on the bugquarium, just to stir the Corsairs up. She enjoyed getting them agitated because she thought the way they scurried around poking at each other was pretty funny.

  She was tapping at the glass again when the doorbell rang.

  She opened the door to find the cheap cigar on the front stoop—in the mouth of the always foul Dick Pratt.

  “Hi, Mr. Pratt,” Katy said. “Did you decide to buy some cookies after all?”

  Pratt scowled. “Blow me, kid. Where’s the deadbeat?”

  “He’s not a deadbeat,” Katy said in defense of her father. “He went to work on a job. So don’t worry, he’s gonna pay you.”

  “Yo, ya damn right he’s gonna pay me!” Pratt said as he jabbed a stubby finger at Katy. “’Cause if he don’t, yer gonna find yer little pink ass out on the sidewalk!”

  For a moment Pratt considered smacking Katy across the face, just to let her know he was in charge, but he decided he wanted a beer more than that so he turned and stormed off.