by Cach, Lisa
“How arrre we going to get in?” She didn’t realize until she said it that she fully intended on going with him. Seeing the Beyond Botox! website had pushed her over the edge: Velazquez was experimenting on women without their consent, and that was so not okay. He had forfeited any right to privacy or the protection of the law as far as she was concerned.
And, too, the thought of being separated right now from Tom was more frightening than the thought of invading Velazquez’s estate. Tom’s determination to save her and her growing faith in his strength and intelligence were all that were keeping her from panic.
“I’ll bet he has an extra set…,” Tom said, spinning round in the chair and going back to Velazquez’s antique desk. He dug around in the drawers again, and a moment later came up with an automatic garage or gate opener, and a ring of keys. “Ha!”
Tom printed out a map to the estate as well as one of the satellite images, and shut down the computer. On their way back to the front office they checked out the day-surgery and exam rooms, and the dispensary—opened with a key from the ring—but there was no Phi-Tox to be found.
“Karen musht be done by now,” Angelica said as they pushed back through the door into the reception area. The tabloids were still spread on the desk, and the computer screen lit, but there was no sign of Karen.
“Done and gone,” Tom said darkly.
Worry crept up Angelica’s spine. This was not the time for Karen to go missing! “Maybe she’sh in the bathroom?” she asked without any real hope.
“Maybe.”
Angelica checked the restroom, but it was empty and dark.
“Look at this,” Tom said urgently, when Angelica returned. He held up one of the tabloids. There were messy red ballpoint notes scrawled next to the columns of print in several places. “She wrote down dates of the women’s visits to Velazquez.”
“Sho the implant rejectionsss are related to the Phi-tox!”
“It’s worse than that,” Tom said. “Most of the dates are written next to names in the other article.”
“Not—” she started, overcome by a feeling of horror as she looked at Karen’s empty chair.
He nodded. “The article about LA women who have mysteriously disappeared.”
“Oh god. Karen! Velashquesh musht have come back—” She cut herself off, stopping her fears from running away with her. “Wait. If Velashquesh wahsh here, he would have checked his offishe.”
Tom nodded. “He would have caught us, too. Which either means he wasn’t here and Karen wandered off on her own, or…”
“Or?”
“He’s taken Karen and retreated to the lobby to call the cops.”
Alarm set Angelica’s neck hairs on end. “Either way, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Agreed!”
They found the fire stairs and hurried down, but Angelica’s stiffening body slowed them. Tom scooped her up into his arms. “It’s faster,” he said against her protests, and she put her arms around his neck and let herself be carried.
On the ground floor Tom set her down. The door to the outside was attached to a fire alarm. “We’ve got to try the lobby, first,” he said, and carefully pushed open the door to the lobby and peered out the crack. Everything was quiet. “Stay here,” he said, and slipped out.
Angelica waited tensely while he tiptoed to the end of the elevator bank and peeked around the corner toward the guard and his desk. He looked back at her and shrugged his shoulders, then gestured for her to come forward. She obeyed, and then he put her hand on his arm and led her out past the desk, where the guard was reading a book.
“Hey!” the guard suddenly said.
They stopped in their tracks. Angelica’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest. “Yes?” Tom said, a faint quiver in his voice betraying his tension.
“The Asian girl. She didn’t look too good. Is she okay?”
“Uh, not really,” Tom said.
“She shouldn’t be walking around alone like that. Someone should be looking after her.”
Angelica felt Tom’s arm relax under her hand. “That is exactly what we intend to do,” he said. “Did you see which way she went?”
“Left.”
“Thanks.” They started to leave.
“And, hey!”
They both stiffened and turned back. “Yes?” Tom asked.
The guard’s shoulders were hunched, his face uncertain. “I’ve kind of had my eye on her for a while. Is she, er…single?”
Angelica chuckled, her nerves straining at the odd sound. “Her name’sh Karen, and shhhe lovesss men in uniformsssh. You shhhhould asshk her out.”
The guard’s face brightened. “I just might do that. G’night.”
“’Night.”
“Christ almighty,” Tom said under his breath as they fled into the night air. He dragged Angelica across the street towards Mr. Toad.
“Wait, he shaid Karen went left!”
“You need more syrup, and we can do a faster sweep for Karen from the truck.”
Angelica saw the logic and allowed herself to be helped into the toad.
Tom popped the top on the second to the last bottle of syrup and put it in her hand. She glugged it while he fiddled with Mr. Toad, coaxing the truck to start. Rrr rrr rrr, the engine said. Rrr rrr rrr!
“C’mon,” Tom muttered. “C’mon!”
At last the engine caught, rumbling to life, and then they were easing down the road. This part of Beverly Hills was quiet at this time of evening, with all of the retail shops closed. As they turned onto Brighton Way, though, they saw a small group of women mobbed around the front of a shop. One of them was familiar.
“Karen!” Tom shouted, rolling his window down.
She didn’t seem to hear. As they approached, a pair of women threw something at the plate glass of the front window, shattering it. A moaning cheer went up amongst the group, and they pressed forward, knocking out the last of the glass and invading the shop.
“What the hell are they doing?” Tom said, pulling over.
“Karen!” Angelica hollered out her window.
Tom yanked on the emergency brake but kept the truck idling. “Stay here!” He jumped out and jogged to Karen, grabbing her by the arm just as she was about to go through the broken window with the others.
Angelica smelled the heady scent of chocolate. She looked up and saw teuscher of Switzerland above the door, and didn’t even mind the pretentious lower-case T. These were chocolatiers, famous for their truffles. Her mouth watered. Chocolate was so much tastier than Karo syrup.
“Truuuuuffles,” she moaned, and fumbled with her seatbelt. “Truuuuffles!” She creaked open her door.
Tom was trying to drag Karen back to the truck, but like Angelica she was moaning out her desire. “Chahhhhcolaaaate! Chahhhhhcolaaate!” Angelica stumbled past, drawn irresistibly toward the scent of cocoa butter and sugar.
“Angelica! Get back in the truck!” Tom said, grabbing her arm.
“Truuuuffles!” she whined.
“Chahhhhcolaaate!” Karen cried.
Together, they started again toward teuscher, Tom dragged along by the superior force of their combined hunger.
“Goddammit!” he swore, and released Karen.
The next thing Angelica knew, her feet were off the ground and she was manhandled back into the truck and strapped in. Karo was poured into her mouth, and then Tom was in the driver’s seat, forcing Mr. Toad at maximum speed away from the chocolate shop. As the scent of chocolate cleared from the air, her senses returned. She sucked down syrup and then put her hand on Tom’s arm.
“What about Karen?”
He turned a corner. “I can’t handle both of you.”
“But we can’t leave her there!
“I’m sure the police will arrive at any moment,” he replied, turning onto Santa Monica Boulevard. “They’ll put her somewhere safe. Jesus H.!” he shouted, slamming on the brakes as a mob of women stepped into the road in front of the truck. Mr.
Toad jerked and bounced to a stop.
The women ignored the little truck and stumbled onward towards K Chocolatier. One of them started dragging a trashcan toward the plate glass.
“It’s Night of the Living Dead,” Tom said, his voice hushed.
“And I’m turning into one of them,” Angelica whimpered, her heart in her throat.
“Not if I can help it,” Tom vowed, his voice full of dark determination. He put Mr. Toad back in gear and hit the gas.
Chapter Nine
It was midnight when they rolled up to the gate in front of Velazquez’s Malibu home. The estate was at the top of a bluff between the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean, and they’d only seen one other driveway off the unlit, one-lane road leading up to the gate.
“Jeez Louise, I didn’t know plashtic shurgery paid this well,” Angelica said. They’d stopped at a supermarket on the way to refill their supply of Karo. “No wonder my parentsh wanted me to go to med shchool instead of shtudy art.”
“I don’t think plastic surgery does pay this well. He must have family money.” Tom cranked down his window and reached for the buzzer to the gate.
“What are you doing?” Angelica cried.
“Seeing if anyone’s home. Better to find out now than when we’ve snuck in.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
He hit the buzzer and they waited. Seconds ticked by without a response, and then Tom jabbed the buzzer several more times in a row.
“If he was ashleep, he’sh not now,” Angelica said.
“Exactly.” Tom gave the buzzer another jab for good measure. After a couple minutes went by, he pointed the automatic opener at the gate and pressed the button. The gate slowly swung open, and Mr. Toad chugged through.
The cobblestone drive wound under a canopy of trees up the hill, coming out at last in a courtyard with a four-car garage at one end, and a massive portico at the other. Tom ignored both and pointed the toad toward the left end of the house, where a path led through the shrubberies.
“What are you doing?” Angelica whispered anxiously as bushes scraped the side of the truck.
“The satellite image showed a path around the house. Better to have the truck out of sight of the front entrance if he comes home.”
Angelica gurgled in response.
They came out of the bushes onto a wide green lawn, illuminated along the landscaped edges with up-lights that showed off the forms of trees and bushes. The far edge of the lawn disappeared into night air: the bluff over the Pacific. The lights of distant ships twinkled near the horizon, and overhead a half moon sent its watery light through a thin layer of hazy marine air. Tom parked Mr. Toad under the branches of a eucalyptus, the truck’s faded green paint blending with the menthol-scented leaves of the tree.
“Leave your door open,” Tom said. He fished a flashlight from the glove box and then got out, leaving the keys in the ignition. “I want a quick getaway if it comes to that.”
Angelica looked at him, then at the truck that never started in less than a full minute. There was no such thing as a quick getaway in Mr. Toad.
“Don’t say it!” Tom warned, knowing her thoughts. “The toad has ears!”
Angelica shook her head and lugged her clinking grocery bag of Karo with her out of the car. “According to the shatellite image, the lab shhhould be over there,” she said, pointing.
Tom nodded, and they sneaked their way along the edge of the house for a hundred meters, slipping past windows and across a terrace. They came to a block of the building without windows, the beige stucco wall broken only by a single, unassuming steel door. Above them, they could hear the whirr of HVAC equipment on the roof.
“This has got to be it,” Tom said, and started trying keys on the door. The fourth one worked, and he turned the knob and opened the door a crack. Silence greeted them.
“No alarm shyshtem?” Angelica whispered hopefully.
“Don’t know. Could be silent.” He poked his head in the door, then chuckled softly.
“What?”
He opened the door wider and showed her. There was an alarm system, but it wasn’t activated. Its LED lights glowed green in welcome. “He seems kind of complacent about security,” Tom said.
“There are probably houndsss about to attack ush.”
Tom took a quick glance back over his shoulder at the quiet grounds of the estate, as if it were a real possibility. “No barking.”
“The deadly ones bite firsht, bark later.”
He gave her a dark look, all the more menacing for the tubes that still protruded from his nose. “You’re giving me a hard time, aren’t you?”
If she could have grinned, she would have. “Jusht trying to relieve the tenshion.” She took a swig of syrup.
He grunted, and held the door open for her. Together they slipped into the dark hall, and Tom switched on his flashlight. Its ellipse of white halogen light illuminated an institutional tile floor and utilitarian doors set into the walls. He raised the beam, and the light glimmered on solid glass double doors at the end of the hallway.
“That looks like something,” Angelica whispered.
“Let’s see what.”
They crept down the hall. Angelica, feeling the same nervous dread she had when going through a Halloween haunted house as a child, reached for Tom’s hand. It was warm and strong, and he gave her a reassuring squeeze.
Two of the doors they passed seemed to be to service rooms: behind them, the muffled hums and rhythmic thumps of compressors and fans were dimly audible. As they came to the end of the hall they saw it continued for a few feet to the right, ending in a mahogany door with a worked iron handle.
“Probably goes into the house proper,” Tom said, and turned back to the glass doors. He put the flashlight up against the glass, peering through. “It’s an antechamber.” He grabbed the chrome handle on one of the doors and pulled it open. Angelica felt a rush of warm humid air scented with flowers and forest mold.
“It musht go to the atrium,” she guessed, following Tom into the antechamber. It was only five feet deep, ending at another glass door that was set in a wall of glass. Through the door they could see a steel catwalk stretching straight ahead, tropical leaves overhanging the handrail. The moon sent just enough illumination down through the round skylight for her to make out the silhouettes of a few trees. “Good Lord,” she whispered in awe. “He’s sure serious about his house plants!”
About fifty feet away, across the atrium at the other end of the catwalk, was another glass door, this one leading to a lit area beyond. “Do you think someone is home?” Angelica whispered, holding tight to Tom’s hand.
“If that’s the lab down there, he might always leave some lights on. Or it could be a grow operation, if he gets the Phi-Tox from a plant.”
“Or he could be home.”
“Well, yeah. If you want to be pessimistic about it.” Tom tilted his head. “Listen!”
Angelica did. Through the glass she heard the muffled trills of some animal; there were also the quiet chirps of insects; a solitary, angry squawk; and rustling. “It’s not just plants in there,” she said.
“No.” He pushed open the second door and led her forward.
Their footsteps clanged on the catwalk, and the atrium fell into silence at their intrusion. Angelica breathed in warm air as thickly humid as a steam bath, the scent of jungle even richer and more floral than in the antechamber. She pressed close to Tom, then muffled a shriek as something fluttered close to her head with a sound of rustling taffeta and then away again into the darkness. “What was that?”
Tom shone the flashlight into the foliage, searching for creatures. “Bat? Bird? Giant moth?”
Angelica groaned softly. “Don’t let it be a bat.”
The beam of the flashlight lit on a creature, and stopped. “Uh-oh,” Tom said.
“What?” Even as she said it, Angelica’s eyes followed the beam and saw what. A fat yellow snake lay on a branch not three feet fro
m them, its rings of coils dripping over the sides of the branch like melting frosting. Revulsion rose from Angelica’s gut to her throat, lodging there with the sickly sweet taste of stomach acids and Karo syrup. She gurgled.
Tom flashed the light away from the snake and pulled Angelica forward along the catwalk. “Let’s not look at that.”
A bird squawked, and then a few insects began their hum. A moment later a creature beep-beeped loudly on their left, and Tom flashed his light toward the sound. A small, brilliant orange frog glowed against a green leaf the size of a platter.
“Beautiful,” Angelica breathed, stunned by the hue of the frog.
“Mm,” Tom murmured. “It looks like a type of poison dart frog.”
“Poison dart, as in ‘used to make poison darts’?”
“Yeah. Most of them are harmless, but some varieties are deadly. One frog can make enough paralytic toxin in its skin to kill several people. Those are the types that jungle tribes use for their poison darts.”
“You seem to know a lot about them.”
“I have an interest in toxins, given how often I’ve been bit or stung by snakes, jellyfish, insects, spiny fish—”
“And you want me to go scuba diving? I don’t think so.”
The frog leapt away into the darkness. Instead of following its path with the light, Tom suddenly turned round and shone the light again on the yellow snake. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
He leant over the metal rail and aimed the light down to the bottom of the atrium. Angelica followed his gaze, but saw only hints of forest floor, rich in humus. “Velazquez has an entire ecosystem in here,” Tom pointed out. “Trees, dirt, insects, frogs, snakes, birds.”
“He’s big on rain forest conservation. He says they’re nature’s pharmacopoeia.”
Another beep-beep sounded in the foliage, and Angelica laughed softly.
“What?”
“They sound like Mr. Toad.”
“Mr. Toad,” Tom said, his voice trailing off into thought. “Did you know, zombies in Haiti are thought to be created in part by a toxin from a toad? Toads and dart frogs...” His voice rose in excitement. “This whole atrium is for the poison dart frogs!”
