Deadout

by Jon McGoran

  Jimmy and I shared a look. Then he gently pushed the gate open. It creaked loudly, the hinges a couple of swings away from falling off completely.

  There was a long driveway ahead of us, stretching to a house a hundred yards away. The driveway was lined by a dense wall of tall conifers. Beyond them, around the house and behind it, were fields of blueberries. The GPS coordinates put the feral hive in the woods to the left, about halfway to the house.

  We were going to knock on the door, warn Johnny Blue, and have a look in the woods. But before we could get there, Blue emerged from the trees near where the bees were supposed to be. He was carrying a shotgun.

  Tyrique and Dawson stepped out after him.

  “Oh shit,” said Tyrique with a grin, pointing me out to Dawson. “It’s this motherfucker.”

  “You’re trespassing,” said Johnny. He sounded drunk.

  Jimmy held up his badge. “Police.”

  “You got a warrant?” As he said it I noticed a bee flying around his head. He waved at it lazily.

  Jimmy sighed. “Looks like someone’s been messing with your gate. I got probable cause. But really, I’m only here to give you some information.”

  Johnny smirked. “And what’s that?”

  I saw a couple of more bees flying around.

  “There’s something gone wrong with Stoma’s bees.”

  Johnny laughed and shook his head. “What is it with you hippies and all this bullshit about the bees?”

  I laughed out loud, because calling us hippies was ridiculous. Then I wondered if he could smell the patchouli.

  “First you’re all worried about the bees,” he said. “Then you’re all worried about the new bees. Then you’re worried that there aren’t any more old bees. I still don’t know what the big deal is about any of them, but there seems to be plenty of them around here, doing a great job. Busy little fucking bees.” He brought up the shotgun. “So I think maybe you’d better just get the fuck off my property.” He swatted at another bee, but missed.

  “Johnny,” I said. “Those aren’t regular bees. Those are the Stoma bees.”

  He laughed. “No, they aren’t. Stoma keeps their bees locked up tight and under control. These are regular local bees like the ones you assholes said were all wiped out. But even if they were, so what? Bees is bees. They’re pollinating the shit out of my crops, doing whatever they’re supposed to be doing. Soon, they’ll be doing it on the mainland, and those farmers will be as happy as I am. The rest of it’s bullshit. Now get the fuck off my property.”

  “Johnny—” I said.

  “Bullshit!” he thundered, firing the shotgun into the air. Tyrique and Dawson jumped, then shared a look that said, “We got to find a new gig.”

  As the echo of the shot faded, I heard another sound, one that made my hair stand up, a low buzz in the background. Not far from where Johnny and his guys were standing, I could see bees flying around, emerging from the trees, then zipping back in. They weren’t meandering; they were moving with great purpose.

  “Bees to the left,” I muttered to Jimmy.

  “I see them,” he replied.

  “Johnny, don’t do that,” I said. I kept my voice soft and held out my hands, palms out. “Those bees aren’t normal bees. Loud noises set them off, and if you keep shooting that gun, they’re going to—”

  He pointed the gun in the air and squeezed off another blast. More bees started darting out through the trees.

  “You don’t tell me what to do with my mother—ouch!”

  He slapped his neck, his face turning dark red with anger before his eyes went round with the pain.

  Tyrique looked down, suppressing laughter, until Dawson yelped and slapped one hand with the other, fast and hard. He looked triumphant, holding up the bee and crushing it between his fingers. But the tide had already turned. I turned to Jimmy, but he was already backing up slowly.

  The trees seemed to be shooting bees at them, little brown darts flying past Blue and his men, then curving around and snapping back, circling and darting in. Blue yelped, a high-pitch squeal against the grunts and muttered obscenities of his men.

  “Blue!” I yelled, back-stepping toward the car. “Run for it! The house or the car, either one, but you can’t stay out here.” One of the bees arced past me, and I pulled back but didn’t swat at it.

  Blue was still swatting and dancing. He’d probably been stung a half-dozen times. Tyrique and Dawson must have been listening because they turned and started running. Then Blue let out a ragged yell and raised the shotgun again. For a moment I thought he was going to take out his bodyguards for running away, or turn the gun on Jimmy and me, but instead he fired into the trees, blasting a hole two feet wide in the dense conifers.

  For an instant, there was a quiet stillness. Dawson stopped and looked back, absent-mindedly waving his hand at a bee that had followed him. Even the bees seemed taken aback by the shotgun blast.

  Then there was a sound like a chainsaw and a column of bees gushed through the hole in the trees like a fire hose on full-bore. It hit Johnny Blue and it stuck—a thick, roiling mass that enveloped him from head to toe. The shotgun fell out of his hand, and he dropped to his knees. Tyrique and Dawson took off, fast.

  Jimmy and I jumped into the car, and as Jimmy started it up, Johnny Blue pitched forward onto the ground. We drove up and I reached for my door handle, but Jimmy grabbed my wrist, shaking his head.

  “It’s too late,” he said. “Nothing we can do for him.” He looked ahead at the bodyguards. “But those guys could probably use a lift.”

  Before I could acknowledge he was right, we were rocketing forward in a spray of gravel, bees bouncing off the windshield. “You ready to get stung?” I asked Jimmy when we pulled ahead of Tyrique. Jimmy kept the car rolling as I reached behind me and opened the back door.

  Tyrique dove onto the backseat, four or five bees coming in with him. I swatted at them with a rolled-up copy of the Vineyard Gazette Jimmy had left on the floor of the car. The last one landed on Tyrique’s bald head and I swatted it hard, with a loud smack. Tyrique looked up at me, eyes smoldering out of a face pebbled with welts.

  Then Jimmy slammed on the brakes and Dawson dove in from the other side, blindsiding Tyrique and bringing in another handful of bees.

  I handed the newspaper to Tyrique and the backseat became a flurry of newspaper whacks and thrashing limbs until the bees were dead and the two men lay on top of each other, breathing heavily but without any signs of an allergic reaction.

  Dawson raised his head. “What the fuck was that?”

  “I told that crazy little fuck this was some bad shit,” Tyrique said. “I told him from the get-go, shit wasn’t going to end well. They put up that much money, they ain’t going to be asking for a little bit in return.”

  “Who’s they?” Jimmy asked.

  Tyrique looked almost surprised, like he’d forgotten we were there. Then he seemed to decide he didn’t care. “Stoma,” he said, trying to pluck one of the stingers out of his neck. I wanted to tell him to scratch it, not squeeze it, but I didn’t think he’d be receptive to my advice. “That dude Sumner, creepy-ass motherfucker.”

  “What was the deal?” Jimmy asked.

  Tyrique and Dawson looked at each other.

  Dawson shrugged. “Not like Blue’s going to mind at this point.”

  Tyrique nodded slowly. “Blue didn’t have the money to buy that farm. I don’t know where he even got the idea to do it, crazy little motherfucker. That dude from Stoma fronted him the money for it, but said he had to do what they say for the first few months, bringing in them bees. Blue started freaking out when shit got intense, all these protesters and shit. Sumner told him to sit tight, that they was moving things up.”

  “Moving what up?”

  “They said they were moving something to the mainland ahead of schedule.”

  Annalisa’s suspicions had been right. “The bees?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But
they said it was happening tomorrow.”

  “You heard them say that?”

  “Sumner talked shit right in front of us, like we deaf or something.” He shook his head. “Blue thought he was home free. I knew he was too much a dumb-ass to be long for this world, but I didn’t think he was going to go out like that.”

  “You hear anything else about Stoma or bees or anything like that?”

  He shook his head, finally getting the stinger out of his neck, flicking it away. “Nah, man, just that.”

  Jimmy offered to take them to the hospital, but they just wanted to get to their own car, parked behind the house. They looked out the windows for a solid minute, checking for bees. Then they got out of Jimmy’s car and very quickly got into a pimped-out Jeep Grand Cherokee. We followed them back down the driveway, but when we stopped next to Johnny Blue’s body, still covered with bees, they kept going.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jimmy said, fighting a visible shudder.

  Tyrique and Dawson didn’t even slow down when they hit the road, squealing their tires as they turned onto the street and disappeared.

  Jimmy turned to me, looking scared—and unnerved by the fact that he was. I don’t think it was a familiar sensation for him. “So what do we do now?”

  73

  The question was still hanging in the air when we got back to the house.

  “Johnny Blue, Benjy, Julie the lab tech, plus Claudia Osterman and Lynne Nathan,” I said as we pulled up. “Kind of feels like we should tell someone.”

  Jimmy laughed grimly. “I agree,” he said as we pulled into the driveway. “But from what Wilks was saying, and from what happened to Benjy’s body, there’s no one left to tell.”

  As we stood there talking, the front door opened and Nola walked out. When I looked over at her, she said, “I need to feed the chickens.”

  “What?”

  “The chickens, back at the farm. I need to feed them.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s too crazy out there.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “But they need to eat. And I have to feed them. If we leave now we can be back before dark.”

  “Johnny Blue is dead. We just saw him being stung to death.”

  She stepped back, closed her eyes for a second. “Doyle,” she said quietly. “I have to go.”

  I let out a deep sigh and turned to Jimmy. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes. We’ll figure out what’s next then.”

  The streets seemed deserted. Everyone was either lying low or in Katama, protesting for one side or another. I couldn’t shake the feeling as we drove that unseen gears were grinding away, that things were happening out of sight, things I should be stopping. I drove even faster than usual, and Nola didn’t complain. The farm looked exactly as it had when we’d left. It hadn’t been a full day, but somehow I expected it to be overgrown with weeds and out of control.

  As I waited for Nola, a bee circled me. I could feel myself tensing, but it wasn’t threatening, just looking for a flower. After a couple of seconds it made its way over to a pot of geraniums on the back porch.

  It looked like just a regular bee, but I knew it probably wasn’t, and I felt sorry for it. I thought about the butterflies back in Dunston, the things that had been done to them. This bee probably thought it was a normal bee, unaware that its genes had been scrambled to produce such a terrible result. It occurred to me that the people weren’t the only victims here.

  When Nola was finished, we got back in the car, relieved to be getting away from the farm.

  We were just at the end of the driveway when her phone rang.

  She looked at me as she answered it, her face suspicious.

  “Oh, hi, Jimmy,” she said. Then, “Sure,” and she handed the phone to me.

  “There’s developments,” he said. “Apparently the special exemption is being granted. They’re going to let Stoma take their bees to the mainland. Archie Pearce is coming to the island himself to make the announcement.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what they’re saying on the radio. He’s holding a press event at the Katama site. Probably timing it to get that nice sunset light for the TV cameras.”

  I laughed in disbelief. “That’s insanity. It’s already crazy there. He’ll cause a riot.”

  “I know it. They just called me in. So what do we do?”

  “We could arrest them.”

  He laughed. “We’ve got nothing on Pearce, not that we’d ever get close enough to arrest him, or have enough manpower, or the political support.”

  “What about Sumner?”

  “Probably the same thing. Besides, we don’t even know where he is.” He let out a sigh. “Where are you?”

  “Just left Teddy’s farm. Heading back to the house.”

  “Okay. I have to go. I’ll feel better knowing someone is here with Annalisa.”

  When I got off the phone, Nola had tears in her eyes.

  “You heard?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  I reached over to squeeze her hand.

  As a cop, you know sometimes the bad guys get away with it. It hurts, but you get used to it. This one hurt more than most. Maybe because the stakes were so big, or because the victims were so small. Or maybe it was because the reason they were getting away with it was because they always got away with it. Because they were bigger than the apparatus that was in place to stop them.

  I heard the now-familiar sound of helicopters and looked up to see the Stoma Corp logo, flying toward Katama. I wanted to stop my car and shake my fist at their arrogance, how they rearranged the world to suit their liking. From altering life so it fit their plans to risking a catastrophe so they could stage a publicity event in the middle of a war zone.

  Even the way they dismantled Renfrew, taking his home, ruining his family, absorbing the Thompson Chemical Company, which had been in the Renfrew family for a hundred years. He was probably as bad as Pearce, just not as smart or as rich. But the way they destroyed him on every level was evil.

  A cop sped past us in the same direction as the helicopter, blue lights flashing in his grill. Jimmy Frank was headed there, too, along with probably every other cop on the island. And every protester, too. I wondered if the whole island would tip over, as everyone rushed to Katama, just so Archie Pearce could gloat.

  That’s when it hit me.

  “What?” Nola asked, wondering why I’d taken my foot off the accelerator.

  I plunged it back down.

  “TFS,” I said. “Thompson Farm Supply. That’s the old name of Thompson Chemical Company’s place here on the island, Renfrew’s chemical unit in Vineyard Haven. Stoma owns it now. I bet that’s where they’re doing whatever they’re doing, while everybody’s on the other side of the island, in Katama, looking at Archie Pearce’s dog-and-pony show.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  I pressed the gas a little harder. “We’re going to try to stop them.”

  * * *

  The newly repaired gate was unlocked when we arrived. The old sign was still visible behind the new one: Thompson Farm Supply, with the happy farmer on the cartoon tractor.

  Nola tried to call Jimmy to tell him what we were doing, but she couldn’t get through. He probably had his hands full in Katama.

  I pulled up and stopped a few feet in front of the gate. The grass was high on either side of the driveway. I had no idea what I was going to find in there—bullets or bees or nothing at all—but I wasn’t about to bring Nola. She could be pretty stubborn, but this time I was going to hold my ground. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

  “I can’t go in there,” she said.

  “What?”

  She put her hand on my arm. “I’ve been thinking, and maybe you’re right, maybe I’m not sensitive like I was, but … It’s a chemical facility. Jesus—”

  “Wait out here,” I said, resting my hand on hers. “I mean, it could get very dangerous in there and I’d rather you wait outside, but
I think you would be fine. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  She paused with her hand on the door handle.

  “Remember when we were leaving the apartment, before we came up here, when I had to get your bags because the guy was spraying the hallway?”

  She was looking at me intently, probably wondering where this was going. “Yes.”

  “That was Roskov, the landlord. He said he was spraying for bugs. But he also said he had been doing it every month, for years. I wanted to make sure you knew that.”

  She stared at me, processing that information. “Okay,” she said. “Well, let’s talk about that some more later.”

  I nodded. “Now, go hide in those trees. Try Jimmy again. If I’m not back in a half hour, get out of here. Just stay clear of the roads until you’re a couple of miles away.”

  She looked in my eyes for a second, then grabbed my face and crushed hers against it. Then she grabbed the shotgun and got out.

  74

  Nola opened the gate, gave me a brave smile, then ran across the grass and disappeared into the trees.

  I coasted slowly down the driveway and pulled in between two metal shacks. I took out my Glock, double-checking the clip as I got out of the car. The chemical truck Teddy had filled his tank from was still there, in the middle of the cluster of buildings. I crept around to the back of the nearest structure.

  The sun hadn’t set, but the shadows were getting long. The weeds and bushes were growing close to the buildings, but there was enough space to slip between the branches and the metal walls. I had squeezed around three of the shacks when I heard the sound of metal sliding across metal and footsteps in the gravel. I poked my head around the corner and saw Sumner standing at the back of a pickup truck with two stacks of metal boxes in the back. He was holding a clipboard and looking at his watch. Then he looked up at me and smiled.

  “Carrick. There you are.” He smiled. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’ve been looking for you, too,” I said, stepping out with the Glock in front of me.

  “Really?” He laughed. “Are you here to arrest me?”

  “Maybe. Why, what are you doing?”