by Bobby Adair
When he arrived back in Denver, he’d hole up in the house until he turned symptomatic. He’d infect Heidi—at least that was Paul’s plan—and then he’d call the hospital, concoct some story of how he’d gotten infected, and being the first patient in Denver, he’d get the best treatment they had to offer. Heidi, the second patient in Denver, would get the same. Their chances of surviving were excellent.
Excellent in a relative sense.
Heidi had told Paul the minute he indulged his insanely stupid plan he’d better plan on coming home to an empty house, because she was going to get into her car five minutes later, drive to Denver International Airport, and hop a plane back to San Antonio. She’d rent a car and drive it up to her parents’ house in New Braunfels, Texas. That’s where she’d wait for Paul’s folly to play itself out. She didn’t mind adding that she’d take the life insurance when he died and spend it on margaritas and amorous cabana boys in Cozumel.
It didn’t matter what she said by then. He was mad, she was mad. Both were past the point where words were anything but painful little hand grenades tossed across the chasm of their disagreement.
A sign displaying the distance to Pueblo stood by the road. Paul passed it and pushed his speed over eighty to flow with the southbound traffic.
Chapter 32
Paul drove through the last of the mountains he’d see on his trip as he left Colorado and entered New Mexico. He turned east at Raton and cut across the northeast corner of the state toward Clayton and Texline, passing little towns along the road that had the look of an apocalypse that left them dead fifty years prior. Whatever reason people had for living, working, and building their little hovel towns so far from any kind of city, the economics of it had stopped making sense a long time ago. Most of the houses, gas stations, motels, and stores were rotting away under sagging roofs. Old cars rusted on flat tires. Trees grew through windows and weeds conquered driveways.
It was a preview of America to come; an America Paul was executing a bold plan to prepare for. Most of it passed, ignored. Paul’s plan and his troubles took over his thoughts and left him only enough mental bandwidth to keep his car aimed at the asphalt ahead and his foot on the gas pedal.
He stopped on a stretch of road so deserted he saw volcanic hills pushed up out of the flatness, ten, twenty, maybe thirty miles away. Antelope grazed far out on the horizon-to-horizon carpet of tan grasses. No car was coming or going for miles in either direction. Paul filled his tank from the gasoline cans riding in the bed of the truck and relieved himself without the slightest worry anyone would see.
He crossed the border into Texas and the plain flattened out so much that grain silos ten miles up the highway were visible. To his right and left, irrigated circles of corn a half-mile across bordered the road—dried brown and ready for harvest. Dalhart and Dumas passed his windows. Miles of rolling red dirt hills dotted with smelly oil pumps fell behind.
Oblivious to everything around him and settling into the boredom of the drive, trouble found him.
Paul sat in his pickup, idling on the shoulder. Ahead of him, the hot air shimmered over the blacktop. Behind him, a Texas State Trooper sat in his car, shifting his focus between Paul and the computer that provided him with all the information that he was likely to need about Paul’s truck.
“Turn off your vehicle,” the officer’s voice ordered over his PA.
Paul cut the engine. With the air conditioner off, he rolled his windows down, and hot air blew in. He’d planned to make the entire trip anonymously. If a record of his travel existed, it might turn into a problem later on.
The patrolman walked up to Paul’s window, peering into the car through his trite aviator sunglasses. “Driver’s license and insurance.”
Paul produced the documents with a pleasant smile. “Was I speeding?”
“Do you have any outstanding warrants?” the officer asked. “Anything I need to know about before I run your license?”
“No.” Paul was a little offended. Maybe back in his teens and early twenties—his hoodlum years—he’d had a warrant or two.
“Do you have any weapons in the vehicle?”
“No,” Paul told him.
“Do you have any drugs?”
Paul looked emphatically around the cab of his truck. “Where would I put them?”
“People find a way to hide them,” said the officer, humorlessly. “Is this your vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in Colorado?”
Paul wanted to snap back, “I have Colorado plates!” but bit his tongue. “I live in Denver.”
“What brings you to Texas?”
Paul’s patience was wearing thin, but he didn’t want a ticket. He pointed up the road. “I’m just going to visit a friend in Dallas.”
The officer nodded and said, “Stay here. I’ll be back.” He walked back past the bed of Paul’s truck, while looking very curiously at the gas cans.
Shit.
Minutes passed. Paul worried. Going back to Denver after all he’d fought through with Heidi would be demoralizing. If he did go back, what then? Paul had no answer. His window of opportunity was narrow.
After a short while, the officer strode back up beside Paul’s car, took a long look again at the gas cans, and stopped by the window. “You were going seventy-eight in a seventy.” He handed Paul his license and insurance. “I’m not giving you a ticket today. Keep an eye on the speed.”
Paul thanked him, smiled, and got back on the road.
Chapter 33
“You were in Kenya, Pakistan, Italy, Germany, England, and here. Which cities specifically?”
Salim looked at the man in the plastic suit standing by his bed, mask over his face, and what looked like ski goggles over his eyes. At the man’s side, a silent companion in similar attire scowled. “Frankfurt.”
“And?”
Salim closed his eyes as pain throbbed through his head. “Lahore.”
“You were in Pakistan for a long time.”
“Relatives,” Salim said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Why were you in Nairobi?”
Salim didn’t need to think about that answer. He’d practiced the lie so many times it almost seemed true to him. “Safari.”
“Safari?” The questioner turned to his companion. Doing his best to sound impressed. “Wow. I’m lucky to afford my deer lease. Must be nice.”
Salim shook his head and felt gravel roll painfully back and forth inside his skull. “I took pictures. It’s not—” He lost his train of thought. “Pictures.”
“Is that where you contracted Ebola?” the questioner asked.
“Ebola?” No.
“Yes, in Nairobi, did you contract Ebola there?”
“Ebola is in Liberia. I didn’t go to Liberia.” Salim was confused. He was frightened. Is that what killed everyone in Kapchorwa? “I have Ebola?”
The questions came in a flurry after that, so fast that Salim didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He was having trouble just paying attention; what focus he could muster was pinned to thoughts of his death sentence. That’s what Ebola was, a painful prelude to inexorable death.
A nurse dressed from head to toe in the standard half-ass space suit, with a big clear plastic shield in front of her face, came into the room. She wore a surgical mask underneath. She did something with a monitor beside Salim’s bed and checked the fluid in his IV bag.
“Is my lawyer here?” Salim asked, not sure himself where that question came from.
“You have a lawyer?” The questioner nearly shouted it.
Salim answered, “I don’t know.”
“Why would you need an attorney?”
“I don’t know.” Salim asked, “Am I going to die?” Things got fuzzy after that.
Chapter 34
It was one of those bars in the rejuvenated warehouse district—every city had one these days. The building was old and narrow. A hundred years of improvements had been scraped off rough wooden floors and
weathered brick walls. Black lacquer tables, gas lamps on the walls, and long shiny bars juxtaposed the new décor with the old, and people piled in after work to drink to the sound of piped-in blues that were played live on the weekends.
Through the light crowd Olivia spotted Mathew Wheeler, already at a table halfway back, by the wall. He stood up in an old-fashioned, gentlemanly way when she arrived. She was a bit impressed. The most she’d gotten in the way of manners from the guys she’d dated through college and since was a “Hey, babe,” and a peck on the cheek while leaning over the table.
Wheeler pulled out a chair and said, “You look like hell.” He smiled widely.
The nascent bubble of romance burst and Olivia laughed as she collapsed into the chair. “I’m sorry. I’m...”
Wheeler sat and then waved at the waitress. “You need something strong, I think.”
Olivia smiled and nodded.
“Work?” Wheeler asked.
She nodded again, adding a shake of her head. “Everything. It’s everything, Mathew.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Wheeler gave the waitress their order, then turned his attention back to Olivia and looked down at his watch. “Here are the rules. You’ve got five minutes to vent about whatever you want. I’ll listen. I’ll nod. I’ll say, “Yup.” I’ll say, “You go, girl.” I’ll even hug you if you need it. When your time’s up, we’ll talk about other things. Got it?”
“Why did you get divorced again?” Olivia asked with a wry smile.
Looking down at his watch, Wheeler replied, “You just wasted five seconds. If you want to spend your whole five minutes talking about my troubles...well, that’s your prerogative, I guess.”
“So, that’s how it works?” Olivia asked. “I get five minutes. You get five minutes. And then we talk about the Braves or the Falcons or something?
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Fine. My brother is lost in Africa. I called my dad the other day and told him I was worried and he needed to maybe work from home for a while. You know.” Olivia looked out through the glass wall at the front of the bar.
“Yeah, I know,” said Wheeler. “But that’s for my five. Don’t steal my material.”
Olivia smiled again. “My dad—” she caught herself, not sure what to say, knowing she couldn’t tell him all Heidi had said when she called last night, crying. “He’s not handling Austin well. I don’t know what to do.”
“Should you take some time and go home?” Wheeler asked.
“Drive for two days, just to have him insist that everything is fine?”
“Hardheaded?” Wheeler asked.
“You know it.”
He looked at her in a way that implied more than he said. “I’m guessing it’s a family trait.”
“And work.” Olivia shook her head. “I can’t talk about work, but it’s...it’s...”
“Fucked?” Wheeler asked.
Olivia laughed. “Exactly what my dad would say.”
Wheeler looked at his watch.
“I don’t need my full five minutes. You go ahead.” Olivia replied.
Wheeler smiled, but looked serious at the same time. He took his watch off and laid it on the table in front of Olivia. “You’re the timer lady. Give me the go.”
“Okay.” Olivia waited for the second hand to hit the twelve. “Go.”
“People are protesting outside the CDC campus every day, and the crowds are growing. This morning somebody threw a rock at my car, and it’ll probably cost me two dollars less than my deductible to get the dent fixed. Congressmen are screaming at the director, who screams at my boss, who screams at me—”
“Literally?” Olivia asked.
“Figuratively. Well, not the congressmen part. You know how they are.” Wheeler sipped his drink. “We’ve got eleven labs doing something with the new strain, and that’s just here in the States. Everybody in the world is on this one, because it scares the hell out of all of us. We’ve infected our monkeys, and we’re still figuring things out.”
“Is it airborne?” Olivia asked.
Wheeler shrugged. “Can’t say yet, but one thing we can almost certainly say: the antigens shifted. Any of the experimental treatments for Ebola Zaire...” Wheeler shook his head slowly and looked down at his ice cubes. “They don’t seem to have any effect at all. We may be starting from scratch on this one.”
“That sounds bad.”
Wheeler smiled again with the same strangely serious look as before. “Worst-case scenario.” He leaned back in his chair and half chuckled. “Back in college we used to dream about finding a new bug. The more dangerous the better. Of course the dream always ended with a miraculous cure, a Nobel Prize, and very few deaths.”
“Kind of a cross between ‘Luke Skywalker’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’?” Olivia asked.
“’Grey’s Anatomy’?” Wheeler grimaced. “Maybe, if you want to put it that way. We don’t know what this bug will do. We’re still trying to figure out what’s happening in Africa. Nobody with the new strain has died yet, but everybody is holding their breath on that one. Maybe it’ll turn out to be Ebola Light. People get sick, but very few die.” Wheeler shrugged.
“But you don’t believe that, do you?”
Wheeler shook his head. “I’m not the believing type. How am I doing on time?”
“I stopped checking.”
“You’re not very good at this.” Wheeler picked up his watch and wrapped it back around his wrist.
“Either the five-minute game doesn’t work, or you’ve still got something else to vent about,” she replied.
Wheeler pulled in a deep breath. “Between us?”
Olivia nodded.
“You may already know this...”
Shaking her head, she added, “Long story, but I’m kinda out of the loop on a lot of things right now.”
“Do you need another five?”
Olivia shook her head. “What else do you have?”
“Those damned tight-lipped Germans.”
“What about them?” Olivia asked.
“How many cases do you know about?”
“The last number I got was thirty-eight,” she replied.
Wheeler paused, then said, “The number is higher. A lot higher. I talked with a colleague at the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and people over there are losing their shit. The Frankfurt number topped three hundred.”
Chapter 35
Jimmy Kerr liked to shave his head and wear a goatee to offset his boyish features. He was a big man, standing a good bit taller than average. His big, round belly, wide ass, and meaty shoulders gave him an ominous presence.
Despite the look, Jimmy wasn’t the type to intimidate to get his way. He’d never been a violent man. Sure, he had a short temper, but who didn’t? He’d been arrested a couple of times on domestic violence charges and didn’t mind telling his version of the story: the crazy bitch had been off her meds and had threatened him with a kitchen knife. He’d only punched a few holes in the sheetrock and had never hit her. In a tussle, as Jimmy defended himself, she’d gotten a few bruises that cost Jimmy some time in jail. That was wife number two. The story with number three had different details, but the result was the same.
Wife number four never got a bruise. Jimmy awoke in the darkness after going to bed drunk and angry. Maybe he’d said some things. He couldn’t remember. He did remember waking up to the surprise of learning how cold the barrel of the revolver felt pressed against his nuts. More was said. Threats were made. Jimmy left that night with a change of clothes, the cash in his wallet, and his manhood intact.
Crazy bitches!
Jimmy’s smile, charisma, and flair for spinning heaping loads of prattle attracted the type. Those same talents came in handy when he mustered recruits for his moneymaking schemes, which were sometimes legal, most often not.
While he was smart enough and inventive enough to come up with ways to steer money into hi
s pockets, he never seemed to have enough of that elusive something to make himself rich. In the early days of high-performance scanners and printers, he’d gone into the business of manufacturing counterfeit money. He saw it as a victimless crime. The trick with printing money back in the eighties—before security strips and watermarks—wasn’t getting the accuracy of the print right, it was getting the color and feel of the paper right. It had taken him only a few hours to purchase the scanner and printer, hook them up to a computer, and generate his first counterfeit bill. He’d spent a couple of weeks working out the paper and dye problems. In the end, he was able to produce bills that never raised an eyebrow when passed off to unsuspecting clerks at drive-through windows. The problem with counterfeiting, as he came to learn, was not in producing the bills. It was in passing the twenties off for change, his method of converting fake cash to real cash. By the time he dyed and dried the paper, printed and cut the bills, aged the finished product, and made his way around town passing them off one at a time, he came to realize he wasn’t making much more than he would at a legit job.
Fuck that.
Jimmy abandoned the scheme and moved on to Medicare, where he saw himself as something of a pioneer. He’d engineered a process to defraud the government of millions long before anybody knew on what an industrial scale Medicare fraud could exist. Of all the money that flowed through Jimmy’s scheme, not nearly enough of it dribbled down to his pockets. He kept himself in late model cars, cigarettes, and beer while managing to pay his child support, but was always living paycheck to paycheck, or however that concept is described in a criminal enterprise.
Identity theft—another product of his criminal aptitude—was a low-risk scheme that generated lots of cash, but it turned out like the counterfeiting scheme: too much legwork to appeal to his lazy nature.
