Predator Page 23

  Each of them wears a green badge with his photograph, but Dr. Self doesn’t have her glasses on and can’t read their names.

  “We rang the bell and didn’t think anyone was home.”

  “So you just walk on my property and help yourselves?” Dr. Self says.

  “We’re allowed to enter open yards, and, like I said, we didn’t think anyone was home. We rang the bell several times.”

  “I can’t hear the bell from my office,” she says, as if it’s their fault.

  “We apologize. But we need to inspect your trees and didn’t realize inspectors have already been here….”

  “You’ve already been here. So you admit you’ve trespassed before.”

  “Not us specifically. What I mean is we’ve not inspected your property before, but someone has. Even if there’s no record of it,” the inspector with the PDA says to Dr. Self.

  “Ma’am, did you paint these stripes?”

  Dr. Self looks blankly at the stripes on her trees.

  “Why would I do that? I assumed you put them there.”

  “No, ma’am. They were already here. You mean you haven’t noticed them before now?”

  “Of course I’ve noticed them.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, when?”

  “Several days ago. I’m not sure.”

  “What it indicates is your trees are infected with citrus canker and will have to be removed. That they’ve been infected for years.”

  “For years?”

  “They should have been removed long before now,” the other inspector explains.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “We stopped painting red stripes a couple years ago. Use orange tape now. So someone marked your trees for eradication and it looks like no one ever got around to it. I don’t understand that, but in fact, these trees do show signs of canker.”

  “Not old canker, though.”

  “Ma’am, you didn’t get a notice, a green notice that indicates we found symptoms and instructs you to call a one-eight-hundred number? No one showed you something like a specimen report?”

  “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” Dr. Self says, and she thinks of the anonymous phone call she got yesterday evening right after Marino left. “And it really does look like my trees are infected?”

  She steps closer to a grapefruit tree. It is heavy with fruit and looks healthy to her. She leans close to a branch as an inspector’s gloved finger points out several leaves that have pale lesions on them, scarcely noticeable ones shaped like fans.

  “See these areas?” he explains. “They indicate recent infection. Maybe just a few weeks. But they’re peculiar.”

  “I don’t get it,” the other inspector says. “If the red stripes are to be believed, you should be seeing dieback and fruit drop, should be able to count the rings to see how long ago. You know, there’s four or five flushes a year, so you count rings….”

  “I really don’t give a damn about counting rings and fruit drop! What are you saying?” she exclaims.

  “I was just thinking that. If the stripes were painted a couple years ago…?”

  “Man, I’m stumped.”

  “You trying to be funny?” Dr. Self yells at him. “Be-cause I don’t think any of this is funny.” She looks at the pale, fan-shaped lesions and keeps thinking of yesterday’s anonymous phone call. “Why did you come here today?”

  “Well, that’s what’s kind of strange about this,” the inspector with the PDA replies. “We’ve got no record of your trees already being inspected and quarantined and scheduled for eradication. I don’t understand. Everything’s supposed to be registered in the computer. The lesions on your leaves are peculiar. See?”

  He holds one out, shows her, and she looks at the odd fan-shaped lesion again.

  “They don’t normally look like that. We need to get a pathologist out here.”

  “Why my damn yard today?” she demands to know.

  “We received a phone tip that your trees might be infected, but…”

  “A phone tip? From whom?”

  “Someone doing yard work in the area.”

  “This is crazy. I have a yard man. He’s never said anything to me about something being wrong with my trees. None of this is making any sense. No wonder the public is infuriated. You people don’t know what the hell you’re doing, just barge into people’s private property and can’t even keep it straight which damn trees to cut down.”

  “Ma’am, I know how you feel. But the canker’s not a joke. If we don’t deal with it, there won’t be any citrus trees left….”

  “I want to know who called.”

  “We don’t know that, ma’am. We’ll get it straightened out, and we certainly apologize for the inconvenience. We’d like to explain your options. When’s a good time to come back? Will you be around later in the day? We’ll get a pathologist to look.”

  “You can tell your damn pathologists and supervisors and whoever that they’ve not heard the last from me about this. Do you know who I am?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Turn on your damn radio today at noon. Talk It Out with Dr. Self.”

  “You’re kidding. That’s you?” one of the inspectors, the one with the PDA, asks, impressed, as he ought to be. “I listen to you all the time.”

  “I also have a new TV show. ABC, tomorrow at one-thirty. Every Thursday,” she says, suddenly pleased and feeling a bit more charitable toward them.

  The scraping sound beyond the broken window sounds like someone digging. Ev breathes shallowly, rapidly, her arms raised above her head. She breathes shallow, rapid breaths and listens.

  It seems she heard the same noise days ago. She doesn’t remember when. Maybe it was at night. She listens to a shovel, someone plunging a shovel into the dirt behind the house. She shifts her position on the mattress, and her ankles and wrists throb as if someone is beating them and her shoulders burn. She is hot and thirsty. She can barely think and probably has a fever. The infections are bad and every tender place burns unbearably, and she can’t lower her arms, not unless she stands.

  She will die. If he doesn’t kill her first, she will die anyway. The house is silent, and she knows the rest of them are gone.

  Whatever he did to them, they aren’t here anymore.

  She knows it now.

  “Water,” she tries to call out.

  Words well up inside her and disintegrate in the air like bubbles. She talks in bubbles. They float up and vanish without a sound in the hot, foul air.

  “Please, oh please,” and her words go nowhere and she begins to cry.

  She sobs and tears fall on the ruined green robe in her lap. She sobs as if something has happened, something final, like a destiny she never could have imagined, and she stares at the dark spots her tears make on her ruined green robe, the splendid robe she wore when she preached. Beneath it is the small pink shoe, a left shoe, Keds. She feels the little girl’s pink shoe against her thigh, but her arms are raised and she can’t hold it or hide it better, and her sorrow deepens.

  She listens to the digging beyond her window and begins to smell the stench.

  The longer the digging goes on, the worse the stench gets inside her room, but it is a different stench, a dreadful stench, the acrid, putrid stench of something dead.

  Take me home, she prays to God. Please take me home. Show me.

  She manages to get on her knees, to kneel, and the sound of the digging stops, then starts again, then stops. She sways, almost falls, willing herself to stand, struggles and falls and tries again, sobbing, and then she is on her feet and the pain is so awful, she sees black. She takes a deep breath and the blackness passes.

  Show me, she prays.

  The ropes are thin white nylon. One is tied to the coat hanger bent and twisted around her inflamed, swollen wrists. When she stands, the rope is slack. When she sits, her arms are raised over her head. She can’t lie down anymore. His latest cruelty, short
ening the rope, forcing her to stand as much as she can, leaning against the wooden wall until she can’t stay on her feet any longer and she sits and her arms go straight up. His latest cruelty, making her cut off her hair, then shortening the rope.

  She looks up at the rafter, at the ropes over it, one tied to the coat hanger that binds her wrists, the other to the coat hanger bent around her ankles.

  Show me. Please God.

  The digging stops and the stench blots the light out of the room and stings her eyes, and she knows what the stench is.

  They’re gone. She is the only one left.

  She looks up at the rope tied to the coat hanger around her wrists. If she stands, the rope is slack enough to loop once around her neck and she smells the stench and knows what it is and she prays again and loops the rope once around her neck and her legs go out from under her.

  43

  The air is thick and wavy like water and slaps hard, but the V-Rod doesn’t wobble or seem stressed as Lucy grips the leather seat with her thighs and pushes the speed up to one hundred and twenty miles an hour. She keeps her head low, her elbows tucked in like a jockey as she tests her latest acquisition around the track.

  The morning is bright and unseasonably hot, any vestige of yesterday’s storms gone. She eases back the throttle at thirteen thousand nine hundred rpms, satisfied that the Harley with its larger cams, pistons and rear sprocket, and souped-up Engine Control Module can scorch the pavement when needed, but she doesn’t want to push her luck for long. At even a hundred and ten, she is going faster than she can see, and that isn’t a good habit. Outside her pristinely maintained track are public roads, and at such high speeds, the slightest surface damage or debris can prove deadly.

  “What’s it doing?” Marino’s voice sounds inside her full face helmet.

  “What it should,” she replies, dropping back to eighty, lightly pushing the handlebars, swerving around small, bright-orange cones.

  “Damn it’s quiet. Can hardly hear it up here,” Marino says from the control tower.

  It’s supposed to be quiet, she thinks. The V-Rod is a Harley that’s quiet, a race bike that looks like a road bike and doesn’t draw attention to itself. Leaning back in the seat, she eases her speed to sixty and with her thumb tightens the friction screw to hold the throttle in a loose version of cruise control. She leans into a curve and pulls a forty-caliber Glock pistol out of a holster built into the right thigh of her black ballistic pants.

  “Nobody down range,” she transmits.

  “You’re clear.”

  “Okay. Pop ’em.”

  From the control tower, Marino watches Lucy sweep around the tight curve at the north end of the mile-long track.

  He scans the high earthworks, scans the blue sky, the grassy firing ranges, the road that cuts through the middle of the grounds, then the hangar and runway about half a mile away. He makes sure no personnel, vehicles or aircraft are in the area. When the track is hot, nothing is allowed within a mile of it. Even the airspace is restricted.

  He experiences a mixture of emotions when he watches Lucy. Her fearlessness and abundant skills impress him. He loves her and resents her, and a part of him would prefer not to care about her at all. In one important way, she’s like her aunt, makes him feel unacceptable to the sort of women he secretly likes but doesn’t have the courage to pursue. He watches Lucy speed around the track, maneuvering her new hot-rod bike as if it is part of her and he thinks about Scarpetta on her way to the airport, on her way to see Benton.

  “Going hot in five,” he says into the mic.

  Beyond the glass, Lucy’s black figure on the sleek, black bike speeds smoothly, almost silently. Marino detects her right arm move as she holds the pistol close in, her elbow tucked in to her waist so the wind doesn’t rip the weapon out of her hand. He watches seconds tick off on the digital clock built into the console and at the count of five presses the button for Zone Two. On the east side of the track, small, round, metal targets pop up and quickly fall back in loud, flat clanks as forty-caliber rounds bite into them. Lucy doesn’t miss. She makes it look easy.

  “Long range on base,” her voice fills his headset.

  “Downwind?”

  “Roger.”

  His footsteps are loud and excited as he walks quickly down the hallways. He can hear what he feels in the way his booted feet move over the scarred old wood, and he carries the shotgun. He carries the shoebox that holds the airbrush, the red paint and the stencil.

  He is prepared.

  “Now you’ll say you’re sorry,” he says to the open doorway at the end of the hall. “Now you get what you deserve,” he says as he walks quickly and loudly.

  He walks into the stench. It is like a wall when he walks through the doorway, worse than out by the pit. Inside the room, the air doesn’t stir and the dead stench has nowhere to go and he stares, shocked.

  This can’t have happened.

  How could God let this happen!

  He hears God in the hallway and she flows into the doorway, shaking her head at him.

  “I prepared!” he yells.

  God looks at her, the one hanged who went unpunished and shakes her head. It is Hog’s fault, he is stupid, he didn’t foresee it, should have made sure it couldn’t happen.

  She didn’t say she was sorry, they all do in the end when the barrel is in their mouth, talk around it, try to, I’m sorry. Please. I’m sorry.

  God disappears from the doorway, leaves him with his error and the girl’s pink sneaker on the stained mattress and he begins to shake inside, shake with a rage so powerful he doesn’t know what to do with it.

  He screams as he strides across the floor, the filthy floor, sticky and foul with her piss and shit, and he kicks her lifeless, disgusting, naked body as hard as he can. She jerks with each kick. She sways from the rope around her neck, angled up to her left ear, and her tongue protrudes as if she is mocking him, her face bluish deep red as if she is yelling at him. Her weight rests on her knees on the mattress, and her head is bent, as if she is praying to her God, her bound arms straight up, her hands together, as if she is celebrating victory.

  Yes! Yes! She sways from her rope, victorious, the little pink shoe next to her.

  “Shut up!” he screams.

  He kicks and kicks with his big boots until his legs are too tired to kick anymore.

  He slams and slams her with the stock of the shotgun until his arms are too tired to slam anymore.

  44

  Marino waits to activate a series of human-shaped targets that will flip up from behind bushes, a fence and a tree on the base curve, or Dead Man’s Curve, as Lucy calls it.

  He checks the blaze-orange wind sock center field, verifying that the wind is still out of the east and gusting at maybe five knots. He watches Lucy’s right arm holster the Glock and reach back to an oversized leather saddlebag as she glides at a steady speed of sixty miles an hour around the crosswind curve, entering the downwind straightaway.

  She smoothly pulls out a nine-millimeter Beretta Cx4 Storm carbine.

  “Going hot on five,” he says.

  Sculpted of a nonreflective black polymer, with the same telescoping bolt used in an Uzi submachine gun, the Storm is a passion of Lucy’s. It weighs less than six pounds, has a pistol-grip stock that makes it easy to handle, and ejection can be altered from left to right. So it is nimble and no-nonsense, and when Marino goes active on Zone Three, Lucy rolls in and brass cartridge cases flash in the sun, flying behind her. She kills everything on Dead Man’s Curve, kills everything more than once. Marino counts fifteen rounds fired. All targets are down, and she has one round left.

  He thinks about the woman named Stevie. He thinks about Lucy meeting her tonight at Deuce. The 617 phone number Stevie gave Lucy belongs to a guy in Concord, Massachusetts, a guy named Doug. He says several days ago he was in a bar in Ptown and lost his cell phone. He says he hasn’t cancelled the number yet because some lady apparently found his phone, called on
e of the numbers in it, ended up talking to one of Doug’s friends, who then gave her Doug’s home number. She called, said she’d found his cell phone, promised to mail it to him.

  So far she hasn’t.

  It’s a slick trick, Marino thinks. If you find or steal a cell phone and promise to send it to the owner, maybe he doesn’t get his electronic security identification number deactivated right away and you can use his phone for a while, until the person gets wise. What Marino doesn’t quite understand is why Stevie, whoever she is, would go to all the trouble. If her reasoning was to avoid having an account with a cellular company such as Verizon or Sprint, why not just get a pay-as-you-go phone?

  Whoever Stevie is, she’s trouble. Lucy is living far too close to the edge these days, has been for the better part of a year. She’s changed. She’s gotten inattentive and indifferent, and at times Marino wonders if she’s trying to hurt herself, hurt herself badly.

  “Another car has just sped up from behind,” he radios her. “You’re history.”

  “I’m reloaded.”

  “No way.” He can’t believe it.

  Somehow, she has managed to drop out the empty magazine and slide in a new one without him noticing.

  She slows the bike to a stop below the control tower. He sets his headphones on the console, and by the time he gets down the wooden stairs, she has her helmet and gloves off and is unzipping her jacket.

  “How’d you do that?” he asks.

  “I cheated.”

  “I knew it.”

  He squints in the sun and wonders where he left his sunglasses, new ones, Ray-Bans. He seems to be misplacing things a lot these days.

  “I had an extra magazine here.” She pats a pocket.

  “Huh. You probably wouldn’t in real life. So yeah, you cheated.”

  “He who survives writes the rules.”

  “What’s your thinking about the Z-Rod, about turning all of them into Z-Rods?” he asks, and he knows what she thinks about it, but he asks anyway, hoping she’s changed her mind.