So the one fucking person he did not want to talk to was the fucking Kildar.
“Jenkins. You heard about the spray truck?”
“I heard,” Dunn said, sighing. “What about it?”
“It’s, like, missing? And it’s one of the best distribution systems they could use.”
“It was being transferred by its driver to the maintenance facility,” Dunn said. “It’s just overdue. The maintenance manager panicked; they’d gotten the word, too. But it was driven by its regular driver. It’s probably just broken down somewhere. It’s only been missing thirty minutes.”
“Tell me you don’t really believe that? We’re talking about a Pakistani who is a known worshipper at one of the most fundamentalist mosques in your area. He goes missing with a spray truck when we’ve got VX in play and you’re… what? You’re sitting on it?”
“We put out a general call,” Dunn said. “What the fuck else do you want us to do?”
“I saw the call. It was a very low priority, no possible terrorism code, no threat code at all, in fact. It’s fucking nuts! One of your deputies pulls the thing over and he’s fucking dead, you know that?”
“You telling me my job?” Dunn asked, snarling. “Okay, no, I don’t believe that. Yeah, I think that we have a serious situation here. My boss doesn’t. The fucking No-Go colonel we got saddled with couldn’t lift his nose out of day before yesterday’s reports to even notice. Why? Because it’s just the regular driver. The fact that the guy is from Pakistan doesn’t fucking matter, okay? That is not part of the decision-making process, okay? Nor is his house of worship, okay?”
“God, sucks to be you, doesn’t it?”
The guy actually sounded sympathetic and Dunn sighed again.
“Yeah, sometimes it does,” Dunn said. “But my point is that we can’t use profiling to upgrade the status. It’s the normal driver taking the thing over for maintenance and currently it’s simply ‘missing.’ If we see it, a deputy will check it out. Until something else happens…”
“The first warning you’re going to get is screaming.”
“Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here,” Justin Stockton said.
Justin was twenty-three years old and recently had come to wonder if sales was his career. He had dropped out of University of Central Florida in his sophomore year and lived with three friends in a small apartment on Silver Star Road. The foursome existed on chips and cheese with an occasional “healthy” meal of McDonalds or Dominos pizza. When they weren’t working their various nearly minimum wage jobs they played video games. While they sometimes had trouble making the rent or their car payments, they never missed a bill from their ISP.
Justin was also, unfortunately for him, a smoker. And since it was unlawful to smoke inside of a public building in Florida, he had stepped outside. Specifically he had stepped out the back door to the loading docks. His Marlboro was in one hand and lighter in the other when he saw the four men in gas suits loading a spray truck off the dock.
“That shit’s got to be bad for you,” Justin continued, maneuvering to stay upwind and reconsidering the cigarette; it might also be flammable.
“We are having trouble with truck,” one of the men said in a thick accent. “We are needing to refuel it.” He had stepped away from the other four and now approached Justin, his hand out. “I am Gabrel.”
“Justin,” Justin said, sliding on his salesman grin and holding out his own. “But that’s not fuel…” The stuff was weird and oily but definitely not gas or diesel. He’d gotten some on his hand when they’d shaken.
“Yes it is,” the man insisted, lifting the hand and thrusting it at Justin’s nose. “Smell…”
It smelled like…
Gabrel grinned as the man twitched on the ground. It worked.
“We are finished, Gabrel,” Mahmoud said, rolling the last of the barrels away.
“God is Great.”
Petra Smith was nineteen and had a bit of a crush on Justin Stockton. She’d only been working the computer section of the store for a few weeks, possibly the reason she still found Justin attractive. But she saw potential under that slacker façade. Justin was smart, he knew everything there was to know about configuring computer hardware to get the max performance for a video game — and if he’d just apply himself he could be really successful, maybe even a store manager.
So Petra had followed Justin outside “on break.” Just to talk. Sure, he smoked and kissing a guy who smoked was like licking a dirty ash-tray but…
When she saw him lying on the ground, though, she screamed and ran over, not even noticing the two barrels dripping clear liquid onto the dock.
“Justin?” she screamed, trying to roll him over. He was twisted up in a really strange position, like he’d cramped up or something. She couldn’t move him so she darted back into the store, feeling dizzy. It was probably shock. “Help! Somebody help!” she screamed, stumbling through the stock room. She caromed off one of the shelves and realized she could barely see through the tears. It was getting so black…
“Kildar,” Greznya said. “Report of a Hazardous Materials incident at the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard.”
“That’s about three blocks from here,” Mike said, accelerating. The traffic on Sand Lake, as always, was solid tourists. And it was moving slow. He seriously reconsidered his decision to turn onto it.
He cut in front of a minivan from Michigan then back past an SUV from New York. But it was bumper to bumper in front of him. And going really slow.
“Fuck this,” he said. A driveway on the right led to the Popeye’s and that he knew from reconning the area wouldn’t get him anywhere. But there weren’t any cars on the sidewalk.
He turned into the driveway and then onto the sidewalk, hitting his horn in a solid blast as he drove sedately down the concrete walk, tourists scattering in front of him.
Up ahead, at the head of the line of cars, he could see a spray truck in the right-hand lane. What was stopping traffic on the left he had no idea.
Mabel Zermenfuster Wassenester was seventy-nine. She had been born and raised on a farm near the small town of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Her first driving experience had been subsequent to her marriage, the lesson administered by her mother who had originally learned to drive a horse-drawn wagon. Mabel always remembered her mother’s various admonitions. Never turn so fast that a bottle of pop on the floor will fall over. Brakes are only for emergencies. And if, God forbid, you find yourself on a multilane road, the left-hand lane is the safest and it’s there that you should drive. You stay in the left-hand lane until it’s time to turn right, change lanes, then turn. Slowly.
Mabel’s problem was that there was a line of cars, and a spray truck, in the right-hand lane when it came time for her to turn onto International Drive. She’d never seen a spray truck out during the day and only occasionally when she couldn’t sleep at night and one of the loud, smelly trucks drove by. She was heading over to her friend Margaret’s house. Margaret lived in an apartment on Kirkman Road and the only way Mabel knew to get there was down International Drive. She sorely hated the road — there were simply too many fast drivers on it — but it was the only route she knew. She had never noticed that she actually passed Kirkman to take I-Drive. This was the route she’d learned the first time and she stuck to it.
When she reached the intersection, the light had turned green and she took a great dare. The spray truck should stay in the right-hand lane as it turned. She had seen that it had its blinker on and now the yellow lights were going. It was clearly going to spray down International Drive. Maybe that would slow some of those young tarts in their tank-tops and skimpy little bikinis down!