“Oh, please! You don’t have to be a scientist to know that iguanas and chickens have identical respiratory and digestive systems. When an iguana is sick, you give it bird tonic. If you transferred a bird virus to an iguana, the virus would weaken because the iguana is a cold-blooded animal, but the iguana would essentially become a vaccine-producer.”
Kurtz stared at me with a look of surprised respect, sort of like a dog looks at a human after the human makes barking sounds.
I spread my hands, palms up. “Once you know how, I imagine it’s rather easy. You’ve infected Ziggy with avian flu, he has produced antibodies, and now you’re drawing blood from him to spin them out in your vaccine-making machines.”
Sounding like somebody who had always wanted to talk about his work to an equal, Kurtz said, “In the beginning, I tried to use silver nitrate to attenuate the virus. It went much faster when I conceived of using iguana blood instead.”
I looked at the welts on Kurtz’s hands and knew he had planned to draw blood from Ziggy that night. That had been the purpose of putting him in the wine room, to shut him down so he could draw blood without being whipped or scratched. I also knew that when Ken Kurtz was between bouts of debilitation, he was a lot stronger than anybody had imagined possible—strong enough to pick Ziggy up and carry him to the wine room, strong enough to walk out to the guardhouse and shoot Ramón in the head while he slept.
I said, “I don’t understand why you killed Ramón.”
A flicker of surprise moved across his cheeks. “How did you know?”
“Until this minute, I didn’t. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense. What I don’t understand is why you did it.”
“He saw the lab. He would have talked.”
Gilda said, “You killed Ramón?”
“It was your fault. You opened the door from the wine room to the lab while he was still in the wine room. He saw through the door.”
“Bastard!”
I didn’t know which one disgusted me more, Kurtz for always blaming somebody else for what he did or Gilda for trying to rise to his level of sliminess. From the fury and pain in Gilda’s eyes, I had a feeling that Paloma’s suspicions about her husband and Gilda might be true.
She backed up a step from Kurtz, got a firmer grip on her gun, and glared at me as if I had been a partner in the crime.
I said, “Some people are damn disappointing.”
She waved the gun side to side. “Now you will both go into living room. I will walk behind. If you run away, I will kill you.”
She might not have been capable of murder before, but I believed her. Gilda had crossed over her own drawn line, and now she wasn’t simply furious and determined, she was full of fine reckless vengeance.
Stepping smartly in my high heels, I clacked through the wine room. Drawn to the living room’s warmth and light, Ziggy had moved closer to the door that Kurtz had left open. Careful to stay far enough away to avoid his tail or his claws, I circled around him and stepped through the doorway. Kurtz and Gilda must have followed my lead, because they both got past him without being lashed or clawed.
When I reached the fireplace, Gilda called out, “Stop.”
Beside me, Kurtz bent to the basket of wood on the hearth. At first I thought he hoped to fling a log at Gilda and knock the gun from her hand, but instead he carefully arranged kindling and fresh logs on the smoldering fragments to reignite them.
Scientific minds have screwy priorities.
Gilda had a wild-eyed grip on her gun, but I could tell from the way she held it that any shots she got off would be poorly aimed—not that a random bullet isn’t as destructive as an aimed one, especially if it hits you. It seemed to me that the situation required somebody with a cool head. Unfortunately, the best we had was me.
I said, “Gilda, the police are looking for you because they think you may have killed Ramón. Once they know you didn’t, they’ll have no interest in you. But you’re in Florida where the death penalty is alive and well, so if you kill either Ken Kurtz or me, you’re a dead woman.”
I didn’t think it necessary to point out that Guidry might arrest her for conspiring to kill Kurtz.
Still looking unfazed by her big gun, Kurtz said, “Gilda, do you really believe you can simply pack up the vaccine and walk away from here? Dixie’s telling the truth about the FBI. The minute you go out the door with the vaccine, they’ll take it.”
He sounded so certain that for a moment I believed him. Maybe the FBI really was out there somewhere in the darkness watching us, maybe they were picking up our conversation on remote speakers. If they were, Ken Kurtz would surely be arrested for industrial espionage and for murder.
If Gilda believed him, it only fueled her anger. “Yes, they will take vaccine and let you go free! They will say I killed Ramón, that I am evil one. They will kill me and make you a hero.”
Something uncoiled in my chest, and as I looked at that raving woman with the oversized gun and the outrageous imagination, I knew she might speak the truth. I also knew that I was the expendable one, the fly in the ointment that nobody would miss. It wouldn’t be hard to frame Gilda as Ramón’s killer. And if they killed me, they could easily say Kurtz had shot me after I’d broken into his house.
The galling thing was that a lot of people, including Guidry, wouldn’t have trouble believing I had broken into Kurtz’s house. The fact that I actually had broken in didn’t make it any easier to like the idea of people thinking I had.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Kurtz and Gilda stood facing me with the wine room behind them. While my brain spun out the possible scenario that Gilda had just described, I became aware of a green movement behind them. Through the wine room’s open door, Ziggy had got enough warm air to get his brain spinning too. He was on the move with his tongue flicking forward to smell the air, running silently on the pads of his feet toward the leaping flames Kurtz had restarted in the fireplace. I braced myself. If Ziggy did what I thought he would do, he might be my salvation.
When he was within a foot or two of Gilda and Kurtz, Ziggy’s tongue smelled the fire.
His reptilian brain hollered, Heat is to the right!
He made a quick turn toward the fire, sensed danger to his side, and whipped his tail sharply around Gilda’s legs.
Gilda screamed and threw up her gun hand. In a flash, I leaped to grab it. She struggled, but Gilda wasn’t exactly an Amazon and surprise had caused her to lose balance. With her gun in one hand, I only had to shove her hard with the other to cause her to fall backward. She fell like a tree, stiff-legged and stiff-armed, arching her back over Ziggy, whose tail was still wildly lashing. She landed in the perfect location for his whipping tail to slash whatever part of her body was closest to him. Since she lost her head and scrambled around on all fours, that meant pretty much all of her.
Fighting back the nauseating dizziness of knowing I might kill somebody again, I spread my legs in my damned high heels and stiffened my arms, holding the gun pointed at her with both hands. She was too busy trying to get away from Ziggy to notice.
With his dewlap billowed to its fullest extent and his forelegs stiffened to raise his chest, Ziggy stretched himself in front of the warm fire and bobbed his head. His color was still dull, but he looked quite pleased with himself.
A figure moved across the glass so rapidly I wasn’t sure I had seen it, but it set off a contest in my head between euphoric hope—that I’d accidentally been telling the truth and FBI agents were ready to come in and arrest Kurtz—and paranoid fear—that they’d arrest Gilda, kill me, and let Kurtz go free.