The paranoia was too awful, so I went with hope.
To distract Kurtz, I said, “I should have known you weren’t that sick. A man that bad off couldn’t drink wine.”
Scientist to the end, he said, “Not so. Red wine has antiviral properties.”
Behind him, the front door eased open half an inch.
I looked around at Gilda to see if she had noticed, but she was examining the ugly slash marks on her arms and hands. The ones under her pants legs weren’t visible, but I knew from experience that an iguana’s whip burns on your legs hurt like nobody’s business.
The door opened wider, and a tall man slipped silently into the room. He wore black jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, so it took me a moment to recognize the fanatic who’d called me a harlot. He was carrying a Colt .357 Magnum, a gun even larger than Gilda’s. In his large hand it didn’t look out of place.
He winked at me and I almost sagged with relief. I had been right about him; he was FBI.
He said, “I’ll take over now.”
Shocked, Kurtz spun around to look at him.
I lowered Gilda’s gun and handed it the man.
Feeling proud but trying for humble self-effacement, I said, “I took this from Gilda.”
Then, to show I was too smart to be taken in by a burlap robe and a fake fanatic act, I said, “That was a great disguise you used. But I knew you were an agent.”
I felt like a kid with a gold star. I couldn’t wait to tell Guidry how I’d known all along who the good guys were. Me, Dixie Hemingway, was in cahoots with an FBI agent who was there to arrest Ken Kurtz for corporate espionage.
Kurtz said, “Hello, Walt.”
I heard a tiny buzz in the back of my skull, as if a gnat had slipped through my bones and got trapped in there.
The monk-turned-agent tipped his chin toward Ziggy.
“You know, Ken, we could have shared him. But no, you had to hog all the credit like some publicity-hungry diva.”
The buzzing in my skull grew louder. I looked at the FBI agent’s hands and saw crusted claw marks and welts.
Kurtz said, “I’m sorry I didn’t kill you last night.”
I said, “You’re the one who tried to steal Ziggy.”
The man gave me a blank look, and Kurtz laughed. For a man with a gun pointed at his head, he was remarkably cheerful.
“She calls the iguana Ziggy,” he said. “Sort of an inside joke.”
To me, he said, “Dixie, meet Walter Cahill, chief zoobiologist for the Clarex Foundation. I imagine he’s the one who knocked you out.”
The phony monk had the gall to grin at me. “Sorry, nothing personal.”
As if she’d just noticed that our number had grown, Gilda stood up and waved her arms like a traffic cop.
“Monsters! You are monsters, both of you!”
They turned toward her with the lazy insolence of men who can’t be bothered by criticism. Cahill held a gun in each hand the way movie cowboys do, his .357 pointed toward Kurtz, and Gilda’s .44 Magnum carelessly at his side.
Behind them, Jessica Ballantyne slipped through the open door.
If it hadn’t been for the Glock .45 in her hands, she could have been the latest arrival at a happening midnight party. Once again, I vacillated between relief and caution. She was genuine FBI, but she was also in love with the man she had been sent to arrest.
Gilda shouted, “You say you make world better, but is not true!”
Absorbed in her fury, Gilda didn’t notice Jessica. Absorbed in themselves, the men were smirking while they watched Gilda’s performance.
Jessica had adopted the gun stance that every trained law-enforcement officer uses. Feet spread, knees slightly bent, shoulders back, chin parallel to the floor, both arms extended, the gun in both hands, left thumb over right thumb, trigger finger stretched toward the barrel. She might be a lovesick mess, but the woman knew how to handle a gun.
In a low menacing voice, she said, “Drop the weapons, Walt.”
Both men froze, and for an instant a play of emotions rippled across their faces.
Low as an exhaled breath, Kurtz said, “Jessie.”
The word held so much love and longing that I forgot about the guns and looked at him. He wore the smile of a happy man, and his eyes burned with new excitement.
Cahill let the guns fall to the floor.
Kurtz said, “God, Jessie, I’ve dreamed for two years that you came back to me. I thought it was an impossible fantasy. When Dixie told me you were alive, I was afraid to believe it, afraid it would turn out to be a hoax.”
Jessica’s face remained still, but her eyes showed the turmoil she felt.
Gilda had been ignored as long as she could stand. Still bleeding from Ziggy’s claws, her arms windmilled as she bounced in place.
“He killed Ramón!”
The woman’s one-track focus was beginning to get on my nerves, but at least she was telling the truth.
I said, “She’s right, Jessica. Ken Kurtz killed the guard.”
With her eyes still locked on Kurtz’s, Jessica said, “Is that true, Ken?”
Kurtz flapped his hand. “Don’t get distracted by extraneous details, Jessica. The important thing is that we’re together again. You’re a scientist, a brilliant scientist. Together we can do everything we always dreamed of doing.”
Jessica said, “I was sent here to arrest you.”
“They’ll drop it, Jessie. I can name a long list of judges and congressmen and FDA people who’ve been bought by BiZogen or ZIGI. There’ll be some media flap for a while, and then it’ll die down. Don’t worry about it.”
Her voice went even huskier than usual. “I understood how you felt about our colleagues being killed, but I’ll never understand how you could deliberately murder a man.”
He went very still, as if her words held coded meaning that only an old lover with intimate knowledge of another’s pitch and turn of phrase could translate. Then he raised a hand to his face, where spasms moved like small jerking animals under his blue skin. In that moment, he was such a pitiable figure that every eye in the room fixed on his quivering visage. Nobody noticed his other hand plunge into his pocket until he pulled out a small gun. It appeared to be a Smith & Wesson
.38 Special, a revolver with a two-inch barrel. Since revolvers don’t leave casings, I supposed it was the gun he’d used to kill Ramón, the same gun he’d worn under his robe when I first met him. Now I knew why he’d fussed with the logs in the basket. That’s where he’d hidden the gun.
From the corridor, somebody yelled, “Freeze!”
In the next instant, what looked like half the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department exploded into the room from all directions, all with their weapons trained on Ken Kurtz.
Like a highway accident in which a second of chaos seems to stretch into sequential minutes, time slowed to a crawl.
Kurtz pivoted toward the southern corridor with his gun raised and pointed directly at deputies there. At that same moment, Ziggy panicked from all the new smells and sounds and streaked across the room, running straight toward the deputies in the southern corridor. Seeing a small dragon coming at him, the nearest one jerked his weapon toward him.
I yelled, “Don’t hurt the iguana!”
With his body still turning toward the southern corridor and his gun still raised, Kurtz became aware of Ziggy’s blind run and of the deputy’s startled reaction. Instinctively, he leaped toward Ziggy, for an exquisite moment spread-eagled above him. At that precise instant, Jessica put a bullet through his neck.
Kurtz fell on top of Ziggy and rolled to his side facing Jessica. His gun fell from his hand, and in the moment before death claimed him, it looked as if his eyes were focused on her with calm acceptance.
Ziggy scrambled free and scuttled away, his tail dragging through Kurtz’s blood to form a red connection between blue man and green beast.