Fatigue clutched at his body. He started the tub and flipped the lever on the stopper, allowing the basin to fill up with cold water.
He stripped down, taking off everything but his socks and his underwear. He grabbed the longest towel he could find, twisted it into a rope, then poured some Bacardi on it. It soaked into the terry cloth, filling the small bathroom with the strong smell of rum. He flipped the long towel over his back, feeling the cold, wet, rum-soaked spot send chills up his spine. He positioned that cold spot right over the Triangle. One end of the towel went over his left shoulder, the other under his right arm. He tied the ends together, making the towel hang like a bandito’s bullet strap.
Si, senor. El Scary Perry is a baaad man.
He soaked the end of a smaller hand towel with Bacardi, then laid it on the toilet. With the preparation finished, he took four long, uninterrupted swallows of Jack Daniel’s.
Perry sat on the tub, the cold porcelain sending another wave of chills through his body. He held the knife and the lighter with his left hand. In his right he held the rum-soaked towel.
It was time.
Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn.
Perry flicked the lighter. He watched the tiny orange flame shift and turn.
Yes, ya gonna burn.
76.
Dew stood just inside the front door to Building G. He shivered slightly, but not from the winter’s cold. Like every other building in the sprawling complex, Building G had twelve apartments, four each on three floors.
Perry Dawsey, the one-legged killer, was in one of those apartments.
Dew pulled his notebook from a jacket pocket. He quietly flipped through the pages, eyes looking down at the book one second, flicking back to look up the stairs and down the hall the next. He half expected to see the hulking nutcase tearing down the hall or the stairs, hopping madly, ready to do an encore presentation of the Bill Miller Crucifixion.
Dew reviewed the notes he’d collected from the cops. Building G had been checked by a pair of state troopers. There had been no answer at apartments 104 and 202. Dew put the pad back into his coat pocket, hand brushing against the. 45 just to make sure it was there. If his hunch was right, he had a chance to kill Dawsey and do it with no press, no interference from the local cops.
Going in alone was dangerous, probably stupid. But Dawsey probably had a hostage right now. If the rapid-response teams closed too quickly and Dawsey saw them, he might drag that hostage out into the open where the cops could intervene. That would complicate things.
Dew pulled out the big cellular and dialed. It rang only once-they were waiting for his call.
“Otto here.”
“Get the squads in position,” Dew whispered. “I’m in Building G. Do not-I repeat, do not -approach until I say so. I’ll stay on the line. If the connection is cut off, move in immediately, understand?”
“Yes sir. Margaret and Amos are with me. They’re ready.”
Dew pulled his. 45. Adrenaline surged through his veins. His pulse raced so fast he wondered if a heart attack would take him down before Dawsey could.
77.
Racal suits were not built with comfort in mind. Margaret Montoya sat in the back of gray van number two, along with Amos and Clarence Otto. Both men also wore the bulky suits. All they had to do was put on the helmets, pressurize and they were ready to battle with whatever bacterium, virus or airborne poison Perry Dawsey might spew forth.
Only Margaret knew it wasn’t a bacterium, and it wasn’t a virus. It was something different altogether. Something… new. She still couldn’t put her finger on it, and it was damn near driving her mad.
“So this couldn’t be natural,” Margaret said. “We’d have seen it somewhere.”
Amos sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Margaret, we’ve had this conversation already. Several times.”
He sounded exasperated, and she couldn’t blame him-scientific curiosity or no, her mouth had run nonstop for hours. There was an answer here, if she could only get a handle on it, somehow talk it out.
“We don’t know it hasn’t been seen before,” Amos said. “Just because it hasn’t been recorded, that doesn’t mean it’s not known somewhere in the world.”
“Maybe that holds true with a regular disease, something that makes people sick. One sickness is much like the next. But this is different. These are triangles under people’s skin-there would have been something. A myth, a legend, something. ”
“You obviously don’t think it’s natural,” Otto said. “So you agree with Murray? That it’s a weapon?”
“I don’t know about a weapon, but it’s not natural. Someone made this.”
“And leaped decades ahead of any known level of biotech,” Amos said patiently. “This isn’t cobbling together a virus. This is creating a brand-new species, genetic engineering at a level that people haven’t even theorized yet. The meshing of new organic systems to human systems is perfect, seamless. That would take years of experimentation.”
“But what if it’s not designed to build those systems, the nerves and the veins?”
“Of course it’s designed to do it,” Amos said. “It built them, right?”
Margaret felt a spike of excitement, a brief flicker of insight. There was something here, something she couldn’t put her finger on.
“Yes, it built the nerves and vein siphons, but we don’t know if it was designed to build those specifically.”
Otto shook his head. “I just don’t follow.”
“Blueprints,” Margaret said. “What if the initial seed, or spore, or whatever, is designed to read blueprints, like the instructions built into our DNA?”
Amos stared at her with a mixture of two expressions-one said, I hadn’t thought of that, and the other said, you’re taking the fuck-nut bus to Looneyville.
“Go on,” Amos said.
“What if this thing reads an organism? Figures out how to tap into it, grow with it?”
“Then it doesn’t need people,” Otto said. “Why wouldn’t we have seen this in animals?”
“We don’t know it hasn’t infected animals,” Margaret said. “But maybe there’s something else going on here, more than pure biology. Maybe it needs…intelligence.”
Amos shook his head. “Needs intelligence for what? This is all conjecture, and besides the fact that you are obviously one crazy bitch, who would make an organism like that?”
The pieces started to fall into place for Margaret. “It’s not an organism,” she said. “I think it’s a kind of machine.”
Amos closed his eyes, shook his head and rubbed the bridge of his nose all at the same time. “When they commit you, Margaret, can I have your office?”
“I’m serious, Amos. Think about it. What if you had to travel great distances, so great that no living organism could survive the trip?”
“So you’re talking even longer than a plane trip to Hawaii with my mother-in-law.”
“Yes, much longer.”
Otto leaned forward. “Are you talking space travel?”
Margaret shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe you can’t send a living creature across space for as long as it takes to get from Point A to Point B. But you can send a machine. An unliving machine that consumes no resources, and has no biological process that could wear out over time. It’s just dead. ”
“Right up until it turns on,” Amos said. “Or hatches or whatever.”
“The perfect infantry,” Otto said. “An army that doesn’t need to be fed or trained. You just mass-produce them, ship them out and when they land they build themselves and gather intel from their local host.”
Amos and Margaret stared at Otto.
“Okay,” Amos said. “For the sake of a crazy science bitch and a gungho junior spy that’s watched too many movies, let’s say you’ve got this ‘weapon.’ What good does that do you? You send these things across the universe, stopping on Vulcan for a couple of brews, of course. But why?”