“Hey there!” Theo called.
Gabe Fenton, the biologist, emerged from the brush, indeed holding up some kind of antenna, followed by his Labrador retriever, Skinner. The dog ran to meet Theo and greeted him with two muddy paw prints on the chest.
Theo rubbed Skinner’s ears to hold him at bay, the classic slobbering Labrador control move. “Gabe, what in the hell are you doing down here?”
The biologist was covered with burrs and foxtails, his face striped with soot from the charred brush. He looked exhausted, yet there was a note of excitement bordering on ecstasy in his voice. “You won’t believe this, Theo. My rats moved en masse this morning.”
Theo tried, but couldn’t match Gabe’s enthusiasm. “That’s swell, Gabe. Texaco blew up last night.”
Gabe Fenton looked around at the surrounding area as if seeing the destruction for the first time. “What time?”
“About four in the morning.”
“Hmmm, maybe they sensed it.”
“They?”
“The rats. Around 2 A.M. they all started moving west. I can’t figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen.” Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. “Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here’s their location at 1 A.M.” He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.
Gabe hit another key. “Now here they are at two.” All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.
“Well, don’t you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore.”
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. “Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?”
Gabe looked crestfallen. “Well, I don’t know the significance yet. I’m tracking the ten that didn’t move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them.”
“And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can’t be here, buddy.”
“Maybe there were fumes,” Gabe said. “But that doesn’t explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore.”
Theo couldn’t bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. “You had any dinner, Gabe?”
“No, I’ve been doing this since last night.”
“Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I’ll buy.”
“But I need to…”
“You’re a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can’t function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer.” Theo gestured to his Volvo. “You can stick the antenna out the sunroof.”
“I guess I could take a break.”
Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. “Your dog needs pizza. It’s the humane thing to do.”
“Okay,” Gabe said.
“I want to show you something over by the creek bed.”
“What.”
“A footprint. Or what’s left of one.”
Ten minutes later they sat over frosty mugs of beer at Pizza in the Pines, Pine Cove’s only pizza parlor. They’d taken a window table so Gabe could keep an eye on Skinner, who was bouncing up and down outside, giving them an ever-changing view of the street, then the street with dog face (ears akimbo), then the street, then the street with dog face again. Other than to order a beer, Gabe Fenton hadn’t said a word since they’d gone to the creek bed.
“Will he just keep doing that?” Theo asked.
“Until we take him a slice of pizza, yes.”
“Amazing.”
Gabe shrugged. “He’s a dog.”
“Always the biologist.”
“One needs to keep the mind limber.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think that you obliterated most of what you thought was a footprint.”
“Gabe, it was a footprint. A talon or something.”
“There are a thousand explanations for a depression in the mud like that, Theo, but one of them is not an animal track.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, there hasn’t been anything that large on this continent for about sixty million years, and for another, animals tend to leave more than one track, unless it’s a creature especially adapted for hopping.” Gabe grinned.
The flying dog head pogoed by the windowsill.
“There were a lot of people and vehicles around there, the other tracks might have been wiped out.”
“Theo, don’t let your imagination run away with you. You’ve had a long day and…”
“And I’m a pothead.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“I know, I’m saying it. Tell me about your rats. What will you do when you find them?”
“Well, first I’m going to keep searching for the stimulus of their behavior, then I’ll catch a few of the group that migrated and compare their brain chemistry to those that headed toward the shore.”
“Does that hurt them?”
“You have to blend up their brains and run the liquid in a centrifuge.”
“I guess so then.”
The waitress brought their pizza and Gabe was severing cables of cheese from his first slice when Theo’s cell phone rang. The constable listened for a second, then stood and dug into his pocket for money. “I’ve got to go, Gabe.”
“What’s up?”
“The Plotznik kid is missing. No one’s seen him since he left on his paper route this morning.”
“Probably hiding. That kid is evil. He rigged up something with his remote control car that affected the chips in my rats once. I spent three weeks trying to figure out why they were running figure eights in the parking lot outside the grocery story before I found him lurking in the weeds with the controller.”
“I know,” Theo said. “Mikey told me that if he wired ten of your rats together, he could pick up the Discovery Channel. I still have to find him. He has parents.”
“Skinner is a pretty good tracker. Want to take him?”
“Thanks, but I doubt that the kid had a pizza in his pocket.”
Theo folded his phone, snagged a slice of pizza for the road, and headed out the door.
Ten
Val Riordan leaned against her office door, trying to catch her breath and maintain her temper. Nothing in her clinical experience compared to the sessions she held on the day after the Texaco exploded. She had seen twenty patients in ten hours, and every one of them had wanted to talk about sex. And not abstract sex either, not issues or attitudes about sex, just squishy, thumping sex itself. It was unnerving.
She’d anticipated a spike in libido among her patients (it was a common symptom of withdrawal from antidepressants), but the books said not more than five to fifteen percent would have a reaction—about the same number that experienced a loss of libido upon taking the drugs. But today she’d hit one hundred percent. It was as if she were running a kennel for hopeless horndogs rather than a psychiatric practice.
After the last patient, she’d come out of her office to find her new receptionist, Chloe, furiously masturbating, her feet hooked into the edge of the desk, her steno chair squeaking like a tortured squirrel. Val had excused herself, turned on her heel, walked back into her office, and shut the door.