Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  Corso cut the throttle. Pulled the lever back into neutral and raised his hands above his head. The little aluminum cruiser began to rumble his way. The guy on the sixty-caliber couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Standard issue Coast Guard blues, orange life jacket, baseball cap turned around backward so as not to interfere with his aim. He was sighting down the barrel at Corso, who raised his hands higher into the air and stood up.

  “No problem,” he shouted.

  The kid smiled. He had braces, for christ sakes. Corso watched in horror as the kid’s finger tightened around the trigger. Corso closed his eyes. The static clack of gunfire filled the early morning air. The power of the reports shook the little boat, nearly causing his knees to buckle.

  Corso held his breath and waited for the huge slugs to tear off one of his arms, to grind his torso in two…to…

  His feet were suddenly cold and wet. He frowned and opened his eyes. The front half of the boat was gone. The weight of the engine was rapidly pulling the remaining rig under the water. The kid’s metallic grin was bigger than ever. He let go with a whoop, like he’d just won a kewpie doll at the state fair. Corso was wet to the armpits now, and then, with a single hiss, the dinghy slid into the darkness below.

  Corso began to tread water.

  23

  They had always known each other. That’s how it was in the towns. Everybody knew everybody else forever. If you were not related to them, you knew someone who was. Or at least someone who came from that same town and recognized the family name.

  They had new names now. Names they had learned together. Learned to answer to without thinking of who they used to be, or what the new names meant. The kind of names that fell easily from the American tongue. Way back when, he’d had another name. The one his parents gave him, so many years ago. Parag Dubey. After his grandfather. But that was then, and this was now. Now he was called Bobby Darling. He was a boyish, gangly twenty-eight. Narrow-faced, with a sheaf of straight black hair that tended to fall across his damaged left eye. Hair the color of obsidian, his mama used to say.

  Bobby Darling had known Vijay Kumar for as long as he could remember. When the doctor peeled the stiff bandage from his eye, Vijay Kumar had been the first thing he’d seen, standing there next to his dirty cot, hopping from one foot to the other like a monkey. These days Vijay called himself Nathan Kimberly. Like the spawn of one of those families who took on the surnames of their oppressors. As an act of respect, they said at the time.

  Nathan paced back and forth across the dusty front room like a caged tiger. He’d always been nervous and quick with his hands, but the excitement of approaching events had lent an even more manic quality to his birdlike movements.

  “Martin’s been gone too long. Something’s not right here,” Nathan said.

  “Not much gets by you does it?” Bobby snapped.

  If Nathan picked up on the sarcasm, he didn’t let on. “What did Mr. Holmes say when you told him that Martin had broken ranks?”

  “He said he’d take care of it.”

  “What if Martin’s gone to the authorities?” Nathan wanted to know.

  “If he’d gone to the authorities, they’d be here by now. Besides…” Bobby hesitated. “I’d be willing to bet he’s in no position to be dealing with the authorities.” He threw a grin around the room. “Just like everybody else in this house. Huh?”

  Nobody bothered to argue.

  “His real name’s Brian,” Madhu Verma said out of the blue. “He used to live around here. That’s why they brought him along.” Nathan scrunched his features and did his “I’m offended” face, the one Bobby wanted to pound to jelly with an iron rod.

  “His safety depends on anonymity,” Nathan chastised. “If he really told you—”

  Madhu laughed in his face. “Fucking amateurs,” he spat.

  Madhu Verma was now known as Wesley Singh and was, without doubt, the angriest human being Bobby Darling had ever encountered. When they were children together, Madhu had tortured small animals until their anguished cries had filled the air like funeral smoke. To see him there, sitting on the couch cleaning the nine-millimeter for the millionth time, stroking the weapon like it was his private part, sent a shiver down Bobby Darling’s spine. This was the person Bobby wanted to keep in front of him at all costs. He had no doubt that, if pressed, Wesley would murder any one of them in a heartbeat.

  Parul Rishi and Suprava Remar were cousins. With Parul it had been easy. They’d taken out the r, made his first name into Paul. Left the last name alone. Suprava had become Samuel Singleton. Depending upon how one looked at it, it could be said that Paul and Samuel had suffered the worst luck of all of them. They had merely been visiting when the disaster struck. On any other day, at any other time, they would have been safe in faraway West Nimar where they had lived. As fate would have it, however, their entire families had journeyed north to attend the wedding of yet another cousin, and thus had suffered the same fate as the locals.

  The doorbell rang, sending the room into a state of suspended animation. Nobody moved except Bobby, who pushed himself off the couch and ambled over to the door. It was the old lady from the house next door. Bobby made sure Wesley had lost the automatic before he pulled open the door. She was short. No more than five feet tall. Hair all piled up on top of her head in a grandmotherly way. Long beaded chain looped around her neck with her glasses dangling from the ends. She was angry.

  “This has got to stop. I’ve called the paper. They’re sending a man out.”

  Bobby gave her his boyish puzzlement face. “Excuse please?”

  “My newspaper,” the old woman said. “It’s gone again.”

  Bobby kept his face in concerned mode. He looked back over his shoulder. Surveyed the room. “Any of you know anything about this lady’s newspaper?” he inquired. He waited for the grunts of ignorance to settle and then turned his attention back to the woman. “I’m sure it’s nobody here,” he said.

  She tapped the screen door with her finger. Bobby thought about severing the finger with his Buck knife. Maybe sticking it up her ass. Maybe sticking it up her ass without cutting it off. Decisions. Decisions.

  “Ever since you guys moved in here, three mornings in a row now it’s the same thing. I go out and the paper’s gone.”

  “Must be somebody else,” Bobby tried.

  “Somebody else my butt,” she spit. She wagged a bony finger in his face. He could feel the blood rising in his chest like a wave. “It better stop, sonny,” she said. “I’m telling you…it better darn well stop.”

  With that, she turned on her heel and waddled off down the brick walk. Bobby parted the dusty curtains and watched as she skirted the separating hedge and then cut across her own front lawn on her way home.

  “Bitch,” he said.

  When he turned back toward the room, Wesley was smirking as he pulled the folded newspaper out from under the sofa cushions. “I like to watch her scratch around for it,” Wesley said. “Like a chicken after you cut off one of the legs.”

  Killing a chicken for dinner had never been enough for Wesley. No…he had to make it into a spectator sport…something that satisfied that bottomless thirst for pain and suffering he carried around inside himself.

  Bobby opened his mouth to protest, even though he already knew the answer. He wanted to ask what kind of person steals a paper he doesn’t even read, at a time like this, when they’re this close to having their revenge. But a sudden movement in his peripheral vision pulled his attention to the street in front of the house.

  Holmes…driving by slowly with the window down. Driving a dark blue van just like the gray one Martin had left in. Holmes. The man who had come to help them and, for his trouble, had lost everything in the world he valued. The man who’d picked them from the garbage and brought them together for this moment.

  He watched as Holmes cruised by. Then stepped out onto the porch and kept his eye on the van until it turned left into the Safeway parking lot and
disappeared. Four minutes later, Holmes strode into view.

  Holmes nodded at Bobby on his way up the stairs.

  “Where’s Martin?” Bobby asked.

  “Elsewhere,” was the terse reply.

  “Is he going to be a problem?”

  Holmes shook his big square head. “Not in this world. Perhaps in the next.”

  24

  The first thing he noticed was the red emergency light over the door. Inside its little metal cage, it had begun to blink, silently, on and off in a rapid cadence. Jim Sexton looked over at Pete Carrol, who was filling time picking lint from his baseball cap. Pete didn’t look up, just kept picking away. Then the door banged open and a pathologist in a green scrub suit came through at a dead run, surgical mask hanging down over his chest, mouth gasping for air as he sprinted across the reception area and disappeared down the far hall, gone only long enough for Jim and Pete to exchange glances before the buzzer began to scream, its hoarse electronic bleat bouncing off the walls and ceiling like a fire drill at school.

  And then the reception area was full of people. Ten…a dozen…doctors, lab types in white coats, security guys, a pair of secretaries, a guy in a suit…all hurrying across the brown tile floor toward the blinking light and the screaming buzzer.

  Pete bounced off the wall and reached for the camera. Jim made eye contact, shook his head, and then, while Pete was still collecting his jaw, he fell in with the shuffling pack of humanity as it squeezed through the NO ADMITTANCE door and hastened down the long polished hall. His presence was lost in the gravity of the situation. Before he got to the viewing window, he heard a sob and then the sound of tears. “Oh God…Shauna,” someone said. Someone wept out loud.

  One of the suits turned to the nearest security guard. “We’ve got a Phase Four emergency here, Phillip. We need a fire department hazardous materials team here as quickly as possible. We’re going into isolation mode. Nobody goes in. Nobody goes out.” Phillip pulled a handful of keys from his belt and began to jog up the corridor.

  “Oh God, God, God,” somebody sobbed.

  Assistant Fire Chief Ben Gardener slipped into the Critical Incident Room unnoticed…no easy feat for a man six and a half feet tall bearing disturbing news. As he closed the soundproof door, the intense buzz of conversation piqued the skin on his face in much the same manner as cannon fire flattens the cheeks of those standing close by. The feds had moved everything. Brought in more tables to accommodate the brigade of federal agencies which had been brought to bear on the situation. Wired the place for what must have been a hundred different phone lines, twisting miles of thick braided cables that ran along the baseboards like the roots of some newly discovered tree.

  Gardener’s eyes swept the space. The Homeland Security Agency had taken over the entire north wall of the room. Half a dozen agents whispered into plastic mouthpieces, while another trio fed documents into fax machines. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases shared the south wall with an unnamed agency whose role was apparently so sensitive they had declined to identify themselves. Braced as to their bona fides by Frank Thome, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, they were rumored to have produced a document whose mysterious contents had very nearly reduced the coordinator to genuflection.

  For obvious reasons, the Centers for Disease Control had set up shop at Harborview Medical Center, while both the FBI and the CIA had commandeered entire floors of luxury hotels for use as command posts. Between the three agencies, more than a hundred federal operatives presently roamed the city, while a hundred more were being held in reserve.

  Out in the center of the room, Harry Dobson was making measured conversation with that same smarmy bastard from the State Department who’d thanked them both for their departments’ efforts and then informed them that neither department would henceforth be required.

  He raised a hand and ran his fingers through his thick hair. The movement caught Harry Dobson’s eye. Ben Gardener inclined his head no more than an inch and then turned and exited the room in three long strides.

  Two minutes passed before the door opened again and Harry Dobson stepped out into the hall. Ben Gardener didn’t say a word. Instead, he turned his back on Dobson and strode quickly down the hall. Dobson followed along in silence. All the way to the elevator. Down fifteen floors to ground level and then out onto Third Avenue, where Gardener walked half a block from the entrance before coming to a halt next to a forest of newspaper dispensers. “EBOLI,” one headline shrieked. “JIHAD VIRUS,” trumpeted the other.

  Again Gardener used his head to motion. This time back at the Public Safety Building. “Those guys make me nervous,” he said by way of explanation. Dobson nodded his wholehearted agreement. Ben Gardener checked the street before he went on. “We’ve had another incident,” he said.

  Dobson blanched. Held his breath. Gardener went on. “Two dead. A forensic pathologist named Shauna Collins and a coroner’s assistant named George Bell.”

  Harry Dobson exhaled with a rush. “Only two?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the morgue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “One of my teams responded to the call,” Gardener began. “Same thing. Dead people…dead virus.”

  “The CDC do the tests?”

  “They trained all our people this morning. We did them ourselves. Why?”

  “Go on.”

  Harry Dobson listened in silence. By the time Gardener was finished speaking, Dobson’s forehead was a washboard of furrows. “What was the vic’s name again?” he asked.

  “Shauna Collins—”

  “Not them. The corpse they were working on,” Dobson interrupted.

  “Martin Magnusen,” Gardener said. “A Canadian citizen.”

  “This is the guy with his throat cut?”

  “Ear to ear from what I hear.”

  Dobson smiled at the rhyme and thought it over.

  “A glass vial?”

  “Just like the bus tunnel.”

  “And your boys think it came out of the vic’s pockets.”

  “That’s sure how it looked.”

  Again Harry Dobson paused to reflect. “The feds know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why don’t we keep it that way?”

  Gardener raised an eyebrow. “Any particular reason?”

  “They’re sure as hell not telling us anything.”

  Gardener shrugged. “They never do.”

  “Unless the investigation goes in the Dumpster, in which case they’ll disappear like a cool breeze and we’ll be left holding the bag.”

  “That’s how they operate.”

  “So what say we keep this little tidbit under our collective hats…”—he waggled a hand—“for the time being at least.”

  Gardener made a doubtful face. “Counting people like dispatchers and morgue personnel, probably a dozen people already know about it.”

  “See what you can do to keep it quiet.”

  “That kind of thing usually doesn’t work out too well for anybody.”

  Dobson nodded his agreement. “Give it a try. Anything happens, I’ll take the heat.” This time it was Ben Gardener who took his time answering. From nearly anyone else in state or city government, such a statement would have to be considered pure unadulterated bullshit. From Harry Dobson, however, the promise was another matter.

  “You want to give me a hint here, Harry?” Gardener said.

  “Things get ugly, might be better you didn’t know.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Dobson ran both hands over his face. “Okay…so…”—he waved a hand—“I’m not sure exactly what time, but sometime last night the East Precinct gets a nine-one-one call about a possible homicide up on Capitol Hill. What we got is a guy in his mid-thirties with his throat cut. He’s kneeling on some woman’s kitchen floor with his head just about cut off, and she claims she doesn’t know a th
ing about it. She claims she found him that way when she got home. No idea how he got in the house or who might want to do something like that to him.” He paused. “Other than her, of course.”

  “She knows him?”

  “Used to. According to her he’s been living out of the country for the past six years or so…dodging an assault beef.” Gardener opened his mouth to speak, but Dobson waved him off with a finger. “An assault beef for tattooing this same woman from head to toe against her will.”

  “This the woman who woke up and found herself decorated with all kinda…”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And she claims she just found him there on her floor? After all these years? He just shows up dead on her floor.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Strange.”

  “We haven’t gotten to the strange part yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “She says his name’s not Magnusen. She claims he’s some guy named Bohannon. Says she spotted him in the street outside her house and then she and some cabdriver spent most of the evening following him around the city, until she finally lost him, at which point she goes home and finds the guy bleeding all over her kitchen.”

  “You look into this?”

  “We never got the chance. I had a couple of gold shields questioning her about the murder when, all of a sudden, the feds show up and snatch her from us.”

  “Over what?”

  This time, it was Dobson who checked the street. “Here’s where it gets interesting. The feds want her because she spent the early part of last night with none other than our friend Frank Corso.”

  “The guy from the bus tunnel?”

  “Seems they used to be an item.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “What’s even more interesting is that my detectives felt pretty certain she was telling the truth about just finding him there on the floor…and these are experienced men I’m talking about here. Twenty years plus…both of them.”