Quarantined

by Joe McKinney

  The van was inside the garage, just like she said.

  I opened the garage door and a wave of dust poured out onto the gravel driveway. A murder of crows took noisily to the air from the roof. The van looked undamaged. I walked around it, nodding to myself as I headed for the cab.

  There, I stopped.

  Inside the cab, in the passenger seat, was Kenneth Wade, face bloody and bruised, as dead as dead can be.

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  * * *

  Chapter 13

  I looked down at the dead cop. His gas mask had been ripped off his face and his head was leaning back against the seat, mouth open slightly, eyes milked over. He had a day or two worth of blond stubble on his chin. He'd been beaten badly. There were dark, livid bruises on his face, around his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth, where a thin stream of blood had dried and turned to black crust. His gun was missing.

  Wade's radio was as dead as he was. It had been left in the ON position, the battery drained.

  His cell phone was on the floorboard, next to his left bootie, and I tried that. It worked. With a lot of difficulty, I manipulated the tiny phone around the contours of my gas mask so I could talk with the dispatcher's office and tell them where I was and what I needed.

  As I put the phone back as closely as I could to where I picked it up from, it occurred to me how many of the cardinal rules of crime scene management I had just violated. I probably shouldn't have opened the garage door. I definitely shouldn't have opened the van's door. And any respectable defense attorney would have a field day with me using the dead man's cell phone. I saw myself, several hours in the future, writing a very long report in which I would use the phrase “necessary due to exigent circumstances” over and over again.

  Shaking my head, I closed everything up the way I'd found it and walked around to the other side of the garage, where I figured I could wait for the cavalry to show up.

  It seemed to be my day for corpses.

  Just around the corner, thrown with apparent haste and swarming with black, iridescent flies, were two more bodies. Looters, from the looks of them. I got close enough to see the bullet holes in their chests. “Lovely,” I said, dreading the extra work their misfortune was going to cause me.

  I was staring at the corpses, thinking about how the scene got to look the way it looked, when I heard a twig snap. My gaze darted into the alley behind the garage, into the overgrown tangle of tall grass and weeds and shrubs there. Through the green and brown mess of vegetation I saw a man, a looter, with a shotgun, inching his way towards the garage.

  I jumped back behind the corner of the garage, and looked around for a way out. I couldn't risk going back into the street, and I couldn't cross the alley again without giving away my position.

  You're screwed.

  The man tried to approach quietly, but didn't do a very good job of it. I slipped around to the other side of the garage and picked up a long, skinny piece of metal pipe leaning against the garage. I gripped it, holding it straight up, like a walking stick. The pole was about the size of a broom handle, awkward to swing, but it was all I had to work with.

  I pressed my back against the corner of the garage nearest the alley, listened to the crunching vegetation, and got my mind ready for what I was about to do.

  Instead of swinging it, I jabbed the pole into the man's shocked face as he came around the corner. I heard his nose crack. Blood went everywhere. He went down to his knees, losing his grip on the shotgun at the same time, and held his face with both hands.

  “Shit,” he said. It sounded muffled through the broken bones and web of his fingers.

  I took a step back, grabbed one end of the pole with both hands and swung it down over my head, onto the back of his.

  It laid him out. He collapsed to the ground, not dead but not moving, either.

  I tossed the pole away and grabbed the shotgun. As I looked around, trying to figure out what direction to go in, I heard shouting. Looters. They were in the street, pointing and yelling in my direction. They ran at me, still shouting. One took a wild shot at me with a pistol and I heard the bullet whiz by me, striking the vegetation in the alleyway with the crack of breaking wood.

  I ran along the fence line, parallel to the alley. The suit was light, but bulky, and it sounded like I was crumpling up wax paper as my legs scissored back and forth. By the time I reached the far back corner of the yard, they were already coming around the corner of the house. Another shot went by my head and I jumped the fence, ducking into the cover of the overgrown alley. The shrubs pulled on my suit, but I pushed through to the other side. I came out right on top of a group of chickens that squawked in protest as I ran through them. I didn't stop. Kept on running. This time, I headed for the house next door to Carmenita Jaramillo's.

  I turned and saw three of them entering the yard. Before they could get a shot off I fired the shotgun at them. They were far enough away that there was little danger of the shot doing anything but peppering their skin, but the noise was enough to cause them to duck for cover. I used the opportunity to duck into the gap between the house and the garage. My plan was to run around the front and try to double back on them, maybe come at them from the opposite corner of the house. But as soon as I entered the gap, I realized that wasn't going to happen. There was a 12 ft high brick wall in front of me, sealing me into a dead end.

  I was frantic. I went down on one knee, hugging the wall of the house, shotgun up and ready, waiting for the end. I heard the looters laughing in the backyard, calling out to me. They'd figured out I was a woman. I got the sense of what they were saying, and it didn't sound like they wanted to kill me. At least that wasn't the first thing they were going to do.

  But then, suddenly, their laughing turned to surprised, angry shouts, and one of them even let out a girlish squeak of a scream before the sound was cut off by a sickening crunch.

  I held my position for at least a minute, waiting to see who came around the corner. When no one did, I inched forward.

  I stopped at the corner and took a deep breath, then edged around the corner with the shotgun ready to go.

  My mouth fell open inside my gas mask. I lowered the shotgun.

  There, standing in the middle of three kneeling looters, their hands clasped over their heads, was Chunk, a rather serious looking shotgun in his hands. One of the looters was down. He looked dead.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  The cavalry was a SWAT team divided up into four two-man units, all of them in full biohazard gear. A police helicopter hovered overhead. Once the scene was locked down, the evidence technicians, the SAPD's version of CSI, was brought in. Things happened smoothly after that, more or less by the book.

  By the time Chunk and I made it back to the Scar and started writing our reports, the afternoon sky had begun to color with an approaching storm. Towering purple and black thunderheads loomed on the horizon, shouldering up against the low, rounded hills of the Hill Country. The air had a charged, electric smell.

  It was drizzling by the time the sun disappeared.

  Later, from the report writing room, I could hear rain pounding on the building's metal roof.

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  * * *

  Chapter 14

  A hard rain. Silver sheets of water danced in the air across the parking lot. The rain was so loud Chunk and I had to nearly yell to hear each other over it. We were standing under the awning of the Scar's administrative building, waiting to make the mad dash to our cars.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure? You had a hard one today.”

  “We both did.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I mean it. Thanks.”

  “Any time,” he said. “You take care now.”

  And then we were off, running for our cars. By the time I reached mine I was soaked to the bone. Ordinarily, it took me fifteen minutes to dr
ive home from the Scar, but that night it took me almost two hours the rain was so bad.

  Billy was asleep on the couch, so I went to check on Connie. I opened her door quietly and poked my head in. She looked like she was sleeping, face mashed into her pillow, arm thrown heavily over her stuffed animals, but almost as soon as I looked in on her, she poked her head up, wide awake.

  “Mommy?”

  “Hey baby. What are you doing awake?”

  She rubbed her eyes as she sat up on the edge of the bed. I knelt down in front of her.

  “I heard your car.”

  All I heard was the rain pounding on the roof. “You did?”

  She nodded.

  “What's wrong? Can't sleep?”

  She shook her head. Poor thing was so exhausted she could barely hold her head up, and I knew that she'd been waiting up for me.

  “Are you okay, Connie?”

  “I wore my mask all day today, Mommy.”

  “Oh baby.” I brushed the hair out of her face. “I'm sorry I yelled at you yesterday.”

  Connie yawned. “I miss you, Mommy.”

  “I miss you too, baby. I miss you very much.”

  “Are you going to be here for my birthday?”

  “You bet I am. We're going to have a party for you and everything.”

  “Is June going to come?”

  June was her friend, one of the only ones left. “You betcha,” I said. “Her mommy said it was okay, so she's coming.”

  “Who else?”

  “Well, it's going to be kind of small. Mr. and Mrs. Avery from next door will be there, and June and her mommy, and me and Daddy, and your Uncle Chunk, too.”

  “Uncle Chunk's funny,” she said.

  “Yeah, he's a character. Is there anything you want for your birthday?”

  The words were out of me before I could stop them. I was talking like everything was normal, like if she wanted something I could actually go out and buy it.

  She looked at me with sudden seriousness and nodded.

  “What is it, baby?”

  “I want a chocolate cake, Mommy. Can you make me one? Please.”

  I didn't answer for a long moment because I was too stunned, thinking about what Carmenita Jaramillo had told me, that smiling mummy in her rocking chair. Finally, weakly, distantly, I mumbled, “Chocolate cake?”

  She climbed up to her knees, hands churched together in front of her like she was praying, only her face was one huge hopeful smile.

  I couldn't say no. I wasn't that strong.

  She threw her arm around me and squeezed me, right on the bruise on my ribs. I winced in pain, but I didn't try to peel her off. I wouldn't have done that for the world because it felt so good. My baby felt so good in my arms.

  Billy was awake. He leaned against the wall in the dark hallway, with his arms over his chest.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  He kissed me. “Welcome home.”

  “Good to be home.”

  We walked out to the living room. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water and, when I came back, we went out to the back porch and sat in a pair of green lawn chairs—a wedding gift from Billy's mom and his step dad. We watched the storm thrash the tops of the trees down by the creek.

  “We needed this rain,” he said. There was a long pause before he said, “Connie and I went down by the creek today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It's down a couple of feet. Grass is looking dry, too.”

  “Mmm.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to the wind, to the pounding rush of the rain. I smelled the air around me. It had come alive with the storm. When I opened them, lightning flashed. In the sudden burst of light I saw the whole of our lower property sloping down from the house.

  “It's beautiful, Billy.”

  “Yeah.”

  We hadn't had a quiet moment like that in a long while. A moment where we both knew how lucky we were, all things considered.

  He brushed his hand against mine. I took it, and we held hands.

  “Are you gonna do your yoga tonight?”

  “No. Too tired. I think I bruised my side pretty bad today.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He asked me how, and I told him. “Let me see,” he asked.

  I leaned forward and pulled up the left side of my t-shirt, past my bra. “Can you see it?”

  He frowned. Reached out and touched it with a finger. “It looks bad.”

  “Feels bad, too.” I tried to make it a joke, but he didn't laugh. He got up and went to the back door. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Back in a sec.”

  When he returned, he had some ice cubes wrapped in a towel.

  “We had ice cubes? Where did you get ice cubes?”

  “This may sting a little,” he said, and put the ice pack up to my ribs. I flinched. The fingertips of his freehand glided slowly up and down my arm, making me shiver. “I heard you talking to Connie.”

  I flinched again as he touched another tender spot.

  “Sorry.” Then, a moment later, he said, “You promised her a chocolate cake.” There was no judgment in his voice. “That's gonna be kind of hard to put together, don't you think?”

  “Maybe.” I pulled away from the ice and pulled my shirt down.

  He looked at me.

  “Sorry. That's starting to sting.”

  “You need to keep ice on it.”

  “I will. Later.”

  He put the ice pack down on the floor between us. “So how are you gonna get the stuff for a chocolate cake?”

  “I don't have much of a choice, do I?”

  “Yeah, but Lily...”

  “I know. But it'll be all right.”

  Billy turned his chair so that he was facing me. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and began to massage them. Slowly. Gently. I closed my eyes, and my head began to rock with the rhythm of his hands. God, those hands.

  “You know it's probably gonna be expensive.”

  “I know.” Actually, I had no idea how much it would cost. The black market was unpredictable, but I didn't care about that. I was so tired.

  “Is that helping?” he asked, his hands spreading warmth against my skin.

  Lightning lit up the property again.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Oh, yes.”

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  * * *

  Chapter 15

  The next morning, Chunk and I went over the inventory of property found in the van. Most of it was routine stuff, like you'd see in a doctor's office or college chem lab. Other items were unique to field work, but still routine considering the circumstances, like one hundred and thirty seven glass vials, two laptop computers, a centrifuge machine, a gas chromatograph, extra fillers for a gas mask, extra biohazard gear, an unopened box of surgical face masks, goggles, and on and on for two typed pages.

  The only item that really interested me was Emma Bradley's handwritten journal, which was found under the passenger seat.

  “Anything on that list gonna help us?” Chunk asked. He meant other than the journal.

  “Probably not. I want to show it to Myers though. See what he says. Plus I'd like to see what he knows about Bradley being out in the GZ before we talk to hippo woman again.”

  “Why wouldn't he know she was working out there?”

  “No, that's not what I mean. I mean he's probably gonna tell us more than hippo woman will.”

  “Okay.” He went and checked out a car for us. I was betting that Wessler, the retired sergeant who ran the fleet division at the Scar, was cussing us for losing two of his cars in as many days, but I knew he wouldn't give Chunk a hard time about it. He was scared to death of Chunk.

  When he came back Chunk jangled the keys in front of me. “Wessler's not happy,” he said, and laughed.

  “You didn't scare him again, did you?”

  “No, of course not.” He winked, and within ten minutes, we were on th
e way to see Myers again.

  Chunk drove. I sat in the passenger seat and read Bradley's journal for about the twentieth time. Most of it was just a desert of math and chemical equations. But there were other parts, small notes to herself and longer sections where she recorded her observations, that gave me a sense of what a contradiction Emma Bradley must have been. Turning through page after page of numbers and tables showing the numbers of dead from the various districts all across the city, I was struck not by the gut-wrenching loss of life her journal described, but by the girly-girl handwriting in which that carnage had been recorded. She wrote in a big, loopy script, the same kind I expect to find on notes about boys in Connie's pockets when she gets to the seventh grade. I half expected to see little hearts instead of dots over her lower case letters. Maybe an “I love Kenneth Wade” in the margin.

  I also found a small bundle of ten photographs, secured with a green rubber band and sandwiched between the pages. There were a few of her with other members of the WHO staff. There was one of the inside of her trailer, which was a mess in the photograph, but hadn't been when we searched it after we found out who she was. I found a picture of her sitting in Kenneth Wade's lap. She had her hands together, between her thighs, a big, drunken smile on her face. Wade had his arms around her waist.

  The last picture showed her in her bra—a cute pink, lacy pushup—and a long black gypsy skirt. She was drunk in that one too, and it kind of looked like she was belly-dancing. I wondered who took the picture.

  “Work hard, play hard,” Chunk said.

  “I guess.”

  I put the pictures up and flipped through the journal again.

  “What do you think about a timeline?” he asked.

  “We might be able to use some of this.” We'd been trying to map out the time up to her death from what Bradley described in her journal, and there was enough English between the numbers to get a fairly good breakdown of her last week. “Wish there was more on the last day, though.”

  The standard procedure when investigating a homicide is to start with the twenty-four hour rule. You want as much information as possible about the victim's movements during the twenty-four hours prior to her death. This is your best chance to identify the killer. When you turn your attention to prosecuting the killer, you focus on the twenty-four hours after the victim's death. This shows you state of mind.