To Bobby, Manuel said, “You think I’m out of line, too?”
“You can do what you want,” Bobby said.
“Your boardhead buddy here is smarter than he looks,” Manuel told me.
Testing Manuel’s self-control, trying to determine if there were any limits to the lawlessness in which the police were willing to engage, Bobby said, “An ugly, psychotic asshole with a badge can always do what he wants.”
“Exactly,” Manuel said.
Manuel Ramirez — neither ugly nor psychotic — is three inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, twelve years older, and noticeably more Hispanic than I am; he likes country music, while I’m born for rock-’n’-roll; he speaks Spanish, Italian, and English, while I’m limited strictly to English and a few comforting mottoes in Latin; he’s full of political opinions, while I find politics boring and sleazy; he’s a great cook, but the only thing I can do well with food is eat it. In spite of all these differences and many others, we once shared a love of people and a love of life that made us friends.
For years he had worked the graveyard shift, the top cop of the night, but since Chief Lewis Stevenson died one month ago, Manuel had been head of the department. In the night world where I had met him and become his friend, he was once a bright presence, a good cop and a good man. Things change, especially here in the new Moonlight Bay, and although he now works the day, he has given his heart to darkness and is not the person I once knew.
“Anyone else here?” Manuel asked.
“No.”
I heard Feeney and the other deputy talking in the foyer — and then footsteps on the stairs.
“Got your message,” Manuel told me. “The license number.”
I nodded.
“Sasha Goodall was at Lilly Wing’s house last night.”
“Maybe it was a Tupperware party,” I said.
Breaking the magazine out of the Glock, Manuel said, “You two showed up just before dawn. You parked behind the garage and came in the back way.”
“We needed some Tupperware,” Bobby said.
“Where were you all night?”
“Studying Tupperware catalogs,” I said.
“You disappoint me, Chris.”
“You think I’m more the Rubbermaid type?”
Manuel said, “I never knew you to be a smartass.”
“I’m a man of countless facets.”
A subdued response to his questioning would be interpreted as fear, and any show of fear would invite harsher treatment. We both knew that the perverse martial law in force during this emergency had never been legally declared, and though it was unlikely that any authority would ever hold Manuel or his men accountable for high crimes or misdemeanors, he couldn’t be certain there would be no consequences for his illegal acts. Besides, he’d once been a by-the-book lawman, and beneath all his self-justification, he still had a conscience. Wiseass remarks were my way — and Bobby’s way — of reminding Manuel that we knew as well as he did that his authority was now mostly illegitimate and that pushed too hard, we would resist it.
“Don’t I disappoint you, too?” Bobby asked.
“I’ve always known what you are,” Manuel said, dropping the pistol magazine into one of his pockets.
“Likewise. You should change brands of face makeup. Shouldn’t he change brands of makeup, Chris?”
“Something that covers better,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said to Manuel, “I can still see the three sixes on your forehead.”
Without responding, Manuel tucked my Glock under his belt.
“Did you check out the license number?” I asked him.
“Useless. The Suburban was stolen earlier in the evening. We found it abandoned this afternoon, near the marina.”
“Any leads?”
“None of this is your business. I’ve got two things to say to you, Chris. Two reasons I’m here. Stay out of this.”
“Is that number one?”
“What?”
“Is that number one of the two? Or is that bonus advice?”
“Two things we can remember,” Bobby said. “But if there’s a lot of bonus advice, we’ll have to take notes.”
“Stay out of this,” Manuel repeated, speaking to me and ignoring Bobby. There was no unnatural luminosity in his eyes, but the hard edge in his voice was as chilling as animal eyeshine. “You’ve used up all the get-out-of-jail-free cards you had any right to expect from me. I mean it, Chris.”
A crash came from upstairs. A heavy piece of furniture had been tipped over.
I started toward the hall door.
Manuel stopped me by drawing his billy club and slamming it hard against the table. The rap was as loud as a gunshot. He said, “You heard me tell Frank not to trash the place too much. Just relax.”
“There aren’t any more guns,” I said angrily.
“Poetry lover like you might have a whole arsenal. For public safety, we have to be sure.”
Bobby was leaning against the counter near the cooktop, arms crossed on his chest. He appeared to be entirely resigned to our powerlessness, willing to ride out this episode, so totally chilled that he might as well have had lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. This pose no doubt deceived Manuel, but I knew Bobby so well that I could see he was like a dry-ice bomb about to achieve blast pressure. The drawer immediately to his right contained a set of knives, and I was sure that he had chosen his position with the cutlery in mind.
We couldn’t win a fight here, now, and the important thing was to remain free to find Orson and the missing kids.
When the sound of shattering glass came from upstairs, I ignored it, reined in my anger, and said tightly to Manuel, “Lilly lost her husband. Now, maybe, her only child. Doesn’t that reach you? You of all people?”
“I’m sorry for her.”
“That’s all?”
“If I could bring her boy back, I would.”
His choice of words chilled me. “That sounds like he’s already dead — or somewhere you can’t go to get him.”
With none of the compassion that once had been the essence of Manuel, he said, “I told you — stay out of it.”
Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died giving birth to their second child. She had been only twenty-four. Manuel, who never remarried, raised a daughter and son with much love and wisdom. His boy, Toby, has Down’s syndrome. As much as anyone and more than some people, Manuel knows suffering; he understands what it means to live with hard responsibilities and limitations. Nevertheless, though I searched his eyes, I couldn’t see the compassion that had made him a first-rate father and policeman.
“What about the Stuart twins?” I asked.
His round face, designed more for laughter than for anger, usually a summer face, was now full of winter and as hard as ice.
I said, “What about Wendy Dulcinea?”
The extent of my knowledge angered him.
His voice remained soft, but he tapped the end of the billy club against his right palm: “You listen to me, Chris. Those of us who know what’s happened — we either swallow it or we choke on it. So just relax and swallow it. Because if you choke on it, then no one is going to be there to apply the Heimlich maneuver. You understand?”
“Sure. Hey, I’m a bright guy. I understand. That was a death threat.”
“Nicely delivered,” Bobby noted. “Creative, oblique, no jarring histrionics — although the bit of business with the club is a cliché. Psychotic-Gestapo-torturer shtick from a hundred old movies. You’ll be a more credible fascist without it.”
“Screw you.”
Bobby smiled. “I know you dream about it.”
Manuel appeared to be one more exchange away from wading into Bobby with the club.
Stepping in front of Bobby so that the two of them wouldn’t be face-to-face, and hoping miraculously to raise guilt from Manuel’s graveyard conscience, I said, “If I try to go public, try to mess where I’m not supposed to mess, who pu
ts the bullet in the back of my head, Manuel? You?”
A look of genuine hurt passed across his features, but it only briefly softened his expression. “I couldn’t.”
“Very broly of you.” Broly is surfer lingo for brotherly. “I’ll be so much less dead if it’s one of your deputies who pulls the trigger instead of you.”
“This isn’t easy for either of us.”
“Seems easier for you than me.”
“You’ve been protected because of who your mother was, what she achieved. And because you were…once a friend of mine. But don’t push your luck, Chris.”
“Four kids snatched in twelve hours, Manuel. Is that the going exchange rate? Four other kids for one Toby?”
Admittedly, I was cruel to accuse him of sacrificing the lives of other children for his son, but there was truth in this cruelty.
His face darkened like settled coals, and in his eyes was the livid fire of hatred. “Yeah. I have a son that I’m responsible for. And a daughter. My mother. A family I’m responsible for. It’s not as easy for me as it is for a smartass loner like you.”
I was sickened that, once friends, we had come to this.
The entire police department of Moonlight Bay had been co-opted by those higher authorities responsible for concealing the terrors spawned at Wyvern. The cops’ reasons for cooperating were numerous: fear foremost; misguided patriotism; wads of hundred-dollar bills in prodigious quantities that only black-budget projects can provide. Furthermore, they had been impressed into the search for the troop of rhesuses and human subjects that escaped the lab more than two years ago, and on that night of violence, most had been bitten, clawed, or otherwise infected; they were in danger of becoming, so they agreed to be participants in the conspiracy, with the hope of being first in line for treatment if a cure for the retrovirus was discovered.
Manuel couldn’t be bought with mere money. His patriotism was not of the misguided variety. Sufficient fear can bring any man to heel, but it wasn’t fear that had corrupted Manuel.
The research at Wyvern had led to catastrophe, but also to positive discoveries. Evidently, some experiments have resulted in genetic treatments that are promising.
Manuel sold his soul for the hope that one of those experimental treatments would transform Toby. And I suspect he dreams of his son achieving intellectual and physical transformation.
The intellectual growth might well be possible. We know that some of the Wyvern work included intelligence-enhancement research and that there were startling successes, as witness Orson.
“How’s Toby doing?” I asked.
As I spoke, I heard a stealthy but telltale sound behind me. A drawer sliding open. The knife drawer.
When I had interposed myself between Bobby and Manuel, I’d meant only to defuse the escalating tension between them, not to provide cover for Bobby to arm himself. I wanted to tell him to chill out, but I didn’t know how to do so without alerting Manuel.
Besides, there are occasions when Bobby’s instincts are better than mine. If he thought this situation was inevitably leading to violence, perhaps he was right.
Apparently, my question about Toby had masked the sound of the drawer, because Manuel gave no indication of having heard it.
A fierce pride, both touching and terrifying, couldn’t drive out his anger; the two emotions were darkly complementary. “He’s reading. Better. Faster. More comprehension. Doing better at math. And what’s wrong with that? Is that a crime?”
I shook my head.
Although some people make fun of Toby’s appearance or shun him, he’s the image of gentleness. With his thick neck, rounded shoulders, short arms, and stocky legs, he reminds me of the good gnomes from the adventure stories that delighted me in childhood. His sloped and heavy brow, low-set ears, and soft features, and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes, give him a dreamy aspect that matches his sweet and gentle personality.
In spite of his burdens, Toby has always been happy and content. I worry that the Wyvern crowd will raise his intelligence far enough to leave him dissatisfied with his life — but not far enough to give him an average IQ. If they steal his innocence and curse him with a self-awareness that leaves him anguished, trapping him between livable identities, they will destroy him.
I know all about unfulfillable longing, the fruitless yearning to be what one can never be.
And although I find it difficult to believe that Toby could be genetically engineered into a radically new appearance, I fear that if any such attempt were made, he might become something he wouldn’t be able to bear seeing in the mirror. Those who don’t perceive beauty in the face of a Down’s-syndrome person are blind to all beauty or are so fearful of difference that they must at once turn away from every encounter with it. In every face — in even the plainest and the most unfortunate countenances — there is some precious aspect of the divine image of which we are a reflection, and if you look with an open heart, you can see an awesome beauty, a glimpse of something so radiant that it gives you joy. But will this radiance remain in Toby if he is redesigned by Wyvern scientists, if a radical physical transformation is attempted?
“He’s got a future now,” Manuel said.
“Don’t throw your boy away,” I pleaded.
“I’m lifting him up.”
“He won’t be your boy anymore.”
“He’ll finally be what he was meant to be.”
“He already was what he was meant to be.”
“You don’t know the pain,” Manuel said bitterly.
He was speaking about his own pain, not Toby’s. Toby is at peace with the world. Or was.
I said, “You always loved him for what he was.”
His voice was sharp and tremulous. “In spite of what he was.”
“That’s not fair to yourself. I know how you’ve felt about him all these years. You’ve treasured him.”
“You don’t know shit about how I felt, not shit,” he said, and he poked the air in front of me with the club, as if driving home his point.
With sorrow as heavy as a rock on my chest, I said, “If that’s true, if I didn’t understand how you felt about Toby, then I didn’t know you at all.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” he said. “Or maybe you can’t bear to think Toby could end up with a more normal life than yours. We all like to have someone to look down on — don’t we, Chris?”
My heart contracted as if around a thorn. The ferocity of his anger revealed such profound terror and pain that I couldn’t bear to respond to this mean-spirited accusation. We had been friends too long for me to hate him, and I was overcome only by pity.
He was mad with hope. In reasonable measure, hope sustains us. In great excess, it distorts perceptions, dulls the mind, corrupts the heart to no less an extent than does heroin.
I don’t believe I’ve misunderstood Manuel all these years. High on hope, he has forgotten what he loved and, instead, loves the ideal more than the reality, which is the cause of all the misery that the human species creates for itself.
Descending footsteps sounded on the stairs. I looked toward the hall as Feeney and the other deputy appeared in the foyer. Feeney went into the living room, the other man into the study, where they switched on the lights and dialed up the rheostats.
“What’s the second thing you came here to tell me?” I asked Manuel.
“They’re going to get control of this.”
“Of what?”
“This plague.”
“With what?” Bobby asked. “A bottle of Lysol?”
“Some people are immune.”
“Not everyone,” Bobby said as glass shattered in the living room.
Manuel said, “But the immune factor has been isolated. Soon there’ll be a vaccine, and a cure for those already infected.”
I thought of the missing children, but I didn’t mention them. “Some people are still becoming,” I said.
“And we’re learning there’s only so much change they’re able to to
lerate.”
I strove to resist the flood of hope that might have swept me away. “Only so much? How much?”
“There’s a threshold…. They become acutely aware of the changes taking place in them. Then they’re overcome by fear. An intolerable fear of themselves. Hatred of themselves. The self-hatred escalates until…they psychologically implode.”
“Psychological implosion? What the hell does that mean?” Then I understood. “Suicide?”
“Beyond suicide. Violent…frenzied self-destruction. We’ve seen…a number of cases. You understand what this means?”
I said, “When they self-destruct, they’re no longer carriers of the retrovirus. The plague is self-limiting.”
Judging by the sound, Frank Feeney was smashing a small table or chair against one of the living-room walls. I guessed that the other deputy was sweeping Sasha’s bottles of vitamins and herbs off the shelves in the study. They were dutifully teaching us a lesson — and respect for the law.
“Most of us will get through this all right,” Manuel said.
But who among us will not? I wondered.
“Animals, too,” I said. “They self-destruct.”
He regarded me with suspicion. “We’re seeing indications. What have you seen?”
I thought of the birds. The veve rats, which had been dead a long time. The pack of coyotes no doubt were nearing the threshold of tolerable change.
“Why’re you telling me this?” I asked.
“So you’ll stay the hell out of the way. Let the right people manage this situation. People who know what they’re doing. People with credentials.”
“The usual big brains,” Bobby said.
Manuel poked the club in our direction. “You may think you’re heroes, but you’ll just be getting in the way.”
“I’m no hero,” I assured him.
Bobby said, “Me, hell, I’m just a surf-smacked, sun-fried, beer-whacked boardhead.”
Manuel said, “There’s too much at stake here for us to allow anyone to have an agenda of his own.”
“What about the troop?” I asked. “The monkeys haven’t self-destructed.”
“They’re different. They were engineered in the lab, and they are what they are. They are what they were made to be, what they were born to be. They can still become if they’re vulnerable to the mutated virus, but maybe they aren’t susceptible. After this is all over, once people are vaccinated and this outbreak self-limits, we’ll track them down and wipe them out.”
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