Dead of Night df-12

by Randy Wayne White

  In the Amazon, she added, indigenous people were the most common victims. No doctors for them, which is why we heard of it so rarely.

  “There’s some kind of herb they use to dissolve the fish, but the pain’s so bad that males sometimes resort to self-inflicted penectomy. You can ask your friend about that.”

  Catfish have saw-edged spines, sharp as a hypodermic, and secrete a complicated protein poison. Thinking about it made me cringe.

  She told me she’d bring a copy of the article when she came back that night to do the minor operation required to remove the candiru. She’d managed to get a catheter in Tomlinson; had the outpatient surgery reserved for 7:00 P.M. The phenomenon had so seldom been documented, she said, that she wanted to videotape the procedure. Other physicians were already asking to attend.

  “But it’s not serious. I want to stress that. Within two days, maybe three, he’ll be completely recovered.”

  As she was leaving, I said aloud, “A parasitic catfish from the Amazon? Jesus, bizarre.”

  I was talking to Lake, but the woman stopped, laughing in a way that communicated congenial sarcasm. “Finding an illegal exotic species in this part of Florida? That would be shocking-if it wasn’t an almost daily occurrence. All right, I’m exaggerating, but not much. The ER staff will tell you: ”

  She said that, over the last week, the emergency room had treated five people who’d been bitten by nonnative spiders. Entomologists at the University of Florida had identified one as a Calcutta scorpion. She couldn’t remember the name of the other spider. It was from Africa, and two of the patients nearly died.

  “Crab spider? Maybe that was it.”

  I said, “A six-eyed crab spider? That’s African-and dangerous. A lot more poisonous than a black widow, or brown recluse.”

  “Yes. That’s the one. There were the spider bites and then, three days ago, a grade school janitor drives himself to the ER. He comes in, face white as a sheet, carrying a garbage bag that has a fifty-pound snake in it. The thing was more than eight feet long.

  “He said he found it on the playground. The guy killed it when it came after him. One of those guys who carries a shotgun in his truck. His words: ‘It charged me and struck.’ It did sort of graze him, but no venom. Thank God, because we got a positive ID on that, too. African again. An illegal exotic. It was an African mamba, which they tell me is potentially lethal.”

  Something-the intensity of my expression, perhaps-had caused her to focus on me rather than on what she was saying, and so she spoke more slowly, almost by rote, as she finished, “The Disney World area’s filled with exotics. Human and animal.”

  I said, “This has all been in the last week?”

  “Seven, eight days, yes. That’s why it hasn’t made the national news yet. This county depends on tourism, so the local weeklies aren’t going to put it in the headlines. But word’s bound to leak out.”

  A South American fish, she added, was no surprise to her.

  “Once I remove the candiru, I’ll let you examine it,” she said. “Get your professional opinion.”

  27

  LOG

  18 Dec. Saturday 18:04

  Bartram County Hospital… SMT victim of escalating biosabotage…

  … updated Hal H. by phone. Asked for background checks on J. Reynolds amp; D. Stokes. H. said he’s surprised I’m no longer his reluctant operative. Accurate. Now in SMT’s room trying to decipher why I’m willing to go back in service, piecing together a premise…

  It was an hour before his surgery, and Tomlinson was his abnormal, cheery self. Cheerier. He sat in his private room, bed cranked up like a lounge chair, wearing a gown that tied at the back. There was a big, familiar grin on his face. A drunken grin.

  The PCA system to which he was attached had everything to do with his good mood. PCA as in “patient-controlled analgesia.” It allows the patient to administer his own pain medication.

  When they told him about it, Tomlinson stopped groaning long enough to say, “If the gadget works, I’ll have one installed on my boat. I’ve got money.”

  The nurses set up an intravenous morphine sulfate drip overhead, found a vein, inserted a needle, and taped it to his arm. Within easy reach, they placed a button connected to the PCA system. As long as he didn’t breach the preset lockout parameters, Tomlinson could get additional morphine by pushing the button.

  During the first hour, he’d drummed on the thing like it was the flipper of a pinball machine. Now, though, with the pain finally masked, he sat happily in his bed, grinning, flirting with nurses, using the phone whenever it came into his mind to call someone new.

  That was often. Drunks get phone-happy in the early stages of a binge. Tomlinson is among the most phone-loving of drunks. In the right mood, he’s also funny as hell. He plays the caricaturized role of the mind-zapped hipster so naturally that I’m never sure when he’s acting or just being himself. The lines between the two are blurry.

  Lake and I sat bedside as the man chatted and laughed into his cellular phone. My son read a magazine while I sat thinking, making notes in my log, preoccupied with the string of poisonous exotics that Dr. Shepherd had listed. Spiders, scorpions, a snake, parasitic worms: all species from either Latin America or Africa.

  Both regions house outlaw governments and violent extremists.

  The exotics had other characteristics in common. With the exception of the snake, they all produce a prodigious number of eggs or larvae-life capsules so tiny that tens of thousands of each could be easily smuggled into the country. They wouldn’t take up much more space than a paperback book. Once hatched, each species would also adapt to Florida’s subtropical environment.

  That was the most unsettling similarity. Multiply X thousands of breeding pairs, then multiply again by X hundreds of thousands of offspring. The population would grow exponentially.

  Harrington was right. This wasn’t biovandalism, this was a biological attack. The perpetrators had chosen well. A species that produces many thousands of offspring is an “evolutionary responder.” It is a fecund, or reproductive, response to predators who’ve adapted specialized feeding abilities-“phenotype characteristics”-that make the fecund species easy prey.

  It’s called “fecund selection.”

  But when a fecund-select species is introduced into a region where there are no predators, it is an environmental catastrophe. Historically, people responsible for these catastrophes have not been terrorists. They’ve been well-intended government officials, or private importers of plants and animals.

  I’m a scientific journal junkie. I know that four or five thousand exotic plant species have already established themselves in the United States, along with a couple of thousand exotic animals, all reproducing. I’d read that, annually, these exotics cost us millions a year, because we must assume the aggressive role of artificial predator.

  Devastating examples of fecund-select exotics came to mind:

  The gypsy moth was brought to the U.S. from France by an entomologist who hoped to cross them with indigenous moths and create better silk. A few gypsy moths escaped, multiplied, multiplied again. They were soon an unchecked cloud that defoliated entire forests throughout New England.

  In the 1950s, government biologists turned calamity into cataclysm when they began spraying DDT to kill the moths. It took much too long for officials to admit that DDT also decimated our native insect and bird populations. Several species were poisoned to the brink of extinction-eagles, brown pelicans, and osprey among them.

  Dragonflies, which prey voraciously on mosquitoes, were among the earliest of DDT’s casualties, so mosquitoes bred out of control-which required spraying heavier concentrations of the chemical.

  DDT is a potent carcinogenic, readily absorbed through the cell walls of pasture grasses, ripening vegetables, and herbaceous fish. It also seeped into our water systems. A generation of children grew up drinking DDT-laced milk and water and eating DDT-contaminated food. Unknown thousands of th
at generation are still suffering the effects. All because of an exotic moth.

  Water hyacinth, a South American floating plant, and kudzu vine, from Japan, were other examples. Kudzu vine arrived by ship in the late 1800s to shade porches of Southern mansions. In the 1940s, government agricultural agents decided it was the ideal answer to erosion because it grows rapidly-up to a foot a day. Within a few years, the vine was suffocating farmlands and forests. It now blankets millions of acres. Hyacinth clogs millions of acres of waterways.

  In Florida and neighboring states, there are too many examples of noxious exotics that breed, travel, and destroy, unhampered by natural checks: the Cuban tree frog, the walking catfish, several species of tropical fish, and, recently, the Indo-Pacific species of lionfish-dangerous because its spines are lethal.

  Brazilian fire ants are some of the most vicious little bastards on Earth, and among the most ecologically destructive. The ant, named for its fiery bite, entered via ship through Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s-the beginning of a long, slow nightmare. Fire ants sprout wings during their breeding cycle, can travel miles during mating flights, and hatch copious numbers of eggs.

  The ant was soon killing local populations of native insects, whole colonies of ground-nesting birds, and infant mammals, as they ate their way into neighboring states. Ironically-and sadly-I’ve yet to hear of an environmental group that has aimed its financial or political guns at this biological cancer. Annually, fire ants destroy more indigenous species than the most heartless of developers.

  I’ve done enough reading to know that plague and pestilence are not just words entombed in an ancient book. On the largest of scales, a balance between predator and prey is requisite if a biota is to function as a whole, because the health of the macrocosm is dependent on the health of all its living parts.

  It is a fragile symbiosis. Predation is one of the few checks that prohibits one species from dominating, then destroying all others.

  The only exotic on Dr. Shepherd’s list that didn’t seem an efficient choice as a bioweapon was the mamba. The species is too dangerous to handle, and snakes lay too few eggs to have much impact on a sizeable geographic area.

  But then I gave it some thought. Decided maybe I was wrong.

  In the African bush, only once had I seen a green mamba. Along with the taipan of Australia, it’s the scariest snake I’ve encountered. Confronting a mamba? Chilling.

  The snake grows more than fourteen feet long. Over ground, some claim, it crawls faster than an Olympic sprinter can run-unlikely, but illustrative of the fear it creates. The grade school janitor said that the snake he killed had charged him. The janitor was lucky. He had a shotgun. I’d heard accounts of pissed-off mambas running down men from behind and biting them in the back. Maybe apocryphal, but the animal’s physical abilities are well documented.

  The snake I’d encountered was face-to-face, and once was enough. When agitated, a mamba stands erect, a third of its body off the ground, so it’s at eye level. You and the snake, staring at each other, its face and jaws not much smaller than your own. Just before it strikes, a mamba shakes its head violently, flattening cobralike. It opens its mouth wide to show the black interior. The snake is olive gray to green, not black. The name comes from this attack display.

  If a mamba wet-strikes a healthy adult, death is statistically certain if the victim doesn’t receive antivenom within half an hour. It is not a Hollywood death. Because of the megadose of neurotoxin, the victim dies slowly, clearheaded, but as a suffocating paraplegic. Its venom reserve is so massive that there are accounts of a single African mamba dropping through the roof of a house and killing as many as twelve inhabitants before crawling away.

  So maybe it was a good choice as a bioweapon. Release a small number of mambas at places chosen to create the greatest possible public outrage: the Mall of the Americas; public schools. The terror factor would be enormous.

  “Diabolical”-the right word.

  The green mamba I’d encountered had behaved like an irritable, hyperactive teen. “Probably had a nest in the area,” one of the locals told me later. “Makes them fierce. Deadly mean.” The snake’s head swayed like a metronome, but its eyes never broke contact with mine. The eyes were convex scales on an organism covered with scales. They were a lucent gray-blue, as dead looking as keratin plates, yet they implied the irrelevance of all knowledge because they reflected all that could be genetically known: If it touched its mouth to me, my beating mammalian heart would stop.

  An African mamba is among the few creatures on earth instinctually certain of its ascendancy. I hoped I’d never face another.

  It crossed my mind that the people doing this were another form of exotic. There is nothing sinister about snakes, or sharks, or spiders. They are what they are, beautifully coded, the trophies of adaptation. But these people were purposeful; seditious exotics, no less poisonous than the creatures they’d smuggled into the U.S. So far, they’d operated without being discovered. Like the fecund-select creatures they were using, there was no predator to track them and intercede.

  Until now.

  I’d been given the assignment. My options included whatever extreme action I deemed appropriate. Eternalize.

  My license had been reissued.

  I thought of Jobe Applebee, the little man who’d experienced too much chaos during his life. I thought of a good lady who once placed the imperatives of scientific method only after the love she had for her son, and husband. I thought of Tomlinson’s pain… remembered the disgusting vision of guinea worm on the move.

  Sitting in that hospital room, I sent a silent message to the perpetrators: You are being tracked now.

  LOG

  18 Dec. Saturday 18:43 (addendum from a reluctant operative)

  Bartram County Hospital.

  Premise: Predation is a necessary check that prohibits one species from destroying all others. A society whose moral ideals inhibit its own defense is a society doomed to destruction by those predators it defines as immoral.

  … all primate units struggle for ascendance, the weaknesses of many sheltered by the strength of a few. Conventional human conduct-trappings of respect, ceremony, alliance, and ritual-are added later to maintain the comforting illusion of a sentimental, civilized world…

  – MDF

  I sat thinking dark thoughts, writing in my log, as I listened to Tomlinson, the cheerful drunk, hold court on the phone. He’d already called several island fishing guides-Jeth, Alex, Neville, Doug Fisher, and Dave Case among them. Next he dialed my cousin, Ransom.

  When she answered, Laken and I listened to what was by now a familiar, one-sided conversation: “Guess who’s got a fish stuck up his willy. Yeah, it’s me. Who else? Nope. My penis. I’m not kidding. Seriously… a fish. The little fiend went for a swim up the Sunshine Skyway. I’m in the hospital right now.

  “No, I’m not drunk. I’m doing mainline morphine, which is like visiting an ol’ war buddy. Makes the wounds seem fun. They’ve got this special machine I plan to buy and keep aboard No Mas…”

  I watched Tomlinson tilt his head, listening to Ransom for what seemed like a long time, before he became insistent. “Yes… I told you. They’re gonna do surgery in about half an hour. Listen to me closely: I… HAVE… A… FISH… UP… MY… DICK. Which means no live broadcast tomorrow. Sorry, no can do. In fact, I’ve gone to work with Doc on a special government project. Top secret; can’t say. I’m his researcher and personal assistant. So we may have to tell our Zen students it’s recess time. Go play alone in their own heads for a few months…”

  He listened for several moments before raising his voice. “Lady, I’m surprised someone hasn’t dropped a house on you. They don’t make ruby slippers in size twelve?” He looked at me and wagged his eyebrows, enjoying himself. “I didn’t mention my new seafood special. If I wrap Zamboni in a bun, cover ’im with tartar sauce, is there a chance you might get a case of the Tomlinson munchies again? Just for old times’ sake? Doctor says
he’ll be standing tall, right as rain, within a couple of days.”

  I watched him grimace, then hold the phone away from his ear.

  “Here,” he said, “your sister wants to talk to you.”

  I took the phone. Waited quietly as Ransom added an epilogue to her heated rant. When she was done, I said, “Some of those words, I’m surprised you know. Some of them, don’t even know.”

  In her singsong, Bahamian lilt, Ransom replied, “Oh. It’s you, my brother. Thought I was still talkin’ to that idiot business partner of mine. His Holiness, Mr. Two-Timing Tomlinson. Is what he said true? Does he really have a fish in his thingee?”

  I told her, yes, he apparently had a fish in his thingee. “The doctor used a special scope to take a look. She thinks it’s a fish called a ‘candiru.’ ”

  “ ‘Candy-roo’? With that skinny boy, I’m surprised it ain’t a damn moray. He say he doan want me to come up there, but I’m bringing my video guys anyway. We got our live broadcast tomorrow. I don’t care what that ganja bum say. Our students will be tuned in, all over the world. He not gonna cost me twenty, thirty thousand just ’cause he caught a fish.”

  I said, “That’s between you two. As of now, Lake and I plan on driving the Volkswagen back to Sanibel tonight. But just in case the surgery doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to, I’ve got a taxi on standby. A limo service-” I smiled at my son. “He thinks it’s cool. No matter what happens here, Lake’s flying out tomorrow.”

  Ransom said that was fine. If I didn’t stay the night, she could bring Tomlinson home whenever he was discharged. “I thought you was leaving tomorrow, too. Going to Iowa. Does your sweetie pie, the pregnant jock, know you standin’ her up again?”

  There’s an antagonism between Ransom and Dewey that I don’t understand. Never will.

  I told her that I’d probably leave Monday. “But if there’re complications here, it’ll be okay. Dewey’ll understand.”