10 Tahoe Trap (33 page)

“Sure,” she said.

“Sure, we can use your house?”

“Sure.”

“Great. How would I get the key?”

“I’ll... Lemme think. Can you come by the hospital? I’ll leave the key with Doc Lee in Emergency. The address is on the little paper fob.”

I thanked her profusely, hung up, and looked at Diamond and Paco.

“Now the question is how to trap them once they break into the house,” I said.

“Always looks easy in the movies,” Diamond said.

“Pepper spray,” Paco suddenly said from the living room.

We turned and looked at him. “Now there’s a hypothetical,” I said. I got up, walked in, and sat down on one of Diamond’s big chairs. Diamond followed.

Paco was looking at the living room wall. His brow was furrowed with the normal frown and something else. The look of a kid solving a puzzle. The sunglasses on his head reflected the living room lamp and looked like giant bug eyes.

“Pepper spray comes in small containers,” I said. “Good for shooting into a person’s eyes if they attack you. But a house is a big space. We probably wouldn’t know in advance if they were coming in through a door or a window. Or maybe through the attic. Now if we had tear gas canisters, then we could fill the building and possibly trap them.”

Diamond was shaking his head. “Tear gas is hard to get. You have to be a qualified official from a law enforcement agency.”

“I thought tear gas was like pepper spray,” Paco said.

“Kind of,” I said. “They both make your eyes burn. You can’t see or breathe. The big difference is volume. You need a lot of gas to fill a building.”

“We could make a lot of pepper spray,” Paco said.

“Make it? How?”

“Our Cassie’s Viper peppers are over a million Scoville units. If you touch them, you can’t touch your eyes, or you’re in big trouble.”

“You have enough of them to make a lot of spray?”

“One whole end of the hothouse is Vipers.”

“You got an idea of how to turn peppers into pepper spray?” Diamond asked.

Paco shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked back toward the kitchen and the counter where they’d made the chocolate soda. “Pro’bly put them in the blender or something.”

Diamond raised his eyebrows. He looked at me. “Kid’s maybe got something.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’ll be a chemist when you grow up,” I said to Paco.

“What’s a chemist?” Paco asked.

I had to think about how to answer that. I looked at Diamond.

“A chemist is a person who understands the chemical properties of materials,” he said. “Things called atoms and molecules. A chemist knows how to put them together and take them apart. A chemist can make completely new chemicals using that knowledge.”

“Like making a chocolate soda out of cookies and ice cubes,” Paco said.

“Yeah,” Diamond said, “but what’s cool about chemists is that the atoms and molecules they use are super small. So small, in fact, that you could put many thousands of them on the point of a needle.”

Paco made the smallest of head shakes. “You couldn’t even see them,” he said.

“No, not with your eyes.”

Paco’s disbelief was obvious.

“Okay,” I interrupted, “we use a blender to grind up lots of Cassie’s Viper peppers,” I said. “And we figure out how to make spray. Our plan is to get Salt and Pepper to break into this house to get you, Paco. Not a simple setup, but doable. Once they break in, how do we use pepper spray to trap them in the house?”

“I don’t know. I’m just the chemist,” Paco said. “But if it gets in their eyes, they couldn’t see to get out.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking. Then, in a sudden outburst, he almost shouted, “We could use fire ants, too.”

”Are you thinking of ants instead of pepper spray? Or are you thinking we could use both fire ants and pepper spray?”

“If we did use both,” Paco said, “the superheroes would have to do whatever we wanted.”

“Which would be worse to get hit with?” Diamond asked. “Pepper spray or fire ants?”

Paco thought about it “They’d both be bad,” he said.

“Does pepper spray hurt fire ants?” I asked.

Paco shook his head. “Nothing hurts fire ants. They’re superhero bugs.”

“We can get fire ants at your farm, right?” I said.

“There’s a bunch of nests in the field behind the hothouse. Cassie tried to kill them.”

“Didn’t work?”

Paco shook his head. “You can’t kill fire ants. All you can do is run away when they come after you.”

“How would you collect the ants?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Shovel and bucket. But you’d have to cover your skin. They can chew through anything and then sting you to death.”

“Really,” I said. “Let’s see if we can get some details from the bug expert.” I picked up the phone and called Street.

“Doctor,” I said when she answered.

“You only say that when you want to use my expertise,” she said.

“I’m not calling about sex,” I said. I glanced at Paco when I realized what I’d said. He showed no reaction.

“Funny guy,” Street said.

“I’m calling about your second major expertise. Insects. Specifically fire ants.” I hesitated. “Or are they one of those bugs that aren’t technically insects?”

Street laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said with emphasis. “When entomologists say that insects will inherit the earth, we are often specifically thinking about creatures like the social insects. And of those, fire ants are by some measures at the apex.”

“Of course,” I said. “Apex insects.”

“Toughest bugs there are,” Street said.

“You mean that collectively? Or individually?” I said.

“Both. If you were proportionally as strong as a fire ant, you could crawl up a vertical wall at fifty miles an hour. You could pick up your cabin and toss it into the lake. You could jump from any height without getting hurt. Plus, fire ants can eat almost any organic material, animal or vegetable. Practically everything is food to them. And they communicate with pheromones. Which, with the social organization, is what makes them such pests. Dangerous, even.”

“Because they sting? Paco said that fire ants could kill you.”

“Well, a single fire ant sting is only one-point-two on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. When one or two or three fire ants sting you, it hurts, but you’ll survive. But if you trip and fall into a nest, that disturbance will cause the ants to send up a pheromone-style fire alarm klaxon. If you’re very quick, you can get up and out with only a few dozen or a few hundred stings. But if you’ve bumped your head and are dazed and hesitate, you could be in serious trouble.”

“Some people are allergic to their stings, right?” I said. I saw Paco looking at me.

“Yes,” Street said. “But fire ants are dangerous even if you’re not allergic. When an entire nest mobilizes to attack you, they swarm over you. It’s often worse than having a nest of hornets come after you because there are such great numbers. You could end up with ten thousand stings. Fifty thousand stings. That’s enough to kill a cow.”

I paused. “So obtaining fire ants to use in subduing people might not be very practical.”

 “What!” Street sounded appalled.

 “Paco had a fantastic idea. Remember the two heavies who took Paco? Salt and Pepper? We’re thinking about making a trap for them. Doc Lee has a colleague who bought a tear-down that we can use. We get Salt and Pepper to think that Paco is hiding out in the house. Our hope would be that they would break in, attempting to get Paco, and we would take them down with pepper spray and fire ants.”

“Owen, that could be really dangerous,” she said. “Both because of the men and because of the ants and spray.”

“But it could work, right?”

“I suppose. You’d have to be very careful.”

“Paco was already telling me the same. So I wondered what I should know about fire ants before I try this.”

“I’ve never thought of ants as weapons. But fire ants would certainly be a good species to use. We refer to them as RIFA, Red Imported Fire Ants. They were accidentally introduced into this country during the nineteen thirties in Mobile, Alabama by ships coming from Brazil. Since then, they’ve spread across the southwest and up into California. They get a lot of attention from people because of their poisonous stings and their aggressiveness.”

“Can they actually kill people?”

“They have. They kill lots of smaller animals. And they make life really difficult for ranchers and farmers.”

“Because they kill farm animals?” It sounded unbelievable.

“Healthy livestock run away,” Street said. “But when a cow gives birth, if the calf lands close to a nest, the ants can kill it. We’ve developed a few techniques for destroying individual nests, but we’ve had no luck with large-scale eradication.”

“How would you recommend that I dig up and transport a nest of fire ants?” I asked.

“I’ve never thought about such a ridiculous thing. The main thing to remember is that fire ants don’t run away from you like other ants. They run toward you in mass attack mode. They will swarm up your shovel the moment you stick it in the ground, so you’re going to need something like a hazmat suit. Booties over your shoes, sealed at your pant cuffs, heavy jeans, gloves sealed at your sleeves, hood, goggles, all taped and sealed.”

“You don’t think I could just shovel fast?”

She paused. “There are probably many people who have under-estimated the risks of fire ants. You could end up thinking that the fire ants are worse than those men who are after Paco.”

 “Got it. Any idea how big a fire ant colony is? Would it fit into a five-gallon bucket?”

“There’s a lot of variability. Large nests can go six feet deep in the ground and contain millions of individual ants. But if you could get a concentrated portion in a bucket, you’d probably have tens of thousands of ants. They’re quite small compared to carpenter ants. The problem is getting them into the bucket. As soon as you shovel them in, they’re going to swarm back out, trying to get to you.”

“I’ll shovel twice as fast.”

“I don’t think you understand how fast fire ants move.”

“I saw some at Paco’s house. They were running, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

“Have you seen a nest?”

“Paco’s going to show me where to find some.”

“When you see it, you’ll know what I mean. Fire ants are frenetic. Frantic. Like they’re in constant panic mode. They run so fast it’s as if they’re dancing on a vibrating platform. The moment you touch them, you’ll get an explosion of movement. Transferring any significant number of ants into a bucket will be a real trick.”

“I was thinking that I could just scoop with a bucket and then pop the lid on.”

“Then you’ll crush them,” Street said.

“I thought they were super tough.”

 “They are, but if you dump enough dirt on top of ants, you’ll immobilize them just like burying a human. They move around underground through their tunnels. Without tunnels, they’d be trapped and eventually die. At least the ones that don’t figure out how to get into your underwear.”

“Lovely picture.”

“And when you get ants in a bucket, you can’t just put the lid on, either. They’d suffocate.”

“Ants need air?” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

“I could wrap screen over the top instead of a lid.”

“Not just the top. They need air down in their dirt. If you had some kind of a miniature lattice network to dump them into, then they’d have air and they wouldn’t get buried with too much weight on them.”

“Right.”

There was a pause on the phone. “As a scientist, I should also let you know about the risks of introducing new species into an environment that hasn’t previously seen them.”

I’d heard about that problem. “Like the bird-eating snakes in Guam?”

“Yeah. But as I think about it, I don’t think you’d be creating an ecological catastrophe. Fire ants are very temperature sensitive. As soon as they experience a single cold fall night in Tahoe, they will mostly die. The rest will succumb soon after.”

“Hey, hon?”

“What?” Street said.

“You’re a dream.”

“Because of my expertise?”

“Yeah,” I said. “All kinds.”

“Thanks.”

We said goodbye, and I told Diamond and Paco what she’d said. I didn’t expect Paco to respond, but I thought it was probably good that he have the experience of an adult running ideas past him.

“Once you get ants,” Diamond said, “you’ll have to be ready to move fast. Even if they’re superhero bugs, they won’t survive long in a bucket.”

“Which brings up the same point about pepper spray,” I said. “Let’s say we grind up a bunch of peppers. It could be that the potency of the chemical wouldn’t last long. Whatever method we devise for spraying it would have to be ready to go.”

Diamond finished his last swallow of beer and stood up. “A problem that will be easier to solve after we get some sleep.”