Antenna Syndrome (27 page)

I called Vivien back. She picked up after three
rings, but said nothing. I heard muffled sobs. They seemed to come
from a great distance away. I was glad to be doing this over the
phone. I didn’t like to make women cry and I liked even less to see
it.

“Vivien, are you there?”

“Yes,” she said in a voice choked with emotion.

“Did you know?”

“I saw something in her bedding back in June that
made me suspicious. I knew what Jack was like when he drank. I was
afraid to say anything, but I suspected the worst. Over the past
month Marielle had become more withdrawn. I used to be a nurse, you
know, and I’ve seen a few rape victims. I guess she was desperate
for a way out of here, and when her friendship with Crabner
blossomed, she must have decided it was time to escape. I just
didn’t want to believe the man I was married to could do such a
thing.”

“Would Jordan have allowed her to move out on her
own?”

“Never.”

“So she may have faked her own abduction?”

“I thought of that.”

“Then why’d you lead me on to think it was a
kidnapping?”

“I wasn’t sure. And we couldn’t just do nothing.
Jordan would have fired us if he’d come home and found her gone. It
just happened that Natalie was in town that weekend. When I told
her what happened, she arranged to hire you.”

“But if you suspected she’d run away rather than
been kidnapped, why’d you pay a ransom?”

“The ransom demand came as a surprise. It made me
doubt what I thought had really happened. But I had no way to get
in touch with Marielle and confirm she was all right, so I had to
pay it. I still don’t know if she was really kidnapped, or whether
the ransom was to pay off the people who helped her escape.”

“Chances are, Jack was behind it.”

“But right from the first, he’d insisted she’d just
run off.”

“That was just his line, but he knew she had reasons
to leave. Except after a few days, he probably saw her
disappearance as an opportunity of a lifetime. Between the ransom
demand and the sale of the paintings, he could pay off the Russian
mob and pocket something for himself.”

“But what about Marielle? Where is she?”

“Mixed up with some very weird people. But I hope to
find her tonight.”

“Please bring her back home. She’ll be safe here now
that Jack’s gone. I’ll take care of her.”

Chapter 47

Feeling naked without my pistol, I dashed across the
street faster than a cockroach. I entered an alley and approached
my building from the rear. Major sat outside the back door, getting
some Vitamin D from the sun angling between buildings. He was
wearing sunglasses but his only concession to air quality was a
pair of nose-plug filters.

Werewolf lay a few feet away, but he’d already
heard, smelled or sensed my approach, because his head was up and
his ears erect, a growl muttering deep in his throat.

Major raised the shotgun that lay across his knees.
The barrel swung in my direction.

“Friendly,” I called out. The sun was in Major’s
eyes and I didn’t know how well he could see my face from behind
his sunglasses. “Savage requesting permission to land.”

“Granted.” Major pointed the barrel at the sky and
waved me in.

I squatted a few feet away. Werewolf studied me a
moment, sighed and went back to sleep.

Major had his shirt off, revealing his battle scars:
a star-burst gunshot wound below the left shoulder, a knife slash
across the ribs, and a speckled midriff from a shotgun blast too
distant to have penetrated his thick hide. I was glad he was on my
side, not on my trail.

“You’re lookin’ kind of wasted.” Major pushed his
sunglasses down and studied me. “Been out shaggin’ all night
again?”

He laughed, but it was more of a joke on me, seeing
as I hadn’t had sex in a long while.

“Just having a bad day.”

“Didn’t I see you on the hall camera, going into
your office half an hour ago?” Major said. “I went to the john
right after, but while I was in there, I thought I heard gunshots.
But maybe it was those punks over there.” Behind the alley was a
derelict building whose occupants were mostly transient. The police
were in there every week, looking for missing persons or stolen
goods.

I said nothing. Maybe it had just been a bad dream.
I couldn’t be sure until I went back to my office for a reality
check.

“Can I borrow your sidearm a few minutes?” I asked
Major.

“What’s up?”

I shrugged. “You’re familiar with the term,
plausible deniability
?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I’m invoking it for your protection.” I held
out my hand.

He drew his Beretta M9 from his leg holster and
passed it to me handgrip first. “Please don’t kill nobody,” he said
but, as a scholar, his use of the double negative was his way of
saying,
do what you gotta do
.

I stuck the pistol in my waistband and took the
stairs to the third floor. I racked a load and checked the safety.
I went down the hall on the balls of my feet and tried my office
door. Locked. With key in one hand, M9 in the other, I unlocked the
door and looked inside. Boyle and Mundt’s bodies lay on the floor,
blood pooled beneath truncated necks. Their heads lay several feet
away.

Stifling my gag reflex, I fetched what I’d come for.
I found my pistol in Boyle’s jacket pocket. I left the baggie of
rape evidence in the fridge but opened my floor safe and retrieved
the rest of the down payment Natalie Jordan had given me. When the
forensics team eventually showed up, they’d take this place apart
looking for evidence. Money tended to shrink, if not completely
disappear.

I stuffed my spilled gear back into my tote bag. I
debated what to do about the blue-metal Bobcat that lay on my desk.
It hadn’t killed LeVeen and I’d never touched it, so maybe it was
safe to leave behind. On the other hand, Mundt had brought it along
to frame me. For all I knew, it may have been used in another crime
of which I wasn’t aware. I put on a latex glove and picked up the
gun.

I went to my broken window just in time to see a
truck coming down the street, its open box half-full of broken
concrete from some tear-down in the neighborhood. I threw the gun
into its box as the truck passed. Bye-bye, Bobcat.

~~~

Major was still where I’d left him, now rolling a
joint. He finished and tucked it behind his ear. I handed his
Beretta back to him. He sniffed the barrel, checked the safety and
holstered it.

“Everything okay on the third floor?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell.” I sagged to the ground with
my back against the wall.

“Need a mental laxative?” Major tugged the joint
from behind his ear, lit it with a long drag and offered it to
me.

“No, I’m good.” But I needed to chill. I took out my
vaporizer and kept him company with a few puffs of KavaKat.

I looked at my hands. The little finger on my right
twitched like a dead roach’s leg. Yep, I had the heebie-jeebies. I
flashed back to Buzz in the doorway just before he’d killed Boyle –
hands clasped at his chest as if in prayer. I recalled a video clip
of a praying mantis on the Discovery channel – its fore-claws
folded in front of the body, then the lightning jerk-and-snatch to
pull the victim into the cutting mandibles.

The image gave me goose bumps. A humanoid praying
mantis? Impossible. Then I thought of the giant hornets on
Ronkonkoma Lake and Yamazaki’s talk of Globik building insects on a
human scale. Could Buzz be half-man, half-insect? How did you kill
something like that? I thought of all the bugs I’d swatted, tough
as nails and tenaciously mobile even after dismemberment. I didn’t
like the idea of a crazed praying-mantis-man tearing the walls down
to get at me. I’d better start practicing my quick-draw with the
Heckler & Koch.

“
What’s buggin’ you?” Major asked
between puffs.

I wasn’t big on sharing, but I was in a jam and
needed a wingman.
Between the
cops and Buzz having shown up at my office, I felt like a raccoon
running out of trees to climb.

I gave Major the
high-level account of my week. As I recapped the past few days, I
realized the body count was getting up there:
Walker, LeVeen, Boyle and Mundt. Not to
mention Marielle gone AWOL and Myers hospitalized.

“
You need a dog for protection,”
Major said, exhaling a cumulus cloud. He poked Werewolf with a
foot. “He might look like shit, but he is this man’s best friend.
Anybody messes with me, he’d tear their legs off.”

Good to know.
Werewolf yawned, revealing a
wicked set of yellowed canines.

I took another hit of KavaKat. As I exhaled I felt
the tension billow out of me. I looked at Major and Werewolf with a
sort of brotherly love. He was just a retired veteran with an old
dog, but I felt completely safe with them.

“
Major, I’ve got a major bug
problem.”

“Not on your floor. We’ve got a ground level
chemical barrier second-to-none. I know because I breathe that shit
day and night.”

“I don’t mean my office. I mean that clinic in
Tribeca.” I told him about Yamazaki’s suspicions regarding Globik’s
clandestine research and development program. And it wasn’t
hypothetical. I told him about the giant hornets of Ronkonkoma
Lake. And Buzz, the bodyguard who’d bitten off the gunman’s fist at
the Media Centre. I didn’t want to scare him by telling him what
had happened to Boyle and Mundt in my office.

“Man, what are you smoking?” Major had a fit of
hysterical laughter. “That’s crazy talk.”

“I’m serious. Dr. Globik’s the next thing to a mad
scientist. One of his receptionists looks like a hybrid that
crawled out from under a rotten log. He’s paid off the Department
of Building Inspections to keep them out of his clinic. My guess,
it’s some kind of factory like Yamazaki destroyed once already –
but now using leading-edge laminate printing to make
larger-than-life insect parts for prosthetic patients.”

“Get the fuck out of here. Who’d want a limb made
from insects?”

“People with no alternatives participate in
experimental procedures.
People
with no medical insurance, people with no family to help,
people who want to be whole again
…
”

“That doesn’t fit your
little runaway. Her daddy’s got money, and so does she. Why
surrender herself to that risk?”

“Why do people
get metal studs through nose, ears, lips? Tattoos all over their
faces? Horns implanted in their foreheads?”

Major grimaced.
“Because they’re freaks.”

“Maybe she’s a
freak too. Or maybe she’s just confused. Either way, I won’t get
paid unless I find her.”

“So find her and
extract her. Her family can take it from there.”

“That’s the
plan, but I’m starting to worry about its execution. Globik seems
to have surrounded himself with insects. If I encounter a major bug
infestation during her extraction, I’ve got to deal with
it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t
want to be pursued by a swarm of giant hornets. Or anything with
six legs. When it comes to exterminating, it’s them or
me.”

“G
o in
with a shotgun and shoot anything that skitters. After that,
nothing cleans up like fire. Just be careful about collateral
damage. You don’t want to get your ass sued off by the next-door
neighbors.”

“Got any DDT to spare?”

“Only about twenty gallons.”

He showed me the storeroom and the five-gallon jerry
cans of DDT. He also had dozens of empty wine bottles. We found a
funnel and some rags. Major started pouring four inches of DDT into
each bottle. After he’d emptied one of the pesticide cans I took
the empty across the street to Mr. Kim’s where I filled it with
gasoline and bought a quart of motor oil.

Back at Major’s, we topped up the bottles with
gasoline, plugged them with oil-soaked rags and gave each a shake
to mix the gas and DDT. Molotov cocktails for giant bugs.

I set a case of bottles next to the back door.
“Ready to rock and roll.”

Major shook his head. “Rock stars only come out at
night.”

Chapter 48

A full moon. From out in the city of restless
millions came a growl of street traffic and wail of police sirens.
Someone was on the run and someone was chasing him. It was a story
as old as the hills, replayed daily on the streets, in movies and
on TV, and in books we no longer turned to when life ceased to
offer the excitement we thought it owed us.

Major gave me a pump-action shotgun and a box of
shells. He produced a pair of bandoliers that we loaded and clipped
to our gunstocks to sling the shotguns from our shoulders. I
brought my tote bag and an extra box of ammo for my pistol. Major
hefted the case of Molotov cocktails and we crossed the street to
Mr. Kim’s garage. Werewolf followed.

“What is it?” Mr. Kim said when he buzzed us in.
“Hyena?”

“This is Werewolf.”

“Where you take him?”

“Hunting.”

Mr. Kim stayed behind his desk, but hit the intercom
and barked something in Korean. A few moments later, one of his
sons pulled up to the entrance with my Charger
.
When he got out of the car and saw Werewolf, he
backed away. I opened a door and Werewolf climbed into the back
seat. Major and I loaded our gear into the trunk and we drove to
Tribeca.

En route I stopped at a cyber café and made a quick
call to the Midtown precinct. I said a high-end escort named
Tatiana Borodin had killed Ron LeVeen yesterday in his Delancey
Street apartment, on behalf of her accomplice Jack Randall. I gave
her address and the location of the pistol I’d hidden in the
underground garage. Plus Jack’s address and the Tesla’s plates.
Twenty-three seconds without giving the dispatcher a chance to ask
questions. Face to face, a cop would have made me repeat it six
ways to Sunday. They’d have to settle for a replay.