Into the Inferno (30 page)

58. HEY, LADY-KILLER: GET RELIGION;
SAY YOUR PRAYERS; DON’T SPILL

The vault interior was eight feet tall, five feet across, and maybe three and a half feet deep. There were five shelves, a gray cash box the sole squatter of the upper shelf, notebooks and manuals stacked on the two shelves closest to eye level, vials in racks on the shelf at belt level, a collection of dust balls on the first shelf above the floor. On the floor were two large corrugated cartons, one taped shut, one open.

I examined the notebooks and a manual, but the jargon contained so many formulas, they might as well have been authored by aliens.

The first three vials were labeled hydrochloric acid, sodium azide, and sodium cyanide—not the ingredients you wanted to drop in Aunt Maud’s tea. I was no chemist, but I’d had my share of hazardous materials classes for the fire department and knew hydrochloric acid and sodium cyanide shouldn’t be mixed. Sodium azide was a poison if taken orally and lethal enough that even contact with your skin was to be avoided. Two years ago it had been the centerpiece of a shocking story about a pair of teenagers who’d broken into a factory in Massachusetts and gotten it on themselves while looking for cash and drugs. Both died. God only knew why Marge was keeping it in this vault or what they used it for here.

Dangerous as they were, these weren’t chemicals that would send your brain back through twelve million years of evolution. No. We were looking for something else.

I knelt and peered into the open cardboard box on the vault floor. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a carton of Bibles. I pulled the first three or four out and examined the black leather bindings in the dim light.

Last February Holly’s truck had been carrying Bibles.

I picked out a book and leafed to a random passage, something William P. Markham had taught us to do. My index finger fell on Ecclesiastes 2:20–21:
Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I had toiled under the sun.
Yeah, me, too. According to Markham, a random opening of the Bible would be directed by God; thus, whatever passage you turned to was given to you by God, meant for you specifically, a message from above, the word of God out of his mouth. Before his stroke my father often let his Bible fall open at random. If he happened on a passage he didn’t like, he continued the process until he found something more to his taste.

I recited the next verse in Ecclesiastes from memory.
“ ‘For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill; yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.’ ”

The passage was about two emotions I had come to know well: despair and vanity. I was in despair because of my situation yet had enough vanity left to think I counted for something in the grand scheme of things, that I was more than a molecule on the ass of a flea crawling across a map of the universe. There was only one problem.

I wasn’t.

I was the same as every other human on the planet, and when the final random asteroid came hurtling through space to take us all out in one big flash, to pitch us into the inferno, our destruction would no more be directed by William P. Markham’s God than by a finger randomly placed in the Bible.

How I wanted to believe in a God. I envied believers, no matter what their persuasion. Maybe that was the despair the passage in Ecclesiastes had spoken of. But wasn’t it the ultimate vanity for me to think I was important enough that a God a billion light-years away had enough interest to orchestrate my days and nights, mine, Jim Swope’s?

There were probably countless habitable planets for a God to keep track of, and here he was letting little old me have this fender bender, giving me a good job, giving me a wonderful pair of daughters, letting my wife leave me, turning me into a veggie—all because it was part of some grand scheme that would make sense somewhere down the line.

What if God had put a single germ on the planet Earth a billion years ago and was coming back in another billion years to see what had come of it? What if that was all there was to his plan?

It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to believe.

More than anything I wanted to believe in a Lord who would rescue me. Yet, no matter how hard I wanted it, I couldn’t convince myself there was a God or that God provided an afterlife.

I opened six or eight Bibles from the open box, then ripped the shipping tape on the second box, which, according to the label, had been freighted in from Tennessee.

Fancy that.

More leather-bound Bibles. I took one out and turned it upside down, flapping the pages as if to dislodge a bookmark. Something broke on the floor at my feet and I heard the hollow, tinkly sound a shattered Christmas tree decoration might make.

The floor around my feet glinted with tiny jewel-like shards of glass. I’d dropped a small glass ampoule. Pieces of broken glass were everywhere, on my shoe, in my pant cuff, on my sock. Alert not to cut my hand through the latex glove, I brushed them away.

When I inspected the inside of the Bible, I found a section of the Old Testament cut out with a razor knife, just enough to accommodate the vial. I opened four more Bibles before I found a second ampoule. When I had six of them, I lined them up on a nearby chair.

Each was stoppered with a tiny synthetic cork and half filled with a greenish-gray powder that looked like ground pencil lead. None of the ampoules were labeled.

Canyon View appeared to have more use for religion than I had.

There were another thirty or so Bibles in the boxes, no telling how many more ampoules. When you thought about it, a book made a relatively secure container. After all, it had taken a whole lot of mishandling to burst the boxes in Holly’s truck.

Moving to the desk across the room, I sank into Marge DiMaggio’s plush leather swivel chair and pulled the telephone across until I could read the dial pad from the light of the street lamp outside. Stephanie answered her cell phone on the first ring.

“You all right, Jim?”

“I think I found the mother lode.”

“What is it?”

“You have to see it.”

“Be there in a minute.”

She was breathing heavily when she burst through the door, her hair tossed back with the speed of her movement. “Don’t move from the doorway,” I said as she started into the room.

“Why not?”

“I spilled something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“At least let me switch on a—”

Before I could stop her she’d turned on the lamp near the door. The black light. She turned it off as soon as she realized her mistake. I suppose, as had I, she’d forgotten the lamp was ultraviolet.

“Turn it back on.”

A moment later we were looking at a green phosphorescent glow coming from the floor in front of the vault and from my feet. It was stronger in certain spots, weaker in others, as if the black light were tracking footprints. My footprints. And my left foot, the one I’d dumped the ampoule on. Now we knew what the black light was for. Whatever was in the ampoules had been laced with phosphorescent matter to make it show up under ultraviolet. I’d noticed ultraviolet lamps in the offices downstairs, too.

“Jim. Look at yourself.” For the first time I looked down at my lap and the desk in front of me. A greenish glow came off the telephone I’d used to call her, smatterings of green on the desktop, a stronger glow from my right hand and shirt. “It’s on your face, too. What is it?”

“Holly had Bibles in her truck. Canyon View was shipping books. They ship this shit in Bibles.”

“What’s that on the inside of the safe door?”

“Oh, crap. I didn’t see that.” I walked across the room to the vault and moved the door until the combination of ultraviolet and outside light made the notice readable. “They call it DiMaggio number fifty-six, or D number fifty-six. Your aunt related to Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player?”

“By marriage. Phil was.”

“He hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games. D number fifty-six:
’Avoid contact with skin. Avoid contact with eyes. Avoid flame. Avoid breathing vapors in the event of fire. Rinse thoroughly in a series of staggered showers. Use cold water and at least fifteen minutes of heavy soaping. Destroy clothing and anything else that comes into contact with number fifty-six.’
”

Circumventing the green glow on the floor, Stephanie took a couple of steps into the room. “You go take a shower. The way you are now you can’t even sit in the car.”

“Don’t come in.”

“Push that door back toward me. I’ll turn on the light and read it. There might be something about an antidote.”

“Okay, but don’t walk over here.”

“I won’t.”

I swung the heavy vault door so Stephanie could read the instructions; then I stepped into Marge DiMaggio’s shower facility. The room had two exits. Now I knew why. You went in one end contaminated, came out the other clean. Or so you hoped. There were three shower stalls, with rinse-off areas outside each, glass doors arranged so that you stepped in one side, then out the other, making a kind of S as you worked your way through. A diagram on the wall presented the steps.

I took off my clothes, then rendered the latex gloves I’d been wearing inside out, one into the other, and stepped into the first shower stall and turned on the water. It was heart attack cold—warm water opened the body’s pores and allowed the absorption of foreign substances. I soaped up, scrubbing every part of my body with the sterile mitts provided, scrubbing until I ached all over from the cold. I found the shampoo and lathered my hair. I shivered under the cold spray for fifteen minutes and found myself beginning to go hypothermic. I stayed in the second shower ten minutes, as suggested on the wall diagram. Ten more minutes in the third shower.

After toweling off, I stepped into a too-small set of blue hospital scrubs and a pair of paper slippers that fit perfectly. DiMaggio had big feet. Or maybe these were leftovers from her husband.

Back at DiMaggio’s office the overhead lights were on. Stephanie was on the other side of the room, her back pressed firmly against the wall. I wondered for a split second whether she’d somehow gotten into the D#56. She seemed frightened, no, petrified.

But D#56 wasn’t the problem.

The problem was standing next to the closed vault door. Scott Donovan was the problem. An even bigger problem was the nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol he held in his right fist.

“Hey, lady-killer,” he said, grinning at me. “All clean now?”

59. TUB-O’-LARD

“Don’t be shy,” Donovan said, waving the pistol around in a mock orbit of greeting. His voice was as calm and soothing as it had always been. “Come in and join the festivities.”

I stepped into the room, but not so far that I wouldn’t fall back into the corridor when he shot me. Had Stephanie not been there, I would have fled. Or tried to. Now Stephanie and I were stuck to him and to each other as if he were a strip of flypaper and we were hapless insects.

Standing near the vault, Donovan turned his head to examine it, and Stephanie took the opportunity to gesture at me with her right hand. She held a small object behind her hip, but I couldn’t tell what it was. A handheld heat-seeking missile launcher would have been nice, but it looked more like a syringe. I had no idea where she’d found it. She hadn’t brought it with her. After Donovan made certain the safe was locked, he turned to us, his eyes as blank as a cod’s.

“Too bad you’re not safecrackers,” he said, his tone reasoned and mellow, his demeanor so nonchalant you would have thought we were discussing the weather. “I never thought you’d get this close.”

“You going to call the police?” Stephanie asked.

“At this point, that is not an option.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because there comes a time in business and commerce when somebody backs you into a corner and you find yourself forced to do something you never would have done under normal circumstances, something you don’t want to do but which needs doing. I’ve found myself in that predicament several times in my career. Unfortunately, I’m in that predicament right now. You two shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what all you’ve found while you’ve been poking around, but we can’t afford to take a chance you’ve uncovered any of our trade secrets. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who work here.”

“Let me get this right,” I said. “You’re going to kill us because you want to be fair to the people who work here?”

“Don’t be twisting this all around. You people are the ones who made the mistake. Breaking and entering, I think it’s called. It’s a form of sabotage. Espionage, you might even call it. You’ve heard of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. No different. The work we’re doing here has implications for national security.”

His voice was soothing. It was hard to believe he had a gun and was saying what he was saying. The man who is about to kill you is supposed to be a maniac, not someone with the demeanor of a shy pizza delivery boy.

Stephanie must have heard him in the hallway while I was in the shower. I could visualize the scenario. She would have had time to warn me or shut the vault door, probably not both. She must have found the syringe inside the vault while I was in the shower. I wondered what was in it.

Showing up Monday morning to an office redecorated in blood and brains wasn’t going to please DiMaggio, especially if the blood and brains belonged to her niece. Tonight Donovan’s job was to get rid of us with the least amount of disruption to the office surroundings.

Maybe I was guessing, but his look wasn’t one of moral quandary; it was more that of a man facing a conundrum: how to get these two yokels outside, dead, and into the trunk of his car with a minimum of fuss.

Donovan scratched the tip of his nose with the barrel of his chrome semiautomatic, pondering, looking us over, checking out Stephanie. I didn’t know anything about guns, but his looked well oiled and cared for, like something he might use to take down bull elephants when he wasn’t bumping off burglars.

“How did you find us?” Stephanie asked.

“The building’s got a silent alarm. All the key officers are automatically notified.”

“You all drive in together?” I asked.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If we had some witnesses.”

He looked at me meaningfully, and his tone began to take on a hard edge. He was working himself up to this. I could see in his eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses that he was trying to steel himself to the task at hand. At the commune once I’d watched my father butcher a live chicken. He’d made the same shift in attitude right before he picked up the chicken by its legs, laid its neck across a block of wood, and swung a hatchet down hard.

“You killed Achara, didn’t you?” I said.

“You think because I’m standing here with a gun I’m the bad guy? Don’t get confused.
You
broke in.
You
snooped through our building. I saw the offices downstairs that you ransacked. You’re the ones who did this to yourselves. Don’t be blaming it on me.”

“Achara did that to herself, too?”

“Not me. You burned your house down.”

“You’re going to kill us, Donovan, at least have the balls not to lie while you’re doing it.”

He considered just long enough to give me a glimmer of hope that maybe he wasn’t going to kill us. It didn’t last long. “Okay. That’s fair. I killed her. I poured gas around your living room. I thought you were inside. I thought it was over right there.”

That he was willing to admit culpability in the burning of my home meant he thought we weren’t going to tell anybody. That we were as good as dead already. I said, “Three years ago you flew to Tennessee pretending to help while you were pulling strings in the background to make sure nobody learned anything. You did the same thing in North Bend.”

“I can’t deny there was some strange stuff happening in Chattanooga.” He laughed.

“And who called the fire investigators and told them I set up the explosion? And last night, my house? Somebody you know?”

“Mrs. DiMaggio insisted on doing that herself. She used to be in summer stock. Loves playing a part. Practically begged me for it.”

I was sparring. Wasting time. Holding out for a miracle.

Any minute now he would shoot us, wrap us in a big plastic tarp, and drag our bodies downstairs to dispose of.

We might stall him for five minutes, but in the end he was going to shoot us.

Running wouldn’t work—he would easily line me up in his sights before I reached the end of the corridor. And Stephanie didn’t have a chance standing along the far wall of DiMaggio’s office under the Paul Klee. For her, running was not even an option.

I’d been facing my own demise all week, and now that it was here, panic gripped me in a way it hadn’t during the past seven days. I laughed aloud. I was destined to turn into a vegetable tomorrow, and here I was panicking over the thought of getting shot. I guess I was really panicking over the thought of Stephanie getting shot. My life was already over—Donovan would be doing me a favor—but Stephanie was being robbed of the next fifty years. I had an ugly vision of Morgan and my daughters waiting in the hotel room for days before contacting the authorities.

“As long as this is all settled and you’re not going to change your mind,” I said, “maybe you could clear up a few things.”

“Like what?” You could tell he didn’t mind the stalling—the more delay the better. He was still trying to work himself up to this.

“I don’t understand why you dragged Max Caputo into this,” I said.

“Who? Caputo?”

“Remember the trailer on Edgewick Road?”

“Oh, him. I followed the fire engine the day before. After you packed him off to the hospital, I did some reconnoitering and decided his property was ideal for what we had in mind.”

“You mean for wiping out the whole department.”

“Well, yeah. Anybody who might have been exposed in the truck accident.”

“So you killed Max and filled the place up with ammonium nitrate?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Who did?”

“I’m assuming it was the explosion. I left him in a closet.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Stephanie said. “Why were you shipping D number fifty-six without precautions? Especially after that first accident in Tennessee. Why take another chance?”

“The odds were one in a million that anything would happen. Maybe one in ten million.”

“That clearly wasn’t true,” I said. “You’d already had an accident right here in the plant. Another one in Tennessee. Who knows what else that you won’t tell me about? It’s got to be easier to take precautions than it is to run around murdering people.”

“We took precautions.”

“Putting it in Bibles?”

“That and having our own driver handling it. The mistake was hers. Your sister’s the one who screwed up.”

“Like hell she did,” Stephanie said. “You even tell her what was in there? Did you bother to tell her how lethal it was? She didn’t know anything about it. I’ve got her journal. She never mentioned it.”

“You’re still shipping it in Bibles, aren’t you?” I said.

“It was a fluke. That accident. It’ll never happen again.”

“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” I shifted in the doorway, more to see what he would do than to make an escape.

“You’re the ones who don’t get it. This is what always astonishes me about people in your position. If you could see this from my point of view, you’d realize if it was you with the gun you’d do the same thing I’m doing. It’s just how it is.”

“You’re really so blind you think that?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Jesus Christ. You need a psychiatrist.”

“Why did you kill Achara?” Stephanie asked.

Donovan tensed and then relaxed, as if once again deciding it didn’t matter what we knew. I had the feeling he was happy to brag about it, to tell someone, anyone. It must be tough to pull off a nice murder and not be able to tell anyone. His tone grew gruffer, like a preacher working himself up to a bout of cussing. “Bitch needed killing.”

He laughed, but it rang false. He was trying his best to be The Great Evildoer, but somewhere deep down he knew it was wrong and twisted, and he wasn’t proud of himself—even though he was trying to convince himself he was. I don’t think villainy came naturally to him, although self-deception certainly did.

“She made the wrong choice. It was as simple as that.” He clearly regretted killing Achara. He stared at the floor between us, and his voice grew softer. “What happened after she made that choice, well, that was out of my hands.”

“Please let us go,” Stephanie said.

“Sorry. Letting you go is not an option.”

“Sure it is,” I said, moving toward the telephone on the desk. “I’ll call the police. We’ll turn ourselves in.”

Donovan stepped forward and centered the pistol on my chest. We were fifteen feet apart now.

Stephanie was at the outer edge of his peripheral vision. I took another step toward the gun.

“Just stay where you are,” he said.

Donovan wanted to kill us both in a civilized manner, but I was determined not to make it easy for him. He killed me, he was going to remember it. He’d already made the transformation, and now I was, too, reverting to the primordial, moving backward through evolution, returning to a time before civility, a time when men brained each other with rocks.

A man as large as Scott Donovan didn’t spend his spare time lifting weights and practicing karate because he felt he was in control. He was compensating. I had no idea what he was compensating for, but it was for
something
. And a man compensating as hard as he was didn’t take goading well.

So I called him a tub-o’-lard.

Okay, I know, but I was under a lot of pressure, and I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, it seemed to actually work. The natural pink in his cheeks began turning bright red.

“If you think calling me names is going to get you anywhere . . .”

“Jesus. You’d fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking your thumb. I bet your karate works great against a mattress tied to a post.”

“You don’t think I could take you?”

“Not if I had one arm tied behind my back.”

Donovan sneered and tucked his pistol into the waistband behind his back. This was too good. He began rolling his shoulders, flicking his arms back and forth like a swimmer on the starting block, warming up. You were about to kill someone with your bare hands, there was no point in pulling a muscle.

Stephanie crept along the far wall toward the corner. “Don’t do it, Jim.”

Donovan and I locked eyes, mimicking the prefight ritual of a couple of over-the-hill club fighters. I tried to look mean. He did, too. It must have been hilarious.

Before he could make a move, I turned and sprinted out the door.

You can imagine his surprise.