No Immunity (22 page)

“Don’t remember me from his med-school years? There’s a surprise. Those were the four most isolated years of my life.” It had been over a decade since then, but her anger sounded fresh and triumphant, as if she had always known this moment of vindication would come. Her face was flushed and her eyes moist, and in that moment she bore no resemblance to the no-nonsense woman in the saloon.

Kiernan waited till she caught her eye. “For that you were willing to kill me?”

“Kill you?”

“You led me into a mine hole.”

“I didn’t lead you anywhere.”

“You didn’t come back when my headlights disappeared. No one does that on an isolated mountain road.”

“You’ve been here less than a day and you’re giving forth the commandments for mountain driving?” The vulnerability was gone from her face now.

Kiernan shook her head. She couldn’t tell what was behind Connie’s sarcasm—guilt or just anger. There would never be any proof of her intentions. She would never know whether Connie Tremaine would have let her die. Motioning the woman up, she said, “Jeff may have had affairs, but they weren’t with me.”

“Please. You go to med school together, you go to Africa together. It doesn’t take scientific deduction to come to a conclusion.”

“The wrong conclusion.” It would have been easy to tell her about Hope Mkema, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “I’m not speaking of what Jeff did in Africa, or after. But I was there for less than a month and so sick I had to be airlifted out.”

“But you went there to be where Jeff was, didn’t you?”

“Look, here’s the truth. I didn’t like your husband in med school—he was a bore. I wasn’t pleased to find him in Africa, where he’d become an officious bore. And I certainly wouldn’t have come flying out in the wilds here for anything less than the threat of massive contagion that an officious bore wasn’t about to report to the health department. I don’t know what you and Jeff and the sheriff and God knows who else is involved in, but—”

“Jeff and I, we are not involved in anything together. All we share is a name.”

“You were worried enough about him to find me a car and point me out of town. Jeff is missing. You’ve got a safe house here. Where else would he be?”

“I don’t know. That’s my whole point.” She seemed to deflate back against the porch railing. “I don’t love Jeff anymore. Love can be a flimsy commodity in a small town with few choices. But I’ve been around him all my life and I know him. Jeff never went anywhere without leaving word with his receptionist. But today he did. He’s just gone, and for all I know he’s dead.”

Kiernan could see her shivering. “Let’s go inside.”

Inside, the first thing that hit her was the heat; it seemed to steam off the floor, off the threadbare Oriental carpet, from the tapestries that curtained the doors and windows, from the smiling nineteenth-century faces in huge gilded frames above antique love seats, inlaid mahogany, and pink marble tables. The wavering light of the oil lamps made the room almost alive. But if this was a safe house, the guests had cleared out any evidence.

“I’m going to believe you,” Connie said, flexing her arm and eyeing her swollen elbow. In jeans and a heavy sweater, she looked as if she’d broken into this bastion of gentility.

“Do or don’t. Your choice.” The hastily stacked magazines on the marble tables and the streaked ashtrays announced a frantic cleanup. How many frightened, confused women were beyond the closed parlor door? She didn’t ask. The less she knew about the safe house, or who Connie was sheltering at the moment, the less danger she would be to them. Jeff Tremaine was not here, that she did accept.

The sofa beckoned. Suddenly Kiernan realized how exhausted she was. The troubled sleep last night after Tchernak’s outburst seemed years ago. And now the soft cushions …She chose the one hard chair next to a marble table and lay the gun at her side.

Connie disappeared through a narrow doorway and returned with a bottle. “Drink? We could both use one.”

“You go ahead.” She wasn’t
that
sure of Connie. “Just tell me what’s going on here. Start with the dead woman.”

Connie perched on the arm of the brocade sofa. Her free hand tapped hard and quick on her thigh. Her mouth tightened, and the lines around her eyes deepened as she studied Kiernan.

“I thought you said you’d decided to trust me.”

“To
believe
you. Trust is too much to ask on a couple hours’ acquaintance.”

“I trusted you when I bought the truck.”

“And look where that got you!” Connie laughed, and the fragility of that sound said more about her precarious state than had anything before.

“I didn’t have any choice, Connie. And neither do you. I know you’ve got a safe house here. I don’t want to endanger it, as long as it has nothing to do with the dead woman in Gattozzi.”

Momentarily her jaw tightened, then she sighed. “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on that too. The truth is I need to know what you’ve found out. If I don’t figure out who that woman is, someone from the county or the state is going to start nosing around—”

“What do you mean? She was one of your—”

“No, Kiernan, she wasn’t. That’s the whole point If a guest of mine had come down with a condition as horrifying as that woman’s, I would have had her medevacked to Las Vegas even if it meant every reporter in the state crawling all over this place. No way would I endanger everyone here and in Gattozzi. I grew up in Gattozzi; I’ve known those people all my life. No way would I—”

“Then who the hell is she and how did she get into the morgue?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Surely you know if Jeff—”

Connie lifted the brandy glass to her mouth and sipped pensively. “I don’t know anything about Jeff Tremaine anymore. He lives in town; I live here. Oh, sometimes I stay in his house there for appearance’s sake, so people don’t wonder where I live. But it’s a big house.”

“So the dead woman could be someone he knew,” Kiernan said. “But why is the sheriff involved?”

“Don’t know.”

“What about the naval installation off Route Ninety-three, the Admiralty of the Sands? Does Jeff have old navy buddies there?”

Connie laughed again. “One thing you can count on with Jeffrey Tremaine is that he has no naval buddies. Jeff was thrown out of the navy after a year.”

“On what grounds?” Kiernan asked, amazed. “The military wasn’t meting out general discharges for fraternization back then. Drugs?”

“Insubordination.”

“Really?”

“You’re that shocked? Insubordination—you can’t believe he had it in him, can you? Poor Jeff would be so insulted.”

“Well, no,” Kiernan admitted. “Jeff Tremaine in med school wouldn’t dare to have questioned authority.”

“There he never got the chance. He was a middle-of-the-road kid in a very liberal environment. There was always someone else eager to leap first into the fray.”

Kiernan nodded slowly. Her picture of Jeff Tremaine was still the stiff kid in med school. She assumed Africa was an aberration in his life. But the man Connie was describing fit the doctor in Africa, who had been stopped by neither rules nor customs. There, Jeff hadn’t stepped aside for anyone. “Between med school and Africa Jeff was so insubordinate he got himself thrown out of the navy?” she said, still amazed. “Insubordinate about what?”

“Secrecy. He wasn’t about to administer unproven drugs to unsuspecting sailors. Gulf War kind of thing.”

“So, then it’s a safe guess he’s not involved with the local navy?”

Connie picked up her glass and started to the kitchen. “There’s very little I would swear to about Jeff. Maybe that he’ll always be sneaking off to some woman. Surprisingly, that he’s a good doctor. And definitely that he’s not in league with anyone in the navy. Hundreds of acres of land right next to his town being off-limits and the government refusing to say what’s going on there—it bugs the hell out of him.”

“Does Jeff think they’ve got nuclear waste there?”

“Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s top secret, and the navy’s got more influence over what goes on around here than it should.”

“By which you mean … ?”

“Well, I’ll tell you how Jeff put it. It’s like a battleship that gets separated from the fleet so long, the admiral forgets he’s part of the country and starts thinking of himself as head of his own floating empire. Then any boat that comes near is the enemy.”

“So you think—”

“Steer clear of it. You don’t have time to get hassled. Believe me.”

Kiernan followed her to the kitchen doorway. “Okay, but answer me this, then—the reason Jeff brought me to Gattozzi was to get me to take responsibility for the body, right? Was that because he was afraid of the sheriff?”

Connie’s glass was in one hand, and a washrag hung suspended in the other. She turned and leaned back against the sink, oblivious of the precious drops of water splatting onto the floor. “I’m the last one to make excuses for Jeff. It probably doesn’t look to you as if Jeff has much of a career, but he’s active in the state medical association, the state committee on historic cities, the Carson Club, the Nevada Environmental League, the Anti-Nuclear Alliance, and who knows what else. This is his state and he’s concerned about it. But the sheriff is another thing. And yes, Jeff’s afraid of him.”

T
HE ROAD WAS BLACK
: black macadam, blackness on either side. To his right, the Weasel knew, was Lake Mead, built by the WPA to create Hoover Dam and the zillions of kilowatts that made Vegas possible. He had been to the lake, had to tail a visiting Jersey punk there once. He’d had himself a good laugh watching the Hoboken hood staring at the lake shore. “Like they turned on the tap in a brown tub.” That was one thing the little hood had been right about, there was no beach, no trees or shrubs or even grass, just rock, dirt, and water, and marinas every few dozen miles. But deep, and useful, as the late Jersey punk had discovered.

Now the lake was miles to the left, with nothing but turnoff signs to say it was there at all. And on the road, nothing else. Not so much as taillights. McGuire’d never admit it, but he didn’t like empty roads. A nice red set of taillights ahead would have comforted him. A couple sets, on vehicles maybe weaving in and out, would have gone a long way to telling him he wasn’t headed off the edge of the earth. Way in the distance behind he could see white dots. Made him uneasy.

“I’m a city guy,” McGuire muttered to himself for the sixth or seventh time since he’d lost sight of the bright lights of the Strip in his rearview. “I get hired ’cause I know who’s into who, and where ‘who’ is hanging. It goes down in Vegas, I know about it. But here …” The Weasel glared out at the offending darkness as if it were a line of hoods in black cravats and bulletproof vests.

There was a
sound
coming from the engine, or maybe the front axle. Metal grating on metal. It hadn’t been there before, not till he got out on this road with no gas station for another hundred miles, unless he wanted to turn off and drive miles of unlit, winding, two-lane roads and hope one of the marinas would have something besides a self-serve pump. Was it getting worse? He couldn’t tell. If he got stuck out here …

It could have been there before
, he told himself, knowing he was grabbing at straws. He hadn’t taken the ’Cuda out of town in a couple years. Hadn’t hit—he glanced at the speedometer that was stuck at fifty—hadn’t gone above fifty in years.

If he’d known about this trip into the desert when Adcock called, he’d have turned him down flat no matter—He laughed aloud. For ten grand he’d have walked across the atomic testing grounds. He wouldn’t have believed the feds about no one downwind being in danger, he wasn’t that blinded by cash, he’d just have figured that with his lifestyle he was lots more likely to see the end of ten grand than thirty years, or however long it took for those cancers to get you.

He slowed for the turnoff for 93, felt the ’Cuda pull against the turn, then ease into the straightaway. McGuire pushed pedal to floor, leaned back against the seat, and rested his hands loosely on the wheel. Nothing was going to change between here and the Doll’s House. Nothing except an hour of time.

The metallic clanging in Louisa Larson’s car was not in the engine. Her foot was nowhere near the floor. Her toes tapped on the gas pedal, giving the BMW a sputtering ride probably not unlike the miserable old rattletrap she was trying to stay behind. They said people grew to resemble their dogs and take on the personality of their vehicles. If there was ever a guy meant for a sleazy rust bag of a car …

Perspiration was so thick on her hands, the steering kept slipping. The rattling noise wasn’t so loud, she knew that, but it was driving her crazy. She could have passed the thug—she knew his destination—but she didn’t want to alert him. Tailing a car on an empty road should have been as complicated as prescribing ibuprofen for temporary pain relief. But this …Every time she came over a rise, she had to yank her foot off the gas. Once, she was almost in the guy’s trunk, back when there was other traffic on the road. She was losing it. Damn Grady Hummacher, did everything the man touched turn to poison? Okay, so the boys didn’t have the best of lives in Panama, but before Grady, they hadn’t been kidnapped, infected, and likely to be murdered before the virus could kill them.

She could still feel the little thug’s hands on her throat, and the knife slicing down her face. Automatically her hand went to the wound—rough, blood-caked—and she felt the panic and fury anew. Her back was slimy, her sweater wadded against her skin. Last year she had a growing medical practice, a spot on two NMA committees, and useful connections in the Association, in government; she was on her way. And now? Here she was speeding up a deserted highway after a vicious gangster. She had to get to those boys before he did. The thug figured they’d be at the Doll’s House. Maybe. But that wasn’t the only possibility, it was merely the most benign.

The rattling hammered on her head as if it were not coming from the glove compartment but inside her skull.

She had driven this road often enough while finishing off her scholarship commitment to know how long, how frustrating, how endless it was. She floored the pedal and passed the clunker so fast, it had shrunk to miniature size by the time she could check the rearview.