Wild Meat (41 page)

“Olaf’s dead?” she said.

“Afraid so,” Brandon answered, sounding somber. “But at least we know he didn’t suffer, as he might have if the tumors had kept popping up. This way, he went out all boofed up.”

Amy nibbled on a bread roll and had more coffee while the guys explained their plan. First priority would be replacing Amy’s fingerprints on the kitchen knife with Eloy’s. Then they would heave Olaf’s body into the trunk of the sheriff’s car. They’d stuff the three unconscious goons into the car, then drive it half a mile or so down the road and run it into a tree. It would look like the goons had crashed it themselves after murdering their companion and fleeing the scene with an infected animal in their trunk.

“Olaf’s all ripped up,” Stephen said. “He stinks like boof, and the bite marks on his neck are in perfect little clusters, so they look more like sores than anything else.”

Sores that appeared as clusters of little weeping dots
, Amy thought. Just as Robert had described the symptoms of the fever at the logging camp.

Stephen continued. “They won’t find any plague bugs in his blood, but they’ll be expecting to. For a while they’ll think they’ve caught their bio-terrorists, or at least someone trying to sneak an infected animal out of the plague zone for some diabolical reason.”

Amy smiled in spite of her bruised jaw. “And when they ask you what you heard any of them say, especially whether they mentioned names, you’re going to say you heard them talking about something called the Fat Rabbit.”

Brandon looked at Stephen. “She’s awake enough to think deviously.”

“And of course he’ll say he heard them talking about Vendetti and Sanderson,” Stephen said.

“And a guy named Tobin,” Amy added. She reminded them of what the hunter and Robert had told her.
They came right into the camp, sticking guns in everyone’s faces, asking where this fellow Tobin was.
“You have to say that Eloy talked about…about the big Equateurian with the broken nose, who bragged about taking out Tobin when they got hold of the Fat Rabbit.”

Brandon was making notes on his forearm with a pen. “…goons bragged about killing Tobin…” he said aloud as he wrote. “…stole Fat Rabbit…big African guy….”

Amy held up her hand. “Don’t say ‘killed,’ because all I know is that Tobin was missing; just say ‘took him out.’ Oh! One more thing. Say that the chimp was still alive when they put it in the trunk, and it had just been throwing up – it was lit up by the floodlights in front of the Hangar when it threw up, so you could see it pretty well. What came up looked gooey and very dark, maybe even black. Say a couple of the guys were shouting and swearing because they got the gross stuff on them.”

“…slimy black puke…,” Brandon recited, still writing on his arm. “How’s your breakfast going down?”

***

Periodically firing shots into the air to frighten away
any lurking v-chimps, Amy, Stephen, and Brandon spent twenty minutes getting Olaf’s body into the trunk and the three sleeping goons into the sheriff’s car. It was three-thirty in the morning, and sunrise would come a little before six.

There were the sores on Olaf’s neck and wrists, just like one of the fever symptoms reported at the logging camp. And a dart was still in the ape’s neck – a dart fired from a gun that the authorities would find in the trunk of this same stolen patrol car.

Gil started to stir as they dragged him toward the car, so Amy used Eloy’s gun to sink one more dart into each of the thugs.

Dale was the heaviest. They threw him into the back seat and piled Gil and Eloy on top of each other in the front passenger seat. Brandon, wearing gloves, drove the patrol car a couple of miles down the road and rammed it into a big cedar.

Amy and Stephen followed in the delivery van, Amy at the wheel. After the crash, Brandon signaled by hitting the horn and Stephen fired a shot into the air, giving Brandon time to open the door and haul Eloy into the driver’s seat. There was no need to peel off Eloy’s bio-hazard gloves; his prints and those of his partners were all over the late Deputy Elena Cisneros’s patrol car. Brandon closed the door of the patrol car and returned to the van.

Amy
began backing up to turn around, then stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Stephen asked.

“This isn’t going to be that simple,” she said. “Just give me a second.”

She had been thinking all morning about what Eloy and the others would say under interrogation. They would eventually tell everything about Sanderson and the goons
, but they would say they had know idea how the dead chimp had gotten into the trunk, and their interrogators might realize they were telling the truth.

Only Eloy would have any idea who had put the chimp there, because he was the only living one who knew that they hadn’t been alone when they tried to retrieve the v-chimps. Manny was dead; Gil and Dale had been boofed into oblivion before Amy was discovered.

Eloy might well be the only one of these three who had ever even heard Amy’s or Stephen’s names. The others hadn’t been involved in the attempts on her life as far as she knew, and might not even know about her. That kind of information – she hoped – had probably gotten passed along on a strictly need-to-know basis. The identity of the intruder at Elaine’s place was still a mystery, but whoever that was wouldn’t know that Amy or Stephen had appeared in the quarantine zone.

“Are all four of their tranq guns in the trunk?” she asked Brandon.

“One’s still in the back seat,” he said. “With one of those roll-up packets of darts.”

Amy had also brought along the tranq gun darts from the
Hangar, the one she’d fired from the RV window. Its darts were loaded with stronger stuff than Eloy’s, which were only meant to knock out a seventy-pound v-chimp. She opened her door a crack, fired her gun into the air to scare off any lurking v-chimps, and said, “I’ll be right back.” It was about ten long strides back to the patrol car.

From the back seat she retrieved
Eloy’s tranq rifle and a wallet-like plastic holder containing darts. Using an old towel from Brandon’s van to protect her skin, she tore Eloy’s hood off.

Stephen leaned out of the van and called, “Scare shot,” to warn her that he was about to fire another round into the air.

Amy unloaded the tranq rifle point-blank into Eloy’s cheek, then pulled the spent dart out and pocketed it. A satisfying welt appeared immediately. She put three more darts into Eloy’s face, leaving it strangely disfigured.

Eloy was a skinny, muscular guy, and his neck veins bulged prominently. Holding the rifle so that one of the veins bisected the barrel, she fired the fifth and sixth darts.
Then she did the same with five of the Hangar darts.

Stephen fired another scare shot.

Amy wiped down the tranq gun, then pushed it into the bare hands of Gil, getting his prints all over it. Next she tore out the patrol car’s dome light and, leaving the driver door open, returned to the van.

“Whoever finds that car,” she said, “will see Eloy’s face all swollen and discolored, and won’t realize what caused it. The autopsy will show he died from a huge dose of tranqs, but whoever’s investigating will be chasing down a lot of mysteries in the meantime. And these darts’ll be long gone.” She turned to Brandon. “I know you need to drop us off and get back to the
Hangar before dawn, but can we wait here for just a few minutes?”

“I guess so.”

Amy turned off the lights and the engine. A quarter moon was up, and as their eyes adjusted, they could see the outline of the patrol car.

With all the van windows shut tight, they couldn’t hear the rustling in the trees, but they all saw the creature that landed in a crouch on the ground next to the open driver door, then leapt up inside.

***

In the
perfectly camouflaged, 1950s-built bomb shelter outside the crumbling farmhouse where Brandon dropped them off, Stephen and Amy lived on canned goods and crackers from the Hangar.

There was no shower, but the old latrine still had a toilet seat and a big open space beneath it, and it was in a separate compartment of the bomb shelter, with a door that mostly sealed
the odor away from the main living area. Brandon had given them an electric camping lantern, a crate of batteries, a box of magazines, and toiletries. After satisfying themselves that they’d killed all the black widows nesting in the bomb shelter, they slept and slept and slept.

Even through several feet of earth and one foot of concrete, they could hear the choppers as the mountainside was scoured for intruders, fugitives, sick animals, and the body of
Deputy Cisneros.

They couldn’t go outside at night because of the possibility that some v-chimps might have ranged far from the
Hangar. In daytime, during long lulls in chopper noises, they sometimes climbed to the surface to enjoy a few minutes of fresh air.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

As soon as he got off the elevator in the ground-floor lobby of Sanderson Tropical Timber’s headquarters office, Wes Gimble could see the receptionist was terrified. Anyone would have been. The enormous man leaning across the counter towered over her. She rolled her chair a few feet back, but still had to crane her neck to look at his face – not that anyone would want to look upon such a sight. The guy’s gaping, deadpan expression was somehow scarier than if he’d been snarling and gnashing his teeth.

Two of the building’s security guards stood on either side of the guy, each gripping one of his elbows, but he acted as though he didn’t even notice them. Gimble felt sorry for the receptionist; she’d had to deal with pushy law-enforcement people several times in the last couple of days, and now this.

Whatever Hugh Sanderson had gotten into that made the feds want to question him, apparently it had also pissed off some dangerous private interests. As far as Wes Gimble could tell, the monster talking to the receptionist was just too big and blandly fearless to be anything but pure underworld muscle.

“Sir, please,” the woman was saying. “I don’t have any information about Mr. Sanderson. If you would like to leave your contact number….”

The visitor simply stared at the her, while the two guards kept trying to lead him away from the counter.

Strange that the guy would expect to get help finding someone who was clearly on the run – just by walking up to an office worker and asking. Or maybe this was all for show, making sure everyone knew that Hugh had screwed with the wrong people.

What burned Gimble up was that he did know where Hugh had gone. An hour earlier, Gimble had arrived at William Sanderson’s office a few minutes earlier than expected. He’d stood just outside the open doorway and overheard enough of a phone conversation to be able to figure out Hugh’s whereabouts. The conversation had been in a sort of makeshift code, and was with an intermediary rather than directly with Hugh. But Gimble had picked up on certain keywords and knew enough about Hugh’s habits to put the picture
together.

He’d retreated from the doorway and returned a few minutes later. The reason William had summoned him, it turned out, was to
ask what he, Gimble, planned to do in order to ease the effects of the coming storm.

Gimble had engineered one of the finest PR campaigns ever, and Hugh had utterly undone all that work by doing whatever had made him a fugitive. Instead of a shining jewel on Wes Gimble’s résumé, the Sanderson Tropical Timber green campaign was going to be remembered as a sticky mess
. He would forever be trying to distance himself from it.

And now William wanted to know how Gimble was
going to fix things up.

What he really wanted to do was call the feds and tip them off about what he’d heard – not out of any sense of patriotic duty, but simply to get even with the arrogant playboy
and his ungrateful brother.

He was aware of that snotty little rhyme that Hugh had made up about him:
I’m Gimble-him! / I’m Gimble-she!
He had made Hugh a star, rather than just one more faceless corporate veep, but the man clearly didn’t appreciate it. Maybe turning in Hugh would be one of the more satisfying moments of his life. And maybe William would get smacked with obstruction of justice for not doing it himself.

Yet if the Green Angel were apprehended now, the PR mess would be worse than if he were nabbed after the story had cooled down a bit, and that would further undermine Gimble’s future career.

What he really hoped was that Hugh would never be found.

Hugh’s eco-messiah persona had been so successful that, with his sudden disappearance, the air was thick with rumors of his martyrdom. A lot of websites were trumpeting the theory that the whole bio-terror scare involving the Wild Adventure Land had been a setup, a plot by the fossil-fuel and chemical industries to destroy Hugh Sanderson. Hugh had presented too much of a danger to the status quo. He’d been threatening to steer the economy green in a way that no politician had ever had the will to do, so
Corporate Big Brother had made him disappear. Reporters were constantly demanding to know precisely what disease had broken out in the high desert, and when the feds didn’t have a straight answer, the situation stank even more of deception.