Wild Meat (42 page)

As long as Hugh remained a missing martyr, Wes Gimble’s greatest achievement to date would stay great.

Gimble looked toward the receptionist’s counter. Surprisingly, the big man was leaving quietly, flanked by the two security guards, who maintained only a light grip on his enormous elbows. Gimble followed them outside, staying a few yards behind. The guards returned to the building, shaking their heads, and the huge visitor lumbered down the sidewalk, never looking back.

The thought of approaching such a scary creep was nerve-wracking. Do you just tap a hit man on the shoulder and say,
Excuse me, sir…
?

But Gimble did exactly that after screwing up his courage. The big man’s face suggested he had no idea why some well-dressed little guy wanted to help him, but he did listen. Finally he began nodding, then produced a folded sheet of paper, wrinkled and sweaty, from his pants pocket. He wrote everything down,
including the words, “Tell him Wes Gimble says hello.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hugh Sanderson was back in the Caribbean, but could no longer risk staying at any of the better resorts. He was at one of the shoe-string-traveler places in Jamaica, enjoying sweet bread and a mango smoothie from a food stand on the beach. The sun had been up for barely an hour, and the air was almost cool.

The bulk of what Lou Burr had paid him before the whole deal exploded was in a Caymans bank just a few hours’ flight from here – nearly two and a half million dollars. He’d already bought high-quality fake travel documents and moved the money into a new account under the alias. He had thirty thousand in cash on hand in case he needed to go somewhere fast. He could
take puddle-jumper flights back and forth between here and the Caymans quickly and easily if he ever needed to appear at the bank in person and pick up a really large sum of money. For more modest sums, there were ATMs.

He would have had closer to seven million in his account by now if things hadn’t gone horribly wrong, with a few million more to come
. He wouldn’t be more or less in hiding, either. But things could have gone a lot worse. At least he’d had the sense to get the hell out of the U.S. immediately after government slapped a quarantine on the hills around Wild Adventure Land.

It didn’t look like there was much chance of reviving the deal with Burr, of importing the rest of the stink monkeys and setting up the lab at a new location. There wasn’t even anyone left in Equateur to work with anymore. The tall guard had disappeared. The barrel-shaped one had apparently been trapped
in the old logging camp after some psycho blasted the mountain pass that led in and out of the basin where the stink monkeys lived. All those towering rock formations had collapsed inward, and now the pass simply no longer existed. Only a chopper could get the guy out, and that was not going to happen. No one would be heading into that basin any time soon.

The Equateurian government’s official story was that some stored dynamite had
been set off by accident, but their
other
official story was that they’d been considering sealing the basin off anyhow, because of a possible health threat from the wildlife there. Some prick at Public Health had apparently managed to resurrect that phony plague story.

His legal situation back home didn’t appear to be a complete disaster. Pretty much everyone at Top Gun Security was either dead or, like Vendetti, functionally brain-dead. That meant almost everybody who knew what had really gone down in those mountains – or knew about Hugh’s connection with it – was out of the game. Lou Burr
most likely was not worried, because the feds could not prove a connection between him and TGS – not anymore, with Vendetti effectively out of the picture. A couple of Burr’s people in Detroit knew the truth, but none of them were the type to give up anything on a witness stand.

But Homeland Security was still doing its indefinite-detention thing. Even William had been held for a few days. After al
l, Sanderson Wild Adventure Land was the epicenter of what appeared to be a mysterious outbreak, and the company had been harvesting timber in precisely the same location where a similar outbreak had occurred in Africa. Nothing would ever be proved because no bio-terror bugs would ever be found, but Hugh wasn’t taking any chances on going back to the First World until he was absolutely sure that everything had blown over.

And
he was in no hurry. It was kind of breezy hanging out at these cheap places. The beach was still the beach, and there were plenty of pretty girls. He’d bleached his hair and grown enough of a beard that he wouldn’t be immediately recognizable. And he figured that, on the off chance that someone here did recognize him, they’d sort-of be on his side. After all, these young traveler types probably sympathized with the green movement, and the greenies were more on his side than ever, thanks to a wealth of rumors to the effect that Hugh Sanderson had been silenced by the great corporate machine.

Meanwhile, all he had to do was make his 2.5 million last, and
although he hated the limitations of living on a budget, his time in exile was shaping up to be surprisingly enjoyable. No William, no Gimble, no Marcel. He had even survived going cold turkey on the stink juice.

No William.

That last face-to-face conversation with big bro had been sweet. Mentioning Lou Burr had been entirely gratuitous, of course; Burr had no stake at all in keeping Hugh in California. But watching William’s reaction to the name had been priceless.

And now he was on the beach, not having to answer to anyone, with all the time in the world. He was
sitting on a wooden chaise longue on the sand, enjoying the morning breeze as the land heated up, watching young people come and go at the food stand. This was the same sort of crowd that used to frequent the Sanderson Free Forest Campground, creating the original market for ruby.

A slender brunette with a cute British accent was flirting with the shirtless, dreadlocked young man who worked there. She was somewhere under thirty, tanned and toned
, with a colorful hummingbird tattoo on her left shoulder blade.

Two men and a woman, all Nordic-looking, sat around a small round table beneath a red nylon parasol. Hugh had shared a pitcher of Red Stripe with one of these men the night before. They had swapped scuba tales and sworn to go diving together soon.

It was glorious. Hugh was forty, yet he still had a place in this vibrant, vagabond world. He was healthy and rich and free, and that made him a younger man than a lot of twenty-five year olds.

His stomach growled. He had done a lot of swimming the day before, rented a jet ski, and even danced for a while after the sun went down, yet he had neglected to eat much of anything. It was catching up with him now. He decided he was hungry for more than the smoothie and the sweet bread. Real breakfast would be available in half an hour, as soon as the place down the beach opened.

A huge man sat down several yards away and opened a newspaper. He wore what looked like white painter’s pants and a t-shirt with white and green horizontal stripes. He was not hugely obese, but the extra bulk on his large frame made him seem to be spilling over the sides of the wicker armchair. He smoked a kind of filterless cigarette popular among young European travelers. Whenever he turned the pages of his newspaper, he would rest the cigarette on his lower lip, like a caricature of an old-time gangster. His face relaxed into a sloppy smile between drags on the cigarette. He looked a lot like that big oaf who had kept popping up at his lectures and at Free Forest Campground, the one Hugh thought of as Bluto.

Hugh nearly dropped his smoothie. This
was
Bluto. The same guy.

The apparition glanced toward Hugh, gaped at him for a moment, then returned to his newspaper.

Half a minute later, Bluto looked at him again. He looked a third and a fourth time, taking no pains to be discreet about it. Hugh doubted that he’d ever seen a more repulsive person in his life. It wasn’t just his features; there was something about his manner that was idiotic and animal-like all at once. The guy seemed entirely unconscious of his own facial expression, and of the sheen of excessive saliva on his lips, visible even from a distance.

Hugh was rattled now.
He knew this guy had followed him a lot in the past, but how had he known to come here? And who the hell was he?

The man suddenly stood up and lumbered directly toward Hugh, revealing his height to be close to seven feet. His latest cigarette looked ridiculously small in his thick hands. His eyebrows, broad watercolor brushstrokes, were arched as
if in pleasant surprise, although Hugh sensed that this was merely their default position. He swung his great weight from side to side as he approached, while his eyes and mouth remained slack. Add a little Baby Huey to that Bluto look, Hugh thought.

“You’re Hugh Sanderson.” The voice was a little high, a little husky. The big wet mouth stretched a little wider and the eyebrows went up more, as if he expected Hugh to be happy about meeting him here.

Hugh regarded him for a minute. Wanting neither to stay silent nor to admit to his identity, he asked the other man’s name.

“I’m Marty.”

Sanderson felt something bump lightly against his chest. He looked down and realized that Marty had put his hand up to shake. Sanderson had to lean back a foot or so in order to meet the open palm with his own. It was impossible to tell whether the man did not comprehend this awkwardness or did not care.

“And why are you here?” Hugh asked.

“I’ve been following you for months. You must have seen me at your speeches.”

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

Marty was still gripping his hand. “I’ve seen all your TV spots. I’ve got them recorded on my laptop. Every one.”

Hugh only stared at him.

“And I’ve downloaded very good cartoons with you in them. They show you when you were all naked, making love with all sorts of pretty babes. You even made love to Daria, from MTV. Incredibly passionate. Daria was my hero when I was a kid.” His eyes widened and the delight on his face increased, as though he’d just remembered something wonderful. “I’ve added some of my own pictures of you to the fan sites. And movies. I’m going to show you. Did you know there are movies, too?”

Hugh stood up and tried to pull away, but the big hand did not let go of his. He began prying at the big fingers, but made no headway.

“I’ve been looking at those clips and pictures of you for weeks and weeks, all the time I’ve been following you. It’s practically all I do. We’re going to look at them together, you and I. Most of them are animated, but we’ll make real ones. Lots and lots.” His gaping smile brightened even more, and his lips somehow seemed to grow wetter. “I’ve been waiting so long for this, Hugh Sanderson. So long.”

Hugh began flailing, trying to throw the other man off balance.

“A very attractive young man asked me to say hello to you,” Marty said, “but I can’t remember his name.” His face crinkled like a muppet’s as he frowned. Then his features brightened and he cried happily, “It was Gimble! That’s a funny name, you know it? Gimble wimble dimble bimble….”

The place down the beach must have opened early today, because Hugh was suddenly hit by the most exquisite smell of bacon and fried potatoes.

He saw Marty’s free hand coming up to make contact with the underside of his captive arm. The airline bottle looked like a tiny glass thimble in those breadstick fingers.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On the fifth morning, the dawn was bright and warm. Amy and Stephen ascended the ladder and scrambled into the shade and cover of a cluster of manzanita bushes. The outside air was sweet.
Brandon had left them a portable radio that they turned on once in a while when they were up on the surface and could get reception. The latest news reports had said that the quarantine would likely be lifted in a little over a week. They had no phones, but Brandon had promised to try and get message to Rita and to Elaine, providing he found a way to do it untraceably.

“I’ve been thinking,” Amy said as the swigged canned orange juice. “We’ll still need to hide out for a while when we leave this place. At least until we know what’s become of Sanderson and Vendetti. And Top Gun Security.”

Stephen was sitting on the ground, using a couple of sturdy manzanita branches as a backrest. “I guess you’re right. But don’t feel like you have to finance everything. There are places I can go that aren’t too expensive.”

Amy walked over and stood looking down at him. Her cutoff jeans barely came to the tops of her thighs, and she had on the black tank top again. Her face was swollen and bruised where Eloy had thumped her, but she still looked great. Her face, belly, and shoulders were tanned, her muscles sleek and graceful. The phrase
tough chick on a bike
came to Stephen’s mind.

“I thought we were going somewhere together,” she said.

“That’d be fine, if you still want to do it that way. We talked about maybe Central Amer—”

She suddenly descended on him, landing with her butt on his thighs and her knees flanking his hips.