Wild Meat (19 page)

Everyone understood
.

Tall Guard
placed a small brown bag next to the week’s cash, and there was a muffled tick as the little glass vessel inside tapped the coffee table’s polished oak through the paper.

He smiled. “Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll be enjoying that later. I have
work to do this afternoon.”

* * *

Sanderson was only slightly tempted to take a ruby ride and blow off the little bit of logging-related business that required his attention this afternoon. A few weeks earlier he might had given in, but not now. These days he was imbued with a new sense of purpose.

When his visitors had gone, h
e sat back and thought about his coming trip to Los Angeles. It would be the second he’d made since beginning negotiations with Lou Burr.

He would first stop at Sanderson Tropical Timber headquarters on the
east coast, for a photo op as the Green Angel on his mountain top. Next he would fly to California and take the exhilarating ride down into the valley of smoke and blood, where he lived out his role in Lou Burr’s world.

Burr was not going to pay him for any of the shipments until the first kennel of twenty-five animals was housed and producing, and Burr’s men were adequately trained to take over. H
e could probably have sold the whole stink-monkey operation without ever meeting any of Burr’s people personally, but he didn’t want that. Instead, he’d had his staff arrange visas for at least one of the guards, and for a couple of other locals that they’d brought on board recently. He needed people to show Burr’s men how to set up production. Marcel wouldn’t be going; Sanderson needed someone to stay and make sure the kennels here in Equateur were well maintained. He’d also made himself the head of this consulting team, creating a way to put himself right in the center of things.

In the warehouse district east of downtown Los Angeles, a private security company had long served as a money laundry for Lou Burr’s southwestern operations. The office, probably a mechanic’s shop at one time, was now paneled with cheap wood veneer, the concrete floor covered with a thin gray carpet. Aside from laundering, Top Gun Security functioned as a front for a network of methamphetamine couriers. That same network would very soon be facilitating shipments of boof
, and Hugh Sanderson planned to make regular visits to the office.

He’d visited the place three times on his last visit to Southern California, and the e
xperience had been intoxicating. He’d discovered an entirely new brand of thrill being among men who had probably engaged in the most extreme and exhilarating violence. He’d stood right up close to the fire whence issued the smoke that filled this valley. He’d already learned to interact with lesser thugs like the two logging-camp guards. Now he’d begun rubbing shoulders with real American mobsters. Looking them in the eye, trying to manufacture in his own face a reflection of the reptilian treachery he read in theirs.

Once, when the voice of the green path was particularly strong, he had taken a slow look around the office at the men – at the
devils
– who inhabited the valley, and had begun to get a sense of his place among them.

Burr’s young, shave-headed representative from Detroit was sharp, and he oozed danger. The same went for Eloy, the little guy with the pointy beard with whom Sanderson had begun to make special, private arrangements.

The hulking, brush-cut country boy named Cody just seemed like a big, dumb lout. So did the only Italian in the group, a huge man named Vendetti, who had gigantic, square teeth and always wore an elegant silk tie offset by a cheap suit.

Vendetti was the titular boss of Top Gun Security, and he clearly didn’t like having Hugh Sanderson around. His comments indicated that he thought of Hugh as just some celebrity guest, and that they couldn’t talk serious business around him. More than once, Vendetti had said
something like, “Well, Mr. Sanderson, it was great of you to stop by and let us know what to expect, and we’re really looking forward to your team arriving and getting us all set up.”

But Hugh didn’t want to say a permanent goodbye to the ruby trade, and knew he still wouldn’t want to after a couple more months, not even after all the animals had been delivered and he’d been paid in full. Not even after he’d said his long-overdue farewell to the timber industry.

Having breathed in the valley’s smoke and smelled its blood, he never wanted to be fully out of it. He wanted a place there. He wanted his own seat at that particular board-of-directors table, where he’d earned his position without William. It was his creation, one that he took pride in, and he meant to keep a piece of it.

If Vendetti couldn’t accept that, then he would have to be taught that Hugh Sanderson knew how to stand his ground.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Doctor?” an intern said, stepping into Dr. Roland Ngwene’s office. “Do you remember me mentioning a possible recurrence of Loggers’ Syndrome?” The intern was a lean young man with large, serious eyes and a soft but steady voice. Like Ngwene himself, he’d spent time in the army before entering medical school, and it still showed in his manner.

Ngwene sprayed more cleaner onto his varnished desktop and continued scrubbing without looking up. After a moment he said, “I don’t remember it, but if you say it happened, I believe you.” He held the bottle of cleaner up to the window and looked through it. “I’ve diluted this so many times it’s about ninety-five percent water.”

The
Ministry of Public Health did not have enough money for antibiotics to keep children in the eastern villages from shitting themselves to death, as Ngwene had watched his younger brother do forty years before, as he had nearly done himself as a child. Why should there be any money for cleaning supplies?

The intern continued. “The symptoms have appeared over the past few weeks, but not in any of the logging camps. About thirty patients have turned up in a couple of health clinics, all of them young tourists who have been camping about twenty miles out of town. They don’t have the bleeding sores, but the disorientation and wild delirium, the lethargy and the odor are all there, more severe than before.”

“A new strain of whatever caused the cases in the logging camp?”

“That’s the first thing that comes to mind. I went to the clinic where the symptoms have been reported. A number of tourists had shown up in generally depleted health, and it was only among them the signature stink was present. It dissipated after a day or so under care. A nurse reported that almost all of those patients had the periodic spasms that
were seen at the logging camp. Sometimes the mental incapacitation lasts for well over 36 hours, and there is frequent loss of bowel and bladder control. That happened only infrequently at the camp, according to your report.”

Ngwene thought for a moment. “As I remember, we concluded that the odor must have come from contact with the animals, just like the skin rashes – some kind of contact dermatitis.” He wondered whether there were something infectious among the forest animals that had spread beyond the basin where the afflicted logging camp had been. “Have there been
animal attacks at this tourist campground?”

“I asked. No one has reported any such thing. The patients I interviewed seemed surprised at the question.”

“What about blood samples?”

“Still nothing unusual,” the intern said. “The good news is that the death rate is quite low. Of the thirty or so who were given beds at the clinics, only two have died, apparently from liver failure. The others recovered completely.”

“A rate that low could even suggest that the deaths were from complications of other problems. That was our conclusion at the camp, as well.” Ngwene was quiet for a moment. “Someone, let’s say you and two or three others, should go to the campground itself. Get blood samples and interviews from as many of the tourists as will cooperate.”

The intern was writing
quickly on a legal pad. “I’ve already planned a visit there.” He folded a sheet of paper around the back of the pad and poised his pen at the top of a fresh page. “Should we prepare a report for the World Health Organization?”

“We should prepare one, although I doubt the minister will allow us to send it. We’re lucky he doesn’t know who leaked the logging camp situation to the W.H.O. in the first place.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Cody and Eloy, off-the-books employees of Top Gun Security, parked on Cascabel Drive an hour before dusk.
The street was a curvy one, the highest of several parallel streets on a hillside. The backyards of the houses on the north side all extended up into the wild brush of the hilltop.

The tall bitch next door to the target, the one who’d stuck her nose in when they’d come here
the first time, didn’t seem to be home. No car was in her driveway, and a big, cream-colored cat rested in hen pose on the front porch, looking like nobody was around to let it in.

The sheriff’s patrol car that was making the place sticky lately had left the neighborhood half an hour earlier, while Cody and Eloy watched from around the corner. The cops would have been on the lookout for a green van, and this time they had come in a white SUV with the back seats torn out to make room for cargo. Its tags could be linked to their employer, which was one reason they weren’t supposed to be using it to address this particular task, but Eloy was sure no one would find out. Rather than rent-a-cop uniforms, they now wore dark brown coveralls that read, “Phelps Appliances.”

Walking behind the target’s house, they found a dense jungle of vines and fruit trees that hadn’t been tended for years. It was impossible to tell where the back yard ended and the county-owned wilderness began. Sanderson had said that this lady had enough money to travel all over the world but at home lived like a hippie or some kind of religious nut. Eloy thought that sounded about right, judging from the state of the place.

“Why the hell we going into the place before she gets home?” Cody wanted to know.

“Just making sure,” Eloy said, and refused to answer when big Cody asked what they needed to make sure of.

The back door turned out to be solid, secured with a deadbolt. They hadn’t brought along anything for opening locks because this task wasn’t part of the day’s official agenda, but no big deal. Eloy, light-framed and five-foot-two, had gone through plenty of windows before. “I’m going to find another way in,” he said. “Listen for anybody coming.”

Big Cody stood with his hands in the pockets of his coveralls, watching the smaller man scamper off through the overgrown grass. He supposed Eloy thought he looked cool with that beard of his, trimmed to a thin strip along his jaw and pointed at the end like some kind of Keebler-elf version of Robin Hood. But Cody thought it made Eloy a goof, plain and simple.

The guy was tough enough, and Cody had seen him give plenty of people a lot of pain, so maybe the look was a good disguise. Still, goofy was goofy, and Cody couldn’t respect it. Plus Eloy always let it show that he thought Cody was dumb and needed to be told what to do. Like nagging him all day about looking right for the job, and now telling him to shut up and stand still while he found some
clever way inside.

Fifteen feet away,
Eloy found ancient wisteria vines, two inches or more in diameter, growing so densely up the back of the house that they might as well have been bars over the windows. They smothered the eaves above and had already crushed part of the rain gutter.

The condition of the vegetation offended the sensibilities that Eloy had developed in the course of his considerable experience in residential lawn and garden maintenance. The closest he’d ever come to legitimate work had been bossing crews of migrants on landscaping jobs in San Marino. It had really been another front for laundering Vendetti’s various incomes, but the gig had ended up forcing Eloy to do plenty of actual landscaping work. The customers over there
would never allow anything but delicate little ivy to grow in contact with their houses, and even the ivy wasn’t permitted to reach around the eaves and go up to the roof. Wisteria grew only on trellises. Shrubs had to be sculpted into hedges, cones, or spheres, and those near the house had to be dug up and replaced when they got to a certain size, lest their roots attack the foundations. The woman who lived here clearly had no regard for such principles, and that led Eloy to conclude that she must be a seriously undignified fruit loop.

He eventually found a spot where some wisteria shoots had grown between a Dutch window and its frame, and had wrenched one hinge partly out of the wood. He managed, uncomfortably, to squeeze between the vines and the house, and worked for several minutes on loosening the window enough to climb in.

He had just succeeded in pulling the window open when a loud thump startled him. Then came two more thumps, followed by a crunch.

He wrestled out from behind the vines and saw Cody still standing by the back door, hands still in his pockets, his usual sullen pout replaced by an enormous grin.

The back door was open, the deadbolt protruding into empty air and the frame splintered inward where the female end of the lock had been. Eloy glared at Cody and Cody shrugged.