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“If they go in an attraction, off the concourse, maybe we can take them quietly. Squeeze them hard for information.”
“Ten-four.”
“That phone call,” the chief said to me, “was a prelim report on Jeremy and Sibyl von Witzleben.”
The ice-cream eaters had stopped to watch people playing a dart game involving a spinning wheel, an array of balloons, and a barker who distracted the players with amusing patter.
“The von Witzlebens were both microbiologists. She was also an epidemiologist, a specialist in epidemic diseases. He had an advanced degree in virology.”
“What were they up to in Venezuela?” I wondered.
Having lost interest in the dart game, the ice-cream eaters meandered east along the concourse.
The chief said, “They were doing something that could be done only where the government, courts, and cops are all hugely corrupt.”
The ice-cream eaters began to melt into the crowd.
“Damn, where are my guys? Gotta keep those two in sight till I can turn them over to plainclothes.”
“I’ll do it, sir.”
“You don’t have one of these,” he said, indicating the walkie-talkie, “and you can’t have mine.”
As he hurried from the tent to trail the ice-cream eaters at a distance, all the thoughts and memories ricocheting through my head at last coalesced:
Standing at the sink in the half-bathroom at Lauren Ainsworth’s house, watching the rushing water pour over the wound in my hand, the water too hot, exacerbating the pain, but I don’t cool it down, because I’m gripped by a sense of a pending revelation related to the water and the blood and the pain, aware that there is something I know but do not know I know, something about blood and terrible pain and water. The plump cashier with the auburn hair saying, “You’re the one tonight, honey, you’re the one tonight.” Gypsy Mummy and the four blank cards, four blank cards suggesting no future, no future at all, four when one would have conveyed the message. Perhaps the one thing I knew about the true and hidden nature of the world was that there were no coincidences. The Cadillac Escalade burning at the bottom of the desert arroyo. On the phone with Chief Porter, while he’s telling me about Wolfgang and Jonathan and Selene, now known to be Woodrow and Jeremy and Sibyl, and he says, “One or all three look to’ve been junkies … hypodermic needles … ampules of drugs.” Being chased through the pitch-black department store, relying on my special guide dog, my psychic magnetism. Eye-to-eye with Muggs. Microbiologists, epidemiology, virology. Four blank cards, four predictions of death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. But no bodachs. Why no bodachs if mass murder is about to happen? The dying girl in the closet, saying, “You a dog. Oh, yeah, you a dog.” Blood and terrible pain and water. Blind in the death-black department store, led by my faithful guide dog, good old psychic magnetism, led to the man-made cave of suburban bats. A minimum of thirty percent of any colony of bats is infected with rabies. The auburn-haired woman in ticket booth number four, reading Ozzie Boone’s The Last Good Bite, a novel in which death by bats was the red herring. There are no coincidences. The dying girl saying, “Hey, dog, you got papers?” Papers meaning proof of vaccination. Hypodermic needles, ampules of some drug. No, ampules of a vaccine. Blood and terrible pain and water. Hydrophobia. Another name for rabies. Hydrophobia. More facts courtesy of Ozzie Boone: The victim of rabies suffers intense thirst, but any attempt to drink induces violent, agonizing spasms of the throat, hence the word hydrophobia, fear of water. Eye and facial muscles become paralyzed. Infected dogs foam at the mouth, are wild with rage and quick to bite. Venezuela, a dictatorship, virtually a terrorist state. The first two of the Four Horsemen, Pestilence and War. Pestilence as a weapon in the silent war that is part of the true and hidden nature of the world. Weaponized rabies. The cultists vaccinated, the rest of us not. No bodachs because tonight involves only a quiet infection of thousands, no one aware, and the dying doesn’t start for days, the dying and the violence, people raging like rabid dogs, which is when the bodachs would show up in legions. The sandpiper winging through the air, vanishing to one observer but visible to others. To infect the thousands on the midway, the weaponized rabies would have to be airborne, invisible to those who breathed it in, its presence known only to the vaccinated cultists.
The C-4 was a distraction.
The dam had never been a target.
Nothing had been what it appeared to be. Or, rather, everything had been more than it appeared to be.
Fifteen thousand infected. And then how many would they infect before their symptoms became apparent?
This wasn’t only about Pico Mundo. The secret war fought all around us by armies little noticed was about to escalate.
“Norman, are you all right?”
I turned to Connie, who had put a hand on my shoulder. My horror must have been evident, because she flinched as if something about my face, my eyes, frightened her.
“No, you’re not all right—are you?”
“The man Wolfgang Schmidt,” I said. “Did you know him?”
“Did I know him? Has something happened to him?”
News of the three brutal murders in the carnie park had not spread to every corner of the midway in the three hours since they occurred, probably because Wyatt Porter had done his best to keep a lid on it.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“I know who he is. But I don’t know him.”
“He bought two concessions.”
“Some say he never was from a carnie family. Norman, your hand needs medical attention.”
“What concessions did he buy?”
“They belonged to Solly Nickles. Solly got lung cancer and it went fast with him. His kids didn’t want a carnival life, so he took the best offer. Schmidt overpaid.”
“Which concessions, Connie?”
“The duck shoot and the fun house.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the facade of the fun house: the giant dimensional sculpture of an ogre’s face, twenty feet from chin to crown, almost as wide, detailed and scary but hokey at the same time, its crazed eyes rolling in its sockets. Periodically a growl issued from its open mouth, a growl and a strong blast of compressed air that traveled twenty feet into the promenade, mussing patrons’ hair and startling them.
I stepped out of the tent, not quite into the throng, scanning the crowd for Chief Porter. The pumping calliope, the hundred other musics, the laughter and screams of the marks on the thrill rides, the smells and dazzling lights made me a little dizzy. I could not see the chief. He had followed the ice-cream eaters out of sight.
Behind me, Connie said, “Norman, what’s wrong?”
The fun house was east along this leg of the concourse.
I glanced at my wristwatch. Eleven o’clock.
“Norman, your hand.”
Forty-five minutes. Unless someone got nervous for whatever reason and pulled the trigger sooner.
