Into The Inferno Part 6

We'd never had water in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but for the last three years during the spring or early winter the Snoqualmie River, normally two hundred yards distant, flooded the road in front of our house. Three years ago when it flooded, I bunked at the firehouse, Lorie and the girls at the mayor's place on the other side of town. That was when I should have guessed about the mayor and Lorie.

We lived at the end of a short dirt road. Morgan Neumann and her mother lived next door on five acres, a well-worn path between the houses. A vacant field buffered us from the two-lane paved road. To the south there were horses on leased land, untended apple trees squatting here and there in the surrounding fields, a few alders, and at least one tall pine.

Our most recent topic of conversation around the dinner table was whether or not Allyson could have a horse. At nine, I didn't feel she was old enough to take care of it, and with two girls and Eustace, our cat, under my wing already, I didn't need the extra ch.o.r.es. Still, the folks at work had a pool going that there'd be a horse in our pasture before the year was out. Sometimes I thought the guys at work knew me better than I knew myself.

When I climbed out of bed, my legs felt weak and jittery, as if I'd been running uphill all night, but then after I got moving my thighs began to regain some of their strength. My head was throbbing.

Standing over the toilet bowl, I saw that the backs of both hands were scaly, as if they'd been sunburned and were peeling, except they weren't. I washed and dried my hands, but the waxy-looking substance wouldn't come off. Hand lotion didn't help.

"Morning, Mr. Swope," said Morgan Neumann when I went downstairs, still rubbing my hands.

"Morning, Morgan. There's twenty dollars on the fridge if you need groceries. I'll be at the station if you want to get hold of me. Unemployment Beach is not okay, but a video from Blockbuster is. G or PG."

"Daddy, I want to go to the beach," Allyson said.

"Not without me. That current's faster than it looks. It'll sweep you away like a bug on a rug."

"We don't need no video, Daddy," Britney said.

"You don't need a a video." video."

"That's what I said. We're going to play house."

"No, we aren't," Allyson said. "We're going to mop the kitchen floor, and then I'm going to read my book. Morgan's going to surf the Internet."

"I am not," Morgan protested.

"It's okay, Morgan. Just don't let the house burn down."

"Thank you, Mr. Swope. You're the greatest." Knowing Morgan had a pinch of Eddie Haskell in her, I was always a little leery when she turned on the applause spigot.

At the station I had Click and Karrie working with me, plus the two medics the city contracted from Bellevue.

Stan Beebe, who was still on disability leave, showed up in civilian clothes around ten o'clock, eyes bloodshot, unsteady on his feet, reeking of alcohol.

We sat him down in the kitchen and poured him a mug of black coffee. Normally Stan drank coffee by the bucketful, but this morning he only sipped it and played with the handle of the mug.

Click stood in the corner with his arms across his chest.

Wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt, Stan Beebe cupped the coffee mug in his thick hands and stared at the surface of the liquid. His hair was cropped short and peppered with lint. There was animal hair on his pant leg, food stains on his shirt.

Ordinarily, Stan was as meticulous as a parson's cat.

I had never seen him drunk.

In fact, I couldn't recall ever seeing Stan do anything more than hold a paper cup of malt liquor, not even at the wildest department party ever, which we'd had last year at Joel McCain's place. Click and Clack had gotten into a playful tousle and ended up smashing Mary McCain's tea table. Jackie had gotten so juiced, she took a leak in the corner of the spare bedroom and fell asleep on the floor by the dog dish. I spent an hour in the dark on the sofa downstairs with Karrie. The volunteers yukked it up and tossed horseshoes over parked cars, my pickup included.

Mary McCain grew so disgusted with the drunken antics that she made her husband break up the party early.

"You look like you've had a couple, Stan," I said.

"A couple? Man, I'm smashed."

"We all feel bad about Joel."

"It's not about Joel. Tell me something, Jim. What's the worst thing you can imagine? How about you're here, but you're not here. You're dead, or close enough that only a few people can tell the difference. You're miserable to the nth degree, plus your existence makes your loved ones miserable, too. What I don't understand is why they don't have the best medical care for Joel. I know they have that religion, but when somebody's life is at stake, you'd think-Would you? Jim? Back when you were religious, would you have been willing to die for your beliefs?"

"Probably. When I was a kid, I almost drowned in Lake Washington stepping off a dock. Went down like a piece of angle iron. I had just turned eight, and I'd been told if I had enough faith, I could walk on water. Some big kids pulled me out."

Beebe placed his lips on the rim of the coffee mug and inhaled the aroma. He set the mug down on the table and slowly spun it around in his hands. "Mary McCain's just like you were stepping off that dock. I called her last night. She thinks Joel's going to be healed. Jesus healed, and Christian Scientists think they can heal, too. See, they feel the majority of world thought is against them-"

"It is."

"-that the majority of thought on this earth is causing the problem. Joel once said if everybody believed the way he did, there would be no sickness or evil. 'Course Joel told me there wasn't any matter, either." Stan pinched himself. "No matter. We're all spiritual beings. Everything else is false."

"You mean we're really floating around in ether like ghosts?"

"Something like that. Joel said you had to demonstrate these things a step at a time. You wake up from the dream one step at a time."

"Look, Stan, I've been around zealots all my life, and if there's anything a religious freak is good at, it's seeing what he wants to see and ignoring everything else."

"Don't call Joel a freak."

"I didn't mean it that way. Or maybe I did. His mother-in-law stuffed half an apple down his gullet because she thought he was healed. You think she's tuned in to reality?"

Stan's eyes met mine for the first time in over a minute. We broke into simultaneous laughter as we thought about the apple sliding across the floor. His mood quickly grew dark again.

"You going to be all right, Stan?"

"Yesterday I told you I was dying. Now you ask if I'm going to be all right. That's the trouble with you, Jim. We have to spell everything out for you. Let me say it one more time-I'm dying. Just like Joel. But I'm not going to end up choking on apples. Not this buckaroo. No sirree. Not in my my future." future."

"I guess you're right. I guess you do have to spell it out. What are you saying, Stan?"

"I'm saying I have twenty-four hours to kill myself."

"You're not thinking about suicide?"

"No, I'm not thinking about it. I'm going to do it."

"This is silly. Joel fell off a roof. He doesn't have any disease. He hit his head."

Beebe looked at my hands, grabbed one of them, then dropped it. "Christ! You got it, too!"

"Got what?"

"You have the shakes yesterday?"

"That woman chasing me all over town made me nervous."

"Newcastle had the shakes. He goes out by himself on a seven-day hike. Dies of exposure. They figured he was on his way back when he went down. Day seven."

"What do you mean, when he went down?"

"Same way Joel went down. Same way Jackie went down. It's a syndrome, man."

"I don't see a syndrome. All I'm seeing is a whole lot of bad luck."

"Newcastle . . . I figure it took about two days for him to die. They said from the look of him, he was on the ground the whole time. Some animal bit half his ear off, and he didn't do anything about it."

"I hadn't heard that. Stan, you're not really thinking about killing yourself?"

"I got a copy of the autopsy report. He had the hands, too. Like yours."

"We've probably been using some bad detergent around here."

"It's not no soap. We been poisoned."

"Is that what your doctor's testing you for, poison?"

Beebe's laugh had a hysterical component to it. He turned and looked into my eyes. "I'm going to be just like the Fire Plug over there in Alpine Estates."

"Jackie got drunk and crashed her car."

"Well, I'm drunk. Maybe I'll do a better job of crashing my car than she did."

"Joel slipped and fell off his roof."

"Not how that happened, either."

"Newcastle had a heart attack. He shouldn't have been out in the woods alone."

"My guess is we were all exposed to it on an alarm. Chemical or biological. It doesn't matter. Once it's through with you, you're helpless. You want to end up like Joel, fine. But it ain't for me."

12. A BARREL ROLLS OFF A TRUCK.

"Look," said Stan. "Remember that story Newcastle told us? Happened in California twenty or thirty years ago? A barrel rolls off a truck onto the highway somewhere? They send a company of volunteers to check it out. The barrel doesn't have any markings, so they roll it off the freeway and call the highway department to pick it up. It's been smacked by a couple of cars and it's leaking. n.o.body wears any PPE. It turns out the barrel's full of undiluted insecticide. The chemical enters their nervous systems through their skin, and seven of the nine responders end up in nursing homes. Brain-dead."

"We've all heard that story," I said. "But we haven't investigated any barrels on the highway."

"We did something something."

Stan's morbid pessimism was beginning to get on my nerves. Worse than that, down deep somewhere I was starting to buy into this harebrained hypothesis.

Ian Hjorth had been so quiet I'd almost forgotten he was there, arms crossed in front of his muscular chest, listening quietly. A tall man in his late twenties with thinning blond hair and a penchant for pranks, Ian was well-read but not overly opinionated, intelligent but not particularly ambitious. Because of his fun-loving nature, and despite the fact that he teased me ruthlessly about my love life, Ian was one of my favorite people. He had a wife who was young and pretty and who worked for the city. They had a little girl with big brown teddy bear eyes. Britney called her Pimmy.

Ian said, "I don't buy it, Stan. Newcastle died over a month ago. Joel fell off his roof a week later. Then Jackie had her accident. Okay. Maybe those things happened around the same time. But now we're a month later. If you guys got this on the same alarm, don't you think all five of you would come down with it together?"

"There's nothing says it has to happen that way," said Beebe. "You heard about the state patrolman who was at the hazardous materials spill directing traffic, accidentally got some chemicals on his trousers, went home, and his wife washed his pants in the same load with his kid's baby blanket. The baby ended up dying. The patrolman never even got sick. If he'd forgotten those pants in the bottom of his locker and taken them home half a year later the baby would have died six months after the incident and the death never even would have been connected to the haz-mat spill. This could be something with a built-in time factor we're all tripping in our own way."

"Jesus," said Ian, with a sly grin. "If I was dying, I wouldn't spend my last day with a mug like me or a lady-killer like Jim. I'd be home with my family. Or in Jim's case, at a wh.o.r.ehouse." He looked at me and laughed.

"Thought I'd get on the computer and compose my epitaph," Stan replied grimly. " 'He lived a life-he had a wife-he did his best-now he's at rest.' What do you think?"

I'd never heard anybody feel so sorry for himself, not even me when I'd dipped into the swamps of self-pity after Lorie ran away. Stan was doing everything but sizing himself for a coffin. If it hadn't been so pathetic, it would have been almost comical.

"You feeling sick?" I asked Beebe, thinking about the headache I'd woken up with this morning.

"You don't have to feel sick to be dying."

"What made you go to the doctor in the first place?" Ian Hjorth asked.

"Three days ago I started falling down. I had this junk on my hands. I knew Joel and Jackie had the hands, so I started investigating."

"I never noticed Jackie's hands," Ian said. "And Joel's wife wouldn't let anybody in."

"She let me in," Stan said. "I dug up the autopsy report on Newcastle. Same thing. A whitish discoloration of the hands. Then I started thinking about Joel going off that roof. I'd been on a roof when I fell, I mighta got hurt. I'd been driving like Jackie, I mighta crashed. Out in the woods like Newcastle, dead. So I went to Dr. Brashears. He's the one treated Jackie."

"What'd he say?"

"He started running tests."

"And?" I asked.

"He sent my blood away to some special lab in Texas. He sent some hair samples and tissue to Washington, D.C. Won't find out anything until next week. It's a p.i.s.ser, 'cause I won't be around next week."

"Of course you will."

"Don't believe me, Jim. It's no never mind to me. But remember what I'm telling you, because after you realize you have it, you'll wish you'd listened. It's a seven-day cycle. Who knows what triggers it, but from the minute it starts to the time you sign off . . . seven days. Get your affairs in order. Say good-bye to the people you love."

"Don't be telling me I have seven days left."

"You don't don't. You have six. The waxy hands come on day two."

I couldn't help doing the math. Today was Tuesday. If Stan was right, sometime on Sunday night I'd become a vegetable. Maybe if a team of doctors were telling me this, I might believe it; but this was Stan.

Aware that he had no way of knowing about my headache or the weak feeling in my legs, I asked him to list the symptoms.

"The first day, yesterday for you, the hands start shaking for no reason. Day two: trembling legs, pressure on your frontal lobe, usually in the form of a mild headache, the backs of the hands take on a waxy look."

He'd pegged the last two days perfectly.

I'd never truly believed all the horrors visiting our department could have been coincidences. On top of that, I'd been living with a feeling of impending doom since visiting Holly. I'd seen too much misfortune land on innocent people in the past few days, and now I was bowing to the all-too-human propensity to concoct a sinister plot to account for it. Grief always went down better if you could follow it with a healthy dose of conspiracy.

I didn't want to believe Stan, but he'd pointed out my symptoms like a bird dog pointed out a dead pheasant.

"You driving today?" I asked. Tears were dribbling down his cheeks.