suspicion. “We’re seeing indications. What have you seen? ” I thought of
the birds. The ve ve rats, which had been dead a long time.
The pack of coyotes no doubt were nearing the threshold of tolerable
change.
“Why’re you telling me this? ” I asked.
“So you’ll stay the hell out of the way. Let the right people manage
this situation. People who know what they’re doing. People with
credentials.”
“The usual big brains, ” Bobby said.
Manuel poked the club in our direction. “You may think you’re heroes,
but you’ll just be getting in the way.”
“I’m no hero, ” I assured him.
Bobby said, “Me, hell, I’m just a surf-smacked, sun-fried, beer whacked
board head.” Manuel said, “There’s too much at stake here for us to
allow anyone to have an agenda of his own.”
“What about the troop? ” I asked. “The monkeys haven’t selfdestructed.”
“They’re different.
They were engineered in the lab, and they are what they are. They are
what they were made to be, what they were born to be. They can still
become if they’re vulnerable to the mutated virus, but maybe they aren’t
susceptible. After this is all over, once people are vaccinated and this
outbreak self-limits, we’ll track them down and wipe them out.”
“Not much luck at that so far, ” I reminded him.
“We’ve been distracted by the bigger problem.”
“Yeah, ” Bobby said.
“Destroying the world is ass-busting work.
” Ignoring him, Manuel said, “Once we get the rest of this cleaned up,
then the troop … their days are numbered.” Lights flared in the
adjacent dining room, where Feeney had proceeded from the living room,
and I moved away from the brightness that fell through the connecting
doorway.
The second deputy appeared at the hallway door, and he was not anyone I
had seen before. I thought I knew all the police in town, but perhaps
the financiers behind the Wyvern wizards had recently provided the
funding for a larger force.
“Found some boxes of ammo, ” the new guy said. “No weapons.” Manuel
called to Frank, who appeared in the dining-room doorway and said,
“Chief? ”
“We’re done here, ” Manuel said.
Feeney looked disappointed, but the new man turned away from the kitchen
and immediately headed along the hall toward the front of the house.
With startling speed, Manuel lunged toward Bobby, swinging the baton at
his head. Equally quick, Bobby ducked. The club carved the air where
Bobby had been, and cracked loudly against the side of the refrigerator.
Bobby came up under the baton, right in Manuel’s face, and I thought he
was embracing him, which was weird, but then I saw the gleam of the
butcher knife, the point against Manuel’s throat.
The new deputy had raced back to the kitchen, and both he and Frank
Feeney had drawn their revolvers, holding the weapons in two-hand grips.
“Back off, ” Manuel told his deputies.
He backed off, too, easing away from the point of the knife.
For a crazy moment I thought Bobby was going to shove the huge blade
into him, though I know Bobby better than that.
Remaining wary, the deputies retreated a step or two, and they relaxed
their arms from a ready-fire position, although neither man holstered
his weapon.
The spill of light through the dining-room door revealed more of
Manuel’s face than I cared to see. It had been torn by anger and then
knitted together by more anger, so the stitches were too tight, pulling
his features into strange arrangements, both eyes bulging, but the left
eye more than the right, nostrils flaring, his mouth a straight slash on
the left but curving into a sneer on the right, like a portrait by
Picasso in a crappy mood, all chopped into cubes, geometric slabs that
didn’t quite fit together. And his skin was no longer a warm brown but
the color of a ham that had been left far too long in the smokehouse,
muddy red with settled blood and too much hickory smoke, dark and
marbled.
Manuel seethe with a hatred so intense that it couldn’t have been
engendered solely by Bobby’s smartass remarks. This hatred was aimed at