CHAPTER SEVEN

“Our employers are going to be unhappy,” Sylvester told Caleb.

“Very unhappy,” Lawrence agreed.

“Pissed,” Curly added for emphasis.

Caleb was uncomfortably aware that Lawrence had not put the gun away. He knew these guys played rough. They were Homeland, weren’t they? Jesus, was this prick going to shoot him now? He looked a question at Sylvester. And what was it about that one’s mouth anyway, he wondered fleetingly, it looked funny somehow? What did it remind him of?

Sylvester saw him look at the gun and motioned for Lawrence to put it away. Lawrence slipped it into the waistband of his trousers; not, Caleb noted, into his holster. It was quicker to grab a gun from the waistband than from a holster. Which only told him that the jerk still might shoot him before they were finished.

“Look,” he said, in a placating voice, “Let’s go to my office, why don’t we? We can talk safely there. Just in case that fruity janitor decided to hang around.”

The building that housed Wald-Med Pharmaceuticals had once been an apartment house, and not all of the apartments had been converted to labs and offices. Caleb’s office occupied one of the old apartments, still with its separate kitchen and a comfortable sitting area where he entertained visitors and a bedroom where he sometimes entertained women friends.

“Have a seat,” he gestured at the dark suits and nodded toward the sofa. “How about something to drink?”

“A beer for me,” Lawrence said. He sat on the small sofa and patted the seat for Curly to sit beside him.

At least he put the frigging gun away, Caleb thought with some relief.

“Same for me,” Curly said.

“I will have a Shirley Temple,” Sylvester sat by himself on one of the straight wooden chairs.

“Sorry, all I’ve got is Sprite,” Caleb said. He went into the kitchen and closed the door carefully behind himself. The lock slid to with a satisfying clink. Remembering the gun and the cold look Sylvester had given him, he flicked on the little television sitting on the kitchen counter. A closed circuit TV gave him a view of the adjoining room and the three men he had just left.

Just in case they mean to sneak up on me, he thought. Across the kitchen another door opened into a back corridor that led to a freight elevator just a few steps away. If he had to, if they tried to pull anything, he could make a fast exit while they were breaking in this door.

What really pissed him was that, what had happened was not in any way his fault. It was entirely her fault, the bitch, he thought angrily. Melissa Hyde. She was the one who had betrayed him. She deserved what she had gotten.

But you could just bet these guys were blaming him for everything nevertheless. He would not put it past them to decide to plug him after all, to save their own butts. That was the way the government boys worked. Hard asses, every one of them.

For the moment, though, his guests were seated where he had left them, waiting patiently, not even saying anything to one another. He took three glasses down from a cupboard wiped them on a pant leg and, keeping one eye glued to the television screen, peed carefully into the bottom of two of them and filled them with beer from the refrigerator, carefully so as to keep a good head of foam.

The Sprite was a little more difficult. The best he could do with that was cough up a big wad of phlegm: honk, hack, grrrmm and spit it into the glass with the soda pop. He stirred all three glasses carefully, set them on a tray, and brought them back into the sitting area, passing them around.

The gorillas immediately took hearty swigs of the beers he handed them. Sylvester sipped his Sprite decorously.

“No cherry?” he asked.

“Afraid there hasn’t been one of those around here for years,” Caleb said with a chortle.

“Har, har, har,” Curly laughed noisily, but the frowns from the other two quickly silenced him except for a faint hiss, like the air leaking out of a tire.

“Gosh, this is good beer,” Lawrence said, taking another hearty swig.

Curly slurped and smacked his lips. “Terrif’,” he said. “What kind is it?”

“It’s a special label. So now what do we do?” Caleb asked.

“It’s obvious. Now, you find the woman,” Sylvester said. “This Doctor Janet Jackle.”

Caleb considered that for a moment. “She must have the cat with her,” he said, thinking aloud. “The damn thing is the size of a sheepdog and eats small children, from what Melissa told me. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the two of them. A cat that size would be hard to miss. Meantime, there is still the other one, the one in the hospital, Melissa Hyde. She’s a problem, too. If she wakes up, she’s going to make trouble. She will tell them I was the one who conked her, not that Drag Thing the way I told the cops.”

“So, what’s the prob’? We just see she doesn’t wake up,” Curly said.

Which Caleb thought was a good idea, but Sylvester quickly disagreed. “Morons,” he said scornfully. “We need her alive. She is the one who can tell us the formula if we can’t get it any other way. She is the only one who knows it, right? So we have to see that she stays alive, at least until we get the Alley Thing formula. We just have to make sure we are the ones who are there when she wakes up.”

Caleb shook his head. “It won’t do any good,” he said. “She won’t tell me a thing. She’s totally pissed at me. The ungrateful bitch. That’s why I whacked her in the first place.”

“She will tell us, if we make her the right offer,” Sylvester said.

“Such as?” Caleb asked.

“Such as, we offer to trade her girlfriend for the formula.”

“But we haven’t got her girlfriend,” Caleb said.

“We will have to get her, then,” Sylvester said. “You will have to get her, won’t you?”

Shit, Caleb thought, who would ever have dreamed he would want to hook up with Janet Jackle, the über-dyke?

Sylvester set his Sprite aside and stood up. The gorillas quickly chugged their beers and did the same. “Next time,” Sylvester said, “I want a cherry.”

“The beer was great,” Lawrence said enthusiastically.

“What brand did you say it was?” Curly asked.

“It’s a Chinese beer,” Caleb said. “Yellow River. It’s hard to find.”

“I’ll look for it,” Lawrence said, and Curly nodded eagerly.

Sylvester looked around at the quasi-apartment. “We need to consolidate,” he said. “Stay close together till we get this dilemma resolved. Maybe we should move in here with you.”

Which Caleb definitely did not want, but he could see no alternative. “There’s two other apartments down the hall,” he said. “If a couple of you don’t mind doubling up, you could move into them.”

“I’ll take one,” Sylvester said. “You two can share the other.”

“That’s cool,” Lawrence said. Pffft from Curly.

“I have to tell you, though, they are kind of primitive,” Caleb warned. “They’ve got beds. Refrigerators. Showers. The basics. No television, though, nothing like that.”

“We won’t be able to watch TV?” Curly asked, dismayed. “I just hate it when I miss Sesame Street?”

“Ah, come on,” Lawrence said, giving him a playful punch on his massive shoulder. “We can find ways to occupy ourselves besides TV, can’t we?”

With a thunderous roar, Curly let fly a noxious cloud of gas.

“Jesus,” Caleb said. “You ought to do something about your condition. Maybe it’s diet.”

“Yeah, it’s probably something you ate recently,” Lawrence said.

This time the output was even louder and more malodorous.

Caleb pinched his nose between his fingers and Lawrence laughed. Sylvester single-mindedly ignored the interchange and pursed his lips.

What is about his mouth...? Caleb wondered.

“Find the woman,” Sylvester said. “And the cat.”

* * * *

“Where are you going with that patient?”

“Transfer,” Janet mumbled, keeping her head down so no one could get a good look at her face. She wheeled the bed and the IV trolley into the elevator.

“Wait,” the young intern started to say, but Janet pushed the button to close the elevator door.

“Sorry,” she said, “Emergency surgery.”

The door whooshed shut, leaving a puzzled looking doctor staring after her.

Though Janet had stolen the largest smock she could find in the supply closet, it was still far too small for her. The sleeves reached barely past her elbows, and she’d had to leave it unfastened in front. It was hardly surprising that the doctor had not been altogether convinced of her legitimacy.

Well, she only had to get across one more floor, she told herself, and through the emergency room—and they were always so busy there, it was unlikely anyone would try to stop her. If they did....

“Be brave,” she whispered to the unconscious Melissa. “I’ll have you out of here soon, where I can take proper care of you. I won’t leave you in here, where that evil Wald could find you. He’s bound to think of that eventually.”

The elevator door opened. Putting her head down again, Janet pushed the bed into the first floor corridor.

The emergency room was as packed and in as much of an uproar as she had predicted. No one even seemed to notice the enormous female doctor in the undersized tunic pushing an unconscious patient out the receiving doors.

A pair of medics rushed in with another patient just as she went out. Their ambulance sat empty at the dock, rear doors standing open, motor still running.

Janet wheeled the bed into the rear of the vehicle, fastened it down and closed the doors.

Inside the emergency room, EMT Luis Cordero heard the slam of a door and, curious, glanced through the glass doors to the arrival dock. To his disbelief, he saw someone jump behind the wheel of his ambulance and a moment later the vehicle began to back around.

“Hey, stop” he shouted, running toward the doors, “You can’t take that,” but he was too late. Even as he pushed through the doors, the ambulance jumped forward with a squeal of tires on pavement and careened down the drive at breakneck speed, almost colliding with another arriving ambulance.

* * * *

Melissa Hyde was gone, vanished from her hospital room.

Curly had been given the job of watching her until she regained consciousness. Sylvester had ordered him to change into jeans and a body-builder tee shirt for the assignment.

“But I won’t look like a real agent,” Curly had objected. He had only recently been ordained a real agent and he was inordinately proud of the regulation dark suit and what it symbolized. He was an American, a patriot, a part of the team, defending his country from evil. The way he saw it, you could not look like a true defender of the American way in jeans and a body shirt.

“You will look like a bodyguard,” Sylvester answered when he voiced his objection. “Which is what you will be.”

Curly did not even clearly understand why he was supposed to be guarding this dame. In his opinion, what they needed was to see that she stayed quiet permanently, and the best time to do that was while she was out cold. That way she couldn’t scream or put up a struggle. He might not be as smart as Sylvester, but he knew that much at least about defending the American way.

Sylvester had been very definite about wanting the woman alive, however. “See that no one else gets close to her,” he ordered, “Except for the doctors and the nurses, and you stick around whenever they are with her. And the minute she starts to come around, you phone me.”

The problem was, there was no one now to stick to. She wasn’t there. And the nurse on duty had no explanation to offer for the disappearance. She did not even want to go close to the room to see for herself, let alone into it.

All she could say was that there had been an intruder in bed with the patient, but when Curly checked, there was no sign of anyone, only a lingering smell reminiscent of wet hair, and a bedpan and a pee stain where someone had apparently dumped the bedpan on the floor.

Looking at the stain left by the puddle, he could not help but think that they were sure lackadaisical about bathroom cleanliness in this hospital. Whenever he got pee on the floor at home—and gosh, it was just one of those things that happened to everybody sometimes, wasn’t it—he always cleaned it up first thing, especially if it was a big puddle, like this one obviously had been. A few drops, okay, he could see leaving that where it was, as long as it didn’t stain the rug or get in your food, but a big puddle like this, in a hospital? Jeez?

“She was there, I tell you,” Nurse Kravitz insisted. “The patient, and there was another woman with her.”

Curly checked the notes Sylvester had given him. “Was the other one a skinny broad, about five foot five inches, hair....?” He read aloud from the description.

“No,” Nurse Kravitz interrupted sharply.

“No hair?” That was great news, the way he saw it. A bald woman would be easy to spot, since most of them had hair.

“No, I mean she was big,” Nurse Kravitz said. “She was enormous. Seven-foot-tall at least, eight-foot. I don’t know, maybe nine-foot, even.”

Curly looked at his notes again and shook his head. He had been instructed especially to watch out for this Janet Jackle broad and if she showed up to take her into custody. Obviously this couldn’t be her, though, not at seven or eight or nine feet tall. His notes clearly said five foot five inches. So that must have been somebody else, for sure.

“Probably this was just some crazy,” he said, “I bet she was a homeless person looking for a place to sack out. A wino, maybe, there’s a lot of them on the streets these days. That’s one of the things that Homeland Security is working to change, to make people’s lives safer from winos.”

“She threatened me,” Nurse Kravitz said with a sob, burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook convulsively.

Head Nurse Corinne Dickson, who was trying to make sense of the story and to placate an obviously hysterical Nurse Kravitz, said in a calming voice, “She threatened to harm you?”

“She threatened me with her pussy.”

Curly looked dumbfounded. He had trouble processing that bit of information. Nurse Dickson, who was known throughout the hospital for her unflappable professionalism, gave him an embarrassed look over the head of the weeping Gladys Kravitz’s.

“There now, Nurse Kravitz,” Nurse Dickson began in her most soothing voice.

“It snarled at me,” Nurse Kravitz cried, refusing to be mollified. “Her pussy. It crept across the room toward me and it snarled.” She did a hoarse imitation of a snarl that sounded more like she was clearing an asthmatic throat.

“Nurse Kravitz has been working double shifts,” Nurse Dickson told Curly in an apologetic voice. “It’s a very stressful job.”

Curly nodded. He had always thought pussies were mysterious things, having had no real experience of them except for that naughty coloring book Lawrence had given him and in which he was looking forward to coloring the pictures, and he had only the vaguest idea of what they might or might not be able to do. He had a difficult time, however, picturing one creeping across the floor, and he was almost certain that snarling was not a usual part of their repertoire.

“And she recited, ‘Oh, beautiful pussy, oh pussy my love, what a beautiful pussy you are, you are’.” Nurse Kravitz looked up at Curly through tear-flecked lashes. “The Owl and the Pussycat.”

“Jesus! There was an owl too?” Curly farted in trumpet tones.

“I’m not making this up,” Nurse Kravitz wailed.

* * * *

“I’m absolutely sure that it was this Drag Thing Jake and I saw, dancing down the street,” Teri said. “And I have to say, she was truly a sight. You couldn’t help but laugh.”

Teri lay sprawled across the bed, basking in the afterglow of a particularly erotic session of lovemaking. She had hardly been able to wait to get home, to her Peter.

“Unfortunately,” she added more soberly, “The reality is, Drag Thing is not really a laughing matter. When she starts mugging people, she is no longer a joke. Then she becomes a menace to society. And the menace must be removed.”

“That man is lying,” Peter said. A cloud of steam trailed his words from the bathroom.

“What makes you say that?”

“He was the one slapping the woman around,” Peter said.

“Peter, you weren’t even there when it happened, how could you possibly know that?” Teri asked.

The toilet flushed loudly. Peter appeared in the bathroom door, naked save for a damp towel draped over his shoulder. She gave him an approving look. She dearly did love his slim, sculptured body, like a swimmer’s or a gymnast’s. So many men had to work hard to keep that look, but with Peter it all came naturally.

She also sorely envied him. For her, it was an hour at the gym three times a week, and a good three-mile run every other day. He never even had to break a sweat.

“Caleb Wald, isn’t that who you said it was? Of Wald-Med Pharmaceuticals, right? Where I work nights, if you’ll recall.” He had not told her yet that he had been fired. At least, he thought he had been fired, though it was not altogether clear to him.

“You mean you know him?” Teri asked.

“Not exactly,” he said, “Not on a personal level. But let’s say I hear rumors. People talk.”

“But there were witnesses to the assault,” she said.

“Witnesses can lie, too, you know.” He tossed the towel aside and began to dress.

“It’s funny you should say that,” she said, her thoughts turning again to the mystery of Drag Thing, of who she was and where she had come from. “I felt the same thing myself. I was convinced that Caleb Wald was lying when I talked to him, and that Janet Jackle person certainly seemed to think he was. I thought so at first, anyway, until the man in the dark suit spoke up. He’s the one who said that Drag Thing....”

“There wasn’t anybody else there at the time Wald was slapping the woman around,” Peter said adamantly.

“You keep talking as if you were there.”

“It’s just...well, it’s just my intuition, is all,” he said.

“Yes, well, unfortunately, honey, intuition weighs less than eyewitness accounts. I just wish I had gotten their statements.”

“Exactly.”

He pulled jeans up over narrow hips and fastened them. Watching him, it occurred to her, not for the first time, that he looked a little peaked. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked, concerned.

“I think I picked up a little dose of something when I wasn’t careful.”

“You need to take better care of yourself, Bunny. Maybe you should take the night off,” she said. “Maybe we should both take the night off, now that I think of it. I’ll stay home, too, and spoon-feed you chicken soup. There’s a can in the cupboard.”

“No,” he said quickly. “I mean, there’s no one else to call at this late hour, to take my shift. I’ll be okay, don’t worry yourself.” He was afraid of what was happening to him, afraid it might happen right in front of Teri. Whatever it was, he added. He still couldn’t fathom it. But he felt pretty sure he didn’t want Teri to see it.

“Okay. You’re the boss.” She got up from the bed and went to the big oak armoire where she kept her uniforms. To her surprise, the door would not open. She tugged at it again, and realized that the key was missing from the lock, where they usually left it. “Why is this locked?” she asked.

“I....” He hesitated. “I moved your uniforms to the closet there,” he said finally.

“But why? What’s in here that’s so special I can’t see it?”

“Christmas is coming,” he said after only the briefest of pauses.

“Oh.” She gave him an uncertain look and started for the bathroom, but at the door she turned back to look worriedly at him. “Peter, you would tell me, wouldn’t you, if there were something wrong?” she said.

“Wrong? What way, wrong?” he asked innocently.

“Well, you know, with us, I guess is what I’m trying to say.” She smiled a bit timidly.

“Absolutely, there is nothing wrong between the two of us.” He said it with such sincerity that Teri could not possibly disbelieve him. She smiled again, more genuinely this time, and blew him a kiss.

“One thing that really puzzles me about this whole Drag Thing business,” she said from the bathroom, “is how he and I keep crossing paths. It’s as if something is drawing us together, as if there were some kind of bond between us. That’s silly, isn’t it? What connection could there possibly be between me and Drag Thing?” Without waiting for an answer, she started the shower.

The moment he heard the water running, Peter went to the dresser for his keys. Did I lock the armoire, he asked himself? Yes, he must have: there on his ring was the key that was normally just left in the door of the armoire. They had never had any reason to lock it. Even before he opened the armoire doors, however, he had a sinking expectation of what he would find.

It was just as he had feared: the armoire was filled with dresses. There was the blue one from before and a new one the color of fresh butter. He recognized that fabric, too. He had specifically selected it for an outfit for Teri. It really had been intended for a Christmas present, but this dress certainly would not do for her, not with her exquisite figure. This was the size of a circus tent.

He put his hands on his temples and squeezed hard. Nothing made sense any more. He thought of those dreams he had been having lately. They seemed so real that part of him had to believe they actually were happening to him, that he really had been there the night before when Caleb Wald had struck the woman in the alley. How could he have dreamed something that really happened?

A thought suddenly occurred to him: no, that could not have been him, not wearing either of these dresses. He took the blue one from the closet. Since he had last seen it, someone had added enormous ruffles at the neck and the sleeves and a sunburst of sequins on the bodice. It was incredibly vulgar.

More to the point, though, it was incredibly large, oceans too large for him. When he held it up in front of him the hem trailed across the floor. Grimalkin strolled up and sniffed disdainfully at it.

No, whatever the explanation was, he could not have worn this dress. He would have tripped over himself just trying to walk in it. This looked as if it had been made for someone eight feet tall.

“What does it all mean?” he asked the cat. Could someone else be sneaking in here and dressing up, and using his fabrics and sewing machine to whip up costumes? Surely that made even less sense than supposing he had been cavorting on the streets in one of these outfits—which was equally ridiculous.

The shower ended in the bathroom. He quickly closed the armoire, locked it again, and pocketed the keys. He would think about it all later, when Teri was gone. Right now, what he needed more than anything else was sleep. He felt like shit—as if he had been up all night.