Predator

15

The next morning, Tuesday, clouds pile up from the distant sea and the pregnant dead thing is stiff on the ground and flies have found it.

“Now look what you did. Killed all your children, didn’t you? Stupid thing.”

Hog nudges it with his boot. Flies scatter like sparks. He watches as they buzz back to the gory, coagulated head. He stares at the stiff, dead thing and the flies crawling on it. He stares at it, not bothered by it. He squats beside it, getting close enough to craze the flies again and now he smells it. He gets a whiff of death, a stench that in several days will be overpowering and noticeable an acre away, depending on the wind. Flies will lay their eggs in orifices and the wounds, and soon the carcass will team with maggots, but it won’t bother him. He likes to watch what death does.

He walks off toward the ruined house, the shotgun cradled in his arms. He listens to the distant rumble of traffic on South 27, but there is no reason for anybody to come out here. Eventually, there will be. But now there isn’t. He steps up on the rotting porch and a curling plank gives under his boots, and he shoves open the door, entering a dark, airless space thick with dust. Even on a clear day, it is dark and suffocating inside the house, and this morning it is worse because a thunderstorm is on the way. It iseight o’clockand almost as dark as night inside the house, and he begins to sweat.

“Is that you?” The voice sounds from the darkness, from the rear of the house, where the voice ought to be.

Against a wall is a makeshift table of plywood and cinder blocks, and on top is a small glass fish tank. He points the shotgun at the tank and pushes the pressure pad on the slide, and the xenon light flashes brilliantly on glass and illuminates the black shape of the tarantula inside. It is motionless on sandy dirt and wood chips, poised like a dark hand next to its water sponge and favorite rock. In a corner of the tank, small crickets stir in the light, disturbed by it.

“Come talk to me,” the voice calls out, demanding but weaker than it was not even a day ago.

He isn’t sure if he is glad the voice is alive, but he probably is. He takes the lid off the tank and talks quietly, sweetly, to the spider. Its abdomen is balding and crusty with dried glue and pale yellow blood, and hatred wraps around him as he thinks about why it is bald and what caused it to almost bleed to death. The spider’s hair won’t grow back until he molts, and maybe he will heal and maybe he won’t.

“You know whose fault it is, don’t you?” he says to the spider. “And I did something about it, didn’t I?”

“Come here,” the voice calls out. “Do you hear me?”

The spider doesn’t move. He might die. There’s a good chance he will.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so much. I know you must be lonely,” he says to the spider. “I couldn’t take you with me because of your condition. It was a very long drive. Cold, too.”

He reaches inside the glass tank and gently strokes the spider. It barely moves.

“Is that you?” The voice is weaker and hoarse but demanding.

He tries to imagine what it will be like when the voice is gone, and he thinks about the dead thing, stiff and fly-infested on the dirt.

“Is that you?”

He keeps his finger pressed against the pressure pad, and the light points where the shotgun points, illuminating wooden flooring filthy with dirt and the hulls of dried-out insect eggs. His boots move behind the moving light.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

Inside the fire arms and tool marks lab, Joe Amos zips a Harley-Davidson black leather jacket around an eighty-pound block of ordnance gelatin. On top is a smaller block weighing twenty pounds, and it wears a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a black do-rag with a skull-and-bones pattern.

Joe steps back to admire his work. He is pleased but a little tired. He stayed up late with his newest teacher’s pet. He drank too much wine.

“It’s funny, isn’t it,” he says to Jenny.

“Funny but disgusting. You’d better not let him know. I hear he’s not somebody to tangle with,” she says, sitting on a countertop.

“The person not to tangle with is me. I’m thinking of putting red food coloring in a batch. To look more like blood.”

“Cool.”

“Add a little brown, and maybe it will look like it’s decomposing. Maybe find a way to make it stink.”

“You and your hell scenes.”

“My mind never stops. My back hurts,” he says, admiring his work. “I hurt my damn back and I’m suing her.”

The gelatin, an elastic transparent material comprised of denatured animal bone and connective-tissue collagen, isn’t easy to handle, and the blocks he has dressed up were hard as hell to transfer from the ice chests to the back padded wall of the indoor firing range. The lab door is locked. The red light on the wall outside is on, warning that the range is hot.

“All dressed up with no place to go,” he says to the unappetizing mass.

More properly known as gelatin hydrolysate, it is also used in shampoos and conditioners, lipsticks, protein drinks, arthritis relief formulas and many other products that Joe will never touch the rest of his life. He won’t even kiss his fiancee if she is wearing lipstick, not anymore. Last time he did, he closed his eyes as her lips pressed against his and suddenly he imagined cow, pig and fish shit boiling in a huge pot. He reads labels now. If hydrolyzed animal protein is listed in the ingredients, the item goes into the trash or back on the shelf.

Properly prepared, ordnance gelatin simulates human flesh. It is almost as good a medium as swine tissue, which Joe would prefer. He’s heard of firearms labs that shoot up dead swine to test bullet penetration and expansion in a multitude of different situations. He would rather shoot up a hog. He would rather dress up a big hog carcass to look like a person and let the students riddle it with bullets from different distances and with different weapons and ammunition. That would be a good hell scene. A more hellish one would be to shoot a live hog, but Scarpetta would never allow it. She wouldn’t even hear of the students shooting a dead one.

“It won’t do any good to try to sue her,” Jenny is saying. “She’s also a lawyer.”

“Big shit.”

“Well, from what you tell me, you tried that before and didn’t get anywhere. Anyway, Lucy’s the one with all the money. I hear she thinks she’s something. I’ve never met her. None of us have.”

“You’re not missing anything. One of these days, someone will put her in her place.”

“Like you?”

“Maybe I already am.” He smiles. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not leaving here without my share. I deserve something after all the shit she’s put me through.” And now he’s thinking about Scarpetta again. “She treats me like shit.”

“Maybe I’ll meet Lucy before I graduate,” Jenny says thoughtfully, sitting on the counter, staring at him and the gelatin man he has dressed up like Marino.

“They’re all crap,” he says. “The fucking trinity. Well, I’ve got a little surprise for them.”

“What?”

“You’ll see. Maybe I’ll share it with you.”

“What is it?”

“Put it this way,” he says. “I’m getting something out of this. She underestimates me, and that’s a huge mistake. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of laughs.”

Part of his fellowship entails his assisting Scarpetta in the Broward County morgue, where she treats him like a common laborer, forcing him to suture up the bodies after autopsies and count the pills in bottles of prescription drugs that come in with the dead and catalogue personal effects as if he is a lowly morgue assistant and not a doctor. She has made it his responsibility to weigh, measure, photograph and undress the bodies, and to sift through any disgusting mess that might linger in the bottom of a body bag, especially if it is putrid, maggot-infested slop from a floater, or rancid flesh and bones from partially skeletonized remains. Most insulting is the chore of mixing up ten percent ordnance gelatin for the ballistic gelatin blocks used by the scientists and students.

“Why? Give me one good reason,” he said to Scarpetta when she gave him the assignment last summer.

“It’s part of your training, Joe,” she replied in her typically unflappable way.

“I’m training to be a forensic pathologist, not a lab tech or a cook,” he complained.

“My method is to train forensic fellows from the ground up,” she said. “There isn’t anything you shouldn’t be able or willing to do.”

“Oh. And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve made ordnance jelly blocks, that you used to do that when you were getting started,” he said.

“I still do it and am happy to pass along my favorite recipe,” she replied. “I prefer Vyse but Kind amp; Knox Type two-fifty-A will do just fine. Always start with cold water, between seven and ten degrees centigrade, and add the gelatin to the water and not the other way around. Keep stirring, but not vigorously, because you don’t want to introduce air. Add two-point-five milliliters of Foam Eater per twenty-pound block and make sure the mold pan is whistle-clean. For the piece de resistance, add point-five milliliters of cinnamon oil.”

“That’s cute.”

“Cinnamon oil prevents fungus growth,” she said.

She wrote out her personal recipe and then an equipment list that included a triple-beam balance, graduated pitcher, paint stirrer, 12cc hypodermic syringe, propionic acid, aquarium hose, aluminum foil, large spoon and so on, and next gave him a Martha Stewart demonstration in the lab kitchen, as if that makes it all fine and dandy when he’s scooping animal-pieces-and-parts powder out of twenty-five-pound drums and weighing and curing and lifting or dragging huge, heavy pans and placing them inside ice chests or the walk-in refrigerator and then making sure the students gather at the indoor range or outdoor rifle deck before the damn things start deteriorating, because they do. They melt like Jell-O and are best when served no longer than twenty minutes after removal from refrigeration, depending on the ambient temperature of the test environment.

He retrieves a window screen from a storage closet and props it flush against the Harley-outfitted blocks of ordnance gelatin, then puts on hearing protectors and protective glasses. He nods for Jenny to do the same. He picks up a stainless-steel Baretta 92, a top-of-the-line double-action pistol with a tritium front post sight. He loads a magazine with 147-grain Speer Gold Dot ammunition, which has six serrations around the rim of the hollowpoint so the projectile will expand or blossom even after passing through clothing as heavy as four layers of denim or a thick leather motorcycle jacket.

What will be different in this test-fire is the mesh pattern produced when the bullet passes through the window screen before ripping through the Harley jacket and buzz-sawing a swath through the chest of Mr. Jell-O, as he calls his ordnance-gelatin test dummies.

He racks back the slide and fires fifteen rounds, imagining Mr. Jell-O is Marino.