Predator

21

The CITGO station is getting busy with truckers who park their semis behind the food mart and off to the side of the Chickee Hut restaurant, line them up at the edge of the woods and sleep in them and probably have sex in them.

The truckers eat at the Chickee Hut, which is misspelled because the people who come here are too ignorant to know how to spell chikee and probably don’t even know what it is. Chikee is a Seminole word, and even the Seminoles can’t spell it.

The ignorant truckers live from mile to mile and pull over here to spend their money at the food mart, where there is plenty of diesel fuel, beer, hotdogs and cigars, and a selection of folding knives in a glass case. They can play pool in the Golden Tee game room and get their trucks repaired at the CB antenna or tire services. The CITGO is a full-service stop out in the middle of nothing, where people come and go and mind their own business. Nobody bothers Hog. They barely look at him, so many people in and out, hardly anybody to see him twice, except the guy who works in the Chickee Hut restaurant.

It is behind a chain-link fence at the edge of the parking lot. Signs posted on the fence announce that solicitors will be prosecuted and the only dogs allowed are K9s, and wildlife can enter at its own risk. There is plenty of wildlife at night, but Hog wouldn’t know about it firsthand because he doesn’t waste money in the game room, not on pool or the jukebox. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t want sex with any of the women at the CITGO.

They are disgusting in skimpy shorts and tight tops, their faces made harsh by too much cheap makeup and too much sun. They sit in the open-air restaurant or at the bar, which is nothing but a roof thatched with palmetto leaves and a scarred wooden counter lined with eight stools. They eat dinner specials like BBQ ribs and meat-loaf and country-fried steak, and they drink. The food is good and cooked right there on the premises. Hog likes the trucker burger, and it’s only three ninety-five. A grilled cheese is three dollars and a quarter. Cheap, disgusting women, bad things happen to women like that. They deserve it.

They want it.

They tell everyone.

“I’ll have a grilled cheese to go,” Hog says to the man behind the bar. “And a trucker burger for here.”

The man has a big belly and wears a soiled white apron. He is busy popping caps off dripping bottles of beer that he keeps on ice inside tubs. The man with the big belly has waited on him before but never seems to remember him.

“You want the grilled cheese the same time as your burger?” he asks, sliding two bottles of beer closer to a trucker and his lady who are already drunk.

“Just make sure the grilled cheese is wrapped to go.”

“I asked you if you wanted them at the same time.” He isn’t annoyed but rather indifferent about it.

“That would be fine.”

“What do you want to drink?” the man with the big belly asks as he opens another beer.

“Plain water.”

“Now what the hell is plain water?” the drunk trucker asks loudly as his lady giggles and presses her breast against his big, tattooed arm. “Water you get on an air-plane?”

“Just plain water,” Hog says to the man behind the bar.

“I don’t like nothing plain, do I baby?” the drunk trucker’s drunk girlfriend slurs, gripping the stool with her plump legs in their tight shorts, her plump breasts bulging from her low-cut top.

“So where you heading?” the drunk girlfriend asks.

“North,” he says. “Eventually.”

“Well you be careful driving around down here all by your lonesome,” the woman slurs. “There’s a lot of crazies.”

Do we have any idea where he is?” Scarpetta asks Rose. “He’s not in his office and he’s not answering his cell phone. When I spoke to him after staff meeting and said you needed to see him, he told me he had an errand to run and would be right back,” Rose reminds her. “That was an hour and a half ago.”

“What time did you say we should leave for the airport?” Scarpetta looks out the window at palm trees shaking in the gusting wind and thinks again about firing him. “We’re going to have a thunderstorm, a bad one. That figures. Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait for him. I should just leave.”

“Your flight’s not untilsix thirty,” Rose says as she hands Scarpetta several phone messages.

“I don’t know why I’m bothering. Why am I bothering to talk to him?” Scarpetta glances through the messages.

Rose looks at her in a way that only Rose can. She stands quietly, thoughtfully, in the doorway, her white hair swept up and pinned back in a French twist, her gray linen suit out of style but elegant and crisp. After ten years, her gray lizard-skin pumps still look new.

“One minute you want to talk to him, the next you don’t. What is it?” Rose remarks.

“I guess I should go.”

“I didn’t say which is it. I asked what is it.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. I keep thinking about firing him, but I’d rather resign than do that.”

“You could take the position of chief,” Rose reminds her. “They’d force Dr. Bronson to retire if you’d agree, and maybe you should seriously consider it.”

Rose knows what she’s doing. She can seem very sincere when suggesting something that she secretly doesn’t want Scarpetta to do, and the result is predicable.

“No thank you,” Scarpetta says adamantly. “Been there, done that, and in case you’ve forgotten, Marino’s one of their investigators, so I wouldn’t exactly get away from him by resigning from the Academy and ending up at the ME’s office full-time. Who’s Mrs. Simister and what church?” she asks, puzzling over one of the phone messages.

“I don’t know who she is, but she acted as if she knows you.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She called a few minutes ago and said she wanted to talk to you about some missing family in theWestLakeParkarea. She didn’t leave her number, said she’d call back.”

“What missing family? Here inHollywood?”

“That’s what she said. Let’s see, you’re flying out ofMiami, unfortunately. Worst airport on earth. I’d say we don’t need to leave… well, you know the traffic down here. Maybe we should leave as early as four. But we’re not going anywhere until I check on your flight.”

“You’re sure I’m in first class? And it’s not been cancelled.”

“I have your printed reservation, but you’re going to have to check in because it’s last-minute.”

“Can you believe it? They cancel me, and now it’s last-minute because I had to rebook?”

“You’re all set.”

“No offense, but that’s what you said last month, Rose. And I wasn’t in the computer and ended up in coach. All the way toLos Angeles. And look what happened yesterday.”

“I confirmed it first thing this morning. I’ll do it again.”

“Do you think this is all about Marino’s hell scenes? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him.”

“I suspect he feels you shunned him after that, no longer trusted or respected him.”

“How can I trust his judgment?”

“I’m still not sure what Marino did,” Rose replies. “I typed up that particular hell scene and edited it just like I do all of his, and as I’ve told you before, his script didn’t include a hypodermic needle in that big, old, fat dead man’s pocket.”

“He set up the scene. He supervised it.”

“He swears someone else put that needle in the pocket. Probably she did. For money, which thankfully, she didn’t get. I don’t blame Marino for the way he feels. Hell scenes were his idea, and now Dr. Amos is doing them and getting all sorts of attention from the students while Marino’s treated like…”

“He’s not nice to the students. Not from day one.”

“Well, now it’s worse. They don’t know him and think he’s an ill tempered dinosaur, a cranky old has-been. And I know just how it feels to be treated like a cranky old has-been or, worse, to feel like one.”

“You’re anything but cranky or a has-been.”

“At least you agree that I’m old,” Rose says as she steps back through the doorway, adding, “I’ll try him again.”

Inside room 112 of the Last Stand motel, Joe sits at the cheap desk across from the cheap bed and checks the computer for Scarpetta’s plane reservation, jotting down the flight number and other information. He calls the airline.

After five minutes of dead time on hold, he gets a real person.

“I need to change a reservation,” he says.

He recites the information, then changes the seating to coach, as far back in the plane as is available, preferably a middle seat, because his boss doesn’t like windows or the aisle. Just like he did last time so successfully, when she was flying toLos Angeles. He could cancel her flight again. But this is more fun.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about an E-ticket?”

“No sir, a change this close to departure, and you’re going to have to check in at the desk.”

He hangs up, exhilarated, as he imagines the Almighty Scarpetta trapped between two strangers, hopefully two enormous, smelly ones for three hours. He smiles as he plugs a digital recorder into his super hybrid system telephone handset. The window air-conditioning unit rattles loudly but is ineffective. He is getting uncomfortably warm and detects the faint, foul stench of rotting meat from a recent hell scene that included racks of raw pork ribs, beef liver and chicken skin rolled up in carpet and hidden beneath closet flooring.

He scheduled the exercise right after a special lunch he charged to the Academy that included barbecue ribs and rice and resulted in several students gagging when the foul bundle was discovered oozing with rotting fluids and teeming with maggots. In their haste to recover the simulated human remains and clear the scene, Team A neglected to notice a torn bit of fingernail that was also beneath the flooring, lost in the stinking, putrid slop, and as it turned out, that piece of evidence was the only one that could have revealed the identity of the killer.

Joe lights a cigar as he fondly remembers the success of that hell scene, a success made all the better because of Marino’s outrage, his insistence that Joe once again had stolen an idea from him. The big bumpkin cop has yet to figure out that Lucy’s choice of a communications-monitoring system that interfaces with the Academy’s PBX means that given the appropriate security clearance, one can monitor whomever he pleases in almost any way imaginable.

Lucy was careless. The intrepid super-agent Lucy left her Treo-an ultra-high-tech palm-size communications device that is a personal digital assistant, cell phone, e-mail, camera and everything else-inside one of her helicopters. It happened almost a year ago. He’d barely started his fellowship when he had the most amazing bit of luck, was in the hangar with one of the students, an especially pretty one, showing her Lucy’s helicopters when he happened to notice a Treo inside the Bell 407.

Lucy’s Treo.

She was still logged on. He didn’t need her password to access everything in it. He kept the Treo long enough to download all its files before returning it to the helicopter, leaving it on the floor, partially under a seat, where Lucy found it later that day, having no idea what had happened. She still has no idea.

Joe has passwords, dozens of them, including Lucy’s system-administrator password, which enables her and now him to access and alter the computer and telecommunications systems of the South Florida regional headquarters, the central headquarters in Knoxville, satellite offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Benton Wesley and histop-secret PREDATOR research study and everything else he and Scarpetta confide in each other. Joe can redirect files and e-mail, get hold of the unlisted phone numbers of anybody who has ever had anything to do with the Academy, wreak havoc. His fellowship ends in a month, and by the time he moves on, and he will in a big way, he might just have succeeded in causing the Academy to implode and everybody, especially the big stupid thug Marino and the overbearing Scarpetta, to hate each other.

It is easy to monitor the big dope’s office line, to secretly activate his speakerphone so it is like having an open mic in the room. Marino dictates everything, including his hell scenes, and Rose types them up because he can’t spell, has terrible grammar, rarely reads and is practically illiterate.

Joe feels a rush of euphoria as he taps cigar ash into a Coke can and logs into the PBX system. He accesses Marino’s office line, activates the speakerphone to see if he is in and up to something.