CHAPTER 16
An alarm was blaring.
Lydia sat up naked in bed. She could still hear the alarm, but then she realized it was only the telephone. The clock read 5 A.M.
She snapped up the phone and yelled, “What!”
“You have a nice sleep?” a voice inquired.
This was outrageous; it was Chief White. “How come you’re calling me at five in the morning?” she complained. “You gave me the day off, remember?”
“I need ya to do me somethin’. I’d have the night boys do it ’cept they been out all night flaggin’ traffic. Some stoner done rolled fifteen thousand gallons of super unleaded all over the Route. My boys are plumb wore out and stinkin’ fierce of gas.”
“Okay, Chief. What do you want me to do?”
“Go out to agro. Them state guys are finally packing it up. Some geek named Latin is runnin’ the show. They’ll be trucking out by nine.”
“They got a prelim for us. Go pick it up.”
“All right,” Lydia groaned.
“Good girl. Report to me when you’re done. Now, this Latin guy’s got a bug up his bum the size of my Buick. Be nice to him or else he won’t tell you squat. Nose around, try and see what they’ve been up to. Use your” —White gave a typical hick laugh— “your feminine powers of persuasion.”
Lydia rang off, sputtering. White didn’t want to go himself because he figured Lydia’s tits and ass would prompt a more cooperative response. She suited up quickly, enjoying the early morning silence. Dawn had not yet broken when she pulled into the agriculture/agronomy site. State cadets were loading signs into a van. “Quarantine Area, Do Not Enter,” they read. Three semi rigs were parked in a row behind the stables. A state sergeant directed her to a wheeled trailer. Gas powered generators pumped racket into the air, like jackhammers. But the electricity had been fixed. Why would they need generators?
A work booted nerd in khakis met her at the trailer door. He looked bony, had short hair and a long neck. “My name is Dr. Hatton,” he said.
Lydia told him regrettably that she’d missed that issue.
He handed her a single piece of paper. “This the prelim?” she asked.
“There is no preliminary report. This is a state quarantine release form. It authorizes that your agro site can now be safely reoccupied.”
“Then what happened to the agro animals?”
“We’re not prepared to release any conclusions as of yet.”
“In other words,” Lydia observed, “you have no intention of cooperating with the local authorities.”
“I am the only authority here,” Dr. Hatton said.
“It’s none of your boss’s business… Buick?”
This might be fun. “You know what I think, Dr. Hatton? I think you’re not giving me answers because you don’t have any. You guys don’t know what you’re doing out here. You’re a bunch of pussies.”
Hatton was getting pissed. “Pussies?” he challenged.
“That’s right. Lightweights. You’ve been sitting out here for two days, blowing tax dollars and doing nothing.”
Hatton glowered.
“Did you at least autopsy some of the animals?”
His tension strained further. He was getting closer to the line she wanted him on. “Of course,” he said. “Dozens. There was an inconsistency in some aspects of the structural pathology.”
“Great answer, Doc. Show me.”
Hatton smiled. “You don’t have the stomach for it.”
Lydia laughed in his face. At D.C. she’d broken into hardhouses full of weeks old corpses of junkies. She’d hauled up maggot swollen floaters. She’d cut down drug stoolies who’d been hung upside down and gutted like deer. “I’ve seen things that would make your worst nightmare look like Ronald McDonaldland. You talk big, Hatton, but if you had any real guts, you’d show me what you’ve got in those rigs.”
Now Dr. Hatton’s true self was beginning to glimmer through. “It would be a pleasure,” he said.
He took her out to the closest semi rig. This would be his morgue on wheels; that’s what the generators were for, to run the coolers while the trucks were parked. Inside, buzzing tubes lit a tiny office. There was a water cooler, a coffeepot, and a little fridge for snacks.
“So we’re all pussies, is that it?” He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hood, then a plastic face shield. He looked ridiculous in it. “Well, I’ll show you what this pussy has been doing for the last two days.” He heaved open the metal door and led her in.
Inside was very cold. High coolers gusted chill and noise through metal grilles. In back, pairs of animals lay strapped to steel shelving, probably a dozen pairs. Each had been split like a cleaned fish; body cavities were stuffed with bagged organs, and an eye had been removed from each beast, to check ocular potassium levels, she assumed. This great bulk of bagged meat whelmed her.
Dr. Hatton stood by a metal table. On the table lay a dead horse. “You wanted to see? Well, take a look at this.”
He tossed her a small plastic pouch which contained several ounces of some red marbled gray mush. A tag on the bottom gave an index number, time and date of dissection, and Hatton’s initials. The next line read:
“They’re balls!” Hatton yelled at her. “Horse balls!”
Confusion screwed up Lydia’s face. “It’s just mush,” she said.
“They’re
Lydia had no idea what he meant. Hatton patted the horse on the table. “I was saving this baby to open for the people back at AHL, but what the hell! Who the fuck are you to come here and question my competence!”
“Doctor, I wasn’t—”
“Shut up!” Hatton barked. Then he laughed. “It’s show time!”
Lydia gasped. Hatton raised a sixteen inch Homelite chain saw. It started up on the first try. Hatton flipped down his visor and went to work. He delved the blade up into the animal’s top hind leg, through the joint. The sound was atrocious, a searing, hitching scream. Lydia almost couldn’t watch.
“This is what I’ve been doing the last two days, bitch!”
Hatton continued to saw. Clumped blood and shreds of muscle spat out of the meaty groove; his face-shield and coat were flecked with it. Then the horse’s leg flipped over on the floor. Hatton turned off the saw, then went right to work with a big autopsy scalpel, cutting a deep gash into the animal’s rear belly. He was a maniac. He grinned like a madman through the flecked visor.
“Lo!” he shouted. From the gash, bare handed, he yanked out a flap of yellowed tissue. “A little of the old mesovarium! See?” He threw it on the floor and ripped out more. “A little peritoneal tissue, a little stroma!”
What he withdrew next looked like a large strip of steak with a lump on the end. He slapped it down on the table. “See that?”
Lydia nodded rather morosely.
