jacket, headed back into the bathroom. The water in the tub felt like it was just this side of boiling as I eased myself down into it, which was just about the temperature I was looking for. I sat in the steaming water, gulping Scotch, until I felt a new kind of numbness, a warm sensation of comfort, slowly oozing through me.
And with the returning warmth inside and outside my body returned the realization that there was no time even to rest, much less get drunk. Garth was still the prisoner of men who thought nothing of killing themselves, and thus would undoubtedly kill him in the wink of an eye if the mood so struck them; I had to find him before the mood struck. It was not yet noon; now that I was out of danger, I certainly could not waste time sloshing around in a tub and getting wasted. I set the remainder of my drink down on the floor, got out of the tub, and toweled myself off as I reflected on the thought that there was only one place left to go. As far as I was concerned, the police should have gone there in the first place-but they hadn't, and probably wouldn't.
Lieutenant Malachy McCloskey and the rest of the NYPD could do what they wanted, but I was going to find a way to drop in on Mr. Big himself.
Constantly feeling like I was moving in a dream, I carefully cleaned, oiled, and reloaded my Seecamp, which I'd somehow managed to hang onto. I was just putting the gun in the pocket of my parka when the phone rang. I hesitated, then picked up the receiver.
'Yeah?'
'Frederickson?! What the fuck's going on?! What were you doing down by the river, and where's the stiff you were talking about?!'
Suddenly I started getting a fresh chill. 'You didn't find him, Lieutenant?'
'Find who?! Frederickson-!'
'Tanker Thompson-the ex-football player. He killed William Kenecky, and he tried to kill me. Have you spoken to Henry Blaisdel?'
'Frederickson, you stay right where you are! I'm sending a squad car to pick you up. You're coming over here to the precinct station, and then you and I are going to have a long talk.'
'You bet, Lieutenant,' I said, and hung up.
I started for the door, suddenly felt my head begin to spin, and promptly fell on my face. I didn't pass out, but for long moments I felt as if I were clinging to the edge of a void, about to fall in. I clung to consciousness, taking deep breaths. Finally my head cleared. I managed to get to my feet, although I swayed. Mr. Big was obviously going to have to wait until I'd had some proper rest and my body had had time to recover from the pretty good shock it had been given during the course of my battle with Tanker Thompson and subsequent dousing in the icy Hudson.
But I couldn't do my resting in the apartment, because, if I did, I was more than a little likely to end up resting in a jail cell. Moving slowly but deliberately, I packed a gym bag with a couple of changes of underwear, toilet articles, some tools of the trade, and a clean shirt. Then I took the elevator down, locked up, and started hoofing it toward the Sheraton Hotel, a few blocks away. I was just turning a corner when I heard the screech of brakes behind me. I looked around, saw two squad cars, lights flashing, pull up to the curb in front of the brownstone. I kept walking.
11
I slept right around the clock, and then some, and finally woke myself up with an enormous sneeze, followed by two or three lesser sneezelets. I wrapped myself in an oversize bath towel for a robe, called room service, and ordered a pot of coffee, French toast, home fried potatoes, bacon, a bottle of aspirin, and a bottle of vitamin C. I needed to keep up my strength-or get it back. While I was waiting for the food to arrive, I shuffled off to the bathroom to brush my teeth and shave. I didn't feel all that hot, and I was convinced that I could sleep for another week if I really put my mind to it. On the other hand, considering what I'd been through, I decided I wasn't feeling all that bad; I knew I was slightly feverish, but that beat being dead.
My order arrived about the time I finished getting dressed. I took two aspirins and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C, followed that with the food and coffee. By the time I'd finished eating and drained the pot of coffee, I was ready to roll.
It was time to go visiting.
I dressed in jeans, a sweat shirt, and sneakers, strapped the Seecamp in its holster to my ankle, then double-checked the other items in my gym bag to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything in my rush to get out of the apartment and escape the long arm and time-consuming inquisitiveness of the law. Everything was there. I zipped up the bag, called down to the desk to tell them to send the bill to my office, then left.
The Blaisdel Building was only a few blocks away, but I had the hotel doorman hustle me up a cab anyway; I assumed Malachy McCloskey was more than a bit irritated with me, and I didn't want to risk being spotted on the street and picked up by the police. I told the cabbie to stop a half block away, and I looked around before getting out; there were no police around. When a large knot of pedestrians came by, I hurriedly paid the driver, settled in with the crowd of walkers, then darted into the entrance to the Blaisdel Building.
Although I had strongly disapproved at the time, I was now grateful that Garth had checked out the building's security system; now I knew what I was up against as I searched for a way to get up to Henry Blaisdel's penthouse triplex. I was going to have to be wary of all sorts of sophisticated alarm devices. Still, there had to be a way to get up there, short of scaling the building, and if I had to shoot a few Born Again Christian Athletes for Christ on my way up, I was more than ready.
But first I wanted to check out the Nuvironment offices-or what used to be the Nuvironment offices-on the off chance that Peter Patton, before he had been so unceremoniously ousted from office and life by Tanker Thompson, might have left something behind that could lead me to Garth, or Vicky Brown, or both.
I hurried through the lobby and down the narrow, far corridor to the locked door at the end where Patton had taken me on my initial visit. I looked back down the corridor to make sure nobody was watching me, then took a set of lock picks out of my gym bag, huddled over the lock, and went to work. It wasn't an expensive lock, and I got lucky on my third try; the door clicked open, and I went through. The private elevator in the vestibule was down, its door open. I stepped in, drew out my Seecamp, then pressed the single button that would take me to the Nuvironment offices on the ninth floor.
The first thing that hit me when the elevator door sighed open was a blast of hot air. It must have been ninety degrees in the gold-carpeted reception area, and I couldn't understand why anyone would have turned up the thermostat before they left.
The second thing that hit me, as I passed through the heavy door of smoked glass, was the smell of rotting flesh. I gagged, took a handkerchief out of my pocket, and put it over my nose and mouth. Then I started down the central corridor, giving Peter Patton's spacious office a cursory glance. Nobody was home.
There was a lot of square footage in the Nuvironment offices, including what looked like research labs of various sorts and open workplaces. Somebody-Tanker Thompson, I presumed, acting on instructions from God-had really trashed the place; every computer on the floor had been reduced to a tangle of steel and plastic, smashed circuitry, dangling wires, and all of the drawers in the desks had been pulled out and emptied. As far as I could tell, there wasn't a scrap of anything, anywhere, that would afford the slightest clue as to why Nuvironment had closed up shop, what they thought-or knew-was going to happen on New Year's Eve, or where they might be holding Garth.
There was one very large room where I suspected some answers might have been. In the center of the room was a huge display stand, a kind of great wooden box on legs, surrounded by shards of plastic. There were marks on the empty walls where maps or charts might have been hanging. The entire floor was covered with ooze, a mixture of water and sand littered with what appeared to be electrical components and large swatches of rotted vegetation. Judging from the size of the room and the depth of the mire on the floor, I judged that the container that had been on the display stand had held upwards of a thousand gallons of water. I was certain that what had been demolished had been a model of a biosphere.
Off to my right, half submerged in the ooze and caught on a piece of broken plastic, there was what appeared to be a piece of posterboard. I sloshed over and picked it up. In black letters against a pale blue background was written the word EDEN.
