Bio-Strike

Or had he?

Excited, Lathrop indulged his urge to confirm it.

“Exit Profiler, run video,” he said into his mike, watching the gondola pull away from him.

Another two voice commands, and the scene was replayed on his eyeglass display.

A thrill shot from his spine into his arms and fingertips. Beautiful. And to think a few seconds ago, he’d felt let down.

He supposed he could have hung around some more, drifted among the crowd until he’d observed where Quiros and his lady companion headed once they left the ride. But experience told him it was time to fold. And he was sure they’d be going their separate ways, at any rate.

Enrique had gotten what he came for. As had Lathrop himself.

Thinking he couldn’t be happier with his afternoon’s work, Lathrop turned from the carousel and took the walkway back toward the parking lot.

“Three Dog Night. Jefferson Airplane. The Troggs,” Ricci read aloud, leaning over the selection tabs on the big vintage jukebox in Nimec’s poolroom. “Got to admit, Pete, you’re—”

“A wild thing?” Nimec snapped his fingers.

“Groovy,” Ricci said.

Nimec grinned.

“That’s the same model juke that was in the hall where I spent the whole summer of ’68 with my father. A Wurlitzer 2600.” He patted the machine’s fake wood-grain side panel. “Same songs, too. Three selections for a quarter, ten for fifty cents.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Must’ve been some year.”

“We were on a streak, and flush for a change. Couldn’t miss the sweet spot on a cue ball for anything,” he said. “I don’t think it would’ve mattered if we’d been trussed and blindfolded, which is how I bet some of the mugs considered dealing with us before they paid up. These were some hard, tough sons of bitches, let me tell you.”

“How come they behaved?”

“My old man was harder and tougher.”

Ricci nodded.

Nimec went around the soda bar. It was white with a red Coca-Cola bottle-cap design on the base, chrome trim along the counter’s edge, and a half-dozen white stools. Everything looked a little grubby. The chrome finish was scratched and dulled in places. There were cigarette burns on the countertop. Some crumbled and yellowed padding was pushing through a tear in the leatherette cushion of one of the stools.

“How about something to drink?” Nimec said from behind the pump. “The cola’s got the right proportions of syrup and fizz. And I have frosty mugs. Or there’s beer, if you want.”

Ricci sat on one of the stools, inhaled air thick with the odor of stale cigarettes and cheap cologne.

“Better make it soda,” he said. “I start out hugging a drink, three hours later I wind up wrestling with one. Like that Bible story, when Christ wrestles with Satan in the desert.”

Nimec looked at him.

“Except,” he said, “Jesus, you’re not.”

Ricci gave a vague impression of amusement.

“The truth shall set you free,” he said.

Nimec poured two colas from the fountain, puffs of condensation dispersing from the ice-cold mugs as he filled them and then handed one to Ricci across the countertop.

They drank in silence. Then Ricci lowered the mug from his lips with an ahhh of appreciation.

“Good,” he said. “Not too fizzy, not too syrupy.”

Nimec smiled.

Still holding the mug by the handle, Ricci made a scratch in the thin rime of ice on its outer curvature with his thumbnail.

“You going to tell me why I was invited here?”

Nimec gave him a nod. “Your RDT proposal’s been rubber-stamped on a trial basis,” he said. “I figured you’d be pleased. And I wanted to give you my congratulations in person rather than over the phone.”

Ricci sat there looking at him for a long moment.

“Thanks, Pete,” he said. “And not just for the well wishes.”

Nimec shook his head. “I don’t deserve any credit for this. The idea was yours. You’re the one who sold Gord on it. Sold everybody on it. Some of us just took longer than others to realize they’d been persuaded.”

“And maybe wouldn’t have at all if you didn’t push.”

Nimec shrugged and said nothing.

“The ragin’ Cajun among the enlightened?” Ricci asked after a moment.

“To be honest, he’s not gung ho. But he’s willing to suspend his opposition and give things a fair chance.”

“Didn’t think fairness was one of his capacities.”

Nimec put down his mug and leaned slightly forward over the counter.

“About Thibodeau,” he said. “He’s a little headstrong, maybe going through some difficult personal times, I don’t know. But he’s also a good man, stand up to the bone.”

“And?”

“Your comment on the Pomona about the circumstances that got him shot was a low blow. He may have deserved it from you at the time, and I’m not going to be critical. But between us, his actions in Brazil weren’t careless or foolhardy. They were heroic, expedient, and they saved a lot of lives, very nearly at the cost of his own. I would hope you could acknowledge it.”

Ricci was briefly quiet.

“Say I do,” he said. “Say I even respect him for it. You asking me to admit that to anyone but you?”

Nimec shook his head.

“I know when I’m already running ahead,” he said.

They sat drinking their Cokes in the deliberate shabbiness of a pool parlor generated from thirty-five-year-old memories and impressions “So when can I start putting together the new section?” Ricci said after a while. “Soliciting volunteers for tryouts, that sort of thing?”

Nimec glanced at his watch.

“It’s three o’clock on the button,” he said. “You okay with about five after?”

Ricci gave him the barest smile and lifted his soda to his lips. The frost on the mug had now melted to leave behind glistening beads of moisture.

“Bottoms up,” he said.

* * *

On the books, Felix Quiros earned his bread from the family-owned automobile salvage business he managed on the outskirts of San Diego. But his veal was in the money he made shipping various hot American vehicles to countries throughout the world via Mexico.

Sometimes in broad daylight, mostly at night, these were driven into the fourteen-acre yard directly from the streets and garages where they were stolen. The spiffiest models would be rolled into long aluminum vans that would cart them across the border at illegal transit points. The less-desired vehicles were dismantled for parts in Felix’s chop shop.

As he gazed down between stacks of crushed automobile bodies in the dark of this chill, moonless November night, Lathrop could see a shadowy line of maybe five or six cars pass through the chicken-wire fence across the yard toward where the metal vans waited with their extended ramps. A couple of others were moving along a different gravel path toward the lifters, conveyers, and compactors in the recycling and demolition area.

It was almost like watching them roll into an automatic car wash, he thought. Neat.

“So, when I gonna find out why you got me here rattling my stones, instead of us meeting inside where it be nice and warm?” Felix said, standing there with Lathrop amid the rows of gutted and flattened vehicles. He hugged himself for warmth, rubbing his hands briskly over his shoulders. “What the fuck’s this about?”

“Privacy,” Lathrop said.