Bio-Strike

Felix tipped his head toward the trailer at the far end of the scrapyard.

“That right over there is my private office, comprende?”

Lathrop looked at him.

“You have a fresh mouth, sonny. Ought to consider finishing school,” he said. “It did wonders for Enrique. Who’s the reason I’m here.”

Felix made an unsatisfactory attempt at minimizing how much that piqued his interest.

“Ain’t got to be disrespectful. All I’m saying, we both gentlemen, ought to give ourselves our props,” he said. “And what’s up with my uncle, anyway?”

“Main thing far as you’re concerned is I met with him today, and he happened to mention that he’s upset about you moving on Salazar without his nod.”

Felix struck a posture of bluff rejection lifted straight from some MTV hip-hop video, head pulled back, chest thrust forward.

* * *

“How’d he find out I got anything to do with that?” he asked. “And why he want to talk to you about it?”

Lathrop released a deep breath.

“Okay, time to cut the wiseass bullshit,” he said. “You didn’t hear me say our meeting was about you. Enrique made a comment, and I figured you might want to know what it was. Far as who clued him it’s you did the hijack, I don’t have the foggiest idea. Maybe you opened that big show-off’s mouth of yours to somebody with an even bigger one.”

Felix shook his head rapidly.

“No way, no way,” he said. “Besides, if Enrique’s in a burn about this, how come you didn’t put in a good word? You the man told me when Salazar’s shipment was coming. You the man told me Enrique wouldn’t have faith I could do the job. Told me to keep it under the fucking table till after the product’s turned over, split the earnings with him afterward, finally get him to recognize me. You the man, Lathrop.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m your guru. Or your lawyer. It’s not my place to jump into the middle of a family tiff. I gave you my best advice before, figured I’d give it now. No extra charge. Go talk to Enrique. Tell him the truth, be clear you weren’t intending to hold out on him. Just omit the fact it was me who put you onto the shipment.”

Felix tossed his head and did a kind of petulant shuffle, kicking the toe of his shoe into the dirt.

“Omit, right,” he muttered. “How I know it wasn’t you gave me up to my uncle?”

Lathrop expelled another long breath, glanced quickly around to be sure nobody was lurking amid the walls of the junk-metal canyon into which he’d lured Enrique, wanting to avoid making a mess of the punk’s trailer. A mess that would have to be scrubbed and sanitized before he could be on his way.

“I warned you about talking nasty,” he said. “You should have listened.”

Felix suddenly became still. Swallowed. His expression showing an awareness that he really had opened his mouth too wide this time.

“What’s that supposed to mean, man?” he said.

The silenced Glock nine appeared in Lathrop’s hand as if he’d snatched it out of nowhere.

“Means you’re gone, Felix,” Lathrop said. “Gonzo alonzo.”

He brought up the pistol and squeezed the trigger twice, putting two slugs into the precise center of Felix’s forehead before he knew what hit him.

Cleanup here was easy. Lathrop put on his gloves and disposed of the body in one of the junked cars down the aisle with a rusty but undamaged trunk lid, stuffing it inside the trunk, pushing the lid shut, even getting it to latch.

Then he went back to toss some dirt over the blood and skull fragments.

Lathrop wasn’t looking to be overly thorough concealing the kid’s remains. It really didn’t matter whether Felix was discovered by some Quiros stooge or eaten by foraging rodents. Just as long as nobody could pin anything on him.

Ten minutes later, he slipped out of the salvage yard unnoticed, anxious to get back home. Tired as he was, he meant to take a closer look at the videos he’d taken of Uncle Enrique and Blondie on the carousel.

Not to mention that his cats needed feeding and a little tender loving care before he fell into bed, the three of them having been left alone since very early that morning.

EIGHT

VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 6, 2001

Margaret Rene Doucette lived alone in a three-story ancestral townhouse in the heart of New Or-leans, attended by her servant of long years, an aging Creole woman named Elissa, who occupied the detached slave quarters out back. Engaged by Margaret Rene’s parents when she, their only child, was just nine or ten, Elissa had stayed on as caretaker of the house after it was willed to Margaret Rene as part of a large inheritance upon their sudden, untimely deaths.

At the time of the automobile collision that killed them in 1990, Margaret Rene was thirty-two years old, recently married to a financial consultant with a carriage trade brokerage firm, and three months expectant. Though she and her husband had purchased a new riverside home in Jefferson Parish, they decided to put that property up for sale and move into the Vieus Carre residence.

Despite her grief, Margaret Rene had found solace knowing the family she planned to raise would be embosomed in a place so full of sentimental attachments for her, where the spirits of her forebears seemed still to inhabit the high-ceilinged bedrooms and parlors, the graceful interior courtyard with its terra-cotta tiling and bowers of lush, tropical greenery, imbuing them with a healing and supportive warmth.

Since those days, a decade gone now, the hope of renewal that eased Margaret Rene’s sorrow had been peeled away from her like bloody strips of skin under a torturer’s flaying knife.

Her son — christened Jean David, after her father — had seemed a normal, if colicky, infant for the first six months of his life. But ominous signs of problems far worse than simple cramping had soon manifested. He’d had difficulty swallowing, and his food often would not stay down. There would be unpredictable spikes and dips of body temperature that could not be associated with common pediatric illnesses. When he was ten months old, Margaret Rene noticed an odd jerkiness to his movements and a gradual loss of previously acquired physical skills. His balance would fail even when he was holding the bars of his crib, and he would be unable to sit straight in a high chair. Playthings would drop from his straining grasp, his fingers sometimes clenching around his thumb as in a newborn — a fist that would lock tightly shut, the fingernails digging into his palm until it bruised, and on one occasion bled profusely.

In precautionary tones, the child’s doctors had recommended a blood sample be taken and sent to a laboratory specializing in the detection of lysosomal disorders, a term unfamiliar to Margaret Rene and her husband until then, broadly explained to characterize a range of defects in a type of cellular membrane. When clinicians at the lab noticed an almost total deficiency of galactosylceramide B, a bodily enzyme vital to the development of the brain and nervous system, they hastily forwarded the specimen to yet another medical facility in Philadelphia for further testing. More frightening, alien terms such as leukodystrophy and DNA mutation and myelin sheath were mentioned to the parents during this tensely waitful period. As Margaret Rene struggled to understand them, she had often felt as if she were listening to the indecipherable chants of the voodoo priests who had been said to wander the narrow streets of the Quarter in her girlhood.

The final diagnosis was devastating. Jean David was found to have globoid cell leukodystrophy, or Krabbe’s disease, a rare genetic disorder transmitted by a pair of carrier parents. The enzymic compound surrounding his nerve fibers was decayed, like insulation that had been eaten away from electrical wiring, causing the nerves themselves to degenerate and die. While the disease’s symptoms could be managed and possibly slowed, there was no cure, no stopping or reversing its progression. It was terminal in virtually all infantile cases. Only the length