Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [23]
“I guess you’re right. I guess you do have to spell it out. What are you saying, Stan?”
“I’m saying I have twenty-four hours to kill myself.”
“You’re not thinking about suicide?”
“No, I’m not thinking about it. I’m going to do it.”
“This is silly. Joel fell off a roof. He doesn’t have any disease. He hit his head.”
Beebe looked at my hands, grabbed one of them, then dropped it. “Christ! You got it, too!”
“Got what?”
“You have the shakes yesterday?”
“That woman chasing me all over town made me nervous.”
“Newcastle had the shakes. He goes out by himself on a seven-day hike. Dies of exposure. They figured he was on his way back when he went down. Day seven.”
“What do you mean, when he went down?”
“Same way Joel went down. Same way Jackie went down. It’s a syndrome, man.”
“I don’t see a syndrome. All I’m seeing is a whole lot of bad luck.”
“Newcastle . . . I figure it took about two days for him to die. They said from the look of him, he was on the ground the whole time. Some animal bit half his ear off, and he didn’t do anything about it.”
“I hadn’t heard that. Stan, you’re not really thinking about killing yourself?”
“I got a copy of the autopsy report. He had the hands, too. Like yours.”
“We’ve probably been using some bad detergent around here.”
“It’s not no soap. We been poisoned.”
“Is that what your doctor’s testing you for, poison?”
Beebe’s laugh had a hysterical component to it. He turned and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to be just like the Fire Plug over there in Alpine Estates.”
“Jackie got drunk and crashed her car.”
“Well, I’m drunk. Maybe I’ll do a better job of crashing my car than she did.”
“Joel slipped and fell off his roof.”
“Not how that happened, either.”
“Newcastle had a heart attack. He shouldn’t have been out in the woods alone.”
“My guess is we were all exposed to it on an alarm. Chemical or biological. It doesn’t matter. Once it’s through with you, you’re helpless. You want to end up like Joel, fine. But it ain’t for me.”
12. A BARREL ROLLS OFF A TRUCK
“Look,” said Stan. “Remember that story Newcastle told us? Happened in California twenty or thirty years ago? A barrel rolls off a truck onto the highway somewhere? They send a company of volunteers to check it out. The barrel doesn’t have any markings, so they roll it off the freeway and call the highway department to pick it up. It’s been smacked by a couple of cars and it’s leaking. Nobody wears any PPE. It turns out the barrel’s full of undiluted insecticide. The chemical enters their nervous systems through their skin, and seven of the nine responders end up in nursing homes. Brain-dead.”
“We’ve all heard that story,” I said. “But we haven’t investigated any barrels on the highway.”
“We did something.”
Stan’s morbid pessimism was beginning to get on my nerves. Worse than that, down deep somewhere I was starting to buy into this harebrained hypothesis.
Ian Hjorth had been so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was there, arms crossed in front of his muscular chest, listening quietly. A tall man in his late twenties with thinning blond hair and a penchant for pranks, Ian was well-read but not overly opinionated, intelligent but not particularly ambitious. Because of his fun-loving nature, and despite the fact that he teased me ruthlessly about my love life, Ian was one of my favorite people. He had a wife who was young and pretty and who worked for the city. They had a little girl with big brown teddy bear eyes. Britney called her Pimmy.
Ian said, “I don’t buy it, Stan. Newcastle died over a month ago. Joel fell off his roof a week later. Then Jackie had her accident. Okay. Maybe those things happened around the same time. But now we’re a month later. If you guys got this on the same alarm, don’t you think all five of you would come down with it together?”
“There’s nothing says it has to happen that way,” said Beebe. “You heard about the state patrolman who was at