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No one else had smelled anything, but Mitch, whose face had gone all red and puffy from the wallop of heat, said it was mustard gas. Invisible, almost odorless, and in about twelve hours his organs would start to rupture. He had to go to a hospital.
Thing was, Doe couldn’t let Mitch go to the hospital, couldn’t let him make up some bullshit story about how he got exposed to mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly like he could have been defending his trench against an offensive by the Germans. So they’d burned down the new lab, and Mitch had been the first guy to end up in the waste lagoon. Too bad, because he knew a lot of useful things.
Doe was up earlier than he would have liked and later than he should have been. He forced himself out of bed and hobbled around his bedroom, moving from closet to dresser and back again, keeping his legs wide apart to ease the pain. He wasn’t going to look at his balls anymore. He’d decided he would just not look. He’d wait a week and then look again, surprise himself by seeing a normal sack. That was much better than checking them every day like some sort of hypochondriac.
No one would have guessed from looking at his trailer, from looking at the stuff in his trailer, that he had a fat and fast-growing account in the Caymans, and that was just how he liked it. Sure, his trailer was a little bit bigger than most of the others in Meadowbrook Grove, a little bit more nicely kept. He had a girl come twice a week to pick up for him, so he didn’t need to bother with crap like laundry and putting away dishes. That’s why most people lived badly. They had to choose between the freedom of laziness and the tyra
Doe knew that a cleaning girl was the third way. In his case, he had a chunky sixteen-year-old with bad acne and droopy eyes. Her mother said she was slightly retarded, and Doe had no problem believing it, the way she hulked around, mumbling cheerfully to herself. But she cleaned with a thoroughness that bordered on obsession, and she didn’t steal or nose around. Even better, he almost never felt the urge to fuck around with her, ugly thing that she was. One time he thought about throwing her down and shoving it right into her asshole, purely on principle, because he could get away with it. Give her a cookie or a lollypop or something, and she’d be all right. But the phone rang or someone knocked on the door, and he was distracted.
First thing that morning, he staggered into the shower, angling himself so the water didn’t hit his balls. He stayed in there for a long time, maybe too long, but finally forced himself out, and after a cursory pass with the towel, he stumbled into loose-fitting jeans and a Tampa Bay Bucs T-shirt. With breakfast in hand, a bag of Doritos and a Pepsi from the fridge, he hit the truck.
Bastard was dead, and that was going to be a problem. Now he had to see to it that there were no other problems. He needed to do the rounds, make sure everything looked normal. Bastard had a family emergency, he might say. He had to take off, visit his dying mother, fuck his dying sister, it didn’t matter. Bastard found out he had colon cancer and had to go off for treatment. That might be good. Serves the fuck-stick right for messing with Karen. He deserved to have the world thinking he had ass cancer.
Meanwhile, Doe would have to get someone else real soon, because if production dried up, there was going to be trouble. Even if Doe understood in principle how to cook, he wasn’t about to risk getting an organ-melting blast of mustard gas. So until they could recruit a new cook, it would be business as usual. A great deal of the distribution went through the encyclopedia kids- those two assholes the Gambler kept close- so that wouldn’t be a problem. Same as always, they’d come to town once a month, go into neighborhoods, pass off to their dealers. Nice and neat. Cops didn’t look at them twice.
They weren’t the problem. The problem was the extracurricular product that the Gambler and B.B. didn’t know about. Things had been growing lately, and Doe had begun to move beyond the cover of bookmen. There were other distributors now, and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they’d whine. If their tweaking crankhead buyers didn’t get what they wanted, they’d do more than whine. They’d make trouble, they’d break into houses and knock off convenience stores and old ladies in the street to get their ten fucking dollars for their fix. They would get themselves arrested, and once these assholes were sitting across the interrogation table from the cops, too stupid to ask for a lawyer, they’d talk.
Doe drove out to the hog lot and parked his truck out back. He was alone, no chance he wasn’t, but even so he looked around carefully. He saw nothing but the pines, the undulating waste lagoon, a few egrets passing overhead, and a waddling trio of ducks- the ugly kind with gnarled red knobs on their beaks. An enormous toad, almost the size of a di
Mitch had designed the door to the lab so that it was practically invisible from the outside if you didn’t know where to look- just slats in the corrugated metal exterior of the hog lot. Doe slid his fingers inside and pulled the hidden latch outward. The door swung open and a blast of cool air hit him hard. He always winced. Always. Like the cool air might contain the same toxic cloud that killed Mitch. But it was just the AC, cranking hard. Unlike the hog lot proper, which he kept just cool enough to keep the hogs alive, the lab was downright chilly. If it went over sixty-five degrees, alarms went off to warn them. He had a special receiver in his house, in his car, in the office. It seemed like a good idea because of all the shit they had in there; if it got too hot, the place would erupt into a toxic mushroom cloud. So he kept it under sixty-five degrees.
Christ, he hated the place, and he avoided it as best he could. Bastard had made it easy. Piece of shit though he was, he had been good at his job, had been able to make sure everything went as it should, and he could cook quickly and safely. All of that freed Doe from having to do more than the occasional spot visit. Say good-bye to that for a while. He’d be practically living in this shithole until he felt he could trust their new cook- as soon as they could find one.
After the cool, the first thing that hit him was the stench. An impressive trick considering that he’d been walking along the shore of the waste lagoon. But that was what the waste lagoon was for- it disguised the stink, the gripping, knife-sharp, gut-churning stink like cat piss that rammed through his eyes and up into his brain the instant he crossed the threshold. Doe grabbed at one of the face masks, the kind favored by workers removing asbestos, hanging near the door. It helped a little, but he could still smell it, and he could hear, softly through the wall, the low, pathetic grunting of hogs.
The cooking gear lay everywhere- empty containers of stove fuel, starting fluid, ammonia, iodine, lye, Drano, propane, ether, paint thi