Behind him, in the bed of the truck, there was a soft, heavy sound as something turned over. He glanced in the utter blackness of the rearview and saw nothing but could imagine the heavy tarp tenting as something shifted under it.
He waited out the two minutes patiently. At the stroke of eleven the guards drove their cart outside the gate and Sturges hopped out, looped the chain through the poles, hung the big Yale in the links, clicked it, and climbed back into the cart. By 11:02 they were gone. Vic nodded, appreciating efficiency and good timing, even in wetbrains like those two. As soon as the golf cart vanished around the corner, he jerked open the door of his truck—no light came on, he’d taped the button down—got out and walked to the tailgate.
“Rise and shine, cupcake,” he said, tapping the metal rim of the truck bed softly. By the time he’d lowered the tailgate, the thing under the tarp had crawled down from its nest behind the cab. Vic grabbed a corner of the tarp and whipped it back as Kenneth Boyd lumbered down off the bed, eyes glaring rat-red in the darkness. “Jeez, you stink!” Vic said, wincing and waving a hand in front of him. He pulled a small plastic tub of Vicks VapoRub from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and daubed a little under his nose.
Boyd wrinkled his nose at the smell. Maggots wriggled in the deep cuts on his face and three layers of dried blood were caked around his mouth. He was as tall as Vic, and heavier, and could have ripped Vic’s arm right out of his body, but when Vic took a single step toward him, Boyd recoiled. When Vic had returned the Vicks to his pocket with one hand he’d drawn his Luger with the other. He pointed it at Boyd’s head. Boyd’s eyes were feral and wary. Vic saw that Boyd recognized the danger in that gun, and nodded.
“I guess you really are getting smarter in your old age, Boyd ol’buddy, ’cause you’re not giving me any of that snarl and hiss shit. Good, because now is not the time for me to be getting into a pissing contest with Night of the Living Dead, you dig? The Man’s been in my head just like I’m sure he’s been in your head—such as it is—and you know what we got to do. Clock’s running, so get to it.”
He lowered his pistol and stepped to the door that was set into the wall between the compressors. It should have been locked and it should have been attached to an alarm, but the knob turned without protest and the door opened with no sound at all except a faint creak of hinges.
“C’mon, boy,” Vic said. “Fetch!”
With only a hungry growl Boyd shambled past him into the bowels of the hospital. Vic glanced at his watch, then settled back against the cold hospital wall to watch the gate.
(4)
“So, what does that mean?” demanded Willard Fowler Newton. “How exactly am I overdoing it? This morning I was your ace reporter. Now I’m a leper?”
Dick Hangood chewed his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and continued to stare silently at Newton. Noxious blue fumes from the cigar polluted the room, giving it a London fog appearance. “Newt, I don’t know how to answer that question exactly,” he said, “because it seems no matter what I say about that damned article of yours, you do a rewrite on it, add about ten column inches of editorial, and try to sell it back to me…and it’s really starting to piss me off.”
“Oh?”
“Do you want to know why?” Hangood tapped an inch of ash into a ceramic tray. “I’ll tell you. You see, the way it works around here is that I am the editor and you are the reporter. With me so far? Good. My job, in case you never had a chance to review the office handbook, is to decide which reporter should be assigned to which story, and then make some informed decisions on what they should write about those stories. Still with me?”
“Well, I—”
“As editor, I have the additional responsibility of reading each and every story that crosses my desk and making decisions on the correctness of the grammar, the completeness of the information, and…”
“Yes, but—”
“Sure, but I—”
