Roscoe was convinced the project was impossible, and he told the state he had complete faith in his workers. Roscoe’s plan was to minimize costs, jack up expenses, and milk the thing as long as he could. What did he care? The quarter million a year in R&D seed money was chump change. Just keep up the appearance of work. He hired the remnants of the German team, ninety-year-old scientists who had come to the country in 1945 after the Americans beat the Russians to Peenemünde and scooped up all the best scientists. The Russians took the next bunch. Those that neither country wanted paid their own way to the States and now worked on the harvester. They gladly accepted Roscoe’s fifty percent pay cut because it was that or face war trials at The Hague.
The harvester research was the redheaded stepchild at Roscoe’s company. The real money was in his other contract with the Florida department of agriculture — an exclusive arrangement to provide the state with sterile Medflies in the event of another citrus infestation. Roscoe had studied the equation from ten different angles before offering the bribes.
The Medfly — now that was an organism Roscoe could respect. Short for Mediterranean fruit fly, the Medfly was a highly destructive, ambitiously reproducing little life bundle whose sole mission was to inject oranges and grapefruit with its eggs, which hatched and gorged themselves on the host fruit until they broke out and laid their own eggs. The buggers multiplied so fast that discovery of a single fly always set off statewide panic. That’s why the groves were saturated with Medfly monitors, essentially the old Shell No-Pest Strip, little boxes with openings and sticky pieces of cardboard inside. In the mid-nineties, three Medflies were found in one of the monitors in western Florida, and the state immediately blanketed ten counties with a cheap insecticide that headed off the outbreak and gave people diarrhea and short tempers.
Roscoe was a visionary. He knew people wouldn’t put up with that for long. There was another option to deal with Medflies, and even better, it was expensive. Sterile Medflies. The insects had ultrabrief life spans. Drop, say, a million sterile flies — outnumber the virile guys a hundred to one — and math would take care of the rest. Roscoe invited the key people to lunch, wrote the right checks, and soon he had his exclusive contract. All Roscoe had to do now was wait for the next outbreak and the tide of public opinion to come in.
That was two years ago. Roscoe had grown weary. His contract was set to expire, and others were now interested. Roscoe went to the scariest bar in rural Polk County, The Pit, the kind of place where people hire guys to kill their spouses. Roscoe began drinking with a man named Lucky. Lucky had killed two people, one of each, a husband and a wife. Different couples.
Roscoe said he had a proposition.
“It’ll cost ya.”
Roscoe said that wasn’t a problem — now here’s what he wanted done….
“There’s got to be a catch,” said Lucky. “Where’s the risk? The difficulty?”
“That’s just it. There is none.”
“Something’s not right,” said Lucky.
“Will a thousand-dollar retainer be enough?”
Lucky wrote his number on a napkin.
Roscoe got up one morning the following week and waited by the mailbox. The truck arrived. “Morning, Mr. Weege.”
“Morning, Rex.”
The mailman handed Roscoe a stack of letters. Roscoe ran inside and spread them out on his rolltop desk. There it was, an envelope postmarked Venezuela. He slit the flap with a
Midnight. Lucky sat in the dark cab of his four-by-four pickup, listening to the radio and drinking white lightning. Polk was strange radio country. The most enlightened station was static. Lucky turned the dial through various programs about them queers, them exterterrestials, fishin’, shootin’, huntin’, prayin’ in classrooms and can’t-miss investin’.
Lucky stubbed out a Winston. “Let’s get this over with.”
He climbed down from the pickup and headed into a dark orange grove.
Two days later, Roscoe heard what he’d been waiting for on the evening news.
Roscoe’s phone rang before the report was over. It was Tallahassee.
