Текст книги "Sleep Tight"

Автор книги: Jeff Jacobson

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CHAPTER 10

3:57 AM

December 28

Dr. Reischtal was down on his knees on the smooth, polished stone floor, under the window at the end of the hallway. His back was bowed, forehead resting on his clasped hands, and he was halfway through whispering his morning prayers when the phone rang.

At first, he wasn’t sure how to react. His first instinct was simply to ignore the shrill bleating. One did not put God on hold while one answered a paltry phone call. Yet, this was the department phone. His staff was under strict orders only to call this phone under precise circumstances.

He felt his concentration vacillate. He clenched his hands tighter, raising his voice from a whisper to almost a hoarse shout. Work could wait. Everything could wait. His time with the Lord was precious. Sacred. In fact, his devotion to his Lord was what made him so effective at his profession.

Dr. Reischtal was the director of special operations for the special pathogens branch in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. With the exception of Dr. Reischtal himself, no one was entirely sure what these special responsibilities entailed, only that he was the man to contact if certain parameters were exceeded when a suspicious death was reported.

Dr. Reischtal knew. He understood the exacting nature of his responsibilities, and why striving to maintain a clear line of communication with his Lord was so vitally important.

Unlike the traditional priests and the wishy-washy New Age pastors who spoke of the devil as if he were some sort of harmless metaphor, Dr. Reischtal knew Satan was real. The idiotic fire-and-brimstone born-again evangelists were closer to the truth, but they howled about the devil as if he strode through the cornfields on cloven feet, slinging fire at all true believers with his pitchfork and seducing everybody else down into the pits of hell.

Dr. Reischtal knew better. He knew that Satan existed in the tiniest of organisms, patiently waiting for a chance to turn this paradise mankind had been given into a hellish wasteland. It was only fitting then, that the ancient one lurked in the primordial ooze.

Hell was not a place separate from paradise, and the devil strived to turn paradise into hell. He knew this because he had seen the devil, pinned under glass, as he watched him carefully with own two eyes through a microscope.

Pieces of Satan were kept frozen, locked away deep in the cavernous levels of the CDC. Dr. Reischtal had filed a memo that these samples be destroyed, but the suggestion was quietly rebuked. The samples were vital, in case further vaccines needed to be developed.

He said nothing else. In his professional life, he was smart enough not to refer to Satan by name, or even suggest that they were all dealing with mankind’s oldest and deadliest foe. But he knew. He knew. And his job, his holy mission, was to maintain a vigil, watching and waiting for any signs of where Satan may be trying to force his way through a crack into this world.

The phone continued to ring. There was no answering machine, no voice mail. It would continue to ring until he answered.

Dr. Reischtal’s prayers faltered and stopped. He pushed himself to his feet, placating his discomfort at leaving the prayers unfinished with the promise that he would start over when he finished with the phone call.

“Yes,” he said into the receiver. Only the knowledge that punishment would be severe for the voice on the other end of the line made him feel a little better. He listened for a moment, then said, “Chicago. I would have thought New York.” He exhaled. “No matter. Assemble the components. I want a plane ready within the hour. I will expect a car at my door in precisely thirty minutes.” He remembered his prayers. “No. Make that sixty. Please remind the liaison in Chicago that they are to follow the strictest isolation procedures. Any—I repeat, any—deviation from my written protocol will be dealt with in the harshest possible manner.” He replaced the receiver.

God did not tell him whether they were false alarms or if true battles were about to begin when the calls came in. So he made sure he was ready. “I pledge my allegiance, oh Lord, in this endless war. In this life and the next,” he said, then went back down the hall, knelt under the round window that looked out to the stars, and began to pray again.

CHAPTER 11

5:16 AM

December 28

Lee was not happy. His head felt like it was going to crack open any moment, spilling his throbbing brain onto the slate tile of the suite’s bathroom. The sun was creeping over the far edge of Lake Michigan, slicing through the air and boiling his eyes. He could handle the sun though; he’d find the damn switch that lowered the blinds later. Although he couldn’t, for the life of him, understand what he’d been thinking last night when he’d demanded a view of the lake.

No, what Lee needed right fucking now was a goddamn drink of water.

Problem was, he couldn’t figure out how to turn the faucet on.

There were no handles. Just curving horns of pure, smooth onyx that jutted boldly over two shallow black sinks. He tried waving his hands under what he thought might be the faucet, hoping for a motion sensor, but nothing happened. He squinted around the gleaming, ultra-modern bathroom. Everything was gray and black, with brilliant white starburst accents. Even the toilet and bidet, elevated on two steps like thrones, were jet black. He tried the second sink and got the same result. Behind him, across a space larger than most living rooms, waited both a tub big enough to fit four people and a shower that could easily fit another four, with a bewildering array of nozzles that sprayed you from every conceivable angle. Lee honestly couldn’t remember if he’d even used them last night or not.

The morning sun still sizzled through the bare windows, ricocheting off the mirrors that covered every inch of wall space. Even the ceiling was one solid mirror. Lee wasn’t sure why. Who in the hell would want to look up and watch themselves taking a dump?

He swept the chic complimentary perfumes and toiletries off the counter in disgust. It didn’t help his head, but it reminded him not to let his rage slip out of control. He took a deep breath, releasing it slowly through his nose like the anger-management counselor had coached. It didn’t work. It felt like he still had barbed wire wrapped around his skull, and some giggling evil bastard kept twisting it tighter. He idly scratched at his right ass cheek. Fresh itching erupting up his torso, and he attacked it, ending with a furious scratching in his right armpit.

What kind of shit had he gotten into last night? His head hadn’t hurt like this since . . . well, right now he couldn’t remember. He was going to have a serious chat with Jamal when he felt better, and if the dealer wasn’t forthcoming about his party favors, Lee would only be too happy to call on a couple of large, mean boys he kept employed down at the motor pool for just such occasions.

Maybe the hooker had some aspirin. Or maybe even something stronger. He couldn’t remember her name. He’d left her sprawled facedown on the bed, still passed out. The thought of digging through the wreckage of their suite for aspirin sounded exhausting, and so he simply squatted, holding on to his pounding head. Plus there was always the chance he might take the wrong pill, and he couldn’t be seen acting irrationally in public.

The itching spread to his groin and he took a moment to rake his nails through his pubic hair. For a moment, the scratching felt so good it almost eclipsed the pain his skull. He wondered if a shower might help. Maybe he could try and get some of the spray in his mouth, get a drink of water that way.

He stood, feeling the sunlight wash over his body. He caught sight of himself in the mirror. Instinctively, his gaze went to his abs. Still flat and tight. Then to the skin under his jaw. Still firm. Good. But too many nights like—

Wait a goddamn minute. He turned sideways, so the sunlight illuminated the right side of his body. Tiny red blotches covered his skin, from his ass to up under his armpit. He looked down at his groin in horror. More red bumps.

That BITCH.

He stormed into the suite and grabbed the hooker by the ankle and dragged her off the bed. “Get up. GET UP! Get up, you filthy, diseased cunt.” The girl struggled to open her eyes through a mass of blond curls and landed in an awkward tangle of long limbs and heavy breasts. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

“Baby, what’s—”

“You fuckin’ whore. Shut your fucking mouth.” He paced around the bed, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Baby, I—”

Lee sprang at her. He grabbed a fistful of blond curls and punched her twice in the face. Grabbing her hair with both hands, he head-butted her, and felt the satisfying crunch as her nose shattered. She collapsed on the floor. He straddled her chest and took his time, using both fists in swinging, roundhouse arcs. After the fifth or six blow, she stopped struggling under him and tried to wrap her skinny arms over her head.

He was still hitting her when somebody knocked on the door.

Lee sat back, panting. He glanced quickly around the room, as if to make sure there were no cameras aimed at him. He stood, collecting himself for a moment, paused long enough to spit on her, then crossed the room and opened the door. “What?”

His uncle was at the door. Short, with a bad back. Dead eyes that wouldn’t blink at a night fire at an orphanage. “Jesus Christ, Lee, you want to bother answering your cell?”

“I got busy.”

“Do we, or do we not, have an agreement that you will keep it with you at all times? I have been calling you all morning. And when I call, you answer. It does not get any more simple than that.” This was Lee’s uncle Phil. He was an alderman, and although Lee was the star, nobody was kidding anybody.

Phil ran the show.

Phil, with his hunched figure, sunken eyes, and gray hair, would never rise beyond an alderman. He was, however, a very skillful Chicago alderman. As a Chicago alderman, as long as you weren’t a convicted child molester or a member of the NRA, you could get away with most anything. But he had gotten his fingers too dirty for the kind of scrutiny that comes with the elections for a higher office.

Lee, however, was handsome and charming enough for the business. Phil found all possibilities of opportunities as far as Lee was concerned. Lee wasn’t going to be just a Streets and Sans commissioner forever. No, he was being groomed. Whispers floated through the elevators and walls in City Hall. “Congressman. Maybe even a senator. After that, who knows?”

And Phil would be the man behind the throne. The only one Lee trusted utterly. Phil was looking forward to all the new pies he’d be able to dip into.

This morning, however, made the job difficult. “You some kinda run-of-the-mill, bought-and-paid-for politician who puts his dick before the job? Is that it? Is that who you are? Somebody who’d rather fuck some coked-up whore than take care of himself?”

Lee stammered out, “No . . . no . . . I . . .”

“‘I’ what?” What’s that? What are you trying to say for yourself?”

“I just found out.”

“Oh. You just. Found. Out. I see.”

“I’m taking care of this situation.”

“I see.”

They listened to the whore trying to cry through a shattered face.

Lee said, “I’ll deal with it. I promise.”

Phil pushed past him and shut the door softly. He locked it. Tested it. Took a deep breath. He turned on Lee. “What kind of fucking hotel did you set us up with here? Jesus Christ, did my sister beat you in the head with a frying pan when you were a child?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You aren’t the only one that’s been bit, dickhead.”

Phil waited until Lee met his eyes, making sure that Lee understood that he was talking about the businessmen who worked so adeptly behind the scenes to make sure the Machine was well-oiled in their favor. “Nobody’s blaming you. Not yet. This goddamn hotel—it’s got fucking bugs, Lee.”

“Bugs?” The beating had quickened Lee’s pulse, but his head was still foggy.

“Yeah, you fucking idiot. Our friends, they’re all bit up. So am I. Itches like a sonofabitch.”

Puzzle pieces finally started snapping together for Lee.

Phil saw the light of understanding finally dawn on Lee’s face. “First, get on the phone with the manager. I want eggs and oysters and Bloody Marys in their rooms five minutes ago. Make sure those guys are taken care of. Next, get Dr. Preston up here immediately. I’ll be there in ten minutes. I gotta go back and get some ointment on these rashes. Tell the manager to meet me in the lobby in fifteen minutes, but I’ll stop by the rooms first, see if I can’t calm the old bastards down.”

“Okay.” Lee looked back at his whore. “Call that pimp. He needs to escort his property from my room. Stupid bitch got drunk and fell out of the tub.”

CHAPTER 12

9:10 AM

December 28

Two men and a dog moved in a halting shuffle along the wide corridor. The beagle, Daisy, padded silently along and stopped at the sixth doorway. The two men froze and held their breath. The dog nosed the door open and pushed inside. They followed her inside. Daisy sniffed and pawed at the crumpled sheets that lay at the foot of the bed in the vast suite, gave one short bark, and promptly sat down.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman, the general manager asked. He was a sweating, pallid man in his mid-fifties who demanded that the employees call him Mr. Ullman, never by his first name. He looked like he might be sick any minute.

Daisy’s handler, Roger Bickle, was a round little man dressed in a white uniform with a red bow tie. He knelt down and peeled up the fitted sheet from the mattress. Using a pen flashlight, he lifted the edge of the mattress and examined the seams. Daisy barked again.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman asked again, impatience cracking his voice. “Why is he doing that?”

“It’s a ‘she,’ sir, and it means that we have a positive result.”

“Positive? So that is . . .” Mr. Ullman was clearly overwhelmed and confused. He refused to give up the hope that a positive result meant that his rooms were pest-free.

The exterminator shook his head. “It’s not a good thing, sir. I’m sorry.” He stood, grim and apologetic, hoping his professional appearance would reassure the general manager. Roger secretly liked wearing his company’s uniform. He went along with the usual bitching and moaning about the ridiculous outfit in the locker room, but every morning, he felt proud to clip on the bow tie. He believed the uniform carried authority, and had a calming effect on clients.

He circled the bed, pulling up the fitted sheet as he went. “I’m afraid to inform you that Daisy has given us a positive sign. And what that means, sir, is that you have an infestation of bedbugs.” He swept the pen light along the seams in the mattress and focused on a spot near the headboard. “Yes. Here we are. You can clearly see a physical presence right here.”

Mr. Ullman got closer, put on his glasses, and stooped over, peering at the circle of light. He saw brown spots dotting the fabric and what looked like tiny, finely crumbled scabs. “What is it?” he finally asked.

“Bedbug fecal matter,” Roger said with no small amount of satisfaction. For a moment, he thought the general manager might actually vomit. “See, what happens is—”

“Please, I don’t need to know.” Mr. Ullman sank back onto the leather couch. “All I want to know is how to get rid of them. Quickly and quietly.”

“They might be in the couch too,” Roger pointed out helpfully.

Mr. Ullman leapt to his feet and swatted at the tail of his suit coat. He looked like he was about to cry. Instead, he fingered his tie.

Roger grunted and pulled the mattress sideways about a foot. Lying on the floor, he shone the pen light on the underside of the mattress. “Yes, sir. There is most definitely an infestation of bedbugs here.” He pinched something tiny between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like the husk of some foreign fruit seed. “Here we have an exoskeleton.”

He swung his flashlight back to the wall. “And like any bug, when there’s one, there’s a ton.” He held the exoskeleton out.

Mr. Ullman waved it away. Now that the harsh reality had settled in, he only wanted to know one thing. “How do we get rid of them?”

Roger struggled to his feet. “That, sir, is not an easy question.”

“Surely you must have some kind of pesticide for these things.”

“Yes and no,” Roger said while checking the other side of the bed. “DDT nearly wiped them out fifty years ago, but of course, to the benefit of humanity”—he had a quiet laugh with himself—“that’s been banned. Most of the bugs they’ve tested show signs of immunity anyway. Bedbugs are awfully . . . resilient. The main problem with pesticides is that even if you find one that works, all you’re doing in a building like this is driving them from one room to another, or one floor to another. They can fit anywhere.”

“A building like this? Are you kidding? This floor was just completed two weeks ago! This entire building is brand new!” Mr. Ullman was starting to take the infestation personally.

The Serenity was Chicago’s latest luxury hotel, inhabiting an entire city block, stretching from Washington to the south to Randolph on the North Side, and Dearborn to State, west to east. Much of the space near the streets had been carefully landscaped, layered with reflection pools and birch trees. The building itself was triangle shaped, both in footprint and profile. It rose one hundred and thirty-four floors above the city, culminating in a great sweeping point at the top. The leading edge of the building faced the lake, flanked on both sides by curving slabs of gray windows. The locals had immediately dubbed it “The Fin,” as in a shark’s dorsal fin, to the dismay of the owners and Mr. Ullman.

Mr. Ullman kept trying to get the exterminator to understand the true significance of the hotel. “We have been in the news practically every day for weeks now. It has all been carefully orchestrated, I can assure you. Surely, you heard about the charity ball last night? Everyone in town was here.”

Roger considered this. He spread his hands apart in a helpless gesture. “If this building is so new, then why would it have so many bugs?”

Mr. Ullman licked his lips, then pressed them together so tightly they almost disappeared. He did not want to discuss the matter. “I think you will understand our need for discretion. We had a . . . situation, where we discovered that a group of homeless people had been hiding in the unfinished sections near the roof, and using these rooms to sleep in at night. We scrubbed and fumigated everything, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I can only assume . . .” Mr. Ullman gestured helplessly. They contemplated the room in silence, until finally Roger felt compelled to say something, anything. “Yes, well. The problem is that once they are established, it can be very difficult to eradicate them. The females lay an average of up to five eggs per day when they’ve had a good meal. That’s over two hundred eggs in their lifetime. And the babies are ravenous. That’s what I’m assuming we have here. Bedbugs molt five times before reaching adulthood. That’s why I’m finding so many exoskeletons.”

Roger slid the entire bed away from the wall and shined his light behind the headboard. “Aha! Here we go.” He produced a pair of tweezers and held it up for the manager. Up close, it wasn’t exactly menacing. The little bug was about the size of an apple seed. Six feeble legs waved about helplessly.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Ullman said. “Fine. But now what do we do?”

Roger dropped the bug in a specimen vial and secured it in the chest pocket of his uniform. “To be absolutely sure, I would recommend clearing out every piece of furniture in these rooms and destroying them. Start over. At the very least, dispose of all the mattresses, the couches, the easy chairs. Anything with padding and fabric.”

Mr. Ullman was aghast. “Are you joking? Do you have any idea of what this couch cost? More than your annual salary, I’m guessing. That chair? Hand built in Italy. The mattress alone cost over fourteen thousand dollars for God’s sake. Are you seriously saying there is no chemical that we can use to kill these things?”

Roger shook his head. “The amount you’d have to use would destroy the furniture. Heat can kill these things, but again, you’d risk ruining the furniture.” He thought for a moment. “Bedbugs can live up to a year without eating. But they have very weak jaws. They’re just tubes, really, one for injecting you with their saliva, which contains both an anesthetic and an anticoagulant, and the second one sucks out your blood. Fascinating stuff, really when you—”

“I’m sure it is. You were saying.”

“Well, they can’t chew through much of anything. Not like your cockroach, let me tell you. It’s not hard to trap them. If you could get by without all this furniture for some time . . . some considerable time . . . you could seal everything in plastic sheeting. Then we could go through the rooms, sealing every crack and crevice with clear silicone.”

“Would that solve the problem?”

“You would have to store them for over a year.”

“So I could theoretically not dispose of these, and claim it on insurance?”

“If you have bedbug insurance.”

Mr. Ullman studied his spotless shoes. “It was overlooked.”

“I don’t know if your insurance will pay for it or not, but if you seal this furniture and this mattress and box springs, the rest of the bed too, just to be sure, then, yes, I think it would take care of the problem.”

“As soon as possible, get it done.”

The furniture was encased with industrial-strength plastic wrap and sealed with clear plastic sheets, to be on the safe side. All of it, the couches, the chairs, the mattresses, were triple sealed in duct tape. The workmen rolled it away to the freight elevators while more exterminators arrived to seal the cracks between the floors and the walls, all electrical outlets, light fixtures, and anywhere else a dime could fit sideways. The carpets were steam cleaned again and again, and inch-wide double-sided tape encircled the inside of every vent.

The furniture was taken to the basement, where it was wheeled past the massive clothes washers and dryers, then carried down the stairs through the narrow walkways between massive pipes and various industrial machines, down into the third level of the sub-basement. The concrete here had been slapped against the crumbling walls that linked tunnels under the Washington and Lake train stations. They pried open a steel door at the far end, and packed the furniture inside a room the size of small church. The door was padlocked, sealed with duct tape, and promptly forgotten by the staff.

It took only a few seconds for the noise from the workers to diminish and disappear completely. Thirty minutes later, the first rat squirmed into the room from a crack in the far wall and sniffed the furniture. In three days, the rats began to build a nest. They tore through the plastic like a toddler going after a sliver of cake wrapped in Saran Wrap, digging into the soft underbelly of the cushions and mattresses.

The bedbugs grew aware of the new blood and crawled out to feed on the sleeping rats. As the rat nest grew, so did the bug population. The bedbugs encountered the bat bugs inside of the second week.

Bedbugs and bat bugs are so similar that each species can only be distinguished by microscopic examination. Inevitably, some of the male bedbugs attempted to mate with the bat bugs. The males crawled over the bat bugs, stabbing the females in the abdomen with their hypodermic genitalia, filling the body cavity with sperm. All but one of the traumatic inseminations produced sterile offspring. This one female found a quiet spot inside one of the expensive mattresses and laid three sticky white eggs. Fourteen days later, the eggs hatched.

All three bugs carried the virus.