“I’m…” Beth voiced, but that was all she could say. Under the pressure of the circumstance, no potential explanation came to mind.
Dr. Cheveau noisily stashed his box on one of the shelves, then grabbed Beth’s away from her. He looked at the open latch.
“Where’s the lock?” he growled.
Beth extended her hand and then opened it. In her palm was the open padlock. Martin snatched it and examined it.
“How did you get it open?” he demanded.
“It was open,” Beth asserted.
“You’re lying,” Martin snapped.
“I’m not,” Beth said. “Honest. It was open and it made me curious.”
“Likely story,” Martin yelled. His voice reverberated around the confined space.
“I didn’t disturb anything,” Beth said.
“How do you know you didn’t disturb anything?” Martin said. He opened the box and glanced inside. Seemingly satisfied, he closed it and locked it. He tested the lock. It held.
“I only lifted the cover and looked at one culture dish,” Beth said. She was beginning to regain some composure, although her pulse was still racing.
Martin slipped the box into its position. Then he counted them all. When he was finished, he ordered her out of the incubator.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said after Martin had closed the insulated door behind them. “I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to touch those boxes.”
At that moment Richard appeared in the doorway. Martin ordered him over, then angrily related how he’d caught Beth handling his research cultures.
Richard acted as upset as Martin when he heard. Turning to Beth, he demanded to know why she would do such a thing. He wondered whether they weren’t giving her enough work to do.
“No one told me not to touch them,” Beth protested. She was again close to tears. She hated confrontations and had already weathered a previous one only hours earlier.
“No one told you to handle them either,” Richard snapped.
“Did that Dr. Stapleton put you up to this?” Martin demanded.
Beth hesitated, not knowing how to respond. As far as Martin was concerned her hesitation was incriminating. “I thought as much,” he snapped. “He probably even told you about his preposterous idea that the plague cases and the others were started on purpose.”
“I told him I wasn’t supposed to talk with him,” Beth cried.
“But talk he did,” Martin said. “And obviously you listened. Well, I’m not going to stand for it. You are fired, Miss Holderness. Take your things and get out. I don’t want to see your face again.”
Beth sputtered a protest and with it came tears.
“Crying is not going to get you anywhere,” Martin spat out. “Nor are excuses. You made your choice, now live with the consequences. Get out.”
Twin reached across the scarred desk and hung up the phone. His real name was Marvin Thomas. He’d gotten the nickname “Twin” because he’d had an identical twin. No one had been able to tell the two of them apart until one of them got killed in a protracted disagreement between the Black Kings and a gang from the East Village over crack territories.
Twin looked across the desk at Phil. Phil was tall and skinny and hardly imposing, but he had brains. It had been his brains, not his bravado or muscles, that had caused Twin to elevate him to number-two man in the gang. He had been the only person to know what to do with all the drug money they’d been raking in. Up until Phil took over, they’d been burying the greenbacks in PVC pipe in the basement of Twin’s tenement.
“I don’t understand these people,” Twin said. “Apparently that honky doctor didn’t get our message, and he’s been out doing just what he damned well pleases. Can you believe it? I hit that sucker with just about everything I got, and three days later he’s giving us the finger. I don’t call that respect, no way.”
“The people want us to talk to him again?” Phil asked. He’d been on the visit to Jack’s apartment and witnessed how hard Twin had hit the man.
“Better than that,” Twin said. “They want us to ice the bastard. Why they didn’t have us do it the first time is anybody’s guess. They’re offering us five big ones.” Twin laughed. “Funny thing is, I would have done it for nothing. We can’t have people ignoring us. We’d be out of business.”
“Should we send Reginald?” Phil asked.
“Who else?” Twin questioned. “This is the kind of activity he loves.”
Phil got to his feet and ground out his cigarette. He left the office and walked down the litter-strewn hallway to the front room, where a half dozen members were playing cards. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.
“Hey, Reginald,” Phil called out. “You up for some action?”
Reginald glanced up from his cards. He adjusted the toothpick protruding from his mouth. “It depends,” he said.
“I think you’d like this one,” Phil said. “Five big ones to do away with the doctor whose bike you got.”
“Hey, man, I’ll do it,” BJ said. BJ was the nickname for Bruce Jefferson. He was a stocky fellow with thighs as thick as Phil’s waist. He’d also been on the visit to Jack’s.
“Twin wants Reginald,” Phil said.
Reginald stood up and tossed his cards on the table. “I had a crap hand anyway,” he said. He followed Phil back to the office.
“Did Phil tell you the story?” Twin asked when they entered.
“Just that the doctor goes,” Phil said. “And five big ones for us. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Twin said. “You gotta do a white chick too. Might as well do her first. Here’s the address.”
Twin handed over a scrap of paper with Beth Holderness’s name and address written on it.
“You care how I do these honkies?” Reginald asked.
“I couldn’t care less,” Twin said. “Just be sure you get rid of them.”
“I’d like to use the new machine pistol,” Reginald said. He smiled with the toothpick still stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“It’ll be good to see if it’s worth the money we paid for it,” Twin said. Twin opened up one of the desk drawers and withdrew a new Tec pistol. It still had some packing grease on the handle. He gave the gun a shove across the desk. Reginald snapped it up before it got to the edge. “Enjoy yourself,” Twin added.
“I intend to,” Reginald said.
Reginald made it a point never to show any emotion, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. As he walked out of the building, his mood was soaring. He loved this kind of work.
He unlocked the driver’s-side door of his jet-black Camaro and slipped in behind the wheel. He put the Tec pistol on the passenger seat and covered it with a newspaper. As soon as the motor was humming, he turned on his tape deck and pushed in his current favorite rap cassette. The car had a sound system that was the envy of the gang. It had enough subwoofer power to loosen ceramic tile in whatever neighborhood Reginald cruised.
With one last glance at Beth Holderness’s address and with his head bobbing with the music, Reginald pulled away from the curb and headed uptown.
Beth hadn’t gone directly home. In her distressed state, she needed to talk with someone. She’d stopped at a friend’s house and even had had a glass of wine. After talking the situation over, she felt somewhat better, but was still depressed. She couldn’t believe she’d been fired. There was also the gnawing possibility that she’d stumbled onto something significant in the incubator.
Beth lived in a five-story tenement on East Eighty-third Street between First and Second avenues. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, but it wasn’t bad either. The only problem was that her building was not one of the best. The landlord did the least possible in terms of repair, and there was always trouble with something. As Beth arrived, she saw there was a new problem. The outer front door had been sprung open with a crowbar. Beth sighed. It had happened before and it had taken three months for the landlord to fix it.