The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (58 page)

The bastard was not only
ready, but probably eager. Because he paused, looked directly at a
young bearded news anchor seen nightly on Channel Four, whereupon
the young anchor popped that question as though on cue—with the
added “tough” query about whether Mr. Belking himself had known of
these “inhuman” experiments.

Yes, he had known,
approved, and provided substantial funding for Dr. Wintersong’s
experiments. Animal experiments, of course, only with animals, who
apparently didn’t mind. But then Belking almost won my reluctant
admiration, at least for his warped intelligence and diabolical
slyness. Only this morning, as stated, did he learn after the fact
of the human heads Dr. Wintersong had kept alive for eleven days. A
long, pregnant pause, and then—Alive! Think of it! Eleven
days—eleven months—eleven years! The possibilities were immense,
thrilling, fantastic, and of thunderous importance to all humanity.
Dare we dream, like William Wintersong, M.D., of Immortality? Dare
we dream? If so, with courage, with federal funding, it would
surely some day soon be possible to preserve the intelligence, the
knowledge, the wisdom—yes, the life—of an Einstein, a Joan of Arc,
a Martin Luther King...even a crucified Jesus saved from the
cross!

Well, hell, I thought,
that tore it. How could scientists or feminists or conservatives or
liberals or minorities, or especially good Christians, knock that?
I would have sworn nobody could make medical murder sound like a
virtuous moral necessity, but Belking had not only done it but
tagged most bases in the ballpark while doing it. After that how
could anybody except pro-death fanatics and health nuts knock it?
How could the scientists and politicians, whose support was
necessary for continued “immortality” research object to living
eleven more years after they died?

Perhaps even more
dismaying, there had to be thousands of stuporously-sick people out
there—assured by medical pessimists that their various organic
malfunctions were all terminal—who would unhesitantly choose
scientifically tested-and-approved “craniectomies” today over the
inevitability of doctor-guaranteed death tomorrow.

Why not? For decades
surgeons had been cutting out and replacing imperfect but
perfectly-repairable hearts and throwing the originals away.
Hearts—and lungs, livers, pancreases, kidneys, whatever was
available for sale in there. Of course, for sale; you wouldn’t
expect to give them away, would you? So why not surgically excise
the entire body, harvest its giblets and various goodies, then
throw the unmarketable stuff into the garbage. Maybe Belking and
Wintersong weren’t crazy after all; maybe this was merely a
health-care idea whose time had come.

I didn’t have much time to
wonder about all that, because right then at the very
end—significantly, the last words Belking’s listeners would hear
from him—he launched into a minute-long crescendo of serious horse
manure about me, about that despicable and dangerous—now even more
dangerous—arch-criminal, Shell Scott.

Belking could have gotten
an actor, an upside-down Oscar for hyperbolic hamminess somber,
sorrowful, his voice lower, slower, funerial. It almost made me
itch from the inside out, because he made me sound, even to me like
the Bubonic Plaque coming down with pneumonia.

Which meant, sure as
skunks stink, by the time Belking finished there were lots of
brilliant citizens out there in TV land who knew a thin gooey
miasma must be oozing from Shell Scott and slurping on out past the
farthest stars, digesting everything in its path, and suspected
that, what ever it was they’d caught it already.

The most dismaying thing
was: nobody laughed.

Visible in the television
picture, near and around Belking were twenty or thirty other
people, reporters and police and deputies plus a handful of POCUEH
terrorists not yet arrested. But not one of all those people
laughed, and a few of the hardboiled and cynical reporters actually
looked alarmed.

No question: I was in deep
trouble.

Well, Hank had told me
people would believe anything about “disease” except the truth:
that they themselves were its creator, but this was a painful way
for me to become convinced he never exaggerated, not
really.

At twelve-oh-nine a.m.,
bleak beginning of Sunday morning, the male and female co-anchors
began taking turns reporting another story, something about
Congressional plans to provide free burials for everybody who died
prematurely of old age. So I turned to Dane and said, “Let’s go.
I’ll explain—”

That was odd. She had
stepped back, shrinking away, and staring at me wide-eyed, both
arms crossed tightly over her boobs. What the hell? I thought—but
only for a fraction of a second. Because it was, instantly, clear
that this was a diluted expression of what might henceforth be
expected from citizens confronted suddenly by The Slobbering Death:
me.

“
No—wait—it’s not true,” I
said.

“
Not...true?”

“
Attagirl, good thinking.
Don’t—don’t panic.”

Well, it took me half a
minute, maybe longer, to win Dane’s confidence again. To, at least,
keep her from screaming and jumping out the window. By the time I
explained that I’d been forewarned about what Belking was going to
say, informed by Hank’s unheard-by-her comments on the phone, while
Hobart’s hammy but effective histronics must have caught Dane with
her normally keen and even gorgeous intelligence off guard, she had
not only stopped shrinking away but was no longer squashing her
boobs, which I took as a good omen.

Thus encouraged, I said,
“Bottom line, there isn’t any Super-IFAI culture, or if there is I
didn’t become acquainted with it. And I certainly didn’t step on
it, or get infected by IFAI—or anything else. Hell, I haven’t even
had a cold for a year and a half.”

She smiled a small smile
and I added, “Belking just made it all up. The whole thing—about
the super-horrible bugs, at least. See?”

She nodded, at first very
slowly, then briskly. “Yes, I can understand why he might.” Dane
paused, sighed, and continued, “But the other—you told me you got
inside Omega, when Dr. Wintersong and Mr. Belking were taking me
away, but did you—did you kill that man? The one the police found
dead there?”

“
Grinner? You bet. But only
after he tossed a shot at me. Cops will find a slug from his gun in
the back wall, where it wound up after not quite dismantling my
head.”

She sighed again, more
deeply and naturally than before, and appeared really to relax for
the first time since the newscast had ended. “Then all that about
your ruining Dr. Wintersong’s culture, becoming infected... Mr.
Belking, well, he just lied?”

“
Like Baron Munchhaussen on
his best day.”

“
He certainly was
convincing. He almost convinced me, Shell—almost. Just for a
minute.”

“
Sure. Maybe that’s because
most people will believe horseflies cause Charley horses if a
licensed medical expert says so. Happens all the time. Like,
according to Hank anyhow, every year’s brand-new flu bug... I
stopped. I swear, Hank has really done a job on me—”

“
About him, Shell, Doctor
Hernandez. On the phone, didn’t you say something about meeting
him?”

“
Yeah, and soon. So we
might as well get started.”

“
But how, if everybody’s
looking for you, police and—?”

“
Trust me. Let’s
go.”

And, this time, we went.
Not far. Up to my Cadillac, which is—was—a shiny Robin’s-egg-blue
convertible, a familiar sight to about six thousand cops, several
hundred other citizens in L.A., and half the population of
Hollywood. Which description applied before it became even more
easily identifiable because of its eye-catching collection of
bullet holes.

Wintersong’s black
Cadillac sedan was parked in the garage of Belking’s beach-front
home. Fortunately my own garage-door opener actuated the door and
it slid up, rumbling softly, folded out of sight. Not so
fortunately, I would have to transfer Dr. W., and his friend Hobie,
from my Cad to his.

I sighed, found the
sedan’s keys in Wintersong’s coat pocket, backed his Cad next to
mine. Five minutes later the job was done, but the gut-straining
exercise did not further endear me to either of them. The doctor
wasn’t much trouble; but Hobart Belking, even bound and gagged and
beat-up all over, was a lot like one of the wild animals he loved
to blow away. He’d had a few hours with nothing to do except stew,
and I had a hunch he’d spent most of those hours thinking of just
that: his magnificent prizes, those beautiful smooth-muscled
animals he’d searched for and found; joy of the hunt and sick
sweetness of the kill, bright quickening of life in him each time
one of them died, and his pride in displaying their well-preserved
corpses. All that—and what they were now, ashes and soot and
fire-blackened eyes.

Whatever the reason, if
vicious grunts could kill I would have been long kaput. As I’d
heaved him out of my Cad’s trunk and dumped him into Wintersong’s,
Belking was gutterally grunting, twisting, straining, raging to
kill something again.

And I wondered what this
beef-shouldered tusk-toothed at-least-temporarily-psychotic nut
would do if I—or somebody else—ever let him get loose.

Behind the wheel, key in
ignition, with lovely Dane sitting quietly beside me—very quiet,
very still—I thought for a moment about that. Belking alone was
more than merely a formidable enemy. Largely because he wasn’t
Belking “alone.” With his billion or so bucks, position and
prestige, hundreds of powerful political and corporate—and
judicial—associates and friends, he was more like an enemy crowd,
the General in charge of an army of generals, or chief cook of the
cannibals boiling people in pots.

It was depressing,
therefore, to realize that even ignoring Belking, William M.
Wintersong, M.D. was enemy enough. Perhaps not personally very
threatening, it could not be denied he was an admired and
prestigious representative of, and prominent spokesman for, the
most dangerous and deadly organization of sacrosanct citizens on
earth, DOCTORS.

But I’d gotten myself into
a position from which there was now no possibility of retreat. So,
since there was no other direction available except sideways, from
this moment forward my path would be—forward!

Forward to... Well, I
didn’t have that part figured out yet. But I turned on the
ignition, stepped on the gas, and moved—forward.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN

Hank peeled his lips back,
jamming his teeth together as though trying to eat them. For an old
geezer who could look quite handsome when in his normally pleasant
mood, these occasional metamorphoses were disturbing.

“
I wish you wouldn’t do
that,” I said.

“
Los bastardos!” he went
on, ignoring me. “Now we have them—you have them, trussed and
bundled in your vehicle—but they have us! What can we do with them?
What? What?”

“
I’ve been asking myself
those same three questions, Hank—”

“
At any moment, I expect
hordes of policemen, deputies, FDA Gestapos, CDC investigators, and
the Surgeon General in full Halloween uniform bursting upon us. I
expected it already, before now even. Should they do this and into
custody take us, and from out of the automobile extract them, can
you guess what will happen?”

“
Yeah. Sure. I
imagine—”

“
No, you can imagine
nothing horrible enough. They will give both Belking and Wintersong
Nobel Prizes and free tickets to Disneyland while executing us
instantly in my driveway.”

“
Hank, it’s always darkest
just before...?”

“
Before Midnight, no matter
what they say. Ai!” Hank flipped both hands into the air, turned,
began pacing again.

I looked at Dane. She
still wore an expression indicating a kind of bewilderment mixed
with burgeoning apprehension. It was an expression that had been
burgeoning for some time now.

We’d arrived at Hank’s
combined home and office on Mulberry Street twenty minutes ago, and
he’d greeted us with his normal volubility and enthusiasm. When
he’d squinted with concern at my face, which was apparently still
somewhat lumpy, and commented that I looked “seriously distorted,”
I told him it was merely a temporary residue from my disagreement
with Hobart Belking and he should see the other guy, then
introduced him to Dane Smith.

It was of course, their
first meeting, and Hank gazed upon her as a miser might contemplate
his millions, saying, “Hermosissima! You are ravishing, Miss Smith.
It is a great pleasure for my heart to meet one so
most-beautiful.”

Then he bent forward and
kissed her hand like one of those thin-mustached European
fruitcakes, and I could tell she liked him already.

After moving to Hank’s
inner office, we’d spent five minutes filling each other in with
bits of info and fact not previously covered, then another five
minutes discussing pros and cons of our immediate circumstances.
Our immediate circumstances didn’t look too hot.

That’s when Hank had begun
pacing. Pacing, and trailing streams of words behind him. Words,
phrases, whole sentences and even paragraphs about allopathic
myopia, about non-existent diseases that were terminal only when
treated with orthodox futility and fatality, and also how great was
the opportunity almost-now to cure the madness of medicine and
restore virtue to the long-deceived people—those millions of
senselessly sick, cruelly crippled, needlessly dying, the millions
already bereaved and surviving in sorrow their beloved dead—by
awakening them all from their medicated sleep and beginning the
ending of their bassackward faith in gods of death and priests of
perversion... but also how perilously endangered already-now, not
tomorrow but today, tonight, now, was that great and splendid hope,
how precariously balanced it was, how fragile this opportunity
which might not come again.