Hungry Ghosts (22 page)

The entrance, halfway down the walk on the side of the building, was a weathered green utility door, the kind that might lead to a storage room—no window, bell, or knocker. Webb's fist was almost on the wood when I caught it. “Wait! I want the tenant to answer, not hide! Let's try a gentler rap first.” I rapped softly. A minute passed. I nodded at Webb and he hit the door in something between a bang and an earthquake.

The door opened a crack. A woman with blonde hair looked out warily, her expression one of pre-set annoyance. As she surveyed Webb her mouth hardened. But when she spotted me, she did a double take.

I was every bit as startled. “Georgia! What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“You rent this flat?”

“My department does,” Georgia said.

“Your department?”

“CDC.”

“The Centers for Disease Control? You're an epidemiologist?”

She laughed uncomfortably and I could feel my face flush as she read my amazement that the woman quivering in the alley this morning could have a responsible job with a front-line agency fighting epidemics. She hesitated, as if I had caught her with her bathrobe hanging open, and then added, “CDC does plenty of mundane things. It's not all about anthrax and Ebola. I'm here checking wind patterns for vector distribution.”

“I'd guess an evening wind would distribute vectors all over the city.”

“You'd be wrong, but not that wrong,” she said more confidently. She looked like the sane twin of her morning self. “On an average night one biological error could infect a third of the city.”

“Hey, you hired Jeffrey, didn't you?” Webb said.

Georgia gasped. I'd forgotten all about him standing in the shadows. But her reaction went beyond surprise. She'd gone as pale as she'd been this morning.

“Makes sense,” he charged on. “You rent his apartment, right? You need a guy with time to turn loose balloons. Your balloons. He's got the skinny on where to set them off.”

“How did you know?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

“He hired my cab.”

“When?”

“Couple of days ago.”

“Where . . . where did you take him?”

“Broadway and Divisidero, out by the Cliff House, Fort Point, Sutro Tower, and one other place. Can't remember that. It was one long fare.”

“Why do you care, Georgia?” I asked, mostly to make her focus back on me.

“Please don't let this go beyond us.” She was focused on me, imploring, counting on the bond forged between us earlier. “CDC doesn't want to alarm civilians. If people even thought we were thinking about biological
elements in their wind, it'd be a total nightmare. We're not just checking here, we're in every major city. But if word leaked—”

“But why do you care where Jeffrey went?”

She sighed. “He hasn't turned in his report. I advanced him the expense allotment. The agency is generous; the protocols were set in the days when it had to include enough for baksheesh and bribery. So it was three hundred dollars. I didn't expect it to tide Jeff over as long as it appears it has. I've got stuff stacked up waiting for that report and I have to account for the expenses.”

“I could take you around again,” Webb offered, a bit too eagerly.

“If I had time to drive around the city, I would have done it in the first place. If I'd known, I would have. By now, dammit, I've spent that much time making excuses for the delays.” Bureaucratic indignation trumped fear.

“If you need the report so badly, why don't you just go upstairs and bang on his door until he answers?” I said.

“Jeff? He doesn't live upstairs. He used to live down here. I rented this place after he moved out.”

I glared at Webb.

“He used to own it,” he insisted. “He told me a couple of times. Honest.”

“Do the people upstairs own the building, Georgia?”

“I pay them the rent.”

“If Jeffrey doesn't live here anymore, where does he live?”

She shrugged.

“You hired him to do your survey. You issued him money. You must have gotten an address for him.”

“Of course. Of course, I did. It's just so much a formality for my part of the work I didn't connect it. But of course.” She went to the metal table
in front of the window and fingered through a stack of papers and pile of scraps held down by a little jade frog. The address was on one of the scraps. “Here.” She handed me an address on Eddy Street.

“That's the Tenderloin!”

“It's not as rough as it used to be,” Webb said.

But
, I was thinking,
it was a huge step down from here
. It was the kind of step an addict might make.

“I suppose you're expecting me to drive you there, too,” Webb grumbled.

“No.”

From habit, his face scrunched into a pucker of offense.

“Go,” I insisted. “All these motels here, filled with eager tourists.”

“Yeah, well, you'll get home on your own. I got a living to make,” he said, as if clinching an argument.

He left at a fast lumber, glancing over his shoulder twice in case I was gaining on him. When he was out of sight, Georgia's shoulders relaxed and she let out a huge sigh.

I put a hand on her shoulder. “Georgia,” I said, “surely you don't assume I believed your story.”

C
HAPTER
22

G
EORGIA
'
S HANDS
were shaking violently. She pressed them into fists so tight it looked like her bones were about to pop through.

I knew all about fear: the nausea, the humiliation, the paralysis of body and of mind. Feeling the way Georgia quavered wildly under my touch, I was horrified. And I was furious. “Don't give me this act. You're not having a panic reaction. And you're no great actress.”

She jolted back, stared at me.

“You may be frightened, all right, but your fear is that you've miscalculated, and that's no phobia. Unless you tell me the truth, right now, I'm going to be into every facet of your life. Anything you ever worried about being exposed, it will be. Got it?”

“But the room with the snakes, it did happen!”

“And here you are back in the city where you were set up for that awful experience. Here you are living in the apartment of a crony of the woman who set up that harrowing encounter. You chose to move into a place Tia knew well, that she had or could get a key to. She could've walked in here anytime with a box of cobras. Georgia, this is the last place a terrified woman would choose.”

She drew back; dark brown eyes flickered up and settled back like an opaque shield.

I said, “You came here to prove you're not afraid anymore.”

It wasn't a question, but she took it as a challenge. “Right. But this time it was Tia who was afraid.”

“How come?”

She turned and strolled into the living room, very much like a woman in control. “What I told you this morning was true. After that week, I fled. Didn't even give notice on my job. Left the landlord a check and a note but no forwarding address because I had no idea where I was going. I was just getting out of San Francisco. Forgot most of my clothes. Ended up in Atlanta because I missed the connection to wherever I'd bought the ticket. It didn't matter where I was going, or where I was. One cheap motel was like another. I thought I'd . . . I didn't think. I just sat there.

“But here's the odd thing. In a while—it seems like it was only a few days, but I really had no sense of time, so maybe it was longer—I came out of it. I saw an article about the CDC honing in on an outbreak of Ebola and I knew—I just
knew
that that was what I wanted. I'm no scientist; I had no background for CDC, but I wanted to be a part of that. A month earlier I would have chalked it up to a pipe dream and checked the want ads for clerk jobs. But then it was like I could see into the future where the job was mine. So I figured out what I needed to apply and I got a temp job while I took the classes I needed. I did the whole thing without hesitation. It was exactly what Tia had told me would happen.” She looked at me now unblinkingly.

“So you came back here to thank her?”

“Oh, no. I came to panic her.”

“How?”

She leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. I could hardly believe it was the same woman. “Honey, I represent the major medical investigative agency in the country. You don't want me focusing on you.”

“You could focus on me from now to Christmas; it wouldn't faze me.”

“Yeah, but you're not Tia Dru. You haven't tried every pill and potion hoping for a miracle.”

“Still, it makes no sense—”

She laughed. “And you say you know all about fear? Sense has nothing to do with it. I told her I'd put her on our watch list, that we call the shots with Homeland Security when we have to, and there was no way she'd ever fly again without her baggage being fine-combed and the police alerted in any city where she landed. I told her she would never even taste the substance that could heal her.”

“Why? You got what you wanted. Why the vendetta?” But I knew the answer and it made sense.

She inhaled, shivered, and then said softly, “I could have died in that room. She had no right.”

“That's not the reason, is it?”

Her hand slipped off my arm. “No.”

I waited.

“I ran into her at a pharmaceutical conference. I was liaising with a research group looking into a low-dosage curare derivative used topically, and she—well, I don't know what her excuse for being there was. She probably talked her way past one of the guards. But she spotted the curare group and she wanted samples. She walked right up, put her hand on my shoulder, and took over, like she owned me! Because she thinks she owns me. Because . . .”

“Because
you
think she owns you, right? Because you're not sure your whole life isn't a house of cards.”

She sat dead still, as if there was nothing more to be said. And then she added, “Of course they gave her a sample. They had no business handing out a drug like that, but she's Tia, and so of course they did. And then . . .
then she held out her hand to me . . . and . . . and I gave her mine, because . . . she owns me.”

She was staring blankly, all hint of bravado gone.

I sat, equally stunned. All these years I had assumed Tia left her lovers with a gift greater than herself, but maybe I'd been wrong, 180 degrees wrong. Maybe when she left and deprived them of her body, she also took their souls. Did the men Tia set on the path to their dreams have the nagging fear that Tia owned them? Did Gary fear she could somehow undercut his law practice? Was Jeffrey afraid she'd expose him as a charlatan posing as Barbary Coast authority?

And Tia herself, had she known what she'd done? Had it been intentional? Or did she live in the fantasy of conveying the great gift? Had she ended up as hollow as Georgia? I felt a rush of grief greater than at any time since her death. Finally, I said to Georgia, “When was it you faced down Tia?”

“Tuesday afternoon. I found her address. I went there. She was just getting out of the shower. I leaned on the bell till she dragged herself there. I told her and I left, just left her to think about it.”

Georgia's pale face hardened into a shell of triumph. The hungry ghost has a stomach as big as the ocean, a neck as small as a pinhole. I was stunned by the absolute cruelty of it all.

Tuesday afternoon, when she was starting to get dressed for the reception.

“Jeffrey,” I said, “why did he let you have this apartment, his apartment? Were you two in this revenge together?”

“Jeffrey? You're kidding. With Tia, Jeffrey never gave up hope.”

“Jeffrey isn't a fool; he knew Tia used him.”

“He just didn't know how much. But even if he did, he wouldn't care. If he can give her what she's desperate for, he'll do it, no matter what he has to sell.”

“Do you mean he's buying some illegal drug?”

“No, not buying.”

“Planning to steal?”

She stood up. “Look, I don't know. He didn't tell me his plans.”

“Not intentionally, but he told you enough for you to figure things out. There's no vector survey that requires a guy driving balloons all over town, is there? What kind of fourth-grade project would that be? CDC is a bit more sophisticated than that. You didn't hire Jeffrey to find out anything; you paid him to be gone from his shop so you could search it.”

“How could I get into Jeffrey's shop?”

That one took me a moment, but the answer was right there. “Renzo's got the key, just like Jeffrey's got his. Renzo, whose son kidnapped you and left you blindfolded. Renzo's not about to say no to you. That's why his son is gone, isn't it? He's hiding from you.”