Wild Meat (32 page)

“Why don’t we ask Lou Burr where he thinks I’d be most useful?”

William stopped breathing.

“You know
Lou Burr, right?” Hugh said. “The fellow with the office down on the docks in Detroit. You met him when Dad introduced you around.”

“Tell me…” William spoke slowly
, having a lot of trouble focusing. “Tell me exactly what Lou Burr has to do with you, with anything you’re doing. Explain right now what you’re trying to accomplish with all the disconnected shit you’ve said here today, or you’re done.” He was out of his chair now. “You’ll be off the payroll starting tomorrow morning. No one on the board is going to stop me from getting rid of you. Half of them will thank me.”

“You know Lou’s daughter Jenn is going to Georgetown?” Hugh’s voice was serene, and he was doing that smiling-blinking thing again. “Starting her second year there. Sweet kid. I met her a few weeks back.
Lou had a kind of early Labor Day barbecue. I was surprised not to see you there.”

William sat down. He was dizzy. He had never seriously considered threatening to boot Hugh out of the company before. Now he’d
made the threat and Hugh seemed unmoved. He ought to be moved; William knew damn well that Hugh had no portfolio to speak of. Not enough to live off and make it grow at the same time.

Then it struck him that Hugh might be subtly threatening him, implying that any hand raised against him was also raised against Lou Burr.

But that was absurd. What influence could Hugh possibly have with Burr? This was just typical flakery from Huey the professional socialite. A hissy fit from a prima donna movie star.

William
tried again to get through to his brother; he needed to get him to stay on top of the PR work at least for a while, with it all going so spectacularly well. If Hugh flaked out at this point, there was no telling what would happen. Now that Sanderson Tropical Timber had such a high profile, any negative development could send its image into a tailspin. The collapse of the Hugh Sanderson myth might make the whole green campaign seem like a cynical deception, drawing a vehement thumbs down from the eco community. The “unmasking” emails would start flying again. Furniture retailers and manufacturers would rush to distance themselves from Sanderson Tropical Timber.

“I don’t know what’s got you upset, or
even if you are upset, or just wired from all the running around, or what. But here’s what I need, what the company needs you to do. Just follow through on everything that’s scheduled for the next couple of months. That’s it. Then take another vacation. Take some time and write a book while you’re name’s hot. That’ll be extra money, all yours. Spend six goddamn months in French Polynesia. Just don’t break down on me now.”

William
really wanted to press Hugh about why he’d brought up Lou Burr. The mention of that name was by far the most unsettling and bewildering element of this strange conversation. He decided to wait until later; better to take things one at a time.

“Can you do that, Huey? Just follow through on what we’ve already got scheduled, then take a
good long break, and then we’ll talk about what happens after that.”

Hugh stood up and said, “
Yes, we’ll talk,” then abruptly left.

CHAPTER FIVE

Amy stepped up to the roll-down steel door and dispatched the padlock with one bullet
, hoping no one would hear the shot and report it. Not likely; this was Sunday, and the area was deserted.

Vendetti slid aside a flat metal bar that ran the width of the
entrance, rolled up the garage-sized steel shutter using the heels of his hands, and stepped into the darkness. Fluorescent lights flickered on, revealing a cavernous ground floor that contained approximately nothing.

Whatever conveyor belts, strapping machines, shelving
, and storage bins had been here eight or ten decades earlier, only wreckage remained. It lay in tangled heaps around the edges of the space, ready-made housing for rats. The new fluorescent light fixtures had not been hung from the ceiling, but were propped lengthwise against the walls and heaps of detritus.

Bales of hay were piled on a wooden palette near one wall. Vendetti headed in that direction
.

Amy followed, gun still in hand
, and said, “I really like what you’ve done with the place.”

“Door next to the hay is the freight elevator,” Vendetti said. “That’s the way to the basement. All three levels. Stinkies are on the lowest level. The guys who come to feed them won’t be back for a couple hours.”

Amy suddenly felt far less confident about controlling Vendetti than she had during the drive. He seemed to be thinking more clearly now, as though the booze had not only calmed his shakes but also quieted some monstrous internal chatter that had earlier been short-circuiting his thought processes. Or maybe he’d gotten a burst of energy from knowing that his fix of boof was mere minutes away. Now his movements were fluid, nearly businesslike, as he headed across the floor toward the bales of hay.

“I had some guys in here fixing up this old-time elevator,” Vendetti said. “I set up the whole thing. Sanderson wouldn’t have known what to do, who to call, how to keep from having code-enforcement cops sniffing around and asking about permits.” He pointed to the hay. “That stuff keeps the stinkies from sleeping in their own shit too much. We just keep dumping more hay down the chute. Fresh stuff falls through the bars
at the top of the cage, and the stinkies got a nice clean beddy-bye.”

He hit a switch beside the elevator. A motor hummed somewhere below and a second later the doors opened, wobbling noisily. The elevator was big; they could have driven a Volkswagen into it. Vendetti went in, stood at the far end, and hit a button after Amy and Stephen had entered. He cooperatively stayed on the opposite side, next to the buttons. “Elevator’s got doors on both ends, see? When we get down there, these ones behind me will open.”

While they were still moving, Stephen began making faces. “Is this the stench you remember?” he asked Amy.

“Smells like fresh peach pie to me,” she said. “But we know why that is.”

“I can’t believe how heavy it is,” Stephen said, grimacing.

“Actually,” Amy said, “there is something else along with the boof.” The pastry aroma seemed somehow polluted.

“You smell their shit and piss along with the good stuff,” Vendetti said. “Just like any animal cage that doesn’t get cleaned too often.”

“W
here’s ‘down south?’” Amy said, but Vendetti once again ignored the question.

The door opened and they stepped into the lower cavern. There were dim orange-brown bulbs at odd intervals around the basement. The corners, far walls and upper limit remained in shadow, but the weak amber light was enough to reveal that there were not really three basements, merely two levels of catwalks around the edges of this one. The catwalks were in sad repair.

It was warm, at least eighty degrees. Someone had the sense to keep the place heated in order to prevent the animals’ metabolisms from getting too badly out of whack. No one had thought of humidity, though. Equateur was intensely humid all year round, but the air down here was dry enough to give anyone a nosebleed.

The v-chimps’ sounds became frantic, so much like panicked chimpanzees that for a moment Amy expected to see real apes.

Vendetti, barely visible in the bloody pumpkin glow, pointed to a faintly shimmering wall in the middle of the basement, about fifteen feet across and ten high. The orange lights were shakily reflected there. The animal enclosure was smack in the middle of the basement, about ten yards distant from each of the basement walls.

“
The walls of the cage are chain link, covered with fiberglass on three sides,” Vendetti said. “But the front wall is covered with clear vinyl. They spray through the chain link when they see us, and the spray hits the vinyl sheets and runs down.” Amy tried to see into the cage, but it was impossible with so much reflection on the vinyl.

Something like a small sink was affixed to the enclosure’s outer right wall at about chest level. On the floor next to it were two five-gallon plastic buckets.

Above the cage was the lower end of a long metal chute, which extended up to the higher of the two catwalks. Sitting on the catwalk next to the chute’s upper end were two bales of hay, one intact and the other half depleted.

“Can’t the animals jump up to that chute?” Amy asked.

“Top of the cage is covered with part of an old iron fence,” Vendetti said. “The bars are far enough apart to let the hay through, but not for the stink monkeys to squeeze out.”

When Vendetti got close to the cage, there came short, faint bursts of drumming on the plastic: shots of boof aimed at the approaching human.

“When they spray like that, they get a reward,” Vendetti said, animated and gushing with information, which heightened Amy’s suspicions. “First you come up front here to make ’em spray, then you go around and reward them by dumping the red stuff into the metal sink on the side of the cage. Sink drains into a pipe that leads to a trough inside the cage, and the monkeys all get on the floor and suck it up.”

“Red stuff?” Stephen said.

“Mostly pig blood right now. Cheap to buy it out the back door of that big slaughterhouse east of here.” He pointed to the buckets next to the wall of the enclosure. “If you give them live animals to feed on, they waste the boof spraying the prey.”

Amy and Stephen followed him at a safe distance as he went toward the front of the cage. He crouched at the base of the hanging vinyl sheet. “Like I said, boof hits the sheets and runs down. Then we turn on the misters.” He picked up the ends of two extension cords and plugged one into the other. A whooshing started and the space beyond the vinyl became cloudy.

“Mist makes the rest of the spray run down the vinyl into the trough,” Vendetti said.

He pointed down to a white PVC pipe, four inches in diameter, cut in half lengthwise to form the trough. It ran the length of the plastic sheet, directly under it, slanting down toward the outside corner of the cage, where it emptied into a sawed-off, one-gallon plastic jug. Half a minute later, they heard the liquid drizzling into it.

Enough of the jug’s handle remained for someone to pick it up, which was exactly what Vendetti did now. He set the jug aside on the floor, then reached alongside the bottom of the cage, picked up an identical empty one, and put it where the first had been. “Then we replace the jug, and it starts all over again,” he said. He picked up the original jug, his grip squeezing the upper part of the jug into an oval, then stood up slowly, being careful not to spill the precious liquid.

Amy whispered, “All this tour-guide
crap – he must be trying to distract us from something.”

“There was already a lot in this jug before we came down,” Vendetti said. “We like to let it set out so that some of the water evaporates in this dry air. That way the boof is less diluted when we put it into those one-liter bottles over there.” He nodded toward several cardboard boxes stacked along one of the walls. “The distributors like having standard sizes
and strengths.”

Then Amy thought she understood what he had in mind, and was glad she still had the Finnish pistol aimed at him.

She crossed an arm in front of Stephen’s chest and began backing up, marching him back toward the elevator. “Keep heading that way,” she said quietly, “no matter what I do.”

Vendetti was about fifteen feet away now, too far to fling the boof at them with any assurance that they would both get a full dose of it, but a couple of bounding steps on his part would make them very easy targets.

“Put it down,” she shouted.

Vendetti didn’t bend to set the jug down, but began to back away along the side of the animal enclosure. Amy hadn’t expected that.

She fired over his head once to make her point. The sound was shocking in the cavernous place, and the animals instantly became silent, their instincts confused. They had sprayed, but had not yet received food, and their intended prey had become loud rather than docile.

Amy yelled again. “I want to see you put that jug down on the floor. And then step away from it. I’ll be happy to shoot you if you don’t.”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Splash you? I wouldn’t waste it.”

“Put it down.”

“How do I know you won’t shoot no matter what I do?”

“Because if that’s what I wanted, I would have done it as soon as we got off the elevator.
We can still use your help if you’re willing to throw in with us. You know how to set up a boof lab.” She was trying to come up with any story that would get him to just set the  jug down for a minute.

“All I wanted to do was get high,” Vendetti said. His voice shook a little. He’d been insane with desperation when they first found him, yet now that he held boof in his hands, he suddenly had enough control to wait until he was somewhere else before indulging.

“Go ahead and dig into it,” Amy said. “We’ll look after you. You’ll be no more helpless than you are now, and at least you’ll be happy.”

Vendetti receded further, moving along the side of the animal enclosure,
fading into the shadows. Then he was gone