“Well, this kid came in just before dinnertime this evening, and I didn’t know whether to believe his story or not.” Dr. Whitehead tugged at his mustache. “He was just a drop-in, said he was driving down from the airport in Denver to Canon City and couldn’t go any farther because he was coughing so much and his head ached so bad. Said he could hardly see to drive. Seems like he’d been up north somewhere with a big crowd on a camping trip this past week, and then all of a sudden everybody started getting sick. Three of them died — ”

  “Died!” Suddenly Ed O’Hara blinked awake.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Died of what?”

  “I’m not just sure. Pneumonia, it sounded like. They’d begun packing down the mountain when they started getting sick, and they tried to get the three worst ones to some hospital in Seattle, but all three were dead on arrival. At least I think that’s what he said, the story was getting pretty garbled. I gather that he was getting sick too, and somehow lost contact with the rest of the party and just took a cab to the airport and flew back to Denver on the ticket he had in his pocket. Stopped here because he couldn’t go any farther.”

  “So what did you do?”

  The young doctor took a deep breath. “Well, I examined him and took a chest X ray — he had consolidation in both lungs, looked like double lobar pneumonia, but he wasn’t cyanotic yet, just coughing like mad, so I took a culture and smear of his sputum and ran a fast gram’s stain on the smear, but the bug sure wasn’t pneumococcus or anything else gram-positive. All I could see was gram-negative rods. Of course, I plated out the culture and put it in the incubator, but he was getting worse in a hurry, coughing more than ever, getting up some blood, and I didn’t think we had time to wait around for a culture, so I started him on gentamycin and clindocin.”

  Ed nodded. “On the premise that it was some kind of atypical E. coli, I suppose.”

  “Right. I hoped the antibiotic might hit it, but it hasn’t done anything yet that I can see. And then about an hour ago he started bringing up lots of blood and getting very short of breath and cyanotic, so I had Miss Towne and a couple of the LPNs help me get him on the respirator back there — his temp had gone up from 101 to 105 in three hours — and that was when I found out he had a pulse of 240 and damned little blood pressure at all, and I decided I’d better call you.”

  “Good thinking,” Ed said sourly. “Well, let’s take a look at him.”

  They took a look. The youth was coughing weakly in the respirator; otherwise he was barely responding at all. When Ed stopped the machine and bent to listen to his chest, the patient burst into an explosive paroxysm of coughing, spraying Ed’s face and T-shirt with blood and splattering Peter Whitehead’s white lab coat with red-streaked sputum. Ed wrinkled his nose. “God, what a stench. You don’t suppose he’s got a lung abscess, do you? Ho — wait a minute.”

  The doctor had been stripping down the youth’s gown when he saw the purple hemorrhagic welts on the arms and chest. He felt under the armpits. “Did you feel these lumps?”

  “Uh, lumps?”

  “Yeah, under his arms. Groin, too. Did he have these welts when you first saw him?”

  “Uh, not like that.”

  Ed O’Hara’s face was gray when he came out of the cubicle. “Let me see those slides you made.”

  The young doctor tagged along behind as Ed headed for the little emergency-room lab. “I’m afraid they aren’t the greatest slides, Ed. They just didn’t seem to take the stain worth a darn … ”

  “Don’t worry, just show me the slides.” Ed adjusted the microscope and stared down through the oil-immersion lens, a muddy-looking field filled with pus cells and red cells and debris, rod-shaped bacteria all over the place, but barely pink and barely visible, certainly not the sharp red-staining appearance of E. coli organisms.

  “I hope I didn’t do something wrong,” Whitehead said nervously, tugging his mustache.

  Ed looked up. “Son, you did everything you knew how to do and did it just exactly right. Now I need to know if you did one other thing. Did you save the original sputum specimen?”

  “Yes. It’s in the incubator.”

  “Great. Have we got any Wilson’s stain around here?”

  “Wilson’s stain? There’s Wright’s and Giemsa … ”

  “Giemsa might do, but Wilson’s would be better.” Ed rooted around on a shelf. “Yeah, Wilson’s. You heat-fixed that first slide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then make another just like it and I’ll stain it.”

  Moments later he was staring down at a newly stained slide, filled with bacteria, far more distinct and sharply defined. “Take a good look.”

  Peter looked and looked. “They’re rods, all right, but they’ve got a little spot of chromatin in each end. They sort of look like closed safety pins … ”

  “Right,” Ed said. “They’re the murderer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’ve got a dead man back there on that cot. He was probably beyond help before he even walked in here. He’s got a couple of hours left, no more. And we’re liable to be dead men, too, if we don’t move fast.” Ed looked at the bloody smear on his T-shirt and the brown splattering on Pete’s white coat and swallowed hard. “First of all, get those nurses down here, the ones who helped you with the respirator. Get them off the hospital floor and get a list of every patient they’ve been near since they were down here — or anyone else they’ve contacted. Tell Miss Towne to open up the pharmacy and bring down all the streptomycin and chloramphenicol we’ve got, and I hope to Christ we’ve got quite a lot. Meanwhile, lock the doors to this place and don’t let anybody in until we can get some help — God! You, me, the whole emergency room, the respirator, those nurses, the patients, all contaminated. We’re going to have to close this place down. A whole fine modern hospital turned into a pesthole in eight hours flat by that little bug that looks like a safety pin … ”

  “What is it?”

  “Yersinia pestis. The kid’s got plague pneumonia, and he’s blowing it around with every breath he takes. Now get going, fast, and then come back. I’ll have some other things for you to do when you get that all taken care of.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “First I’m going to make a couple of calls, to the State Department of Public Health and then to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to find out what you do when you’ve got a live case of plague pneumonia that’s contaminated a whole community hospital.” Ed took a deep breath. “Then I’m going to start feeding streptomycin to everybody in sight — if we have enough on hand — and then I think I’m going to pray for a while. We’re liable to need all the help we can get, before long.”

  10

  Carmen Dillman had martinis already made when Jack came down from his studio around five, paint still on his fingertips. “Did you get that dust jacket finished?” she said.

  “Finally.”

  “Do you like it?”

  Jack made a face. “Alonzo will like it, and that’s all I care about. It’s part of a series layout, so it’s nice exposure.” Jack took half a martini down at a gulp. “I’ll take it with me down to the city tomorrow and see what else he has stacked up for me.”

  “And lunch with Jocelyn, I suppose,” Carmen said.

  “Sure, why not? She hands me a lot of artwork to do. And I have to see that aerospace client of hers, too. That sounds like a nice fee — all kinds of fancy color work for their annual report.”

  Carmen nodded glumly, staring at her cocktail in silence. Jack watched her closely for a moment. “So what’s the problem?” he said finally. “You know I go down there on Tuesdays. Why so gloomy about it?”

  “Jack, I saw a rat in the backyard this morning.”

  “Oh yeah? You’re crazy. We haven’t had a rat here in Brookdale since the town council passed those sanitation ordinances ten years ago — and started enforcing them. You must have seen a squirrel.”

  “It was a rat,” Carmen insisted. “I saw it come out of the woodshed and cross the backyard toward the house. It was a foot long, and black, with a pointy nose and a long naked tail. I grabbed a broom and ran outside. By then it was running along the foundation of the house, and then it just disappeared. I think it went in the basement.”

  “And where was Dummy all this time?”

  “The cat? Asleep on the sofa. Where else?”

  Jack poured himself more martini and stared soberly at his wife. She could have been right, of course. The rats used to come up from the river, years ago, when the restaurants in town were still leaving big cans of garbage open in the back alleys. He could remember seeing them dart across the road in his headlights now and then. But then people began to complain, and the County Health Department climbed all over the town council, and there was a big extermination program and the lids went onto the garbage cans and the disposal trucks started coming daily instead of once a week, and pretty soon the rats all disappeared …

  No, he thought, it was a squirrel she saw, or maybe a wood-chuck, they’re all over the place these days. But just the same … “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you get Dummy off her ass and put her down in the basement for the night? If we’ve got a rat down there, she’ll get it. And listen, for God’s sake: don’t go chasing rats with a broom anymore, okay? They can be vicious when you corner them.”

  11

  “Who was that on the phone?” Amy Slencik said as she came into the cabin on Grizzly Creek with an armful of beets from the garden.

  “That was my job foreman,” Harry said sourly. “He says Ted Smith has pulled his crew off the underground wiring job.”

  “He’s what?”

  “Pulled out. Disappeared in the night. His boys came in and hauled off their backhoes and trucks about midnight. No sign of them in town today. Said they were losin’ money, so I could just go suck rocks.”

  “But Harry, Ted bid that trenching job! He signed a contract with you.”

  “So what’s a contract? He’s gone. Am I supposed to chase him to California? I can’t even hold up his last week’s payroll — he’s got it already.”

  “Well, you can sue the bastard,” Amy said.

  “I could if I was rich — but I haven’t got time or money to sue him. What I’ve got to do is get those trenches dug, somehow. You can’t lay underground without trenches. Goddamned bastard.” Harry walked over to the cabin window. “Well, at least I got your irrigation pump going again.”

  “I know. And just in time. What was wrong?”

  “Dead pack rat in the intake pipe. Plugged it up tight. Don’t ask me how he got in there, the foot valve was just fine, but there he was, inside.”

  “Well, I’m glad it wasn’t the whole pump,” Amy said.

  “That’s for sure.” Harry nodded. “Pack rats I can live with. People like Ted Smith are something else.” He stared down the creek toward the place where old Doc Chamberlain’s cabin was located, a hundred yards downstream in the cottonwoods. “I keep thinking we should just dump the construction company and retire out here full time. Show those bastards that somebody else can walk off a job too. Doc was talking about the same thing last summer, just taking up full-time residence here on the creek and let things in town go hang. Maybe we ought to talk to him again one of these days and see what he thinks right now. Maybe go down and buy him a drink tonight.”

  12

  The house Frank Barrington was looking for was down a long canyon road outside the town of Canon City, Colorado, at the very end of a string of cheap builders’ houses as alike as ugly ducklings in a row. Frank eased the little rented Ford down the steep road, watching the house numbers closely. Near the very end of the road a little yellow house had a yard sign that said COMSTOCK on a plastic board pressed to make it look like wood.

  Frank turned into the driveway and snapped off the motor. The place looked deserted — no car in the drive, garage open and empty, drapes across the front windows. Well, that figures, Frank thought glumly. He had gotten a 7:00 A.M. flight from Sea-Tac to Denver, then boarded a local puddle jumper south to Colorado Springs, arriving around 2:00 P.M. Mountain Time. Four times en route he had tried the Comstock number, twice in Seattle, twice in Denver, with no response. By the time he’d rented the car and started south to Canon City to find the place itself, he was pretty sure it was going to be a big waste of time, but he had to try. It was the one connection with Pam that he could pin down: a name and address on a Forest Service citation.

  He got out of the car, walked up on the porch and pushed the doorbell, heard the dingdong noise inside. He pushed it twice more, waiting, then banged on the door with his fist. Nothing. Finally he walked around the house, looked into a kitchen window at the back. Nothing alive in there. An open box of cake mix sitting on the counter. A mixing bowl with a beater, tipped back, the blades covered with something thick and white. Some dirty dishes in the sink, and a microwave oven, still turned on … somebody left in a hurry …

  Starting back for the car, Frank saw a white-haired man standing on the neighboring porch, staring at him. “You looking for something, buddy?”

  “I’m looking for Comstock,” Frank said. “Robert Comstock.”

  “You ain’t going to find him,” the man said. “He ain’t here.”

  “So I see. Do you know where he went?”

  “Couldn’t rightly tell you, buddy.” The man looked at him closely. “You didn’t hear about that? He’s dead.”

  “Dead of what?”

  “Pneumonia, so they say. Got sick up there in Seattle and just turned up his toes. Same with two or three of the others.”

  Frank walked over to the man, not sure he’d heard right. “You say Comstock died in Seattle? This Robert Comstock?”

  “It was on the TV just this morning.”

  “Look, this is very important,” Frank said. “He had about twenty people with him up there. They were camping, right? Do you know if any of the others have come back?”

  “Well, sure, I think Art Toomey’s kid, Pete, got back, and — say, who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Forest Service.” Frank held out his government ID with his picture on it. “I’m checking out that camping party.”

  “You aren’t planning to make trouble, are you?”

  “Well, no, I’m trying to keep people out of trouble, and I need to know what happened up there.”

  “Well, you could check with Pete Toomey, they live up on Avondale Street, you can get the number out of the phone book. Then there were Ted and Vi Thompson and a couple of people from Colorado Springs … ” The man went on to name half a dozen others, with their addresses or general locations.

  Frank thanked him and got back into the car. Exhausted as he was, he felt an urgency to get going down the list that afternoon. It was no easy job. Canon City, thirty-five miles south of Colorado Springs, boasted only about 12,000 people, but it was a rural sprawl of a town, spread for miles across a flat basin surrounded by rough sandstone hogbacks and outcroppings to the north and south and the rising Rockies to the west. Frank checked a local map in a gas station, then drove a couple of miles west of town and turned right up Skyline Drive for a high view back at the town for general orientation. Then, back in town, he started searching out the streets and houses. The rental car was a lemon, a clutch that slipped on grades and brakes that grabbed so badly he nearly flew through the windshield whenever he touched them. Nor were the people he was looking for, when he began finding them, much more cooperative. Mostly they looked vaguely frightened, closed up like clams or slammed their doors in his face the moment he mentioned Comstock or the camping party.

  Pete Toomey, the first one that he actually located, was sick in bed with a “bad cold,” his mother said, and she wouldn’t let Frank see him; the doctor told her, she said, to take him to the emergency room at the local hospital if he got any worse, and in any event, he wasn’t in condition to talk to anybody right then. Ted and Vi Thompson, in a little cottage on the far side of town, cut him off in midsentence and slammed the door hard; when he persisted at the doorbell, Ted returned with a doublebarreled twenty-gauge and told Frank, past a privacy chain, exactly how many seconds he had to pack into his car and get out of there. Two other tries were equally unproductive — one not home, with no response to repeated telephone calls, the other a house he couldn’t find at all until he discovered that the town had two streets with the same name on opposite sides of the valley and he had wasted an hour searching up and down the wrong one.

  By then it was eight o’clock in the evening, and Frank was beginning to see things at the side of the road that weren’t there. No point going on without rest, he thought, got to have a clear mind, at least, just in case one of these people decides to break down and talk for a change. He found a room in town at the Sky Valley Motel, walked down the main street to a steak house for food and then returned to the motel and fell asleep on the bed with his clothes still on.

  It was not until three the next afternoon that Frank finally struck pay dirt. Jerry Courtenay was just getting home from work as Frank drove up to the little house tucked away in the hills above the town. Jerry was a small, bright-eyed, wiry man driving a plumber’s van. He looked at Frank’s Forest Service ID, and then at Frank, and nodded briefly. Yes, he was one of the group that just got back from the Enchantments. Yes, it was the group Comstock had organized, and no, he wouldn’t mind talking to Frank about what had happened up there if he thought it would do any good. “Goddamned awful about Bob and those others,” he muttered. “I don’t know what hit ‘em, but something sure did.” He led Frank into the house, introduced his wife and a small son. “Beer?” Frank nodded, and the man tossed him one. “Just let me change my clothes,” he said.

  A few minutes later Jerry sank down in a living-room chair with his own beer. “So what do you want to know, exactly?”

  “Everything that happened up there,” Frank said.