Anonymous Rex (6 page)

“Two dead, though—smoke inhalation, we think,” says Dan. “One more in critical got caught in the fire—guy who owns the joint, actually.”

“Dino, right?”

Dan fixes me with a raised eyebrow. “With a name like the Evolution Club? Come on …”

“Kinda shoots down the insurance company’s self-inflicted arson theory,” I point out. “I mean, if I was gonna torch my own place, I’d sure as hell step out for a bite to eat a good hour before those flames hit.”

“You’d think so, right? But my men said it took four of ’em to pry the guy outta the back room. He’s half dead, burned like a turkey, and still he’s grabbing onto the door frame, putting up a fight.… Said they never seen anything like it.”

“Like he was protecting something?” I ask.

“Who knows? We didn’t find a thing, ‘cept a real nice desk chair.”

“Lemme guess—he’s a Compy, right?”

“Nope—one of your kind. We know them Raptors ain’t too bright.”

“Least my brain ain’t the size of a Ping-Pong ball.”

Dan flips me his pad, the papers crackling through the air. “Check it out,” he says, pointing to his handwritten notes. “Got these word for word from the attending officer. Witnesses all confirm a loud noise, then smoke. The place starts to clear, the trampling starts, and then a rush of fire from the back just as the firemen arrive.”

“Rush of fire, eh? A bomb?”

Dan shakes his head. “We’ve had inspectors combing the place for the last day, and they can’t find explosive traces. But you’re on the right track.… Here, walk with me.” Dan heads down the stairs, and I dutifully follow. The dull ache in my tail is slowly subsiding, and for this I am grateful.

We wend our way past scorched tables and blackened bar stools, every surface covered in a light gray ash. The individual chair backs, I notice, have been carved into the shape of humans at different
points along their twisted evolutionary path, each of them wildly caricatured and none of them particularly flattering.
Australopithecus afarensis’
expression of outright stupidity is counterbalanced perfectly by the smug, I’m-running-the-food-chain-now look on the face of
Homo erectus; H. habilis
squats contentedly in a pile of his own feces while the supposedly evolved
H. sapiens
is depicted as a large blubbery mass permanently attached to a big-screen TV. Someone had a bellyful of fun designing this place.

“Look at the spread,” says Dan. “Right along the wall here.”

I narrow my eyes, squinting in the relative darkness of the club. We’re standing far back from the front entrance now, the only available illumination filtering in through a jagged lightning bolt—shaped skylight in the ceiling. But I can see the streaks, vicious skid marks toasted into the walls, and I’ve been on enough arson jobs to know what it means.

“Blast pattern,” I say, and Dan agrees. The long, dark sear tracks emanating like sunbursts from an open doorway lead back to what should be the flash point of the fire. “That the office?” I ask.

“Storage room. Fuse box, too.” Dan runs his rough hands along the wall, the cracked, blistered paint peeling to the ground. “Lotsa boxes in there, most of ’em didn’t make it through the fire. I got the boys downtown poking through the stuff as we speak.”

A weak scent, a familiar scent, wafts through the air—hits me like rancid roast beef, but I’ve been on enough of these jobs to know better. “Gasoline,” I mumble. “You smell that?”

“Yeah, ’course I do. Our chemical guys found some traces, but that’s not surprising. They got a generator one room over in case they lose power, and this place here’s where they stored the fuel.”

Jotting everything down as quickly as possible, I glance back over my notes. Tight letters, strong loops, tall and thin. “You guys got a scenario mocked up already, don’t you?” I ask.

“You betcha. LAPD never sleeps.”

“Explains all the sugar intake. Okay, lemme guess at this one.” I clear my throat and shoot my cuffs, ready to dazzle, or at least mildly impress. “Fire sparks in storage room, smoldering. Probably electrical, fuse box blowing—that’s the first noise the witnesses heard. Catches some boxes on fire, holding maybe skin mags, maybe some of that porn from Taiwan.”

“Porn from—you got something you wanna tell me, Rubio?”

“Don’t stop me now, I’m rolling. So there go the skin magazines, crackle crackle crackle, and half an hour later, clouds are pouring outta the closed office. We got dinos and humans boogying away, and then someone sees the smoke. Rush, rush, rush, trample, trample, trample, everyone clears out, someone calls the fire department. Still just smoke, but a lot of it now. Firemen arrive, lights flashing, siren blasting, big scene, and just as everyone gets outta the joint, ka-BOOM—fire reaches the spare fuel tanks and the place goes up in flames. Freak accident, end of story, everyone goes home and diddles their spouses, ‘cept for the two dead guys and the owner up in the hospital.”

Dan applauds, and I bow deeply, feeling my girdle stretch under the pressure. “That’s pretty much how we have it,” Dan admits. “We checked out Donovan Burke’s financial records, by the way—”

“The owner, right?”

“Yeah, some playboy hotshot who flew out west a couple years back, set up shop real quick—he’s up in intensive at County. We ran a search on him downtown, ’cause we knew you guys’d be snooping around to make sure it wasn’t an inside job, but it came up clean. This place was the hottest spot in the Valley—poor sonofabitch was raking it in night after night. Had to hire an extra girl just to count it all.”

I know there’s a great mystique, an almost sexual allure, to the lone private eye working his case, sludging through the slime-infested streets, digging past the dirtiest of details to finally find his man—hell, I’ve gotten dates on that premise alone. And in some respects, I actively enjoy that sort of work. Keeps me sharp, on my claws. But when a job’s as seemingly cut-and-dried as this one, I like nothing better than to have all the information handed to me by a good friend in local law enforcement. I mean, they have to do it anyway, so why not share the wealth?

Unfortunately, sometimes they miss things.

“You gonna pack it up?” Dan asks as we walk out of the nightclub, heading to my car and a spare pair of Dockers. “Go back to Teitelbaum, give him the info, and tell him where to stick it?”

“I need to keep this job,” I remind him. “And my life. Insulting a T-Rex ain’t the way to go about it. Anyway, I’m gonna check out a few more leads.”

“Look, I’ll give you all the witness reports I got. What’s left to check out?”

I need a hat to tip, a trench coat to tug, a cigarette to dangle from my lips. Private investigation without props doesn’t make the grade. “You said that the anonymous caller to the fire station reported a big blaze at the Evolution Club, right? Those the exact words—big blaze?”

“So far’s I know, yeah.”

I tap Dan’s shirt pocket, my gloved finger rapping against his notebook. “But none of your witnesses actually saw the flames until
after
the fire engines arrived.” I pause a moment … waiting … waiting … and then Dan figures it out.

“We got a time conflict here, don’t we?” he says.

“Yep we do,” I reply, affecting the widest smile in my repertoire, the one that carves a shining half-moon out of my lips. “And you got a bunch more paperwork to fill out.”

Dan shakes his head morosely—forms and filing are not the Brontosaur’s forte. But he’s a trooper, and I know in my heart of hearts that come morning, he’ll be hunched over his typewriter, concentrating on detail like a monk illuminating a precious manuscript. “You wanna come back to the house tonight?” he asks. “I’m gonna grill up a few steaks, maybe go wild and do a little oregano seasoning.”

A shake of my head, a shuffle back toward the front of the club. Dinner sounds great—steak sounds better—steak and oregano would just about put me through the roof—but I’ve got work to do. That, and I need a few more hits of basil, pronto. “Sounds great, but I’ll have to take you up another time.”

“Hot date, eh?” Dan wriggles his eyebrows lasciviously.

I think of the burned Velociraptor up in the hospital, of his perplexing struggle to remain inside a room blistering with heat, with smoke, with a hundred ways to die. Nobody’s
that
attached to a desk chair—even Teitelbaum would manage to wriggle his way up and out of the office with five thousand degrees pressing against his back. It stands to reason, then, that Donovan Burke had a reason to stay in that room—a damned good one—and there’s only one dino who can tell me what that reason was.

“The hottest,” I tell Dan, and make my way out of the nightclub.

H
ospitals are a tough gig for anyone, I’ll give you that. The last place the sick and dying need to be is around the sick and dying. But for a dino, it’s worse. Much worse.

Even after all these millions of years—all these tens of millions of years—of the laboriously slow evolutionary process, we dinos still receive our best information through our schnozzes. Twenty-twenty vision and pin-drop hearing notwithstanding, our main sense is scent, and when we’re deprived of the olfactory, it can be quite the debilitating experience. You’re not going to find anything on this earth more pathetic than a dino with a head cold. We whine, we sniffle, we complain at the top of our stuffed-up lungs that nothing seems right, that the world has suddenly lost all color, all meaning. The most courageous of us revert into sniveling infancy, toddlers just out of the shell, and those who are pretty sniveling to begin with become downright unapproachable.

A hospital has no smells. None of use, at least, and therein lies the problem. The gallons and gallons of disinfectant slopped along the floors and onto the walls every day make sure that not a solitary odor molecule makes it out of Dodge alive. Sure, it’s all in the name of good health, and I can understand where the elimination of bacteria and similar microscopic evildoers might come in handy in fighting off
infection and whatnot, but it’s a bitch and a half for any dino trying to keep his sanity.

I’m losing it already, and I’ve barely gotten through the front door.

“I’m here to see Donovan Burke,” I tell the thin-lipped nurse, who is busy brooding over a cup of coffee and this morning’s—Tuesday’s—crossword puzzle.

“You gotta speak up,” she says, a stick of gum smacking rhythmically between her short, blunt teeth. Instinctively, I lean in closer to her pistoning jaws, my nostrils flaring, my brain craving a whiff of Bubblicious, Juicy Fruit, Trident—anything to combat this pervading sense of nothingness.

“Donovan Burke,” I repeat, pulling back before she notices me sniffing away at her mouth. “That’s Donovan with a D.”

The nurse—Jean Fitzsimmons, unless she swapped name tags with someone else this morning—sighs as if I have asked her to perform some task beneath her station such as steel-toe boot licking. She allows the newspaper to flutter out of her hands, and her narrow, birdlike fingers set to tapping away on a nearby keyboard. A computer screen fills with patients’ names, their respective ailments, and prices that simply can’t be correct. One hundred and sixty-eight dollars for a single shot of antibiotics? For that kind of cash, there had better be some serious street pharmaceuticals in that syringe. Nurse Fitzsimmons notices my gawk and pointedly turns the monitor away from my Peeping Vincent peepers.

“He’s on the fifth floor, Ward F,” she says, her eyes warily combing down and across my body. “Are you family?”

“Private investigator,” I reply, whipping out my ID. It’s a nice picture of me in my human guise, from a time when I had the cash and the inclination to keep up my appearance—tailored suit, power tie, eyes glistening, and a wide, friendly smile that betrays none of my sharper teeth. “My name’s Vincent Rubio.”

“I’ll have to—”

“Announce me. I know.” Standard protocol. Ward F is a special wing, set up by dino administrators and doctors who designed it so that our kind might have a sanctuary within the confines of a working hospital. There are dino health clinics all over the country, of course, but most major hospitals contain special wards in case one of us
should be brought in for emergency treatment, as Mr. Burke was last Wednesday morning.

The official story on Ward F is that it is reserved for patients with “special needs,” a scope of circumstances ranging from religious preferences to round-the-clock bedside care to standard VIP treatment. This is a broad enough definition that it makes it easy for dino administrators to classify all their nonhumans as “special needs” patients, and thus move them and only them onto the ward. All visitors—doctors included—must be announced to the nurses on staff (dinos in disguise, every one), ostensibly for privacy and security, but in actuality in defense against an accidental sighting. It sounds like a risky system, and every once in a while you’ll hear some dino raise the roof about the chances that we take, but the whiners never come up with a better solution than the system we have now. As it is, dinosaurs represent a large proportion of the health care industry; respect for medicine and surgery is something all dino parents try to instill within their children, if only because our ancestors spent so many millions of years dying of insignificant bacterial illnesses and minor infections. And with all these dinos becoming doctors, it’s easy for them to fill hospital wards—sometimes entire hospitals—with a primarily dinosaur staff.