The Glass Factory (26 page)

What do we find? Enough Chemrel Max Coveralls to outfit a small army, three emergency full-body showers and four eye/ facewash stations. Looks like these guys were prepared for handling some major toxics. There’s a five-foot-high cabinet labeled
ACID
in huge red letters, which was awfully nice of them, and a few dozen plunger cans. Wai-Wai explains that these are designed specifically for use with highly flammable liquids. And if it weren’t for her I probably would not have opened the huge yellow plastic drums to reveal the solid steel drums inside.

Wai-Wai gives them a rap. “Muffled,” she says. “There’s another layer of protection. This is some serious hazard containment.”

“I want a sample of it.”

“Why don’t we just lift the red drum of
BIOHAZARD
WASTE?”

“Because I want this one.”

“Oh. I’m going to have to put that phrase in my next grant application.”

Wai-Wai locates the cabinet with the empties, takes out a small container-within-a-container, rinses it out in a deep lab sink and dries it, just to be sure, and proceeds to extract a couple of quarts of something black, gooey and repellant. Now she wants some software. I figure the most important stuff is in the drawer with the biggest lock. Will these goons never catch on to that? It takes some work, and a little obvious damage to the lock, but I get it open. She flips through the stacks of diskettes, grabs a few that seem to be copies no one will miss immediately. We close the drawer and relock it. I shut and lock the back door and we both go back out up through the ceiling, replacing the tiles after us.

“Not bad for two little maids from school,” says Wai-Wai.

We stumble, wet and tired, through the woods and get Wai-Wai’s car seats all dirty driving back to main campus and the Chem Building.

“At least I’ve got a key to this front door,” she says.

Up in the lab, she siphons off a few milliliters of the black ooze and runs it through a few routine tests.

“Yep,” she says. “Just as I thought: It’s gunk.”

“Can you get more specific?”

“Not without some parameters. That’s why we brought this,” she takes out the software. We go to an office adjoining the lab. She turns on the light and jumpstarts the computer. But it doesn’t take long to find out the access to the software is pretty effectively blocked.

“I’m good at ripping these things apart physically, but that’s it,” I say, rapping the top of the computer.

“Okay, I can’t do it. But I know who can. Let’s meet back here tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure. What’s another day …?”

The next day the EPA is at it again, banging on the gates of the glass factory, but they don’t have the warrant yet and the place is still stalling. Gina says they’re trying to slow the process down by requesting copies of every public document on record, which she’s then required to provide. That’s a Morse tactic, all right.

A salesman comes to the door and tries to sell us a water purifier.

I ask, “Does it filter out trichloroethylene?”

And he goes, “Mbeuh-euh, I—”

“Never mind.”

My car won’t be ready ’til tomorrow. So I bike up to Wai-Wai’s lab, and she grabs the software and walks me over to the campus computer center. There’s a supply store, classrooms full of desks and display monitors and computers, and, way in the back, some offices. Wai-Wai takes me into the smallest one, with little slits for windows like the architects were expecting the place might have to be defended from Saxon longbowmen or something, looking out onto the “it-came-from-another-planet” windowless concrete monstrosity that Wai-Wai tells me is the Lecture Center.

Wai-Wai introduces me to her computer whiz friend Faith Wiegeneest. She’s a white girl, of Dutch descent, like that isn’t obvious with a name like Wiegeneest, and
finally
one who’s nearer to my generation. In fact, she’s a couple of years older and even a little bit more frazzled than me, which I was beginning to think wasn’t possible.

“That’s a pretty name,” I say. “Does it mean anything?”

“Yes. ‘Healer.’“

“Oh, no. First I meet someone named Alan Wrennch, now this: Your name isn’t really ‘Faith Healer,’ is it?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Jeezus.”

“What’s yours?” I tell her my name. “Philomel’s a kind of bird, isn’t it? But what does Buscarsela mean?”

“It means ‘hip deep in sheep shit.’”

Faith chuckles.

“Enough of this chit-chat,” says Wai-Wai. “We’ve got something for you. Heal
this,
Faith.”

Wai-Wai hands her the diskettes. Faith slips them in and punches up some stuff. She explains to us that she’s trying to identify the operating code, but even that is blocked. However, she knows of only a handful of codes that can do that, so once again the excess of security on Morse’s part has the opposite effect of pointing us towards a solution.

She says, “You know, sometimes people’s pig-headedness amazes me. And sometimes it doesn’t. Now, this really isn’t the right terminal for this. Trying to bust a code on a Unisystems 1200 is like trying to perform an appendectomy with a backhoe. I mean, it can be done, but it’s
messy.”

But I don’t care. Fifteen minutes later we’re printing out a list of chemicals fifteen pages long that Wai-Wai identifies as toxic organic volatiles, everything from alkylamine nitrates to xylidene triethylamine, and a corresponding list of configurations and words she does not recognize.

“They look like trade names, not chemical names,” says Wai-Wai. “They could mean anything.”

“But will this help you analyze the sample?” I ask.

“I’ll let you know by tomorrow.”

I bike home. Tired out from last night’s activity and the round-trip biking, my wits really aren’t about me as I dismount and walk towards the back of the house. As I round the shadowy corner something heavy and metal swings towards me. I get off the first hundredth of a second of a duck-and-roll reflex when it slams down on my head and knocks me to the ground; it probably would have killed me but he wasn’t expecting this helmet (bloody fool doesn’t know how to handle a wrench).

I roll to a stop flat on my back. The guy slices off my belt pouch and runs. I’m stunned, but I shake it out of my head and suddenly find myself on my feet and chasing the bastard. But after a block and a half the pain starts oozing through the protective sheets of brain-made painkiller and fight-or-flight juices, and thick, hot blood is pounding like a dull metal clapper against my bell-shaped head while someone drives hot metal tent spikes into my chest and lungs. But the beast within me rages through the pain, ignoring it.

I chase him down and tackle the guy, but I’ve got a death grip on a shadow. My head all but abdicates into total blackness while the tent spikes turn to molten lead, burning holes in my chest. I crumple around prickly icicles of nothingness, and we both go down. I twinge uncontrollably and curl up, helpless as a flipped beetle. He kicks himself free, then keeps kicking what’s left of my head and chest. Then he falls across me screaming:

“Aaooowwww!”

He must have burnt himself on the molten lead.

Claang!

The clapper in my head goes off, but he’s the one screaming: “Aaah!”

Claaang!

Him again: “Aaaggh!”

Weight is lifted off me, and another
clang
drops it next to me.

I push myself away from mother earth’s grave embrace one more time and roll over. My eyes still see. I look up. Reggie Einhorn is standing over the guy and clobbering him with a four-foot section of lead pipe. A few more swings and the guy stops moving.

The molten lead cools enough to condense, withdraw, reform. I’m still breathing.

“Thanks,” I say. “I think you saved my life—”

“What? With this fly-swatter?”

“Ow!” Sharp stabbing pains in my neck and chest.

“Let me go call a doctor.”

I give him Stan’s number.

My assailant gets arrested. The cops tell me he has been arrested four other times in Suffolk County, twice for muggings. They want me to believe that it was just a mugging. But still. I wonder … Then why was he waiting
for me?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I think love is terribly primitive.
—Helen Fisher

ANTONIA’S VERY UPSET
to see me in pain, but I talk to her and calm her down and tell her I’m going to go to the doctor and that he’ll make me feel better.

“Can I go, too?” she asks.

I say, “No, I don’t think you should.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Pleeeeese?”

“Oh, okay.”

Rosita’s shocked but supportive, until Billy foolishly tells her my paranoia-inducing it-sure-seemed-like-he-was-waiting-for-me story and she gets completely spooked, so Colomba sends her off to Elvis’s apartment for a few days until things calm down.

Reggie drives me up to the hospital in his pickup truck. It’s too painful to sit the whole way and I have to curl up on the seat with my head resting against his leg. When we get there he helps me down to the sidewalk. The odd thing is
he’s
shaking. This must have been more of an ordeal for him than I realized. He’s not satisfied when I tell him thanks, I can handle it from here, but I manage to send him home.

Antonia says, “It’s raining.”

Is it? I’m not
that
far gone.

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is.” And she goes: “Shhhhhhhhh—”

“Oh.” Pretend rain. “Well, let’s go.”

“No, we’re going to get wet.”

“We’ll use an umbrella.”

“I don’t have an umbrella.”

“Well pretend you do.”

“I don’t want to get wet.”

“If you’re going to pretend it’s raining you can use a pretend umbrella.”

“Oh. Okay.” And she walks with me towards the hospital entrance. “We’re not getting wet.”

“No, we’re not.”

“The umbrella’s keeping us dry.”

With Antonia leading I hobble down the newly buffed corridor that reeks of cleaning fluid vapors. A nice chaser to the carbon tet I’ve been breathing all month.

Stan looks up in horror. “Filomena? What happened?”

“Somebody hit me over the head with a wrench. Fortunately, they weren’t expecting the bike helmet.”

“Show me the spot.” I do. It’s very tender and sensitive to his hard, professional palpations. But no concussion.

“We’re going to have to clean and bandage those abrasions. How about the rest of you? Does it hurt much?”

“Only when I move.”

“Let me see you walk.”

I hobble a few more feet. He lays me flat on my back and stands behind my head, placing both hands on either side of my neck, just under the chin. His fingers firmly probe and prod.

“The shock was distributed unevenly. Slight subluxation of the first cervical vertebra. Your upper body muscles are going to be very stiff and painful by tomorrow. Relax.” He’s cradling my head with two hands. “Deep breath. Let it out—” Before I realize what he’s doing he quickly twists my neck and moves the vertebra back into place with the sound of an enormous knuckle cracking. Antonia laughs at the sound. “Oh, you like that?” he says to her.