John Lutz - Spark

As Val’s friend Jane had said, the door at the end of the hall was unlettered. Carver turned its knob and pushed.

No give.

The door was locked.

He quickly made his way to the door that said ADMINISTRATION and tried it.

Ah! Unlocked.

He went inside and limped around behind the receptionist’s desk, then began searching through the drawers.

He found everything but keys.

As he straightened up with a soft groan, something gleamed in the flitting penlight beam. He focused the light and saw a thick ring of keys dangling from the lock of a gray metal file cabinet. It looked like a complicated insect that had been surprised and frozen by the light on its climb up the steep wall of steel.

He smiled and wiped the damp back of his hand across his lips. The odds were good, with that many keys.

He went to them and pulled the file cabinet’s key from the lock. Carrying the key ring, he limped back into the hall and down to the file room’s locked door.

He counted carefully. The ninth key he tried opened the file room door. He played the penlight beam over the floor to make sure there were no obstacles, then entered.

There were no windows in the room, so he located the wall switch and flicked it upward.

Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered to life, then light flooded the room and Carver felt a rush of disappointment.

There were no file cabinets.

The room was only about ten feet square. There was a small gray metal table in its center, with an IBM computer on it, a box of disks, and some pens, pencils, and erasers. A gray folding chair was at one end of the table. There was some sort of cabinet that took up most of one wall and had louvered metal doors.

Carver opened one of the doors and saw a bank of small, square filing drawers. He slid one of the narrow drawers out on its casters.

It was lined with 3 1/ 2-inch computer disks.

He cursed anew the age of the microchip. If anywhere in the medical center there were printouts of whatever was on the disks, he didn’t have time to search for them.

He saw that the drawers were labeled alphabetically. When he pulled out the K drawer, he saw more disks. All of them were labeled in blue ink. Under K he found “Keller” and started to remove the file.

Then he decided someone might notice it was missing.

He limped over to the computer on the table, and the open box of disks. He got the Keller Pharmaceutical file from its drawer and laid it on the table next to a disk he drew from the box. Carefully he peeled the adhesive label from the Keller disk, then pressed it onto the other disk. Placed the substitute under K in the file drawer.

He remembered a “Deceased” heading in the file cabinet. Quickly he found Jerome Evans’s file disk and substituted for it as he had the Keller disk.

He took the genuine disks with him as he made his way out of the building the same way he’d entered.

Still on an adrenaline high, he felt good when the night air hit him.

In fact, great.

“Get what you wanted?” Val asked eagerly, when Carver was standing outside the Dodge.

“I think so. It’s on disks.”

“Computer disks, I guess you mean.”

“Yeah. So it’ll take a little time before I find out whatever there is to know.”

“With the world all complicated the way it’s gotten, you’re gonna need a computer.”

“I know somebody who’s got one,” Carver said. He looked at his car parked out on the street. “Right now, I need to get back to the Warm Sands and get some sleep.”

“Was tonight worthwhile?” Val asked, as he hunched forward in his seat and started the Dodge’s engine.

Carver said, “I’ll let you know.”

He watched as Val cranked up the window to hold in the air-conditioning, then drove slowly from the lot.

Carver limped toward the Olds, feeling the thickness of the humid night as if he were plodding underwater, the stolen disks heavy in his pocket.

Val was right. The world got more complicated every day. Somehow, while Carver wasn’t paying attention, it had been turned into an electronic jungle.

Making it an ever more dangerous place for hunted and hunter.

Carver stood leaning on his cane behind Beth, looking over her shoulder. They were in her room at the Warm Sands, breakfasting on stale doughnuts and coffee he’d brought from a quick-stop market down the highway, seeing what was on the Keller Pharmaceutical disk Carver had stolen last night. He was fully dressed, Beth was in panties and bra, seated like a supplicant at the room’s tiny desk with her portable computer open and glowing like a god before her.

It had taken her only a few minutes to key up the information on the disk, which consisted mainly of Latin medical descriptions and columns of figures.

“Not much here but what looks like a record of orders, delivery dates, and payment amounts and dates,” Beth said. The radio was on in the room, not very loud, rap music. The human voice was never meant to be a drum. He wished she’d turn that crap off.

He leaned closer and studied the orange-tinted screen. It would take someone more knowledgeable than either of them to know what the listed drugs were for, what the prices and delivery dates meant. Maybe a CPA with a medical degree.

While he was leaning so near her, Carver decided to kiss Beth on the ear. He was bending farther forward to do that when he noticed one of the abbreviations on the computer screen: MCL.

Beth shivered as he spoke less than an inch from her ear. “What do you make of that?” he asked. He pointed to the half-dozen identical abbreviations.

She rubbed her knuckle in her ear. “That your mind’s not entirely on the job.”

“I mean those sets of letters. They might stand for Mercury Laboratories.”

“If they do,” Beth said, “it appears some of the medical supplies were drop-shipped. Ordered and paid for through Keller Pharmaceutical but delivered direct from Mercury.”

“Nothing necessarily unusual there,” Carver said, “but it does isolate the Keller drugs that were developed by Mercury.”

“Some of them, anyway,” Beth said. “Other Mercury shipments might have reached the medical center by way of Keller.”

Carver straightened up, leaning on his cane and still gazing at the computer screen. The names of the drugs, be they generic or commercial, meant nothing to him. But then he didn’t read Latin. He took a bite of chocolate-iced cake doughnut, licked his fingers, and reached for his foam cup of coffee where it sat on the desk. He chewed, swallowed, sipped. Said, “Let’s see what’s on the Jerome Evans disk.”

Beth changed disks and went through her ritual with the computer, mumbling under her breath about EXE commands and paths. It was a lingo Carver regarded as intelligible as Latin. A fly droned close to the computer. Without bothering to look directly at it, she managed to knock it across the room with a casual backhand flick, a blur of dark flesh and red fingernails. Maybe EXE stood for “exterminator.”

She punched several keys in quick succession. The disk drive whirr ed and clunk ed softly, the screen flickered, and there was the information they sought.

The Jerome Evans file contained a plethora of information, from the date and time of his check-in at Emergency, to the date and time of his expiration written on what Beth called a scanner copy of the death certificate. From what Carver could make out, the autopsy revealed fatal damage to the heart. Jerome also had prostate cancer, but it was in the beginning stages and was in no way a factor in his death. As Hattie had told Carver, the official cause of her husband’s death was listed as cardiac arrest. The trauma to the heart was effected by a massive blood clot that had moved into the aorta. There was Dr. Wynn’s signature attesting to all of this.