Stephenie Meyer - The Chemist

“And then what happens?” Kevin asked.

“Your target takes a nap – for an hour, maybe two, depending on his or her size.”

“This thing is tiny,” he complained, holding the ring between his thumb and forefinger and staring through the hole.

“Sorry. I’ll try to have bigger hands for you next time. Put it on your pinkie.”

“Who wears a pinkie ring?”

She smiled. “I think it will suit perfectly.”

Daniel chuckled.

Kevin shoved the ring onto his littlest finger, but it made it only over his first knuckle. The pouch barely reached his palm. He’d need more tubing if he ever wanted to hide it in his sleeve. He frowned at the apparatus for a moment, then suddenly grinned. “Neat.”

Daniel leaned forward and gestured to the rings Alex still wore. “What do those other two do?”

She lifted her right hand, wiggling her ring finger with the gold band. “Kills you easy.” She held up the middle finger of her left hand with the rose-gold band. “Kills you hard.”

“Oh, hey!” Kevin said in sudden realization. “Is that what that girlie slap back in West Virginia was about?”

“Yes.”

“ Damn. You’re one dangerous little spider, Ollie.”

She nodded in agreement. “If I were taller or you were shorter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Well, I guess that was your lucky day.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Which one did you try to hit me with?”

She held up the middle finger on her left hand again.

“Harsh,” Kevin commented. “Why don’t those rings have all the extra stuff?” He waved his hand so that the tube and pouch swung beneath his hand.

“Be careful,” she warned. “That could detach.”

Kevin caught the little bag and cradled it in his palm. “Right.”

“My other rings are coated with venom. A little goes a long way. Just one drop of cone snail venom is enough to kill twenty men your size.”

“Let me guess, you keep cone snails and black widow spiders as pets back home?”

“No time for pets, and really, black widow venom is on the very weak end of the damage scale. No, I used to have access to a lot of things. I studied cone snail venom briefly because of the way it targets particular classes of receptors. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I kept what I could and I’m careful with my supplies now.”

Kevin looked down at the ring he wore again, considering. It kept him quiet, which Alex appreciated.

She chose Howard University Hospital, because it was a level-one trauma center and she knew her way around the facility – unless a lot had changed in the past ten years.

She did a slow loop around the buildings, scanning for camera placement and police presence. It was not even seven a.m., but there were plenty of people coming and going.

“How about that one?” Kevin asked, pointing.

“No, that will mostly be linens and paper goods,” she muttered.

“Take a break before you do another lap; we don’t want to be noticed.”

“I know how this works,” she lied.

She drove a few streets west and stopped at a small green space. A handful of joggers were doing their rounds, but it was otherwise fairly empty. They waited in silence for ten minutes, then she pulled out and drove a wider circle, staying two blocks out from the roads around the hospital. Eventually she spotted something promising – a white truck labeled HALBERT & SOWERBY SUPPLIERS. She was familiar with the company and was pretty sure they would have usable goods on board.

She tailed the truck into a loading area behind the main building of the hospital. Kevin was ready, fingers already wrapped around the door handle.

“Just drop me behind them, then wait a block up,” he told her.

Nodding, she slowed to a brief pause just behind the truck, too close for Kevin to be seen in the mirrors. Once he was out, she reversed a couple of feet and then drove away at the exact posted speed. She glanced into the truck from under her hat as she passed; there was only a driver, no passengers. Still, there were plenty of people in scrubs and maintenance uniforms on the sidewalk. She hoped Kevin could be unobtrusive about this.

She braked at the stop sign on the corner, wondering how she was supposed to wait here when there was no parking. Before she could decide, she saw the white truck coming up behind her, one car back. She drove ahead slowly, goading the car between them to pass, then letting Kevin pass, too. She could see the driver – a very young-looking black man – leaning against the passenger-side window with his eyes closed.

“Well, there aren’t any cops following him… yet,” she muttered as she began following.

“Will it hurt the guy?” Daniel asked. “What Kevin stuck him with?”

“Not really. He’ll have an awful hangover when he wakes up, but nothing permanent.”

Kevin drove for about twenty minutes, first putting some distance between them and the hospital, then seeking the right place for the transfer of goods. He decided on a quiet industrial park, pulling to the back where there were several empty loading spaces near closed, roll-down access doors. He backed into one and she parked next to him, on the lee side, where she would be invisible to anyone entering the lot.

She yanked on a pair of latex gloves, handed another to Daniel, and shoved a pair into her pocket.

Kevin already had the back door of the truck open. She handed him the extra gloves, then boosted herself up onto the floor of the cargo hold. Everything inside was secured in opaque white plastic bins, stacked high and anchored to the walls with red nylon cords.

“Help me get these open,” she instructed. Kevin started pulling the bins down and removing the lids. Daniel climbed in and followed his lead. Alex went behind them, sorting through her options.

Her main worry was being shot. It seemed the most likely fallout from an offensive action. Of course, she couldn’t rule out being knifed or beaten with a blunt object. Still, she was very happy when she found a bin with blowout kits; each had tourniquets, gauze impregnated with QuikClot, and a variety of chest seals. She started a pile, adding different kinds of closure strips and gauze packs, dressings and compression bandages, chemical heating and cooling packs, resuscitation kits, a few bag-valve masks, alcohol and iodine wipes, splints and collars, burn dressings, IV catheters and tubing, saline bags, and handfuls of sealed syringes.

“You planning to start your own field hospital?” Kevin asked.

“You never know what you might need,” she countered, then added in her mind, You might be the one who needs this stuff, idiot.

“Here,” Daniel offered, turning one of the half-depleted bins upside down and dumping what was left into another. He took the now-empty bin and started organizing her pile inside.

“Thanks. I think I’ve got everything I want.”

Kevin secured the bins to the wall, then wiped down the door. She followed him again until he found a place to leave the truck and driver, behind a small strip mall. He quickly cleaned his fingerprints from the cab, and they were on their way.

When they got back to the apartment, Raoul the housekeeper had been and gone, and Val was lying across a low sofa watching a big-screen TV that Alex could have sworn was not there yesterday. It was playing a black-and-white movie.

Today Val wore a pale blue jumpsuit with short shorts and a plunging neckline. Einstein lay on the sofa beside her with his muzzle on her arm. She was petting him rhythmically, and he didn’t get up to greet them as they came through the door. He only pounded his tail against the sofa when he saw Kevin.

“So, how did all the spying go?” she asked lazily.