Warren Murphy - Feast or Famine

Destroyer 107: Feast or Famine

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

At first, no one connected the hideous death of Doyal T. Rand with the greatest plague to threaten America's breadbasket since the Dust Bowl.

Doyal T. Rand wasn't a farmer. He was a geneticist. His chief accomplishment in life was the discovery of the sex gland in roaches. Learning to shut off the pheromone-producing gland was the same as shutting off a roach's genetic ability to replicate itself. No more replication, no more roaches. While human birth control remained a subject of controversy, many on both sides of the argument practiced roach birth control without giving the moral implications a second thought. Nobody cared about roaches. Not even Doyal T. Rand, who had become a millionaire many times over defusing and frustrating their furtive little sex lives.

Doyal T. Rand was on his lunch hour on a sunny April morning when he forgot a simple truism. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Technically, it wasn't a free lunch that killed him, but a candy sample.

Doyal T. Rand stood on the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in New York City making faces at the rows of restaurants while trying to decide whether he was in the mood for Chinese or Thai. Actually, he hungered for Korean barbecue, but the nearest Korean restaurant was in Herald Square, which was too long to walk, and Doyal T. Rand was too cheap to take a cab.

While he was mentally tasting Bi Bam Bap on his hungry tongue, Doyal T. Rand heard what was to him music.

"Free sample!"

Rand turned. On the corner behind him, a man was standing in the cool of April, with a tray slung from his shoulders like those that cigarette girls carried in old B movies. He wore some kind of team jacket and cap. Doyal T. Rand didn't follow sports, so his eyes flicked from the team logo to the man's hands.

He was handing out free samples of something to anyone who would accept them.

"Free. It's free. Free to all," the hawker kept saying. His face was an animated shadow under the bill of his cap. He wore mirrored sunglasses tinted an iridescent emerald.

Doyal T. Rand stepped closer. At first, it was curiosity. Then greed. And when he noticed people unwrapping the samples and popping them into their mouths, he had to have one. It didn't matter what it was. It was free. Doyal T. Rand liked free stuff. If someone were to can puppy poo and offer them two for the price of one, Doyal T. Rand would buy four cans and walk away grinning.

"I'll take one," he told the vendor.

"It's guarana candy," the vendor said.

"I don't care. Just give me one."

"It's made from a Brazilian berry supposed to have aphrodisiac properties. Not that we're guaranteeing anything."

"I don't care what it is. I just want mine," Doyal T. Rand said impatiently because he took a strict forty-five minutes for lunch. Enough to wolf his food down and slide out the door before the waitress realized she'd been stiffed on her tip.

The tray was filled with what looked like amber marbles wrapped in cellophane. When Doyal got a good look, his undersized heart sank. The stuff looked like hard candy. He didn't like hard candy. He preferred caramel or nougat. Bull's-eyes were his favorite. He loved chewing through sweet caramel to the dry, powdery confection center.

Still, this candy was free.

"Gimme," Doyal T. Rand said.

The vendor ignored the dull amber candies rattling around his waist-high tray and palmed one from his pocket. That one was slightly larger than the others and slightly redder. Doyal, his eyes on all those free samples, failed to notice his came from the hawker's pocket.

"Is it hot?" he asked, thinking of a peppery candy called Red Hots, which he detested.

"No. Sweet."

"I don't like hard candy," Doyal T. Rand muttered, ever the ingrate.

"You'll like this."

"We'll see," said Doyal T. Rand. Just as he turned to go, he caught himself and asked, "Can I have another?"

"One to a customer."

"It's for my secretary. She has a sweet tooth."

"One to a customer."

Shrugging, Doyal T. Rand walked off, absently unwrapping the ball of hard amber sugar. He still had to figure out where to eat. Lunchtime was ticking away.

Rand finally decided on Thai food. He stepped off the curb as the light changed and, without thinking about it, popped the hard amber candy into his mouth.

It was pleasantly sweet. There was a kind of tang to it that took the edge off the sweetness. Doyal T. Rand rolled it around on his tongue, paying more attention to the taste. It began tasting familiar. Then he remembered a soft drink that had come on the market last fall. It tasted just like this. It was good. The candy was good, too. Best of all, it was free.

Rand was halfway across Seventh Avenue when he decided the candy was worth going after seconds.

He turned, biting down on the hard, sweet ball, and instantly his head filled with a weird buzzing.

Not his ears. His head. It started low, then swelled with incredible speed. He had a wild thought. He wondered if this was the aphrodisiac effect the vendor had mentioned kicking in.

Then the buzzing filled his entire head, and the world winked out as if he had been struck blind by the very sweetness of the taste in his mouth.

Doyal T. Rand took a halting step, then another. His head swayed, then jerked, and then he pitched forward on his face in the middle of the crosswalk.

The light changed, and a phalanx of capsulelike yellow cabs surged toward him, honking and blaring for him to pick his lazy ass off the intersection so that Manhattan traffic could flow with its normal multidirectional pandemonium.

When Rand refused to move, they went around him. At first, with care, but once traffic flow resumed, several vehicles left short stretches of smoking tread as testimony to their brake-pad strength.

All that honking brought NYPD traffic cop Andy Funkhauser surging into the blaring congestion, blowing his whistle like a fury.

Officer Funkhauser all but tripped over the body, dropped the whistle from his mouth and used his hands to direct the traffic flow while he tried talking into his shoulder radio.

The ambulance pulled up while the light was red; and a pair of EMTs jumped out.

"I didn't touch him," Officer Funkhauser said, one eye on a fresh barrier of yellow cabs that eyed him with hungry headlights as they waited for green.

"Drunk?"

"Could be diabetic."

One of the EMTs got down on his knees. "Hey buddy, can you hear me?"

The body of Doyal T. Rand declined to answer. So they rolled him over.

Officer Funkhauser had one eye on the impatient traffic. The light had finally turned green, and engines were growling. He was keeping them at bay with only the upraised palm of his hand.

He heard one of the EMTs say "Ugh."

He had never heard an EMT go "Ugh" before. The poor bastards saw everything. Officer Funkhauser thought he had seen everything, too.

So he took his eyes off the line of cars and cabs and glanced down.

What he saw hit him like a mule's kick.

The victim's face was turned up to the sky. The sun was shining down with a clarity New York City only enjoyed on cloudless days.

The victim's eye sockets were scarlet caverns. There was no blood. No eyeballs. Just the red bone that was designed by nature to hold the human eye in place.

"Jesus, where are this guy's eyes?" blurted the EMT who hadn't said "Ugh."

At that point, the dead guy's mouth-there was no question he was dead-dropped open. The sun shone directly into it. It showed the interior of his mouth. And showed without a doubt that the dead man had no tongue. No uvula, either.

"I think we have a homicide here," the first EMT muttered.

"Fuck," said Officer Funkhauser, who knew he had to call for Homicide and a morgue wagon and didn't think his upraised hand and his badge could hold off the growling cabs much longer.