Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

Two, there might be a guard on duty. Meadows decided to hold that in abeyance.

Three, the people at Lifeline Laboratory were nuts and didn't think they'd be burglarized.

Mçadows decided that nobody was that crazy so he rejected that possibility. Back to possibility two: the laboratory had a guard on duty. That was probably the light in the front of the building.

Zack Meadows didn't trust guards. He had been a private guard once and knew what they did. They brought their bottle, their girlie magazines, and thirty

11

minutes after everybody went home for the night, they fell asleep.

He got into the building by slipping the back lock with an expired credit card. Meadows didn't carry credit cards anymore because he could never remember what he had charged and he was sure the credit card company was making up most of the items on his statement.

Enough light came through the uncovered windows for him to be able to walk through the dark laboratory. It was a large room with tall laboratory tables, eight feet long, topped with white formica. There were five of them in a row on his right side. On his left were cages, stacked neatly from floor to ceiling, and he was startled for a moment when he heard the high-pitched squeaking of rats, but then he realized they were safe in the cages. There were other animals in cages too, but he could not tell what they were in the semi-darkness and he was careful not to walk too close to them.

He walked toward the front of the building. Through the window in the door on the far end of the room, he peered down a long hallway toward a front reception room. Meadows could see a pair of feet propped up on a desk. Men's shoes, blue trousers. A desk drawer was open and a bottle of scotch was protruding from it.

He nodded to himself, pulled down the shade on the inside of the laboratory door, then pulled the shades on all the windows and the back door before flicking on a light. He locked the door leading to the rest of the building. If he heard the guard stirring, he could turn off the light and flee the building before the man could get into the room.

12

The place was like a zoo, he thought. The entire side wall was covered with cages and inside the cages were rats and monkeys and some kind of lizards and even bowls of worms.

Jasper Stevens had told him about the animals but he had wanted to see for himself.

There was one small cage whose glass was painted black. Attached to the front of the cage was an eyepiece so an observer could press his face to it and look inside the cage.

Zack Meadows pressed his face to the eyepiece. A pair of rats ran around inside the big fishtank. An overhead light brilliantly illuminated the cage. If what Jasper said was true. . . .

Meadows turned off the overhead light inside the cage. Enough light drifted in through the sides for Meadows to see in through the eyepiece. As soon as the light went ofí, the two rats scurried into a corner and huddled there, squeaking and shivering, the terror that racked their bodies total and crushing.

Rats afraid of the dark? Jasper Stevens had told him that but he hadn't really believed it.

"Yes, that's right, Mr. Meadows. They're afraid of the dark," said a voice behind him.

Meadows wheeled and bunked his eyes once as the strong overhead fluorescent lighting contracted his pupils.

Standing just inside the connecting door was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had flaming red hair and a complexion that made him understand what people meant when they said creamy skin. She was wearing a light tan sweater with a brown suede skirt and a matching leather vest. She was smiling at him and if a woman who looked

13

like that had smiled at him on the street, it would have made his day. His week. His month.

But this smile didn't seem all that warm and cozying, because the woman held a .38 revolver in her right hand, pointing unwaveringly at him. She looked as if she had held that gun before and knew what to do with it.

"How'd you know my name?" he asked.

The woman ignored the question. "We have other rats who are afraid of other things," she said. "And other animals too. Not just rats. It's amazing, with a little electric shock, a little starvation, a little heat applied to the genitals, you can teach any animal to be afraid of anything."

Meadows found himself nodding. Jasper Stevens . had explained all this to him in the afternoon. He wished that he had been able to understand more of it. There was something about animals, when they learned to be afraid of something, they created some kind of proteins in their brains. And then if you injected those proteins into other animals, they would instantly become afraid of what the first animals were afraid of. It had sounded like bullshit to Zack Meadows. It still did.

"How'd you know my name?" he repeated.

"And just what is it you're afraid of, Mr. Meadows?" the woman asked him. She still had that smile on her full lips, her mouth shining brightly. It looked as if she had just licked her lips with wet tongue.

"Nothing, lady," said Meadows. "I'm not afraid of you and not that gun either." He waved a hand at her, and turned to walk toward the back door. His senses were sharp, waiting to hear the cock of the revolver's hammer.

14

There was no sound.

Just as he extended his hand toward the doorknob, the back door pulled open. There were two men standing there, wearing white laboratory clothes. Big men.

Before he could run, they had his arms pinned between them, and turned him around to the woman.

She returned the pistol to the purse she had placed on the lab table. Meadows noticed that it was also brown suede. He liked women who coordinated their clothes. He doubted if telling her that would make much difference.

"So you're not afraid of anything?" she said. "We'll just have to see about that, Mr. Meadows."

"I asked you. How do you know my name?"

"I'm afraid your friend, Jasper Stevens, was careless."

Meadows shook his head. "I hate careless people,"

he said.

The woman nodded. "That's right. Carelessness

kills."

The two men hustled Meadows down a short corridor to a small office off the laboratory. There were two tall filing cabinets in the corner, and when one of the men pressed a button on the bookshelf, the filing cabinets swung away from the wall, exposing a flight of stairs leading down to a basement. Bebind him, Meadows heard the redhead calling out to the

guard.

"Everything's all right, Herman." "That's good, Dr. Gladstone," he said. His voice didn't sound like that of a drunk, Meadows thought. Suddenly he thought of a fourth reason why he might not have seen a burglar alarm. The

15

alarm had been hidden. A trap had been set and he had fallen into it.

Downstairs, he was pushed into a room with two metal cots in it. On one of the cots was Jasper Stevens. He was curled up in a fetal postion and his eyes opened wide with shock when the door opened.

"You jerkoff," Meadows growled. "This is what I get for being so trusting."

He was ticked and he was still ticked when they locked the door and even more ticked a half hour later when the two men came back and held him down and the redheaded Dr. Gladstone injected something into his neck and then into Jasper's, and then unconsciousness overtook him.

He didn't know how long he was unconscious, but when he woke his hands and feet were tied and he was blindfolded. His fingertips hurt and when he touched his thumb to his fingers, he felt them raw and mushy under his touch.

But that did not bother him. It was something else. He heard the roar of an engine and the slapping of water against the sides of a boat, and even though he had gone through four years of the Navy without ever getting seasick, this was something else and he felt the bile rising in his throat and he fought back the impulse to throw up because with the gag in his mouth he would likely choke on his own vomit.