GARY CARSON is a California refugee working as an IT monkey for the corporate regime in Reno, Nevada. Lizard Flicks is his first novel. His short story 'Dog Breath' appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Hardluck Stories. He is working on a second novel, Collision Course, and planning a series of hardboiled crime thrillers set in the Roman Empire.
Act One: Factions
CHAPTER 1
The job kind of spooked him.
Hauthberg choked down a beer while he cleaned his piece, a hot Walther with a threaded barrel and a 15-shot magazine. He oiled the trigger, checked the action, then loaded two clips with hollow points he'd scored off this pimp in Richmond. Then he packed all his gear in a gym bag and got ready to leave. He took the gun, a silencer, a pair of binoculars, a flashlight, a can of "medium fog" pepper spray, and a roll of duct tape to muffle the screams.
He split for work at dusk, feeling raw as a broken bone. Traffic sucked like usual, the evening commute rumbling along the highway—Interstate 80 east of San Francisco—four lanes of brake lights and exhaust crawling through Berkeley, San Pablo, Richmond, Vallejo. The flow stalled on the Carquinez Bridge, backed up for miles, then started rolling again after the pigs cleared a wreck in the cruise lane. Mars lights flashed. The clamor of horns drifted across Mare Island and San Pablo Bay.
Hauthberg stewed in his Dodge Ram, punching through the FM stations, checking his watch. He lit a joint of skunk weed, his face flat and hard, scarred from a yard riot at San Quentin and a couple of old bar fights. Six-foot-two, two-ten, an iron rat with a ponytail of dirty-blonde hair, he had a tattoo of a lightning bolt on the back of his right hand, courtesy of the Aryan Brotherhood. Hunched over the wheel, he spaced on the gridlock, flexed his shoulders, coughed up some smoke. The bud torched his lungs, but it kept him kind of level.
Headlights mobbed the last exit to Vallejo. He had to check in with his employer, so he stopped at a 7-Eleven and called an unlisted number from a pay phone in the parking lot. Alan Strunk, head of the Corporate Intelligence Unit at Dreman BioCorp, picked up on his mobile, then called back on a landline.
"Go ahead," he said. "Give me a call when it's done."
Hauthberg lit a Camel and hacked up a lunger. His head felt like a zit.
"You looking for anything in particular?" he asked.
"Clarification." Ice cubes rattled on the other end of the line. Strunk was probably drinking his standard J & B after a hard day gypping orphans and screwing the competition. "You know as much about it as I do, so try to fill in the gaps."
Hauthberg watched a traffic helicopter circle the highway, its rotor light flashing.
"I'll get the story," he said. "If the asshole's got one."
Strunk hung up. The dial tone buzzed in Hauthberg's ear. He crushed out his butt, got back in the truck and drove to the parking garage on Mariposa where he'd stashed his job car—this Ford Taurus he'd ripped off from a mall in Berkeley the night before. After two week's planning, the job was coming together like jaws around his head. His gut squirmed. He lit another smoke.
The garage was deserted. He parked on the ground floor, grabbed his bag, then took the fire stairs to the top level and walked over to the north side, watching the shadows. The Ford was still there, back in the last row, a black four-door sedan with hot plates, a full tank of gas and a trunk lined with plastic. He got behind the wheel and started the engine, the blood pounding in his head.
Driving off, he checked the time again. Two hours to go. The rush came on strong—weed, beer, adrenaline, all mixed up like a jolt of high voltage. He headed west on Marine World Parkway towards the glow of Mare Island and Vallejo Heights. Headlights crowded the rearview. Blobs of neon floated through the dark.
#
The Klaxon Labs warehouse was an industrial slum ringed by arc lights and security fences on the bank of the Napa River. A row of trucks faced the loading docks and staging area, where the night shift worked a line of conveyors, packing drugstore crap for shipment. The place bustled with activity. Air-brakes hissed in the lot. An 18-wheeler clattered through the front gate, spewing exhaust and country music, its trailer banging over pot holes on the access road leading to the highway.
Hauthberg slumped down in the front seat of the Taurus, scanning the warehouse through his binoculars. He had parked in an alley about a hundred yards from the gate, back in the darkness of a junk yard full of scrap iron and rusted car bodies—a blind spot he'd found on a recon five nights ago. A back road led to the alley and nobody could see him from the warehouse, but he had a good view of the loading dock and a side door leading to the administrative offices. Every night at 8 p.m., more or less, the warehouse manager came out of that door, got in his 2000 Cherokee and drove home to his wife in San Pablo. Hauthberg knew because he'd followed him there every night for a week.
The mark's name was Johnson. Clyde Johnson. He was a nobody, 42 years old, a paper pusher with slicked-back hair, bifocals and lips like a puckered catfish. Hauthberg had seen a couple photos from a personnel file Strunk had bought somewhere. Johnson was a whistleblower—shooting his mouth off about something that nobody wanted to talk about at Dreman BioCorp. Call it office politics: Dreman was the biggest drug company on the West Coast, Klaxon a wholesale pharmaceutical distributor. The VP of Research & Development at Dreman, this sleazy dickwad named Phillip J. McCord, had passed the job to Strunk, head of corporate security, and Strunk had dumped it on Hauthberg like a wad of steaming crap.
"Find out what's going on," Strunk had said. "McCord's shitting his pants over this asshole and I want to know why he didn't give it to Legal."
"What's the pay?" Hauthberg didn't like it, but he hadn't worked since a bug job the month before.
"Twenty grand with a bonus for results. This could turn into something big down the road."
"Screw the bonus and make it forty."
"I'd like to, but I don't have the budget."
What a load of crap.
#
Johnson was running late.
Hauthberg checked his watch, then picked up the binoculars and scanned the warehouse again. Exhaust fumes drifted past the arc lights on the main building. A forklift moved back and forth on the dock, its warning light pulsing through the haze. Hauthberg focused on a couple beaners sharing a joint next to an utility shack, then he panned across the outbuildings and staging area, zooming in on the forklift. Just then, the door to the administrative offices opened and a bar of yellow light fanned across the lot, shining on a row of windshields. He got this charge of adrenaline when he saw Johnson walk out, a dumpy little rat in a black overcoat, carrying a briefcase. The manager waddled over to his Cherokee, got in and started the engine. Smoke puffed from the tailpipe. The backup lights flashed.
Hauthberg waited until he saw Johnson drive through the front gate, then he backed out of the alley and headed north along the river with his lights off, watching the access road which ran parallel about fifty yards to his right. Johnson's headlights flickered through gaps in the junk yard. The two roads merged at a four-way stop in the middle of an industrial wasteland about a quarter of a mile away. Hauthberg made the intersection just in time to see the Cherokee go by, its headlights washing the pavement.
They were alone on the access road. He followed Johnson's taillights for a couple blocks, passing machine shops, tank farms and weedy lots, then he punched the gas and got right on his ass. Johnson must have seen him by now, but it didn't matter. Hauthberg turned on his high beams, switched lanes and pulled up next to the Cherokee. The manager glanced over, his face pale behind the tinted window. He looked freaked, his mouth hanging open.
Hauthberg yanked the wheel hard to the right. They banged fenders and he got this scrambled glimpse of Johnson fighting for control as the Cherokee hit a curb, bounced a couple times, then slammed into a corrugated-iron fence, coming to a stop at this weird angle. Hauthberg pulled over, popped the trunk, grabbed his stuff and got out, walking over to the SUV and checking the road in both directions. No cars in sight. A traffic light changed from red to green about a mile to the north.
Steam gushed from the Cherokee's buckled hood. One of its headlights had shattered, but the other one was still working and a cloud of dust sparkled in the glare off the smashed fence. Hauthberg turned his flashlight on the driver's window, leaned over and rapped on the glass. Johnson sat there in a daze, blood trickling down his forehead. He touched his nose, held up his hand to block the light, then rolled down the window, blinking in confusion.
"You OK?" Hauthberg asked.
"I think so...I..."
Hauthberg grabbed his collar, yanked his head out the window, then soaked him down with pepper spray, aiming for his eyes, nose and mouth. Johnson sputtered and shrieked, his glasses dangling from one of his ears. Hauthberg opened the door, pulled him out of the cab and dumped him on the ground, where he lay coughing and flopping around like a jellyfish in a tattered suit. He was a fat bastard and Hauthberg had to drag him, kicking and yelling, to the back of the Taurus, where he stuffed him in the trunk and slapped some duct tape across his mouth. Then he taped his hands together behind his back and slammed the lid down, breathing kind of heavy. Twenty grand sucked for this muscle crap. He walked over to the Cherokee and turned its lights off, checking the road again. Still clear. He could hear Johnson thumping in the trunk.
Driving away, he swerved around the road, aiming for the pot holes. Eyes stinging from the pepper spray, he checked his watch, then lit his first cigarette in hours and started coughing.
Time to earn that bonus.
#
Factory lights burned on the horizon. Gusts rustled weeds. A train moaned and railcars clattered through a switch in the distance, fading into the white noise and sirens of Vallejo. A culvert gushed in the dark. The glow of a pump-house light glistened on the Napa River.
Hauthberg parked behind an abandoned gas station and dragged Johnson inside, dumping him on the floor by this desk littered with mouse crap and moldy papers. The dick rolled over on his side, hands behind his back, overcoat ripped and splattered with mud. He blinked, eyes swollen and bloodshot in the glare of the flashlight.
Hauthberg ripped the duct tape off his mouth. Johnson sputtered, dried blood and shit on his forehead.
"Who are you?" he gasped. "What do you want?"
Hauthberg propped the flashlight on the desk so the beam hit Johnson in the face, then he opened the gym bag, took out the Walther and slapped in a clip. Johnson squirmed on the floor, bug-eyed and sweating.
"What do you want?" he asked. "Money? Take my wallet. I'll take you to my ATM—anything. I'll give you my PIN."
Hauthberg yawned. They always tried to bargain. He screwed on the silencer and pointed the gun at Johnson's face.
"You sent some email to Dreman," he said, like he actually gave a crap. "This guy named McCord. You called his office."
"McCord?" The dumbass gaped in confusion. "What?"
"You made some threats. You said you were going to expose him. You threatened the company like you had some kind of inside dirt."
"You work for McCord?"
Johnson started coughing.
"You been talking to the FDA," Hauthberg went on. "What's it about? What's the deal with Dreman?"
Johnson stared at him, trembling, his face bloated from the pepper spray.
"If you work for him, you already know."
"Just start talking." Hauthberg prodded him with a boot. "I got a schedule."
"My wife's in the hospital." Johnson choked out the words. "They say she had a drug reaction. She sees things. She sleeps all day and talks to herself. They found her wandering around in traffic on Telegraph Avenue. Out of her mind."
"That tells me jack." Hauthberg checked his watch. He was running out of time. "Get back to McCord."
"It's their pill." Johnson tried to sit up. "Dreman's new sleeping pill. They doctored the trial reports, covered up the side effects." He coughed again, spit on the floor. "She was taking it. She had insomnia. I heard rumors from my retailers, but I didn't believe it."
"So you went to the FDA."
Johnson shuddered. "I filed a complaint, but nothing happened. Too much money...politics...I never thought they'd go this far..."
"Who else? Who'd you talk to?"
Johnson faded. He started to mumble about his wife and Dreman and McCord and sleeping pills and a bunch of other crap that didn't make any sense. Hauthberg checked his watch again. Time to boogie.
"Who do you work for?" Johnson asked.
Hauthberg shot him in the head.
#
The air got damp and nippy.
He went through Johnson's pockets, took his wallet and watch, then dragged his carcass through the weeds and dumped it in the river. When the pigs found the body and the wrecked Cherokee, they'd probably write it off as a carjack and murder. It happened all the time.
Hauthberg drove back to the highway, stopping every mile or so to get rid of his stuff. He tossed the duct tape and pepper spray into a vacant lot, dropped the wallet and watch down a sewer, wadded up the plastic liner from the trunk and stuffed it in a dumpster. Then he drove back to the parking garage and ditched the Taurus, heading across the bridge in his Dodge. Getting rid of the silencer and gun took a couple more hours. He disassembled the Walther and dropped the parts into various sewers, then he dumped the silencer into the Bay off the Berkeley Marina Pier. When he was clean again, he stopped at this bar on University, tossed down a couple shots and called Strunk from a booth by the johns.
"Any problems?" Strunk asked. He sounded kind of jumpy.
"Nothing to speak of." Hauthberg lit a smoke and watched a couple longhairs playing football under a neon Budweiser sign. "I got something, but I don't know if it makes any sense."
"Meet me in the lot tomorrow," Strunk said. "Make it around ten—they're going crazy at the office and I'm booked up for the rest of the day."
"All right."
"Something's going on." Strunk came off eager. "I'm still waiting for some information, but if things play out the way I think they will, the shit's about to hit the fan. I think it ties in with your thing tonight, but I don't know the details. I could have some more work for you after I hear your report."
"Something official?"
"No. It's in-house and extracurricular. Just you and me."
"Something with Dreman."
"Right. The merger's got them spooked. The stock's through the roof, but I think that's about to change."
"Somebody fucked up."
"Big time. A doctor. One of the Spinner shrinks. Let's just say that somebody died and Dreman's market leader is about to blow sky high."
Copyright© 200
6 Gary Carson