No Immunity

tightened. She took a step back.
    “Are you carrying a weapon, ma’am?”
    “What? No, goddammit, I am not carrying a weapon across the state line. I’m not planning to smuggle it onto the airplane. And I don’t have time to stand here and discuss it. It’s been a long day and I need to get home.”
    “Sheriff Fox is asking for your cooperation.”
    In a minute he’d be telling her to put her hands on the car while he patted her down. No, not telling, “asking” in an offer-you-can’t-refuse manner. “Potter, what is this about? I know you’ve got an extremely dangerous situation in Gattozzi. But there’s nothing you’re going to find out from me that Jeff Tremaine can’t tell you himself. The disease warrants immediate and serious attention, but I can’t diagnose it for you. For that you’re going to need a virologist, an epidemiologist, and a lab with Level Four capacity. I’m sure the sheriff has already been in touch with Public Health. What do you think I can possibly tell you?”
    “It’s not my place to say, ma’am. But Sheriff Fox in Gattozzi figured it was worth the expense of five deputies to find you.”

CHAPTER 13

    Brad Tchernak was halfway down the steps when the idea of checking out Grady Hummacher with his neighbors occurred to him. Maybe Kiernan wasn’t so fucking ingenious; he could spot the next move as well as she could. Detective work was all about instinct, just the way reading the defensive tackle was. There was no time on the line of scrimmage to scan a mental list of moves that meant the tackle was going to shift right and go underneath or shift left and spin behind you. You just had to know in your gut. Now his gut told him that the address across town would still be there in half an hour, and that the real question was here.
    He turned back up the stairs and knocked on the door of the adjoining unit. It was an odd setup in these upscale condos. Grady’s four-room unit was attached to this grander place as if it were the servant’s quarters. The door to the “big house” was oak, half again as wide as Grady’s. A Henry the Eighth kind of a door. Tchernak lifted the metal lion’s head and let it swing back. Inside he could hear the bell ding through the foyer, a Henry kind of a foyer. He stepped back, glancing down the length of the long wooden porch. Unlike Grady’s brown-shingle unit, the facade on this half was stone. Faux stone. He’d been an extra in a couple of movies in college and he’d seen enough breakaway walls to recognize the comforting, soft contours of “faux.” But this was good faux—“faux of the highest quality,” he could imagine the builder describing it. The windows were framed in hunter green, and the whole place gave the feeling of Henry’s hunting lodge. Perfect for the wealthy or wishing-to-be-wealthy-appearing.
    “It’s open. I’ll be with you in a min,” a woman’s voice called. Her accent was midwestern maybe, Tchernak couldn’t tell. She wasn’t shouting, but her deep tone cut through every other noise, and you couldn’t miss it no matter how much you wanted to.
    Tchernak smiled. Whoever she was expecting, it didn’t matter. Kiernan had broken into houses; the cops had found her in at least one apartment after she’d locked the lock and let herself in, and she’d had to do some fast lying to get herself out of that. That was thinking on her feet; and she was as sharp as they come at pedal fabrication. He wasn’t; he knew that. It worried him. But now he saw the truth; he simply wasn’t going to get into that situation. Women would let him in, they always had. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t handsome. In truth—he knew it—he was an ugly guy. His nose was big and bony; his face long; his eyebrows were like moss; and when he’d seen snapshots, he’d noticed a certain haunted look around his eyes. And his hair, well, he didn’t have to wonder about that. Every time he came home from college, his mother greeted him: “Vivien Bradley Tchernak, look at your hair. It’s too long, too wiry. And that mustache!” He honestly didn’t know what women saw in him. But c’est la vie , right? He let himself in the Henry door.
    The room was huge, the walls dark oak (faux, of course), the arched ceiling two stories at its apex. Two overstuffed couches covered in some thick maroon flowered stuff faced each other in front of the giant stone hearth. And over the mantel where the moose head should have been, there was a