No Immunity

here, bring them to me.”
    “Alive?”
    “Yeah, alive. What do you think—I’m in the international memorial business?”
    No, I do not. I think you’re Adcock Explorations. That would make you Reston Adcock. And if you assumed Pm too lame to have Caller I.D. and a reverse directory, why’d you bother hiring me?
    “Weasel, these kids may be sick, with some kind of foreign virus.”
    “You sure?”
    “That’s what Hummacher told me.”
    “Whew!” Disease, he knew what that meant. In 1994 a hundred people got laid low from something in the Vegas water. City went crazy. Tourists thought Legionnaire’s disease, pictured their last breath disappearing up the air conditioning vents, and shunned the hotels like they were coroners’ slabs. City lost millions. Mob lost millions. And that was over a bug that caused nothing worse than the stomach flu. With this—“Whew! And you’re asking me to get next to these kids, these walking packages of foreign germs? For five thou? I don’t like taking risks normally, and this, this is crazy.”
    “Ten thou. And you don’t need to get downwind of them. Just get me their location.”
    “Twenty.”
    “Ten. This job’s big. I’ll remember it.”
    McGuire hesitated. Disease freaked him. All those too-small-to-see things eating your insides out. He really didn’t want this case. But he knew Adcock’s reputation. It’d be easier dealing with the two little germ-bags than looking over his shoulder forever for Adcock. “Okay, but I need the ten now.”
    “Half’ll be under your door when you get back.”
    “What’re you, crazy? I don’t work like—”
    “It’ll be there in half an hour. But you have to move now. You’ve got a date at a clinic run by Dr. Louisa Larson.”
    “There’s a lead there to Hummacher?”
    “What do you think?”
    McGuire let out a wheezy puff of air and his lips curled upward. “You’re hiring me for scorched earth. So this Hummacher character, you care if he’s scorched?”
    “I need Hummacher. Or I need the boys.”
    “Do you care what happens to anyone else?” McGuire waited, forcing the issue. At least make Adcock admit he’d be stepping over bodies on his way up the aisle.
    “I need Hummacher. Or I need the boys.”

CHAPTER 15

    Louisa Larson stared at the spotless examination room. Her arms ached, her blond hair was plastered flat against her scalp with sweat. The room reeked of Clorox, enough to kill every virus in Nevada. She wouldn’t be able to put a patient in this room for a week, even with the windows wide open.
    She hadn’t needed to clean that ferociously. One sensible scrub would have done it. As it was, she might as well have dunked Juan and Carlos into the vat.
    Juan and Carlos. An icy shiver shot through her body at the thought of them. Why had she ever agreed to care for them? Because she was the one person who could make things happen for them. She could give them lives.
    She should have realized how much time they would require. She had thought they’d be ripe for every virus in town, but until now they exhibited signs of no more than colds. But for the time they took, they might as well have had meningitis.
    Oh, shit. Meningitis. Type-A meningococcal meningitis erupted in fevers, headache, nausea, vomiting. But not hemorrhaging from the eyes. Not petechiae so dense that the bleeding through the skin turned it red. Not like Juan and Carlos. They had to have picked up something else. Somewhere else. Not here in her clinic. Surely.
    Was she fooling herself? What was she going to do, tell the world they’d contracted an unnamed hemorrhagic fever while they were in her care? They had only been in their apartment, here with her, or off with Grady on the picnic to the Breadfruit Park. Oh God, they couldn’t have gotten it from the research project. She wasn’t a researcher by nature, she was a healer. But when you accept a college grant, you have to pay it off. So she’d worked on the project. It had only been for a year. Done nothing to advance her career. Less than nothing. All she had to show for it was the pass to the Breadfruit Park. That couldn’t have had anything to do with the boys. Their condition had to be an anomaly. But two cases? It could torpedo her career.
    She stepped into the halfway and walked slowly past the pediatrics room with the bunny decals on the wall, the adult rooms she had painted herself in cheery yellow or calming green. She stopped, gazing at the painting of the