“Erica!” Lori yelled. “We’re getting out of here. Now!”
Lori grabbed Erica’s arm in a vise-like grip and pulled her from between the two game machines. Matt came from the other side and lifted Erica up over a writhing Lonnie The Loser, threw her one-ten pounds of weight over his football-player shoulders and the four of them made their way quickly out of the bar. Erica wouldn’t remember until much later — about the time she was having to tell the whole tale from start to finish for the FBI guys ― that she had screamed bloody murder the entire length of the bar and halfway to their car.
*
All that occurred Saturday night. By Monday morning there was something decidedly wrong with Erica’s face. Besides the tender puffiness, her skin was rapidly streaking with strange marks. Her lips swelled up like little purplish cocktail sausages. She was also losing hearing in one of her ears. And Erica itched — badly.
Lori took her to the Emergency Room at Brackenridge Hospital, again not taking no for an answer.
Lori stayed with her there in the ER for ten hours after the ER doc took skin samples. Meanwhile Erica’s face and head got worse. She itched and burned and she wanted to scratch her face off, but Lori kept holding her hands down. Lori wore latex gloves the whole time. That alone should have tipped Erica off.
Erica was sure they were going to give her some topical ointment, some sedatives ― hopefully Vicodin, which she would be able to sell to one of her friends ― and then let her go. But that idea, like many another of Erica’s ideas, was shelved when she was told she was being admitted.
About the moment she asked “Why?” in abject frustration ― and it came out sounding more like “Aye?” because of the way her lips and tongue were swollen ― in walked a man wearing a blue dinner jacket flanked by another man in a police uniform. The fellow in the blue dinner introduced himself as an FBI agent, and she instantly forgot his name. But it was the uniformed officer who would stick in her mind for the rest of her life.
“Before we get your signed consent and knock you out, Ms. DeWare,” the ER doctor said, “because we do have to get you to surgery right away ― you need to tell the whole story to these gentlemen.”
“What story?” she asked, only it came out “‘Ott ‘owey?”
The uniformed officer introduced himself Ralph Bigham. “About the guy in the bar who was kissing you,” he said.
*
Ralph Bigham was with the Office of the Travis County Medical Examiner. Although he was no doctor he was, nonetheless, a forensics expert. Ralph mostly handled the cold cases, those files still open but that were, officially, at a dead end.
Ralph had moved to Austin a couple of years back after a stint as a Sheriff’s Deputy in Brazos County. He’d left not long after he’d loaned his sidearm to a convicted felon who was intent on solving a murder case that the local powers-that-be wanted closed. Even though Charles Lyman, the felon, had solved the case, took down one of the two killers and helped send the other one to prison, Ralph had seen the writing on the wall. Ralph was no longer welcome in the Brazos County law enforcement community.
The next step up was Austin. He had packed his bags on a Friday afternoon, drove to Austin on Saturday morning, and by Saturday night had gotten a job with the Coroner ― a job that few others would have accepted for any amount of money, much less actively sought.
Now, two years later, there was a chance that the little red-haired University of Texas sophomore, Erica DeWare, was going to help him put most of a shelf of cold case files to bed. And it was the shelf that had bothered him the most since arriving, as three of the cases had occurred during his brief watch.
Ralph sat on the edge of her Erica’s bed and smiled at the girl.
“You suffer from a flesh-eating bacteria,” he said.
When he saw that Erica was going to get hysterical, Ralph said “tut-tut-tut. They’ve caught it in time to save your face and your hearing. You’ll be fine. Just fine. But it will take up to a four-week stay here in the hospital for you to fully heal. Now, you have to listen to me carefully.”
Erica nodded.
“You have a bacteria called Necrotizing fasciitis. There is only one place to find such this particular strain of the bacteria. Are you following me?”
She nodded again, and Ralph Bigham could see that he had Erica’s full and complete attention.
And then he told her.
*
They came for Lonnie Wayne Smith in the middle of the night and quietly surrounded his home. Two dozen men and women were in the team, eleven Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, a five-man crew from the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Division of the Department of Justice, four from the Austin Police Department Hostage Crisis and Sniper Unit, two Travis County Sheriff’s deputies, and Ralph Bigham and a bookish little woman ― Ralph’s assistant ― Delores Rogers. Delores gripped her twelve-gauge riot gun in a white-knuckle grip.
On a pre-arranged signal Ralph and another man wearing black over bulging kevlar gripped a miniature battering ram between them, counted to three in a whisper as they swung it back, swung it back, and then slammed it into the wooden panel next to the doorknob.
The door slammed open and seven black shapes poured into the house.
When they entered his bedroom, Lonnie Wayne Smith was just getting out of his bed. He was in his George Foreman underwear.
“What?” Smith asked. But then the dark shapes poured into his room and tackled him, rolling him off the backside of his bed and into the wall.
“We got him!” a voice said into a tiny microphone and was picked up by forty different sets of ears — the men and women both in the house and outside, and the backup team around the block.