“I can’t,” the disembodied voice said. “Have Jonathan take you to the elevator.”
I pulled the clerk close, figuring the store was thick with microphones. “Ocampo,” I whispered. “Is he armed, Jonathan?”
“Hunh?”
“Don’t lie to me, kid. Is Ocampo sitting on a stack of guns up there?”
The clerk looked at me like I’d started making chicken sounds. “Fuck no. Gary usually ain’t even sitting.”
“What’s that mean?” Gershwin said.
The clerk rolled his eyes and waved us through the door behind the counter and into a room of inventory, boxes of magazines and games in various stages of sorting and packaging. The kid pointed to a grated opening in the corner. “The elevator. Push ‘up’ and guess what … it takes you up.”
The scene was less threatening than odd. I keyed my mic and told Canseco and the unit we were heading upstairs, then stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t a freight elevator, but not one of those house-sized lifts either; a meter and a half square or so, big enough to carry a large fridge with a couple guys beside it. It groaned between floors and stopped behind a gray panel. Gershwin and I were pressed to the sides and had our weapons at our sides, just in case.
I slid the gray panel aside, finding a room so dark we were momentarily blinded. All I could see, backlit against the vertical bands of light between the blinds, was a pale hill constructed on a low table and for a split-second my mind showed me Richard Dreyfuss creating the mud tower in Close Encounters. At the base of the hill, against the wall, was a pair of flat-screen televisions, the screens dead.
Was the rapist hiding behind the mound … aiming a weapon at our heads?
Someone sneezed. “Ocampo?” I said, crouching in the elevator. “Where are you?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” sighed a whining voice. “Stop your dawdling and come in.”
Stepping into the room was like entering a fog made from body stink, stale air and, for some reason, a background smell of onions. Drawing closer, the mound resolved into a rounded blue sheet atop not a low table, but a large bed. The apex of the sheet fell like a ski slope to a pudgy roll of chin. The chin rounded up into a head atop fluffy pillows.
I stepped closer and heard a whirring sound as the head began to ascend, the bed mechanically inclining. Curious blue beads of iris watched me as Ocampo rose to sitting position.
“What do you think I’ve done that you enter my home with drawn weapons?” His voice was angry.
“May I see your hands please, Mr Ocampo?” I instructed.
“You think I have a gun? Is that it?”
“Hands in sight, dammit.”
He sighed and produced two fat hands, the fingers like pink overstuffed sausages. He wiggled them. “See a gun anywhere? What on earth do you want?”
“We’re interested in where you were this morning,” Gershwin said.
Ocampo’s eyes squinted tight in what I took as anger but instead exploded in a huge sneeze. He scrabbled for a tissue from a box beside his pillow. He blew his nose, rolled the tissue in a ball and dropped it in a basket beside the bed frame, almost full of used tissue. I was getting a bad feeling about this bust.
“What did you say?” Ocampo demanded, his eyes red and wet.
“This morning,” Gershwin repeated. “About daybreak. Can you tell me where you were?”
Ocampo stared in what seemed disbelief. He snapped the plump fingers, making a thub sound. “Oh, now I remember. I was running a marathon.”
“Be serious, Mr Ocampo.”
“Then I seriously assure you I was right here. Why?”
“We’ll ask the questions, Mr Ocampo,” I said, studying the mass beneath the sheet. His body couldn’t be that large. It had to be a ruse.
“What is your mobility, sir?” I asked as my hand crept toward the edge of the sheet.
Again the stare of disbelief. “My mobility?”
“It’s important.”
“I walk around the block when weather permits. Sometimes two or three times a week.” He sneezed again, repeated the motion with the tissue.
I reached out and snapped away Ocampo’s sheet, expecting to find the body of a football linesman padded out with pillows. Instead I saw a vast landscape of naked flesh, folded and dimpled and lolling, the man’s breasts drowsing down his sides like deflated porpoise heads, his genitals hidden under rumpled pouches of pimpled overhang. Several wadded tissues tumbled to the floor.
“YOU SWINE!” Ocampo screeched, scrabbling to cover himself as his face reddened. “You filthy PERVERT! You SCUM!”
I shot Gershwin a glance. Something was hideously awry. I returned the edge of the sheet to Ocampo’s hand and he yanked it back in place.
“You NAZI FILTH!” he railed. “My lawyers will destroy you!”
Gershwin nodded me to the corner of the room. “This guy couldn’t assault a box turtle, Big Ryde,” he whispered. “He’d never catch it.”
“What are you talking about over there?” Ocampo railed. “What are you plotting?”
I nodded. No matter how dangerous or desperate Ocampo’s inclinations, he would be too slowed by his volume to abduct anyone. As for slyly doping someone’s drink, the floor would shake with his approach, as surreptitious as a tractor.
“Somewhere along the way the DNA got messed up, Zigs.”
“What do we do?”
“Do you hear me you, you … fascists?”
I shot a glance at Ocampo, his face equal measures of anger and humiliation. “First, we try to mollify him. If this hits the headlines, Roy’ll tear his hair out.”
“It’s harassment, pure and simple! Storm troopers!”
We both shot glances at the huge man, scrabbling through a tabletop of crumpled tissues and allergy meds and finding an iPhone. He brandished it like a scimitar. “I’m phoning my lawyers. Then I’m calling every news station in town.”
My mind raced. Ocampo was taking photos of us, grist for his lawyer, no doubt. “I’m gonna call the lab and give them hell,” I whispered. “Get ready.”
“What lab? Who?” Gershwin said. Then, “Oh.”
I retreated to the elevator and fake-dialed my cell. “Give me fucking Pedersen,” I growled, tapping my toe impatiently. When I saw Ocampo’s eyes move to me, the act began.
“YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT,” I howled. “We’re at Ocampo’s house now. GARY-FUCKING-OCAMPO. IT’S NOT HIM! Never mind why, you asshole … It was your goddamn lab that ID’d this poor man as the perp. NO FUCKING EXCUSES. We embarrassed an innocent man and MADE OURSELVES LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF HORSES’ ASSES IN THE BARGAIN.”
“What’s he doing?” Ocampo demanded of Gershwin. “Who’s he talking to?”
“Some lab moron whose ass he’s personally gonna kick when we leave here, sir,” Gershwin said.
“I should drag you over here to apologize to Mr Ocampo in person,” I snarled. “You will?” I held my hand over the cell and turned to Ocampo. “Excuse me, sir, would it help if we had the guy responsible for this—” I pulled the phone to my mouth “AMAZING FUCK-UP”, then re-aimed it at Ocampo – “come over here and apologize to you in person?”
Ocampo looked confused. The invaders had become