people, especially children and tourists, and children of tourists. He would talk to them about the weather, about baseball, about anything -- the blander the better -- and then, five or six minutes into the conversation, he would spit out a live lizard and act as if he was not aware of it, and continue to talk as if nothing had happened. He loved to see their faces when that happened. You can tell a lot about a person from the way they react to someone who spits out a live lizard and goes on talking as if nothing had happened. The children admired him because not everyone can talk with a live lizard hiding in the back of their throat, and a few of them who tried it themselves ended up swallowing their lizard. The children followed him around to witness the reaction of his victims. They thought he did it for their own amusement and over time it became true. And then he had to go and do that to Doc Minus Two. Doc Minus Two did not raise an eyebrow when he saw the lizard coming out of the man’s mouth and landing on the pavement. He just lifted his foot and squashed the reptile into a red pulp, and he was very casual about it, too, and went on talking as if nothing had happened. The man who spat out lizards was paralyzed in shock, and after this he did not show his face in town again. This is how the children of Gatlinburg came to hate Doc Minus Two with intensity. And this was the man who Nat swore to me was the only person on earth capable of taking on an organization which had murdered sixty six people with ease.
IV.
I knocked on the barn-house door hesitantly. It was the way Nat described it: a cabin hiding under twenty coats of paint. In its current state it was green, but looked yellow from certain angles and reddish from others. It occupied a small clearing in the woods, and a short dirt road connected it to the street.
The door rocked on its hinges with every knock. It was a few minutes before Doc Minus Two opened it. He was a grey-haired man in his sixties, which was what I had expected from someone who had served with Nat in Vietnam. He was stout and of medium height. He had tired but penetrating eyes and an almost perfectly round head, and thinning hair that made that head look even more round. On his face there was an expression as if he was just about to retire to bed before I had disturbed him. I was to learn later that this was his default expression. It was there even when he relaxed his facial muscles and did not want to convey any emotion. He did not speak, and waited for me to plead my case.
"Nat sent me. He said I should hire you."
"Hire me for what?" He had a gruff voice.
"I need a P.I."
"You don't look like someone who needs a P.I." He slammed the door in my face.
I knocked politely again and he opened the door a second time with a show of impatience. I said, "I know I look like someone who's led a sheltered life and I'd be the first to admit it. But now I'm in deep trouble."
"Why don't you go to the cops?"
"I can't. Those who are after me have FBI informants. If I go to the cops they'll find me."
"Who's after you?"
"I don't know."
"Listen, shit for brains, go back to Nat and tell him I got enough crazy in my life; I don't need any more today thank you very much." He was about to close the door again, but I put my foot on the threshold and assumed a more aggressive tone and this slowed him down. "Someone's been bumping off all passengers and crew of Flight 2251 from two years ago. I'm the only one left. They killed sixty six people already. Children, too. They have a global reach. I'm not safe anywhere."
This made him less hostile. I don't know if it was the uniqueness of my story that got his attention or my persistence. He did not open the door wide for me, but he did stop trying to close it, and let me in. A strong smell of tobacco permeated the inside of the cabin, mixed in with the aroma of something fried. I had interrupted his breakfast. On a simple wooden table were a large omelet and a few pancakes, which is the national food in Gatlinburg — there seem to be more pancake houses in the area than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Behind the table was a small kitchenette with a dirty electric stove and a plastic sink. Doc Minus Two sat down to continue where he left off, and as he did this he raised his tired eyes from his omelet and hanged them on mine and said nothing and continued to chew. He did not invite me to sit down. The steam rising from the omelet combined with the smoke from a half a cigar that lay in an ashtray, and it made the air look as if it had texture that I could grab and stretch, and through that veil we saw each other. Still standing up, I told him everything that had happened to me in the past few days and handed him the flight manifest the FBI woman had given me. He gazed at it briefly, then asked if he could keep it.
"Does this mean you'll help me?"
"This means you can hire me, that's all it means. Whether I or anyone else can help you with this is a different question altogether." He wiped his mouth. "I don't come cheap, but I offer two price structures. A thousand a day if I do all the work alone, or six hundred if you help me. I don't have assistants."
"You want me to come along with you when you go to investigate people who might be out to get me? You don't have much regard for my safety, now do you?"
"No."
"All right, I'll take the six hundred a day plan and be your assistant." I did not have a lot of savings to fall back on, and besides I thought it a better option than sharing a cave with a black bear and not knowing what was happening with the investigation.
"You being my assistant would also increase the chances of failure, but that's mainly your problem. And of course, you'd need to pay all related expenses I may incur while on this case. Also, I'd expect a thousand now in good faith money." Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the cheap brass chandelier that hung over the table, and I knew that I should not be disturbing him now as he was beginning to think about the case. I gathered the courage to grab a chair and sit down. He did not mind. After a few moments he said, "If I'm to believe your statement that you didn't do anything to them — and I'm not saying I don’t believe you — then that leaves us with three possible reasons for them wanting to kill you. One, that you sixty seven people, or some of you, witnessed something you should not have witnessed; two, that one of you took something sensitive from the plane you shouldn't have taken and they don't know which one of you has it; and three, that you could have contracted something while on that plane that they don't want exposed."
"Like what?"
"Like a new virus someone's created in a lab. Something that stays dormant for years before attacking. You can kill half the population of a country this way and no one will be able to figure out who patient zero was because they contracted it so many years ago. No traces, see?"
"So why kill us?"
He took a drag from the cigar. "Maybe it was not ready for prime time yet. Say they just wanted to transport it to another lab and their courier screwed up and a vial that he had on him broke. They didn't want the virus discovered too early so decided to kill all those exposed to it. Of course, if that were the case, then one of the passengers was the courier, and they killed him, too. For all we know it could have been the government itself breeding those viruses, or a government. That would explain a lot."
This sounded far-fetched to me, not something a P.I should concern himself with. I began to question his sanity and wondered if I should leave now while I still had a chance. This was the second person who was not all there that I had met in the last couple of days, and were I not so desperate I would have had nothing to do with either of them. But I was desperate.
Doc Minus Two may have doubted his own sanity at that moment, because he waved a self-deprecating hand a moment later. "It's only a theory, of course, and probably not a good one, because if that were the case a lot more people besides the passengers would have been exposed to the virus — the ground crews, relatives and so on — and none of those were murdered that we know of." He stared at the brass chandelier again. "Whatever the reason for the murders, I sense fear. They are afraid of what you know or what y
ou carry. This is no crime of passion and not the work of a madman. Someone is acting in self defense here. Someone is trembling."
"Good to know I'm not the only one."
"Don't look for sympathy here, kid," he said rudely. "I don't care if you're afraid or not. You want help with that go find yourself a therapist. You pay me to help you crack this case, not to make a man out of you."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I don't give a shit if you're sorry, either. Just shut up and let me concentrate, will ya?" He put the half-finished cigar in his mouth. His left hand with the three fingers tapped on the table slowly.
Embarrassed by my own insecurity I put emotions aside and went back to business. "What about the Minotaur? The man who shot Peterson said something about a Minotaur."
"Could be the babbling of a dying man. Or he may have misheard."
"How can we be sure?"
"I'm sure of nothing at this point, but I can’t investigate a word somebody thought someone else had said. It's as useless to me as a self-adhesive toilette paper at this point." He raised his eyes. "Now, let's talk about evidence we might actually have. Do you still have your flight ticket from that flight, or the receipt?"
"I threw it away long ago."
"Pity. Do you remember where you bought it?"
"I got it from work. I was still employed then. They used