No Immunity by Susan Dunlap Page A

health department. They’ve got to get this woman in a Level Four room and—”
    He turned back to the gurney and stood as he had been before she spoke, hands braced on the rim. She couldn’t tell from his blank gaze if he was staring at the corpse, the picture of Hope Mkema framed inside his head, or the awful possibilities in the near future. Finally he nodded toward the freezer door, waited for her to open it, and slid the gurney inside. “Of course you’re right, Kiernan. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve got a buddy in the health department—Wilson Brede, you know him? I’ll call him.”
    “I’ll use the bathroom while you call.”
    “Last door on the left.”
    She forced herself to wash with scrupulous care, begrudging each moment it kept her in the tiny gray room. The rental car, which had seemed tiny and slow, dull and awkward, compared with her Jeep Cherokee in her driveway and her TR-3 in the garage, now beckoned like a Maserati on the fast road to freedom.
    “Did you get him?” she asked as she walked back into the morgue.
    “Yeah. He’s on his way.” Tremaine rolled the gurney back into the freezer. “Kiernan, listen, I really appreciate your coming. I know this sent me over the edge, and I asked a lot of you. But listen, I did not mention your name to Wilson. No need for you to be held up.”
    Kiernan nodded. “Thanks. I have a five o’clock plane.” She didn’t offer her hand to shake, and Tremaine made no move toward her.
    The rental car coughed. She should have warmed the engine. She let it cough its way to the highway. Better to call AAA from the side of the road than spend another minute in Gattozzi.
    She tried her cell phone, but it was out of range. Radio stations grew and faded, and it wasn’t till she’d been on the road an hour that she got a news magazine on a station out of Las Vegas, reporting on Las Vegas. She’d had enough of Las Vegas and its surroundings. She put the radio on Scan, but nothing else came in. There was a time for the comfort of silence, but this wasn’t it. Her consciousness was flooding with visions of people dying from symptoms worse than Lassa, more violently than from Ebola, and she needed the sounds of normality just so she could keep focusing on the road. She listened to the reports of phenomenal growth on the Las Vegas Strip, of large casino hotels being demolished to be replaced by even larger ones, of gaudy facades giving way to mini theme parks. The Hacienda’s eleven hundred rooms had bitten the dust—literally—to be replaced by Circus Circus Enterprises’s four thousand. The MGM Grand, Harrah’s, and Circus Circus were metamorphosing into dreamscapes more unescapable. Thirty thousand rooms in all had been added. And more were planned. A whole new gambling city on a man-made lake was in the works. “Success here builds on itself. As long as the excitement keeps up, the city’ll keep booming, and construction will keep constructing. Over seven billion dollars have been spent already. So, folks, keep those quarters dropping in the slots. The city’s counting on you.”
    Kiernan pressed down on the accelerator. If Tchernak was here, she thought, he’d be seeing highway patrol cars behind every hillock, cocking his neck to check for traffic spotters in the sky. She smiled. And she’d be saying, “Do you really think the Nevada Highway Patrol is going to pull me over when I’m heading to Las Vegas? I don’t think so. They’re not going to settle for a fifty-or sixty-buck ticket and keep me from an hour’s fleecing at the craps table.”
    Rounding a curve, she came into a wide plateau. Maybe the emptiness would save them here in Nevada. Maybe the dead woman had not been in contact with anyone, except the person who brought her to Jeff Tremaine. Maybe that person … Maybe. Maybe. Maybe whatever she had was not contagious at all. Maybe a hundred other Nevadans were just beginning to feel feverish. Maybe one of them was driving to