Page 93 of Sucker For You

“Wes.” Her voice was cold, flat.

—no.

A smack of wind cut through his stomach. It slapped the humor from his mouth and the breath from his lungs. Somehow, without conscious input from his brain, he found himself kicking off his fins. “What’s wrong? Are you safe?”

Immigration agents; another migraine; a finger severed with a fish knife.

He strode toward the institute, walking fast, but slowed a little by lugging his gear through the dunes.

Chase—

“I know what happened to our octopus,” she said.

He stumbled. Horribly, his first sensation was relief—followed by pain when he stepped on a mussel. “What?”

“There was discussion in the break room this morning about the Cephalopod Sentience and Welfare Act. The bill to protect laboratory cephalopods. We were hypothesizing what its passage could mean for MORI.”

“Was Dr. Solomon—” Collecting his legs, Wes got himself moving again against the weight of his lead vest.

“She wasn’t there. But Brianne was. Her phone rang while we were talking. She ignored it. Then she said something about checking MORI’s inventory of cleaning supplies and left.”

“Aren’t most of the cleaning supplies already in the break room?” He’d peeked inside that glorified closet during their first tour of the lab, where rubber gloves, canisters of vitamin powder, towels, and surgical face shields had jockeyed for space with a coffee pot.

“Yes.”

“So what was she—”

Isabel spoke over him. “Fifteen minutes later, I was disposing of some algal residue in the biological waste bin. The receptacle is outside, near the loading dock by MORI’s rear exit, behind a fence to keep out raccoons. I overheard Brianne talking on her phone there on the dock. I couldn’t see her from behind the paling. But I could hear her. I heard her when she answered another call.”

His calves cramped. He pushed himself through the sand, past the Sandholdt lot trailhead. “What did she say?”

“She was angry. She told the caller never to interrupt her during work hours. Not unless it was an emergency. Never to call from a corporate number, either. The caller was agitated. Brianne didn’t care. She didn’t care that they were reporting the escape of a second subject from a testing facility. She said the specimen wouldn’t live long in the wild, anyway. Besides, an earlier subject had escaped on September third and hadn’t raised any alarms. It probably wasn’t alive anymore, either.”

They’d rescued their octopus from the bay on that same Sunday.

Isabel knew that.

Camera smacking into his chest, Wes kept running while she told him, “Maybe the caller was concerned about a reductionin their test-subject population. But Brianne said she’d deliver another one tomorrow.”

“Another—” A stitch seared his ribs.

“Octopus.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes.” Tonelessly, Isabel continued, “Brianne Nichols is stealing juvenileOctopus bimaculoidesfrom the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute. She’s trafficking them as research subjects for a pharmaceutical company. But I don’t know how. And I don’t know where the testing facility is located.”

Fuck—fuck!

“If she’s transporting octopuses, the facility’s got to be nearby. Maybe the industrial buildings on Sandholdt Road?” he panted. Almost back to MORI’s parking lot. “The old sardine canneries right on the water? Close to where I saw that weird bait ball. There was another one today, and I almost—”

“Maybe,” she cut him off, still mechanical, still so coldly factual. “Maybe the company has a satellite testing facility right here. It’s a viable location for collecting specimens. For experimenting on them. It would be difficult to move delicate, temperamental, stress-prone cephalopods regularly between Moss Landing and Las Vegas.”

“Las Vegas?”

“BioPulse Pharmaceuticals is headquartered there.”

“BioPulse?”