“I don’t know,” Desiree said absently. “You make a good case, but if I’m sick, I want them to do everything possible to cure me.”

“You want them to do everything possible, but not anything conceivable, whether it benefits you or not.”

“True.”

“And, as an ethical person, even if you want to allow for animal testing, don’t you think there should be some sort of standard of need? Maybe a tester should have to make a case for why it is necessary to sacrifice a monkey or a dog or a rat for a particular cause. Right now they are free to slaughter and torture however many thousands they like without oversight.

“And you know there’s a whole lot of animal testing that has nothing to do with health. Cosmetic companies subject millions of animals a year to torture to see if this new and improved nail polish remover does as much damage to a rabbit’s eyes as the old version. You’d think it would be enough to know that putting corrosive material in your eyes is a bad move, but these guys need to test it out.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Who knows why? Insurance liability or some nonsense like that. They just do it.”

“Come on,” Desiree said. “You’re telling me that big corporations pay who knows how much just to torture animals unnecessarily? I don’t believe it.”

“Really?” A strange sort of smile came over Melford’s face. “You don’t believe it? Lemuel, you don’t have to be at the pickup until what? Ten-thirty or eleven, right?”

“Right,” I said slowly.

“And you have nowhere you need to be before then?”

“Well,” I ventured, “it would be nice to go to a movie.”

“Nice try.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I told him, “but I really don’t like it.”

“No,” he said, “you won’t like it. You won’t like anything about it.”

I guess we were already heading in the right direction because Melford hit the gas harder.

“Where are we going?” Desiree asked.

“Well, I wasn’t planning on doing this so soon, but I’ve already done the logistical work, so why not.” He grinned at her. “We’re going to visit a research lab.”

Chapter 28

WE DROVE FOR ABOUT AN HOUR, farther away from Jacksonville, until Melford pulled off and took us through a bleak landscape of fast-food restaurants, topless bars, and pawnshops. Finally, he turned again and we went about another ten miles through wooded roads until he stopped and parked in a little strip mall with a jewelry store and a dry cleaner. We got out and he walked to the back, where he proceeded to take out a black garbage bag full of black sweat clothes.

“Dig around,” he said. “Find something that fits, but don’t put it on yet, or you’ll be hot as hell.” He picked up a black gym bag and slung it over his shoulder, and then he reached into a cardboard box and handed us each a lump of cloth. “You’ll need these, too.”

They were ski masks.

I already had as many legal problems as I needed, so I had no desire to break into an animal-testing facility, but I knew better than to bring that up or to suggest that maybe I should wait in the car. I was in, and I wasn’t getting out.

Melford opened up his gym bag and passed around a bottle of bug spray, and once we’d applied that we began the trek through a fairly thick copse of pines. It was still light out, but the mosquitoes were buzzing around my ear, moderately deterred by the repellent. The cluster of trees smelled of rotted leaves and the sourness of an occasional decomposing opossum.

Desiree didn’t say anything. She had a look of amused determination on her face. But why should she care? She clearly did illegal things all the time. One more wasn’t going to bother her.

Finally we began to emerge and Melford held up his hand, the platoon commander ordering us to stop.

“This is as far as we go for now,” he said. “It’s Saturday, and there won’t be anyone there, but we’re going to wait for dark all the same. Shouldn’t be more than an hour and a half or so. In the meantime, I’ll go over with you the reconnaissance I’ve already done.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out several pieces of paper, which he proceeded to unfold on the ground. They were hand-drawn maps of the interior of a building.

“What exactly are you planning?” Desiree asked.

“Nothing fancy,” he said. “This is a simple hit-and-run. You wanted to know what animal rights activists do- well, this is it. We’re going in, we’re going to take pictures and collect evidence, and we’re going to get out. Simple as that. Then I’m going to pass along the swag to an animal rights organization, and they’ll make the images public and try to stir up controversy. Pretty basic, yes?”

“Sure,” Desiree said. “Piece of cake.”

Piece of cake. I looked through the woods at the building beyond. About a hundred feet of well-manicured grass spread out between the edge of the woods and a squat white building without windows. A thin layer of shrubs outlined the structure, but that was all as far as gardening went. It looked bland, harmless, except for its menacing blankness. At the far end, just before an oceanic expanse of parking lot, I saw a concrete slab sticking out of the grass with the company’s name chiseled deep.

Oldham Health Services.

Like the coffee mugs and boxes in Karen and Bastard’s trailer. Melford had claimed to have no idea what it was. And now we were about to break in.

It wasn’t nearly dark enough to move until almost nine o’clock. Melford smiled at me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you back in time to keep you from getting fired.”

The three of us sat there, listening to the chirping cicadas and frogs and night birds, watching the poorly lit grounds of Oldham Health Services grow dark. “These guys are so behind the times,” Melford explained. “Up north, they’d never leave a lab like this so vulnerable. But animal rights activists haven’t really made themselves known in Florida, so the bad guys feel safe.” He took a look around. “Okay, put on your sweats.”

Desiree began to unbutton her jeans, but Melford shook his head. “Over your clothes, my dear,” he said. “We want to be invisible going in, but we want to look normal once we’re inside.” He glanced at her bikini top. “You’ll want to leave the sweatshirt on, I think.”

Once we were clad in black and had our masks on, he gave the forward gesture, and we charged onto the lawn like a trio of commandos, heads down, bulleting into the unknown.

I was already starting to sweat, but I felt the rush. For an instant I understood why Melford was Melford, I understood the thrill of doing something illegal, of breaking boundaries, rejecting the mundane and the stable. And it wasn’t as if we were burglars, motivated by base greed. We were defying authority for a moral cause. Whether it was my cause, whether I believed in the cause, seemed irrelevant. Just being there made me feel alive.

The yard was poorly lit, and Melford led us around the side and up a set of concrete steps that led to a metal side door. He opened his bag and removed his pick gun, the one he had used on Karen’s trailer, and within two minutes the door had clicked open. We slipped inside.

It was pitch black in there, no lights on and no windows. Melford took out a flashlight and instructed us to remove our masks and sweats- all but Desiree’s top.

“Security is light,” he said in a whisper. “Some guards, almost no cameras. If guards do show up, leave the talking to me.”

Once we’d stuffed the clothes into his bag, he hoisted it up and we began to talk again. We were in some sort of storeroom- metal shelves full of boxes, most marked MEDICAL SUPPLIES. There were glass jars of dangerous-looking liquids, bags of dog food, cat food, rabbit, rat, and monkey food. All of these emitted their own pet store smell, but from farther beyond I smelled odors far more clinical, things chemical and antiseptic.