the cruiser. One of them turned to Erroll when the smell hit his nostrils.
‘Looks like you hit the jackpot, Erroll,’ he said. ‘I smell a popper, or I’m a monkey’s uncle.’
His partner looked nauseated. They approached the Dumpster. One cop lifted himself up to look inside while the other scanned the windows along the alley.
‘Did you see anybody else?’ he called to Erroll.
‘Nobody. Not a soul.’
The cop began shoving garbage out of the way, breathing through his mouth. He nodded to his partner. ‘Yeah, we got a cold one.’
The second cop came to stand next to the Dumpster while the first one threw more garbage out of the way. Erroll could hear him sighing and gasping for breath. Something was clinging to his uniform, and he threw it off with a curse.
Then he stopped cold. He looked closer at the corpse.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the second cop.
‘There’s something wrong with the hands. Wait …’
He looked deeper, gasping in disgust. More garbage was thrown aside. Uncovered, the corpse filled the alley with the stench of decay.
Both cops looked somewhat sick, but Erroll breathed in the smell without blanching.
‘Look at the feet,’ he said. ‘Go on.’
The cop in the Dumpster rooted deeper and paused once again. He came up with wide eyes, looking at his partner.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
The partner stood on tiptoe to look over the edge of the Dumpster. He took a long look, then looked back at Erroll.
‘You saw this?’ he asked.
‘Of course I saw it,’ Erroll said. ‘Saw it first thing. That’s why I came to get you. I told you there’d be changes. Didn’t I? Didn’t I predict this? You can see he’s changed. Just look.’
Both cops looked closely at the body. ‘Holy shit,’ one of them murmured.
Then the younger one got out, went back to the cruiser, and got on the radio to call for an ambulance.
‘See?’ Erroll said to the other cop. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I told the docs too, but they wouldn’t believe me, they just smiled. But you can see with your own eyes that it’s the truth, can’t you? Come on. Say so.’ Erroll was almost jumping up and down in his excitement.
The cop had finished on the radio. A distant siren was heard.
‘What time did you say you found this, Erroll?’ the older one asked.
‘First thing this morning. Six, six-thirty.’
‘And you didn’t see anyone around?’
‘No one.’
The other cop had returned. Both of them stood by the Dumpster, looking at each other and at Erroll.
‘Did you ever see a thing like that?’ the younger one asked.
‘Never.’ The older cop was as shocked as the younger.
Erroll stood talking to them until the ambulance came. A paramedic got out and came up to them.
‘What have you got?’ he asked.
‘Dead body,’ said the younger cop. ‘Discovered by this man early this morning.’
‘Is there something unusual?’ the paramedic asked.
‘Take a look at the hands and feet.’ The older cop stood back to give the paramedic room.
The paramedic stood on tiptoe, just as the cops had done. He took a long look, then turned back to the cops.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
‘I told you,’ Erroll said happily.
The two cops and the paramedic glanced at Erroll. Then the paramedic called the emergency room at the hospital.
‘We have a corpse with an odd deformity,’ he said. ‘I’m heading for the medical examiner’s office. You might want to send someone over to observe.’
They asked him something over the radio.
‘The hands and feet don’t look right,’ he said. ‘They’re enlarged and deformed. You have to touch them to really see the difference. To me they don’t even look human.’
Erroll nodded, giggling. ‘I told you there’d be changes,’ he said, putting on his earphones.
Gary, IndianaNovember 24
In 1984 Colin Goss, already a giant in the pharmaceutical industry, found that leftist terrorists had closed down his newest factory in Costa Rica. They dynamited one of his buildings, killing twenty workers on a night shift. They also threatened the local workers he had hired.
Goss had the manager of the facility complain to the authorities. They promised to safeguard the security of the plant. Their promises were empty. New terrorist attacks followed. The plant manager himself was kidnapped and held for ransom. The leftist guerrillas demanded that Goss pay the ransom and take his business elsewhere.
Goss took matters into his own hands.
Two weeks after the kidnapping of Goss’s plant manager, a group of commandos led by professional soldiers whom Goss had hired at twice their usual fee assassinated the leaders of the local guerrilla movement. All but one, that is. The last was kidnapped from the small rural compound he used as his hideout. His name was Gabriel Cabrera. A legend among local leftists, Cabrera was the driving force of their movement.
The next week Cabrera was exchanged for the manager of Goss’s plant.
From that time on the Goss operation was allowed to function in safety. A small army of security men, all trained commandos, remained in place to assure the plant’s security and the safety of the workers.
One year to the day after the original assault on Goss’s plant, Gabriel Cabrera was run over by a laundry van in San Isidro. The driver of the van disappeared before police arrived at the scene.
No leader of similar force was found to lead the guerrilla movement, which was set back a generation by Cabrera’s death.
The Costa Rica episode had come to be known as ‘Colin Goss’s Godfather story.’ He never mentioned it in public, and denied it when reporters asked if he had killed the terrorists intentionally. But it had assured his public image once and for all. Goss could accuse anyone he wanted of being soft on terrorism and know that the charge could never be leveled at him. He had paid his dues on that score.
Rumors still circulated to the effect that after the World Trade Center attack, Goss had offered to send a group of his own commandos to Afghanistan to locate and capture Osama bin Laden. His offer was refused, because the White House did not trust Goss to keep quiet about his role in the mission if it was successful, and because the political consequences would be terrible if Goss became a hero to the public. Not even the life of bin Laden was worth the risk of positioning Colin Goss to become president himself one day.
Tonight Goss arrived at a noisy rally being given for him in Gary, Indiana. The unruly crowd was made up largely of steelworkers, many of them out of work due to the deepening recession.
Goss’s advance men had made no effort to quiet the crowd. On the contrary, the Goss people had projected images of chaos, violence, and hunger on huge video screens, so that by the time Goss was announced the mob was almost out of control.
This