Tim Dodd lay in the garden tub and soaked. Soaked, he thought. He was thinking of doing that to the Inquirer. Sure, he was on their dime, but he'd earned it. They were paying for this fourth floor room, an expensive room at that. They were footing the bill for this hot bath and for the room service, which he had abused for the past two weeks. But they had gotten some good articles from him. Roe Fox, his immediate editor, had admitted that they received a flood of calls and letters concerning his pieces on Salutations. He'd boosted sales considerably in the South, Fox had told him. But the story was starting to flicker out. People had seen enough photographs of trussed up alligators in the back of some gator hunter's pickup truck. And the hospital bed photos he'd gotten of the fat jogger who'd been nailed by the cottonmouth were topflight, certainly. But the paper had run it twice and that kind of stuff was losing its punch.
"Either build up this giant snake thing you've got going, or head on back. You can't run up your expense account like this forever," Fox had told him.
"I'm not making this up, Roe. These people really are losing their pets to some silent predator coming out of the woods. For real."
"Save it for the funny papers, Tim. This is Roe Fox you're talking to. Now, find your giant snake or get your ass back to home base. You've got a week, son."
And that had been four days ago. That's why he had been desperate enough to follow that Riggs fellow into the forest. Riggs. He wondered how much Riggs knew. And Tatum. And that nut, Grisham. Damnation. Dodd stretched to his full length in the hot, steaming water, and still his toes could not touch the far end of the tub. He squinted his eyes in pleasure and watched tendrils of vapor steaming up from the soapy water, rising up to condense on the bonewhite tile above. He slid down until his head was submerged, then he surfaced, scrubbing shampoo into his scalp.
"Ouch," he said to himself, his nail coming in contact with a laceration on the top of his head. When he'd calmed down after downloading the contents of the digital camera, he had slowly realized the extent of the scratches and cuts all over his body. And his hair had been home to a couple of ticks that had buried their bloodthirsty little heads near his right ear. Shuddering, he recalled how he had pried one loose from his groin and another from his left armpit. Filthy place, those forests. He had stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, watching the blood and the dirt run down the drain before he had drawn this deep bath.
Taking the bar of scented soap from its place in a clam-shaped tray, he swirled it in his small hands, examining the cuts thorns and grass had sliced there. Even now the soap was causing the wounds to sting, but the slight pains had ceased to bother him. A very small price to pay for what he was probably going to get out of all of this. He rubbed soap in his face, lathering his beard, then submerged his head yet again, rinsing himself.
It was time for Tim Dodd to cash in his chips, enjoy a big payday. If he did this right, he could retire. He wasn't really the kind of guy who enjoyed this game. Yes, there were worse ways to earn a living. God knew he'd had some lousy jobs in the past, and compared to them, this gig was a dream. But the fact was that he just didn't care for work of any type. What he wanted to do was make enough to buy a nice condo on a beach somewhere and become a gentleman of leisure. Screw working. Screw being told what to do. For years, he had been searching for the big score, and this, it seemed, was it.
He wondered how much The Globe might bid for the story, accompanied by photographs. But he had to plan it right. He couldn't take any chances that some legal technicality might gum up the works. Dodd had to play his cards well, and if he did, then there was a best selling book in it for him, and movie rights, too. Jesus, this was like some throwback story to the early twenties. Nobody discovered things like this in this day and age.
Nobody but Tim Dodd, it seemed.
But he would need some confirmation. Pictures could be faked. They could do anything with a computer, now. They could make things come to life on the movie screen so convincingly that it was impossible to say where fantasy stopped and reality began. He'd need someone to back him up. He'd need someone to admit that there was, indeed, at least one dinosaur living in the wilderness around Berg Brothers Studios' dream town.
Or, if it wasn't a dinosaur, then it was certainly something that looked like a dinosaur. If not a dinosaur, then what? What else was ten feet tall and walked around on its hind legs and had small, clawed arms and talons on its scaled feet bigger than butcher knives? Dodd had stared for ten minutes at the best image he'd coaxed out of the laptop. Part of the shot had been of the thing's head; a staring black eye focused intently on the viewer.
Thinking of his race with it, he wondered why it had not caught up with him. It had been just behind him toward the end, just before he'd stumbled upon Grisham. Dodd had felt the pounding of its feet; it couldn't have been more than forty or fifty feet behind him, then. Why had it run? Was it scared of men? If it had been, then it wouldn't have chased him.
Maybe Grisham knew about it. But no. Dodd even shook his head, convincing himself of the old soldier's ignorance. If the Colonel had known about the thing, had suspected Dodd had seen it, then at the very least there would have been a much more unpleasant exchange between them. The guy obviously hated the crowds of people he was afraid Salutations was going to bring to his island of right wing paradise. And once word of such a creature got out, then the attention this area had gotten so far was going to be nothing in comparison. No, Grisham was not the place he would have to go to for confirmation.
Rising from the tub, he pushed the chrome lever and let it drain. Water, cloudy with soap and with dirt began to swirl quickly away, vanishing soundlessly. Soon he was gingerly rubbing himself down with a cream white towel, careful not to rub the fabric too hard upon any of the crisscross of scratches that patterned his arms and legs. He hissed as he drew the towel along the back of his left thigh. Dodd suspected that there might be a thorn or some other foreign object still lodged in the flesh there. He'd have to go to a doctor and have it examined. The thought of someone probing the wound with a needle or some other surgical tool made him shudder. He'd give it a day or two.
There was Holcomb and his bunch out at that ridiculous compound. The more Dodd thought about it, the more sense it made that the billionaire probably knew something about the animal he'd seen. The guy had ruined his own reputation among environmental groups for chasing after nonexistent creatures like the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot. And there had been that episode a few years back when he'd claimed to have discovered a population of mastodons, or some other such extinct elephant. Actually, Dodd had to admit the guy had almost hit the nail on the head with that one. But what he'd thought was some kind of mammoth had turned out to be a mutant form of regular elephants. Someone at the Inquirer had gotten a story with legs out of it.
However, the chances of Dodd getting through to Holcomb, to back him up on this, were probably slim and none. First of all, it was obvious to Dodd that the guy was trying to buy up all of this land and stop the studio from getting it so that Holcomb could take the credit for discovering these things. And, having "discovered" them, he would have that entire wilderness wrapped up as his private dinosaur habitat. It wasn't a bad idea, and he'd probably try something like that himself if he had the dough and the resources to do it. Nope. He wasn't going to get any help from Holcomb. If there was one thing he'd learned about extremely wealthy men, it was that they were very ambitious and were never happy with what money they had. He suspected guys like that were always trying to figure out how to get it all.
And that left Dodd with your friendly neighborhood wildlife officer: Mr. Ron Riggs. It couldn't be coincidence that he had been following Riggs right before he'd encountered the dinosaur. Of course Tim could argue that it couldn't be chance that he had stumbled into a meeting with Colonel Winston Grisham. But he was convinced that the meeting with Grisham had been a fluke, and a lucky one if what he saw in that thing's big eye had been hunger.
Tim finished dabbing himself dry and went out of the bath and into the bedroom. He'd laid his clothes out, a pair of jeans and a dark blue long-sleeved shirt. Room service was going to be bringing up his supper within half an hour, and he didn't want anyone else seeing his arms and legs covered in scratches. Maybe they wouldn't mention it, but word would get around. And right now he didn't want anyone passing along any kind of gossip. The other glory rags had given up on Salutations as a story, and it had been all Tim's for the past few weeks, but one never knew. A rumor or two and he'd have competitors snooping around, trying to scoop him. He couldn't have that, and certainly wanted to do everything in his power to prevent it.
His grand appearance in the lobby that evening hadn't helped though, he thought as he carefully pulled on his pants and drew on the shirt. If the scratches started leaking, he doubted anyone would notice the stains through the dark fabrics he was wearing. Tentatively, he walked around the king-sized bed, taking a couple of exaggerated steps, to test how it all felt. There was just a little irritation, nothing to worry about.
Going into the den area of the suite, he sat on the couch and looked at his laptop. He'd immediately copied the files onto a pair of disks, even the innocuous ones. Dodd didn't want to take any chances with them. They were his only proof right now, and he'd have to go with that if he couldn't find anything more concrete before he got ready to break the story. And that was another problem, he realized.
One of the first things he'd have to do when he got ready to make his move would be to resign from the Inquirer. Technically speaking, this was their baby. He was just an employee. This story, these pictures, this whole deal was theirs. He was just a lowly grunt and the articles and whatever came from them was just work for hire. He'd have to time it well, quit his post, wait at least a few days, and then put the whole thing up for auction. Maybe they'd buy their own pictures back. If they bid high enough.
Sitting there, he thought of how close he had come to activating the phone modem and faxing the files straight to the home office. Dodd had even gotten to the point of bringing up the fax program before he'd come to his senses. He ran his injured fingers through his wiry hair, thinking of the big payoff that was going to be his.
With any luck at all, soon he'd have a decent retirement account sitting in the bank, a good money market fund earning a comfortable living, a townhouse (maybe two) with an ocean view. Dodd thought of Seattle; he thought of his time there with Anne, his wife who'd left him. Hell. Maybe he could get whoever bought the pictures to throw Anne in on the deal, too. Despite everything, he still loved her. Who knew? Maybe she'd come back to him when she heard about all of this. Anything was possible, now.
Dodd sat, drying in the cool air, and he waited for room service to bring the steak and lobster dinner he'd ordered.
And a bottle of wine.