Night Relics by James P. Blaylock Page A

carefully. He knew just how sick you’d get from drinking contaminated water. No real damage if you got to the antibiotics
    in time. Little bit of a bug. Some gastrointestinal distress, that’s all. Over in a day or two. Of course you’d have to drain the tank and disinfect it and fill it again. And you’d go crazy wondering how the hell rats
    had got in there in the first place. But really what it was was a minor sort of irritation, something to make an old man fed
    up with living out in the sticks, where you were at the mercy of every damned rat in creation.
    Klein nodded, following the story uneasily. Peg walked past and he signaled her. “I think I need another beer after all,”
    he said. He fought to maintain some self-control, but he was losing badly. Pomeroy was walking all over him. Why? That’s what
    Klein wondered. Pomeroy was going to lengths here. Clearly he thought he had some kind of upper hand, but in regard to what?
    And what really frosted Klein was that he had seen it coming. He had known what Pomeroy was, that he was capable of this kind
    of vicious trick.This was his own damned fault.
    Ten years ago he and Pomeroy had some dealings together, back when Pomeroy had been working for Delta Core Sampling, a Newport
    Beach firm that had finally been litigated to death. The building that housed the company had burned under mysterious circumstances,
    eradicating incriminating records.
    Providing false core samples had been the issue in the litigation. A couple of houses out in Oceanview Heights had slid down a
    hillside that had turned out to be clay instead of bedrock. The core samples provided by Delta had been fakes, allegedly drilled
    out of an adjacent hill. Klein had built the houses. That was a few years before married Lorna—part of a past that was better
    left in shadow. The owner of the drilling company, Pomeroy’s boss, had died of a heart attack. Pomeroy had walked away and become
    a car salesman, apparently very successful, though there was no explaining the success.
    So there were reasons that Pomeroy could sit here telling Klein about poisoning a man’s water tank with dead rats, and Klein
    couldn’t just hit him over the head with a beer bottle and do the world a hell of a favor. The second most regrettable thing
    in Klein’s life was getting involved with Pomeroy again. The truth was, Klein had set the man loose on the canyon, bankrolled
    him, pep-talked him. Monsters by Dr. Kleinstein.
    And that’s where the trouble would come from. It wouldn’t be fraud that would take them all down, it would be Pomeroy and his
    bag full of rats.
    “So when I tried to pet the creature,” Pomeroy skid showing Klein his bandaged hand, “it took a bite out of me.”
    “Can’t imagine why,” Klein said.
    Pomeroy shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine why either. “I’ve got a couple of other nice plans, too. Even better. We’ll
    wedge the old man out of there yet. That’s the nicest place in the canyon. I’m thinking of keeping itfor myself. A little investment.”
    “Why don’t you lay off the nice
plans,
” Klein said, working to keep from shouting. “A checkbook ought to do the trick. We’ve had this conversation more than once.
    We’ve picked up a few places, we’ve got a lot of maybes, we’ve got twenty people to talk to still. All signs point to
success.
Leave the goddamned rats at home from now on. And as far as personal investments go, keep the bigger picture in mind.”
    “Relax,” Pomeroy said, lowering his voice. “The beauty of this is that it’s rats. They’re a naturally occurring pest out there.
    Put arsenic in the tank, and they’ll come looking for you. Put a rat in the tank and they put out a warrant on Mother Nature.
    It’s foolproof. It’s biodegradable.”
    “Clear it with me next time.”
    Pomeroy shrugged.
    “Mr. Ackroyd happens to be a friend of my wife’s,” Klein said. “They used to work together. He’s a nice old guy. Now what
    the hell