“God, this is like Langford’s lab,” Rondeau said. “Creepy-crawlies everywhere. Is this some kind of zoo annex?”
“It’s a pet store,” Marla said. She peered into a large tank inhabited by half a dozen water dragons, leaping from artificial tree branches to the walls of the tank and back again. Another held a huge iguana, the size of a small dog, resting on a rock, its tongue flicking slowly in and out. She moved on to an open-topped tank filled with water and rocks. Tiny pinkish lizards with slick skin sat on the rocks, staring up at her. Another tank held small frogs. Not like the one in her bag—these were green, with bulging eyes, and toes with round suckers on the ends, and they clung to a branch in the tank. Still, she supposed they’d come to the right place.
Rondeau wandered off to look at ball pythons, and Marla went in search of B. She found him at the counter in the back, talking to the clerk, a stocky man in his twenties, with close-cropped dark hair and what Marla guessed was a semipermanent scowl. “Marla, this is Ray,” B said, and the clerk nodded to her. He wore a navy blue bowling shirt with the name “Butch” embroidered in curving white script over the right breast.
“I was just saying, I don’t know much about frogs,” Ray said. “Snakes are more my thing. But if you show me what you’ve got, I’ll see what I can do.”
Marla glanced at B, who nodded. “Ray’s good people,” he said.
She nodded. She couldn’t see the harm in letting an ordinary see the frog. Opening the side flap of her bag, she removed the plastic bag, unrolling it so the little yellow frog was visible, but still covered in a thin layer of clear plastic. “I wouldn’t recommend touching it,” Marla said. “I don’t know much, but I know it’s poison.”
Ray hunched over and peered at the frog, then grunted. “Turn it over. Let me see its underside.” Marla did as he asked, and Ray nodded. “Damn. Hold on. Let me get a book.” He headed for the back of the store.
Marla turned to B. “How do you know him?”
“He’s a writer, actually, and he interviewed me back in the day, when I was just getting to be famous. We stayed friends after that, used to go out to bars together and stuff. We’re even tighter now, though, since we both stopped drinking. He says the freelance writing market’s shitty right now, so he has to work here.” B shrugged. “He knows a lot about snakes.”
“Hmm,” Marla said. “So he’s not…like you? Ah, like us?”
“You mean does he talk to dead people? No. Not that I know of. But he’ll be discreet, mostly because he doesn’t give a shit, and he’s a friend, so it’s okay to talk to him. I wouldn’t have brought you here otherwise. My life sort of depends on you, I think. So don’t worry.”
“Half my job is worrying. And the other half is making sure I don’t have anything to worry about.”
Ray returned, holding a coffee-table book with a bright-color cover. He set it on the counter and began flipping through the pages, past pictures of dozens of different frogs—dark green ones, tiny ones with bulging eyes, even a startlingly blue one.
Then he tapped a page with his forefinger and spun the book around so Marla could see it right-side-up. A golden yellow frog stared, black-eyed, straight at the camera. The image had caught the frog in motion, and it stood as if in a superhero’s crouch, like Spider-Man right after sticking a difficult landing, one front foot resting on the ground, the other held up, toes splayed, wide mouth turned down as if in a frown of concentration. “This is one of only a few photographs in the world of, ah, let’s see, Phyllobates terribilis,” Ray said. “Golden poison dart frog. Mr. Terrible. All the vital stats are there.”
Marla bent over the book. This was the animal, all right. Ranging in size from one-half to two inches long, uniform metallic yellow in color. Unlike other poison dart frogs, it had “teeth”—really a bony plate in its upper jaw. Marla didn’t like the sound of that. The Aztec frog-monster in that stolen carving had teeth—fangs, in fact. That wasn’t the only way Mr. Terrible differed from other frogs. Unlike most species, these were social animals, congregating with their own kind, and they were fearlessly diurnal, probably because they had little to fear from predators, being almost unbelievably poisonous. Each of these frogs had enough toxin in its skin to kill a hundred adult humans, and poison darts made from their venom remained potent for up to two years. Two-tenths of a microgram of their venom was lethal in the human bloodstream, and each frog contained a hundred micrograms. But even that level of toxicity didn’t explain the instantaneously appearing welts Marla had witnessed on those touched by the frogs. Mutex had somehow magically hot-rodded these frogs, made them even more poisonous than they were in nature, which was a bit like loading an elephant gun with dynamite—just plain overkill. Mr. Terrible didn’t exactly thrive in this environment, though, favoring the tropical rain forests, especially in Colombia, which was where Mutex had supposedly spent some time studying.