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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,