Bombshell (11 page)

Lying on the floor of the van, Molly rolled to face him, confronting only his black balaclava. Blood ran from her mouth, and sweat shone on the taut muscles and sinews of her arms. “That,” she said, “is a Swiss-made vagina, and it runs like clockwork.” The dissonance of the deep yet tender voice and the sex organs and breast implants, the tattoos, and powerful musculature, caused the rendition team to hesitate and fall back on the benches that ran along the interior of the blacked-out van. “I fought in Vietnam to get this far,” she said, “and if I had a moment with each of you, you might regret it. What are you, the fucking heavy metal wing of the Ku Klux Klan?”

“Was that your motorcycle outside the house?”

“No.” Molly sensed from the snaking of the van that they were traveling south, along Highway 14, in the direction of Albuquerque. She had to maintain her wits and her bearings, despite the violence and humiliations. Another of the dark figures leaned toward her.

“Was that your house?”

“I'm a burglar, assholes. I had broken in when you interrupted.”

“But you answered the door.”

“Is it more of a crime to be a nonchalant burglar? Am I under arrest, or just under your jackboots?” Molly struggled to her knees, to relieve the pain in her arms that had been locked behind her back. She wanted her abductors to talk more, so that she might be more precise about their general East Coast accents.

“You're transparent, liar.”

Royce brandished the wallet that he had pulled from Molly's jeans. “Pinkerton.”

Dresner took the driver's license. “Molly Pinkerton. Ah, it says you're the neighbor. It's a nice picture of you. You don't look, what, sixty-five. Who's your friend, Molly Pinkerton? Are you sure you want to take a beating for him? If we take you back, will we find him at the bar instead?”

“Are we going to the mother ship?”

“Fuck you.” Dresner spoke resignedly.

For some minutes, they rode in silence. Molly's blood ran along the floor.

In the fighting he had lost track of the positions of his men. About him, he saw only a trinity of thugs in black masks. It was too dark to perceive the color of their eyes. Yet, each seemed to betray a silent dismay, and he
understood that each of the solemn killers would be calculating and quantifying his failure. Now they possessed and had brutalized an aging transsexual who resembled nothing of the suspect. Dresner tried to plot the fallout of this mistake, but ahead of him was only a blizzard of confusion.

“All right, stop right here.” Dresner punched the back of the driver's seat.

Royce was incredulous: “That's it?”

“My call,” Dresner snapped, overcompensating.

The plastic bonds at Molly's wrists were severed and the scraps retrieved.

“Get out. And if we have to see you again, it will be so much worse.” Dresner's own words struck him as childish, part of some lost Oklahoma ritual he had buried.

Molly was shoved out of the vehicle and her clothes were strewn from the rear doors as the van disappeared into the darkness of the unlit highway.

Slamming the doors, Dresner addressed his team. “Okay, you know what to do next. Run the name, the license, et cetera.” He sounded exhausted. “Get the hair samples from the hood, and swabs of the spit and the blood. Run them.”

As the van drove on, Dresner's phone vibrated. Trembling, he snatched it from his pocket. He was breathing hard. A text message was scrolling across the screen. PATROLMAN FOUND DEAD IN BURNING CAR NR PANTEX NUCLEAR FACILITY NR AMARILLO, TX. ISSUES. SUSPECTED HOMICIDE. SUICIDE UNLIKELY. Electronic warnings bored into Robert Dresner's skull. He thought as fast as he could, assembling the nexus, trying to salvage what he could of the situation:

Los Alamos National Labs and the Pantex Plant were both militarized locations under the National Nuclear Security Administration wing of the Department of Energy. Hoping that this faint inspiration would assuage his guilt, he dialed for his director. The Voice answered:

“Robert. You have something? Did you locate the motorcycle?”

“Perhaps.” Dresner swallowed with difficulty. He didn't want to disclose the ragged details of the bad rendition. What he required was some sliver of reassurance. “I mean, we located the motorcycle, but not the owner. There was someone there, and we're going to check hi—her out. I think she was a neighbor of our man. Spicer is working the suspect's house over. But this dead cop at Pantex—maybe this was a day trip, a recon gone wrong. I'm speculating.”

“Your speculations are our business, Robert.”

“Well, Pantex is another NNSA site, like Los Alamos. This might be coincidence, but I think we should put a call through to the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque before a pattern develops. I can send someone down there. Actually, we're only about forty minutes away. I'll call Spicer and tell him to get out and lie low for a couple of hours, and I can get down there and deal with this personally. And there's a chance our man is on his way there, right now.”

The Voice said: “Where are the next closest NNSA sites, after that?”

“Not sure. Missouri or Nevada, probably.”

“It's what we have. I appreciate your call, Robert.”

Robert Dresner instructed Green to get the team to the Sandia Labs. Then he tried to call Spicer. There was no answer. “Spicer can't have a signal in that ghost
town,” he muttered. Despite the lack of communication, he was confident that Spicer would finish his forensic and recon and get out of the house in good time.

In the moonlight, wracked from her beatings, Molly had gathered the ragged remnants of her clothes that had been cut from her and scattered across the asphalt and red dirt shoulder of Highway 14 from the rear of the jet-black, unmarked van that had abducted her. The road had twisted upward into the hills. It was difficult to see exactly where she was, but she knew that if she could continue to stagger downward, then she would reach Madrid. The emptiness of the Turquoise Trail hummed about her. Far away, she heard the weird cackle of coyotes ripping flesh from bone; painful memories of the night she was busted for hustling hormone shots . . .

July 4, 1985. In those days, she was a pale, willowy pre-op scoring on the satin side streets of Chinatown, taping her sex back along her inner thigh. She had decided upon her name, and her old name—the masculine birth name—had become a meaningless blur of syllables, a sound like a death rattle. She was reaching the point where if she did not pass over from the mistake of manhood, then she would suicide out. Remembering the streets, she saw neon, rain, lanterns, and epicanthic stares. She was tall, like a ghostly mannequin made from whitewashed bamboo. The shots were thinning her muscles. She no longer needed to shave. Yet, the man she had been in Vietnam when he sprayed adrenal M-16 rounds into crowds of women and children running from a burning hut, that primal shade still hung on her back, reeking, hirsute, and clawing. He had to be exorcised. Soon, she would leave him on the operating floor beyond the jungles of Mexico.

As distant fireworks burst over Fisherman's Wharf, Molly Pinkerton looked for her Chinatown connection in the pungent steam of the evening.
Her connection was another pre-op, a petite boy who when slipping her the estrogen doses would look at her as if to say: You're not serious, are you? Don't go too far, Jack. Let's stick to dress-up, man. But Molly was fixed on the other side and the shrugging off of all remnants of animus. It was only later that she would learn that this, at least for her, was impossible. That night, she could not find her connection. In the place where they usually met, she encountered three skinheads from Oakland, scuffing in the broken glass that Molly deduced must have been the smashed estrogen phials.

“Have you seen Fang?” she asked, willing her drag to work.

“No ‘Fang,'” one of the skinheads said, starting toward her. “Just fags.”

The beating came down, a cascade of violence from the dozen hammers of their fists and boots. She tried to raise her hands, but they were blown aside. Her ribs shattered inward toward her lungs and her jaw dislocated and cracked before she lost consciousness. Afterward, streetlight fell across her body, her eyelashes smeared off in a black mist and her lipstick spread across her cheek like in some pop video. When she awoke, all that was within her was to lie weeping in the street, until a cop discovered her and called an ambulance . . .

She forced her way, disoriented and confused, along the dark snake of the road, struggling toward the lights of Madrid. Tremors possessed her in waves of nausea and violent memories. Her flesh was electrified with pain, the taste of blood in her mouth, a bloom of welts and bruises overwhelming her face through her tattooed makeup, her nerves in crisis. During the turgid miles of her descent, her mind sought to arrange conflicting information: If Cash was the intended target, they could not have known what she looked like; physically, they were poles apart. The
abduction fell apart when they thought they had bagged a woman, so then, how could they have been targeting Cash? They were not nouveau riche queer-bashers, and they were not frat. They had asked about the motorcycle. They were looking for the rider, but did not know the sex of their mark. They assumed a male target. But who were they, and what did they want with Cash?

Molly clawed back into town in the dormant early hours; dogs howled in the coal dust dark. Scarcely a lamp illuminated the blank shanties. The door of Cash's cabin swung idly on its hinges as she approached. There was a sharp flash of light. Initially, Molly took it to be lightning over the hills, but then she saw it again, exposing the interior of Cash's home. Holding her breath at the threshold, Molly heard the familiar spit and whine of a professional camera, a flashbulb flicker betrayed the black silhouette of the intruder. One of the abduction gang had remained, but should have split the scene by now. No cell phone reception, Molly realized. The rest of the gang would have tried to contact him with a warning, but he would have little or no signal in Madrid. Suppressing the spikes of pain in her ribs, the fear of a torn breast implant, Molly moved silently into the house and the small kitchen. On the table, beside the typewriter and a stack of paperback books, was the straight razor that Cash would use to cut her ragged hair. Silently, Molly picked up the blade.

In the living room, Spicer held a small flashlight between his teeth while he photographed documents spread across the couch. Molly crawled from the kitchen, controlling her breathing, recalling the pouring jungles of Vietnam, the quiet terrors of night stalking. She thought of the skinheads beating her down. Now, here was one of the latest, dressed in black, buzz cut, and searching for her only friend. For a moment, undetected, Molly knelt behind the intruder, letting her heart beat a dozen times, letting it slow down. With one powerful arc and slash of her arm, she drew the
razor swiftly and cleanly through his black fatigues, slashing deep into soft flesh, severing his hamstrings and opening pulsing arteries to the room. Blood sprayed from both legs, showering Molly in gore. In the reflex inhalation before trying to scream, Spicer sucked the flashlight back through his teeth and into his throat as he collapsed. The camera fell from his grip and jerked in stroboscopic spasms on the floor. He writhed piteously and almost silently upon the Navajo rug, saturated in blood, a ray of white light pouring from his mouth, roving over Molly's face; he made choking sounds, tooth enamel cracking on metal. Molly pinned his arms with her knees; blood drooled out with the light.

“I realize that there is a choice, motherfucker,” Molly snarled. “I should stop you choking and pull the flashlight out of your throat, but you'll bleed to death anyway, and after the beating your boyfriends just gave me, I find myself morbidly fascinated to watch you die. I should ask you questions, but you would be reluctant to explain. I should find this revolting, but when you have witnessed one traumatic death, you've seen them all. You cunts really hurt me. I imagine that you wanted to hurt my friend, right? So, you see that you have abdicated your rights. There is absolutely no question of letting you survive. Brutalized by an ageing transsexual war vet? No one would believe you.”

As Spicer lost consciousness, bleeding out on the cabin floor, warm plasma soaking his thighs, his last sight was of the face of Molly Pinkerton, her CIA-smashed mouth with its tattooed lipstick, a corona of blond hair in the brilliant fuzz of his flashlight as he choked on it.

Adrenal currents lit up her flesh as Molly rolled the corpse up in the rug and dragged it into the bathroom. She would burn it in the morning. Returning to the living room, Molly switched on the lights. She gathered the sprawled papers and retired to the kitchen to make coffee. She poured
a glass of water, taking three sips before leaning over the kitchen sink and letting the rest of it run over her hair and neck. She removed an elastic band from the pocket of her ripped, bloodied jeans to tie the cold strands out of her eyes.

Molly began to work through the typewritten sheaves, ragged pages torn hastily from books, a Picasso postcard, halftone photographs, and fading newspaper clippings. There were several pages that resembled idiosyncratic astrological charts with their scrawl of intersecting lines and symbols. The pages that Cash appeared to have typed for herself were in red ink. Molly drank her coffee and stared at the capitalized titles of the pages, this strange bricolage of obituaries, history, fantasy, catastrophe, and violence. Pages and pages ran on in unbroken paragraphs. As Molly read, it was clear that Cash had created a plexus of justifications and rationales, and that even Molly herself had place within it. Now she had killed one of the shadowy agents who were taking Cash seriously enough to want to kidnap her. The corpse gurgled in the bathroom as Molly lost herself in the weird torrents from Cash's typewriter: