Bombshell (17 page)

“If you circumvent me ever again, they'll never find your bones, okay?”

“Sir. I'm calling you to tell you something. I'm in Madrid. I've been at the Coalmine Tavern. Look, her name is Varyushka Cash.” Royce spelled it. “It cost me some drinks. Listen, you tell The Voice. Tell him you got it from the tranny. I've been back to the house. I took some scans that will come to your phone in a moment. Really, Robert, I'm very sorry if I fucked you up.”

Ten minutes later, with the transmission from Royce on the screen of his phone, and several pages of hard copy, Dresner returned to the gurney. “We pulled Operative Spicer's remains from your fire, and they will be shipped back to his family for his funeral. You know, by now, that his camera transmitted the images of you murdering him to us. But I want to talk about you, or about the man you once were, Jack Torma.”

Molly blinked from the gurney. Dresner watched her—it, as he thought—swallow. “You have police records, of course. Your DNA put us in mind of some prior incidents, from when you used to hustle hormone shots with the Asians in Chinatown, the Tenderloin, and the Castro. What was it, estrogen, or testosterone inhibitors? Did you shoot up rubber?”

Molly tried to imagine where Cash might be, what she was sparing her.

“Then there was the stabbing in '91; self-defense, granted, and you managed to break his neck before he got the knife out of you, and no time served, I know. But you were a known hormone runner.”

Molly tried to shake her head, but the bonds held her fast.

Dresner lifted his clipboard. “Are you familiar with the maxim ‘Anarchy is the sum of an educated people'?”

He paced around the chrome rails. Abruptly, he stretched a black towel across Molly's face, and the drowning began. He poured water over the flannel and her airways from a metal canister. Each time that it stopped, Robert Dresner asked more questions, and each time that it resumed it was more terrible than the last—suffocation in a thin pour of cold water.

“Or, let me try ‘The History of the Cold War Is the History of the Sex War,' or ‘The uniting principle of violence is sexless. And the principle of violence is distinct from and not contingent upon the body. Therefore, for the modern Amazonian feminist, if she is forced to fight men, she does not do so from the weaker corner of her body.' Get it? Familiar?”

As the drowning went on, Molly felt the wretched sacs of her lungs imploding, regions of her brain giving out in a series of strokes that she saw as power failures in cities seen from the air.

“Do you recognize this screed, Jack? ‘As a woman, I am informed that the nature and singular function of my work is parody, parody in imagination. Therefore, at a certain juncture, my work must be exteriorized and have real victims, thus destroying parody, and any sense of my work being envious yet ineffectual imitation of the male. Killing is both affect and effect. Women, unlike men, are not generally given to random killings, or the setting up of false logics—race hate, misogyny, and insult—to explain a chain or spree of brutalities. Women kill during self-defense, but men kill as part of their will to power.' Wow. It's not your fault, Jack. Your friend Varyushka probably didn't want you to know that she was completely fucking insane. Where is she now?”

The chain reaction of her death was underway. Though Dresner was overconfident in his ability to sustain her torture, Molly experienced it like cascading sparks and dull explosions of paralysis as parts of her faded away. Her mouth tried to form a word: “Varyush. . . . ka . . . ”

“If her motorcycle is leaning outside her cabin, does that mean that she is driving the car registered to you? I mean, it's missing, isn't it?” He pinched her nose between his thumb and forefinger, asphyxiating her again, glancing at his wristwatch. “Okay, breathe, cunt. Now, do you recognize the
words ‘Nuclear power is Russian roulette'? You see, it occurs to me that your friend has been more attracted to military-industrial sites so far. What's going on? Is she fucking with us and sending us off at a dogleg to the real action? Did she start those wildfires?”

Dresner leaned close to the shaved and bloodied head, now drenched in cold water. The pale adrenaline of revenge flooded him as he poured more water over the wreckage of her face. He became aware of his erection pressing against the wet metal of the gurney. “Don't make me humiliate you, bitch. Agent Spicer was my friend. Why do you want to humiliate me?”

The words fell through Jack Torma.

The words fell out of the back of Molly Pinkerton's dead skull.

APRIL 10, 2011. IN NEW ORLEANS, GRIEF CAME DOWN ON CASH
like a burning spear. It entered her at the throat and with infinite weight it penetrated downward, splitting her. She could neither name it nor could she locate its source. Was it that grief that she was concealing from Nona Laveau or something else—for her city, for her body? Her tears soaked into the red velvet of Nona's couch. She shook with the effort of silencing her weeping. Surrounded by the plastic fetishes and dying candles of the room, she thought of the conjoined killer Ardhanari again, of that other incarnation of Shiva that is an androgynous, hermaphrodite fusing of the male death-head with the female Shakti. Cash told herself: The uniting principle of violence is sexless. She would not be prevented from violence by assumptions made about or by her sex. She thought of Molly as the rod went deeper. What if someone had got to her? She gathered her belongings
and stole silently from Nona's house. As nameless tears ran down her face, she removed the tarpaulin and wiped the humidity from the windscreen of the low-rider with her sleeve. With trembling fingers, she pushed the key into the door lock and turned it slowly, minimizing all sounds, trying not to wake Nona. She would never see her again.

Cicadas rattled in the Spanish moss. Mosquitoes lighted on her neck. She slid into the car and pulled away slowly, rubber hissing on the slick street. The Garden District was deserted. Tram rails glistened in her headlights. She glanced at the slingshot resting in the coffee cup holder between her and the passenger seat. A storm was approaching from the immense darkness of the Gulf as she crossed the scudded river on the Pontchartrain Expressway. It was fortunate that she had abandoned her thoughts of a paint bomb gesture aimed at Waterford. The rain would wash it away. Now she had something more dramatic in mind. If Nona could not take her seriously, she wondered if anyone was interested in her. She would, as she had always known that she must, increase the violence even ahead of the assassinations. The road behind her must glow and bring heat to the war. Now she would haunt the atomic industry even as it haunted her. The low-rider curled back under the curve of the river, shadowing it along US-90 between psychedelic malls and cemeteries as thick rain began to fall.

On River Road, beyond the Holy Rosary Cemetery, the lights of the Waterford nuclear power plant sparkled through the rain like a degenerate city. The plant was hemmed in by cemeteries, hordes of irradiated corpses dreaming of breaking through the plutonium runoff in their topsoil. The plant was licensed one year before Chernobyl consumed itself. She could see the containment building and the vast pylon that loomed over the road ahead of her. There was also a small security cabin with a television on inside. Noticing her car, a figure stepped from the cabin waving a
flashlight. Cash switched her headlights to full beam and waited for him to reach her. The rain whipped across his face and he raised his arm against it and the blinding rays from the car. Cash rolled down her window, rain spattering the rich upholstery. The security guard was young, she could tell, by the enthusiastic way he jogged toward her. Breathless, he stood beside the car and leaned toward the open window, illuminating her with his flashlight: a small young woman with rust-red hair and a slightly protruding upper lip, a Black Widow slingshot loaded with a chrome ball bearing stretched and aiming at his face.

“This is for the Liquidators.”

The guard opened his mouth to cry out, but only silent air passed from his white lips. Cash released the taut straps and the ball tore into the young man's palate, ripping splinters and blown teeth into his brain where the ball passed and cracked the back of his skull. The implosion of his face ripped him from the road. The last messages from his brain kicked his legs as he fell toward the trees shrouding the Waterford parking lots. Switching off the headlights, letting the car turn over, Cash stepped out and threw the flashlight into the river. Cool, possessed, she strutted along the perimeter fence line, pulling the heavy ball bearings from her jeans pockets and shooting them over the coils of razor wire at the plant buildings. The rain penetrated her clothes in moments, yet offered no distraction as she destroyed the windows of Waterford. Plexiglas from smashed street- and parking lot lights poured down on the asphalt, rattling artificial hailstones. She shot out the windshields of any cars that remained there, unleashing a siren howl of alarms. Men ran from the buildings. Moving swiftly, she merged easily with the night and the raw storm setting lightning down on the pylons. She gunned the low-rider through a night world of graveyards, swamps, plantations, and reptilian dreams, throwing up a wake of dead leaves and scorched tarot cards in her rearview mirror. The crouching
houses looked like skulls. Vagrants picked at the lawns. Oaks leaned across the wet streets, and a black ghost hissed in the slick Gulf. As she drove, she thought of Nona waking to find her gone and the chaos at Waterford. Each provocation now, every insignificant man that she could lure and cut up, would be a target dummy, vital practice ahead of the assassination of the Winters men and her assault on Indian Point. The Winters family was a nuclear dynasty. It was inevitable that in one configuration or another, she would find herself killing a father in front of his children. It was strange to find that an essential part of her ached for the release of that violence. Yet, as the rain lashed the dark glass of the car, approaching twenty-five years after the holocaust of Chernobyl, did it not make perfect sense?

She pulled onto the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, relieved to find that the storm had not shut it down, heading for the north shore across the twenty-four miles of the moonlit reservoir. Beyond the guardrails and the craning of the streetlamps that defined the thin suspended road, the water expanded around her. Soon, she found herself alone in the middle of the great lake. Yet, almost imperceptibly, something began to take shape in the passenger seat. At first, Cash thought that a moth must have flown into the car when she had rolled down the window to shoot at the Waterford lights. Then it appeared that motes of glittering dust were gathering, drawn by static into tiny embryonic formations. This ghostly infusoria drifted beside her, sometimes illuminated in the headlights of oncoming cars that filtered through her darkened windshield from the opposite causeway. Slowly, the constellations of it came together. She began to experience a distracted fear, driving fast, watching this thing beside her, as it developed in the passenger seat. For a moment, it resembled the lights of a city seen from the air at night, but then it would shift. Exhaustion was taking its toll, she thought. Yet, when she cast her eyes back to the dark space of the passenger seat, she saw something that almost caused her to careen from the road. The car skimmed the
guardrail. Sparks peeled from it like the tail of a comet. The man in the passenger seat did not flinch as Cash struggled to regain control of the speeding vehicle.

His clothes were twenty-five years out of date, muted blue and gray shirt and slacks suggesting a uniform. The final livid particles swirled and adhered to his form. He ran his hand across his unshaven jaw, flicking what appeared to be luminous perspiration from his fingertips across the black dashboard. She saw it drip in radium tears from the binnacle. In the half-light of the car interior, he turned toward her. His voice was ancient and remote. The faint tones of it were swathed in static.

“Varyush . . . ka . . . ” The metallic sound emanated slowly as if from some pit of pain. She tried to avert her eyes, to drive. Yet, she stole a cursory, horrified glance at him. At his breast, three phials glowed from his shirt pocket. She rubbed her eyes with her fist, yet he remained, seated there, riding with her, staring at her. “Varyushka.” The voice: the sound of cassette tape chewing up in the player.

At last, she found her courage and contempt. “What do you want?”

“This thing that you are doing, you must stop before it is too late.”

“Oh yeah? Who the fuck are you to say, Daddy?”

“You must not hate me,” the voice slurred. “Varyushka . . . ”