Cast of Shadows - v4 (8 page)

When she arrived from the Bay Area for her residency in January, she found Houston more hospitable than she expected. There were decent bookstores and an active theater community and a good symphony (not that she ever attended). The people were friendly (although most folks she met were, like her, from elsewhere) and the winter days pleasant when it wasn’t pouring rain. The summer nights were something else, however. In the summer, it was like breathing coffee.

This neighborhood on the southwest side of the nation’s fourth-largest city was the site of a de facto evacuation every night at six. It was empty now except for the hospital and a few gated apartment complexes and the Taco Cabana down the street, where insomniacs and night-shifters sat at tiny, unbalanced Formica squares and paired hastily made fajitas with cold bottles of Dos Equis. Right now she was more tired than hungry.

Across the street, into the parking garage, Joan took long, swift steps with locked knees. Sleepiness aside, she felt hyperaware in the lonely fluorescent-lit concrete cavern.

When she’d parked here, seventeen hours ago, there were minivans so tight to either side that it strained muscles in her thighs just to climb out of the car. Now her used Taurus was an orphan, almost completely alone on level eight.

Joan didn’t pick the man up until he was twenty yards from her and closing. He might have crossed over from level seven, heading up. He looked to be in his thirties, but might have been a hard-living
twenty-something. He wore a wedding ring — or a ring on that finger anyway — and he had a hoop in his left ear.

“Miss? Miss? I’m really embarrassed about this, but my car got towed and I’m just three dollars and seventy-five cents short of the fee. Is there any way you can help me out?”

Joan’s hand went into her purse, where her thumb found a folded-up five and her pinky sought out a lighter-sized canister of pepper spray. She watched him walk toward her. He wore an open blue windbreaker, presumably to ward off a sudden shower, and his striped shirt was tucked into acid-washed jeans. Low on his forehead he had an Astros cap, but not one with the current logo. His auburn facial hair reflected a few days of neglect, but wasn’t organized into anything you could call beard or mustache.

In his left hand he had a thick ring of keys. Among them, she glimpsed one of those frequent-shopper discount cards from a large chain grocery. Later, she’d wonder why she found that detail so benign.

She grabbed the five.

The fist with the keys struck Joan across the cheek and she yelped as she fell into the car door. He grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head back and forth while ripping the purse off her shoulder. He pulled a gun from the rear of his waistband and pressed it above her ear like he wanted it to stick there by itself.

“Get in the fucking car and drive,” he growled, pushing her into the driver’s seat and throwing her own keys on the floor mat, where she had to grope for them. As he hurried to the passenger side, she never thought about running, never presumed she could outpace him.

He directed her down, out of the unmanned garage, and east on Bellaire, then northeast on Main, away from the med center toward downtown.

“Do you have a family?” His voice was cold and hard to understand, like a robot mumbling.

She nodded, trying to keep the tremble in her hands away from her voice. “Parents. Brothers. Not around here.”

“I mean kids,” he said testily, waving the gun at her in a hammer motion.

She shook her head. He didn’t say why he wanted to know, exactly. “You have to take care of your own,” he said.

“What?” She wondered right away why she was asking him questions that could encourage or antagonize him, or both.

“No one else matters,” he said in a dreamy, drunken octave one register higher than he likely intended. “Your son. Your mom. Your goddamned fucking wife.” He ordered her east on Memorial. “Where do you live?” he asked.

“Sugarland,” she said.

He bisected her purse, opened her wallet, and lifted her license to read it in the passing streetlights. “Liar,” he said, and leaned his head indifferently against the window.

They didn’t drive far, to an empty lot surrounded by office buildings. In six hours there would be five thousand people within screaming radius. Just now, there was no one.

He grabbed her hair again. “Get in back.”

Pinning her to the bench seat with his knees and the barrel of his gun, he searched casually through the rest of her purse, filling his pockets with cash, a cell phone, and gum. Then he doused her face with her own pepper spray — mercifully, in a way, she thought, as it allowed her to focus on the pain in her eyes, instead of the horror below.

And it gave her an excuse to cry, which, in those dark, awful, vulnerable moments when she imagined that such a thing as this could happen, she had sworn she would never do.

“Jesus. Joan. I didn’t know.”

“Because I didn’t want you to know.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d look at me like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop it.”

“So why are you telling me now?”

“Because I think you need someone to talk to. I thought it might help open you up if you knew I was a” — she started to say
survivor
— “that I had been through it. I don’t pretend to know what Anna Kat went through. But in the moments before it happened, behind the wheel of that car, I imagined the worst happening to me. Imagined my life ending with a bullet, or a knife. In just a few instants I became resigned to it. But I survived it. Like you. The way you survived an assassin’s gun. And you survived Anna Kat’s attack. Or you will. But you need to talk about it, Davis. It’s been a long time.”

“I just don’t think it’s fair,” Davis said, reaching his hand inside his jacket to finger the old wound through his cotton dress shirt. “For different reasons — insane reasons — people wanted us both dead, but somehow I lived and she died.”

Joan tilted her glass against her lips and let a piece of ice slide inside her mouth. It melted there while she waited for the sentimental tone of the conversation to dissipate. “You’ve been sleepwalking at work ever since it happened. That’s why I was so surprised to see you at the Finns’ today. That’s the sort of gesture I’d expect from the old Dr. Moore.”

“Maybe I’m coming around,” Davis said. He forced a smile.

“Maybe. Have you ever talked to anybody? A professional?”

“Jackie and I have seen a marriage counselor off and on.”

“Has it helped?”

“Hard to say. We’re still married, sort of.”

“Well, you can always call me, you know, if you’re still having trouble. Especially at work. I have a sympathetic ear regarding matters of the office.”

“Has Gregor or Pete said anything to you? About me?”

“Not in four years. They asked how I thought you might be holding up, between the shooting and AK. Nothing since.”

Davis peered into his glass. “The guy who attacked you. Why did he say that?”

“Why did he say what?”

“That bit about ‘your son, your mom, your wife.’ What was the point of that, you think?”

“My shrink told me he was trying to explain himself. Apologize. Make excuses. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and he was trying to put blame somewhere. Maybe that’s right. I don’t know.”

“Did they ever catch him?”

“Nope.”

“Do you think you’d know him if you saw him again?”

“I used to think so. It’s been ten years now. He’s changed. My memory of him has changed. I think I’ve aged him in my head, so he’s always that much older than me. I’m not sure the guy up here” — she tapped her head — “looks much like the real asshole anymore.”

“Do you still feel helpless? Like you just have to do something, anything?”

“Do anything? For what?”

“To find this guy. To make him feel what you felt.”

“That’s exactly the rapist’s point, Davis. I
can’t
make him feel what I felt. I could shoot him dead and he’d still have me trumped. You know the movies where there’s this really evil bad guy, who does horrible, unspeakable shit? And in the end, the good guy, the cop or whoever, turns the tables on him at the last minute and kills him? Pushes him out a window, or chops him up in a boat propeller, or whatever? I hate that. I hate it when the bad guy dies. I think it’s much worse to have to live with what you’ve done.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “Well,
I
live every day with what he’s done.” The “he” Davis meant, of course, was Anna Kat’s killer, but to Joan that man and the Houston rapist were the same: faceless, nameless evil.

“Evil takes up space,” she said. “When the men who commit it — and it’s mostly men, you know; we can have that discussion another day — when the men who commit evil die, it creates a vacuum, and somebody else gets sucked into it. Killing the evildoer doesn’t kill the evil. Another takes his place. Evil is a physical constant. Like gravity. The best we can do is to try to keep ourselves and the ones we love on the right side.”

“Our moms, our sons, our wives,” Davis repeated. “You know what I really struggle with? Not
who
so much as
why
. I mean, I want AK’s killer to be punished, but he could be one of thousands of interchangeable punks and monsters and assholes. I hate the thought that there was no reason for it. No motive. That AK died just because some ex-con passing through town needed to scratch an itch. I wouldn’t even need to know his name if I could just see into his eyes and try to understand why he did it. Why it had to happen.”

“Would that really be enough?” Joan asked skeptically.

“I don’t know,” Davis said. “What if you really could fight it? Fight evil. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you have to? At any cost?”

She reached out and touched his arm between his elbow and wrist. “Some prices are too high, Davis.”

He said nothing, but didn’t agree.

Mississippi was just about his least favorite place in the world, yet it was also the place he felt the safest. That was just another one of those contradictions that Mickey felt proved the existence of God. The natural order was continua and spectra, with extremes at either pole and graduation in between. Everything changed by degrees and everything in the universe could be said to be mostly one thing or the other — hot or cold, black or white, right or wrong. Only omnipotent God had the power to make it both things at once: hot
and
cold, black
and
white, right
and
wrong. Killing people was always wrong, but couldn’t God, on occasion, make it right as well? The same way he made Mickey both miserable and content here in Mississippi? At least it was springtime and not so hot. It was wet, though. Before this afternoon Mickey doubted that three hours had passed since he’d arrived without a heavy shower replenishing the mud and mosquitoes.

The farm was large and neglected, 150 acres of knobby land and rocks and rotting barns and stables. It had been a cotton plantation years ago and that made Mickey a little uncomfortable — he admired African-Americans who had persevered through slavery and prejudice and who, having been rejected by the mainstream culture, had developed a culture of their own, a culture that espoused solidly conservative social values. Didn’t polls show that blacks were against cloning for any purpose, even research, by a margin of more than two to one? Harold’s family hadn’t owned this land during the days of slavery, at least, but Harold was undeniably a bigot, if an old-fashioned one, occasionally letting slip an almost quaint Southern slur like “nay-gra.” Mickey scribbled a mental note to have a talk with Harold one of these evenings, sipping lemonade on the big porch, about ways to bring more African-Americans to the cause. That would really freak out the West Coast liberals, wouldn’t it?

Three years ago, Mickey wouldn’t have risked coming here. Harold was too well known, and the feds were always watching his property, raiding it twice a year with warrants drawn on suspicion of harassment, or solicitation to commit murder, or violation of the RICO statutes. They never got a conviction, however. Harold had an ACLU lawyer who counterattacked with the First Amendment, once even taking his case to the United States Supreme Court, which found seven-to-two in Harold’s favor, igniting the editorial pages in New York and San Francisco with white-hot outrage. In the last twelve months, Harold said, the feds had grown bored with him, or frustrated that they couldn’t make anything stick, and so they mostly left him alone. “You can stay here as long as you like,” Harold told Mickey. “But I wouldn’t use the phone.”

Harold Devereaux wasn’t even an official member of the Hands of God, although HoG probably wouldn’t have survived the last few years without him. Harold called himself an “independent contractor serving one client only: the Lord God Almighty.” He was a prolific writer and anti-cloning pundit, but most famously (and this was what had brought him before the Supreme Court) he was the proprietor of a Web site identifying clinics, doctors, and researchers who advocated or practiced the cloning of human beings. Occasionally, when one of these individuals would die or retire, Harold would put a red line through his or her name. Sometimes the doctor would only be wounded, and Harold would change the color of his name from black to gray. Many people, specifically the individuals named on the site, didn’t like this. They called it a hit list. Harold’s ACLU lawyer disagreed, and seven justices happened to agree with Harold’s lawyer.

Out of 357 names, there were twenty-four red cross-outs on Harold’s site. Mickey was responsible for nine of them. Six had died of natural causes, six more had retired or quit out of fear for their lives or the lives of their families, and three had been shot in the head by an unknown person or persons. The police suspected the same killer might have perpetrated all twelve, Mickey’s nine plus the other three. They even had a name for him: Byron Blakey Bonavita. Two years ago Byron disappeared into the Kentucky woods with the FBI on his trail, and since then, every time Mickey offed a doctor, some witness claimed they’d seen Byron Bonavita in the area. He was like Elvis. Mickey didn’t know if Byron had committed the other three killings or not, but he was glad to have the FBI looking for someone else’s face every time he finished a job. That was probably why he was still in business.