Crosscut (23 page)

Carlos wobbled to his feet behind the counter. “Taylor, the key. Please.”

Jesse advanced on Taylor. She backed away.

“Ass whacking is stage one. From there it gets worse.” He gave her a zombie stare. “I see dead people. In your hair.”

She backed around the sofa. “Keep away.”

He pursued her. “Stage three gets nasty.” He grabbed his cell phone. “I get the uncontrollable urge to
phone your husband
. So I’d haul my ass the hell out of here. This second.”

We all heard the front door open. “Taylor?”

Our heads turned in unison. In the doorway, plumbing supplies in hand, stood Miguel Martinez.

He beheld the tableau. His truck keys fell from his hand. The plumbing supplies fell from his hand. His head swiveled toward the kitchen and he gaped at his brother.

“Miguel, what is this?” he said.

As one, Taylor, Jesse, and I looked at the man in the kitchen.
“Miguel?”

He ducked back behind the counter, looking plaintively at his twin. “Carlos, I can explain.”

The man in the doorway stretched his hands toward Taylor, beseeching. “How could you do this to me?”

Her finger veered toward the kitchen. “No, no—that’s Carlos.”

Naked boy quailed, “
Chica
, no. I’m Miguel.” He looked at me. “And don’t worry, Miss Delaney, I was never going to put this on the clock.”

That, in hindsight, was when I began feeling dizzy. I saw Tater push her
To Kill a Mockingbird
glasses up her nose. I heard Naked Twin tell her to check his tattoo, it had his home run total, and my head began spinning. Her heels clicked. She said, “I’ll be damned.” Carlos—fully dressed, heartbroken Carlos—bolted out the door. Taylor grabbed a big box labeled WEEKEND FIREWORKS and ran after him. Miguel dashed out from behind the kitchen counter shouting, “The key!”

He was in full swing. That was when I fainted.

 
The room fuzzed back into being. The view was white and the floor lay hard beneath my back. I was staring at the ceiling.

“Lie still,” Jesse said.

My feet were up on his lap. I waited while color returned. Yellow came, and black shadow. The soprano hum cleared from my ears.

“Tell me they’re gone,” I said.

“With a boot up their butts. One of yours. Hope you don’t mind.”

Turning my head, I saw his shirt. Gray brightened to blue and white. His hand was squeezing my ankle.

“I put in a call to Dr. Abbott,” he said.

“Okay.” Cautiously I pulled my feet down and sat up.

“Easy.”

The dizziness subsided. “I’m all right. It’s just everything. And I didn’t eat all day.”

“You’re going to the doctor anyway.”

Taking my hand, he pressed his fingers against the pulse point in my wrist. His face looked strained.

I squinted at him. “Severe intermittent CTIS?”

He waited for a few seconds, counting my pulse, before he glanced down. “Cousin Tater Intolerance Syndrome.”

I smiled. “Did you fire Miguel?”

“Did you want me to?”

“No. I need him to lay the shower tile.” The zinging sensation faded. “Twist his nuts off with a pipe wrench, maybe.”

“I got you something else. A fifty percent discount on the remodeling.”

I held out my hand and let him help me to my feet. “Reason number ninety-seven that I love you.”

The apartment building was a crumbling edifice overlooking the 101 where it slid down out of Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood. It reminded him of the place where he grew up. The trappings were as worn and tacky as the whore—dingy furniture, a hash pipe, and a set of Princess Diana commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint. He lowered the blinds and got to work.

He took out his cordless drill and installed the new lock on the door. The whore’s life was lonely, but even lonely whores might have friends. And they always had a pimp.

He gave her corpse a final stare. Alive, she had been rotting flesh. Breathing, speaking, rutting meat. Saliva pooled at the back of his throat. And the army had discharged
him
? Claimed that
he
was unfit to fight on behalf of meat like this . . . this . . .

But he refused to undress in front of Wanda, so she tried to undress him. She touched him. She should not have touched him.

He had snapped her neck at the top, C-1.

He bundled her body into a bedspread, duct-taped it into a shroud, and shoved it into the closet. He stripped and showered and toweled off, careful not to pull open the cut on his hand. He wiped the towel across the steamy mirror and beheld his reflection. His blown pupil stared back at him, black and wide.

He was not capricious and he was not wasteful. He took only those on the list. And he tested them only to determine whether they perceived pain, whether they continued perceiving pain under increasingly intense application of stimuli, and whether at some point their pain perception shut off completely. Most, of course, ended screaming. But those who stopped feeling pain, those worthless unworthy who didn’t know the power and invincibility that could have been theirs—those ended in silent confusion.

He ran the towel around the mirror. He saw the scars, all the rest. He hated seeing it, this ugliness. He hated living with it. Some men, he knew, felt comfortable in their skin, proud and open, even if they were effeminate. The ladyboys back in Thailand would primp and priss, sashaying even if they were simply working behind the counter at their mama’s dry-cleaning shop. And they were beautiful. The boy who saw him at the bar in Patpong had thought Coyote beautiful as well, the boy with the sleek black eye-liner who had kissed his ear and slid his hand along the crotch of Coyote’s pants and laughed when he didn’t respond, saying, “You not want a ladyboy, cowboy; you want to
be
a ladyboy.” Coyote had killed him.

Thinking of the boy caused him to fret. Things had begun going wrong when he saw the ladyboys. Their beauty, their silky movements and delicacy had upset him. Killing that boy had been beyond the mission parameter, but he had been compelled to do it. And he had been repulsed by those desires in himself. Herself. Whatever he was becoming.

He dressed and returned to work. Soon the apartment was transformed. The photos, printouts, X-rays, and other recent data were thumbtacked to the wall. On the coffee table he set out the original source material from Bassett High.

Somewhere in here lay the error. He must find, correct, and eradicate it, so that the mission could continue.

And he needed to do it quickly. He underlined four names. He needed to take them, and soon.

 
Dr. Lourdes Abbott bustled into the examining room carrying my chart. Beneath her white lab coat she wore a gray wool dress and stethoscope. The furrow in her forehead had deepened since my last visit.

“Positive,” she said. “You’re pregnant. Very.”

I nodded. She crossed her arms over the chart and offered me a compassionate, noncommittal look. She knew I wasn’t married.

“You’ve been under considerable stress, I understand. A pregnancy adds to that, especially if the news itself is upsetting.”

“No, this news is great.”

She looked doubtful.

“Really.”

Her furrow creased further. “Despite what you see on soap operas, fainting generally isn’t the first symptom of pregnancy. I want to check your blood sugar and do some blood work to make sure you aren’t anemic.” She rested her hand on my arm. “Get yourself seen by your ob-gyn as soon as possible. Till then rest, eat well, and take prenatal vitamins. Drink plenty of water.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She patted my arm, saw the diamond on my finger, and arched an eyebrow.

“Yup,” I said.

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Her hand remained on my arm. “The young man out in the waiting room—he’s the one who phoned about you?”

I indicated the ring. “He’s the one.”

Her eyebrow stayed up. Her expression reeked of curiosity.

“You’re wondering how this happened?” I said.

“Frankly, yes.”

“Apparently we’ve been struck by lightning. We haven’t had fertility treatment. It’s pure, cosmic luck.”

Her face mellowed. The smile was in her eyes. “Then I’m thrilled for you.”

“This kind of luck might come around only once in a lifetime. So I want to take the utmost care of myself.”

“Don’t get overanxious about the fainting. I’m cautious, not alarmed.”

“I went down on a hardwood floor.”

“Your body’s designed to take that kind of bump. It’s not as if you jumped off a building.” She eyed me. “There’s something else?”

“I just found out that I was exposed to toxic chemicals on a field trip in high school. I know this makes me sound like a hypochondriac, but a number of my classmates have died from neurological problems.”

Emotion guttered behind her eyes—concern, and perhaps skepticism. “What kind of problems?”

“Varying. They start out with anorexia, paranoia, obsessions, and loss of coordination. Then they just die. And another classmate has a terminal brain disorder. She says it’s eating tunnels in her head.”

Dr. Abbott stilled. “How has she been diagnosed?”

“I don’t know.” I realized that Valerie hadn’t phoned me back. “But she thinks it’s tied to the chemical exposure. And no, I don’t know which chemicals, and it’ll be hell to find out.”

“Tunnels. That’s the word she used?”

“Yes.”

She frowned and rubbed her ear. “It almost sounds like she’s describing a spongiform encephalopathy.”

“Mad cow?”

“Variant CJD, kuru . . . there are several varieties of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, TSEs. She gave you no more information?”

“I’m waiting to talk to her again.”

She eyed me critically. “You’re awfully wound up over this.”

“Kuru and mad cow are prion diseases, right? Contracted from eating infected brains?”

“Yes. So, unless your school cafeteria engaged in ritualistic cannibalism, you should take a step back and calm down.”

“Can they be caused by exposure to toxic chemicals?”

She crossed her arms over my medical chart. “Neurodegenerative diseases can be caused by anything from a head injury to genetic mutations. You’ve extrapolated too far for the evidence you’ve been given.”

“You don’t understand.”

At which point the spigot turned on. Sputtering tears, I told her about South Star’s research into sleep deprivation and a pain vaccine. The explosion and the
Outbreak
treatment my class received afterward. Students from the field trip beginning to die after graduation. From propeller hypnosis, anorexia, drug abuse, a car wreck, and now murder. Valerie Skinner and the brain-eating disease that was killing her.

Dr. Abbott handed me a tissue. When I wiped my eyes, she put a hand on my shoulder.

“This is far more than I realized you were dealing with. But here’s the bottom line. Your health is excellent. Correct?”

“Aside from this attack of the killer hormones, you mean.” I blew my nose. “Yes. I’ve been fine.”

“Don’t project your friend’s illness onto your own life. If you speak to her, try not to apply every symptom she describes to yourself. You’ll make yourself ill.”

I nodded. “There’s something else. One of my classmates . . .” I cleared my throat. “One woman died following childbirth. So did her baby.”

She sighed and fixed me with a cut-it-out glare.

“And no, I don’t know why Sharlayne or her baby died. It’s just god-awful scary right now.”

Her hand circled my wrist, cool and firm. She took my pulse and apparently disliked the count. The furrow reappeared.

“How about I phone the hospital where Sharlayne was admitted and see if I can learn anything?” she said.

“Please. Yes. Thanks. God, thank you.”

I gave her the information about Sharlayne’s Spirit and Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Memphis. I had a dozen more questions, but she was giving me a firm stare: conversation closed. She patted my arm. I wondered if she was holding back her thoughts so as not to terrify me.

“Let’s get that blood work.” She squeezed my arm. “You have another seven months to climb this mountain. Take it step by step.”

 
Back in Jesse’s truck, we puttered through crosstown traffic. The sun was pulling the city into the kind of golden afternoon that beckons you down to the beach, laughing and splashing into the blue surf. Valerie didn’t answer her phone. When we approached a dip in the road Jesse slowed to ten miles per hour and babied the truck across.

“You don’t have to handle me like a Fabergé egg,” I said.

“The doctor wants you to take things slow.”

“Not this slow.”

Behind sunglasses his face was cool with concern. “Watching out for you and the kid isn’t just my top priority. It’s my only priority.”

His protectiveness warmed me. “Thanks, Galahad. But that old lady just passed you. The one on the sidewalk, riding the motorized scooter.”

“Did not.”

“She blew you a kiss and shouted, ‘So long, sucker.’ ”

His mouth skewed. He swung around the corner onto Anacapa and eased the truck up to a more normal speed. His face remained tense.

“I let you down in L.A. It won’t happen again,” he said.

“You haven’t let me down.”

The look he gave me was sharp. Admitting weakness took guts. And he hated it when people let him off the hook because of his disability.

“I know you won’t let me down again,” I said.

He changed lanes. “If you feel up to it I’ll stop by work and see what’s brewing.” He checked the rearview mirror. “Then—
Fuck
.”