Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (5 page)

Adrianne admitted it. "We'd go anyway, for the money."

"Yes. Of course we would. Because we're mercenaries
just like anybody else with a skill. If somebody hires a roofer
to put on a new roof, but the roofer can see that the old roof
is fine, then he puts on a new roof anyway ... because that's
what the customer wants."

Is that really what we are? Adrianne wondered. She didn't
dwell much on the answer.

"I read on a website that all your PK is dead," Adrianne
said next, to change the unpleasant subject. "That's not
true, is it?"

Suddenly Adrianne's plastic meal tray flapped down in
her lap. She pushed it back and slid the clip back over.
"Funny."

"I just don't do it anymore, I just tell people I can't,"
Cathleen admitted. "It's too much of a headache. Especially
since the accident. I'm sure you heard about that."

Of course Adrianne had-everyone in the field had. A
TV documentary on psychic power. Several strong men
lifted a two-by-four wall frame off the ground to waist
level. Another man-the show's producer crawled under
it, and then the others let go of the frame's edge. It hovered
in mid-air for several seconds, then fell. The producer got
several cracked ribs and a broken nose.

"I guess this sounds terrible, but I don't feel that bad
about it," Cathleen went on. "About the guy who got hurt,
I mean. I was just dating him-well, I mean I was cheating
on my husband with him-and the son of a bitch actually
threatened me. Said he'd tell my husband about our affair if
I didn't do a spot on his dumb TV show."

"Some people get what's coming to them," Adrianne
agreed. "They treat us like we're animals in a petting zoo."

"Mm-hmm. Sometimes it's hard not to resent just about
everybody." Cathleen turned suddenly, touched Adrianne's
arm. "Oh, but here's a story you haven't heard-at least I
hope not. A couple of years ago I was dating this guy who
was a professional bowler. He'd just barely made the cut to
get on the PBA tour. So all of a sudden he starts throwing
these really great games, beating everybody-"

"Was it really you?" Adrianne asked.

Cathleen nodded, grinning. "I was sitting in the audience. Any time he needed a strike, I'd push the ball or knock
the pins that didn't fall. For about six weeks, this guy was
the best bowler in the world!"

"Did you tell him?" Adrianne leaned over and asked.

"Oh, of course not. He thought it was him. He made
hundreds of thousands of dollars because of me and set a
world record for strikes. Then he started to get big-money
endorsement offers. So you know what he does? The son of
a bitch was sleeping with some trashy bowling groupie behind
my back."

"I hate to ask but ... what did you do?"

"Nothing. I left him and the next year he got kicked off
the tour because he couldn't qualify. No more perfect
games for him, the prick."

Adrianne laughed.

"What about you? Still working for the Army?"

I'm ... retired," Adrianne mulled over the answer. "They
still call me up sometimes when something hot's happening, but usually I'm not up to it. I can still RV without
much problem-it hurts sometimes."

"But you don't OBE at all anymore?"

"I can but I don't, haven't in a long time." She knew that Cathleen knew about the accelerant drugs, and the barbiturates she was addicted to as a result. "It hurts too much afterwards. I knew one man who got a brain tumor because of
it. And there are always the strokes. Occupational hazard."

"The Army hounded me for a long time. I can't imagine
what they wanted me to do."

"Oh, I can. You'd be surprised. Them, and Navy Intelligence. There're these other weird people out there too,
IGA. Stands for Inter-agency Group Activity. They even
scared me. I know a few people who worked for themnever saw them again."

"Creep me out." Cathleen checked her fingernail polish,
then groaned. "I remember reading an editorial in one of
the malts during the Iraq war. The editor said that the government should recruit experients like you and Peggy Falco
to go out-of-body and look for Hussein, and the whole
time I'm thinking I know damn well they've been doing that
since before the war began."

The details of the comment gave Adrianne can to pause,
and in the pause she may have fractured her response into a
giveaway. Cathleen was probably playing her.

"Then I saw in a chat-room one night some 'anonymous' source saying that three times when we almost got
him, it was you who saw him while you were RV-ing Baghdad from some Army base in Maryland." Cathleen blinked
at her. "Is that true?"

Damn it... She was playing her, all right. And it was all
quite true but more than three times. The closest she'd come
to finding him was the empty apartment building on
al-Mu'azzam Square, near Sa'dn Street, downtown. Adrianne had seen Hussein being rushed inside. Then she RV'd
back out, got a description of the building and the street, and
gave the information to her case officer at Fort Meade. Twenty minutes later, several thousand-pound, satellite-guided
bombs brought the building down. But Hussein had left in a
jeep five minutes previous. "Cathleen, you know I can't talk
about anything I may have done or may not have done for
the Army. There're a few little things called the National
Classified Secrets Act and the Federal Secrecy Oath."

Cathleen grinned. "I know. I was just toying with you.
Actually, I'm envious."

The remark shocked Adrianne. "What on earth for?"

"I don't really contribute anything. You do. All I do is
bend spoons and scry crystals. By the way, how is Peggy
Falco? Haven't heard from her in years."

More darkness sifted into Adrianne's mind. "She committed suicide last Christmas. She couldn't walk, had no
sensation on the left side of her body for the last two years."

"Oh, God. I'm sorry."

"She was greedy. She was too into the power trip, and
maxed herself out. But she was the best in the world."

"Now you are."

"Uh-uh. You should see some of the kids they're bringing in now. There's one boy who's only fourteen and he
can... " but Adrianne cut it off there. She knew she was
talking too much.

"Sorry. I shouldn't have pried." She shot the first bright
smile since she'd sat down. "It's good to see you, though. I
didn't mean to run at the mouth. I know you don't like to
be bothered and to chat much and all that. It's just nice to.
.. sit next to someone I know"

"Yes, it is, and it's good to see you too," Adrianne replied.

Cathleen let out a long breath, rubbed her eyes. "God... "

"Rough night?"

"Yes," was all Cathleen said.

A stilted stewardess squawked through the always ignored pre-takeoff safety instructions. Adrianne let it go
out the other ear, preferred the steady whine of the turbine.
She didn't care where the exit door was because she genuinely wasn't afraid to die. She knew there was a Heaven
because she'd gotten to see it several times.

And once she got to that house in Florida, she wondered
if she'd get to see Hell.

Clements couldn't say why he would describe the mansion
in this way; it was just a feeling in him, a throb in his gut.

The mansion looked maniacal.

Its front must've been fifty yards long. Gray stonework
raised the outer walls five stories. The severely inclined roof
was covered with gray slate, gutter lines and parapets running
with intricate cut-iron crestings. Even the drainpipes and
rainwater heads sported pointed arches and fleurs-de-lys.

All gray.

If disconsolation had a color, this was it.

The front existed as a plane of gun-slit windows with
pointed-arch transoms and filled with lead-lined stained
glass, most of the panes of which looked black. Two cylindrical brick chimney stacks poked up atop the center rampart, like horns.

Clements shivered.

"You don't mind if I coke up, do ya?" the girl asked. She
held up a crack pipe.

Clements' eyes bolted from his binoculars straight to her
face. Just the idea soured him, made him want to rage.
"Yeah, I mind very much."

"Because it's against the fuckin' law."

"So is picking up hookers."

His lips pursed. He'd never hit a woman in his life but just
that second, without thinking, he felt the impulse to crack
her across the face as hard as he could. "That's different-"

"Oh yeah," she laughed, slipping the pipe back into her
shorts.

"The people you buy that from are the same people selling it to nine-year-olds on playgrounds. The same people
who want to keep the poor stuck in their ghettos, the same
people who've enslaved you. And you know what, those
people buy their supply from cartels in South America who
give hundreds of millions of dollars to the people who
brought the World Trade Center down and killed four
thousand some odd people. So just think about that. Any
time you buy yourself a twenty-rock, a penny or two of that
twenty goes to psychos who love to murder women and
children."

She didn't listen to half the diatribe, her bloodshot eyes
looked back out into the night.

Clements brought his own eyes back to the Zeiss binoculars, watching the front of the house. The sun was going
down now, painting the front face of the edifice with edges
of orange, as if its framework were aflame. Soon, he suspected, the outdoor floodlights would come on. If they
didn't, Clements also had an infra-red monocular and a
Unerd low-light scope. He wanted very much to see if the
men brought anything out.

"Who're those guys?" the girl asked.

Clements had forgotten her name because they were all
the same: Snowdrop, Teardrop, Candy, Kitty. He wasn't even
doing a trick tonight; usually he paid more attention. "Fu migators," he answered, still staring at the house through the
bright, infinity-shaped field.

"So you're waiting for them?"

,.Yes

" ?"
VVhy

"You ask too many questions."

She was a half-starved urchin like most of them but beneath the hollows of her cheeks and sunken eyes and the
zero body fat physique, she hadn't lost all of her looks yet.
Tramp appeal, was how Clements thought of it in his own
mind. He just had a thing for it, like the girl's own addictions only his wasn't smoked out of a pipe. He couldn't
help it. He was always good to them, and always dropped
them off where they wanted, and he even paid a little more
than the going street price for services, which was low anyway. Street whores were his jones.

She rubbed her upper arms, itching for the pipe. "Look,
you gave me a hundred for an hour, and that's good money
but-" She pointed to the clock in the dash. "you've
got fifteen minutes left so if you want any action on that
c-note, we better get started."

He put the glasses down a moment to light a cigarette. "I
told you, this one's not a trick, I just want you to talk." He
looked back to the house. "About there."

"I've seen you cruising all the time but you've never
picked me up. Then the other chicks tell me you're a great
john-"

He almost laughed. "Thanks"

"Now you got me and you don't want nothing."

"I just want to know about the house, and the girl in the
picture."

"I told you pretty much everything... " Her attention seemed to slip. "How did you even know I'd been to the
house in the first place?"

Clements spewed smoke, ghost-like, out the window.
With no breeze at all, it seemed to hover as it spread--2 disembodied face looking back. "One of the other girls told
me.

"Which one?"

Clements sighed. "Teardrop, Snowdrop, Candy-something like that."

"Well, I told ya, I saw the girl, Debbie, one time."

"This girl?" Clements made her clarify and showed her
the picture again. "You're sure?"

Her eyes dragged back. Now she had her hands on her
knees, rocking them back and forth. "Yeah."

"What was she doing? Was she doing sexual stuff?"

"Nope. It was weird. So many people walkin' around in
there naked, or barely wearing anything, but then I saw her
come down the hall, wearing business-chick stuff."

"Was she affiliated with the Hildreth's porn business?"

"I don't know."

"You see her do drugs?"

"No. Not the one time I saw her. One of guys was taking me and the other girls-"

"The other hookers?"

"Yeah, he was taking us to our room. He called it the
something-or-other parlor; it had a name, a lot of them
rooms did, and it was upstairs on the third floor. Then the
girl--Debbie---stops us and asked if we needed anything.
Seemed kind'a nice. She brought us some bottled water, and
that was it. That was the one and only time I saw her."

"How many times were you in the house total?"

"Six, seven."

"How'd you hear about the place, the gig?"

"Brandy."

One of the three, Clements realized. One of the three who got
their throats cut. He snorted a laugh. "You're a lucky girl."

"I know I was supposed to be there that night but I was
in county detent. A plainclothes U.S. Marshal busted me on
34th Street. Can ya believe it? And I'd have been there, too,
in a heartbeat. Something even told me in my gut-had a
bad feeling, you know? Told me if I worked 34th Street, I'd
get busted. And look what happens. I spend the night in jail,
and my three friends get killed." She glanced anxiously back
out the window, not at the house, at the night. "Maybe
there really is a God"

Clements dragged his cigarette. "Yeah. Maybe there is."
When he looked back in the binoculars, he kept talking.
"What were you saying earlier, about another door, a special
entrance?"

"It's way over on the side, it was between two windows,
and didn't really even look like a door. That's where they'd
park the limo, and it was a different road to the house, not
this main drive out here."