Spark: A Novel

by John Twelve Hawks

  “Everything okay, Mr. Underwood?”

  “I need to find a quick way to draw the revolver.”

  “If you want, you can hang out here for a while and figure it out. I’m going downstairs to fire up the boiler and turn on the heat. We got a six o’clock Mass and it takes most of the day to warm up this place.”

  “Give me twenty minutes,” I said, and Gregory shuffled out the side door. I made sure that both handguns were unloaded, and then moved around the church dry firing both weapons. At first, it was difficult to use the ankle holster, but I figured out a sequence that made my movements both simple and automatic. I would pull up my pants leg with my left hand, then drop back my right leg into a crouched position. Bend at the waist. Slip off the retention strap and grab the gun with my right hand. Draw. Bring my support hand forward. Aim. Fire.

  The church radiators began to rattle and thump as steam rose up from the basement boiler. Sliding the paddle holster beneath my waistband, I drew the automatic and dry fired at the Virgin Mary. I learned two kinds of shooting at the training school in North Carolina. For precise shooting, I see the gun’s front and rear sights and the target all with one glance. Then I focus my eyes so that I see only the front sight, not the destination of the bullet. I pull the trigger with the middle pad of my finger, reassess, refocus, and fire again.

  If I’m point shooting, I focus on the target. It feels like I’m raising my finger to point at someone’s head. In both kinds of firing I want my Shell—not my Spark—to be in control. Thought determines my target and the decision to raise my weapon. But the other steps in the sequence should be thoughtless in every way.

  When Gregory returned with a mop, I left the church, walked to a diner on East Eighty-Sixth Street, and ordered a cup of coffee. I could probably force myself to drink the coffee, but I dislike “normal” food. All over the world people were biting and chewing and pushing dead things into their mouths. The substance enters their stomachs, and then moves like sludge through a clogged sewer pipe. ComPlete comes in two flavors—chocolate and vanilla—but it basically tastes like nothing.

  Sitting alone in a booth, I whispered an e-mail to Miss Holquist:

  // Obtained equipment. Going to customer’s apartment.

  I took a crosstown bus to Emily’s apartment on West Eightieth Street. The block was lined with brownstone buildings that had gabled windows and sandstone steps that led up to the entrance doors. There were green trash cans on the sidewalks, curb-your-dog signs put up by the block association, and trees with little fences around them. But even here, there was a fragment from the Day of Rage. A plaque had been bolted to one of the brownstones that read: IN MEMORY OF NICHOLAS BAUER GRANT AND ALL THE CHILDREN WHO WERE LOST. NICKY, WE MISS YOU. ALWAYS.

  I checked the name with my phone and, yes, Nicholas Grant was one of the students killed by the bomb at the Dalton School. There were private memorials like this all over the world along with large public monuments like the white tower that had been built near the reservoir in Central Park. From almost any area of the park, you could look up and see the top half of the tower floating above the trees. I didn’t care about the murdered children—or anyone else for that matter—but I couldn’t destroy the memories of what I had seen on television.

  Sometimes I wondered why my Spark wasn’t able to wipe away memories that didn’t have a practical use. Once, on the subway, I saw a woman with burn scars on her arms, neck, and chest. Perhaps the death of the children was like an invisible scar that would never go away.

  The keys I found in Emily’s gym bag let me into the building and I climbed up a creaky staircase with a curving banister. Emily’s apartment was on the top floor. I waited for a minute, listening for sounds from anyone inside, and then I racked the pistol’s slide to the rear and forced a bullet into the firing chamber. With my left hand, I inserted the key into the lock, and gently pushed the door open. Two steps in. Close the door. My knees were slightly bent, left foot forward.

  The curtains were shut, but a thin line of light pushed beneath the door that led to the rest of the apartment. A dark figure wearing a hat stood in the far corner of the room, but it didn’t react to my appearance. Instead of firing, I felt around for the switch near the door and turned on the ceiling light. My possible target turned out to be a stuffed black bear wearing a cowboy hat that stood up on his back legs and reached out with his claws as if he wanted to embrace me. He stared across the room at his dead companions—a deer with Christmas ornaments hanging from its antlers, a squirrel perched on a plastic branch, and a hawk with blue-gray feathers and dark bands on the tail.

  I had expected a neat and orderly apartment with shelves of financial books and matching furniture. But the sofa was saggy and the scratched coffee table looked like it had been picked up off the street. There was a vase filled with tissue-paper orchids and a poster on the wall that proclaimed, BOTS DON’T DREAM. Paperback novels—many without covers—had been dumped into a cardboard box and left in front of the stuffed bear.

  Still holding the automatic, I stepped through the doorway and entered the kitchen. A framed photograph near the stove showed a stocky man with a broad face standing next to a teenage girl holding a fishing rod. There was nothing in the refrigerator but pickles and two jars of mustard. A bottle of vodka was in the freezer.

  This was a “shotgun apartment,” which meant that all the rooms were connected in a straight line. The bathroom contained an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub with a shower curtain that displayed singing angels. I searched the cabinet over the sink, found nothing but aspirin and dental floss, and returned to the bedroom. When I switched on the ceiling light, I realized that words were written on the wall opposite the dresser.

  Dear Uncle Roland—

  If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve stopped checking in with you. I’m in trouble. I made a choice and I can’t take it back. Just remember—Home is where the heart is.

  Emily

  The note on the wall made me feel like I was looking at someone’s face. Human Units showed emotion by the movement of their mouth and eyes, but I didn’t have the power to understand.

  Returning to the living room, I searched the little desk beneath the deer head. I wanted to know more about Sean, Emily’s new boyfriend. It seemed logical that she was hiding with him or that he knew her location. I wasn’t expecting to find love letters, but maybe they had taken a vacation together or gone to a concert, and Emily had saved some particle of physical reality to verify that memory. Instead, the desk drawer was stuffed with canceled rent checks and flyers for fast-food restaurants.

  I sat down on the couch near the coffee table and skimmed through a stack of travel books for countries in Central America. Was Emily really going to Nicaragua or was this a false clue? A music box placed near the books displayed a bear and a logger with an ax. These two wooden figures chased each other in an endless circle that passed through one door of a shack, then out a second door while the box played “The Bear Went over the Mountain.” I turned the key, wound up the spring, and played this tune several times. At first I assumed that the bearded logger was chasing the bear, and then I decided that the bear was chasing the logger.

  Emily had lived in this space—eating and sleeping and talking to her friends. The dead bear and other stuffed animals had seen everything. I walked over to the bear and tapped his glass eyes with my finger. They reminded me of the dead eyes that people displayed when they were wearing E-MID contact lenses. Back in the bedroom, I photographed the message with my phone and sent the image to Miss Holquist.

  // This was painted on the wall of the customer’s apartment. Roland is her uncle, Roland Jefferies.

  I returned to the bedroom and opened the armoire. This contained Emily’s corporate identity; her business suits and blouses were hung in a row, waiting to be called forward like a ghost army. Dress shoes with two-inch heels were stored in clear plastic boxes, and there was an orderly pile of unwrapped pantyhose.

 
I didn’t like to be touched by Human Units and it felt strange to be handling someone else’s clothes. The dresser contained Emily’s jeans, sweaters, underwear, and T-shirts—all folded and stacked. But the bottom drawer contained a manila envelope of small adhesive stickers—the sort of thing that growlers slapped up on walls that weren’t being watched by surveillance cameras.

  CLOSE THE EYE!

  RESIST!

  NOT NORM-ALL!

  I also found some tools—a hammer, socket wrench, screwdriver, and pliers—along with a canvas bag that contained torn jeans, old running shoes, and a T-shirt that was splattered with blue and white paint. No words on the T-shirt. But it did display a simple drawing of a house:

  When I had finished searching the room, I lay down in the middle of the bed and tried to figure my next move. Emily’s sheets had a faint citrus scent from detergent, but I could also smell shampoo and some kind of bath powder that was a mix of flowers and vanilla.

  “E-mail in your message box,” Laura announced and I glanced at my phone’s display screen.

  // Find the uncle. If the missing customer is at that location, make a complete sales presentation using your new equipment.

  Still lying on the bed, I used my phone to access Emily Buchanan’s employee file. Her only listed personal contact was her uncle, a man named Roland Jefferies, who lived in a small town near Lake George in the northeast region of New York State. Laura said that the location was a four-hour drive north of the city.

  “Do you have a car, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Should I obtain a rental car?”

  “Yes … please.”

  “A reservation has been made at National Car Rental. The pickup location is three blocks north from your present location, on West Eighty-Third Street.”

  “Thank you, Laura. You’re very efficient.”

  She didn’t answer me right away. Somewhere in cyberspace her consciousness was evaluating my statement. Shadows were programmed to deal with human anger and stupidity, but they still found it difficult to recognize compliments.

  “I hope efficiency is something you value, sir.”

  While I was waiting in line at the car rental office, I used Google Maps to get a street view of Uncle Roland’s residence in Chestertown. It was a large, two-story house surrounded by a lawn dotted with a few apple trees. It was possible that Emily was staying with her uncle. If that was true, then Miss Holquist wanted me to make a complete sales presentation → and kill everyone in the building.

  But how would I know if she was hiding in the attic or a back room? After I left the car rental garage, I dropped by my loft in Chinatown and retrieved the thermal-imaging scanner I had used during my search for Peter Stetsko. The scanner gave me the ability to look through walls. During that cold night in Brooklyn, the scanner had revealed that the Russian wasn’t home. I didn’t need to knock on doors or peer through windows—so I stood in the shadows and waited until Stetsko returned.

  As I headed north on the Taconic State Parkway, the world was transformed into a series of flat images framed by the car windows. If I had stopped and left the car, I could have strolled around a three-dimensional service station, but during the drive my Spark saw reality as pixels on a monitor screen—little bits of light that gave the illusion of solidness and depth.

  I drove for four hours, then turned off the parkway and entered the lake district of Warren County. There were patches of snow on the ground and the two-lane blacktop wandered past frozen lakes edged with cattails and dead reeds that jabbed at the sky. Billboards announced that the area was a “playground” for hunters and fishermen, but most of the small white cottages were boarded up for the winter. I stopped to buy gas, and then entered Chestertown.

  A memorial to the war dead was at the center of the town square, surrounded by a bank and a courthouse and several other brick and granite buildings. Laura told me to turn right, so I left the square and drove past two-story clapboard houses with gray slate roofs. Old cars with rust bubbles around the wheel wells and pickup trucks with gun racks were parked in gravel driveways. One homeowner had placed a Jet Ski up on sawhorses with a FOR SALE sign.

  “You’re approaching your destination, Mr. Underwood.”

  “Yes. I know. Switch off.”

  The Google Maps camera car had photographed a lawn with four apple trees. Since then, Uncle Roland had removed one of the trees and placed a carved sign in front of his house.

  LOON LAKE TAXIDERMY

  SAVE YOUR MEMORIES

  I drove a hundred yards down the road, then pulled over and tried to figure out what I was going to say.

  The thermal scanner displayed an image of infrared radiation. It had a pistol grip and looked like a video camera. As I walked up a stone pathway to the house, I raised the scanner and pressed the trigger. Cold areas were displayed on the screen in shades of purple and blue. Warm spots were colored red or orange, and a human face was bright yellow. The scanner showed the building’s hot-water lines and two active floor heaters. On the ground floor, a single Human Unit moved through a front room and then stepped behind a wall.

  I dropped the scanner into my shoulder bag and knocked on the front door. When no one answered, I entered a room that was filled with stuffed dead animals. A worktable was near the wall and, clamped to the edge, there was a premade wooden deer’s head with a set of real antlers attached to the skull. A little bell rang when I closed the door and Roland Jefferies came out of a back room carrying a patch of deerskin. Uncle Roland looked like an older version of the thickset man with stubby legs who had posed for the photograph hanging in Emily’s kitchen.

  “Good afternoon, my friend. How you doing?”

  “Mr. Jefferies?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m David McCormick, a human resources manager for BDG in New York. Your niece, Emily, works for our bank.”

  “Yeah. I got a phone call from some guy at the bank named Evans.”

  I nodded. “Jerome Evans is in charge of corporate security. Eight days ago Emily left her desk and never returned. She hasn’t contacted the bank and we’re worried about her safety.”

  Uncle Roland kept smiling. “Maybe she got tired of workin’ for your bank. Can’t say I blame her. Sounds like a boring job … making deals and pushing money around all day long. My work might look easy, but it’s a real challenge. It’s not so easy to make a dead cocker spaniel look like he’s happy.”

  “Do you know where Emily is?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “Should I be?”

  “People don’t usually disappear like that.”

  “Hard to vanish when the EYE program is tracking everything we do. But I’m not worried about Emily. My niece is as tough as nails. When she was thirteen years old, she left her crazy parents, bought a bus ticket, and came here to Chestertown. Then she called me up on a phone and told me to pick her up at the post office. Her parents thought she was possessed by the Devil, so they didn’t fight me when I went to court and became her guardian.”

  I was aware of the revolver strapped to my ankle and the automatic concealed beneath my jacket. “The bank wants to find Emily. We’d like to make sure that she’s safe.”

  “Sorry you had to drive all the way up here, Mr. McCormick. But I appreciate your concern. If I hear from my niece, I’ll tell her to call you guys. Have a safe drive back to New York City, and watch out for that speed trap in Warrensburg.”

  I stepped back out into the cold air and smelled the blue-green scent of pine trees. When I reached the LOON LAKE TAXIDERMY sign, I stopped and pointed the scanner at the house. If Emily was hiding in an upstairs room, Uncle Roland would have immediately reported my appearance. I peered through the walls for a minute or so, but Roland continued to stand alone at his worktable. The thoughts in his brain were transformed into a glob of blurry yellow light surrounded by a grid of hot-water pipes.

  The trip to New York was a straight li
ne south dotted by a series of discount shopping malls and Indian casinos. After dropping off the rental car, I should have waved down a cab and returned to Chinatown. Instead, I stood on the corner of Eighty-Third Street and let the wind touch my collar and the hem of my coat. Usually my Spark manipulated my Shell like the construction worker sitting in a cage on the back of a truck-mounted crane. But that evening my Shell was in control. It wanted to return to Emily’s apartment and lie back down on her bed. I felt like I was watching a computer screen as my body marched down to Eightieth Street and entered the brownstone.

  The only light in the stairwell came from the wall sconces on each floor, and I climbed upward through patches of darkness and illumination. Voices leaked through closed doors, and I smelled the slippery odor of fried onions. Key in the lock. Push open the door. Switch on the light and—

  Everything in the room had been destroyed. The lamps were smashed and the papers from the little desk had been scattered on the floor. Someone had slashed open the chair cushions and cut the bear’s neck—exposing a tuft of yellow padding.

  Entering the kitchen, I stepped on broken dishes, then glanced into the bathroom and saw that the angel shower curtain had been ripped off its pole. All the suits and blouses hanging in the closet had been slashed with a knife and the clothes from the dresser were scattered across the room. The mattress had been cut open and the foam rubber pushed out—like fat from a wound.

  I picked up a night lamp, switched it on, and turned to the wall. Someone had used a can of spray paint to cover the message on the wall. Red paint had dribbled down the plaster to the baseboard. It looked like the residue from a shotgun blast that had cut through a target’s body.

  I centered the mattress on the box spring, sat on the edge of the bed, and tried to figure out who had done this.