Prayers for the Assassin

by Robert Ferrigno

  Sarah took Rakkim’s hand as they strolled on, so happy she was buoyant.

  “Strange to see college girls wearing old-fashioned jewelry,” said Rakkim. “I thought the Chinese directed all their energy to the future.”

  “Retro-chic is all over the runways of Shanghai and Milan. Nigerian divas decked in safari outfits, French software designers dressed as peasants, fake mud and all. It’s an attempt to reclaim one’s heritage at a time when individualism is under attack.” Sarah squeezed his hand. “I was writing a paper on the subject before…” She turned around, watched the two Chinese students slip through the crowds.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. Nothing. There was something…but, I don’t remember what it was.” Sarah shook her head. “Just trying to put the pieces together.”

  Wrist alarms buzzed around them, alerting the faithful that they had fifteen minutes before afternoon prayers. No one dashed for the exits; no one made the slightest attempt to interrupt what he or she was doing. In the Islamic Republic, Muslims would have responded or had the alarms turned off, not wanting to advertise their lack of piety.

  Sarah tensed. “There’s Desolation Row.”

  “Relax. Peter has done this before.”

  Sarah hesitated. “Do you believe the Old One? I know you’re sick of talking about it, but why would he admit to faking the Zionist attacks, admit to a fourth bomb, and then lie about what happened to it? Why not just lie about everything?”

  “The most effective lie is ninety-nine percent true. If we believe the fourth bomb is really at the bottom of the South China Sea, why keep looking? Why not just sign up for the caliphate and do whatever he says? No, we have to act as if he’s lying and go forward.”

  “What if he’s telling the truth?”

  Rakkim kissed her. “Then the joke’s on us.”

  Sarah ducked into Desolation Row. The chicest of the chic, deliberately transgressive, the mannequins hollow-eyed and gaunt, bare brick walls, stark lighting. The clothes themselves were flimsy and dull, flattering only the most perfect and youthful figure. No prices. The place was packed—mostly Asians and L.A. Catholics, plus a few blond Europeans. She wandered the aisles, fingering the merchandise with the distant show-me expression affected by those to whom price was irrelevant. He went back outside. Checked the reflections in the windows.

  In a few minutes, Sarah would go into changing room 9. Instead of slipping into something from Desolation Row, she would change into the casual clothes they had brought. Rakkim would show up a few minutes later, loudly complaining. When she called him in to help her, the two of them would slip through a false panel in the changing room and into the maintenance corridor. Peter would be there. Fifteen minutes later they would be lifting off in one of the hot-air tourist balloons. Only this one would go off course, drifting into the Islamic Republic. Peter said it happened all the time. Wind currents were unpredictable, part of the charm of the balloons. A car would be waiting for them when they came down, gassed up and legally licensed, its GPS unit programmed to show every back road in the country.

  “Rakkim?” Sarah’s eyes were wide. “I want to show you something.” She led him back into the store. “There’s a woman beside the shoe display. An older Chinese woman shopping with her granddaughter.”

  Rakkim pretended to examine a blouse. “She’s had some good cosmetic surgery. They tucked up the epicanthic fold, but maintained her ethnic integrity. She looks disgusted by the merchandise, but judging by the diamond studs in her ear, she can afford—”

  “Look at her pendant.”

  “Nice. Plain, but nice.”

  “That’s all you see?”

  Rakkim moved some ugly tops around. “It’s a small, copper pendant with Chinese writing on it. Looks old. What am I missing?”

  “I’m not sure.” Sarah kissed him. “Go wait for me outside.”

  “What about Peter?”

  Sarah gave him a little push. “Now, go, let me shop in peace.”

  Rakkim heard other women laughing as he stalked out. He found a coffee bar. Men were sprawled on small metal chairs, packages on their laps, looking dazed and exhausted. He ordered a double espresso. Ten minutes later…

  “Rakkim!” Sarah beckoned from Desolation Row. “I need you to help me decide.”

  Rakkim walked into the store. The Chinese woman stood at the counter with her granddaughter, the counter overflowing with clothes. He followed Sarah inside changing room 9, tossed the bags into a corner.

  Sarah closed the door behind him. They quickly changed clothes. Slid back the panel.

  Peter stood with his arms folded. Another man and woman beside him. Body doubles. “Glad you could make it.”

  Sarah and Rakkim stepped into the corridor. The man and woman quickly put on their former outfits, then slipped into the changing room.

  Peter replaced the panel, locked it. He spoke into his cell, and a moment later bio-emergency sirens went off all around them. In the crush to the exits, anyone monitoring the mall security cameras would be fooled by their body doubles.

  Peter led them down the passageway.

  “It was too easy,” said Rakkim.

  “Would you prefer we got caught?” said Sarah.

  Rakkim watched other tourist balloons drifting far below, massive orbs stenciled with adverts, iridescent in the sunset. Peter had taken their own balloon to a higher altitude, letting the eastern airstream push them toward the California border. Rakkim shivered, pulled the hood of his heavy jacket tighter. Maybe he was just uneasy being up here in the sky, transitory as a dust mote, completely vulnerable. One handheld missile from below…

  “You should be used to getting away,” said Sarah, sitting cross-legged on a heated cushion. “Disappearing…that’s one of your specialties, isn’t it?”

  Rakkim followed the nearest balloon, caught by the thermals, rising slowly. “Yeah, and keeping track of things, planning every detail…that’s the Old One’s specialty.”

  Sarah tapped away on the cell she had borrowed from Peter. Latest model from China. Full data bank access. Untraceable.

  If Rakkim squinted, he could make out the skyscraper where the Old One had offered him the world last week.

  Peter broke away from the trusted guests he had invited along for cover. He sidled over, nodded at the Las Vegas skyline in the distance. “Nice view, eh?”

  “Any word from our body doubles?” said Rakkim.

  “They’re driving south toward Arizona,” said Peter, still looking toward the city. “Sarah’s double said they’ve had a succession of trailing vehicles, all makes and models. They never get too close and peel off after five or ten miles and are replaced by another. Somebody knows what they’re doing.”

  “Good,” said Rakkim. “That’s good.”

  “Thank you, Peter,” said Sarah, not looking up from the cell screen.

  “Casino management is all about the incursion of debt and the repayment of same.” Peter glanced at Rakkim. “I owed Rakkim.”

  “Note the past tense,” said Rakkim.

  Peter smiled. “I’m going to own the place the next time you two visit.” The breeze barely moved his lustered hair. “I have a car across the border tracking our progress. It’ll be waiting for you when we touch down. I’ll call in our location to the authorities after you leave. Even doing the legal limit, you should be in Seattle in two days.” He bowed to Sarah, ambled back to the pair on the other side of the balloon.

  Sarah waited until Peter was out of earshot. “We’re not going to Seattle. We’re going back to L.A.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Old One lied to us, just like you said. The fourth nuke wasn’t lost off the China coast. It’s on the mainland.” Sarah had that hard, wide-eyed stare, her brain working overtime. “I just…don’t know where exactly.”

  Rakkim sat beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “Like Redbeard always said, keep your eyes open. Pay attention. Life’s a
puzzle. You get new pieces, the picture changes. Don’t be afraid to take a fresh look. That’s what happened, Rikki.” Sarah gazed past him. “Fancy’s scar…it wasn’t from a tracheotomy. It was too round. Too perfect. I wondered at the time if she had done it deliberately. Scarification is popular with certain subcultures—”

  “Tracheotomies are popular with junkies who overdose.”

  “That’s the old puzzle. I got a new piece at the mall and it changed everything.”

  Rakkim glanced around. Peter and the others were on the far side of the balloon gondola.

  Sarah took his arm. “The Chinese woman in Desolation Row wore a medallion the exact same shape as Fancy’s scar, resting at the same place at the hollow of her throat. She said it was a good-luck amulet from the village where she was born. The spot on the throat is the precise intersection of five different energy meridians in Chinese medicine.” Sarah squeezed him tighter. “Fancy’s scar is a radiation scar. Her father must have bought her the medallion on his last trip, and it picked up traces of the radioactive material he was transporting. He probably didn’t realize he had radiation poisoning until—”

  “You spent five minutes with this Chinese woman—”

  “Five seconds would have been enough. I knew there was something about Fancy’s scar that bothered me. I just didn’t have enough data.”

  “You still don’t have enough data.”

  Sarah showed him the cell screen. A round, gray scar with two small pink spots. She zoomed out and Rakkim saw a man’s abdomen with several identical scars running down from his sternum to below his navel.

  “Buttons?” said Rakkim.

  Sarah nodded. “Silver buttons from a military dress uniform. Probably from Chernobyl or some other hot spot, then were sold and reused by this man’s tailor.” She zoomed in closer. Closer. The scar filled the screen. The edges had tiny bubbles with faint striations toward the center. “I saw the same stippling on Fancy’s scar.”

  Rakkim stared at the screen. “It was dark at Disneyland—”

  “There was moonlight, and I was right beside her. I know what I saw. I just didn’t know what it meant at the time. Now, I do. The Old One’s son may have drowned in the South China Sea, but Fancy’s father made it to land. So did the fourth bomb.”

  “Why…would he buy her a souvenir on the most important mission of his life?”

  “Because that’s what fathers do when they go away,” Sarah said quietly. “They buy a memento for their daughter, so she knows he was thinking of her when he was away. That’s why Fancy would have kept the medallion, even after she realized it was ruining her skin. I know I would have. If that was the last thing my father had given me, I would have kept it no matter what.”

  Rakkim remembered the snapshot of Sarah and her father that he had found in her music box, Sarah as an infant resting in her father’s arms. He remembered the expression on her face when he’d handed it back to her. So happy she couldn’t stop crying. She said it was all she had left of him. Rakkim didn’t have anything. Any keepsakes, any photos of his mother and father, had been lost along with everything else before he met Redbeard. Except for the key. A key to the house he’d grown up in. A few days after Redbeard had brought him home, Rakkim had flushed the key down the toilet. He couldn’t remember now if it was because he thought he had a new home…or if he was afraid that Redbeard would use the key and all it represented against him.

  “The Chinese woman said every village has their own distinct medallion,” Sarah said. “When we find the medallion, we’ll know where he was on that last trip. We’ll know where he planted the fourth bomb.”

  “Fancy’s girlfriend…Jeri Lynn. She’ll know where the medallion is.”

  Sarah smiled. “You believe me.”

  “You haven’t been wrong about anything important since I met you.”

  “We still have to find Jeri Lynn.”

  “That’ll be the easy part.” Rakkim hesitated. “If the medallion was so important to Fancy, Jeri Lynn might have buried it with her. She’s been dead over a week. You better be ready to dig her up, because that’s what it could come down to.”

  Sarah’s eyes blazed now in the setting sun. A cold fire. “I’ll do whatever is necessary. Just like you.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Sunset prayers

  Rakkim and Sarah walked up the apartment steps just as two women came out the front door. They embraced. “You take care of yourself, Jeri Lynn,” said the pregnant blonde.

  “If I don’t, who will?” said the short brunette. She waited until the blonde eased down the steps. “You here for Fancy’s wake?”

  “Yes, we are,” Sarah said quickly.

  “Come on in,” said Jeri Lynn. “There’s mostly just cheese balls and orange soda supreme, and the sherbet is melting.” She tried to smile. “I guess you didn’t come for the food—” Her mouth formed a big O. “That isn’t…? Cameron? Cameron!” She barreled past them, scooped the kid up, and swung him around as if he were a stuffed animal. She waved to Sarah, tears in her eyes. “Come inside, honey, you made my day.”

  Sarah and Rakkim followed them into the living room. A couple of other women sat on the couch—a chubby teenager with a baby on her shoulder, and a henna redhead, with a face like a plow horse, looking through a photo album and clucking.

  “Girls, this is…Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” said Jeri Lynn.

  “I’m Sarah and this is my friend Rakkim.”

  “Little mama’s Ella, and that’s Charlotte,” said Jeri Lynn.

  Pleased-to-meet-you all around. The baby let out a deep, rumbling fart and everyone smiled. His mother patted him on the back. “Feel better now?” She stood up, popped a cheese ball into her mouth from the paper plate on the coffee table. “We got to go home and start working on dinner.” She kissed Jeri Lynn. “I am just so sorry.”

  The henna redhead closed the album. “I should get going too.” She gave Jeri Lynn’s arm a squeeze. “She was a sweet, sweet girl and we’ll all miss her.”

  Jeri Lynn walked them to the door.

  The previous night Rakkim and Sarah had driven into Los Angeles and headed straight for Disneyland. It took them a few hours to find someone who could tell them about Fancy’s girlfriend, and even then, they only got a general idea of where the two of them lived. Someplace on the outskirts of New Fallujah, almost to Orange. None of the other rent-wives had ever been invited to visit. It seemed to annoy them. Rakkim wanted to canvass the supermarkets and drugstores with Fancy’s picture, but Sarah had a better idea. She said they should wait until tomorrow, get some rest, and then go back to Long Beach and pick up Cameron. The kid who said he would be waiting for Fancy every day at St. Xavier’s Church. Noon. Sarah said that way they could drive around New Fallujah until Cameron recognized the apartment. Showing up with Cameron would open the gates.

  Jeri Lynn came back, waved them toward the couch, a short woman with frizzy hair, smooth skin, and exhausted eyes. “Sit down. I see people standing up in the house and I think they’re bill collectors.” She had a brave smile. “You aren’t bill collectors, are you?”

  Sarah and Rakkim sat on the lumpy, corduroy couch. It was still warm from the other two. The living room had a few pieces of cast-off furniture, a small wall screen, and a giveaway hologram of President Kingsley on one wall. A family holo of Fancy, Jeri Lynn, and three kids was on the cabinet, the kids in shorts and matching tops. They looked happy. Dried cereal was ground into the lime shag carpet. Chocolate-Soy’Os. Breakfast of Champions. A wooden salad bowl on the coffee table contained a couple hundred dollars in crumpled bills, along with a few sympathy cards.

  Jeri Lynn grabbed Cameron, rubbed his hair. “Damn, I wish Fancy was here to see you.” The hem of her black dress had been altered too many times and was coming loose. She didn’t seem to care. She pushed the tray of cheese balls at them. “Eat something, will you?” She plopped in a chair across from the couch. “How did you folks know Fancy? Do you live in her old nei
ghborhood?”

  “We…we were with her when she died,” said Sarah. It was probably a good idea to get it over with, but Rakkim would have approached it more obliquely.

  Jeri Lynn looked back and forth between them. “You were the ones asking around for her that night.”

  “Yes,” said Sarah.

  “Cameron, why don’t you go in the kitchen and fix yourself something to eat?” said Jeri Lynn. “I know you’re hungry.”

  “I’d rather take a shower first,” said Cameron. “If it’s okay?”

  “Second door on the right. Let me know when you’re done and I’ll get you some clean clothes. You’re about Dylan’s size.” Jeri Lynn waited until he had disappeared into the bathroom. “I appreciate you bringing him here. Fancy…she had a real sweet spot for him. Always talking about bringing him here to live with us.” She arranged her black dress, blew a strand of hair that fell over her face. “What do you want?” she said to Sarah. She had hardly looked at Rakkim since they’d arrived. “You must want something.”

  “We’re very sorry for what happened,” said Sarah. “Fancy was—”

  “My kids are coming home from school in about an hour. I don’t want you here upsetting them. They’ve already been through enough. Cameron can stay. The kids like Cameron.”

  “The men who killed her…they were trying to stop us—”

  “I haven’t even been able to bury her.” Jeri Lynn twisted the gold band on her left ring finger. “Her body is in a cooler at the funeral home, waiting for me to come up with the money to bury her properly.” She glanced at the bills in the wooden bowl.

  “We would—”

  “The local mosque wouldn’t help us. They said Fancy wasn’t a Muslim anymore. I don’t blame them. She prayed at home, but she was too ashamed to go to mosque. Muslims have their rules. Body has to be buried within twenty-four hours. Fine.” She kept twisting her ring. “Catholics are no better. I’m Catholic, but I’m not their kind of Catholic. So they won’t bury her.” She looked at Sarah. “My kids keep asking when they can put flowers on her grave, and I keep telling them soon.” She kept her eyes on the holo portrait of her and Fancy holding hands. “We had a good life before you people showed up looking for her. Not a perfect life…She hated what she did and so did I, but that was her night self. That wasn’t who she really was, that was just a game she played. The rest of the time, we were a family and we were happy. We were happy.”