“You’ve no idea, man. I heard he made a guy dig out his own fucking eyeball with a screwdriver.”
“Just give me something,” I said. “Anything.”
Fizz finished his cigarette and threw it on the ground, smashing the butt before crushing it with the tip of his steel-toe boot. I thought he’d just walk away then, but instead he gave me what I wanted.
“I hear he makes movies with girls. The special ones.”
“Movies?”
“And Heidi told it to you straight. That’s his address, but you’re as dead as Heidi if you go there.”
“Heidi Tripe?” I asked. “How’d you hear about that?”
Fizz snorted, a half smile crooking beneath the twin mirrors of his shades. “Get a clue.”
With his cigarette done and my gas pumped, he turned first. I wanted to call after him and demand the little shit give me the full story. But Fizz was only useful to me alive and free. I let him go.
“Be at his place at 9 P.M. tomorrow,” he said when he was halfway across the parking lot. He turned and flipped me the bird, but kept walking backward. “Bring $500 in cash or they won’t let you in.”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said and flipped the bird back. “What’s it for?”
He didn’t offer an explanation. Instead he shrugged. “It’s been nice knowin’ ya.”
Chapter 20
32 Weeks
I’m hunting Caldwell to the four corners of the earth. Every paper trail, everybody I am sure he has a connection to, every business deal, everything, I take it all in and make a meticulous inventory of his strengths and assets. But I can’t find out enough about him. I read excerpts of his biography on the internet, the bestseller:
Timothy Caldwell, appointed leader of the Unified Church, is a holy man, connected directly to God. Caldwell, as he is called by his followers, a simple one word name like our beloved Jesus—
Or Madonna or Cher, I think, leaning back in my computer chair and blinking several times to lubricate my eyes.
He has demonstrated his miraculous faith healing to countless followers during his sermons at the Adams Street King of the Holy Angels church. These standing-room-only events are full of the faithful, desperate for salvation or a chance to speak to loved ones once more.
“He knew my grandmother’s name, her address, even her cat. He knew everything about her, even what she said to me on my wedding day. I’ve no doubt this man is connected to God.”
(from an interview with Mary Eloise Bethel of Oak Park).
I read all about him and this bullshit persona he’s fed the world, but it doesn’t tell me where to hit him. Can I destroy his financial assets? What is money to a man with his abilities? Can I defame him? Not with his powers of mental manipulation. He would twist that back on his accuser with a vengeance.
So where to hit a man like Caldwell? Where would it hurt most?
I don’t know. So in the meantime, I keep myself moving.
I’ve racked up some favors over the years and I’ve been calling them in. Even little ones that mean next to nothing—can I borrow your hunting gear? Just the orange stuff, thanks. Your shovel? Your M40 gas masks—so on.
I’m calling in the favors, because if word gets out that I am dead to the few people who know otherwise—actually dead this time, I want everyone to feel like their balance is paid in full. Not being able to repay a man can eat at you over the years. I know that firsthand, and I don’t want to leave that kind of carnage in my wake. After all, why save the favors? It isn’t like they’ll accrue interest.
I have two exceptions, two people whose favors are no small matter.
The first is in St. Louis.
It takes me just four hours to get to the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, because I’m coming from Kansas City following up on some intel that I received from a friend. Horns blare as pissed off people try to vent their frustrations along I-70. Construction that was supposed to be completed in December hasn’t been finished and it is nearly March.
Moving this slowly would drive anyone crazy, but I don’t mind. I need time to think about what my contact told me and about what I should tell Rachel when I see her.
He’s taking people, my contact said. People who’ve been replaced and their agents. There’s a guy on the inside, an AMP reject who says C’s looking for something.
Apparently, he thinks he can work some kind of voodoo by putting all these people together in a drug-induced trance state.
But what about the kids? I’d asked him and I think of Maisie again. What does he want with the kids?
Kids are 65% of the replacement industry, he said. Do the math.
When I arrive at the asylum, I put the Impala in park outside the main entrance. The front is a large sweeping entryway with columns stretching up several stories. The boxy, brick exterior imposes on the landscape around it. It makes me think of a creepy orphanage I saw in a film once, with the exception of the green and gold dome on top, very Moscow-esque. The inside is no more cheerful with its white cinder block walls and the tile floors which makes me think of hospitals.
On the fourth floor I find Gladys behind the desk, a nice woman with shriveled hands and an outdated beehive hairdo.
“Hello, Jimmy.” Gladys says, grinning. She is very proud of the fact that despite her age she still has all her teeth. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“I was close and wanted to check on our girl.”
“Good, good,” she says and pushes the sign-in sheet toward me. Then she hands me a black pen so I can scribble my name in the blank. “She’s just fine.”
I watch the old woman shuffle around the desk and come toward the double doors that lead to the sleeping quarters behind me. I mumble assenting sounds while she blabs about nothing until she stops just in front of Rachel’s door.
Rachel is sitting cross legged on her bed with a girl opposite her. A suicide, I guess, by the long jagged marks that climb up each of the girl’s pale wrists. The girl’s palms are face up in Rachel’s hands as Rachel peers into them with an expression of serious contemplation on her face.
Her black bob has fallen forward and hides her eyes, but I can see her lips moving in a hushed whisper.
“Ah-hem,” Gladys says and the girls look up. Rachel’s face brightens. I can’t help but smile back.
“Well, hello, stranger,” she says to me.
My momentary happiness curls at the edges, drying up as I remember what I’ve come here to tell her.
“None of that hocus pocus nonsense,” Gladys scolds, and the girl with the mop of unruly curls piled on top of her head, yanks her hands back. “Go on to the cafeteria for a while, Jo. Let Rachel have some time with her friend.”
Jo, with a red face to match her curls, slides between Gladys and me, then takes off down the hallway toward the cafeteria. Gladys puts an arm on my shoulder and squeezes it. “Take as much time as you need, Jimmy.”
“Thank you,” I say and step into the room. I take a seat at the end of Rachel’s bed, feeling Jo’s warmth soaked up by the mattress.
Neither of us speak until we can’t hear the clanking of the nurse’s keys in the hallway.
Rachel arches an eyebrow. “I think she likes you.”
“She’s old enough to be my mother.”
“No mother would look at her son’s ass like that,” she says and leans back on her hands to inspect me.
“You’re a palmist now?” I ask. “You’re going to have a card table in Jackson Square before I know it.”
She arches her eyebrow again. “Are we going on vacation?”
My smile falters, or some other way, I give up the game.
She jolts upright, tall and tense, grabbing onto my hands. “Oh my God, what happened? Jesse—”
“She’s fine,” I say. “Jesse’s fine.”
“Oh God, then it’s you,” she says, squeezing my hands tighter. “What is it? Whatever it is, I can protect you. Unless it’s cancer. Then you’re just fucke
d.”
I grin. “It’s not cancer.”
She exhales, visibly relieved. “If your health is good, we’re good. I can replace anything else.”
I look down at her hands in mine. So small and slender in comparison, she could be a child. “It’s complicated.”
“Jesucristo el dramatismo!” she exclaims.
“Don’t pretend to speak Spanish,” I tell her. Rachel is Hispanic, her father Puerto Rican and her mother Honduran. But she wasn’t raised by them. As a toddler she was found in the desert wandering alone, either dropped by coyotes or her own parents. A white couple in Arizona took her in and raised her when her family couldn’t be found.
“I’ve been reconnecting with my roots,” she says in a serious, low tone. “I now understand why I’ve loved guacamole so much my whole life. It’s the tree of my people.”
I laugh because that’s what she wants. “Be serious. It’s hard enough to get through this conversation without you teasing me.”
“I’m not,” she argues and pretends to pout. “I’m trying to tell you I feel whole, as a person. Do you think they’ll let me have an avocado tree in here?”
I run my hands through my hair and try to think of how to begin.
“Is it that bad?” she asks. The joking has been put aside. Her eyes are wide with worry.
“Jackson did my death reading,” I say.
“I said—”
“Let me finish. Please, it is hard enough to think,” I beg.
She exhales and folds her arms. “OK. Continue.”
“Caldwell is going to kill me,” I say, but even as I get the words out of my mouth, I hear the little voice inside me, that old bastard survivor speaking up. Not if I blast out his brains first.
“How?” she asks.
I think of the discrepancies in the drawings, one with Caldwell’s hands around my neck, and the other with just my gun up and pointed. “It isn’t clear,” I say. “There are a couple versions of the story.”
“Then it can be changed,” she says, earnestly.
“Are you going to let me finish?”
“We changed it for Jesse,” she says, ignoring me. “She was supposed to die in that basement and so was Ally and everyone else, but I saw it and it was changed. We did that.”
“Please let me finish,” I beg again, squeezing my temples. “For the love of all that is holy, let me say everything I need to say and then if you want to argue with me or berate me, fine. But just let me finish a fucking thought.”
She falls back against her pillows and arches her eyebrow as if to say, well, go on then. Out with it.
“I need two things from you,” I say. “Consider them last requests.”
She opens her mouth and I brace myself but the words never come. Instead, she snaps her mouth shut while her face reddens with the effort.
“First, I need information.” The furrow between her eyes deepens.
“I want you to tell me everything about your special abilities.”
She blinks as if she hasn’t heard me.
“I know you have abilities,” I go on. “You and Jesse are like Caldwell. I want to know how it started and what’s happened. I need to know exactly what you’re capable of and what you think Caldwell has to do with any of it, but let’s start with what you can do.”
She waits as if expecting me to stop her again. When I don’t, she speaks up: “When it started, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. It just sort of consumed me, you know?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.” Because I don’t understand. I’m not sure I believe in Heaven or Hell or angels. But I’ve seen with my own eyes what Caldwell can do, and I know something is happening to Jesse now. I have to understand it if I’m going to stop him and help Jesse. “Make me understand.”
Rachel exhales and her cheeks puff up on both sides. “I had delusions for a long time. There was a guy I would see. He’d be in my home or on the street. No one else saw him and sometimes people would walk right through him. So I knew he wasn’t real. Because death-replacing damages the brain, I just figured I was shot, you know, like busted. So I didn’t tell anyone. But then when I woke up from that last death, I was raw.”
“In pain?”
“Yeah, but a very particular kind of pain. I’d say itchy but that’s not right. It’s kind of like the feeling you get late at night when you can’t sleep. You feel like you might need to pee, your legs are restless and all that—that feeling times a gazillion.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about, so I keep my mouth shut and listen.
“That day you found me all cut and shit,” she says, “I was totally overwhelmed by the power. That’s really the only word for it I guess. Power. It’s a lot like being a walking live wire.”
I can picture that day well enough. Jesse and I had come over to check on her after a replacement. The girls feel pretty rough after a job, and so when Jesse wanted to take Rachel some jellybeans, I was on board. But when we got there, Rachel was in her living room, naked and bloody. She’d cut herself up pretty bad and had smeared the blood all over her naked skin and the floor around her.
Rachel came at us with the knife she’d used on herself, but I stopped her. I sent Jesse back to the car for her own protection and I held onto Rachel, trying to calm her down.
But I remember what I saw clearly.
When I’d pushed her down, trying to pin her and take the knife away, the whole house started to shake. Pictures fell from the walls. Chairs overturned. Drapes and curtain rods tumbled from the windows. “Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked her. “When I was trying to calm you down, you said some things to me about Caldwell.”
“I told you he was Jesse’s father,” she says, her cheeks red with embarrassment. “I said she was going to destroy all of us.”
“But I’d never told you he was her father,” I say. “So how did you know?”
“Because Uriel told me. He’s the guy I saw. See. But he isn’t just a guy,” she replies. “He’s an angel. He’s the one I’m channeling when I do whatever it is I do. He’s the one that’s told me everything about Caldwell, Jesse, and what the hell is going on.”
“So what does he say?” I ask.
Her eyes well up with tears. “You think I’m crazy.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I remind her. “But no, I don’t think you are crazy.”
She takes a minute to breathe, slowing down her exhalations, no doubt a mechanism she learned these past few years in the asylum.
“Uriel says we are special. NRD and death replacement, all of that is just a symptom of what’s happening.”
“What’s happening?” I try to sound encouraging rather than skeptical.
“The world is changing, like it always does.” She shrugs. “But because we’ve developed consciousness as a species, we now have a choice as to what it will change into. We have that power now, to make it whatever we want.”
“How is your angel or power supposed to change the world?”
“I’m not going to change the world,” she blurts. Laughter comes high and nervous from her constricted throat. “I just move stuff.”
“Move stuff?”
“I can move things. People, objects, or myself. You know, stuff.”
“Show me,” I say.
“No,” she says. “If I use it I’m open and vulnerable.”
“Why?”
“Caldwell will know,” she says. “I don’t want him to know what I can do. I’m not ready to face him.”
My heart sinks when I hear this. I really need her to accept the favor I’m about to ask, even if it scares the shit out of her.
“So Caldwell has an angel too, that he can use to change the world?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “But I don’t know which one. I just know that he has been going around stealing other people’s powers.”
You made me what I am, he’d said. He’s right, because I am the reason he discovered how to take power f
rom someone else. My chest constricts around the truth.
“We can talk all damn day if you want, but you said you need two things from me. Two. What’s the other favor? Information and—?”
“I want you to promise that you’ll take care of Jesse. If I die, you have to go to her. Caldwell will try to kill you both. You’re safer together. You can combine your gifts and keep each other safe.”
Her mouth falls open but I say what I need to.
“Jesse still thinks of him as her father. There may be a time when you have to face Caldwell for Jesse. Do you understand?”
“We agreed this was the safest place for me,” she says.
“I know,” I say and squeeze her knees. “I’m asking you to take a big risk. You’ll have to break out of here and get to Jesse on your own. You’ll have to use your resources.”
“You’re asking me to kill him for her.”
I say nothing.
“If Caldwell even finds out about me—” she begins. “I’ll never get the chance to do what you’re asking.”
He’s going to know anyway, I think. The next time he sees me. “I know I’m asking a lot.”
“You’re going to die trying to kill him,” she says, tears in her eyes. “And you want me to do the same.”
“So if I die, you’re going to stay here and leave Jesse unprotected?”
She throws up her hands in frustration. “No, of course not.”
“Then tell me you’ll do it,” I demand. “Promise me that if anything happens to me, that if you don’t get a call from me on October 4th, your bags will be packed and you’re out of here.”
“Promise me you’re going to at least try not to die,” she says. Her jaw works furiously as she clenches and unclenches her teeth. I wonder if she still has the mouth guard I gave her to mitigate all the grinding she does in her sleep.
I exhale. “If it comes to me or Jesse, you know what I’m going to choose.”
She looks down at her lap.
“Promise me, Rachel. If I’m gone, you two have to stick together. I want my girls to survive. That’s my last request. I want you both to live long and happy lives.”
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