“Bill’s the manager here. He knows us. No one knows you, hard guy. So . . . How ’bout you get the fuck back inside and go beddy-bye or what the fuck ever. Faggot.”
Castillo waved. “Sure thing, man.”
He reentered the room and shut the door. “Pack up,” he said.
Jeff had already dressed as he’d been told. “We gotta go?”
“Yeah. Not worth it.” Castillo assembled his own notes, holstered his gun and phone beneath his shirt. Tossed his two laptop cases in the gym bag with his clothes.
Knocking at their door. Banging.
Castillo dropped his head. “You gotta be fucking joking . . . you good to go?” He looked at Jeff.
“Yup.”
Castillo nodded. The damn kid was ready before he was. Not bad. “Stay close,” he said. “Get in the damn car.” He opened the door.
Two of the guys stood outside. “Hey, man, wanted to apologize is all,” one said. “You know. No hard feelings, bro.” Held out a hand, grinning.
“Sure, man. No problem.” Castillo ignored the shake, nodded for Jeff to continue to the car.
Three voices jeering as one: “You-guys-going? That-your-kid? Bet-you-sucking-dicks-in-there.”
Castillo exited the room, blocked them from Jeff. Smelled their drunkenness. Assessed.
“You fucking leaving ’cause of us, man? Shit, man, now I feel all shitty. Fuck that. Damn.”
“Checking out anyway,” Castillo said. “You got the place to yourself.”
“Hey, hardguy,” the bigger of the two said. “How about we gonna call the cops on you, hardguy. Bet you cornholing that kid hard in there, huh? Fucking faggots. You wanna suck my cock now, hardguy?”
Castillo sensed Jeff turn to him for direction. “Just get in the car,” he said.
“Hey, man. You call the cops on us? You fucking did, didn’t you?”
The red pickup truck had started moving.
No, no, no, Castillo was thinking. Don’t be that obvious.
They were. The pickup came to a stop behind his car.
Castillo opened the passenger door of his car, ushered Jeff inside. “Lock it.” Shifted to the trunk.
Three voices: “Where-you-guys-going-man? Ain’t-going-nowhere. Wanna-beer-kid?”
Castillo put his bags in the trunk, shut it. Surveyed the four guys again. Guy One had a buck knife at his hip. Guy Three, one of the stoned ones, maybe had a gun. Maybe. Yeah, Castillo decided. He did. He’d gotten out of the pickup with it freshly jammed in his belt. The two girls and the final guy had gathered in a loose semicircle to watch. Better than breaking beer bottles, he supposed.
He noticed Jeff squirming in his seat for a better look.
Shit.
“You guys mind moving the truck?” Castillo said.
“What truck?” the Big One said, snorted to his pals and stepped closer. Just enough.
“Look, man, I don’t—”
Castillo had hit the man’s throat with the back side of his hand. Stepped back and kicked. The man’s kneecap audibly exploded. Before he’d hit the ground, Castillo was already moving around him toward Guy Three. Gun Guy.
He closed the distance quickly, too quickly for someone stoned.
Grabbed the man’s wrist, pulled. Something snapped. Castillo ignored the shrill scream, forced Gun Guy to the ground with a twist of the broken limb. Punched three times directly into the nose with the heel of his hand. Then took the pistol. Tossed it onto his hood.
The last two came at him together. Good. Castillo eyed the girls: not running, not scared. Merely watching. Guy One had pulled his knife as Castillo thought he would. Both already looked damn unsure. Castillo smiled.
“We gonna fuck you—”
Keep talking, asshole. He’d already covered the gap between them. The movement with the knife was clumsy, probably the first time the guy had ever tried it for real. Castillo sidestepped, grabbed his arm, pulled forward and back, as he’d been trained a thousand times. As he’d used in the field a dozen times. Another loud snapping sound and the knife, still in Guy One’s hand, was now pointed at Guy One’s back. Stab, stab, stab. . . . It’d be that quick to finish it. Castillo fought against the trained reflexes. Instead, he turned the wrist more than usual. With another loud snap, the knife dropped. The man howled like a nervous hound dog.
Castillo grabbed his neck with both hands, pulling the head down to the hood of his car. Felt the nose go. The man fell back, his howling stopped. There’d be too much blood in his mouth. Castillo turned to the last.
“Hey, look, man . . . I . . . look, I don’t wanna . . .”
“Sorry, friend. Only way this works.” Castillo came low, took out the legs first. And then followed with a palm to the lower jaw. Lights out. Kid never even made a sound.
The whole thing had taken about twenty seconds.
The other three guys were moaning around him. Not moving. Or not moving well. Probably still didn’t know what had just happened. Probably’d never seen so much blood, not even on some deer they’d shot. Blood had a way of freezing normal people. One thing was for sure: None of them would ever admit one guy had done this. Which was why he had to embarrass all of them. The girls might joke about it privately later, but they would never dare make it public.
He patted Guy Three, found his keys.
“You wanna move this fucking truck, please,” he shouted and tossed the keys at the girls. One of them rushed to pick them up. He took the gun off the hood and stepped around to his own seat. “Find better people to hang around,” Castillo said.
The girl nodded, got in the truck. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen herself. Castillo shook his head and got into the car. “Fucking animals.”
He started the car. The truck retreated and he pulled away.
Jeff was still staring at him.
“What’s your fucking problem?” Castillo said.
Jeff shook his head. “Didn’t say a word.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
And he did.
JACOBSON FREE
JUNE 05, SUNDAY—INDIANAPOLIS, IN
[From the journals of Dr. Gregory Jacobson]
June 5— . . . What is broken when one can bring himself to kill another? MALES are responsible for the blood and violence of every culture, every country, every age. And serial murder is the masculine zenith of this same gender-based lust for dominance and execution. It is the asocial equivalent of our philosophy, mathematics, music, et al. To wit: There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
June 5— . . . In violence, we forget who we are. The men and women who passed me today who looked me in the eye who know nothing of what I truly am. Veritas Lux Mea. Since the Renaissance, God’s Death, we have presumed to elucidate violence through Science. Before, when I was T., they presumed anthropometry could reveal the mark. Rapists were blond, pedophiles had long left feet, murderers were homely with smaller foreheads, etc. This was scientific fact. Absurd? Any more than claims of possession by Satan or other primitive gods? Any more absurd than our pursuit of the Cain gene? XP11.23–11.4 Do we only need to look there? No. I am still marked. NOW ART THOU CURSED FROM THE EARTH. In violence, we remember who we are.
Her hair was wrong.
It had to be the hair. It was a little too short. Too clean. Everything else was perfect.
The body positioned two-thirds of the way across the bed, on its left side. The shoulders were flattened to the mattress. Head turned to the left cheek. Legs spread. The left thigh at a perfect right angle to her trunk. The other at an obtuse angle. One breast under the head, the other under her right foot. Liver between the feet. Intestines on the right side of the body. Spleen on the left. The flaps he’d removed from her abdomen and thighs were on the bedside table.
The Thing on the Bed.
Like in the pictures. Like in the dreams.
Jacobson dragged the kukri knife gently along her forehead. Do I cut again? He’d already hacked off her ears and
nose. Do I rip some more? Slashed away her lips and down over the chin. Her eyebrows and lids, her cheeks. Picture-perfect. She’d lived for almost two minutes while he’d cut her. Hemorrhaging slowly, painfully, from a deep slash across her throat that went down to her spine. The carotid artery filling her rent windpipe and then flooding her lungs as he continued his work. He’d started next on her abdomen. Then her face. Was this the moment I did wrong? Perhaps he was supposed to start with the face. He simply did not know this detail, forensics in 1888 not being what they were today.
Jacobson closed his eyes and leaned back, letting the vulgar smells of the tiny room fill his nose. He could suddenly feel the warmth of the blood on his face as something wet trailed down his left forearm, and his mind chased after the promising sensation.
His very first memory, his first recollection of childhood, of being, began with a dream. He’d been four or five at the time. He’d woken, screamed for his parents, found he’d wet the bed like a baby. He hadn’t been able to stop crying. His father had spanked him that night. The dream returned later. He didn’t recall exactly when, but it had. A month later, a year. He’d screamed and wet his bed again, but he did not call out for his parents this time. He made sure his terrified sobs were as quiet as possible, and only his bedroom’s darkness was there to comfort him. Boy became man, and still the dream came. Once, or twice, or ten times a year. He no longer screamed or cried anymore. He simply woke up, methodically cleaned himself.
In the dream, he is in a small, dark room. There is a fire in one corner and a bed in the other. And, there is something on the bed. Something evil. He’d always known that part, felt it. That the thing on the bed wants him closer. Wants to fuck him, consume, destroy. Completely. That it wants INSIDE him. He also knew that it was much stronger than he was. That he would ultimately surrender to its wishes. He could not—not ever—win.
As the years passed, the Thing on the Bed became more detailed. In his teens, he learned that it was a woman. Soaked in blood. Ripped open. That it was still alive. Years later, it spread its misshapen legs wider and thrust its hips lewdly at him. It burbled blood from its missing lower jaw. In time, it spoke to him. In his twenties, he stood over it. He held a blade.
There were other dreams. Other women. Each became more familiar over time. But none had ever returned as much as the first. These eventually became fantasies he carried into the waking world. Girls he saw at school, some of the women he worked with, a stranger in a bookstore. He could picture them on the “dream bed,” ripped open and waiting for him. Sex proved unspeakable. He could not ejaculate unless he imagined pushing into the Thing on the Bed. When a much younger man, he’d dated only two women because of this. He’d asked the last if she would play out a silly fantasy with him: tie her up, pretend to cut her.
It had not gone well.
He’d avoided women thereafter and focused on what he hoped was his true passion: science. But while his career as a geneticist flourished, he closed his eyes to the darkness each and every night, knowing that he was an aberration. Monster. Until . . .
Until that day. May 22, 1990. During a conference in Baltimore, a colleague had been reading a book, and, curious, Jacobson had picked up the paperback. Straightaway, everything made sense. Everything. Right there, in black and white, on page 176.
The Thing on the Bed.
It was real. SHE was real. The woman in his dreams.
Mary Jane Kelly. Murdered on Friday, November 9, 1888.
He spent the next hours reading the book from cover to cover. Then again. And again.
Jack the Ripper: Memoirs of the World’s First Serial Killer.
He was—needless to say—unsurprised that one of the many suspects was named Tumblety. An old family name, and old family gossip. His mother’s biological and ne’er-do-well father. Long since lost and banished to time and rumor. But time and rumor meant nothing to genetics. What else, Jacobson had marveled, is passed on through RNA and amino acid sequences?
His research and efforts refocused, the geneticist studied the offspring of killers, and then the killers themselves, eventually creating their clones.
Searching for the root of evil.
But not to cure. Simply to understand. Appreciate. Enlighten.
To find the basest traits of our forebears absolves us.
He’d waited more than twenty years to unearth Tumblety’s DNA and confirm their genomic link. Twenty years to explore alternatives, cures, but ultimately assenting, verifying, to the fact that our lifeblood, our physical quintessence, is inescapable.
Now if he could only finish what was started. Reach the same release his own blood had once known. Mary Jane Kelly’s singular blood-drenched murder had somehow ended the Ripper’s career. Over the years, Jacobson had studied every report he could find, knew the crime scene details and images as well as he knew his own face. The very same molecular fabric of his own body, his own mind, the very blood pumping through his veins, had been there in 1888.
Then, and now. The Thing on the Bed. They were the same.
He looked back down at the bed. The fire’s shadows cast unevenly over the mutilated shape there. He sighed. No. She was not the one. Not yet. But there was still time. Please, God . . .
He would simply have to try again. He gently traced the blade sideways across the skin on her thigh, cleared away a thin trail between pools of blood.
Placed the note card there.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
JUNE 06, MONDAY—HARRISBURG, PA
The Senators were playing some team called the Erie Seawolves.
The ballpark was mostly full, five thousand plus, and Castillo had substituted their seats to the very edge of the Monday-night crowd. Jeff sat quietly beside him, watching the field with the genuine and innocent wonder of a bygone era when people could still be amazed by a baseball game.
A couple batters in, the kid jumped up from his seat, said he needed to hit the bathroom, and Castillo was fine with that. He needed some time to think alone anyway. He’d spent the morning adding more red dots to his “Murder Map,” and the lines still ran in a hundred different directions. Soon he’d have to pick one of them to follow. So he needed something. Anything. Even if from a man half crazy.
The call from Ox had come early morning. Castillo had said they were in Pennsylvania, and Ox had suggested the Senators game as a place to meet. Castillo still had no idea where the guy had called from. Simply said he’d be there.
Castillo watched Jeff working back through the crowd to their seats. Hopefully, the mysterious man would materialize as promised. The guy’s whole demeanor had definitely changed after Castillo had mentioned SharDhara. Maybe he’d finally get some answers.
Ox materialized at the bottom of the third inning.
He was a black man shorter than the boy, with rounded gold glasses, a slender goatee, and a shaved head beneath a new red Senators baseball cap. He wore a matching silk pants suit of burgundy, a pair of large Chinese-style goldfish embroidered in crimson across the shirt. He hugged Castillo warmly, then shook Jeff’s hand. “Marvelous night for baseball,” he said to him. “Marvelous.”
“Covert as ever, I see,” Castillo said, eyeing the outfit.
Ox sat, crossed a leg, studied the ballpark. “Covert enough.” He grinned. “No one’s looking at me. Who we rooting for?”
“Everyone’s looking at you,” Castillo said. “What’s SharDhara?”
Ox cocked his head. “Subtle as ever, yourself, I see. Maybe I never heard about any such thing.”
“Maybe.” Now Castillo smiled. “And maybe you drove nine hundred miles just to tell me that. Or to see the Seawolves?”
“Maybe I drove eleven hundred miles to see an old friend.” Ox raised his hand for the beer vendor. “What’d you contact me for anyway?”
“You know something about everything.”
“Hell I do. You want one?”
“No.” Castillo waited while Ox paid for his beer. During the exchange Ox�
�s face had gone blank in thought. No emotion, no response as he focused on the game below.
“That bad?” Castillo asked.
“First you tell me what you into.”
“Can’t.” Castillo shook his head. “Sorry.”
Jeff had stopped watching the game to study the two men. Ox’s eyes were narrowed some, a tinge of irritation. “A taste, then,” the man said. “Make sure you and I are on the same page, is all. I don’t want any unspecified nastiness coming upon me and my family. Understood?”
“Fair enough,” Castillo replied, leaning in. “A private company is doing shitty things for our former bosses. Horrible shitty. Involves experiments. Kids. Civilian deaths. And someplace or someone named SharDhara. No clue what that means, but I can tell when people are bullshitting me, which they are on this topic. And it got your black ass down here in a hurry.”
“So it did. That’s a fair taste.” Ox kept looking at Jeff. “You one of ‘the kids,’ I suppose.”
The boy looked at Castillo, who nodded it was OK to reply. “I am, sir,” he said.
“You don’t seem too surprised by any of this,” Castillo noted.
“Nothing’s surprised me since I was four. I notice, conversely, you still are.”
“Surprised?” Castillo leaned back in his chair. “I admit I am.”
“Why I love you, Castillo.” Ox looked across him to Jeff again. “This’s a man still believes in good guys and bad guys.”
“I’ve worked some ‘morally questionable’ operations in my day. I know lines have to be crossed sometimes.”
“ ‘Lines crossed’?” Ox snickered, then sipped his beer. “You know your history, boy?” He’d kept his eyes trained on Jeff, but Castillo knew he was still talking to him. “Know the Nazis?”
“Sure,” Jeff replied.
“Sure, sure. Nazis famous for killing millions and conducting lethal experiments on humans, right? Famous for being evil? And these UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”—as he spoke, his voice lowered, sotto voce, then rose into the thunderous boom of an Alabama preacher—“got rid of the evil Nazis. Problem is, at the exact same time, the U.S.A. was also conducting lethal experiments on humans.”
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