by Martin Rose
I said nothing about the out-of-body experience or Atroxipine. We were floating in a whole new conspiracy world of half-truths, things Lafferty didn’t need to know.
“What was the fucking point of all that? What’s the rabbit in all this?”
“I think it’s to kill me,” I said.
“You’re so fucking important, eh?”
“My father’s scared. It’s a testament to his fear that he wasn’t satisfied to let me languish in prison.”
“So they’re letting Highsmith languish in prison instead.”
“Do you know what happens to them? To people like Highsmith, who were brought into black missions like out-of-body stuff? Did you ever talk to Lionel about that? What happened to the rogues?”
“Who cares? They’re criminals. Highsmith said himself he killed those people. They can rot in hell.”
“What if it’s not Highsmith, though? Look, Highsmith got a court case, was judged by his peers. It was all on the level. Even if the case was flimsy, don’t you think every suspect deserves the same? Don’t you think they should have his fair treatment like every other citizen, instead of being locked in a cell and having the key thrown away after his own government uses him up? Isn’t that really what they did to Highsmith?”
“Edmond Dantès,” Lafferty blurted.
I hadn’t thought about that book in years. Long ago and far away when we’d been in the same classes, that had been our summer reading project and we had taken turns slogging through Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo between bouts of sneaking off to swim in the next door neighbor’s pool after dark. I recalled Jamie, sourpussed and sullen while he bent over his medical texts and dissected frogs. As far as he’d been concerned, Lafferty was too low class to hang in our end of the neighborhood. The few good moments in a cesspool of childhood memories.
“You think that’s what they’re doing?” he asked. “You think they’re taking people they used up, hired as tools, and are locking them in and throwing away the key?”
“Lionel seemed to evade the question when I asked,” I said.
“Lying by omission. Sweeping up anyone who can implicate the government in wrongdoing and vanishing them.”
“How very Soviet of them,” I said.
“You know who killed them, if not Highsmith?”
“Not sure. Just a hunch.”
Lafferty nodded.
“You gonna turn him in, when you find him? Just turn him over to Lionel and hope for the best while they figure out new ways to kill you better?”
I said nothing. I had no answer. The trust and loyalty I had assigned to Lionel had broken beyond repair. Yet, the terms of my freedom were reliant on carrying out this job to the end, and all the other monsters awaiting investigation once I finished with the current monster at large. Handing the killer over was out of the question, but I had no clearer idea of what I would do when the time came to make the decision.
To be, or not to be, I thought, reflecting on the interminable hours when my father drummed political science into my head via Shakespeare. Faced with the choice between duty and conscience, Hamlet was no help to me now. Even my Id was quiet and contemplative until I spoke once more.
“You still have my evidence from my brother’s case?” I asked.
Lafferty grinned.
“So. You want the gun back?”
Lafferty leaned down to pop open a box and withdrew a plastic bag. Through the transparent material, the matte black of the semiautomatic carved a silhouette I knew of old. My fingers quivered to touch it, and Lafferty made an amusing ceremony of pulling it out of the plastic and holding it out for me as though his next move would be to knight me with it. Done with the frivolity, our expressions set as it passed into my possession. The metal seemed to jump into my grasp, fitting into the flesh as though it, too, had missed me, longed for me, yearned for me during our long absence. Having her was like returning home at last.
“Look,” Lafferty said as I pulled the slide off the Glock and took out the barrel, staring through it and frowning at the buildup. “I ain’t gonna tell you what to do with your weaponry, but now that you’re not a hell-bent for leather zombie, maybe you wanna try a little harder not to rack up the body count?”
“I killed my brother, Lafferty. What does it matter now?”
“Don’t talk that shit. You know it matters. Try this.”
He slapped a taser on the countertop.
I lifted an eyebrow and set the frame of the gun down to pick up the taser.
“Fewer dead people. Maybe you can avoid a second murder charge in your life. You’re not dead anymore. No gray area loopholes for you now.”
He had a point. I pressed a button on the side of the object and, between two metal fangs, a brilliant line of blue electricity appeared and then zipped out of existence.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
He grinned and said nothing.
Meanwhile, somewhere on an evidence shelf, a taser goes missing from a lapsed case.
“Let me rephrase that—what did the previous owner do with it?”
“Some kid was going around and shocking vending machines with it. Can you believe it?”
I smiled, remembered Lincoln Tanner, my one-time bunk mate in the prison. “You don’t say.”
“Shorts out the circuit. Machine spits out food, or quarters.”
“Really,” I said, and thought of Elvedina.
What would she spit out?
“I’ll take it.”
*
I came back into the rain from the evidence room basement. The vulture circled above the roof, and I surrendered my shoulder to him. He took up the space beside my head while I stoppered my mouth with another cigarette of tightly packed death, stared at the oil stains casting rainbows in parking lot puddles. My Thunderbird was worse for the years, nicks and dents where I’d driven it through the garage door after Elvedina. I wondered where she was now. If she was out there in the rain like the Tin Man, frozen in place with her oil can discarded at her feet. Trade her ax out for a gun, frozen in space.
The idea chilled me. The vulture squawked and protested, flew away into a screeching black mark on the wind as I jerked open the car door and inhaled the stale exterior, then filled it with smoke. But thinking of Elvedina, I kept rerunning the image of her kissing Megan’s forehead. How could a cold, hard machine summon up all the trappings of human feeling to kiss another?
I started the engine and turned out onto the main drag. I smelled the ocean in the air. Heard the cry of the vulture tracking me from above as the vehicle shot like a silver bullet through the town, through the boarded up and foreclosed homes lost to bad investments and personal tragedies; past the tent shelters of the homeless, the strangers hitchhiking up the route; past the old secret burial grounds where the mob buries bodies in the pines; until the landscape changed and the houses turned along more upscale tastes. The road leveling out into new paving afforded by the rich and the well-connected. No more heroin addicts drowning in the gutter here. Now, I drove in the perfumed avenues of the affluent.
The northeast storm winds brought more stinging rain. The vulture sulked and followed me as I drove and put my hand over the firearm. I made sure it was real and, satisfied with the comforting weight of it, I wound my way back out of the gated community and over to the next one, navigating through a warren of cul-de-sacs and well-groomed lawns.
I parked the car in the double driveway of Polly Highsmith’s house. The events revolving around that ill-fated night when I left my body occupied my mind, and with it, Polly’s conversation with her husband, and most of all, Blake’s terror of the Inspector. This did not seem to me the cold-hearted killer I’d been led to believe I was hunting. I kept returning to her, this unremarkable women who appeared all but invisible, who grew smaller with the weight of her tragedies, until I perceived her in a different light, a different understanding. It put me in mind of Megan, it put me in mind of my mother, even Elvedina, w
ho in her illimitable silence embodied some unspoken melancholy—this trio of women tied to disasters like latent Furies from a Greek Tragedy, giving shape and form to crimes others had wrought. It left the last possible conclusion, the most logical direction left to me: Polly.
The driving rain lashed thick and the first whip crack of angry thunder rent the air. The vulture soaked and shivered at the porch and stared at me as though I authored the foul weather.
I passed a row of shrunken and withered pansies, all the color sucked from them, except brown. As though the degradation I had cohabited with for so long as a zombie had evolved like a virus, insidious and invisible, to visit Polly. I carried the stain with me, destroying lives in my ominous wake. All my convictions and newfound conscience for naught.
I ducked into the shadow of the house and rang the bell. Rivulets chilled a line down the back of my neck, soaking my shirt. I imagined an alternate world in which I had not survived Virus X. I imagined Lafferty, tending his evidence room with no knowledge of Niko only three blocks away in the funeral home; Lionel would be tending grapes on some faraway South American spook foxhole. My father overlooking the Capitol with disgust and disdain, pinning a medal on my smiling brother’s jacket. Beside Jamie, his intact and perfect family. Amos.
One virus turned it all upside down and led me here, to this very moment. It seemed to me that all that effort and monstrous fissuring in the universe should have singular meaning. A lightning strike, pivotal moment. A climax to punctuate the senselessness of life. Perhaps a choir of angels trumpeting a delightful chorus in answer. A deus ex machina to lift me from this inferno.
Instead, all I have is the shitty version of a poor man’s parrot, a beat to shit body like a crumpled candy wrapper that’d seen the inside of a toilet bowl. One of these days, I promised myself, I need to get my ass to the beach, buy a houseboat. Take it out to the distant canyons. I would forget all the bullshit and bake in the sun, try not to think about Niko and—
Shattering glass.
The vulture curled his tongue into an S with his beak open and hissing. I tried the door knob. It turned, slick with rain water.
I withdrew the gun and threw the door open wide.
*
All the lights blacked out. Yellow-gray storm light churned through the diaphanous curtains. Polly Highsmith’s home smelled like fresh lemon polish and whiskey. I surged forward with my arm out and steadied into an isosceles lock. Each wet step from the rain was muffled by the expensive carpeting. In a distant room, a bang-crash! as an object met its fate, shattering into pieces beyond my sight.
Through the living room. The couch littered with the remains of a newspaper. A cell phone turned face down on the end table. An empty glass rimmed in whiskey. Bland neutral walls tinted eerie and gray in the rain light, turning everything into a mist.
Around the corner and into the hall, I caught my breath and held it.
Elvedina and Polly stood in the center. Around them, the detritus and debris gave suggestion to the battle ranging through the kitchen. Polly’s headlong flight, the place where Elvedina caught up with her. In seconds, I play-acted their recent past: I pictured Elvedina, a storming bull, reaching one hand out to catch Polly’s streaming hair and yank her back with heartless machinery. Send her to the ground where Elvedina towered over her, straddling her with her face erased of emotion.
Like she was now, with her weapon drawn and the silencer making a long, black exclamation point to Polly’s chest. Polly, a kitchen knife in her hand. The kind of knife you buy with a maxed out credit card at 1 a.m. because it can cut through uninvited cyborgs when the occasion calls for it. A big one-piece, steel pig-sticker. She rammed it up and thrust it into Elvedina.
They were too far in to care; too locked into each other. Faces drawn in the grimmest and bloodiest expressions that left no expression at all. Women hell-bent on killing one another. It drove the breath out of me. Turned me cold to my toes.
Elvedina stumbled back with the knife sticking out of her chest. The silencer wobbled in her grasp. Elvedina grunted and reached up like a wind-up toy, all fluidity gone as she negotiated this new turn of events to grip the blade handle and snap it from her. The hallway lengthened into a marathon mile. Too long to traverse in time. See-saw nausea rollicked in my belly as I dug in and ran anyway, dropping the gun to pull out the taser as I gained momentum. The knife crunched like metal cans in a compactor as she slicked it out of her. A line of dribbling, black blood. Motor oil permeated the air. She dropped the blade to the floor and readied herself to take aim at Polly, who huddled on her expensive carpeting with her hands above her head, her knees curled to her chest, screaming.
I skidded and slid into home base. The taser gleamed and crackled like handheld fire. I thrust it up into Elvedina’s arm, to the meat of her ribs and her eyes, flying open wide to meet mine as we made impact. She felt light as aluminum as I reached out with my other hand to hold her, take her shirt by the fistful and rivet her there while her eyes dissected me, deconstructed me, viciously took me apart bone by bone with all her hate.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
Her eyes rolled back in her head and Elvedina collapsed.
Adrenaline pushed through my veins, made my mouth taste like I’d eaten a plateful of wet cigarettes for breakfast. I kicked her weapon away. It cartwheeled down the hall and disappeared into the space of a shadow as I came down to my haunches to reach for Polly.
She rose up and took my arm, leveraged it so we both came to our feet together. Her hair become a witch’s mire of filaments, her eyes dazed and mouth turned into a permanent stain of bloodless shock.
“I can’t,” she whispered and then burst into tears.
“Polly,” I said, and held her while she cried into my arms and whispered, I’m sorry, over and over again. I’m sorry, I never wanted this. I never wanted to hurt anyone.
*
I poured her a drink and gave her a box of tissues. Polly stared at the collapsed shape in the hallway.
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t know,” I answered while I turned the taser over in my hands. “I think it’s a short circuit.”
Polly didn’t ask what that meant and I wouldn’t have explained it to her if I could. I was exhausted. My stitches itched, fire ants lapping honey off my abdomen. I helped myself to her bottle of Laphroaig and sat on the opposite side.
“Do you know why I’m here, Polly?”
She looked down into the bottom of her glass where her reflection wavered. She looked about to cry again. This time around, she was wearing more than sweatpants—cargo pants and a dark shirt. Dim and neutral colors matched with luggage by the door. Her hair combed back into a ponytail and her eyes hollowed and rimmed with sleepless circles.
“Yes,” she managed to choke out.
I gave her a minute longer to swallow her drink. I followed suit until I emptied my glass. I set it down on the coffee table and folded my hands.
“How did you do it, Polly?”
She didn’t look at me.
“It’s complicated,” she whispered into her glass. She looked frail and breakable in the half-light. The rain tapped and drummed above us with ferocious purpose.
“Nothing came up on the tox screen,” I said.
“It wouldn’t,” she said, putting her glass down. Then she laughed, jagged, running a hand through her hair. “What will my husband say? It will break his heart.”
I blinked. All of this, all those dead people, and all she could think about… was her husband. And in the end, it seemed a human concern to have.
“Why don’t you tell me how, and maybe we won’t have to break his heart after all.”
“It started,” she began, “with the drug trials for Atroxipine.”
Halting, stumbling over her words, she began to tell me.
PART 5
DRUG TRIALS
I don’t know what kind of business you’re in, Mr. Adamson, but—oh, there it is! How on Earth did you g
et a prescription for this? It’s not on the market. Never mind. Doesn’t matter now.
But it mattered, once. My husband was the one who engineered Atroxipine. I know you have not seen the best of me, Mr. Adamson. You’ve seen me as the woman riding the downward spiral into the nadir of life. But when I met him, I was on the incoming wave. And maybe I was deluded by my own youth. Your twenties become a mythical decade of invincibility. Ah, I see in your eyes, you know something of what I say, though you can’t be barely into your twenties yourself, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Adamson. A little too young for this line of work.
I was too young to be a bauble on the arm of a rich and successful businessman. I thought I knew the world. Thought I knew myself. I wanted a fabulous Mr. Darcy to enter my life; and I know now I was not unusual in this desire. I was in college and gaining my own degree in organic chemistry with an interest in biology—do you know that cinnamon has the same organic compounds found in hallucinogens? This was how Blake and I met. Over drinks at a bar, arguing over the chemistry of wormwood in the casual glass of absinthe.
He was impressed with my acumen, my depth of memory. I could draw compounds on the bar napkin with my eyes closed and I won’t lie—our interactions were kinetic. I knew there was a ring on his finger. In every way, we made no acknowledgment of the intensity building in the air around us. I think he was unwilling to admit that his marriage had already failed. He gazed at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, turning his gold band around and around as though it was a time machine he could use to unwind the clock and meet me under better circumstances. But he needed a tech whose head wasn’t halfway up their ass and I was more interested in hard experience than a paper degree. I had no carnal designs on him, at the time. It provided an amusing distraction, to be whisked away by this secure, intelligent, and intense individual to a place where some of the foremost drugs were being produced.
In retrospect, I can appreciate how little I understood of the nature of the drug lab. In all ways it seemed a private enterprise but I couldn’t know it was funded by public money—military money. My first days were spent in the awkward overtures of a new and eager intern attempting to find her place in the company structure—listening to the break room gossip and hearing rumors. Non-disclosure forms. Black suited men with no identification. And once, the rumor of an “Echo Inspector”—oh, do you know him? No? You looked as though you recognized the name—and others besides.