by M. R. Carey
Liz cringed from that image, but Beth definitely approved.
“On the top-of-the-range T34, though,” Crusher said, pointing, “the flashlight is replaced by an eleven-million-volt taser. I personally prefer this model right here, because if I need a taser I’ll use a taser, you know? And with the best will in the world, you’re not going to aim as well with a weapon that’s this heavy. Ergonomically, it’s not designed for point-and-shoot. But some people are looking for a Swiss Army knife, I suppose. They want to have all their options bundled in together.”
Liz looked at the two price tags. The basic model was $299 plus tax. The T34 added another hundred bucks to that eye-watering figure.
Hey, Beth admonished her. Think about what it is you’re buying.
A spiky club? Liz thought.
Survival. This is a right-to-life issue. You don’t get to live unless you can fight him off when he comes for you.
Liz tried to imagine that, and in spite of everything she failed. She had spent her whole married life deferring to Marc. Whenever there had been any kind of disagreement between them, she had grown used to folding in her will, her ego, to avoid the bruising collisions that resulted from standing up to him, or even seeming to have an opinion of her own. Fighting him was something she could acknowledge as a concept but not summon up as a mental picture.
“Do you want to try them both out against a target dummy?” Crusher asked. He seemed to have interpreted Liz’s silence as an inability to choose between blinding her opponent and electrocuting him.
“Thank you,” Liz said. “I’m good.”
“Or we could look at some pepper sprays. Low-impact, long-distance. And the stronger ones will incapacitate in under a second. Your attacker won’t even need to breathe it in. Just the vapor touching his face will seal the deal.”
Shit, yes! Beth enthused. Let’s bring some of that stuff to the party, by all means.
Liz was in the store for almost an hour in the end, and she spent thirteen hundred dollars. That bought her the steak tenderizer in its flashlight configuration, a taser, a plain baseball bat with no cantilevers and a couple of pepper sprays—one of which looked like a BB gun and fired gel pellets that burst into a spray of droplets on impact.
Driving home with the bags beside her on the passenger seat, she felt like a criminal.
See how you feel when you break his face, Beth said.
“Hurting Marc isn’t the point of this,” Liz muttered.
Never said it was. But it’s a sweet little daydream, right?
Liz was alarmed to discover that there was some appeal in the thought. Her grip tightened on the steering wheel. “We just take him down,” she said.
Hey, I know the plan. Who came up with it in the first place? You take him down, and you knock him out. Hard. After that, all you need to do is call your cop friend and let her come in and make the arrest. You’ve got him on a violation of his restraining order, and most likely you’ve got him on a fresh assault. Whack your face against a cupboard door if you need to, so there’s a bruise. He’ll go down for five to ten, guaranteed. And you’ll be free as a bird.
It sounded so easy.
And so terrifying.
“We don’t even know that he’ll come.”
If he doesn’t come, fine. Tomorrow is the trial, and we’ll take our chances. But trust me, his head is chock-full of you right now. He’s pissed as hell because you won’t do what you’re told.
“I could just check us all into a hotel somewhere,” Liz said. Thinking aloud. Still hoping there might be another way out of this. “If he’s found guilty …”
He might get a suspended sentence. You know what a smooth, slimy little bastard he is. Or he might get a tag and a home detention. You’d be an idiot to take the risk.
“I can’t believe he wants to kill me,” Liz muttered, eyes tight shut against the thought, and the images that came with it.
Beth didn’t even bother to reply to that one. Stop at Franklins’, she said instead. We need to pick up some paint.
They took the bus down to the records office right after school. Fran was full of nervous excitement and couldn’t stop talking, but Zac wasn’t giving her much back.
“We’re on the case, Sherlock,” she coaxed him. “The game is a cubic yard.” He smiled, but with less enthusiasm than she would have expected. “What’s the matter?” Fran asked him. Then she guessed. “Your dad’s trial.”
“Partly,” Zac admitted. “Mostly, I guess. It’s tomorrow, and I can’t be there.”
“Well, it is a school day.”
“It’s not that. Mom wouldn’t let me go. She says she doesn’t want Dad to see us all ganging up on him, like he’s the enemy. It’s her case, her complaint, and she wants him to see it that way.”
“She’s smart, your mom. He’s still your dad, even if he’s a dick. If he gets an acquittal, you’re still gonna have to see him. So making him be the big bad is probably not the greatest idea.” Fran hesitated. “So how’s she coping?”
“She’s doing okay,” Zac said. Then he shrugged. “I think she is. She hasn’t been around much the last few days. She’s been doing a ton of overtime at the Cineplex, then coming home exhausted and falling into bed.”
“Probably a good idea,” Fran offered. “Take her mind off all the crazy.”
“I don’t know where her mind is to start with,” Zac said sourly, picking at the rubber seal on the bus’s window as he stared out at the street. “The last few days, when I try to talk to her, it’s fifty-fifty whether she even hears me. She’s a million miles away.”
Fran let the subject drop. She could see he didn’t want to talk about it.
The reception desk at the records office was actually a window in a wall. Iron bars with barley-sugar twists extended from the top to about three-quarters of the way down, leaving a small mailbox-shaped aperture through which to talk and conduct official business.
The lady on the other side of the window looked scary enough that Fran was grateful for the bars. She was whipcord-thin and powerfully permed, and she wore spectacles with tapering points curving up from the outer edge on each side like the horns of an owl. They magnified her bottle-green eyes very alarmingly.
Fran stated her business, said she had called ahead and been given a transaction number, and handed over her birth certificate by way of ID. She also handed over the forms she had printed off from the records office website, and then filled out a couple more that seemed to ask all the same questions over again. Her name, the organization she worked for (not applicable, I am a private citizen), her interest in the case, her legal counsel (still just me) and much more in the same vein.
The horn-rimmed woman looked the forms over for a very long time, separated out the carbons and counterfoils and stamped what seemed like every square inch of every copy with a library stamp. She did it quickly and with spectacular energy, as though stamping was what she was born for and the rest of her life was just waiting for the next piece of paper to come along and be made all official.
“The main reading room is booked,” she said, pushing some of the stamped counterfoils back through the window. You’ve got to pass security first, then go on down to the basement level. Room 107, first left through the fire doors. A clerk will bring the boxes to you.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Fran said, slipping the counterfoils into her jeans pocket.
“Thank you,” Zac echoed.
Which was bad timing, because the horn-rimmed lady hadn’t noticed him until he spoke. “Is he with you?” she demanded.
Fran confirmed that he was.
“Then he has to sign in too, and fill in a G32. First page. In the box at the right, where it says adjuncts, put the number of your G32.”
So then there was another bout of form-filling, and more crazy stamping fun, before they were finally allowed to walk through the security checkpoint and into the building proper. Fran waited a moment for Jinx to scamper under the barrier and join them, but
Jinx didn’t. She was boycotting this whole enterprise.
“Have you seen this place?” Zac marveled.
Fran hadn’t, and she had to admit it was something to see. The lobby looked like it belonged in a cathedral rather than a local government building. There were gray stone arches on all sides, one arcade of them built right on top of another, and the ceilings were so high it felt like there should be clouds up there. The lamps, which were lit even though it was daytime, were big glass globes on golden standards taller than a grown man. The city’s coat of arms was painted on the wall right across from the security post, the colors as bright as a cartoon. It showed three eagles in big golden bubbles, the gatehouse of a castle, and the words benigno numine.
“What does that mean?” Zac asked as they walked past it on the way to the stairs.
“Why would you assume I’d know, Zachary?” Fran asked prissily. He rolled his eyes at her. “Yeah, you’re right, I know pretty much everything. Benigno numine means ‘yay, God’s on our team.’ We swiped it from a guy named William Pitt, but to be fair we waited until after he was dead. Pitt, as in Pittsburgh, by the way. We swiped his name too.”
“I heard about Pitt,” Zac said. “Pretty deep guy, by all accounts.”
“If that was a joke, it was terrible.”
“It’ll grow on you. You’ll laugh before you know it.”
Room 107 was a fifteen-foot cube made almost entirely out of wood. Wooden tiles on the floor, wooden panels on the walls, a very big and solid dark-wood table taking up most of the room. It looked pretty impressive, except that the plaster of the ceiling had an ancient damp stain up in one corner. The smell of beeswax polish was overpowering.
It took about a quarter of an hour before their boxes arrived, wheeled in by a clerk on a little luggage trolley. There were three boxes in total, and they all had the same number on their sides: FP1673812. The United States versus Bruno Martin Picota.
“Doesn’t sound like a fair fight,” Zac joked.
“Fairer than when it was just him versus me.” The words came out sharper than Fran meant them to.
“Sorry,” Zac said.
She shook her head. “It’s okay. Come on, we’re looking for transcripts.”
They found them almost immediately because everything in the boxes was indexed, but a second later Zac found something better. In a cardboard container about the size of a shoebox, there was a stack of thirty or forty cassette tapes, each one numbered and cross-referenced to a list. Recordings of every conversation Bruno Picota had had with his court-appointed psychiatrists.
“The bootleg sessions,” Zac said. “What do you think?”
“I think we don’t have a tape recorder,” Fran said, the flippant response covering a twinge of sudden fear.
“But I bet we can get one,” Zac said.
And he was right. The horn-rimmed lady came across one for them in exchange for a ten-dollar deposit. “Do you think this thing is even worth ten dollars?” Zac demanded, casting a jaundiced eye over the venerable machine. It was made of plastic colored to look like walnut and it had been manufactured by a company called Crown Electronics some time when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth.
Zac inserted the batteries, slotted in tape number one and hit the PLAY button.
Fran’s scalp prickled as a man’s voice came out of the machine, half-drowned in a sea of hiss and crackle. “I worked there seven years,” the man said, his voice surprisingly high and fragile-sounding. That wasn’t how Bruno Picota sounded in Fran’s memories of him. “Mr. Ghent was real nice to me.”
Zac pressed STOP, and then another button. The voice was replaced by a chunter of busy machinery. “Forgot to rewind,” he said.
“Don’t,” Fran told him quickly.
Zac stopped the tape again.
“I don’t want to hear him. It’s gonna freak me out. I’m okay with the words, but not in his voice. Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” Zac said. “This is your show.”
They put the cassettes aside and went back to the transcripts.
They were bulky. The first session alone ran to eighty-three pages, detailing a conversation that had gone on, with toilet breaks, for more than four hours. Only a few minutes in, Fran started to wonder whether she would be okay after all. Picota’s words stirred her emotions in all sorts of ways, some of them less predictable than others.
Maybe the weirdest thing of all was how helpless he was. He kept interrupting the therapists—referred to only by their initials as DH and RTS—to ask where his dad was, when his dad would be coming, if his dad knew where they’d taken him. Fran already knew from that long-ago TV special that Picota had been assessed as having a fairly low mental capacity at the time of the attacks, but they had had an actor voice him, presumably for legal reasons, and the actor had made him sound tough and sinister. The real Picota came across as scared, bewildered and barely capable of understanding what was happening to him.
PICOTA: Is that a tape recorder? Why are you tape recordering me?
RTS: We’ve got to, Bruno. You remember what we told you about what’s going to happen now? The trial? This is so we can see if you’re fit to stand trial, and so we can talk at the trial about what kind of person you are.
PICOTA: I’m a good person.
DH: But you did some things that don’t look too good.
PICOTA: I’m a good person. I am. Can I go home now?
“Jesus!” Fran muttered.
“I know, right?” Zac pointed to a paragraph further down the page. “Look what he says here.”
Fran scanned the text. Picota had worked as a janitor at the Perry Friendly Motel, but before that he had worked at a middle school. He preferred the motel, he said, because at the school he had always been scared of the kids.
PICOTA: They were mean to me. They didn’t like me. I tried not to talk to them much and just get on with my work but they always would ask me questions. Like who’s the president and what’s the longest word I can spell. They didn’t really want to know the answers, they just asked so they could laugh at me when I got it wrong.
“It’s kind of amazing the judge decided he was fit to stand,” Zac said. “This isn’t how normal people talk.”
“Nobody ever said he was normal,” Fran said. But she was thinking the same thing: that her bogeyman was turning out differently than she had expected, and maybe—in spite of all he’d done to her—too pathetic to be worthy of her hate.
“This stuff isn’t what we’re looking for,” she said impatiently. “We’re looking for what happened between him and me at the motel. Homeopathy, remember?”
“But you said nothing is irrelevant,” Zac reminded her.
“I know. But my blind spots are about what he did and what he said. What was going on inside his head doesn’t help us all that much. Let’s find the parts where he talks about what happened. Here, if we take half each we can go faster.”
Fran split the stack of transcripts into two, took one for herself and shoved the other one across the table to Zac. He shot her a glance that had concern and maybe a question in it, but she cast her eyes down and got back to reading.
The first thing that drew her attention was the word Zac had misremembered earlier. The Native American word that didn’t quite mean the devil. Skadegamutc.
RTS: No, never heard of it. How are you saying that again?
PICOTA: With a ch at the end. Ch. Much.
DH: An Indian word.
PICOTA: I think so. Sure. It’s, they’re real. My mom said they’re really real.
RTS: And Fran Watts was one of these things?
PICOTA: Yes.
DH: Can you explain, Bruno?
PICOTA: It’s a ghost witch.
DH: That doesn’t really help. Tell us a little more, please.
PICOTA: It’s, like, the ghost of a witch. A ghost, but it, that it’s got magic. You know? An evil spirit. And you can’t ever see how it [unclear] where it might have come from. You just see that
it’s there. Maybe she had magic when she was alive, you see, but you don’t know that. And anyway now she’s dead she’s got more. A lot, lot more.
RTS: Now she’s dead? I’m sorry, you’re saying that about Fran Watts? That she’s dead?
PICOTA: She is definitely dead.
DH: Did you kill her, Bruno? Is that how you remember it?
PICOTA: [unclear]
DH: Is that how you remember it, Bruno?
PICOTA: Sometimes.
Fran’s chest had started to tighten up as she read, and it had got worse and worse until she had to work at breathing through her clenched muscles. Now that same folding-in-on-yourself feeling was spreading downward to her stomach. If she just kept on sitting and reading, she was pretty sure she was going to throw up. Real soon. She scrambled to her feet, muttered “get some air” and more or less ran out of the room.
She was afraid Zac was going to follow her, but he didn’t. Again, not so dumb for a boy. She faced the wall, leaning in so her forehead was against the cold wood. She gave herself permission to cry, but no tears came. The coldness of the wood soothed her a little, spreading from her forehead down into her flushed face.
She stayed out there for a few minutes, whispering all the worst swearwords she knew under her breath. She was directing them at Bruno Picota, in his cell at the Grove City secure psychiatric facility or wherever he was right then.
“I’m not dead,” she told the wall. Remembering the pain of the knife and the no no no feeling of shock and denial as it broke her skin. “I’m not fucking, fricking, pissing, shitting, bloody … dead!”
Of course you’re not, Lady Jinx growled.
Fran turned around with a laugh that was halfway to being a sob. Jinx was standing there in full armor, her hands resting on the hilt of her downturned sword—a heraldic pose taken right out of The Knights of the Woodland Table.
Take me to him, Jinx said, and we’ll see who’s dead. I’ll slice him in pieces, and then I’ll cut the pieces into smaller pieces until there’s nothing left!