by Unknown
“So wait, you’ve got no criminal record?”
“None.”
“Then how come Abel had to get you a new face and a new identity?”
“Well, partly to encourage me to cut ties to my old life, but mostly (I think) so my old bosses couldn’t get hold of me and use me against Abel.”
He sucked his teeth, mulling it over. “Makes sense, I guess.”
“So now you know my dirty secret.”
“That’s pretty wild.”
“I haven’t met any other ex-spies, that’s true.”
They drove in silence for a while, before Carl raised a new subject.
“How long you figure before the cops find whatsisname?”
Jolene shrugged. “No way of knowing. I figure Henschele’s boss will miss him on Monday and that will kick things off. They’ll look for a motive and bother all his friends, since it was done with his gun and he unlocked the door. That’ll keep ‘em busy for a while. They’ll never tie the two of them to us, if you’re worried about it.”
“What about the other stiff? You think anyone’s going to get upset?”
“You mean the wife? Same thing as with the husband.”
“No, our stiff. Whatsisname, Dobbs.”
“Oh. No way to say. Looking at his file, I don’t think anyone will miss him.”
* * *
(Carl and Jolene had dug a shallow grave before they even met Dobbs. They did it on a stretch of prairie preserve in the back of a state park. It was on their way from Iowa to St. Louis. Jolene had killed him in the truck. He’d been in the middle of complaining to Carl about the shitty attitude he’d gotten when he called TNI, and she’d slipped her belt around his neck and throttled him dead. They dumped him and threw quicklime on him and buried him. At the next exit there was a Quizno’s, so they stopped and had a late lunch.)
* * *
The Mundy family drove to Ralph Kimble’s house.
“Well, the truck’s gone, so they probably aren’t here,” Fred said.
“Why don’t we just ring the doorbell?” Kate asked.
Fred didn’t respond to her, instead asking, “Leslie, is there any way you can… you know, scope it out through the walls?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Dad. I can check someone over if I can see ‘em, but it’s not like X-ray vision.”
“Heh. If it was, I guess they’d call it ‘sex-ray vision’ eh?”
Leslie smiled a little. “That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that. So are we going to ring the doorbell?”
Fred cleared his throat. “I’ll do it, but fair warning—I don’t think I’ll get a very good reception. Uh, last time I saw the man of the house… Ralph Kimble, Joe’s dad… er…”
“The man who raised him, anyhow,” Kate said, helping him along.
“Yeah. Well, Ralph was kind of threatening me with a shotgun from that front porch there.”
“Ah. Worked your usual charm on him, huh?”
“Well Kate, I’d like to see you waltz up to someone and take their son away without them getting bothered.”
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” Leslie said, opening her door.
Fred scrambled after her. It was absolutely imperative to him that he not let her take a risk he was unwilling to take. In his particular belief system, that was damnation.
Kate rolled her eyes, got out of the car and caught up with Leslie and Fred half way to the front door. When the doorbell got no response, they peeked through a few windows.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s at home,” Kate said.
“I told you. Still, did you check the garage?” Seeing the look in his ex-wife’s eyes, he said, “Fine, I’ll do it.”
Like him, she could not encourage anyone else take a risk she would not, so they checked it together, then returned to the car.
“Nothing,” he reported to Leslie.
“Well, what now?” she asked.
Kate shrugged.
“Uh… We could break into the house, but I don’t think it would do a lot of good,” Fred said.
“Yeah, that’s not likely to get you on Ralph’s good side.”
“Other than that…?”
“Call ‘em,” Leslie suggested. “Maybe they’ve got a cell phone.”
(The Kimbles didn’t have a cell phone.)
“I guess we could look for the truck…” Fred sighed.
“How?”
“I don’t know… it’s not like this is a gigantic town.”
“Oh, you’re kidding,” Kate said, “…right?”
“Let’s just look.”
So, for two hours, they looked. When that didn’t work, they got lunch.
“Any more good ideas, Fred?”
“Well, I know one thing that might work. So far, we’ve been trying to find him at random, right? So it’s really a matter of luck.”
“…and luck can always be helped along,” Kate said. “All right, I’ve got you. But how do we pay for it?”
They wound up in a small park by an artificial pond. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze the water yet, but it was still a dark and windy day, so there was no one around to see. Fred pulled out his knife, opened the blade, and tossed it at Kate. With a wince she jumped back—but caught it by the handle. She squinted at the blade.
“Hey Fred… what gives with the etching?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” he said.
She gave him a hard look. He met it calmly.
“Huh,” she said at last. “Well, I suppose if it was loaded, I’d have gotten more of a charge off it.”
“What are you talking about?” Leslie asked. “What’s so special about that knife?”
“Nothing in particular,” Fred said, as Kate tossed it back to him. Someone watching from a distance might almost think they were a family having a friendly game of catch. Then Fred tossed it to Leslie, and when she caught it, blood welled out of her finger.
“Fred,” Kate said, “You know she can’t do it.”
Fred looked from his wife to his daughter. “Still haven’t been able to make it work?”
“I’ll give it a try,” Leslie said resignedly, tossing the knife back to him, “But no, I never have.”
“Well, you’re still taking the chance. Maybe today’s the day it clicks, huh?”
“I’ll try,” Leslie said. She closed her eyes and whispered, “C’mon… luck be a lady… lead me to Joe Kimble.” She was quiet for a moment, then said “Nothing. Sorry, but… I didn’t feel anything at all.”
“I’ll try,” Kate volunteered. She knelt by the knife and spun it in a circle. When it stopped, she looked in the direction indicated by the blade, frowning.
“…no, I’m not getting anything either,” she said. “Fred? Maybe you’ve got a better fix on them?”
He sighed. “Let’s toss the knife some more. It never hurts to be charged up good, right?”
“No, it just hurts to get charged up,” Leslie said, sucking on her finger.
Kate caught the knife without injury on the second round of tossing, but Fred lost a round piece of flesh about the size of his pinkie nail off his left hand.
“Shit,” he muttered, wiping the knife and pocketing it. “This better be enough to find Kimble. You got a map of the town, honey?”
“No I don’t,” Kate said, ignoring the ‘honey.’ “I do have some band aids, though.”
“Much obliged.”
When their hands were bandaged, they found a pay phone with a phone book. Fred ripped the map out of the front of the book and pinned it to the ground between his two feet. Then he grunted the word “Kimble” and dropped the knife on it, point first. He nodded with satisfaction.
“That time it worked. I could feel it. We’ll find him there, on… Locust street.”
As predicted, the Kimble Exterminator van was on Locust street. The Kimble they found there, however, was not Joe.
* * *
In Chicago, a man looked at a manila file folder and bit his lip.
That morning, he had shaved with an electric razor that was less than a year old. He replaced his electric razor every year. His suit was tailored wool. His shirt, pure Egyptian cotton. His wife had given him diamond cufflinks on their twentieth anniversary. This man’s haircuts cost over a hundred dollars. He got manicures, and pedicures. He owned a tiny pair of silver scissors that he used exclusively to trim his nose hairs.
That morning he’d ordered Carl and Jolene to kill Seth Dobbs, but that wasn’t what put a pensive expression on his moderately jowled and expensively groomed face. He made tough calls. That was why he made the big bucks.
He worked for a multibillionaire named Alex Abel who had stumbled across the truth of America’s occult underground. Abel (like anyone with money and power would be) was shocked to learn that the people who were influencing the metaphysical future of humankind were generally crackpot weirdos who could barely manage a bank account. Yet they were the ones who would (in theory) set the schedule for the apocalypse. They were the ones rewiring the universe with nothing more than a strange set of mental associations and a lot of peculiarly focused willpower. They were the ones who charted and navigated currents in the collective unconscious—currents that ordinary people never sensed or even suspected, even as they were swept along unheeding.
Abel had decided that this circumstance was intolerable and had set out to bring a little order and organization to something that was simultaneously amorphous, invisible, and crucial to the future of humanity. The means to the end was dubbed “The New Inquisition.”
Of course, the key to leadership is often delegation, and Abel had delegated part of his authority (largely in the form of a great sum of money) to the expensively-shaved man. That was fine. Previous to his employment with Alex Abel’s occult conspiracy, the man had been vice president of a pharmaceutical company, and had shouldered the responsibility for fatalities resulting from the testing (and later, the marketing) phases of drug development. Now he was causing the deaths on an individual, rather than a collective basis. That was fine.
What put a furrow on his brow and a frown around his mouth was the possibility of fatality on a more personal level. Specifically, he was contemplating his own, and that of his younger sister.
In the end, he took what he construed to be the noble route. He reached across his lovely desk to an ergonomic telephone and pushed the button marked “secure line.” He dialed a cell number that was supposed to be unassigned.
A bead of sweat ran down his side, from his armpit to his ribs, despite his comfortably climate-controlled office.
He heard ringing on the line, then a computer generated voice said “There is no answer. Please leave a message after the tone.” There was a flat noise, and he spoke.
“Hello. You don’t know me, but I have information that you’ll be very interested in. I’ll call back tonight at…”
“Hello?”
A voice had broken in on the other end of the line. A raspy, tortured voice.
“Oh. Hello… is this…?”
“This is just who you think it is.”
“I’m sorry… I got the machine and I thought…”
“Look, what’s this about?” The voice was slightly impatient, but not unkind.
“Well, I have some information. Information that will interest you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. What are we talking about?”
“The location of a rival godwalker.”
There was silent before the harsh voice replied. “I see. A godwalker of…?”
“The Mystic Hermaphrodite.” The man licked his lip, took a gamble. “Same as you.”
“Hm.” There was a pause. “We should meet. Are you in Chicago?”
“I could be.”
“Could you be downtown in an hour?”
He swallowed, hard. “Yes.”
“You know the Berghoff, down in the Loop? Meet me there in an hour. Get the private room—the one no one’s supposed to know about.”
“How will I know you?”
“Give me the name of a famous woman.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Name some famous woman. Anyone you’d recognize.”
“Uh… Julia Roberts?”
The raw voice made an irritated sound. “Personally, I can’t stand those lips. Pick another.”
The man ran a hand through his hair and confusedly said “Nicole Kidman?”
“Much better. See you in sixty.”
The line disconnected. The man blew out a sigh—half relief, even though he knew the worst was yet to come. He tapped the folder on his desk again. It was very thin. There was almost nothing in it.
The label on the folder said “The Freak.”
* * *
“Ain’t there laws against this kind of bullshit?”
Fred stopped in his tracks, dismay visible on his face. He’d been looking for Joe Kimble, of course, and had never thought that he might find Ralph Kimble instead.
“Hi there Ralph,” he said, licking his lips. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot…”
“I oughtta call the cops. This is malicious harassment, or something.”
“…and I just want you to know I don’t hold it against you, you know, the shotgun and everything…”
“If I had that shotgun, I’d be holding it against you.”
The three Mundys were standing on the sidewalk in front of a two-story house with a lawn full of wind-propelled wooden decorations. Ralph had been by the front stoop, checking for termites. When he saw them approaching, he stood and strode forward, to the middle of the lawn.
Kate pushed past Fred and held out her hand.
“Look, whatever my ex-husband did, let me apologize for him. He didn’t mean it. I’m Kate.”
Ralph looked at her hand like she was offering him a dog turd.
“Lemme guess, you’re supposed to be Joe’s mother.”
“That’s kind of a loaded phrase,” Kate said calmly, “But I’m pretty sure he’s the baby I carried to term, yes.”
“Look, I don’t know what kind of bullshit you weirdos are selling, but I ain’t buying none of it and neither is my son. You got that? Joe Kimble is my son, and neither one of us wants…”
“Why are you so angry?” This was Leslie, who had stepped forward to look Ralph right in the eye.
Looking at her, Ralph turned pale.
Ralph had married Lisa Kuppinger when she was twenty-six—pretty late, by the standards of the time. He’d met her when she was twenty, and Leslie Mundy’s resemblance was strong enough to hit him like a hammer.
“Who are you?” Ralph whispered, staring at the eyes, the hair, that long upper lip.
“I’m Leslie Mundy.”
Ralph was perfectly still. Kate slowly lowered her hand, watching.
“I think something terrible happened, all those years ago,” Leslie said. “A horrible mistake was made. It’s no one’s fault. We’re all suffering from it. But if we could all look past our individual hurts…”
“How… how did this happen?”
Leslie shrugged. “I have no earthly idea.”
“Goddamn it… I mean… I mean, shit! How could the doctors screw this up? I mean, this isn’t the fuckin’ dark ages!” Ralph stomped over to the edge of the curb and sat down suddenly. “I mean, how the hell could a doctor exchange my… my daughter for your son? We’ve got a fuckin’ lawsuit on our hands here, is what we’ve got!”
Fred cleared his throat, and Kate shot him a glare. He scowled back and said “Well, there may be more to it than that. It may not be the hospital’s fault, completely.”
“Huh? Not their fault? You’re pretty forgiving of a bunch of people who gave your baby to strangers! You can do what you want, but I’m gonna take them for every dime they got!”
“Maybe we should talk about that later,” Leslie said gently. Hesitantly, she put a hand on Ralph’s shoulder. He twitched, then looked up at her.
“Is there somewhere we can go and
iron all of this out?” she asked.
“Uh… my house is probably the best,” Ralph said. He rubbed his face, like he was hoping to wipe off his dazed expression. “God. I can’t believe it’s true… if Joe only knew…”
“So…” Fred cleared his throat. “So, where is Joe?”
“I wish I knew,” Ralph said bitterly. “We had a fight last night and after, he… well, he took off somewhere.”
“Any idea where?”
“Oh, he’ll turn up,” Ralph said. “He’ll probably come back when he’s cooled off. Or when he runs out of clean clothes.” He shook his head, then stood, turned and dusted off his knees. The Mundys had drifted closer to him. “So… er, Leslie. Tell me. What… shit, I don’t even know what to ask. What do you do?”
“I do makeup for shows in Las Vegas, part time. I also drive a limo sometimes, to make ends meet.”
“Oh.” Ralph blinked. “That must be very interesting.”
“Not too bad.”
There was an intensely awkward silence. Ralph and Leslie broke it at the same moment.
“I’m sorry,” Ralph said, just as Leslie said “You know, I should really…” Then Kate stepped over to Leslie and gave a gentle nudge with her elbow.
“There’s a lot for Ralph to take in,” Kate said, with a significant look.
“Exactly,” Ralph said, with a sickly smile. “I mean, the idea that I’ve got a daughter… you know, instead of a son. That’s… that’s a big change.”
“Not as big as you might think,” Leslie said. Behind Ralph’s back, Fred shook his head urgently. Ralph caught the movement from the corner of his eye and turned to the other man with a frown.