Carlos stared at the rear-view mirror in disbelief. The Ford had taken up immediate pursuit just as the Pontiac had begun to dwindle in the distance. “What shit is this?”
The trackers they had left behind were one thing, a group Will could deal with if he had to. He’d had the same training they had and could anticipate many of their reactions. The Kens were a different story, red-blooded American boys and cold-blooded killers.
As Will tried to figure a way out of their situation without getting the cook and the waitress killed, Jeannie watched him. He was deep in thought, staring off into some middle distance. A thought occurred to him and he looked confident, dangerous, and amused, a flicker of expression that was gone in an instant.
Jeannie was reminded of a movie she had watched on TV not long ago. King Creole. In the film Elvis Presley played a punk with an attitude and talent. At one point he rescued a damsel in distress, looking confident, dangerous and amused as he broke a couple of beer bottles to fend off two goons. Jeannie shook her head and wondered why she was thinking about Elvis movies at a time like this.
The pickup began losing speed. Carlos looked at the mirror again. The spill of gasoline had created a long black fan that glistened on the dry surface of the highway. The Ford Taurus behind them seemed to be riding on it. The pickup engine cut out. The truck rolled a hundred yards and then coasted to a stop as Carlos turned onto the shoulder of the road, grit under the tires rasping and popping. They all looked back and saw the Ford come to a stop.
“Tell these clowns you don’t know me,” Will said. He looked Carlos in the eye. “You two were heading into town, saw me thumbing and picked me up.” He looked at Jeannie. In the relative dimness of the cab her skin was glowing like porcelain. “You didn’t want Carlos to stop for me. Both of you are angry at each other. That’s why you’re so tense.”
Doors opened on each side of the Taurus and two men got out. Carlos would have laughed if his guts hadn’t been in such a knot. Growing up with older sisters he’d seen a lot of dolls, lots of Barbies and lots of their accessories, and these guys looked like Ken dolls. They were tall and slim, wearing nearly identical suits, one blue and one gray. The suits would have been impressive if they weren’t so rumpled and dusty. Graysuit had blond hair. Bluesuit was a redhead, and under the mid-day sun it looked to Carlos like the guy’s head was on fire. They started walking toward the pickup, their right hands reaching under their jackets. Carlos didn’t think they were going for their wallets.
“Remember,” Will whispered. “You don’t know who I am. Some assholes shot the shit out of your truck a few minutes ago, but you don’t know why.” Will opened the door on his side.
“Do you know them?” Jeannie asked.
“Yeah. I met them earlier today and messed them around a little. I guess they’re pissed.”
“Hey man,” Carlos said urgently, “are they gonna kill you?” He was thrown when Will grinned.
“I bet they’ll try.”
Jeannie impulsively touched his arm. There was a little tingle felt by both of them. “Be careful.” He nodded and climbed out of the truck. When he slammed the door shut she noticed that he had left his big pistol lying on the seat.
* * *
A shining white convertible seemed to float across the parking lot of In the Shade. The forty year-old Thunderbird had a blood-red interior. The driver was dressed in shades of white and cream. He sat behind the wheel a moment and let the dust settle around him.
He appeared to be in his late thirties and his Middle-Eastern heritage was clear in his dark eyes, shoulder-length shining black hair and coffee-and-cream complexion. His compelling face could have made him a fortune on TV or in the movies. He wore a stud in his left ear, a small sterling silver fish. Today his hair was in a ponytail, gleaming like polished jet.
Getting out of the car and straightening his suit, he adjusted his silk tie, shot the cuffs of his shirt, and walked toward the diner’s large window frame, shards of glass snapping and crunching under his white bucks.
He searched the inside of the diner quickly, and decided the woman who had been shot in the heart would serve him best. The one with the broken fingers had taken a bullet through the brain and that would require more time and effort than he had to spare. The fact that one of the women was naked under her blazer certainly influenced his decision. A little T & A could brighten the darkest day. Her body was slumped sideways in the booth. He’d seen her dossier. She was working under the name Bonnie Hubbard.
He slid into the booth beside her, admiring her legs. Getting a grip on her hair he pulled her upright, enjoying the way her breasts bobbed. His left arm went around her back, holding her steady as he put his right hand between her breasts over the bullet wound. He closed his eyes. His eyes were closed on purpose. If he left them open he’d look at her perfect tits, and soon he’d want a handful of them. That was a waste of time he could do without. Fucking the dead had its high points, they didn’t talk back, for one, but right now he was in a hurry. Look but don’t touch, he thought.
The big clock over the serving counter ticked quietly. A bird on the roof ruffled its feathers. A fly buzzed by the man looking for a late lunch and settled beside a tacky drop of blood. “Yummy,” the man in white said in a raw voice, tasting the blood as the fly tucked in to a free lunch.
The flesh beneath his hand was now warmer than room temperature. He began tapping his foot and humming. The body in his grasp was loosening, relaxing from the rigor of death. The heat under his hand grew stronger and the man in white smiled serenely when he felt a heartbeat.
Bonnie’s eyes fluttered open.
“Welcome back, baby,” the man in white said.
When he raised his hand the wound was gone.
* * *
Carlos and Jeannie watched in the rear-view mirror as Will walked back to meet the redhead and the blond. The three men stopped halfway between the pickup and the car. They exchanged words as graysuit frisked Will and found an ankle holster holding a revolver, tearing it free with a shhhrik of Velcro. Bluesuit kicked at Will’s feet and Will fell flat on his back. Bluesuit stood over Will and began talking to him as graysuit approached the truck.
Carlos opened his door and had one foot on the ground before graysuit said, “Nice and slow, bean-dog.”
Graysuit gave Carlos a shove and made him lean over the side of the hood while he patted Carlos down. Graysuit gestured at Jeannie with his gun. “You too, babe. Out of the truck.” He cocked his head at Will. “One of his holsters is empty, which means the weapon is here. You better step out with open hands, sweet thing.”
Jeannie climbed out of the truck, leaving Will’s gun on the seat.
Graysuit approached her and pushed her forward onto the other side of the hood in the same position as Carlos. “Could this be the notorious Jeannie Norman? Nice.”
“That’s Jeannie Nelson, tough guy,” Carlos said. He was no longer sure if her name was Nelson or Bellows and wondered why the names sounded so familiar.
Graysuit looked confused.
Jeannie shook her head. “Actually, Carlos, my name really is Jeannie Norman.”
Now Carlos looked confused.
Graysuit gave Jeannie a brief frisk with his free hand. His face registered a few changes. Surprise. Delight. He grinned, and his hand started caressing and squeezing.
Jeannie moved under his rough touch. “Stop that,” she said breathlessly.
Graysuit kept up his manual exploration, running his hot palm over an ass like a ripe fruit. “Your mouth says no,” he whispered, feeling her respond to him even as she shook her head. “But your ass says yes.”
“Hey man,” Carlos said, “leave—”
“Quiet, bean-dog,” graysuit whispered.
Jeannie closed her eyes as graysuit undid a button on her uniform and slid his hand inside, his fingers skittering across her brassiere like the legs of an insect and then burrowing into one of the cups. Graysuit whistled softly in her ear. She started
breathing faster and graysuit said, “Oh yeah.” She made her legs tremble slightly and wondered if she’d ever cease to be amazed at the effect a single pair of balls can have on billions of brain cells.
Jeannie turned her head. Her eyes were half-closed, her mouth open as she let out a sound like a reluctant sigh. She placed her left hand over the cold claw that was clutching her breast. Looking into graysuit’s eyes, she brought her face close to his as if to kiss him, and then she bit into the end of his nose with her perfect white teeth.
Graysuit’s body lurched. His eyes opened wide. Jeannie grabbed his gun with her right hand and aimed the weapon away from her. Tears squirted from graysuit’s eyes. He screamed, sounding like a goose being flattened by a steamroller. “Whonk!”
Carlos leaped across the hood, using his forward motion to drive a fist into the side of graysuit’s head. Graysuit was torn out of Jeannie’s grip and blood gushed out of the end of his nose. Jeannie grimaced and spat a plug of meat out of her mouth. Graysuit’s eyes rolled up and he hit the ground hard, raising a puff of dust.
Carlos scrambled down beside Jeannie, out of bluesuit’s sight. He picked up graysuit’s gun. They were startled when bluesuit bellowed, “Fucking Christ!”
* * *
While graysuit was occupied with Carlos and Jeannie, Will had been chatting with bluesuit.
“Thanks for the skullfucking back at the rest stop,” Bluesuit said.
“My pleasure,” Will had replied, looking up at the man.
“Take your last breath, buddy, ‘cause you’re going to die.” Bluesuit was ready to put a bullet in this fuckhead’s heart, but the guy didn’t seem concerned.
Will was still lying on his back. He got comfortable, resting on his elbows. “You’re Richards, right?”
Richards smiled. “That’s right. Not that it’s going to matter to you a minute from now.”
“They may not know you guys are closing files for the Compound, but the Bureau thinks you two are fags,” Will said.
Richards stared and then blinked.
“They’ve come across your work and suspect you work for an agency, but they think you guys are losing it. Renegades, is how they described you, over-stressed, and showing signs of explosively repressed homosexuality disguised as sociopathic homophobia.”
Color crept up out of Richards’ collar. His face was almost as red as his hair. “That’s a lie.”
“I read it in an FBI file. Come on, you knew the Feds were eyeballing you, and now you know what they think.”
That was pure bullshit. Will had broken into an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in San Diego a month ago trying to confirm who the Kens were working for even though he was sure they were with the Compound. The Bureau was aware of the mystery duo, following in their wake and noting that Richards and Dicks had flashed IDs for the Bureau, the Secret Service, the CIA and the NSA. The Bureau didn’t have much, but all Will needed was a distraction. Just one.
Richards looked up and down the highway, and then glared down at Will. “The Feds don’t know shit. If I’m a fag, you’re Jesus Christ.”
“And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”
“Very good. Matthew 7:23. You think I’m an asshole, huh?”
“Yeah,” Will replied, “I do, Richards. But it has nothing to do with the fact that you are gay.”
Gritting his teeth with rage, Richards looked like a red-faced lunatic. “You lousy fuck,” he said, “I’m no ass-bandit.”
Will gave him a sympathetic smile. “It’s okay, man, you don’t have to deny yourself any more. And if you aren’t gay, why do you dress like that?”
Richards looked furious, and bewildered. “Are you saying I dress like a fairy?”
Will sniggered. “Jesus. Richards, look at your shoes.”
Richards did. When the barrel of the gun strayed away from him Will kicked out at the man’s ankles. As his feet were swept out from under him Richards cried, “Fucking Christ!”
Will leaped to his feet, grabbing Richards’ wrist and giving it a twist. The Glock slipped out of Richards’ hand and Will retrieved it.
“Hey Carlos,” Will called toward the pickup, “You two okay?”
“Yeah,” Carlos said. He stood up, holding graysuit’s gun. Jeannie appeared beside him, wiping her mouth with a tissue. “This guy has a hell of a nosebleed though.”
Will gestured with the gun. “Let’s go over to the pickup,” he said.
Richards was pissed. He stood and brushed himself off, and then smiled.
Coming down the road at a leisurely pace was a white and gold police car.
“Nuts,” Will said under his breath.
A Page from the Past
Hall of Justice, Los Angeles, California, August 6, 1962
Lionel Eicher was nervous. The night was warm and sweat was beaded on his nearly bald head. He was sitting behind the wheel of a car parked down the street from the Hall of Justice. In the bowels of that building was the coroner’s office. He looked at his watch. Any moment now.
His most recent meeting with Kennedy’s people did not go well. They wanted to see concrete results of his work and he had nothing so far. He could not show them William Hill, who was the result of an abandoned project and might yet turn out to have brain damage. He could not show them his most recent achievement, a living infant suspended in synthetic liquor amnii inside a plastic tank in a Compound laboratory. That child would be born soon, but Lionel did not want anyone examining the child until he knew exactly what he was dealing with. He got a bad feeling whenever he was near the child in the artificial womb. Perhaps it was just foolish superstition, but one never knew. No, he needed another child, a healthy, normal product of the clone program that he could show Kennedy.
And he knew where to start. With table scraps.
Under this building in the rooms of the L.A. County Coroners’ Office a certain piggish harlot lay cooling on a slab, a slut who had been the object of a million masturbatory fantasies, a pseudo-blond cock-gobbling whore who was hailed as the world’s greatest sex symbol.
Eicher was disgusted by the thought of women like her. True, she did have an innate beauty which if molded could have amounted to more than it ultimately did, but the empty-headed blonde had never done anything for Lionel and he had seen her stumble and mumble through at least three of her pictures.
Now, if someone with refined tastes, an exceptional education and superior breeding had been able to guide Marilyn Monroe as a young girl and fill her head with knowledge instead of the semen of old kike movie producers they could have brought to life a ravishing and refined creature.
Eicher cursed himself for letting his mind wander. While that zaftig grotesque lay dying cell by cell as the coroner opened her up, a man to whom Eicher had promised a great deal of money was spiriting away a few scraps of the woman, scraps which the man would record as prepared slides and frozen samples. Surely their disappearance would not be noticed, at least not for some time. The man would deliver these scraps to Lionel. Lionel in turn would use them in his next procedure, and when he showed President Kennedy the result of his labors, surely the President would be impressed.
After all, hadn’t one of Kennedy’s greatest thrills in life been sticking his cock into the bottle-blonde floozy’s soiled orifices, festering holes which had already accompanied the assaults of many a rich, aging Jude’s ceremonially flayed prick?
How would Kennedy feel when he learned that a part of his beloved whore lived on? In Eicher’s creation there would be more than just the screen slut Kennedy lusted after. He could easily cut and paste the DNA of this new being with snippets of other genes using Stern’s techniques, making in effect a new and improved Marilyn Monroe. He could also use Stern’s deceptively simple process for lengthening the telomeres, the caps on the end of each strand of genetic matter that controlled the rate at which an organism would age. If the telomeres were not altered his newborn clone could t
heoretically have the same genetic age as her thirty-six year-old source, resulting in a far shorter life span. He could give her a straight nose without surgery. He could remove her weakness for drugs and alcohol. And he could give her flawless, white-blonde hair, that gene being among the first Stern had isolated at Hitler’s request.
Eicher lit a cigarette and waited.
Soon a young man in a white lab coat dashed to the car. He was holding a small plastic bag filled with crushed ice. Eicher accepted the bag with relief, and watched the young man lean against the car, one arm on the roof, as if having a chat with an old friend.
“They took pictures of her last night, man. Pictures!”
Eicher shrugged and removed a small glass vial from the bag. He held a penlight up to the vial and nodded. In the vial were scraps of meat, drops of blood and fragments of bone, the kind of detritus that was often caught in the teeth of a surgical saw. He had a small cooler on the seat beside him.
“Rolled her out, pulled down the sheet and snapped away. Damn!”
Eicher raised the lid of the cooler and dry ice fumes wafted out, filling the car with their peculiar odor. He put the vial into the cooler and closed the lid. Then he took a thick manila envelope bearing the man’s name from his jacket pocket, amused that he and the man in the white coat shared the same first name. He smiled and watched the schwarzer Junge fret.
“Somebody stole some of her stuff. Personal shit.” He leaned forward, whispering. “And I swear to Christ, I think somebody’s been fucking her!” The young black man shook his head. “Man, I gotta get out of this business.”
“Well then, Lionel,” Eicher said. “This may help.” He handed the man the envelope containing the cash, put the car in gear, and drove away.
4
The Prince and the Showgirl
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 6