Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  “Kleine Göre” Eicher whispered. “Come with me!” He started to drag her away when a sharp pain in his right ankle stopped him.

  Stop him! Stop him! He’s always hated you! He’s crazy! For once, Will had to agree with his ghosts. He kicked Eicher in the ankle again as hard as he could.

  Eicher winced. He looked down at Will and grinned. “Little freak,” he said, feeling his anger blossom into something beyond control. He kicked back at Will, his sturdy black Oxford catching the boy in the stomach.

  Will fell to his knees near his silly American soldier doll, and a pack of cigarettes. Eicher’s brand.

  Still dragging Jeannie, Eicher loped behind Will and planted a foot between the boy’s shoulder blades, driving Will face-first into the sand. “Little cigarette-stealing freak.” Eicher shifted his foot up onto the back of Will’s head and began bearing down.

  The boy was struggling, the little girl was crying and Eicher was feeling that all was right in the world when the back of his head blew apart in a flash of light and pain. At least that’s what Eicher thought as he collapsed on all fours into the sandbox, until he glanced over his shoulder and saw haggard old Stern standing over him like some horrible creature out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. For a moment Eicher was a little boy in Berlin again getting the scheisse scared out of him as his father read one of the old stories. Then Stern kicked Eicher in the ass and started swinging a gnarled mahogany cane and Eicher came to his senses, scuttling out of the sandbox like a crab.

  Will shook his head free of sand and stood just in time to see Eicher hold out a hand to the little girl. She picked up her Barbie and the stuffed rabbit, looked at Will and said, “I have to go. Goodbye.”

  When she was within reach Eicher grabbed her wrist and cruelly jerked her to him. Then they walked away.

  Will looked down and saw her hair ribbon lying on the sand. Without thinking he picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said, turning to Stern. Both Stern and Will knew Doc was as close as the boy could come to calling the old man dad.

  Stern tousled the boy’s hair. “You must go and continue training now.”

  Will nodded, but said, “I hate all that fighting, Doc. Sometimes the teachers really hurt me. I like it better when you and me read books together and study stuff.”

  “You and I,” Stern corrected Will, trying to keep the sadness out of his voice. “I like it too, the quiet times.” He knew that as each day passed William was less and less his, and soon the boy would be taken from his guidance for good, to be molded into an untraceable super-assassin or some such nonsense. He knew the Compound would use the boy up and then discard him, and he also knew that the tougher the boy was the better his odds of survival were. The more Will learned about the Compound and its ways, the greater his chances would be of one day breaking free.

  Stern looked down at the boy. Perhaps he was just getting old, but more and more often he found himself wishing he was just an office clerk somewhere, a shopkeeper, maybe even a farmer, a simple man doing a simple job, just him and William. He could look out for the boy and keep him safe. On weekends they could go fishing. He shook his head over his silly dreams. This was the real world, he told himself, and two things are certain. Stern knew that he would probably not live much longer. He was, after all, a doctor, and was able to diagnose himself with a minimum of self-delusion. He also knew that to survive, the boy would have to be completely independent. There were many more bruises and scars in store for the youngster, no matter how much Stern might wish otherwise.

  “You must be strong, William. Strong and brave. One day you will be big enough that no one will be able to kick into your face some sand.”

  “Not even stinky Eicher?”

  “Not even him.” Stern’s bushy eyebrows, now snow-white, came together. “Eicher is stinky?”

  “Yah, shtinky,” Will said, imitating Stern. Stern laughed. “Shtinky like he chust varted in hiss pants.”

  The old man put one arm around the boy, shaking his walking stick in the air with the other. “I certainly kicked him in the pants, no?” Stern’s words were slurred by his partial paralysis. “Knocked off his block, just like Al Capone. Right out of the park.”

  Will snorted laughter. “You mean Babe Ruth, Doc. Al Capone was a gangster. Babe Ruth was the ball player.”

  Stern shrugged. “They both always looked alike to me. Although perhaps I could make a good gangster mit this deadly walking stick, no?” Will laughed again and Stern said, “It is nap time for me. Walk me back to my bed, kleines Teufelchen?”

  They started back to Stern’s cottage at the far end of the Compound.

  “I nearly forgot,” Stern said with a lopsided grin. “I have for you a gift.” He reached into one pocket of his tweed jacket and withdrew a tiny transistor radio. “This is for you. Now you can take with you your music and listen anywhere to those, the insects, I forget the name.”

  “The Beatles!” Will enthused, grabbing the radio and switching it on. “This is groovy, Doc!”

  Stern had no idea why a reference to grooves where there were none was indication of a positive or a pleasantry but he smiled just the same, trying not to grimace when a jockey of discs announced that the next song was from a compilation entitled Rubber Soul, performed by William’s beloved Beatles. A young man who sounded on the verge of losing his voice began screaming that it was the end, little girl.

  Will bopped along to the music, letting the small radio swing madly from its plastic strap. He was thinking that Eicher might like this song since it was about some guy who didn’t want his girl messing around with anyone. Maybe the pretty girl he had just met liked The Beatles. Sliding a hand into his pocket, he felt the ribbon he had picked up and looked back over his shoulder, wondering if she lived in the Compound like he did.

  Before Will could ask, Stern said, “Forget about the girl, William.”

  Will knew that tone. He could ask all day and Stern wouldn’t give away any secrets. But he did ask, “Why did she go with him, Doc? He was mean to her.”

  Stern looked up at the clouds. “She is to him as you are to me,” he said.

  Will wondered if that meant she was adopted, like he was. “But what about—”

  “Forget about her, please,” Stern said.

  “All right,” Will said reluctantly. They walked on together.

  In time, Will forget almost everything about meeting the girl with no name, and it became one more brief and unpleasant moment in the life of a seven year-old boy. But he kept the hair ribbon and the hazy memory of the pretty blonde girl with the gentle touch long after he could recall the details of that day.

  That length of ribbon would ultimately outlast everything; Stern, The Beatles, Eicher ... and Will as well.

  6

  Monkey Business

  Stella D’Oro was pissed off. Her dark Sicilian beauty was enhanced by anger and at the moment she was stunning in her rage. She sat behind the wheel waiting for Louis Rich and Oscar Meyer to finish screwing with the Pontiac’s punctured radiator. The car was toast. Stella was hoping another ride was already on the way.

  Randall Kraft had acted on Doctor Mondani’s suggestion and resurrected President Kennedy’s old noli scribo Executive Order to destroy any evidence of the genetic research of doctors Stern and Eicher. This was an attempt to clean up potential embarrassments from the Compound’s past before President Clinton went ahead with proposed plans to open the government to public scrutiny.

  It had seemed like the simplest job any of the Compound’s trackers had been assigned in years. Retrieve Eicher’s girl. Big deal Stella thought.

  Jeannie Norman was unarmed, she had no special skills, she had no idea she was wanted by them, and she was crossing the state moving from one minimum wage job to another under unimaginative aliases. They could probably pin Eicher’s murder on her, but that would open a can of worms that was better off sealed. Let the LAPD worry about who had bashed in the skull of the old
pervert with a 32oz can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli. Now that the Compound had managed to reactivate the tracking device planted on the target they were finding it easier than ever to close in on her.

  Hit the road, grab Eicher’s girl and bring her to Doctor Mondani at Compound West. Easy, right?

  Stella fumed. Thinking about the mess they had seen as they swept through the diner made her nauseous. Not the deaths themselves, but the crude work of a misogynist. Not the splatters of blood, but the splash of testosterone. A man had done that damage. No woman’s body should be violated by a man the way Bonnie’s had been.

  They had hit the road and found the target sandwiched between two men. One of those chromosomally mismatched mutations somehow had the sense to shoot at the Pontiac’s one weak spot. Stella glared at the car’s hood behind which Louis and Oscar worked. As men, they were tolerable only because they were cowed by her.

  Now the target was gone, a County Sheriff was involved, and some mystery men had interfered, but they appeared to be seeking the man who shot out their radiator, not the target.

  Stella turned down the volume on the radio scanner. The Sheriff’s Deputy calling for back-up was probably the same one who had fallen for their little charade earlier, when Oscar had pretended to pee in the desert while Louis lay flat behind a rise in the earth, his pistol trained on the cop’s head. Stella and Laura had been leaning against the car acting as if things were just fine, their legs and hips covering the bullet-riddled grille of the car.

  She looked at Laura Scudder sitting in the passenger seat. Sometimes she wished she and Laura could just disappear together and forget about the Compound. This job was getting weird, and dangerous. She imagined herself on a white beach, far from anything and anyone, and with her—

  Stella blinked. In her mind she had not seen witty, funny Laura, but the target, a woman who had so little brainpower all she could do was serve eggs and toast and pour coffee. But Stella recalled the pictures she had studied while preparing for the job. She’d had to memorize everything about the face and body of the target so the woman couldn’t hide from them behind wigs and hair dye and contacts and make-up, beneath padding, under restraining tapes or on high heels.

  Stella had found a great deal of material to study. After all, the target was Eicher’s creation, and Eicher had worked for the Compound. Indeed, the target had been born in the Compound and had lived there until Eicher had spirited her away.

  After the target had presumably brained Eicher and disappeared, the Compound flexed federal muscle and acquired all of the old man’s private research, which the LAPD tried in vain to retain as evidence in an open murder case. Over the years Eicher’s research had degenerated from clinical scientific study to the full-blown perversion of a voyeur. In the home he had shared with Jeannie he had always been watching her, even in her most private moments. Watching and photographing and videotaping. As a result, there was no shortage of material to study; filed photos, unexposed film and stacks of videotapes. It was the detailed record of a peeping tom and it was now being catalogued and digitized at Compound West.

  Stella knew every facet of the target’s face and was familiar with every inch of that body. She knew how the target walked and talked and laughed and cried. And sometimes, when she should have been thinking of Laura, Stella was thinking of the target instead. She had seen endless footage of the target made-up and scrubbed clean, fully clothed and completely naked, all of which had been taken without the target’s knowledge.

  With the help of Justice Department approval to override the LADP and confiscate the mountain of material collected from Eicher’s home, the team assigned to sort through the man’s records and personal effects found an astounding amount of video footage of Jeannie Norman bathing and showering and undressing. The team cleaning up after Eicher quickly became an all female enterprise when the notes taken by men cataloging Eichers’ videos and photos became erratic after a week or two. They had all heard about the appeal of Eicher’s girl and it appeared that those stories were true. Only one man in ten was able to ignore her in the flesh, and she was so magnetic her appeal extended to still and moving images.

  Some of the men tried to smuggle home videotape or stole printed stills and pinned them up in their workstations. Some were caught beating off over the images by co-workers, or worse, by wives and girlfriends, and many reacted with surprising violence when those pictures or tapes were taken away.

  It was hoped that the experimental pairing of gay trackers would give the Compound an edge in the search for Jeannie Norman. That was why Louis and Oscar were here. What the Compound didn’t know was that Stella and Laura were also gay, and that was something the women did not want to share, especially in an organization as racist and sexist as the Compound. Stella had to give grudging credit to Louis and Oscar for not hiding their orientation and using it to their advantage.

  Even at the age of seventeen, when she had last been before Eicher’s cameras, the target had a true woman’s body, and during her search for the target Stella couldn’t help but think of the woman from time to time. Now Stella had new images of the woman. A tie clip worn by Duncan Heinz contained a miniature digital camera that had captured and transmitted images of the target, as well as the lean mystery man who had appeared to help her, to Compound West.

  Aged twenty years from the photos Stella had studied earlier, the target still looked wonderful. Ms. Norman wasn’t an aerobicized, electrolyzed, molded-for-men woman of the 90’s. Jeannie had an hourglass figure with natural fullness and natural sags. Under her uniform her belly seemed gracefully rounded, not a flat wall of muscle. Her breasts weren’t as high as they’d been when she was a teenager. There was an unmistakable wrinkle or two on her face and most likely a bit of cellulite on her ass. It wasn’t just Jeannie’s figure, but the way she moved and carried herself, an intangible, indescribable something that drew the eyes of others to her.

  Jeannie Norman had a real woman’s body, all the flaws of which were negated by the most beautifully pale skin Stella had ever seen, skin that was surely the softest thing in existence and if given the opportunity to press her body against that white, glowing flesh—

  Oscar slammed the Pontiac’s hood down and Stella was jolted back to reality. “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  Two Lincoln Town Cars came down the road and stopped beside the Pontiac. A man got out of the first car. He walked to the Pontiac, gave Stella the keys, and then got into the second Town Car, which turned back the way it had come.

  Stella, Laura, Louis and Oscar got into the remaining Town Car. She started the engine and continued their pursuit of the target.

  * * *

  Carlos sat up and looked at his watch. He figured he’d been lying on the ground like a piece of meat for about fifteen minutes.

  The Taurus was gone. Bluesuit and greysuit were gone. Will was gone. So was Jeannie.

  Carlos was angry with himself. His truck wasn’t going anywhere. A Lincoln went roaring by, two women in front, two men in back. They peered at him and then faced forward. Thanks for the help, Carlos thought when the car was out of sight. He heard a noise and stood too quickly, took a breath to steady himself, and then walked to the patrol car. The dead cop was sitting up, holding his head.

  “Dios,” Carlos said.

  There was a bloody welt along the side of the cop’s head and a piece of Al’s left ear was gone. What remained was a pink and red mess that looked like a pit bull had been at it. The collar and shoulder of his shirt were spattered with blood. Al got to his knees and swayed. Carlos helped him to his feet.

  “Got a first aid kit in the trunk,” Al said, leaning against the patrol car and gritting his teeth against the pain as he picked up his revolver and slipped it into the holster. “Keys are in the ignition.”

  Carlos ducked and looked into the car. “No, they aren’t. Maybe they tossed them.”

  Al shook his head. He moved to the front of the Crown Vic, popped the hood and retrieved a small metal
box, a magnetic key holder. “Always losing my keys,” he said, tossing the box to Carlos. “Got spares everywhere.”

  Carlos opened the trunk and pulled out a big plastic case with a red cross on it. Al had eased himself into the driver’s seat, and Carlos squatted beside him, holding a bottle of alcohol. “Man, you look like you pissed off Mike Tyson. A big chunk of your ear is missing.”

  “Damn,” Al said.

  Carlos opened the bottle. “This is gonna hurt, Officer.”

  “Call me Al. Al Johnson. And it couldn’t hurt as much as getting shot does, Mr—”

  “Guerrera,” he replied, as he soaked a gauze pad and slapped it against Al’s ruined ear. “Carlos Guerrera.”

  “Turn your head, Carlos!” Al gasped.

  Carlos looked away. Al let out a yell that made Carlos’ ears ring.

  Al dry swallowed a couple of Aspirin tablets, gripping the steering wheel and gritting his teeth as Carlos picked black flecks out of his ear with a cotton swab. Carlos bathed the ear in disinfectant, and wrapped a bandage around Al’s head to secure a sterile pad against his ear.

  “That should hold until you get to a hospital.” Carlos said.

  Al nodded. It hurt like a sonofabitch.

  The cop picked up the mike and contacted the CHP dispatcher again, asking what had happened to his back up.

  * * *

  The four in the Taurus drove in silence. In the back seat Richards kept an eye on Will. Seated beside Dicks, Jeannie stared out her side window. Dicks was driving.

  Dicks tried to focus on the road but couldn’t help notice Jeannie’s legs, couldn’t ignore the way her loose uniform had shifted up her thighs when she sat down. His eyes scanned the desert and the road and then flicked down and to the right. He checked the road again. Another peek at those legs. He reached over and put his hand on her knee, giving it a gentle squeeze. Christ! Her skin was like silk!