He cursed me, but he agreed to do it.
I could have asked the lieutenant to call him to set up the appointment, but I had to hear his acquiescence, had to be sure he’d really make the appointment. Without mercy, I said to him, “Rick, I want to be able to tell your wife that Lt. Randolph actually saw you at ten-fifteen tomorrow morning.”
That got him. “All right!” he said, shouting at me.
Last, I called Mom.
She said things were cool, and she said, “Grace is a nice woman.”
“Absolutely. You taking her grocery shopping with you tomorrow morning, Mom?”
“Grocery—?” She stopped herself. “Am I?”
“Big sale on at ten-fifteen. I’d get there before that, and then hang around a while afterward, introduce her to folks, let her see what a friendly little town you have up there.”
“She’ll want to move here, by the time I finish.”
“That’s fine.”
“You lake care, Daughter.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
My mother didn’t know what I was up to, she rarely did anymore, but she was quick to understand, and you don’t need facts for that. She used to tell me a story, drilled it into me, really, her favorite story from mythology. Where other girls heard about Snow White, I heard the one about Daphne and Apollo. Apollo’s a god, Daphne’s a wood nymph, and he wants her, but she runs away. Just when he’s about to catch her, and she’s desperate, she prays to her father, a river-god, for help. Her daddy, thinking he’s doing a good thing, saves her by turning her into a tree. Thanks a lot, Dad. You couldn’t turn Apollo into a tree, instead, and let your daughter run free? My mother always said the moral of this story is: Don’t trust the fathers. Never ask the fathers for help. They will freeze you where you stand, always, to protect their precious status quo.
The inference was: When I need help, ask Mom.
I wasn’t crazy about my own plan.
It was all more complicated than I liked, but I had a lot of alibis to arrange, my own included. I also had to work fast, because I couldn’t stall Grace out of town forever. What I was planning to do was take Heckler out. Just like that. No farting around. Strike first. Set him up and take him out, in a way that protected Grace, Rick, and me from any suspicion. I was crossing a line here, a line I hadn’t crossed since Vietnam.
The rest of the setup was easy, even enjoyable, requiring a couple of hours of scouting near the halfway house for a good shooting gallery, and a few hours of rehearsal with my clothing changes and with my equipment, to develop certain ambidextrous skills.
I went to sleep thinking about Vietnam. Bad move, resulting in weird dreams. By now, most everybody knows we had assassination squads working in country, but hardly anyone knows—and no one would believe it even if you showed them photographs, which I could—there were women involved. Let me put it this way: Not every peacenik who traveled to Hanoi was a pacifist, not every girl with a cross on her uniform was a nurse, not every female with a pencil was a journalist. This all happened, you understand, before I realized—it was a man vet who bitterly told me this—that all soldiers, especially draftees, are prisoners of their government. You don’t believe me? Name one other job you can get shot for leaving.
I didn’t dream about ’Nam, though. I dreamed about my mother. She was coming toward me, smiling with determination, a bottle of almond-and-straw-berry-scented shampoo in her hand. She was going to wash my hair. I really didn’t want her to use that stuff on me, and I really didn’t want her to get hold of my head.
I woke up screaming.
Then I lay there thinking—what a dramatic response to such a nothing little dream. My heart was thudding with fear and my upper body was slick with sweat. I put my hands on my chest right above where the X rays had shown the shadow, and I thought: Weird.
After that, I slept like a baby.
A cancerous baby.
When I awoke, I realized that being trained as an assassin is like knowing how to type: it’s a skill you can always fall back on. Ever since I sensed what I was going to do about Jerry Heckler, I’d been thinking about him, but also about a certain child molester I read about who was released on a technicality, and about a terrorist who has somehow finagled his way into a minimum security prison.
I have debts from ’Nam.
And I’d been thinking, maybe I could pay them off—pick them off—one by one, starting with Heckler. Then I could write up my stories—like this one—and get them published anonymously to scare some of the bad guys. Let them start looking over their shoulders and wondering if they could be next. I was getting real excited about this plan. Like Mom always said: Angie, try to leave this world a better place than you found it.
Yes, ma’am.
I was almost laughing as I dressed, turning myself into a plain little wren of a woman. My equipment—sniper’s rifle, telescopic scope, silencer, ammo, tripod, cellular telephone—disassembled quickly and fit perfectly into an ordinary straw bag that I had reinforced for strength. Over my first layer of camouflage, I slipped on thin plastic gloves, then put on coveralls, a well-padded jacket with a hood, a baseball cap with a long bill, and men’s work shoes over my thin ladies’ slippers. I’d already stashed a tool chest in my car after my practice sessions the night before.
As the old song advised: Walk like a man.
I would go up on the roof of a building across from the halfway house dressed as a workman with a tool chest. I would come down as a little wren with a straw bag, a woman so plain as to be nearly invisible.
It was a gorgeous day, chilly, sunny, no clouds.
And it was 9:45 a.m.
Up on the roof, at ten-fifteen, I called the halfway house on my cellular phone and told the man who answered that I was from the gas company and that we had a major gas leak on the block.
“Evacuate. Get everybody out now.”
“Right!” he agreed. People can be so gullible.
Then I called the lieutenant and asked her if Rick Kairn was there yet.
“Sitting right here,” she announced, sounding smug.
At that moment, Jerry Heckler walked out the front door of the halfway house. He was a big man, with a lovely large chest for aiming at, and I had ammo that would take down a grizzly, no mistake. I had to fire a cannonball, because silencers dissipate power.
“Tell me what you’re telling him,” I suggested to Janet.
As she did, I placed one finger of my left hand on the Mute button on my telephone and eased the trigger of the rifle with my right forefinger. Ambidextrous, for sure! And right then—at the worst possible moment in terms of the job—my memory kicked in.
It wasn’t a Vietnam flashback.
What I remembered was that fear resides in an almond-shaped organ deep in the brain, the amygdala. Trigger that, and you trigger terror.
Terror. Heart pounding. Cold sweats.
Like my dream. Mom and the shampoo. The almond-and-strawberry-scented shampoo. I didn’t know what the strawberry meant, but I knew the almond meant: fear.
Mom?
Shit! I didn’t want to think about this now!
As she had warned me, I had never gone to “the fathers” for advice. Thousands of my male contemporaries had and they’d ended up in ’Nam. I had only gone to “the mothers.” And here I was with a gun in my hand anyway.
I felt confused, paralyzed.
In that moment, with one finger on the Mute button … and Janet talking into my ear … and one eye on Jerry Heckler’s chest … and another finger on a trigger, I felt empty as a jar.
Then I resighted, and fired the rifle.
When what noise there was subsided, I released the Mute button. And all the while, the lieutenant was telling me what she was telling Rick Kairn, who was seated right there in her office while his wife was being introduced to a dozen people fifty miles away. If the cops got suspicious enough of me to go to the trouble of tracking this cellular call, I was in deep shit. But, hey, I was already i
n deep shit according to several doctors, so what was a little more? Especially if I kept a crocodile from eating people?
Some days, everything works.
It all went perfectly.
Last week, I had lunch with Grace.
“We’re safe, aren’t we?” she asked me.
“Yes, at least from Heckler, I can’t say about the rest of your life.”
She smiled at me. “Thank you, however you did it.”
“You’re welcome. Now will you tell me what else you learned while you were dead?”
“I learned that we’re already forgiven.”
“Well, that is good news.”
She laughed. “I learned that every evil act is actually a cry from the heart for healing, it is a plea to be reunited with God.”
“Okay,” I said, while she smiled at the skepticism on my face. “Then tell me this, who’s God?”
She laughed again. “There’s no ‘who.’ There’s nothing—no thing—out there. It’s all in here.” Grace pointed to her chest, right about where my tumor is. “God is a name we give to love.”
“Great bumper sticker,” said I, tactless as ever.
But it seemed Grace wasn’t defensive and I couldn’t offend her. I decided not to mention that some scientists would say her near-death experience was merely a release of endorphins in the brain.
As usual, she was way ahead of me.
“You don’t have to believe me, Angie.”
“Okay, then if you don’t mind, I won’t.”
We laughed, both of us, while I wondered why in the world I was resisting the idea that I could be forgiven for every bad thing I had ever done. And then I knew why: because that would mean the Jerry Hecklers of the world were forgiven too.
I had called him, the evening after the morning when my shot had missed him by an inch. I had meant to kill him, had gone up on the roof to blast him. But in that instant when I stood empty—with the voices of both the mothers and the fathers silenced in my head—I changed my mind. I think that may have been the first truly independent act of my life, and I wish I could say I felt good about it.
“I told you not to mess with Grace,” I said to him.
“I didn’t do anything!” he protested. I knew he’d been frightened; I’d seen it in his face after my shot nearly hit him, after I’d purposely aimed off target.
“I know that,” I told him. “That shot was for thinking about hurting her. Now consider what’s going to happen if you do hurt her.”
Maybe crocodiles don’t take warnings, but they’re not complete imbeciles. Even crocs will swim away to another swamp if they hear the sound of gunfire.
I was still worried about those other swamps, though.
“Jerry?” I said. “I’ll be keeping tabs on you. If I hear that you are under suspicion for injuring any woman, not just Grace, I will come after you again.”
“Who are you?”
“A good shot,” I said, and hung up.
Who was I? A good question. I was no daddy’s girl, and never had been. And now perhaps I was no longer my mother’s girl, either. Who was I? A woman, empty, but for something shadowy growing in my breast. For once in my life, I can’t foresee the consequences. But I know this natural law: Shadows cannot be cast in total darkness; where there is a shadow, there must be light.
LIZA CODY was brought up in London, where she studied painting and later worked at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. She is the author of six Anna Lee mysteries, but recently she has become tangled up in the world of women’s professional wrestling with Bucket Nut and Monkey Wrench. She now lives in Somerset.
Solar Zits
Liza Cody
I woke up this morning and decided on plastic surgery. You really can’t begin too soon. After all, the force of gravity starts to work on your face from the moment you are born, and it seems to me that I can’t let gravity have its own way one minute longer.
I will shorten my nose, remove the bony bridge. Suck out fat deposits from under my eyes. A little nipping, a little tucking. You won’t know me.
I’ll change the color of my contact lenses. I’ll change the color of my hair. Everything will be new. I won’t know me.
All it takes is money. I’ll sell the house. I was going to move anyway.
I find a number in the last pages of Vogue. I ring and make an appointment. It is simple. It is not like trying to see a doctor when you need help. This clinic wants to help me. I am not a problem.
Today will be a good day. I have a project, a purpose. I know what I am doing. I know where I am going.
It is a blazing day. The world looks brown through UV glasses and I get into my car. I am going to a clinic in the city. It will take hours through the heat and the traffic, but it is an investment. I will be changed. No one will know me.
The radio is zapped out with static—sunspot interference—solar zits. The airwaves are polluted with sonic whimper. The air conditioner whines. I do not listen. I shoot a disc into the slot. It is an old disc. Not mine. I am not responsible for the lyrics.
A man with a boy’s voice sings, “It was a slow day and the sun was beating …”
It is a speedy day, and the sun is beating. It is even speedy in the slow lane. On the hard shoulder there is a burned-out wreck with blackened steel ribs and no glass. I cannot edge into the second stream: twenty-four-wheelers race by on the outside, bumper to bumper, nose to tail, metal to metal.
This is a long haul, a journey toward transformation and forgetting. Another burned wreck by the side of the road recedes in the mirror. It gets small and then smaller. I will leave it all behind.
I could ask for ECT. Not with asymmetrical electrodes. Asymmetrical electrodes, they say, leave the memory intact. But, they say, if you whack the current through, temple to temple, you can burn out selected memory sites. Then you forget. And when you forget it is exactly as if an occurrence never occurred. Never happened at all.
A fresh face. An empty mind. A different address. A new number. You really won’t know me, and no one can ring and remind me. There will be no long-distance calls accusing me. No one can write and blame me. No blame. Surgical intervention, electrical interference, and a good discreet estate agent. “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry.”
My baby didn’t cry much in his Perspex incubator. He was quiet and good. A good baby is a quiet baby. A quiet baby is a good baby. My boy in the bubble was no bother. Even when they let him out he was no trouble, and I went back to work before he was old enough to miss me. The child minder loved him. And so did I. I wired his crib for sound and watched videos downstairs. He never interrupted once. I could have heard his smallest whimper but he didn’t whimper. He didn’t cry. Later, it worried me because he didn’t laugh either, but not much. Quiet is good where babies are concerned.
He doesn’t need me, I thought. The thought comforted. I had to earn a living. I had to earn the child minder. I had to earn the child. I couldn’t do that if the child needed me.
The boy didn’t need me either. He went to school. They liked him at school too. They wrote, “He has ability.” They wrote, “He is self-contained.”
At night, when we were alone in the house, I worked. He worked too. He worked through his units and modules. We rarely spoke, and if I spoke he rarely heard. He wore headphones and strapped his music to his belt. His music went from ear to ear, sound waves transmitted symmetrically, lobe to lobe, through his brain without destroying a single memory site. I couldn’t hear it.
I couldn’t hear the first accusation either, although it traveled along the telephone wire. It came in the night, arriving as a piece of paper on my fax machine, a soft growl of high-speed words delivered softly into the plastic tray. It growled, in black and white, “What sort of mother do you call yourself?” It said, “Call yourself a mother?” It said, ’Tour boy is a monster.” It was unsigned. No one claimed responsibility.
In the fifth of five gears, fast on the slow lane, with sun searing on the sunroof
, I sing, “The boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart …” I am not responsible. I am on the motorway, far away from information highways and optical pathways. Human voices cannot reach me. No one can say, “Your boy is a monster. You must be to blame.” I will not listen, and what I do not hear will not be true.
I will be nipped and tucked, without laugh lines, cry lines, or life lines. They won’t know me. I will be received as a stranger with a phone number nobody knows. If nobody knows me no one can blame me and I will be a miracle of surgical technique.
The only time the boy saw his father was when he watched the video of our wedding—top hat and tailcoat in the burning sun, confetti like dandruff on his shoulders. The boy did not comment, but later that night he asked me about virtual reality. He thought it might be a good way to learn billiards. That was peculiar: the boy did not play games unless there was sophisticated software attached.
I joked with him and said he had been brought up by Super Mario. But he didn’t laugh. So I bought him a Home Multi-gym because he needed the exercise.
And it was good to see sweat glisten on that fine white flesh. He filled out, but he never went out. He is allergic to the sun. A lot of us are these days. There are magnetic blemishes on the face of the sun and they say we are undergoing fluctuations in the cycle of solar activity. I never leave home without a carapace of UVA and UVB screen. My sunroof is sun-blocked. The air is conditioned. This bubble sustains life and protects from transient pollution. It is safe, and fast on the slow lane.
Later I will shed my tired old skin. I’ll be reborn newborn and my new tight skin will fit me without crease or wrinkle. I will be shrink-wrapped and plastic-coated and never again will I need another generation’s hero to alter my mood. The man with the boy’s voice and images of alienation depresses and excites me. He is not mine to control. I reject him and eject him. When I am newborn, wrinkle free, not me, I will pop a Prozac into my mouth, not a disc into the machine. But soon I will not need to alter my mood because soon everything will be new and unproved.
Women on the Case Page 6