Bombshell

by James Reich

  “Not . . . not in that car outside? I couldn’t help but see that it’s kind of beat up.”

  “No, no! It wasn’t that.” Fuck, she’s seen it. New Mexico plates, also. She’s the type that remembers, and maybe the type that talks. For a moment, Cash imagined winding the telephone cord around the woman’s throat, thin bubbles of saliva frothing from her puckered lips.

  “I don’t mean to pry, anyhow. I’m sorry. Grief is terrible. I know it.”

  “Funeral in Savannah, too many drinks, late night of driving. It was all too much, you know?” Cash pushed her fingers through her rust-red hair. “But I can go home soon. I’m feeling a lot better. But I would prefer to lie down some more, first.”

  “Oh, yes, you should.”

  “Thank you for the tea, Virginia.” Cash saw herself relinquishing her grip on a telephone cable and the receptionist’s body collapsing to the floor.

  “I’ll shut the door,” the old woman said, as her nylon uniform hissed against the doorjamb.

  Cash reclined on the red cover of the bed, staring at the rippled magnolia ceiling. She would leave during the night, without paying further. There was still time remaining to intercept the youngest Winters son. Then she would have to find another vehicle to go north. Molly’s decomposing car seemed to be attracting corpses and ghosts. She lay in the silence of imagined murders, her heart beating fiercely as the hours elapsed, and slowly the nausea passed from her flesh. She took her bicycle chain necklace from the bedside table and fastened it. The green shard of trinitite and the gris-gris bag settled against her pale skin. With her own room unlit, through a gap in the dirty cream curtains she studied the parking lot and what she could see of the crescent of other motel rooms, watching the lights go out. Weak beads of rain trailed against the glass. Finally, she checked the room for things that she might have left behind, and made an inventory of her khaki bag. She opened the door quietly, and moved through the rain to the low-rider.

  14

  APRIL 14, 2011. KIP WINTERS, THE YOUNGER OF THE TWO SONS of Evelyn Winters, rinsed his razor in the China blue enamel basin of his bathroom vanity and wiped the bergamot foam from the faucet and antique taps. The first year of his thirties brought the first strands of white to his blond hair. His father told him that he looked like the young Tab Hunter, although this meant nothing to him. From the upper floor, the bathroom window afforded him a view of his front lawn, deep emerald grass and a weeping willow tree within a low wrought-iron fence grasped by rose briars. He pulled on a clean white shirt and rolled his tie softly inside his suitcase, where he had prepared a series of low-maintenance combinations of clothing that would not be destroyed in transit to Washington, D.C., or throughout his hectic week there. He would miss Savannah, he regretted, but the anticipation of his first visit to the Capital gave him a tangible thrill; and that the conference was close enough to Ford’s Theatre on the fourteenth sent a strange pulse through his skull, a morbid, erotic beat. Furthermore, he would see his brother Frederick’s home, at last, and their father would be there.

  For a moment, he listened to his wife and twin girls hastening about their modern-rustic kitchen, below him, preparing to leave for school. Six years old, already, he thought. He descended the polished wooden stairs and stood in the doorway, leaning on the white frame, regarding his family with something close to sorrow, seeking to fix them like waxworks in his mind. He found himself speaking out loud.

  “It’s only for a few days.”

  His two daughters embraced him as he crouched before them, opening his arms. He tried to inhale the soft anodyne scents of their bathed skin, their damp chestnut hair.

  “We’ll miss you,” his wife said. She was dressed in partial formality for the school run, a silent agreement between the women that they must not embarrass their children or disappoint one another. She wore pleated navy pants and a fitted ivory blouse. “Is my lipstick all right?”

  “It’s sensational, but don’t get it on my shirt, please.”

  She kissed the warm air beside his cheek and maneuvered the children outside, toward the car. “I’ll get it on you when you come home.”

  “See you, darling.” The hairspray from her blond hair lingered about his face, sweet and with nostalgia factored in with the chemicals, although the color was genuine.

  “Look out for your taxi.”

  Suddenly, they were gone. He was alone, with an hour to kill before he needed to make for the airport. There was a light wicker chair on the porch that he favored in rare moments of solitude. He retrieved a fresh packet of American Spirits from the pocket of his black sports jacket, leaving the coat hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. He stepped outside, feeling the humid air on his skin. Reclining in the creaking wicker, he smoked, watching the insects shifting on the turquoise-painted wood slats of the house. He observed the plumage of the birds between the trees, and the slow crawl of a motorcar, its tires hissing on the wet street. It stopped before the house, and he stood up instinctively, as though another tourist needed directions from the picturesque arcades of his neighborhood. He loved the privacy granted by the ancient trees. The 1974 Chevy Impala was finished in dark gunmetal, almost black. Its long form skimmed the road surface on fourteen-inch radials. It was damaged. It reminded him of a mutilated shark.

  “Señor Winters?”

  The young woman extended her slim legs from the dark interior of the car before standing on the sidewalk at his gate; she had on opaque white hosiery, motorcycle boots, a short red skirt, and a ripped black leather jacket. Cash had waited at the edge of the block, methodically applying scarlet lipstick to her small misshapen mouth, tacky warpaint in the humid Southern morning. She had seen photographs of Kip Winters’s wife, of them together in The Wall Street Journal, and of their children.

  “Uh, yes.” He did not recognize the young woman. He hesitated. “I’m sorry, but do we know each other? From the office, maybe?”

  “Señor Winters,” she repeated, pushing her sunglasses from her eyes to the curve of her brow, to fix strands of her platinum blonde hair out of her face. She regarded the suitcase on the porch. “You’re about to leave, for the Low Carbon Symposium in D.C., right?”

  “Ah, you’re my taxi?” He doubted it, even as he said it. He noticed the New Mexico license plate at the rear of the car. “No, you’re from . . . ”

  “I’m from the university,” she grinned, opening his gate, and glancing along the quiet street.

  He looked at his watch. “I do have a flight to catch.”

  “This won’t take a minute. You plan to reopen uranium mining in the Grants belt, don’t you?”

  He smiled, noticing the moleskin pocketbook in her left hand. “Well, not me personally,” he said. “The Winters Corporation does hold a mining license for several Region IV deposits, however. You can visit the website. It’s not a secret.” Kip Winters pulled on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. He intended the gesture as dismissive.

  “Good,” the young woman said. “Let me make a note of that.” She began to reach inside her jacket for a pen.

  “You’re not interviewing me right now, are you?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  The pistol was silent. Kip Winters threw strange angles as the bullets entered his body—elbows rising, head thrown back, spine arching then folding in on himself. Cash remembered a Robert Longo picture as warm jets sprayed from the exit wounds in his back. The final bullet entered his throat and cast him upward before he flopped like a high jumper on his luxuriant lawn. Stepping toward him, she studied the gentle twitching that passed along his body in waves. Slowly, she knelt down beside him. His eyes struggled to fix on her. Blood washed over his larynx as he tried to speak, distant radio squelches.

  “Who?” His right hand lifted slightly from the lawn.

  Cash smiled, exhilarated.

  Suddenly, the quivering right hand flashed toward her, grabbing at her hair, and Kip Winters held the platinum wig in his weakening fist.

  She spat:
“I’m Jean fucking Harlow. Who did you think? You leech.”

  Cash’s mind raced: Harlow’s last movie, Saratoga, the USS Saratoga disintegrating in the poisoned seawater off the Bikini atoll; Harlow’s corpse replaced by a stand-in during production; the dummy ship used for atomic target practice. She snatched the blond disguise as Kip Winters began to emit a hideous rattle. Walking back to the car, she looked back over her shoulder to regard the gore on the grass beside Winters’s body. “Remember Lot’s wife,” she sang to herself, wiping the scarlet warpaint from her lips with the back of her hand. There were women like Jean Harlow that men wanted her to be, and then there were women like Valerie Solanas who she wanted to be. She took Kip Winters by both wrists and dragged him toward the low-rider. Her hallucination of her father’s ghost as she crossed the Pontchartrain Causeway had been an anticipation of this. With the corpse of Kip Winters on the passenger side, she gunned the car out of Savannah with its mint juleps, lynchings, and arboretums of tuberose.

  ROBERT DRESNER’S PRIVATE LATE-AFTERNOON FLIGHT FROM Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque to Washington, D.C., diverted to Atlanta, where he was to pick up another rental car to drive to Macon to make subtle inquiries of a woman named Virginia Jones. Jones had called local police to report that a customized car with New Mexico plates had blown from the forecourt of the EZ-Rest Motel, and its driver, whom she said was named Kimberly Wells, had not paid her final bill. The car, she reported, was damaged along one side and at the front as though it had been in an accident of some kind. It matched the description of an Impala registered to Molly Pinkerton that was missing from the address in Madrid, New Mexico. He reclined his seat and sipped his martini, watching the brunette flight attendant retreating slowly down the aisle. He thought: I’d like to fuck you in the ass. Apart from the flight crew, he was alone on the jet. Beside him, hard copies of Spicer’s photographs shifted slightly on the tan leather upholstery beneath the air-conditioning. He stared down at the green belt following the river through Albuquerque’s south valley before the plane banked and rose over the Sandia Mountains. He wanted the alcohol to temper his frustrations with the ghost chase, but it merely amplified his sexual tension. With the loss of Spicer, his temporary usurpation by Royce, and now the death of the transsexual on his interrogation table, he sucked on the lip of his martini tasting only a profound desolation. The Voice was right: He had fucked up, and that moment was now elongating into a frustrating period of failure. He sought to assure himself that he could be forgiven for misjudging the tolerance of the sixty-five-year-old to waterboarding, given her cosmetic ambiguities. He needed to reassert himself, somehow, to drag some confidence from the cold pit of his guts. The agency stewardess returned, and as she leaned closer to address him, he greedily inhaled her perfume. There was a call for him, she said. There was a secure telephone in the armrest of his seat. He thanked her and followed her legs as she returned to her space beyond the bulkhead. The phone was wired in, and he unraveled a length of spiral cable before answering. He felt an intense aching in his testicles. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

  “Robert . . . ” Dresner found himself mouthing along with the address.

  “I believe that the trail is heating up.”

  “Yes. By now you will have details from the agency aggregators on incidents that indicate eastward movement, correct?”

  “Right. In Louisiana we have a security guard at the Waterford nuke plant killed, apparently, with a slingshot that was then used to sabotage facilities and private property; another guard seriously injured by a dark gray low-rider that had tried to gatecrash Browns Ferry, aiming at the containment building; and I’m factoring in the dead cop at Pantex. We have the name Varyushka Cash, and something of a description from Royce’s inquiries. On April 3, traffic police on I-25 north of Albuquerque stopped her, but the local on the scene didn’t detect that the license was forged; finally we have drone footage from White Sands. Let’s see, what else?” He shifted in his seat, feeling sweat under his thighs.

  The Voice said: “Kip Winters is missing.”

  “Who is Kip Winters?” He sensed immediately that he had again said the wrong thing.

  “Robert . . . ,” The Voice began, and Dresner perceived a wheeze of mechanical irritation. “Kip Winters is one of the luminous sons of the nuclear industry. His father, Evelyn Winters, owns a dozen plants, including areas where our girl has been. Admittedly, we’re just putting that together after his family agreed to inform local authorities in Savannah of his disappearance. He didn’t make a flight to D.C. he was scheduled for, bound for a low carbon symposium where he was to meet his elder brother and his father.”

  “That’s not so incredible.”

  “Except that in Savannah his wife reported something like bloodstains all over their front lawn and across the sidewalk. First cop on the scene reported strands of blond hair stuck in the blood on the sidewalk.”

  “What color is his wife’s hair? Are we sure . . . ?”

  “The hair sample was from a theatrical wig.”

  “Abduction.” The irony was not lost on the commander of the Cross Spikes Club. “So, she does intend more than bad publicity stunts.”

  “She was either lucky or well-informed. An hour later and Kip Winters would have been safely on a flight to D.C. for a symposium. The other Winters homes have private security. She exploited their only vulnerability, the glamour-boy.”

  “Should I still talk to, uh . . . Virginia Jones about this ‘Kimberly Wells’ report?”

  “Negative. When you get to Atlanta, drive straight to Savannah.”

  He cursed through gritted teeth as he watched the clouds passing below the plane. What the fuck am I supposed to do in Savannah? Go stare at the bloodstains on the lawn and wait for her to show up again? She’ll be gone. “Is there a ransom note, or anything else?” he asked resignedly.

  “Only what you have. Out.”

  Dresner set the telephone back into its recess before buzzing the stewardess for another drink. He felt humiliated. Was he being punished for Spicer’s death, for all of these deaths? He pulled his own phone from his jacket pocket and scrolled through the lurid accumulation of data, as Kip Winters’s abduction, his rendition to one of the black sites of Varyushka Cash’s deformed mind, pulled him back south against his expectations. Investigations of the Madrid house continued invisibly. The house was off the grid and strangely vacant of sentimental effects. The only utility they had discovered was the telephone, attached to the name of Molly Pinkerton, her landlord. For too long, they had been working under the assumption that the Trinity bomber was male. He sought to excise the details down in his mind. He returned to two images: One was of the banner, an orange background with the black silhouette of a seven-headed cobra, that Spicer had photographed at her house; the other was the large poster of a sullen-faced woman that hung over the bed there. From the word SCUM, and the books in the room, they recognized the woman as Valerie Solanas, the militant who had shot Andy Warhol. The cobra banner he had recognized as the flag of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the West Coast terrorists who abducted and brainwashed Patty Hearst in the 1970s. What the hell does that mean? he wondered. He thought of the deranged radical feminist literature on the night table and junk bookshelves. From the typescripts, the obsession with Valerie Solanas, the strange love affair, pulsed with dedications, plots, and erotic fixations. All that Robert Dresner could recall was that Solanas was insane, but a somewhat reluctant would-be assassin.

  There were no photographs of her yet, except for the obscure Polaroid from Trinity, an image of an eye and hank of black hair, nothing of the sort in her sparse miners’ cabin, nor at the transsexual’s house. That was strange. Perhaps there had been, but she had erased them from the world. He wondered if these might have been incinerated in the pyre where they discovered Spicer’s charred remnants. From the account given to the Macon police of this Kimberley Wells alias by the receptionist, Virginia Jones, they had garnered the fact that the young woman who absconded
from her motel had hair that was streaked between blood red and burnt orange. She did not seem to possess a Social Security number, or a driver’s license, and she had no prior record of criminality. According to the Trinity manuscript, she was an alien from a dead zone of Eastern Europe. As an alien, she could be made to disappear, so long as her image and her reputation did not gain currency. Without the notoriety she appeared to seek, she would not be missed. Like the region she had come from, she was a dangerous, blank space on the map. Beside him on the leather aircraft seat were evidence bags containing the canister of the Los Alamos rocket, the photograph of a radiation-burnt hand, and steel ball bearings gathered from amid the smashed glass of the New Orleans nuclear plant called Waterford, which belonged to the Winters Corporation. The steel ball bearings reminded him of plutonium pits, things symbolic of her enemy. She had graduated beyond the symbolic. But the typewritten page discovered at the Trinity site made sinister allusions to New York, and Chernobyl, and the suspect’s birthday. It was not over. The hand must close itself about her. Robert Dresner and the Cross Spikes Club had plucked dozens of the nameless from the tarmac of America. He had rolled like a dog through carrion in the psychosis of enhanced interrogation. He was a kidnapper for national security, and he had killed for a good night’s sleep. Yet, as he awaited the close of his forty-first year, he was weary, becoming cynical, and given to rare but increasingly frequent errors of judgment. Was his fiancée to blame for these? Was it the proximity of the end of his career, he wondered, and the approach of married normalcy that was forcing him, unconsciously, to fuck things up? He buzzed for the flight attendant again.