by Dorsey, Tim
“Damn straight we’re Bad Company!” said Jeff, nodding and leaning back in his tuxedo.
“Your turn,” Preston told Jeff.
“Sorry,” said Jeff. “I’m sure you have a helluva left hook…”
“That’s better,” said Spider, sitting back down.
“…But your right’s a little weak.”
“That’s it!” Spider dove across the table at Bad Company, knocking over ice-water glasses and ketchup bottles before the others pulled him back down.
“Look at this mess,” said Frankie. “Waitress!”
“My wallet! My wallet’s gone!” Preston patted his jacket and pants pockets, then stopped and stared across the table. “Give it!”
The Pickpocket Comedian grinned and handed Preston his wallet.
Preston snatched it out of Andy’s hand and stuffed it inside his jacket. “Very fucking funny!”
“The Little Mermaid,” said Frankie.
“What?”
“That’s got a good story. You could use new hypnotic code words like enchanted and sea horse…”
Preston lost his appetite. He threw a bent fork down in his plate and pushed it away.
“Frankie, try to stay up with the class,” said Spider. “That was six fuckin’ subjects ago.”
“I didn’t know it was closed.”
“Just work with us, okay?” said Spider.
“Will you guys shut the fuck up! You’ve already ruined my breakfast!” yelled Preston. “I can’t believe I’ve been reduced to associating with you people. I have a Ph.D., for Chrissakes!”
“What are you saying? Because I have only one arm, I’m stupid, too?”
“I’m just saying it’s the same shit every night. Frankie starts up with The Little Mermaid, and you and Bad Company knock over all the drinks, and thanks to Xolack and his spellbinding silverware tricks, I can’t take a bite of eggs without almost putting my fuckin’ eye out!”
Bruno Litsky came back to the table.
“How was it?”
“Like a goddamn wake,” said Bruno. “Cigarette me.”
“Frankie, you’re up.”
Frankie went down the hall and climbed onstage for his hand-shadow rendition of The Little Mermaid.
A gaggle of young girls entered the restaurant.
“Hey, Preston,” said Andy. “Isn’t that girl on the end the one you had onstage tonight?”
Preston turned around. “So it is.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled across the diner: “Harmonica.”
The girls turned around. One of them began shrieking. She ran over to the corner booth and begged Preston for his autograph again.
Preston stood up and put his arm around Jessica’s shoulder. “I think that can be arranged. Let’s go back to my suite.”
He winked at the other guys as he led her away from the table, toward the men’s room.
Bruno shook his head.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Spider.
“There’s a line you don’t cross,” said Bruno, pointing at Preston and the teenager. “That’s just not right.”
“It’s not right because you’re not getting it,” said Spider.
“Speak for yourself,” said Bruno.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. ‘He’s only got one arm—I’ll bet he doesn’t get any.’”
Preston held the men’s room door for Jessica. Nobody inside except one guy playing a slot machine over a urinal.
“Wow!” she said. “I’ve never been in a presidential suite before. This must cost a fortune!”
Preston pushed open a stall. “Let me show you the bedroom….”
Preston Bradshaw Lancaster had gotten nine women pregnant. That was by his own count. Who knew the true total? That Preston—such a life-giver. Maybe that was why he was against abortion.
The first pregnancy—and again, this is all inexact science—came during his junior year in college. Preston was working on his undergrad in abnormal psych when he became fascinated by the subject of hypnosis. He soon learned the technique itself really wasn’t that difficult; the trick was finding the right personality type, someone in the twenty percent that researchers had identified as highly susceptible to mesmerization.
He walked around the lobby of his dorm approaching women, swinging a pocket watch. “You are getting sleepy.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“This is for a class project.”
“Get away from me, you pig! I’m studying!”
Preston went to the next woman.
“Get lost!”
To his benefit, Preston couldn’t take a hint. He figured it was all in the numbers. He waited until a party, when everyone had been drinking. The first woman laughed but let him try anyway. She went under quickly. Preston led her to his room. He swung the pocket watch again. “You want to have sex with me.”
Even under hypnosis, the woman laughed.
It happened three more times at the party, three different laughing women. Preston had hit a wall, the so-called Svengali effect. He couldn’t get them to do something under hypnosis that was against their nature in real life, and having sex with someone like Preston was against the universal nature of women everywhere.
Preston thought about it and read his textbooks. Something in the espionage chapter caught his eye, the way the CIA and KGB liked to turn the tables during hypnotic interrogations, making the subject believe they’re from the other side in order to uncover double agents. Preston decided to tinker with the scenario.
The next party. A woman was in his room. A watch swung. “I’m Richard Gere.”
Bingo.
Preston couldn’t believe the amount, quality and unusualness of the sex he started getting.
Two months later, back in his room. “I am Robert Redford—”
A knock at the door.
“Go away.”
More knocks.
“I said, go away! I’m doing homework!”
“It’s me, Becky. I have to talk to you. It’s an emergency.”
“Damn it!”
Preston opened the door a crack.
“I’m pregnant.”
“You can’t be.”
“I am.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Your word against mine. Who knows how much you sleep around?”
“I was a virgin.”
“Trying to trap me in marriage? I know what I’m worth! Don’t think I can’t see through this.”
“I don’t want to get married. I need an abortion. I don’t have any money.”
“Oh, so this is about money! You have sex and now you want me to pay. There’s a name for women like you.”
“I need two hundred dollars.”
“Go to hell!”
He slammed the door.
Becky began calling, and knocking again.
“Stay away from me!”
She didn’t. Preston got nervous. Two hundred might just be the start. And what if she had the kid? There could be child support, no end in sight, and all because she was fucking around.
Preston went to his parents, who called their minister. They met in the family’s living room.
“Son,” said the reverend. “You have to tell her you’ll marry her.”
“But I don’t want to marry her.”
“Don’t worry, son,” said the preacher. “You’re not marrying anyone. This is just to prevent her from having an abortion.”
“Preston,” said his father. “The minister and I have already discussed this. There’s no point in letting some bimbo ruin your life.”
“You have a bright future,” said the preacher. “We’re not going to let this woman destroy it. We just need you to make her believe you’ll really marry her.”
“Say whatever you have to,” said the father.
�
��Just string her along until the third trimester, when it’ll be illegal,” said the minister.
“Isn’t that lying?”
“You’ll be doing God’s work.”
“Preston, obviously you’re not completely blameless, but we know how it is,” said his father. “You’re a devout young man. You go to church. You’re just the type they’re looking to lead astray.”
“She had sex before marriage, so she’s a harlot,” said the minister.
“But I had sex before marriage, too.”
“Because she used her harlot ways. You were obviously seduced.”
“Well, there was a little of that.”
“Of course there was. Now go and do the right thing.”
Preston was convincing. She had gotten him into this, and now it was up to him to prevent a double tragedy. Preston saw it as a test of character, kind of a proud moment. His parents even helped; they had both of them over for Sunday dinners and talked about the future.
Becky bought the act, even started looking at wedding and nursery stuff. A few months later, she went up to Preston’s dorm room with exciting news. She had the sonograms—it was a girl!
The door to the room was open. She approached slowly. “Preston?” She looked inside.
Empty. Stripped to the walls.
Becky drove to his parents’ house and rang the doorbell. His mother opened the front door, but the screen door on the outside stayed latched.
“Yes?”
“Where’s Preston? His dorm room is empty.”
“Who are you?”
“What?”
“We don’t know anyone named Preston.”
“…I don’t understand…what—?”
“Never come back here, tramp!”
The door slammed.
They had shipped Preston across the country to finish up at another college in Nevada. That was years and years ago. Where was his daughter today? Preston had never really given it any thought. He went on to postgraduate work in the East, then teaching, building an impressive résumé of being fired from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. He could pull the hypnosis-for-sex stunt as a student, but it was receiving less than enthusiastic applause now that he was on faculty. Women from other parts of the country began showing up on campus looking for him, pushing strollers. In three short years, he was drummed completely out of the teaching field.
His life fell apart in short order, and he ended up living in a Reno flophouse working nights and weekends as a dishwasher. He called his parents for money.
“Didn’t you hear?” said his mother. “We gave it all to the church. And we sold the house, too. We’re going to become missionaries. Isn’t that great news?”
A week later, Preston saw his first stage hypnotist. He was taking a break from scrubbing tureens, standing in the swinging kitchen doors, watching this incredible guy onstage. Some poor salesman from Omaha was making out with an inflatable woman.
Preston returned from the men’s room at the Flash in the Pan, tucking in his shirt. An ecstatic teenager emerged behind him and ran to her friends.
“Scoot over,” said Preston.
Xolack the Mentalist was onstage bending spoons.
“How do you do that, anyway?” asked Andy.
“Do what?” asked Preston.
“Get all these women to fuck you. I thought you couldn’t get people to do things under hypnosis they wouldn’t do in real life.”
The audience down the hall grew angry. “Hey! He’s using his hands! He’s not even trying to hide it!”
“You mean the Svengali effect?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. I just watch a lot of TV.”
“The popular notion you can’t get someone to do something against their nature is a myth. If you rearrange the context, you can get anyone to do anything.”
“Bullshit,” said Spider.
“True story,” said Preston. “The CIA was messing around with hypnosis about the same time they were losing people out high-rise windows on LSD. They were able to get one of the office secretaries to pick up an unloaded gun, point it at another secretary and pull the trigger.”
“How do you know they didn’t hate each other?” asked Andy. “Secretaries can be vicious.”
Preston shook his head. “It’s all documented in government files released under the Freedom of Information Act. These guys were reckless cowboys. They had no idea what they were fooling around with. They should have left this stuff to the universities, where we handled it cautiously and professionally.”
“By screwing your students?” asked Bruno.
Preston ignored him. “Did you know you can place a cold needle in the palm of someone’s hand and tell them it’s red-hot, and it will leave a burn mark?”
“You’ve done that?” asked Saul.
“Hundreds of times.”
“People actually leave your stage with burns?”
Preston nodded proudly.
“You guys are a bunch of rubes,” said Spider. “I don’t believe any of this hypnosis garbage!”
Preston whispered: “Parsley.”
Spider’s eyelids snapped a couple times like he had just awoken from a long nap. He looked around the table. “What’s going on? Why are all of you staring at me like that?”
The others tried to keep straight faces, but when Andy cracked up, they all fell apart.
“Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?” Spider demanded.
Andy wiped tears of laughter. “Sorry, we’re really laughing with you. Preston hypnotized you to think you were a one-armed juggler…”
“With a complex,” added Saul.
“That’s ridiculous!” said Spider. He held out both his arms, like evidence.
They laughed even harder. “You should have seen yourself,” said Jeff. “Trying to pick fights with everyone, holding one arm behind your back.”
“You’re making this up! All of you! I’ve never been hypnotized in my life!”
That just made them laugh more.
“Who ever heard of a one-armed juggler? Fuck all of you!”
Spider stood up and marched away from the booth. Preston yelled parsley, and Spider tucked his right arm behind his back and stormed out of the restaurant.
18
It was a dark and starry night down the long, straight road through the mangroves, miles from anything. A white Mercedes sat at the dead end.
Five men in tropical shirts got out of the Benz and went to the trunk. Ivan, Igor, Pavel, Nikita and Leonid, all former KGB now gone freelance, working for themselves in the land of opportunity, most recently running The Palm Reader bookstore in Miami Beach before landing a contract with Mr. Grande. South Florida was a natural fit for them. Lots of ex-spooks around, CIA, MI6, Mossad, and nobody held grudges. Couldn’t afford to. With constantly shifting political terrain, they depended on each other to network for gigs. Still, there was a loose hierarchy. The Russians were considered among the best. Most of them.
These five began their intelligence careers in different branches of the service, but soon distinguished themselves. Pavel accidentally sat on a plunger, blowing up an elite demolition team. Nikita was the helicopter pilot who misjudged crosswinds during a labor riot and sent a commando unit rappelling down the chimney of a Ukrainian steel foundry. Assigned to protect an emissary to Kazakhstan, Leonid offered him an after-dinner mint—no, wait! That’s my suicide pill! Igor was driving a specially equipped limo in the big May Day parade, past the VIP bleachers on the Kremlin Wall, trying to get something on the radio when he inadvertently flipped up the machine guns and took out the back two rows of a marching band. Their leader was Ivan, who had done something either less stupid or grossly more stupid than the rest. He slept with the wife of someone in the Politburo.
Only one thing to do with people of such intelligence: put them on the torture squad.
Ivan’s boys were well suited to their work, able to blithely perform tasks that made
even the most veteran agents queasy. After all, someone had to work with the electric prods and pliers and train the sexual attack dogs. But there were the good times, too. They had been together a decade now, and when they started reminiscing—oh, the memories. Like how about the time Nikita drank too much vodka and passed out and got raped by one of the German shepherds? Whew! They laughed until they cried about that one!
Tonight would be another for the scrapbook. The Mercedes had made good time across the state and now sat at the end of Cockroach Bay Road on the southeast shore of Tampa Bay. The nearest house was four miles; the only reason the road went this far was to reach one of the most remote boat ramps in the state. There were no streetlights and rarely any traffic this far back except the occasional pickup with blood-spattered upholstery engulfed in flames. You stayed far away from here at night unless you were getting rid of human evidence, which faced accelerated swamp decomposition and what detectives liked to call “animal interference.”
On this particular evening, all was quiet except croaking frogs and the weeping coming from the trunk of the Mercedes. Ivan unlocked it.
“But I’m only an insurance adjuster! Please let me go!”
They carried him to the shore, which had that low-tide smell. They drove long stakes into the muck and began tying the man down.
“Please don’t kill me!”
“You work for Buccaneer Life and Casualty?”
The man nodded.
“Tell us what we want to know.”
“But I don’t know anything! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Nikita walked over to Ivan, standing by the Mercedes. Ivan lit a cigar. “Has he said where the five million dollars is yet?”
“No, but I think he’s about to crack.”
“What method are you using?”
“Crabs.”
Ivan winced. “Terrible way to go.”
“The worst,” said Nikita. “Let’s go watch.”
They strolled back over to the insurance man.
“Tell us what we want to know!” snapped Nikita.
The man couldn’t stop crying.
“All right then!” said Nikita. “We’ll just leave you to the crabs!”