Choice of Evil

family. I never got to pull the trigger. Michelle was closer, and she got off first. And roared away on the back of Crystal Beth’s motorcycle as a team of feds drove a convoy of explosives toward the Hudson River.

That was 26 Federal Plaza, the giant downtown government building that houses IRS, FBI, INS—everything the New Nazis hated. That’s what Morales had been talking about. But it was just talk. Nobody really cared, not with hundreds of Hitler-worshippers in prison. . . and the plot to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb defused.

I was rambling. Not out loud—that would have scared me. But in my head, still. And I didn’t like the sound.

Queen Thana wasn’t the only witch I knew. And now I had to see if Nadine’s friend was going to bring me the offering I’d need for the other one.

“Can you stop by sometime?” Lorraine’s voice, on the phone at Mama’s, as casual as if she wanted me to pick up a bunch of forwarded mail that had piled up for me at her house.

“Sure,” is all I told her.

I hung up. Walked through the back of Mama’s kitchen into the alley, climbed in the Plymouth, and headed over to the place I still thought of as Crystal Beth’s safehouse.

I didn’t recognize the woman who answered the door downstairs, but she must have been expecting me because she forked over a folded piece of paper and slammed the door in my face.

Under a streetlight, I opened the paper. Just an address. I got back in the Plymouth.

I guess I was expecting a dyke bar, but it turned out to be a little diner—one of those aluminum-sided things—standing right off the Red Hook waterfront like a leftover from the Fifties. Inside, I could see they’d ripped out all the old fixtures and set up a bunch of wooden tables so it looked like a regular restaurant.

The crowd was dressed too good for the neighborhood, but I knew it was only a short drive from Brooklyn Heights and other trendy sections, so I wasn’t that surprised—New Yorkers are real adventurous when it comes to eating.

A woman behind the counter saw I was alone and waved her hand in the direction of some empty tables. I took the smallest one I could find—round, with a butcher-block top. I opened the menu and looked around.

I couldn’t tell what the game was. The diner was in a borderland, but the clientele was all from one side of the line. Yuppies are major consumers, but most places won’t let narcotics in the door. Mama has the same rule, and I never asked why. Could be morals, could be the untrustworthy nature of the traffickers. Or how easily homicide comes into play when you fuck with poppies or powder. It doesn’t matter. Truth is, every thief knows, it’s not for nothing they call it “dope.”

Maybe it was a restaurant for real. A waitress came over, asked if I wanted anything to drink. I asked her for some lemonade by touching it on the menu with my finger. She nodded and moved off.

Then I spotted the big guy in a corner, drawing something. I’d seen him before, in another joint. The one where I’d first met Crystal Beth. He looked over at me, like he was bored from working, giving his eyes a rest. His head moved about a quarter of an inch. I sensed someone just behind my left shoulder, but I didn’t look up.

“In the back,” a voice said.

I got up, saw the voice belonged to a stocky woman with an expressionless face.

“I’ll follow you,” I told her.

She shook her head. No.

I walked down a narrow corridor, past the restrooms, to a door marked STORAGE.

“That one,” the woman said.

It opened when I turned the knob. I stepped into an empty room. It was absolutely bare, except for a pocket door. I stood there, knowing there was a lens watching from somewhere, my hands open at my sides.

The flat door slid into the wall. I stepped through.

Lorraine was standing there. “Thanks, Trixie,” she said to the stocky woman. “You got here quick,” she said to me.

“Quick as I could,” I answered her.

Then I saw why she had called. Xyla. Sitting by herself in a corner of the room in one of those orthopedic computer chairs they have for people who spend hours in front of the screen. And the screen was huge—looked like a TV instead of a monitor. The entire wall was nothing but cyber-machinery: lights blinking, hard drives whirring, modem connections buzzing and howling. . . searching for openings.

I walked over behind Xyla’s chair. The screen in front of her was filled with numbers and letters and symbols, all strung together, like they’d turned an autistic kid loose at the keyboard.

“I got him,” Xyla said, not turning around.

“You sure?” I asked her.

“Pretty sure. I got. . . let me check. . .” She hit the keys so fast her fingers were a blur. “. . . four hundred and eighty-eight responses. But most of them were just to the addy—they couldn’t even open the message I sent, just wanted to talk, you know. He’s got his own home page now, so I figure maybe one of his fans—”

“What’s a home page?”

“A website. Like some companies have. You know: www, whatever, dot com? It’s a domain. A webmaster runs it, and it’s only devoted to one topic. We have. . .” She glanced over her shoulder at Lorraine.

“He knows,” Lorraine said. “Crystal Beth told me she told him about ours.”

Xyla nodded. “Okay. Anyway, this one isn’t actually his, okay? I mean, he didn’t set it up or anything. And it’s not a true domain, just a personal home page. Like a fan page, I guess you’d call it. They’re all over the Net. Some cyber-guy thinks a horror writer is hot stuff, so he starts a fan page for him. They usually post a few pictures, maybe some news about upcoming books or appearances. Like that. But the big feature is the message board.”

I gave her a puzzled look, but quickly figured out she was just drawing a breath before she went on: “You can leave messages, okay? Sometimes the star. . . or the writer, or the singer, or whoever the cyber-guy set the home page up for. . . actually answers, but that’s like a big thing. . . real rare. Usually it’s just fans of whoever the home page is for—talking to themselves, you know? Like who should play what character in the movie, like that.”

“And this guy has one of these home pages?” I asked her.

“Yeah. In fact, there’s about a half-dozen of them. One’s even in Japanese.”

“And people write to these message boards with stuff for him?”

“Sure. Mostly it’s like ‘Right on!,’ you know? I mean, they’re fans, right?”

“Of a serial killer?”

“Oh, please,” Xyla said. “First of all, that’s nothing new. Charles Manson has a website. Plenty of people get turned on by serial killers. Go to the movies, read a book—serial killers are hot stuff. But this one, it’s. . . different. I figured, at first, it was mostly gay guys writing, just being. . . encouraging, you know? But once he started blasting those child molesters, it’s like everyone’s on his side. You can see it everywhere. They call him HE. For his initials, I guess it meant, once. But now it’s like ‘he,’ understand? Like ‘He said so,’ see?”

I did see. I’d sure seen

graffiti’ed all over town. Thought it was another of those religious-nut organizations pasting their crap up the way they always do.

“Anyway, so, I got a bunch of hit-backs, like I said,” Xyla went on. “But only three even opened up the encryption, and two of those were obviously from geeks.”

“How’d you know that?”

“ ‘Cause it worked just like you said,” she replied. “That velociraptor bit. The other two, they started in with Jurassic Park. The movie, right? And they wanted me to send them a gif, and—”

“A what?”

“A picture. Digitized photograph. Just wanted to see if I was a boy or a girl, my best guess. So lame. . . like anyone couldn’t send someone else’s picture. Anyway, I knew it couldn’t be them. But this one. . . it’s him, I bet. Take a look for yourself.”

She hit some keys again. The screen blinked, went all blue, then flicked back into white. Xyla pointed at the lettering:

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