Shift: A Novel

BC, however, was a good boy, and he immediately averted his eyes.

But:

“Welcome! We’re so glad you found us!”

And of course BC had seen naked women before. But these women had been uniformly dead, toes tagged, flesh an icy blue and bearing the marks of whatever had killed them, which rendered them both sexless and asexual—and of course silent. He hadn’t realized a girl could speak with no clothes on and was unsure if he could—let alone should—reply. He stared mutely as the girl walked toward him as though she were as primly dressed and perfectly coiffed as Mary Tyler Moore greeting Dick Van Dyke just home from work. Her hair had fallen unevenly around her breast, and the nipple showed through the sparse strands, which somehow made it more prominent than when it had been completely uncovered.

The girl followed BC’s gaze down to her breast, looked up again, smiled.

“Don’t worry, come Monday you won’t even remember how to tie that bureaucratic noose, let alone why you put it on in the first place.”

It was incredible! She talked just like a girl in clothes. Fire didn’t shoot from her mouth, the syllables were perfectly intelligible (although it took BC a moment to figure out “bureaucratic noose” referred to his tie).

“Shy, are we?”

She was right in front of him. Her hands were on his upper arms. BC braced himself, as though she were going to pick him up like a doll and toss him through the air. But all she did was raise herself on her tiptoes, her breasts pressing lightly against his chest with only the flimsiest layer of hair between them and his suit—which, as far as he was concerned, was his flesh—and then, lightly but lingeringly, she kissed him on the lips.

“Welcome to Castalia,” she said, her voice huskier now, the welcome broader than it had been a moment ago.

“Jenny!” an amused but sharp male voice called from somewhere to the left. “Get away from that poor man. You’re scandalizing him to death.”

BC jumped back like a teenager surprised by the babysitter’s parents. He turned to see a slim man rounding the corner of the house. Unlike the girl, his upper body was fully covered—by a long-sleeved yellow button-down whose loose tails winked in the breeze—but it wasn’t immediately clear if he had anything on beneath it. He had a friendly, slightly crooked smile and bright blue eyes and unruly blond hair that was shedding its last respectable cut as quickly as the follicles would allow.

“We didn’t expect you so quickly. You must have made great time.”

“Ye-es,” BC said experimentally. Everything seemed to be working. “Dr. Leary? I’m—”

“Oh, let’s not stand on formalities.” Leary used his clipboard to fend off both the name and the hand that came with it. “We just call the other one Puss-n-Boots.”

“The other—”

“Or Candy Striper,” the girl, Jenny, said, cutting him off.

“Ralph calls him Spooky, which is a little on the nose, but that’s Ralph for you.”

Jenny laughed. “And poor Dickie just calls him, and calls him, and calls him.”

“Jennifer, please.”

Jenny gave BC a once-over. “I think I’m going to call this one Lone Ranger. Because his face is a mask.” She leaned forward to give BC a second, wetter kiss. “You’re going to have a long life,” she said to him quietly, “if you ever let it begin.”

Both BC and Leary stared after her retreating form. “You think her tits are nice,” the doctor sighed, “you should see the rest of her. That girl’s vagina is so agile it could lace up a pair of jackboots and tie them with a sailor’s knot.”

“I …” BC didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say.”

Leary laughed aloud. “Makes you believe the old stories, doesn’t it? That the best way to get information from a spy is via the intercession of a beautiful woman.”

At the word “spy,” something clicked in BC’s brain, and he realized that Leary had taken him not as a guest but as a CIA agent.

Leary’s blue eyes twinkled. “Believe me when I tell you that what I’m going to show you will make you forget all about Jenny.”

He turned and hurried off—toward the back of the house, BC saw, and the dark forest beyond. BC hesitated, but the doctor was skipping along like a leprechaun. Taking a deep breath, BC set off after him.

“I want to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” Leary was saying when BC caught up with him. “It’s going to be a bit shocking, and I don’t want you to panic.”

BC had heard this kind of line from countless coroners and county sheriffs, and in a slightly prideful voice he said, “I’ve seen many shocking things, Dr. Leary.”

“No doubt you have, in your line of work. But that didn’t stop Agent Morganthau from collapsing like Charlie McCarthy without Edgar Bergen’s hand up his ass.”

Morganthau? The name rang a bell, and then he remembered that the director had mentioned him in his briefing before he put him on the train. BC wondered if he and Melchior were the same person.

“Where is Agent Morganthau?”

“I left him with Forrestal and the girl in the cottage. The thing is, Agent, ah—I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

Girl? Neither Hoover nor Melchior had mentioned a girl.