“Have you been on a date with Fonia before?” The voice was pleasant and real-sounding, but tinny and shallow, like what you might expect from an undersized woman.
“Yes, I have.”
“What night was that, sir?”
“Three nights ago. Wednesday. We met at the Swissotel.”
“And your name, sir?”
“Paul.” That was the name he used for prostitutes and phone-sex lines and Internet chat rooms. He couldn’t even remember when he’d started using it.
There was a short pause. “Yes, Mr. Paul. Fonia is on call tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she can see you for her usual rate plus half.”
“Fine.”
“Where would you like her to meet you tonight, Mr. Paul?”
“Mother’s. On Rush Street. At the bar.”
“She can be there in an hour.”
“Perfect.”
Sam turned down the ramp onto the Edens Expressway and leaned on the accelerator. It was a clear night and the concentration of fluorescent city lights made an artificial glowing dome in the distance. His skin was hot and his heart was throbbing and he could feel the pulse in the muscles of his neck without even putting a finger to it. The ache that sometimes came to his head spread in a high arc over his right ear. He opened the glove compartment at sixty-five miles per hour and fished out a bottle of pills, forcing two down his dry throat, but they wouldn’t make the ache go away or stop the artery to his brain from flexing. The only thing that could help would be the sight of a woman’s face contorted in pain beneath him and then, just before she cried out, the sight of that pain transformed into pleasure, lips twisted in fear becoming round, a wince turning into a wicked grin, narrow eyes becoming wide with understanding. Yes, my God, yes!
He was about to drop a thousand dollars on a hooker and he wouldn’t even enjoy it. Not really. But he needed the release. The violent release.
Later that night, around the time Sam could feel the ache in his head subsiding, when Justin could no longer hear his mother sobbing in her bedroom down the hall, Justin slipped from the sheets again and opened his closet door. There was a cheap mirror mounted on the inside, and when his mother dressed him in nice clothes, she liked to stand behind him and look at him in it, as if she could see more of him in the reflection than she could by inspecting him directly. Justin turned to his left and in the glow of the reading lamp from his nightstand, tried to make out the birthmark on his hip, the one he rarely gave a thought to, and he wondered if there were many other boys or men who had it also, or if somehow he and the man from downstairs, the man who had tried to hurt his mother, were just special.
– 47 -
Fifteen years of this shit. Like an aging rocker, Mickey had been on the road for fifteen years, and he was tired. His hair was mostly gone and what remained made a wispy horseshoe around the back of his head. His face and hands were weathered like a hobo’s, and he had ailments in his back and feet and at least three expanding blemishes on his skin that should probably be checked by a doctor but wouldn’t be. He’d die when God called him in from the field. If Mickey the Gerund needed a doctor to save his life, the irony and humiliation would be worse than death, and the Hands of God didn’t provide insurance, besides.
It hadn’t been a life without satisfaction. He had many successes. As measured on Harold Devereaux’s Web site, there were some fifty-seven cloning professionals killed and another sixty or so retired, and better than eighty- five percent of them belonged in Mickey’s column. There was no serious legal threat to cloning these days (if anything, Mickey’s work had earned sympathy for the other side in a we can’t let the terrorists win sort of way) but the business of cloning was under siege. Fewer students were taking up the specialty in medical school. Despite advances in technology, requests for cloned children were down fifteen percent from a decade ago. The Hands of God were slowly winning a war of attrition.
After three kills in six weeks (bullet in Detroit, bombing in Minneapolis, auto “accident” in Des Moines), Mickey agreed with Phillip and the others that he should cool it for a couple of months. The FBI hadn’t stopped looking for Byron Bonavita, although some in the bureau suggested it would be less embarrassing to speculate publicly about the legendary fugitive’s death than it would be to admit they might never catch him. The feds now claimed several different groups were active in committing anti-cloning terror. This was a generally positive development for the cause, as it made violent opposition seem widespread and it still meant they weren’t looking specifically for Mickey. It did mean he had to be more careful, however. The Hands of God were under close scrutiny back in Ohio, and they didn’t want to do anything that might disabuse the feds of their bad assumptions.
That didn’t mean Mickey had to stop operations altogether. He was free to conduct nonlethal maneuvers, although if Phil and the others suspected the risks Mickey assumed in the process, surely they’d have told him to knock it off.
Mickey slept three nights in the rusting Cutlass in a rest stop on I-35 outside Austin. During the day he’d go into town and scope out the streets around Neil Armstrong High School. It was busy, with lots of old trees and routes of escape. He followed the kids at lunchtime, with his eyes after one in particular. On the second day he came across an electric bike outside a comic book store and in a matter of seconds had it hotwired. That night he slept across the front seat with a charger running from his car battery to the bike, which he’d jammed across the back bench.
By day four he’d discovered his subject’s routine. Around three o’clock Mickey checked into a motel that offered “nap rates” and took a shower. He changed into clean clothes, sat at the tiny particleboard desk, and pulled a blank sheet of graph paper from his bag. He unfolded a second piece of paper, this one old and brittle. It was the illustration he’d drawn the first time he’d tried this particular tactic. That operation had gone awry and he wasn’t able to give the drawing to his target, but he liked the idea of it so much that he’d kept it all these years and copied it whenever he needed a fresh one. The graph paper allowed him to divide the paper into quadrants to get the drawing just right. He also thought drawing on graph paper added a touch of meticulous insanity that ratcheted up the fear factor a couple of notches. He dug out a black pen and a red pen and started to work.
He sketched a heart (a medically correct heart) with a snake coiled around it and a pair of hands, one pointing skyward. He drew a sword surrounded by flames. He made an elaborate calligraphic monogram – H O G – and colored it red and black. He listed the names of six recently dead doctors (updated many times over since the original drawing) and crossed their names out with a red pen. Beneath them he wrote the name Oliver Bel Geddes but didn’t cross it out. In careful letters, he printed a verse from Genesis, one of many parts of the Bible he had memorized:
“SEE! THE MAN HAS BECOME LIKE ONE OF US, KNOWING WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD! THEREFORE, HE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO PUT OUT HIS HAND TO TAKE FRUIT FROM THE TREE OF LIFE, AND THUS EAT OF IT AND LIVE FOREVER.”
All the words were written in black ink except for HE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO… LIVE, which he wrote in red. When he was done and the ink was dry, he folded the paper into quarters, slipped it into his back pocket opposite his wallet, and returned the original to his bag.
Mickey checked out of the Pegasus Motor Lodge around five-thirty and drove to a residential street he had scouted earlier. The houses were large and irregularly kept. Many of the lawns were overgrown and the trash cans filled with beer empties. Mickey assumed the renters here were mostly students from UT. He parked the car and unloaded the stolen bike from the backseat. As he rode he started to feel the rush, the anticipation of close contact.
Mickey took his time, careful to obey traffic laws, making a full stop at intersections. He hated people on bikes, especially kids, who thought they could drive on the wrong side of the road or blow through stop signs, expecting licensed drivers in cars and trucks to look out for them. It was still summer and still muggy, but a light breeze cooled his aging skin a bit, especially when he was in motion at twenty-five miles per hour, and when he
