Anonymous Rex (35 page)

“Because I wanted a child, any child,” she spits out. “And Raymond
was a lech, but he would have been a hell of a dad. Not a
let’s go in the yard and toss around the football
kind of dad, but a strong genetic type. I didn’t care about the cross-race mixing. When I told Raymond I wanted a child he said ‘wonderful!’ and took me to Dr. Vallardo right away. Introduced him to me as the best obstetrician in New York.”

“But Raymond thought you were human,” I point out. “That’s why he’d been funding the interspecies mix experiments.”

“You know about those, too, eh?” she says, more than a hint of distaste curling the corners of her lips. “Well, Raymond had gone a little overboard with the … human element by this point.”

“Dressler’s Syndrome,” I suggest.

Jaycee’s guffaw is a violent bray that knocks me down a peg or two. “Let me assure you,” she chuckles, “Raymond McBride did not have Dressler’s Syndrome.” She does not elaborate.

“But he wanted to mix with your ‘human’ eggs.”

“He was interested in my species, you’re right. And, to be frank about it, I wanted his Carnotaur seed. Only problem was Vallardo—once he started harvesting me, there wouldn’t be much doubt that it wasn’t a human egg he was dealing with.”

“All those subtle differences,” I say. “Hard shell, exterior gestation—”

“A thousand times bigger,” she adds. “So you can see the difficulty. So I did what I had to do; I approached Vallardo, revealed myself as Jaycee, and told him to go ahead with our child but not to tell Raymond that I was a dino. I threatened him with every Council punishment I could think up, including complete excommunication from the community, which I think has only been approved once or twice. Napoleon got kicked out, I’m pretty sure.”

“Camptosaur?” I ask, forgetting my fifth-grade history lessons.

“Raptor,” she says, and shoots me a smile. “I had always planned to take my child and disappear back into the dino population once he or she was born, so Raymond need never find out that I wasn’t what he thought I was. So I went through the process again, though by this time Vallardo had improved it somewhat. At the very least, I didn’t have to ingest anything that would make my stomach do cartwheels, so for that I was happy.

“But before anything could come of it, Raymond was killed, and I was left alone. The experiment was over. Since then, I’ve been pretty much … treading water. When I saw that note from Vallardo, I was more worried about having to lie again, about delving back into the whole mess. And all this time I was thinking about calling Donovan, giving it a second try, but now with the fire … I knew what was in the Evolution Club, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Someone wanted those notes, that seed sample—Vallardo’s, all of it—and I guess Donovan just got in the way.”

Jaycee lapses into silence, and I’m not yet ready to take up the slack of conversation. There’s too much to mentally digest. I choose, instead, to deal with more pressing, personal issues. “I understand why you did what you did,” I tell her finally. “And I can accept it. But I’m still hurt that you would do … what you did … with me …” I can’t come out and say it, say that she slept with me in order to keep me quiet, or to gain inside information.

But she can say it easily enough. “You think I made love with you as part of all this, don’t you?” I turn away, and she lifts my face to hers.

Have we fallen into the gender reversal zone somewhere along the way?

“It’s okay,” I mutter, shuffling away from her touch. “You do what you have to do.”

“Vincent,” she says. I do not look up. “Vincent, look at me,” she calls firmly, and I cannot disobey. “What I said before holds true—I care for you. Like I said, in some ways, you remind me of Donovan—”

“So I’m a substitute.”

“No, you’re not a substitute. You’re not a replacement. But when I’m attracted to a type, I’m attracted to a type.” She leers playfully, caresses my chest. “And lucky you, you’re that type.”

“That’s handy,” I say, regaining my balance in the conversation. “You’re my type, too.”

“I’m glad,” she says. “And no matter what happens, I want you to always remember that, okay?”

“Sure.”

“No matter what happens?”

“No matter what happens.”

We make love again, this time as dinos, as nature intended it to be. Our hides rub against one another, rough skin scratching with a sandpaper sizzle as we move back and forth across the sofa, the floor, the bed, and the floor again. There is nothing naughty about it, nothing forbidden, nothing adventurous or on the sly. And whereas that sharpness, that just-below-the-surface buzz of danger, is no longer with us, the act is somehow more beautiful, more real, than it was before.

At some point, after the sun has sunk below the horizon, we make our way to the bedroom and continue to discover one another well into the night. At some point, Jaycee tells me that she needs me, and I find myself saying it back. At some point, I drift off into sleep, hypnagogic images of lizards and jasmine dancing through my head.

At some point, I awaken into pitch black. A voice is whispering nearby, saying something like
catch the next flight
and
be there for the first crack
. In the meager light that has managed to make its way through my bedroom window, I can make out a silhouette of Jaycee on the phone by my nightstand. In my bleary-eyed stupor, the only thing I can think is that I’m amazed that they haven’t shut off my phone line yet.

“Jaycee?” I mumble. “Sarah? Come to bed.”

But even as I try to prop myself up on one arm, Jaycee has placed the receiver of the phone back on the hook and knelt down by my head. She caresses me gently, and plants two kisses upon my closed eyelids.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I think I could have loved you.”

And before I can either respond in kind or ask her what the hell she means by I’m sorry, there’s the glint of a syringe, a sharp poke in my arm, and everything fades into a beautiful, numb shade of black.

G
lenda Wetzel’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen is a lot like my old rental car in the sense that it is small, run-down, and probably infested with vermin. But she’s been nice enough to let me crash on her living-room sofa—a pullout, with only six springs busted!—even though I managed to get her fired by J&T and somehow involved her in a no-longer-official case that has gotten no fewer than four dinos killed and a number of others, including myself, terrorized or harassed. My plan, carefully worked out over this morning’s plane flight, is as follows: I will solve the case, I will find Jaycee, I will lift her into my arms much as Richard Gere did to Debra Winger at the end of
An Officer and a Gentleman
, and I will take her to Los Angeles. We will not go to the backseat of my car, due to the aforementioned vermin problem.

I woke up with a headache that could bring down Godzilla—whatever was in that syringe packed a wallop, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was some sort of concentrated herb. This reminds me of the hangovers I used to get back in my binge and binge days—my God, was it just a week ago?

Pedro turned my remaining furniture and appliances into nineteen hundred dollars in cash, and I thanked him profusely for bilking me out of the last of my worldly possessions. Twenty-dollar taxi to LAX,
fifteen-hundred-dollar plane ticket, forty-dollar trip into Manhattan. I am currently as close to penniless as I’ve ever been in my life, and it’s the furthest worry from my mind.

“I can’t believe you’re looking to bed down with the human,” Glenda says as we prepare to hit the town. She’s been fired from her job at J&T, but claims to enjoy the freedom of working freelance. I think it’s bullshit concocted to keep me from feeling low at a time when I’m already only millimeters in height, but that’s her story, and she’s sticking to it. “I mean … a human, for Chrissakes.”

“She’s not a human,” I explain for the tenth time. “She just looks and smells like a human.”

“If it smells like a human …” Glenda mumbles, the age-old dino truism escaping her lips. “Okay, maybe she ain’t a human, but she’s a friggin’ hussy.”

“And she’s not a hussy. She was doing it for the Council.”

“I got the pictures, Rubio. Kodachrome and everything. The hussy was friggin’ enjoying it.”

“Course she was,” I said. “They were both dinos. Now don’t tell me two dinos can’t enjoy being together …?”

“Yeah, but—” This stops her, throwing her lower lip into a thoughtful pout. “Okay, you got me.”

“Are you going to stop calling her the hussy?”

“Ooh, look at you,” she teases. “You’ve really got the hots for this bimbo, don’t you?”

Once we get that cleared up, I set about formulating a plan of attack on the city. There is much to do and, if my hackles, slowly but steadily rising since I stepped off the plane, are any indication, little time in which to do it.

“First stop, McBride’s apartment on the Upper East Side,” I tell Glenda. “Can you stay here, make a few calls?”

“Shoot.”

“Shoot as in
darn
, or shoot as in
fire away
?”

“Just tell me what to do,” she says.

“Easy job—check with Pacific Bell and find out what calls were made from my house between six o’clock last night and eight o’clock this morning. Might have been collect, might have been calling card, but they should have the call sheet. Jaycee phoned someone from my house, I’m sure of it.”

“And you think when you find that person, you’ll find your little huss … Jaycee.”

I smile at Glenda’s attempt, however belated, to be respectful of my wishes. “She has to be somewhere,” I say. “No one just disappears.”

“Remember who you’re talking about.”

Grabbing my keys, my wallet, a few disintegration pouches on the off chance I should run into trouble, I say, “You’ll get on it?”

“Right away, boss.”

“Thanks.” I peck Glenda on the cheek and she giggles. It’s the first sign of femininity I’ve seen out of my new, temporary partner, but I think I liked her better when she cursed. This is too off-putting. “Now get the fuck out of here,” she commands, and all is right with the world.

“Lock the door,” I suggest as I leave. “Lock it up tight.”

Bolts slam into place behind me.

There is no comparison between, say, the Plaza and Mrs. McBride’s apartment building overlooking Central Park; placing the hotel, however elegant it may seem, next to this place would be like lining up Carmen Miranda next to Queen Elizabeth for a group photo. What seemed so lush at the Plaza now seems downright ostentatious compared to the reserved elegance of this unnamed structure.

Talk about your exclusivity—the doorman, who is not the same gentleman who gladly offered information on Judith the other day—won’t even tell me
his
name, let alone the name of the co-op complex. And there’s no chance he’s letting me in that door. I explain to him that I have business at the building, then switch it to a personal meeting with Mrs. McBride. He doesn’t bite. I try the intimidation tactics that work so beautifully on most I encounter. No luck.

“Is there anything I can do for you to let me inside that building?” I’ve run out of options.

“I don’t think there is, sir.” The doorman has remained eminently polite, but considering he’s not letting me do anything I want to, it makes everything all the more frustrating.

“What if I ran past you? Ignored you and walked inside?”

His smile is chilling. Beneath his ridiculous doorman’s costume I
can make out the shape of considerable muscles dancing in powerful rhythm. “You don’t want to do that, sir.”

Money. Money always works. I pull a twenty out of my wallet and hand it to the man.

“What is this?” he says, looking at the bill in genuine confusion.

“What’s it look like?”

“It looks like twenty dollars,” he replies.

“You win a Kewpie doll,” I say, knowing that there’s little need for tact in a situation that turned tactless long ago. “I didn’t need it anymore. Cluttering up my wallet.”

“But twenty dollars …”

I throw my hands into the damp night sky—what is with this humidity? Has someone dumped an entire ocean into the air?—and say, “Fine, fine, fine! You don’t want the money, you don’t want the money!” I grab for my twenty back, but the doorman holds on tight.

“Whaddaya want from me?” I ask. “You don’t want my money—”

“I didn’t say that, sir.”

“What?”

“I didn’t say that I didn’t want your money.”

It hits me. “You … oh my Lord … you want more, don’t you?” The laughter comes easily, rushing up from my diaphragm and spilling out of my mouth, covering the poor doorman in mirth. “This whole time I’m figuring I’ve got to have some magic word, and all I had to do from the beginning was bribe you!” I amend my earlier critiques of New York; I love this town!

The doorman does not flinch; to his credit, he remains straight-faced as a wooden nutcracker as he sidesteps me and issues a polite good evening to an elderly gentleman leaving the building. Afterward, he resumes his post and stares out into space, hand casually outstretched toward my wallet.

I gladly hold up a hundred for inspection and slip it into his pocket. There’s more in my wallet if I have to lay it on him—if this guy wants a cash shower, I’ll turn on the spigot. The $120 does the trick, though; the doorman nods once, grabs hold of the brass pull, and swings open the portal, granting me access to the vaulted hallways beyond.