Cast of Shadows - v4 (28 page)

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 arrived at the grocery store he dismounted and turned the bike around. He didn’t know the area well and wanted to make sure he didn’t become so lost in the getaway that he’d have to backtrack past the grocery after the cops arrived. If there were any cops at all, of course. One could never tell just how a target might react.

He entered the grocery, which belonged to a chain, although not one of the Texas-sized conglomerates with the travel agency and the copy center and the bank. At the registers, he turned into a small deli with four booths and a tiny pizza oven and a machine that made milk shakes. Four people stood in line ahead of him, and he stared indifferently at the menu board while he waited. When it was his turn he made sure not to put his hand flat against the stainless steel counter (not that they had his fingerprints in their database, or that fingerprints were even used much to ID people anymore, what with DNA being so much more reliable, but it didn’t serve any purpose to be leaving the ghost of his palm behind everywhere he went) and he ordered a turkey club sandwich, no cheese, and stood in another line by the register while they built layers of mayonnaise and sliced meat and lettuce and bacon on a slice of white bread.

His sandwich arrived at the cashier at the same time he did. A boy around seventeen asked him what he’d ordered and Mickey described the sandwich to him and produced a ten-dollar bill. The boy counted out his change, and when he handed it over, Mickey cupped the kid’s fingers in his hand, making sure that he felt the scales of Mickey’s raw, chapped skin.

“Are you Christopher Bel Geddes?” Mickey asked the boy casually. He knew the answer. He only wanted to get the kid’s attention. Most of the time when you talk to them, teenagers aren’t listening to you.

“Yeah?” The kid looked up.

Mickey leaned in and spoke in a low voice. The kid leaned forward as well until his lobe was near enough to Mickey’s mouth that Mickey could have bitten it with an attacking lunge. “Tell your father that he might be innocent in the eyes of the law,” Mickey said, his breath hot in the boy’s ear as he shoved the folded drawing roughly into his apron pocket, “but he still has to answer to the Hands of God.” He said this last bit in something like a Southern accent —
Haints of Gwad
— partially as a nod to Byron Bonavita and partially because, when he practiced it, he liked the menacing way it sounded to his own ear. He called that voice “the Sinister Minister.” It reminded him of De Niro in the remake of
Cape Fear
.

Christopher Bel Geddes was still bent over the counter when Mickey grabbed his sandwich and spun toward the door. He walked with his head down out into the grocery store, behind the row of fifteen registers, which counted off in backlit numbers above the cashiers’ heads. He walked in the direction of the double sets of automatic doors, which did their best to lock the cool air inside.

“Sir?” a voice asked. Mickey didn’t look up.

“Sir?” the voice said again. It was following behind him. “Can I see your receipt, sir?”

Mickey stopped. He didn’t even know if he had a receipt. Christ, they weren’t going to pinch him for shoplifting. Talk about an undignified end. He wished he had left the sandwich on the counter. Taking it was just cocky. He turned around. The security guard was small and his tie was too short and his uniform pinched the fat around his middle. “Um, I paid for it,” Mickey stammered. “They put it in this paper bag.”

“They should have given you a receipt.” The guard turned as if he wanted to lead Mickey back to the deli. Christopher Bel Geddes appeared from behind a stack of Coca-Cola, his leather-soled shoes sliding on the worn linoleum floor. From a hundred feet or so, his eyes brought Mickey and the guard into focus.

“Hey!” the kid yelled.

Mickey ran, his right shoulder checking the second set of sliding doors when they wouldn’t open fast enough. The security guard yelled after him. He saw his bike. No, screw the bike. He’d never get it started in time. He ran as fast he could across the parking lot and back down the road by which he’d come. Already he was winded. He had no chance of outrunning a seventeen-year-old kid. A cloud of shouting gained on him from behind.

He turned a corner and leapt awkwardly over a low chain-link fence, sprinting through someone’s yard. He climbed the fence on the other side and found a gulley that separated backyards between rows of homes along parallel streets and ran down the middle of it, his feet heavy against the mud and the weeds. This was too dangerous. They might see him from the side street.

Mickey jumped another fence, this one in the middle of a block, and ducked behind a yellow plastic playhouse to rest. He didn’t have a gun or even a knife with him. He had change in his pocket and, what else, the damn sandwich. He still had the damn paper bag in his hand.

“Hi,” a little girl’s voice yelled in his right ear. Mickey jumped, but he was too tired to run. There was a kid in the playhouse, maybe six years old. Her black hair was thick, and her new, grown-up teeth were too big for her pea-shaped head. She was leaning out the window and her head was beside his and she was giggling. “I’m Talia. I’m an eye doctor,” she told him, and with a pudgy finger she pushed the lower lid down and away from his right eye and leaned in until her irises were this close to his. Mickey didn’t swat the girl’s hand away, didn’t do anything to make her shout or cry or yell.

“Are your parents home?” Mickey asked. Then he added, “Dr. Talia.”

The girl nodded, still pinching the bag of skin under his eye. Of course her parents are home, Mickey thought. Parents don’t just leave the house when there’s a six-year-old in the yard. Good parents, anyway. “What about them?” Mickey asked. He pointed to a big white house with aluminum siding next door.

Dr. Talia shook her head. “They don’t have babies. Mommy says babies would crank their lightstyle.”

“Great. Thanks.” He waved good-bye and duckwalked into the neighbor’s yard as Talia called good-bye after him. She ran into her own house, no doubt to tell her mother about her new grown-up friend. Mickey made his way around the side of the garage and pushed a window screen in. They had a second car, thank God, an old Audi. He lifted himself up and squeezed through, landing on an empty rubber trash can. Using his own keys to expose the wires, he had the Audi started in less than two minutes. The remote for the garage door was on the passenger-side eyeshade. He backed out slowly.

Down the street and getting closer, he could see a handful of men darting in and out between homes. There were no cops yet, just an assortment of teens and old baldies in deli aprons. He caught a glimpse of the fat security guard catching up to the pack at last, still thinking they were chasing a shoplifter, no doubt. He was talking into a radio. Mickey reached for the clicker and closed the garage behind him as he pulled into the street, just like any home owner taking the Audi to meet his wife for dinner. Young Chris Bel Geddes and the rest of the deli crew hardly gave him a thought as he drove away.

That was a rush, Mickey thought to himself. When they go bad like that, it’s always a rush.

Graham Mendelsohn didn’t usually make house calls to his clients, but he and Davis had a scheduled round at the Northwood Country Club at one, and Graham phoned him at New Tech to say he’d be coming in a little early to talk business. Davis didn’t like the sound of that.

Tall and thin and about Davis’s age, Graham wore pressed khakis and a pink Polo, which put Davis at ease when he saw the attorney turn the corner into his office. A man bearing grim news wouldn’t deliver it in a ridiculous shirt like that. Davis tried to put him off message before Graham could turn the mood sour.

“Did you hear they almost nabbed him?” Davis asked.

Graham stopped rehearsing the announcement he was about to make and froze, resting his briefcase on an extra chair by the door. “No. Who?”

“Byron Bonavita,” Davis said. “He threatened Oliver Bel Geddes’s boy down in Austin and the kid chased him for a few blocks. Bastard got away, though.”

Graham frowned. “Balls. They get a description? DNA? Anything?”

Davis said, “No. A little girl got a good look at him up close, so I’m sure they’ll be out searching for Tigger tomorrow. Anyway, I hope you brought something to cheer me up.”

“Well, the good news is you won’t have to testify,” Graham said. “Ricky Weiss is taking a plea.”

Davis grinned. “No shit?” He made a move for his clubs. This would be the first truly relaxing round he had played in a year.

“I told you he’d fold eventually. Between his own wife and that Tweedy fellow, he was totally screwed.”

“Graham, after that I don’t
care
what the bad news could be.” Davis started to shut down his computer. They could celebrate with cigars on the first tee. “There
is
bad news, right?”

Graham nodded. “Martha Finn is pressing charges against you with the Lake County D.A. for stalking her son. I negotiated a voluntary surrender at noon tomorrow. They won’t announce it ahead of time. There won’t be a perp walk. That should keep it off the television news, anyway. The daily papers will probably bury it in the eighth ’graph of the Weiss story.”