Jaclyn the Ripper (7 page)

The woman was at a place called Starbucks, two blocks away from a highway that serviced streams of motor cars resembling miniature trains without track or sensibility. She loved the wide, flat road of the red-and-blue 405 signs, the concrete slicing through that old whore Mother Nature. In fact, she had rested in one of its underpasses until the sun came up and, if need be, would go back again tonight.

Two cyclists came in, the door stirring the air, and the woman caught a whiff from her own body. It wasn't that nasty, harsh odor she recalled from when she was a man on the hunt for whores. Rather, it was a sweet musk, that same perfume her sister gave off before they'd go hand-in-hand behind the caretaker's house.
Yes, but I am not Penny—I must find a bath or a shower.

She finished her scone and dabbed at her mouth, put off by the paper
napkin.
Whatever happened to linen?
She sighed stoically and sipped tea—a passable Earl Grey—then leaned back in the chair, annoyed by Teresa's shirt stretching taut, annoyed by her own breasts. She must find respectable attire—something Jack would deem suitable—something masculine, except the way these men of 2010 dressed was questionable at best. Their trousers stopped at the calves, a perversion of knickers. They all wore pullover shirts with inane quotations, billed caps and sandals that flopped. True, she had loved the disco shirts and bell-bottoms in 1979, but they were flamboyant and elegant compared with these outfits. She assumed the wires hanging from the ears of these men had something to do with the small, strangely bright screens on their tables. Portable television, perhaps? If not, then it must be the small devices they were talking into, obviously the telephones of the day. She felt a pair of eyes and frowned.
Why does that man keep staring at me? Has he figured out that I am a misincarnation from out of time or does he want to take me behind this coffee store and have at me?
She gave the man a murderous scowl, not realizing that her expression came off as an innocent yet sensual pout.

She bit into the second scone, but her hunger had deserted her. She seethed with rage at whatever force in the cosmos was responsible for her becoming a woman.
Wells—that brilliant little fool—must have done something indecent before his machine got away from him. Yet he has to be here somewhere in this world of concrete and motor cars, stupid clothes and dirty-brown skies, and I will find him and make him wish that the most he knew about the vagaries of time was how to set his pocket watch.

Then it suddenly occurred to her that maybe she was wrong. Maybe Wells wasn't here at all. When she had arrived in 2010, she had panicked because of her toxic glow, yet still had the wherewithal to replace the declinometer and prevent the time machine from going back to infinity. Now—in her mind's eye—she saw that the dark, pillowlike thing underneath it had been a purse.
God knows Jack saw enough of them on the cobblestones of Whitechapel, and I'm quite certain that H. G. Wells wouldn't be caught dead carrying a purse.

Which means the girl must be here.

Bemused, the woman chuckled.
Perhaps the girl grew tired of his clever diatribes and his philandering ways and took his machine to get away. That would explain the declinometer, loose on the floor. And given the special key stuck in the dash, no doubt Wells will be coming here, too—not just for the girl, but to rescue his beloved machine. What to do, what to do.

Start with the girl. Amy Catherine Robbins.

The woman's logic whisked away her anger, and she became aware of music floating from small speakers, a soft, sweet female voice lending a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere to the place. It filled her with a sense of well-being. She smiled unconsciously and nodded along with the music, then noticed her reflection in the window behind her chair. Once again, she was surprised by her image, yet this time didn't mind her lovely face.
I'm really quite beautiful, and if that gives people in 2010 the wrong impression, that's actually quite marvelous. It will make deception and betrayal mere child's play.
Then she saw her breasts, her voluptuous curves and below. She gripped the chair and looked away, loathing her body, for it made her like her sister, like whores everywhere.

“She's great, isn't she?”

Startled, the woman turned. It was the man at the nearby table, leaning over his newspaper, his hand twitching nervously, a brittle grin on his puffy face. He had yellow-brown eyes and a scraggly red beard and he wore his cap backward, concealing his thinning, frizzy hair. The rest of him seemed ordinary, what with a roll of flesh over his belt and trousers.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Norah.”

“Who?”

“Norah Jones. You were smiling, so I figured you liked her stuff.”

“Actually, I prefer Grieg,” said the woman, unaccustomed to her own voice and its musical lilt. “Edvard Grieg.”

Red beard responded with a blank look.

“Wagner, perhaps?” she said blithely. “Have you heard of him?”

“Oh, I get it. You're into opera?”

“Certain operas, yes,” she replied, thinking of
Medea
. She started to
get up, already bored with the conversation and wanting to get away from this wine grape of a man.

“Hey, wait a sec,” he said. “So . . . what are you up to?”

She paused, not sure what he meant.

“I mean, like right now.” He grinned stupidly, revealing straight teeth that were unnaturally white.

She appraised red beard and the insinuations in his eyes, wondering where it would lead with him and what he could do for her. True, he wasn't a woman, a whore, but he was part of that sexual dynamic, and that might be enough. Besides, she needed to practice for her eventual encounter with Wells, and if nothing else, this red beard probably had a shower at his flat.

“Your cap's on backwards,” she said impulsively.

“You're
so
wrong.”

He reached over and turned her cap around so that it matched his, then leaned back and laughed, and soon she found herself laughing with him, her voice high and sweet like a little girl's.

 

They were in a cream-colored Porsche Boxster on the other side of the 405, turning off Sunset and heading into the hills. As they wound past well-kept homes with manicured landscaping, she lounged in the passenger seat and chuckled at the irony. One of her fondest memories from 1979 had come in a brand-new Porsche 944—black like Dolores Clark, the beautiful rich girl Leslie John Stephenson had met at a disco. They'd danced for hours under flashing, colored lights. They'd done drinks and a tête-à-tête, and then she'd driven them to San Francisco's John McLaren Park, intending to christen her car with their hot breath fogging the windows, their ecstasy, their juices mingling on black-leather seats. Dolores couldn't have known that most of the bodily fluids spilled in her car would be her own blood.

The woman smiled nostalgically. “What's your name?” she asked.

“Mike.” Red beard gave her a mock salute and tapped the car's accelerator. “Mike Trattner. How about you?”

The question startled her. She couldn't very well say John or Leslie
or even Jack. Indeed, what sobriquet would she choose? She took off her cap—her hair cascaded down—then smiled as it came to her. She turned her radiance on him and said low:

“Jaclyn.”

“Jaclyn? That's it?”

“That's it.”

He chortled nervously. “Well, that's okay with me. . . . Hey, you'renot a cop, are you?”

 

He pulled off the road on a grass-covered slope, backed the Boxster up to a grove of eucalyptus, killed the engine. Jaclyn liked the sudden quiet, the view of Brentwood below. Without the overcast, she could've seen the Pacific though she didn't know it was there. Nevertheless, she appreciated the irony of the beautiful vista in that they were a mere 343 years away from mankind annihilating its own planet. Then the irritating tap of his nervous fingers on the steering wheel broke the solitude.

“Okay.” He gripped her thigh as if it were a life raft. “How much?”

She swept her hair back and stared off, her anger barely under control. It was one thing to be trapped in a woman's body, yet quite another to be taken for a common harlot. “For what?”

“How much does a hundred get me?”

She swung around and gave him a coy smile, yet her fingernails were digging hard into the armrest lest she lose it and start clawing his face. She whispered, “More than you could possibly imagine.”

He handed her the bill. She stuffed it in the pocket with the kidney and was wondering how far she was going to take this charade, but he gave her no chance for thought. He grabbed her head and mashed his lips against hers, his jaws working, forcing her mouth open. He stuck his tongue deep inside.

Repulsed and infuriated, Jaclyn bit down hard on his tongue, ignored his muffled scream. She gripped him tight so he couldn't escape, worked her teeth like serrated blades and finally severed it.

She let go.

Howling in pain, he leapt from the car, hopped up and down, coughed and retched, his voice fading to a hoarse scream.

She spit tongue and blood on the dash, swung from the car and went after him, her rage unfulfilled.

Wide-eyed with fear, his hands up, he backed away, but she was coming on fast. Before he could escape, she kicked him hard in the groin. He screamed again, went down, rolled into a ball and writhed in the grass.

Jaclyn watched him for a moment, then went back to the Porsche, her own groin stirring with excitement. She started the engine and revved the accelerator, but nothing happened. Then she remembered that as he drove, he was constantly moving this stick-thing back and forth. She jerked on it. The Porsche lurched backwards and hit a eucalyptus tree. She frowned.
Ah, yes. The “R” must be for reverse.
Letting the engine idle, she carefully moved the shift to “D,” felt the little sports car lean forward like a thoroughbred at the gate. She glanced up. Trattner was on his knees now, blood streaming down his front. He had one of those tiny telephones to his ear, was trying to talk, but instead, brayed like a wounded donkey.

She hit the gas and lurched forward.

He made one futile attempt to get out of the way, but the Porsche hit him in the back, and he pitched forward on his face. She drove over his legs, then stopped and looked back. He was still trying to save himself, crawling through the grass with his arms, his useless legs dragging behind. She shifted into “R” and backed over him on a diagonal, crushing his head and torso.

She stopped again, saw his flattened body, vaulted from the Porsche and suddenly was convulsed with laughter. Bent over, slapping her legs, tears streaming down her face, she giggled helplessly and pointed at him. Finally, she managed a breath, a deep sigh, and got hold of herself. She looked off thoughtfully, realizing that her laughter was the closest she'd come to a sexual climax since 1979.

She heard a small, tinny sound, cocked her head, picked up Trattner's phone and put it to her ear.

“This is the emergency operator. Is someone there . . . ? Hello . . . ? Hello, is someone there . . . ?”

She tossed it away, having no need for a telephone, then had second thoughts and retrieved it. The voice was still coming from it. Panic seized her—as if this voice had somehow witnessed what she had just done—and she pressed every button on the tiny device until it went black and silent. She almost threw it away again, then hesitated, slid it in her pocket.

She gazed at red beard's corpse as if it were a sundry store.
What else might one need in this questionable time and place?
She had observed the way people conducted business at Starbucks, so she rooted through his pockets. Not much had changed in thirty-one years, except these days customers slid plastic cards through an electronic device for goods and presumably services. Michael Trattner's wallet had several of these magical little things plus two hundred dollars cash, a driver's license and a picture of his wife.

Sign him and be done with it.

She ransacked the Porsche for a knife or something sharp so that she might take another organ, yet found nothing. Then she discovered the car keys, examined them, and, no, they really wouldn't do for a surgery. She put them in her pocket, anyway, not knowing why, but trusting her instincts. She went back to her search. Still nothing. Frustrated, she was about to give up when she spied the piece of his tongue she'd bitten off, limp on the dash. She recalled when she was Jack; she would send Scotland Yard letters deliberately written in Cockney with crude sketches designed to taunt them. If she couldn't butcher this Michael Trattner, she could paint on him, she could leave the coppers a contemporary work of art. But what? She noticed the stupid happy face on Teresa Cruz's T-shirt, went back to the body, turned it over and ripped off Trattner's shirt, exposing a generous expanse of belly. Using his head as a well, she dipped the tongue in his blood, drew a happy face on his belly, the words “REMEMBER ME?” underneath. She placed the tongue in the middle of the face like a flaccid nose, brushed off her hands in the grass, hurried to the road and started down the hill.

Minutes later she heard a helicopter, but thought nothing of it,
blissfully unaware of GPS technology and that the West LAPD had zeroed in on Michael Trattner's cell when he didn't respond to the emergency operator before she had turned the phone off. It didn't matter. When the helicopter was circling the scene, she was a half-mile away, still hidden by the trees.

 

Near the bottom of the hill, the road widened, and around a curve she came upon homes much smaller and closer together than the ones farther up, and she recalled walking from, say, her childhood home at Aesculapius across the countryside to a village replete with sounds and smells. So here, she expected motor cars, people, movement of some kind, even dogs barking, but was greeted with a profound quiet, a silence that washed away the afterglow of murder and made her flesh crawl. She frowned nervously and reminded herself,
I am the harbinger of bad tidings. Of all people, I should not be apprehensive or afraid. Yet I am.