Cross Dressing (21 page)

Somewhere near the wall containing sixty-seven different salad dressings Dan noticed something odd about the way people were looking at him. Whenever he made eye contact with anyone, they smiled at him rather sweetly. They weren’t smiling in the simple-acknowledgment way people do when they’re merely being pleasant. This smile was respectful,
almost thankful, and in any event, it wasn’t the sort of smile Dan was accustomed to getting. That’s when Dan realized he wouldn’t get caught. He was safe because people were responding not to him, but to his clothes. He was a priest in their eyes. And given fifty random people in a store, Dan thought, who is security
not
going to watch?

He started at the bulk candy containers, eating yogurt-coated malt balls. Then he put a roll of toilet paper in his basket before filching a can of tuna. Things were going smoothly as he wandered over to the meat section. He didn’t like the looks of the pork and he didn’t think he could get away with a whole chicken, so he moved down to the end of the cooler and grabbed what he thought he could get away with. He headed to the front of the store and stopped at the magazine rack. He put down his basket and distanced himself from it as he leafed through a magazine. Then he casually headed for the exit.

Wearing the clericals, Dan felt like a man with diplomatic immunity. He was home free. The automatic doors opened like the gates to heaven. A second later he was safely on the sidewalk outside the store, feeling haughty about his shoplifting skills. Dan’s pride took a fall, however, when the security guard tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Father,” he said. The guard reached into Dan’s shirt pocket and produced the can of tuna. Then he gestured toward the bulge in Dan’s crotch.

Dan smiled immodestly. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to see it.”

Dan reached into his pants and liberated the stolen kielbasa. Then, with a swift backhand, Dan whacked the guard across the head with the sausage and disappeared into the parking lot.

T
ypically when one is fired from a job for attempting to kill a customer, it becomes difficult to find employment in that
same field. Mr. Ted Tibblett, however, could think of no good reason to provoke the moody bastard with the Ruger Super Redhawk .44 magnum, so he made a point of telling Scott that he would give him a glowing reference should anyone inquire.

Scott knew Dan was out there. He also knew it wouldn’t be easy to find him. It would take time, which was all right. Scott had plenty of time, but like everything else, it would also take money, so Scott began his job search first. With Mr. Tibblett’s generous reference, Scott felt good about finding work that would fund his search for Dan. After that, nothing would matter.

While he waited for his interviews, Scott had time to think. He couldn’t figure out why Dan had faked his own death, but he did have an idea why Dan was posing as a Catholic priest. Scott knew Dan had attended seminary before starting his advertising career. He knew this because Dan had used the fact to help land the Mormon account a few years earlier. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was the GM of organized religions in that it had a significant ad budget as part of its proselytizing campaign. But why fake his death?
Hell, why ask why?
he thought. The “why” of it didn’t matter. The priest angle was a good lead, and Scott was going to follow it up.

Scott was in his apartment pumping furiously on the BullyBoy hot-loading some new rounds for the hunt. He had become quite adept at handloading his own ammo over the past two weeks and he found that the process relaxed him, so he kept loading and loading until he had enough cartridges to fill a bandoleer. When he ran out of primers and brass casings, Scott started working out his strategy. He grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up Churches, Catholic. There were several subcategories: Byzantine, Eastern, Latin Rite, Liberal, Roman, and Traditional. He decided the simplest approach
would be the best, so he tore the page from the book and began plotting the church locations on a map of the Valley. He would start at the west end and work his way east until he found the priest he was looking for. He would go to confession over and over until he heard a voice he recognized. Then he’d give Dan his penance.

D
an played hide-and-seek with the security guard until he could sneak back into the microbus and escape. Despite being only a mile from the apartment, it took him nearly an hour to get back. Cal-Trans was doing some unnecessary midday work in the middle two lanes of the San Diego Freeway and there was a Sig-Alert on the 118 due to a six-car pileup caused by idiots in the westbound lanes rubbernecking at a police stop on the eastbound lanes. This forced roughly fifty-eight thousand cars onto surface streets, gridlocking that portion of the Valley. The whole thing was compounded by a fearsome excavation on Magnolia Boulevard, which otherwise would have been the best alternative route.

By the time Dan got home, he was starving, which went a long way in explaining why he thought the pan of soy sauce and canned tomatoes smelled so mmmm-mmmm good. As he stirred the dark red concoction, the heat from the stove charmed his eyes. He stared at the bubbling liquid, thinking about what to do next. He needed a job; that much he knew. A moment later it dawned on him that he already had one waiting for him. Now all he had to do was remember the name of his employer.
What was her name? Sister Somebody. Teresa? No, that was Mother, not Sister. Bertrille? Bernadette? Mary Clarence?
Dan was sure Michael had mentioned her name, but for the life of him, Dan couldn’t remember it.

After the tomatoes bubbled for a while Dan poured them into a bowl. He looked at his dinner and, for the first time in
many years, he paused to give thanks. And while he was at it, he prayed that God would remind him of the name of the nun who was out there waiting to write him a paycheck. After grace, Dan scooped up a steaming tomato. As he blew on it to cool it down, the phone began to ring. Without thinking, he popped the tomato into his mouth and grabbed the phone. The tomato was so much napalm on his tongue. Dan spit it out with phenomenal force. “Jesus!” The tomato shot across the room and exploded against the wall. “Shit! Yiiiiiiiiiii!”

“Excuse me?” came the voice from the telephone.

Dan dropped the receiver and dove for the sink. He flushed his mouth with cold water for a minute before returning to the phone. “Huu-ooo?” he said, the letter
L
being too painful to pronounce at the moment.

“Father Michael?” It was a woman.

“Uh huh,” Dan said, suddenly wondering why he had answered the phone in the first place. “Who is this?”

“It’s Sister Peg.” She paused, wondering best how to proceed. “Uh … where the hell have you been?”

Dan’s mind raced. How much was he supposed to know about this woman? Should he have recognized her voice? Had Michael told him anything about her that he could use?
Quick
, he thought,
put her on the defensive.
“Oh, hi, Sister. I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, but”—he paused and made what he hoped was a pitiful sniffling sound—“my brother died.”

Sister Peg gasped. “Oh my God,” she said. “How … I had no idea. When … I mean, what happened?”

Phew
, Dan thought. He made the transition from burn victim to grieving next of kin and laid it on thick. He talked about the shock and how he had to decide not to tell his mother because of her emotional profile and about how there was no money for a good funeral and about all the inner turmoil that caused and on and on. It was a pathetic story convincingly told, but then Dan had always written good copy.

“I understand,” Sister Peg said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No.” He sighed. “No, the worst has passed,” Dan said, wondering if he’d crossed into melodrama. “I think I’m ready to get back to work.” Dan stuck out his tongue and felt for blisters.

“If you’re sure,” Sister Peg said. “We really do need you out here.”

“I understand,” Dan said. “And again, I’m sorry I didn’t call, but, well, you know, it’s funny, I was going to call you at one point, but I couldn’t remember the phone number out there or even where your, uh, place is.” Dan realized how lame that sounded. “My grief counselor said it was posttraumatic stress amnesia. Said it’s fairly common in this sort of situation.”

Monsignor Matthews had told Sister Peg that Father Michael was prone to stress-related reactions, though he hadn’t been specific and, at any rate, she didn’t care. She just needed his help, so she gave him the phone number, the address, and a description of the place. She just hoped that he could deal with the stress of the Care Center. “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Dan hesitated, wondering what the hell he was getting into. “I’ll be there in the morning.”

B
utch Harnett occupied a moral universe that lacked shades of gray. Things were either right or they were wrong. Either you had sinned or you hadn’t. The very finest moments of Butch’s life were spent trying to find out into which category the subjects of his investigations fell.

Butch was guided by his own interpretation of Romans 3:23. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Of course, by “all” Butch understood the verse to mean
all the people who attempted to defraud his employer. Butch sensed that Dan Steele was one of the people who had sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Righteously motivated, Butch had obtained a copy of Dan’s medical records in an effort to find the truth. Butch loved medical records because, as he liked to say, “you can’t hide from what’s inside of you.” That Butch had obtained these records under false pretenses was immaterial. There was a greater good to be served and one did what one had to in order to serve it; Butch was dedicated to this credo.

Other than CPR training, Butch had no official medical education, but after ten years of poking through people’s private medical files he had picked up a point or two. The thing that jumped out of this particular file was the fact that as a child, Dan Steele had received an active immunization with tetanus toxoid, and ever since then, he had received regular booster shots, his most recent a mere two years ago. Now, Butch would have been the first to admit that he didn’t know all there was to know about tetanus, but he was pretty sure Dan shouldn’t have had it, much less should he have died from it. But he had to make sure. That was his job. So he did some research and discovered that tetanus was an acute intoxication by the neurotoxin elaborated by
Clostridium tetani
, the spores of which were universally present in soil. When
Clostridium tetani
was introduced into a wound in the presence of necrotic tissue and impaired circulation, the spores germinated. Untreated, the bacteria elaborated tetanospasmin, a toxin that blocked the action of inhibitory mediators at spinal synapses and interfered with neuromuscular transmission. The incubation period ranged from eight days to as long as fifteen weeks. Immunization and booster shots were known to prevent the disease with nearly 100 percent efficiency, yet according to the hospital records, Dan was deader than Lazarus—the second time he died.

That could mean only one of two things. Either Dan was one of the unluckiest bastards in the world or he had, indeed, sinned.

D
an found the Care Center with no problem. It was only ten minutes from his apartment. The neighborhood was poor, like all the neighborhoods where Dan had grown up, but this was a notch or two down the food chain. This was truly grim.

Perhaps understandably, the area had a disproportionate number of churches, Sylmar being the sort of place where the promise of a reward in the next life had tremendous appeal. But that was a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be that people out here went to church to be thankful for what they had. For decades Sylmar had been a perfectly nice place to live where—for the most part—people didn’t really want for anything. They were close to the mountains, not far from the amenities of a big city, and the ocean was only an hour or so to the west. But as television and radio spread, so did discontent. All those sitcoms and advertisements showed viewers all the things they didn’t have, all the things that would make them happier if they did. Later, cable and satellite dishes came along, delivering not only more of the same information but also the brilliant hybrid of entertainment and advertisement known as the infomercial. And finally, with the arrival of the shopping channel, one didn’t even have to get out of one’s La-Z-Boy to keep up with the Hernandezes.

The message was clear and the medium was effective and after a while people who once thought they had it all began to feel something was missing in their lives. Consumerism rapidly became a lifestyle. Shopping became a form of entertainment instead of something you did when you needed something. Now people simply
wanted
stuff. They began to feel entitled to it, and they went into debt to get it. But the
easy payment plans designed to help the American consumer acquire the trappings of luxury turned out to be an albatross, especially in poorer neighborhoods. Despite an economy expanding at a record pace, per capita savings was down to zero while personal bankruptcies were reaching historic levels. Before long, people were drowning in debt, hounded by debt collectors, and were told they simply couldn’t afford the American dream. Sorry.

That’s when the Church’s age-old product began to look attractive again. From a manufacturer’s point of view, the notion of eternal happiness in the next life was the perfect commodity. “It’s the only product you will ever need!” Its perfection lay in the fact that the consumer—exploiting the original layaway plan—paid for it every Sunday but had to die in order to find out if the sales pitch was true. “It never needs ironing!” No one in the history of mankind had ever returned the product for a full refund. Not even Microsoft managed that.

Dan pulled into the dirt driveway and parked in the shade of a fruitless orange tree. Stepping out of the old van, Dan waved at the dust kicked up by his arrival. He was nervous. He feared that this Sister Peg would nail him as a fraud the moment he walked in the door, and then where would he be? He took some comfort in the fact that Michael had seen Sister Peg only once and then not for long. But even if he managed to fool the nun, his mother was a different story. What would she do when she found out? The possibilities seemed endless and none were in his favor.