Pygmalion Unbound (14 page)

Soft snoring came through the bedroom door; she touched herself between the legs, feeling raw and bruised labia through the soft down. His insistence and insatiability were surely compensation for a lack of stature where it counted most to a man, and the repeated batterings of her womb ameliorated only by their briefness. Sex, in name only, little communication or connection the way it always was in those sappy videos or chick mags, a selfishness permeating his technique. Six months and maybe as many orgasms from his ministrations, left too sore to finish herself.

And for what? Possible career advancement? Lisa was three years out of school, thought the Bernalillo County DA was a place for advancement out of UNM, spent a couple years working juvenile and traffic and moved up to the big time only after being noticed by a senior deputy named Stephen Magruder, and not for her law review brain but long legs, blonde hair and Barbie figure. The creepiness of a fifty-year old man taking a twenty-something girl for a lover while still married and then as number six in a string of wives never went away and had manifested more of late, and she swore it was over this time, she was done being used. Maybe a smaller county back east, or Santa Fe, which had a more boho vibe —

A soft
snick
of metal sliding, a door opening, she turned from the window, saw the entryway to the one-level ranch (7,000 square feet at 2 mil) and a softly illuminated rectangle framing a human figure, tall and lithe with curls before the door shut softly. She stood naked and defenseless watching the woman — it was a woman from the shape — creep stealthily towards the bedroom, frozen in panic her mouth trying to scream or shout but knowing that to do so meant death. Slowly, she began backing from the window to cover behind the couch —

The shadow stopped, turned, and was on her in several catlike leaps, over a half-wall and a table, jumping and handspringing over the couch to stop her, taking her down to the floor easily and gently, rendering her unconscious with a sharp pressure to the base of the neck, then straddling her chest and pinning her to the wooden floor.

Maria stared down at the limp form beneath her. A witness, but more, she knew. A young woman, naked at this time of night could only mean one thing. A lover, obviously younger, meant he hadn’t changed his ways, but this one looked to be above the age of consent.

Death?

It’s how we treat all living things,
Alannah’s voice whispering in her ear. And this girl was a lesser creature, a victim, who merited compassion. She was unconscious, hadn’t really seen anything in the dark. She pondered how to handle this development.

But if they don’t acknowledge I’m human, don’t have civil rights, how can I be subject to their criminal laws
? An interesting conundrum, one that Des typically hadn’t resolved.

The girl would live.

Maria rose from her crouch, padded silently into the bedroom, slammed on the lights, beheld the tall pale soft body sideways on the bed stir and mumble. “Lisa, turn it off I’ve got an early — ”

The words stopped as Maria whisked the sheets off, took an arm and hauled the man from bed, twirled him and slammed the body against the wall, crushing drywall and rattling the room, slapping the face to wake him up, kneeing him in the soft genitals to take his mind off resistance. She hauled the body down to a kneeling position, took the jaw in her hand, put her face to his.

“I’m not Lisa. Remember me?” She flicked on the lights.

Comprehension slowly dawned in the eyes, then horror. “You’re — you’re…not alive. How?” Eyes beholding something the brain said was impossible froze his speech.

“I’ve been born again.”

The eyes were bugging out, the lips moving fishlike in her grip, the skin turning from pale to scarlet. “I — listen, it was a mistake. It was a long time ago, and — ”

She slammed his head against the wall, causing the eyelids to flutter, slapped him to bring him back around. “I’m not interested in explanations, and I’m not handing out salvation. Tell me how you did it.”

“Did what?”

A crack across his face loosened a couple teeth. “How did you do me in, and how did you frame up Rodney Bonham?”

“I — I didn’t — ”

She picked him up, threw him against the wall again, hard, making the room rattle and the wallboard cave in. He told her.

She stepped back five paces, reached behind her back, felt the leather holster, undid it, drew the weapon inside. She’d detoured through Pueblo around three a.m., found a pawn shop in a seedy area of town, burned through the antitheft systems in five seconds, and helped herself to a sense of security in the form of a Beretta 9 mm with half a dozen boxes of ammo, ten rounds of which were already in the clip.

She racked the slide back, thumbed off the safety, saw dull comprehension turn to panic in his eyes as he began to scramble frantically for cover, made all the more comical by his flabby pasty nakedness.

One slug tore into his knee, stopping the motion and eliciting a hoarse squeal of agony.

A kick to the torso turned him to face her.

The second slug obliterated the tiny offending member between his legs.

The third tore a hole in his chest, stopping the heart.

The fourth for good measure sent his brain spraying across the wall in a pinkish-gray mist of bone and tissue.

She reholstered the weapon, silently and swiftly exited the house, and disappeared into the sagebrush and rocky hills and draws from where she had come.

19

Five days after Maria disappeared, Crane was jolted by the alert that popped up on his monitor at five a.m., over his morning coffee. In his kitchen, an ultra-modern space with rich wood finish and islands glowing under warm ambient lighting and a spectacular mountain view, Crane scanned the headlines every morning before going to the office.

PROSECUTOR MURDERED read the headline of the Albuquerque
Journal
, showing a picture of the fleshy face he remembered from the trial, aged another fifteen years. Magruder had led the investigation and prosecuted the case. Shot four times in his house, female companion injured, suspect believed to be a younger female, athletic with long dark hair…

He froze inside at that.

Maria had gone beyond self-defense.

She’d learned revenge.

She remembered Before.

Which gave him an idea where to find her.

20

It all came back to her quickly, the run-down burned-out crime-ridden neighborhoods that she’d visited in another life. She had been an interloper before, but was now a resident. The dark streets under broken lights, empty windows like eye sockets in a skull, the furtive comings and goings on the grimy streets, it all gave her anonymity. And few questions.

Free, for now, but she’d found that the freedom was in ways a prison. She’d been born four months ago, literally. Which meant she had skipped all the things taken for granted as one matured — government identification numbers, driver’s license, school records, credit applications, all the minutiae taken for granted by humans.

Being entirely off the grid was not as liberating as she’d imagined. In Oklahoma City, after dispatching Magruder, she’d tried to purchase a vehicle for cash taken from a half-dozen ATMs located along I-40 that she’d jacked into and drained. But even for cash, for a twenty-year old Honda, she needed a driver’s license, proof of insurance, and a half-dozen other things. It became far easier to simply wait until after dark and steal a car, ditching the last one.

She had made her way back to Chicago, the city of her last memories, and taken residence in a rickety third-floor brick tenement apartment that stood in a row with other equally decayed buildings. The nights were punctuated by gunfire and shouts and sirens. The woman next door had a constant stream of visitors who stayed for a half hour or so at a time. Next door had a steady flow in and out, staying much shorter times. It was a distraction from her main duty, which was to create a life.

Maria discovered one of the old tricks while at the public library, on the internet — using a keyboard, which was cumbersome, not directly jacking in, which would have drawn unwanted attention. Find someone who died in childhood, request the birth certificate, apply for a social security number, driver’s license, credit cards, and establish the identity from there. There was a depressing number of choices here, but she settled on a girl who had died as an infant. Birth certificate in hand, she applied for a social security account, and by jacking and hacking she created a school record for her from kindergarten through high school graduation. A university degree was going to take longer, but she was working on it. Akeysha Simmons, dob 6/5/01 dod 8/4/02 lived again.

The other part of her existence here was to gather the evidence to get the truth out about Roni’s death. She’d searched and tracked down the real Ronette Maria McVicker, and came to think of her as her twin. A caring woman, the product of a broken home who’d devoted her life to healing, brutally cut short by a senseless murder.

The evidence in the case was still in the evidence locker at the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, since Rodney Bonham, the man convicted of her murder, had been given the death penalty and once the direct appeal was done, the interminable process of
habeas corpus
appeals still slogging on, so the case was never really final and they had to keep the evidence.

Bonham’s DNA was on a piece of clothing found at the scene, lost in the struggle, so it was proven. But the clothing had been taken in another of his cases that had been on appeal at the time of the murder, checked out from the evidence locker by the district attorney and replaced with a duplicate after the plea that put him on probation in the first case, and the real article placed at the scene. Since Bonham had been particularly agitated, he’d argued that the lawyer in his previous case, a sexual assault, had been ineffective, and filed a
habeas corpus
petition on that as well, and on a technical motion the two cases had been joined, which meant the evidence had been joined, and not disposed of in the ordinary course of business within a year. The crime lab had already run a DNA test on the hat, typed it and matched it to Bonham, so a new exam which found no traces of his DNA would be suspect.

It wasn’t much, but she was confident that she’d retained a lawyer who could run with it. She’d sent the package to the offices of Joseph P. Anthony, Esq., a week ago, along with a ten thousand dollar retainer money order. The petition was drawn up and filed the next week, a private investigator hired. It would be several months before any hearing could be scheduled, Anthony told her, but it looked promising.

That done, she turned to the more pressing problem — what was she going to do with the rest of her life? On the run, having to live in the shadows, for decades, merely existing, was hardly fulfilling. What propelled human beings like Alannah and Dr. Franklin and, yes, her Creator, was a Mission, from the crass accumulation of wealth and power to the pursuit of knowledge for the advancement and benefit of mankind.

There was a purpose for her, she knew. She just had no idea what it could be. The Bible talked of signs from God. Maybe she would get a sign from someone or something.

For now, she thought as she walked the steps to the bare apartment she leased, it was enough to remain free. To grow into the humanity that had been denied her.

The top of the stairs was dark, the light long ago torn out and wires hanging loose, plaster cracked and chunks missing in some spots, the paint scuffed and stained and covered with spray-painted graffiti in six tongues filled with words not taught in any language course. She tapped a code into a black rectangular keypad kept in her jacket, and slid the key into the lock which she’d bought and installed herself. The lock was bolted to a metal frame in the door, would slow forced entry. The keypad disarmed the 10kW laser rifle mounted on a tripod facing the door. She entered stealthily, a conventional 9mm Beretta in hand, covering the small room and clearing it.

The single light revealed a room freshly painted a tranquil dark blue, floor carpeted but bare of anything save a futon and a computer terminal. The terminal hooked into a phone line — pirated, naturally — which gave her access to the net, through the computer but also through a custom jack she had designed for direct interface. She had added software and hardware to automatically shifted the IP address after every session to another city, to defeat any tracking software.