The Blonde (16 page)

A
ngela seemed to be considering Jack’s proposal, as ludicrous as it was. My contact lenses, he’d explained. They dried up a couple of hours ago; I had to take them out.

“You know, I’m not like most women,” she told him. “I like to look. But then again, I’ve always been a tomboy, so maybe there’s that. Some circuits crossed in my head, you know?” Jack said he knew what she was talking about. He didn’t.

Finally, she agreed to move the table closer, but she warned him: “If you spurt all over me, I’ll beat the hell out of you.” Jack said he could agree to that.

But the few seconds it took her to move the table closer were excruciating.

First the ticking away of the ten seconds, which Jack counted off too fast, and he hit ten and nothing happened and he thought he’d be fine and was relieved to think that maybe the effect had worn off or he hadn’t been infected as badly as he’d thought….

And then the first nauseating twist, deep in his brain.

Do not scream.

Then belt straps, wrapped around his skull and tightening, like someone had slid a steel rod through the buckle and was rotating, squeezing the leather against his hair and scalp and skull.

Scream and it’s over.

And the icy hot needle sticks in his brain, with inflatable black balloons rapidly expanding …

Scream and she’ll run, and the Mary Kates will finish you off….

Then, Angela’s palms were warm against his cheeks. “Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Jack was incoherently grateful, and he mumbled something about being tired. She gave him an uneasy smile in return. “You ready?” she asked politely. Of course he was ready. He’d do anything for her now. She’d come back to him; she had saved him from the abyss. He wasn’t thinking of Theresa. Or his daughter, Callie. He was thinking only of the woman who was standing in front of him, wanting to watch him masturbate. How easy the slide into debauchery.

The Sybian hummed to life, and Angela mounted it.

“Take it out,” she ordered.

She was shaved down to her skin, not a single strand of hair in sight. Jack’d been lying, of course. His contact lenses were in and his eyesight was perfect. And he could vividly see the buzzing fat rubber tip press up against the lips of her vagina. Her fingers worked the area for a few seconds, presumably trying to tease out her clitoris. Angela looked up at him.

“Dick?” she asked, nodding to his crotch.

Jack fumbled a moment, and though he could have sworn he felt nothing but white-hot fear from the hips down, as if his legs had
completely melted away into the white noise—and buzzing—of the room, he was faintly relieved to find he had a modest erection.

He took his cock out of his pants.

Angela moaned in delight and thrust her hips against the Sybian. Her straining leg muscles made it look as if she could use her heels and knees to snap the saddle in half.

“Rub it,” she said, eyes shut.

Jack was only slightly dismayed to find himself doing what he was told, and his body responding….

Angela bucked as if he were touching her.

“Down to the head.”

The door kicked open behind her.

Someone said, “Step aside, sweetie. We’ve got to ask this man a few questions.”

Jack, with his dick in his hand, looked past Angela and saw two men standing in the doorway. A dark, curly-haired man in a suit, and an Aryan Nations poster boy, also in a suit, which was considerably more wrinkled. Aryan Man was more muscular, but the other guy looked harder, somehow. Leaner.

“We didn’t see your FOP card in your wallet,” said the curly-haired man.

“You’re not on the job, are you, Mr. Eisley?” said his partner.

“We know you’re not, by the way. We ran your license. You’re not a cop.”

The buzzing stopped. Angela quietly dismounted. Brushed strands of hair away from her forehead.

“I came here with someone,” Jack said, trying to find his dick. Where was it? Oh God, oh God. Let’s get it away. Quickly. “The cabdriver. He’s still here, delivering something.”

“What’s his name, then?”

“You like being married, Mr. Eisley?” asked the curly-haired man. “What’s she doing right now, your wife, back in Gurnee, Illinois? Think she knows you’re here?”

Angela, meanwhile, seemed to float backward, gathering up her clothes from the concrete floor. Mostly, she looked disappointed, like she’d had a long day at the office and had been looking forward to that first ice-cold beer, and, wouldn’t you know it, the damn tap was busted again. As she moved away, the two guys in the suits loomed closer.

“Want us to give her a call for you?” Aryan Man asked.

“I just want to leave.”

“Gotta head back to your newspaper convention, right? Is that why you’re here, newsman? Or you planning on writing about this place?”

Looking back, Jack couldn’t have come up with a way to make this night any worse. His plans for Philadelphia had been so simple: meet Donovan Piatt and try to avoid castration. And everything had gone so gloriously wrong, in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Of course, Jack had always suffered from a lack of imagination.

Like this now. The curly-haired guy, holding up the cell phone. “Let’s give her a call now, whaddya think?”

Jack hadn’t figured on that at all.

The Dublin Inside Her Head

B
ut the face, his face, thafs all she could see now. With nowhere to retreat but within her own mind, she kept coming back to him. It had been easier to avoid his face in the past two weeks, with the flurry of activity: booking flights, changing clothes, figuring out how she was going to use the bathroom … all in the presence of other people. Other men. That was the worst part of it, probably. The lack of privacy at the most intimate level. It’s what he’d had in mind all along. Even before their
falling-out. Before this series of disasters she had initiated, and he had upped the ante. Him. Him. Him. She suffocated on him. Choked on him. Vomited him. Bled him
.

All she ‘d ever wanted was to be alone
.

It was why she had left university early, moved out of her mum’s house, replied to that advertisement in the
Dublin Times: “
The Celtic Tiger Is Roaring! Exciting New Opportunities in Scientific Research. Apply Now, Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, County Dublin.” She’d sent her résumé, glossing over the fact that she hadn’t exactly finished her master’s and had opted instead to stock shelves in a Waterstone’s branch while she figured out her next move. The bookstore gig didn’t pay enough to leave home, but this could. And it was something that vaguely promised that her biology degree would be put to some use
.

She had been stunned when she was summoned for an interview within two days. The Operator met her at the door personally; she was stunned again to learn he was an Ainerican. The interview was brief. He asked many questions about where she grew up and what she wanted to do and then gave her the tour, and made a big deal out of all the security protocols. She felt like she was on the set of some spy show, like
Alias
or
Queen and Country.
Iris scans. Thumb-pad sensors
.

The Operator had told her a fake name at first, of course: Matt Silver
.

(Only later did he wink and confide in her: “You know, that’s not my real name. I’m not supposed to tell anyone that. And don’t tell anyone this, either: We’re a secret wing of MIS. British intelligence. They’re paying us handsomely for our scientific innovation.”)

He had hired her on the spot
.

He had asked her out to dinner the third day of her employ. Probably thought he was showing restraint
.

Sea bass, he insisted. She told him she didn’t like dark fish with bones, and, like, hello, she lived here. But he told her it was the best, and he wanted her to have the best. What was the point otherwise? She remembered opening the door of her new apartment
—
after an awkward fumbling at the door, during which they kissed, which was not what she had
intended at all
—
and sitting down on her futon, the one piece of furniture she had been able to take from home, and staring at the dingy white wall for an hour or more. Wondering if she’d exchanged one prison for another. At least she’d had twenty-three years to learn the rules of the first one
.

By the end of the first week, they were “dating.” He expected her to work late hours. Help him with a special project, for which he’d received special funding
.

And when he explained it, and his eyes lighted up, she did feel her heart swell for him. It was an amazing project:

Proximity
.

No more missing children
.

No more kidnapping
.

No more hostages
.

No more international manhunts
.

A small voice in her head said, Yes, and no more privacy. But in the months they worked together, the concept of privacy seemed to fade anyway
.

Besides, there was nothing like them
.

The self-replicating supramolecular assemblies
.

“
Proximity.
”

Or as she called them, “the Mary Kates.
”

She saw the accounts, so much money being pumped into their small research facility, which consisted of half a dozen technicians, Matt, and herself. Before long, she was named associate research chief, and her own salary was insane, and Matt had even found a way to fudge her master’s degree for her. (She’d had only a semester and a half left to go; she didn ‘t feel like she’d cheated.) She sent money back to her mum, and the first words out of her dad’s mouth: “She’s turned whore.
”

Then she saw the files that the Operator had tucked away. Shadow files, right on the same hard drives they used every day
.

He must have thought her dumb. He’d left a box open one day. She couldn’t venture a guess as to the password, so the next morning she spread talcum powder on the keys. When the Operator entered the system
,
she had him paged to a different part of the facility. Then she checked the keys. Wasnh hard to tell which keys had been touched
. A, S, E, V, N.

She thought about it for a few moments. Evans? Vanes?

Wait
.

Her own name
.

Vanessa
.

And what she saw, once she made it to his shadow files, turned her stomach
.

South Eighteenth Street

A
fter he retrieved his gym bag—almost forgot about you Ed, oF pal—Kowalski waited outside for the cab. When it pulled up, he had to laugh. It was the same guy who’d taken him to the airport last night. The dark-skinned guy who was going on about the flat fee. He wondered if there was a flat fee to the place Jack Eisley had gone. Take you from any swank Center City hotel to the S-M perv-out dive of your choice.

This one, the Hot Spot, was a real screamer: mutual masturbation. Kowalski had strong-armed the cab company to divulge the name of the driver corresponding to the medallion number he’d plucked off the video. Another call revealed the man’s cell number. A quick call to the driver, and one mild threat later, he had a name and an address. And yeah, his boy Jack was still there. Having a good time in a back room, the way the driver told it. “Bribed me just to get into the place,” the driver said. “And I don’t even know where the hell he is.”

Next, Kowalski called his favorite freak, a glam-vampire dude named Sylvester, who lived up in the Bronx, to give him some background. Last thing he needed to do was walk into a place like this blind.

The Hot Spot was relatively tame, Sly said. Married guys, mostly, went there to whack off while they watched women straddle high-powered Sybians. Direct clitoral stimulation with double the horsepower of any Black & Decker device. Guys liked it. Gals
really
liked it. Moaning, talking, sweating, but no touching. Because that would be adultery.

Ho, ho, people did amuse him sometimes.

But why would Happy Jack go there? He meets some saucy blonde, gets nearly strangled to death, then goes to an after-hours knuckle-shuffle club?

Unless …

Unless he didn’t want to be alone.

Knew something bad would happen if he did.

“Third and Spring Garden,” Kowalski told the driver. “Is there a flat fee from here to there, by chance?”

The Dublin Inside Her Head (continued)

O
h, she planned ahead before confronting him. This wasn’t a decision made lightly. First, she created a new identity, courtesy of a girl she knew from childhood who ‘d died of brain cancer. Kelly Dolores White. Armed with a birth date, it wasn
V
difficult for Vanessa to build a new identity out of Kelly’s ashes, starting with a drivers license. She had to take the dreaded test again, but so be it. She passed. Unlike the first time, when she’d failed and then had to wait nearly a year for another chance. Next came credit cards, and, being dead for nearly seventeen years, Kelly Dolores White had perfect credit. Together, those were used for a passport, the gold standard in identification. If Vanessa needed to vanish, she ‘d simply become Kelly White
.

Meanwhile, she couldn’t help herself. She became distant. But how could you pretend to love someone you were about to destroy?

The Operator knew something was coming
—
a boom, about to be lowered. He called. And called. And called. And stopped by, unannounced. Then called again later, to make sure everything was okay
.

She told him she just needed a little space
.

“
Space, ” he said
.