Cast Of Shadows Page 3

  The other members of the Hands of God had taken secretly from their own savings and given Mickey about $80,000 in cash. Phil, the insurance guy, said they were his “backers,” and they talked about it as if it was an investment, but they weren’t going to get their money back. They were sponsoring Mickey the way the kings and queens of Europe supported explorers to the New World, but for the Hands of God, the return would be everlasting life.

  Two months later, Mickey returned to the smaller house as a new man, called into God’s army. He announced that he couldn’t love them anymore, that he was giving all his love, every bit of it, to God. To seal the covenant, Mickey explained, he had taken a razor blade and circumcised himself in a motel bathroom. Bev left with the kids that night, and the following week she took out a restraining order against him, which was insane. He told her he would never hurt them. In fact, he was sacrificing himself for them. He had answered God’s call, as Abraham did, and hadn’t God said to Abraham, I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing – all this because you obeyed my command? His family would be rewarded for Mickey’s service. They had nothing to fear.

  He stayed for another month or so, his split-level becoming the new headquarters (a church even) for the Hands of God, who made plans and studied maps and prayed together. They agreed on the details of the next expedition, and Mickey left in his Cutlass Supreme to make it all happen.

  They made one mistake. In Memphis. One of the Hands insisted he had a friend down there – a like-minded friend – who could help with the operation. Reluctantly, Mickey agreed because the friend offered him a place to crash and the Memphis mission was going to take at least two weeks, which would devour a large chunk of his hotel budget.

  After the two weeks were up, and the mission had just been completed, the friend ended up getting himself killed – shot in the chest by Memphis cops – and Mickey was nearly caught fleeing the scene. In a meeting, the Hands of God agreed that on the next job, in Chicago, and on every job after, Mickey would work alone.

  At exactly four-thirty in the afternoon on his third day of surveillance outside the New Tech Fertility Clinic, he climbed over the front bench and crouched in the backseat. His windows weren’t tinted, but they were dirty, covered in dust and white water spots, and the rear dash was piled high with mystery paperbacks and magazines and maps and fast-food containers, all of which acted like military camouflage netting, protecting the inside of the car from curious eyes. He opened the pass-through and retrieved a narrow black plastic storage container from the trunk. He recalled the combination, and the box creaked apart in halves. Wedged in the foot well, he began assembling its contents.

  – 5 -

  Davis stood inside the desk at reception and opened the patient’s folder in his hands. He had his back to the waiting area, and when he looked up he could just see inside Joan Burton’s examining room.

  In her white smock, with her back to him, talking to a young boy and his mother, Joan displayed none of her sensual curves. He couldn’t see any part of her perfectly oval face with its impossibly deep dimples or her long, elegant fingers or her thick ebony hair, which, when not restrained by pins and spray as it was now, sprung from her head in exciting, unpredictable ways. At a holiday party last year, Joan drew stares from every man and woman in the restaurant, with her hair framing her face like an ornate ceremonial headdress. Davis had stolen long, chaste looks at her all night.

  He wrote down a list of prescription medications this patient was currently taking and returned to his office with the information, which he relayed to a pharmacist holding on the phone. Then he input the information into a computer file (where it belonged) and tossed the notepaper away.

  Davis reached across the desk to his phone and dialed home. His wife picked up on a digital extension, and from the thinness of her voice Davis could tell she was outside in the garden.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “I’m coming home early,” Davis said. “Do you want me to grab something on the way?”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. Italian.”

  “AK’s not here. And she’s eating over at Libby’s.”

  “She told me. Is she sleeping over there?”

  “Probably.”

  “Perfect,” Davis said. “I’ll pick up something at Rossini’s for the two of us. You grab a nice bottle from downstairs. We haven’t had a date in a long time.”

  “A very long time,” Jackie said.

  “I’ll see you in half an hour,” he said. “I love you.”

  “Bye,” she said.

  Davis grabbed his sport coat and walked down the hall. He knocked on Joan’s open door – she was still consulting with a patient – but didn’t stop or say anything as he passed.

  “Good night, Davis,” she called after him.

  He waved to Ellen and she smiled back. The waiting room was empty, and he casually stooped to snatch some magazines from the couch and return them to the coffee table. He turned out a light that, to his irritation, others usually forgot to turn off. He detoured into a corner conference room and opened the vertical window blinds on a pair of adjacent exterior walls.

  Outside, it was warm and humid, and the air stuck to his face like a plastic Halloween mask. There was an easy breeze from the lake, which did little more than push the heat around. There were no protesters at the curb, at least. The heat and the rain often kept them away.

  In his head, he calculated the quickest route to Rossini’s this time of day. He kept an ever-updated table of driving instructions in his short-term memory, convinced he could add days or even weeks of productivity to his life simply by avoiding traffic. His wife always had the frutti del mare, and tonight he’d have the shrimp tortellini. If he called them by York Street and ordered before the light at Hillman, it should be ready shortly after he arrived. You didn’t want it to be ready before you got there. You wanted it to come off the stove just after.

  His new Volvo was parked near the back of the building (he left the most convenient spots open as a courtesy to his patients) and he was still experimenting with his keyless remote, getting a feel for its range. Standing at an angle to the front of the clinic, looking through the conference room, he could just make out his car around the corner. He pointed the remote at the conference room window, wondering if he could unlock his car from here, through the double panes of windows.

  Later, he’d say it sounded like a cork popping, although he couldn’t say for sure if that was the sound of the gun or the sound of metal striking bone.

  He knew it was a bullet the instant it entered, just below the left shoulder blade, exploding a rib before exiting his abdomen. It felt like someone had struck him with a baseball bat in the left side while a second attacker stabbed him in the gut with a knife. His knees buckled, and he hung there for an instant, suspended by God knows what, before collapsing onto the walk.

  He could hear shouting and pointing (yes, he would later claim in a tired, confused discursive that he could hear people pointing) and he definitely heard a mistuned car speed away, although it didn’t occur to him at the time the vehicle might be carrying his assailant. He scratched his head against the pavement looking for blood and couldn’t see any. He moved his hand, which had instinctively covered the pain in his belly, and when he held it in front of his face it looked like a flat brush dipped in red paint. Someone approached and tried to turn him from his left side onto his back. He resisted. Then he blacked out.

  – 6 -

  The Beast was a device invented by Anna Kat’s coach, Miss Hannity, from parts of old Nautilus equipment and an even older Universal weight machine. It was designed to increase stamina and also to work muscle groups in the order that a volleyball player would use them. There was a spike exercise and a dig exercise and a serve exercise, an
d each consisted of a combination of repetitions involving the legs and then the arms. Always the legs and then the arms. Miss Hannity had begun the process to have the Beast patented (she had a lawyer and everything), and once, after a game, she had even asked Anna Kat’s father if he would give a medical endorsement of the workout. For marketing purposes. Davis looked it over and said he was impressed but he gave Miss Hannity the names of an orthopedist and a physical therapist. My word won’t carry much authority, he told her. And anyway, with some buyers, it would probably be better if you were not associated with me at all.

  AK rode her bike up to a gazebo-like structure behind the school gym. She turned at the last minute and backed up with her sneakers paddling against the pavement, walking it into a narrow stall. She readjusted the bag over her shoulder and jogged to the locker room door.

  The fall semester wouldn’t begin for another month, but there was sporadic activity at the school throughout July and August. Changing into long, baggy basketball shorts and a size-too-small T-shirt over a black sports bra, she heard other voices and lockers slamming shut, but the showers were mostly empty, which raised her hopes. When she opened the door to the weight room she saw a handful of football players around the bench press, but none of her teammates were working out this afternoon. The Beast was all hers.

  She slid into the device on her back and raised her legs in a recumbent bicycle position, with her feet resting on a pair of levers positioned on either side of a tall weight stack. She inserted her arms underneath a padded bar behind her head. One of Miss Hannity’s innovations allowed the user to change the resistance without leaving the chair. AK set the weights at a warm-up level and began her workout.

  In her headphones was an unfamiliar song, part of a mix given to her by a friend. The singer sounded British. Or maybe Scottish. Definitely rakish. He sang:

  Last night on earth

  Don’t pick up that pen

  We’re so ill-equipped to deal with all

  The pressure, risk, and stress

  They can’t hurt you now

  It doesn’t matter what they say

  You can still feel anger across the grave

  But it was fun anyway

  As she marked the repetitions with exhales, the weights behind the bench press stopped chiming on the other side of the room. Through the forest of machines, the boys would be able to make out only parts of her body – her calves, her hips, her shoulders maybe – and AK smiled to herself as she pushed her legs against the weight and extended her arms. They thought they were being so quiet, but their stealth was giving them away.

  Only in the last two years had Anna Kat begun to think of herself as pretty. In junior high she had been skinny and bookish and so self-conscious about her height she wore sexless flats and carried herself bent forward, as if her shoulders were made of concrete. Oddly, the girls in her class noticed her potential before the boys did. Pretty girls – popular girls – began inviting her to Starbucks, to the mall after school, to parties. She developed an interest in clothes. Her skin cleared. Volleyball straightened her posture. Her freakishly high hips were now the delta of tanned and toned legs that stretched endlessly to her new black pumps.

  She felt desired in amounts equal to her desire.

  When her workout was finished (three sets each, serves, spikes, and digs), AK grabbed a towel from the shelf and walked out, pretending cool indifference to the warm, admiring stares on the backs of her legs as the frosted Plexiglas door slid shut behind her.

  Between the weight room and the girls’ shower, three pairs of glass doors looked out to the practice fields behind the school. Two of them opened with a sucking sound and AK felt the thick heat balloon in the hallway before the cool, forced air of the school pushed it back. Two runners in tank tops and billowing weightless nylon shorts walked past to the boys’ locker room. A third, whom she knew from chemistry, mumbled a bashful “Hey, ’K” and hurried on. A fourth, trailing the others, paused and smiled at her. She waited for the locker room door to shut behind the last of the other runners before saying hello, but she couldn’t get the greeting out of her throat before the boy ducked into the wrestling room.

  Anna Kat followed.

  In announcements and on bulletin boards the wrestling room was called the auxiliary gym, but aside from certain PE classes, hardly anyone other than wrestlers used it for practice. It was a small room relative to the main gym – maybe forty feet square – and thick green-and-yellow mats were rolled against the walls. The boy sat on one of these with his palms next to his hips, grinning.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  AK sat beside him. The windowless room smelled like hot vinegar from fifteen years of adolescent sweat and poor ventilation. No place Anna Kat knew smelled just like it. It smelled like the worst of boys in close quarters. Like prison, she imagined. The odor depressed her.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I got another disc for you in my locker. Some classic stuff. The Clash. Dire Straits. The Mekons.”

  She said, “I’ve been listening to that Mekons disc you gave me last month.”

  “And?”

  “It’s growing on me.” She stared at the blank wall on the other side of the room.

  He said, “Are you okay?”

  AK didn’t want to talk about her dad. Well, she did, but not with him. She tried to dispose of the matter quickly. “I was at the clinic this afternoon. It’s just sometimes I think I’m competing with all those little embryos in test tubes. Other people’s kids. I know he cares about me, but he spends more time with them than he does with me. This will really be my last year at home. It’s frustrating, that’s all.”

  The round of mat beneath her felt spongy and sticky to Anna Kat’s nervous hands, but she remembered how much like concrete it had seemed against her back during a karate elective her freshman year. When the mats were up like this, the wrestling room was floored with thin, sandpapery carpet, and AK removed her right shoe and scratched her toes against it through her sock. It wasn’t meant as an advance, necessarily, but in a few seconds the boy had kicked off his left Nike and pinned her shin against the curve of the mat with his calf.

  He leaned over and kissed her and she kissed him back, draping an arm over his shoulder and touching the wet fade of his sweaty crew cut. In an instant, he had a hand on her breast.

  “Sam,” she said, pulling away.

  “Hmmph,” he said, reattaching his lips to hers.

  “Sam,” she said, disengaging again. “Let’s see a movie tomorrow.”

  “Like a date.” It was a clarification more than a question.

  “No,” she said. “Just… just something.”

  Sam slid his hand up the inside of her thigh and snapped the elastic of her panties with his thumb. “This isn’t something?”

  She pushed his arm away and laughed. “It is. It’s just weird.”

  “Dating is complicated, AK,” Sam said. “This is un.”

  “Un?”

  “Complicated.” He looked for a smile and didn’t get one. “Look, you go to the movies or even Starbucks together and people are talking. You’re seeing Daniel-”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re sort of seeing Daniel. I’m seeing Chrissy-”

  “And Tanya. And Sue.”

  “You know about them?”

  “What’s the matter? More complicated than you thought?”

  “Nah.” He looked at his feet. “Is that what this is about? I mess around with other girls?”

  “No.” She shook her head. That wasn’t it. The problem she didn’t want to admit to was guilt. She felt a bit used. She felt a bit like a user. No one was forcing her to meet Sam, of course. She liked being with him. They did things together that seemed grown-up. They did things together that frightened her. Things that excited her. That was the problem. She liked the way he could thrill her, the dangerous feeling she had when they were togethe
r. When she thought about it, though, she didn’t much like him. Although he was intelligent, Sam could be cruel to people he didn’t like, and he treated his friends only marginally better. To get laughs he said mean things to people’s faces (instead of following the widely accepted high school policy that called for saying mean things behind people’s backs). He was indifferent and selfish and cynical, and while these things made him cool and even a kind of popular, that didn’t mean that anybody really liked him. If they were dating, she would have to defend him, and Anna Kat didn’t know how she would do that.

  Sam’s hand was inside her shirt and flat against her bare back, pushing her toward him. They were sweaty and gritty and aroused. Sam’s teeth closed around her right earring and pulled just the right amount too hard. “Did you lock the door?” he whispered.

  “No…,” she said, as if an apology were coming.

  “Good,” Sam said, and he pulled her down on top of him in the narrow space between the rolled-up mat and the wall.

  In her locker, several walls and halls away, Anna Kat’s cell phone was ringing.

  – 7 -

  There was no place she knew where Dr. Joan Burton felt more useless than in a hospital emergency waiting room. In a building filled with sick people, sick people she had been trained to help, she could do nothing but sit and do triage helplessly in her head. That boy, twelve or so, has a broken finger. The young man – newly minted from college, she suspected – folded into a chair across from the television like a passenger waiting for his plane to crash, possibly appendicitis. An older woman, escorted irritably by a husband of too many years, most likely psychosomatic something or other; she becomes ill to force him to pay attention to her, Joan quietly diagnosed.