Authors: James Reich
“It's just a toy,” Cash lowered her voice, feigning arousal. “A sex toy.”
“What?” Kern turned it over in his hands, his smile exposing small teeth.
“So am I.”
He did not resist as she unlatched his fingers from it, leaning closer to him. He could smell the peroxide that she had used in coloring her hair. His erection strained at the front of his uniform. He saw her watching it, and he moved to unfasten his utility belt and holster. Cash slid the bag onto the floor, so that there was nothing between them. As his belt licked through the final loop of his pants, she reached for it. She said: “Now, show me yours.”
Cash ripped Kern's gun from its holster and shoved it violently into his throat, twisting the heavy metal vertical. She pressed it into his chin, and between his small teeth, raking it over his palate. His eyes widened and a noise came from his throat as he realized that she was squeezing the trigger. The bullet passed through Kern's brain and exploded from his blond
scalp through the headliner and out of the roof of the patrol car; a fountain of Kern's blood and tissue erupted with it before falling back onto the Plexiglas of the revolving lights. Blood sprayed her face and clothes. She tore off her bloody T-shirt and reached for her backpack. It was clean. She tore part of the shirt and held it in her teeth. Slamming the door, she left the shirt in the patrol car. She checked the contents of her bag to make certain that she had not left anything that Kern had removed before she blew his brains out. Cash opened the vodka bottle and threw the cap into the car through the open window. She would make her Molotov cocktail after all. She dowsed the remains of Kern's face with some of the alcohol, watching it run with blood down his dark shirt. She took the rag from her teeth and pushed it into the bottle. The white cotton began to wick the vodka immediately, becoming transparent. Finally, she latched open the cigarette lighter and lit the cloth, before throwing it into the backseat of the cop car. Flames burst across the leather upholstery and lit the dead cop like a wax effigy. Cash ran back to her car and took off. The road flowed beneath her as she turned away from Amarillo.
What had Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, felt when she first killed a man? And when she killed more? What had Valerie Solanas experienced as the bullets moved in slow motion into the pallid body of her tormentor? The question arose, the singular question that demands a killer's introspection: Will I do it again? That question mutated into: When will I kill again? How soon can I kill again? Her flesh was luminous with adrenaline. Murder, she realized, has its own momentum.
The gothic low-rider blasted through the Texas heat haze and into the night beyond the panhandle steakhouse dioramas, carved wooden Indians, horse motels, and primitive bars; strange concrete structures stood sentinel at the roadside, tall grass growing about them and
mysterious bunkers that cracked the ground close by. Cash had observed the increase in roadkill immediately as she had crossed the state border from New Mexico. Armadillos lay punctured and sprawled in thick blood. Dogs, snakes, rodents were ripped open by speeding fenders all along the violent highways. Exhilarated, she drove without stopping through the tornado-blasted brownstones of Wichita Falls and on through Fort Worth and Dallas, vast blank buildings and careening overpasses. The highway was black and moonless, and she trembled as the car roared on, driving through her shock, the shimmering walls of nausea. Hurtling southeast, away from Pantex and Kern's charred corpse, Cash turned up the volume on the cassette player. Perhaps Kern, a fine young Texan Christian, had not lied, and had not called in a report on her car. She could not take the risk. The edges of the state seemed impossibly distant. If she drove flat out, then she could make it to Shreveport, Louisiana, by morning. Then she might be able to rest.
APRIL 7, 2011. ROBERT DRESNER ASSEMBLED HIS CROSS SPIKES
operatives at Kirtland Air Force Base, after flying into Albuquerque: agents Spicer, Gordon, Royce, Jones, and Green. Green, who wore a baseball cap with the logo of an imaginary janitorial business, drove the blacked-out van. Apart from the driver's baseball cap, the men were dressed in black. The fabric of their clothes was designed to resist rips, and to leave almost zero fibers to forensics should any provincial force come to investigate a disappearance. Green was single. So, Dresner reflected, were the other men. It was only he that had made that particular compromise in anticipation of leaving Cross Spikes and the agency at the height of his powers, cool, hard, and unblemished. Agent Spicer, he imagined, would replace him. Gordon, the buzz-cut blond leaning against the metal hull of the van, was retarded by a minor imbalance of conscience over thuggish efficiency. In Royce, the coincidence of intellectual and frat-jock was almost perfect for the agency. However, in quiet moments, when he evaluated him, he found the closeness of Royce's ambitions to his own
faintly troubling. Jones was ruthless and clean, but the timbre of his voice shifted noticeably under excessive stress. Spicer would kill his mother for a dime and fuck her corpse for his country. He was loyal, ambitious, and dispassionate in a manner that reminded Robert Dresner of himself. The Cross Spikes Club regarded Dresner as an icon of the agency. The current configuration had been together for a decade, but he had been its leader for another decade before that, since his twenties. He commanded their absolute respect and loyalty.
“What we know, from the manifesto at the original scene, is that the terrorist is a self-identified alien, a non-citizen, probably a Communist, about twenty-five, an anti-nuclear militant. We're going to pluck him off the dirt, okay?” Dresner explained, as Green negotiated downtown Albuquerque and turned onto Central Avenue; neon signs flickered against the windshield: retrofitted 1950s diners with silver ray-gun gothic dorsal fins, pinup art inking the tattoo parlor windows, ugly 7-Elevens, the vast yellow signage of the Adult Video Megastore. He noted that all of the cars had reversed into the parking lot there, because as an impoverished state, New Mexico only required one license plate on the rear of the vehicle, so that from the street the half-dozen patrons were anonymous. The motels had been held in suspension, locked into the past for sixty years. This was a section of old Route 66. As they passed between an art deco cinema and what appeared to be a queer warehouse bar, Dresner advised: “Make the most of this colorful scene. Everything else in New Mexico is just brown.” He stared at the nightlife through the two-way mirrored glass of the van. Three girls with Bettie Page haircuts, red shoes, and spray-on black denims crossed the avenue when the lights changed. “Albuquerque might be trapped in a rockabilly dream, but holy shit the girls here are actually kind of good-looking.”
They drove Highway 25 toward Santa Fe, where they would exit for Madrid. Moonlight glossed the flat tops of the mesas as the road climbed
through reservation lands, toward the city lights and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, cigarette billboards and casino lightbulbs, a speedway stadium, a dead dog in the periphery of the headlights. Robert Dresner resumed briefing his team en route:
“The Voice is increasingly convinced that there is a common denominator between the wildfires at Los Alamos, last year. We don't have much to work with because most of the traffic cameras in New Mexico are just movie props glued to the signals. However, during the wildfire period, there were persistent suggestions that the arsonist likely came from one of the decrepit outlaw villages to the south of the blaze. Those places tend to crawl with dopers and would-be radicals, so âno shit, Sherlock,' right? But some of our nubile youth at Langley have been combing what footage we have and there
is
a denominator, or what appears to be one. What we have is black motorcycle clocked speeding close to Radium Springs, not far from White Sands and Trinity, and witnessed cruising by the Oppenheimer House and loitering along Bikini Road and Eniwetok Drive. Same bike showed up at the junction of 599 and 14, heading south. If we had the plate this would be a piece of cake, but this state being a shithole, we do not. There are two towns further down there, but the bikers tend to congregate in the one named Madrid, truly a ghost town. This is a photograph of the motorcycle.” The team passed it around, holding it up to the light in the van. “The image quality is shitty. It may be a Sportster or knockoff design. It's too hard to tell from this. But we're going to look for a potential match in Madrid and scope the house. This is a copy of the photograph of the target that he left at Trinity with the manifesto. You can at least see black hair under some kind of cap, but not much else. If the owner looks like good meat, then we'll take him. We have about an hour until target. It's a small town, so stealth is of the utmost. And remember that cleanliness is next to viciousness. So, in short: We have no name, but we have plotted an approximate habitation. Find the bike. With luck, we get this cunt in the van, and get out of here.”
The van was tuned to be almost silent. They drove into Madrid and passed slowly in front of the Coalmine Tavern. Royce leaned close to the driver-side window, pressing upon Green's shoulder. “Those look like touring bikes. Not ours.” Turning off their headlights, Green turned his baseball cap around and blinked several times, adjusting his eyes to the moonlight that shone on the remnants of snowfall. They left the main street and the vehicle stalked along the rough dirt roads behind the façade shown to the tourists.
“Look at these shacks,” Green complained. “Are you sure this is
New
Mexico?”
The men in the van laughed. Dresner noticed that Spicer remained unmoved.
“Keep driving, Green.”
Most of the shacks and cabins were in darkness because the Tavern was still open. Dresner gestured Green toward to a pair of homes separated by a decaying wall. “There!” The van stopped. “All of you, masks on. That's the motorcycle.” He pointed to a black shape leaning close to a small house.
Spicer whispered: “There's a desk lamp turned on inside, and a shadow. Someone's home.”
“Deploy. We'll get a look at him.”
Green remained at the wheel.
Dresner and the others kept low behind the wall.
“Front door opens onto the kitchen.”
Jones asked: “What is that banner on the wall? It's hard to make out in this light.”
“S.L.A.: Symbionese Liberation Army. Communists. Christ, Jones.” Dresner hissed with frustration. Dresner regarded the yellow points of light glimmering from the hard edges of what appeared to be a typewriter on a small table. A black shape obscured the lamp. “There. There's our man. Wearing a cap.”
Robert Dresner moved silently to the door and knocked.
Molly Pinkerton opened Cash's front door, holding a book in her left hand.
Before she could react, the Cross Spikes gang fell upon her, taping her mouth, casting a thick black hood over her head, and binding her wrists with ratcheting plastic bracelets. The book fell into the gray slush in front of the cabin and Jones kicked it into the kitchen before Spicer rushed inside, slamming the door behind him. With Green waiting in the van, Robert Dresner, Royce, Jones, and Gordon dragged the heavy figure across the carbon-streaked snow. Throwing the figure into the vehicle, Dresner said: “When we take the gag away from your mouth, shut the fuck up. No one will hear you. No one will believe anything that you say.”
Molly lay hooded and bound on the floor of the soundproof van. Boots and fists smashed her without rhythm, remorse, or commitment, a routine like a jaded street gang looking for an easy mark for their exercise and the release of sexual tension. Muted knuckles pounded the body. At Dresner's command, Agent Green gunned the van out of the dirt road and back to the drag, moving south toward Kirtland AFB. From there a black flight would take Dresner and the suspect to a blank space on the map, a place of profound alienation and violence. Struggling beneath the driven blows, through the suffocating fabric of the black hood, Molly heard furious voices.
“That's right, you eat it, Comrade Motherfucker!”
“This is just a hazing, Trotsky. You get really fucked up later.”
Something crushed the fingers of her right hand, the pain sending her broken fingers into uncontrollable shaking. She could feel the blood damming under her fingernails, forcing for a crack to jet forth.
“Remember,” the voice came close to Molly's ear, “no one will believe anything you say, and if I have to knock your face into the back of your skull and dump you on the road, I will.”
They pulled the hood off.
Dresner shone a brilliant flashlight into Molly's eyes.
This is wrong. This is wrong!
Blond hair spilled out of the trucker cap that fell from her bleeding scalp. Still uncertain of what he was seeing, Dresner grabbed a hank of Molly's hair, pulling it toward his nose and inhaling. “Change your hair color recently?” he barked, but the absence of new chemicals told him that this hair had not been bleached in some time. It was also too long. Dresner thumbed at her lips, trying to wipe the lipstick away. Suddenly, he realized that the broken mouth had been tattooed red. He rolled the barely conscious form over. The figure was tall and heavy, over six feet. A cold jag of nausea passed through Robert Dresner. How could he have lost the fact that the suspect was barely five-six? He felt an acceleration of his panic. Didn't he tell his crew that the target was slightly built? He shone the light on the torso, and pushed at the silicon in the chest with his black-gloved fingers. “What's your name?” he demanded. There was no
answer, only an agonized murmur. From a kit hanging close to him, he retrieved smelling salts. “Identify yourself!” Dresner let go of Molly's hair and slapped her across the face, the crack of nasal cartilage lost beneath the sound of leather on skin. The face, he thought, was masculine, like a drag act that had gone too far. The idea repulsed him. By now his anger was the smoke around the fact that he had made mistakes. Even as he reached for the knot of Adam's apple in the freak's throat, a distant station of Robert Dresner's consciousness conspired against him: You're losing it, Robert. I know you want out, but you're getting flabby in your processes. It was a cold, metallic voice. In fury, he ripped Molly's jeans from her beaten legs. His gloved hand ripped at her underwear, revealing hairless reconstructed genitalia, pale scars pulsing under the flashlight as the motion of the vehicle pitched her over. “Is that real?” Dresner gagged, shining his light on Molly's crotch.