by a b
A thought came to Wagner suddenly. She turned back to her computer and added two lines of text to the FBI alert. She hit send and waited for the replies. It wouldn’t save Laura from today, but it might the next day, or even the day after.
Wagner peered back over at Legacy. He was staring right at her, like he knew something was different. She admired the way he collected all the energy of the room into his eyes, and said nothing. She broke the silence.
“I might have something.”
“But it won’t help us soon?” he asked, she nodded “That’s good, we have thousands of agents thinking about today. You’re catching on.”
“Smug isn’t sexy.” A dismissive nod.
“I’m glad you identified my biggest daily concern.”
“Just because you work on geological time -”
“It isn’t about how fast you’re moving, it’s if you’re moving in the direction of your goal.” He pushed some papers aside and leaned in with a confidential manner that made Wagner suddenly aware of her posture. “I’d rather be going slowly toward the answer than rapidly zigzagging away.”
Wagner put a hand on her neck, searching for a necklace that she hadn’t worn since she was in high school. The gesture was personal, and left her exposed. Wagner could have won a Nobel Prize in physics for the way she turned insecurity into defiance. “Too smug with that lean, I’m not going to tell you. Coffee break.” She said in a clipped tone.
*****
“I don’t know what happened.” Blue confided in an overly empathetic huff. He was painting black latex over Tracy’s body. He left open all the areas that might be useful in the coming hours.
“Where are we?” she begged.
“Short,” He lied, “it barely changed since yesterday. They must be getting ready for the new girl. This happened last time.” He dipped his brush in a clear substance. “This is an actual mixture of sweat that I’ve collected off the ground, it should make your hair shine.”
“What happened last time?”
“It won’t happen to a pretty little muffet like you, anyway. You know what the men want out there, a performer like you should have no problem giving it to them. Have you ever wondered what a tuffet was, and why Miss Muffet ever bothered taking a rest in a place she must have noticed to be a spiders web?” Blue dipped a tube into a bottle marked lubricant, and then hooked it up an air compressor.
“I can. AH.” CLICK, Tracy caught her breath and could barely talk as Blue shot the mixture into her body. “Is that-” CLICK.
“All done.”
Blue left her face unpainted, hair slicked back tight against her temples. He wanted to see every dimple of every expression that she made. He wanted there to be no escape from her new identity, what she’d become - probably because there was no escape from what he himself was. Some illnesses are best left undiagnosed.
His watch alarm beeped. She was ready. “Don’t be gentle.” Blue whispered into her ear.
*****
A large graphics flat screen monitor was brought in especially for the broadcast. Bailey leaned against the back wall like he was waiting in the doctor’s office. His usual casual manner was absent, indicating that maybe he had a heart after all. Wagner sat up front. She had done something to prepare for this event that she almost never did. She put in her contacts. She was very self-conscious of the fact that she was losing her eyesight early in life, but it was more than vanity that kept her hiding the deficiency. It was the fact that sight was considered a critical factor in her work. She had a genetic condition - underproduction of saline solutions -, which she was told that corrective laser surgery could actually accelerate. The thin corrective membrane that covered her pupils caused her to blink, and irritated her eye with every movement. However uncomfortable, it was necessary for the next hour.
People always commented on her eyes, they were perfect. “Obviously not thinking of function,” she thought as her lids batted down like sandpaper.
Legacy was nowhere to be seen.
Wagner found him in the office. “We had a date.”
“I’ll watch the playback. Playback is where we have the whole picture.” The original broadcasts didn’t contain sound. Two purposes were suggested: to keep the participants from saying something incriminating, and secondly the limiting principles of upload bandwidth of Internet broadcast.
“The playback version is over an hour away.” Wagner was dumbfounded. How could he calmly work while the crime was in progress? A chill went through her. Legacy saw the transformation, and chose to explain himself.
“I get too involved.”
“You? Involved. That’s a good one.”
“I put myself into the crime scene, I’m not just watching, I’m there. It’s a side effect of getting lost in the thoughts of others.”
Wagner smirked sardonically, “You’re there? Are you “you” or are you “Super you?” do you have a cape on?”
“I don’t know how to explain it, I am at the crime scene. I walk around in it.”
“You don’t find what you’re saying ridiculous.” Wagner found mordant humor in his words.
“Putting myself into the situation, live, in progress, will make me less effective.” He said, dismissing her. Wagner didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Just when she was beginning to believe in a version of the myth that followed Legacy’s name like the dictionary definition, reality crept in again. The man was delusional.
By the time Wagner got back to the situation room, the initiation was already in progress. The silent interlaced video images flickered. The women were kissing, a deeply disturbing portrait of bondage, spiritual and physical. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to see the beginning, anyway.
Chapter 15 The Dowdry
The Dowdry was a tin hat, rock shack with cobwebs burrowed into olive green masonry. It sat on a rapidly failing compressed wood foundation that barely kept it from joining the rubble that slid down the mountain every spring. Lodge pole pines hemmed it in at the corners and kept the winter snow from drifting. Not far from the freeway, this backwoods bar was on the old rumbling bark highway – a road built by the logging companies in the forties that had never found its way onto any of the maps. It wasn’t the charm of the place or the owner that kept it in business all these years, off the beaten and even the unbeaten path. It was a marketing ploy that old Burly G’s second wife had come up with during the “good times.” They’d printed over a million matchbooks using the wooden sticks from the plentiful free lumber, and with the help of a few free drinks and miscellaneous favors, the bikers that stopped in made the bar known countrywide. Everyone who drank there was required to take three boxes of complimentary matchbooks and distribute them to bars from coast to coast. It was one of the first and most effective viral marketing campaigns that ever ended in divorce.
When Burly, short for a family name Burline, a huge Nordic looking man, found out that the news of the bar spread partially because of the renowned hospitality of his wife – he sent her packing with a thousand matchbooks and half of his savings. It might be expected that the bar hadn’t been the same since she’d left, but to the contrary, it had barely changed at all.
Driftwood mounted on the walls like trophies, harkening back to the days when forestry taxidermy was a rollicking good joke. Beer taps made from bark shed chips into the glasses like thick dendrological dandruff on creamy white beer heads. A different young woman kept bar, taller than his second wife, older than the fourth, she was the sixth, showing twice the skin as the fifth, but a little more modest in the mind than the others. She went by the name Snowflake.
Snowflake was sitting on the bar dangling her legs over a squeaky rotating seat. A smashed up juke box had been spinning the same record for over a year and nobody seemed to mind. One of the men from the group in the corner called out for another round.
They were the regulars, the only regulars. They played pool, talked heatedly about which one of them had the best shot at getting on reality TV, and got drunk at eleven am.<
br />
They hardly ever talked to Burly, and that was strange only because everybody else talked to him. He was the county’s central distribution hub for quiet concern. Burly once listened to a transient former engineer talk about industrial process adhesives and their uses for 23 hours solid. These new regulars stayed away from him, kept out of earshot. They represented an odd combination of coming to a public place to get away from everyone. One night they’d come in, sweat stains pouring down their shirts, and after three pitchers of beer, the short one told Snowflake that they’d raced there from the old Adventist summer camp about five miles off-road, and they weren’t leaving until they couldn’t find their way home. Two hours later someone came looking for the group. A greasy man with sunken eyes that she’d never seen before, and, come to think of it, had never seen since, showed up in one of those short school buses. He carted them off after he broke up the juke box with a rusty old three-sided chuck ax he’d pried off the wall. The incident had led to Burly’s non-controversial edict that furthermore “no weapons used as décor.”
Snowflake began her sashay over to the men’s table, brushing her hips on the chairs on either side of her in a figure eight motion. The show wasn’t for the regulars, or for her husband, it was for herself, and the part of her that yearned for a playful, graceful pace.
BEEP.
A small blackberry device on the belt of one of the regulars went off. The alarm cascaded quickly through the group and suddenly a chorus of alarms sprang from identical devices that each of them carried. Then one of the devices chimed in with a polyphonic tune, the song “Maniac” from the movie Flashdance. They all looked at him.
“It’s us. The song.” The beat of the tune led to him gracelessly reenacting the scene where the dancer runs in place with a wide smile on his face. The floor creaked.
A lean man with a Welsh accent and a shit-eating grin chimed in “where the hell did you get that?”
The dance ended “The internet, took me seven seconds to download it.” He nodded, smiling like a know-it-all prick that had absolutely no clue.
“What do you fucking mean it’s us?” A sinister voice challenged.
The young one rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt and flashed a tattoo. It was a woman riding a motorcycle, but not an ordinary cycle. The drawing depicted a morphing of man, sex, and machine. The handlebars were a man’s arms grabbing the spiked bracelets of the woman biker who rode the bike. The headlight was a man’s head and his legs made up the seat, wrapping around the woman’s back. Below the picture was scrawled “Rolling F maniacs”.
The sinister one said nothing, but crushed out his cigarette on the younger man’s arm. “That puts a period on it. Stupid bitch.”
The regulars were out the door; pained complaints and crude innuendo could be heard following them to their bikes, then the rumble of the engines into the distance. That’s what always happened, they’d get a page and run off like the president was waiting on them.
Snowflake, the person who actually did wait on them, didn’t feel like she was being treated at all like the first lady when she counted up the tip. Her eyes wandered to the window and the street in front of the bar. She looked out, pretended to be thinking about something far away, but her real thoughts were close by hovering around a new man in her life. Someone who didn’t remind her of anyone she’d met working at this place. She wished he would come in that front door again. She sighed looking at the painted hello kitty pattern on her nails.
“What’s the matter?” Burly hollered across the bar, spit shining the glasses.
Snowflake held up a single dollar bill. She let her fingers work their magic and the paper weaved like a snake around her digits so that a single middle finger was visible to Burly, punctuating her displeasure with the tip. “Cancel the trip to San Martin.”
Burly snorted in agreement. “You look out that window half the day. Nothing changed out that window except the weather in twenty years.” He smiled as she walked back to the bar, brushing her hips along the smooth aluminum sides of the tables then disappeared into the back room.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. He knew. She knew he knew. The only thing Burly could spot quicker than a customer without cash was a wife planning to leave him.
*****
Blue walked across the compound. Gravel crunched under his work boots and skittered away from the tread. An old injury gave him an uneven gait, lurching to the right and consequently slightly dragging his left foot. He’d been told that if the knife had been an inch longer, he might have lost the leg at the knee. His chronic pain flared up from time to time. Today was worse than usual, the kick to the knee that Laura so kindly contributed put more drag into his gait. But it didn’t slow down his pace as he walked from the trailers to what used to be the camp showers and gymnasium. Cleanliness was important to protestants, he thought. It showed in the fact that the men and women’s showers occupied more space than the administration office, which he passed listening to the CLANK CLANK of metal clips against a hollow flagpole. It had once been the proud standard for the American flag and the Camp Exoter pennant, but now it was only a rope, three clips and a rusty cap.
Blade peeled off his vinyl mask and sweat poured off him like greasy dew. He spat on the hands, which he used to pluck the tinted contacts off of his eyes then looked up. Hazel eyes sunk into their sockets, cheeks pitted and oily, hair sticking to the sides of his face made up the man nicknamed Blade. He continued his progress checking his watch and muttering “Roll call.”
He swung the main door open and walked in. Tile ran up partition walls to shoulder height. He did a head count looking around the room, and scowled as simultaneously his eyes lit up with delight. “Who’s missing?”
Blade’s men responded like a heartbeat under duress. They sped up, not fully knowing what they were reacting to. This was the same lazy group of thugs from the bar, although they hardly resembled their former selves. Now they displayed a regimented organization. It was a parade, no that’s too grand. It was a dog show put on for Blade. No one wanted to upset the man who’d just entered the room. When Blade got angry there was always punishment, indiscriminate and crippling were his favorite two kinds. His cruelty was legend well before he’d put wheels under this abduction scheme. In the past, he’d organized this group of ruffians into one of the most highly sought, highly paid group of enforcers on the road. He’d hand chosen them from other biker groups and saying no was not an option. Blade had a very persuasive way of keeping his men in line, and he had rules about everything. He wouldn’t let them gain or lose weight. He had a strict hair length code and it was different for each man. It was like he’d built the likeness of each of his crew into an ideal that he would not allow to change. The men complied, just as they complied with everything he said, because they’d seen what Blade had done.
He took on contracts that nobody else would touch. He would follow intimidation farther than anyone else. Blade changed the minds of top businessmen, politicians and even organized crime lords. Not by putting a knife to their throat, but by putting a knife to the pulse of everything that man or woman prized most in this world. He hounded every interest of his target to the ends of the earth until they saw things his way. Accidents happened to everyone they’d ever met, until Blade got his way. Blade once amputated the leg of the college roommate of a man he was hounding with a blowtorch. The victim was screaming the entire time that he couldn’t even remember his roommate’s name. Too bad for him. All Blade did was leave his business card on the charred stub and suggested that he should give his old friend a call, let him know how he was doing. After something like that he’d evaporate into the roadway system, only to reappear a month, a year or even five years later and perpetuate a very dedicated, very personal reign of terror. His crew had achieved quite a reputation.
Now they sat in neatly divided stations, nozzles and air compressors fixed for the colored liquid mixture that was their costume to be sprayed onto their bodies. To the righ
t of the door was Red:
His name was Sean, a tall lanky guy who served as the group’s mechanic. Sean was Welsh, soft spoken, his eyes vacant, he was much more comfortable interacting with the moving parts of a bike than with any person. He was answering the questions of the man in the stall next to him: Vorest, Violet.
“It keeps sticking between second and third, I don’t see why it isn’t a priority.” Vorest said smearing himself in a mixture of powder and oil before applying the color.
Sean saw their leader standing in the doorway then replied. “Blade sets the priorities.”
“Well this should be one!” He said kicking the tub of powder in front of him and sending a cloud into the air, which he snorted deep like cocaine. Vorest had a dark islander complexion and a white hot temper. He was always looking for a fix and a fight. His laugh rattled like an engine, mechanical and joyless, and it cut out abruptly, like he was daring someone to find him less than hilarious. His jokes usually involved pain.
Green was in the next stall and he laughed at everything. He went by the nickname Feely, “I want you guys to start calling me the green goblin.” He liked to give himself new nicknames.
