Castle Danger--Woman on Ice

by Anthony Neil Smith

  Robin moved to the front window and peeked through the crack in the curtains. “There’s a second cop car now. The drivers are talking to each other through the windows.”

  Joel rushed to her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and jerked her away from the curtains. He tried to take a look himself, but wasn’t as coordinated. “Goddamn it!”

  I said, “Look, it might just be them switching shifts or something.”

  Robin shook her head. “No, this is something else. There have never been so many cops around here.”

  Joel paced, the most nervous I’d ever seen him. He looked at Robin. “It’s all because of him! We’ve got to get him out the back.” To me, “Go see your mom, or some friends of yours, or, shit, a McDonald’s.”

  “Fuck no.”

  “Robin, this is no joke—”

  “I said ‘fuck no’ and I mean fuck no. You can’t get caught, either one of you. And I swear you’re both as smart as potatoes without me.”

  “Ten minutes ago you told me to roll on Manny and wash my hands.”

  I raised my eyebrows, gave her a look.

  “That was before he fucking found something. Jesus. Quick, I’ll get you real pantyhose, keep you warm, and a better jacket. Nothing I can do about the shoes, though.” To Joel, “Get dressed. We’ll both get dressed. And then we’ll all get out of here. Grab the laptop.”

  It took me a minute to think it out, because I was just grateful she was on my side. But she didn’t offer me any of Joel’s clothes, although I could’ve guessed he had some leftovers from sleepovers past. No, she assumed this was me, more than Manny was me. She didn’t see it as a costume. Maybe I was starting to not see it that way, either.

  She came back a few minutes later while Joel was still dressing, covered in oversized sweatpants, oversized hoodie, and Ugg boots. She handed me the wad of pantyhose and said, “I haven’t worn them in years. Just for job interviews.” She also handed me a wet washcloth, warm. “For your knees.”

  On the other hand, she could’ve given me some fucking sweatpants, too. Robin was a tough nut to read. She had the chance to keep me from suffering, but nope. Just old pantyhose.

  After I took off my ruined stockings and cleaned most of the blood and grit from my knees, I did my best to clean the dirt from my fingertips. Robin crouched beside me. “You’ll want to bunch up the hose and pull them on slowly, or they’ll tear. A tear draws attention.”

  I nodded. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”

  “You’ll pick it up along the way. Just ask for help when you need to.” Then she tilted her head to the side and furrowed her brow. “You know what? Here, come with me.”

  She stood up again and headed to the bathroom. I stopped for a moment before following, goosebumps on my arms. I blinked away the waterworks. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.

  I sat on the toilet as Robin turned on the light, then picked up what I guessed was Joel’s razor. Next, she squirted some shaving gel into her hand, then lathered it onto my face.

  “You want me to do that?” I asked.

  She shook her head and pushed my chin up. It didn’t feel safe, letting this woman run a sharp blade across my neck, but she did it with such confidence that I kept my doubts to myself. And her eyes, those dark, sociopathic eyes, they were fascinating. I could understand how Joel fell under her spell. Even in my confused and exhausted state, I could tell there was something dangerous about her, but also something … aggressively attractive. Have I already said ‘poor Joel’? Well, just in case: poor, poor Joel.

  After the shave, Robin wiped me clean with a warm cloth, then knelt and slathered me in base until it looked as if I was doing Vaudeville. Then rouge, then lipstick, then mascara. She worked fast, said “Oops” a few times, but when she was done, grinning, I stood and looked in the mirror and … who was that? That was me?

  Have you ever had that moment, looking into a mirror, when you think there’s a double looking back? Definitely not you, but another person with different thoughts and motives? An entirely different personality? Was this woman in the mirror the person who had been trying to escape my skin all these years? The one who tried to burn my balls off?

  “It’ll do in a pinch,” Robin said. “Make-up is a miracle, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to touch my cheek, the contour, the color a deep wine red, but Robin caught my fingers before they could smear her work. So I smoothed my skirt down and turned to find Joel fully winterized and ready to go, arms crossed. No smile.

  “This really is you, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. Nodded. Shrugged again. Dry throat, so I filled the awkward silence with a cough.

  “I mean, I call you fag and stuff, but this is different.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He went “Hmm” and shook his head.

  I said, “You know, I wouldn’t blame you if you put the blame on me. That’s true, after all. I can deal with it.”

  He shrugged, then held up a small revolver. When I froze, fearing I’d misread the situation again, he nodded for me to take it. “It’s Robin’s, but I convinced her you’re a trained shot. I’ve got my forty-five. Time to go.”

  We did, the three of us. Out the bedroom window, Joel helping us ease down and drop the rest of the way, a shock to the legs, before he followed us down.

  “That was the second window I’ve jumped out of tonight.”

  Robin rubbed her shoulder. “Shit.”

  But we were all in one piece, and once our separate anxieties gave way to a shared awareness of our dizzying, life-affirming and sheer irrepressible audacity, we walked away as though treading on stepping stones of our former selves. Just … up and walked away. Leaving our lives behind, at least temporarily for them, indefinitely for Manny. I hadn’t chosen a name. I’d fantasized about them before, but I’d never settled. Amanda? Hermione? Manuela?

  I yawned. Later, I decided. Tonight, the ‘Woman with No Name’ felt appropriate.

  4

  It turned out to be a McDonald’s. We had to walk several miles, and it was nearing three in the morning, but it felt like only minutes had passed since we’d left the apartment, and we were still looking over our shoulders, listening for sirens, but inside the clanging, sizzling chaos of McDonald’s with a parking lot full of semis left running and truckers trying to keep it together, we ordered coffee and breakfast and settled into a booth where we could see both entrances.

  Robin passed her laptop across the table, and I plugged in the first flash drive. Waited for everything to boot up, then started the search. I hoped it would be easy, with no booby-traps or viruses that only a trained computer geek would be able to crack, and from the look of it, my wishes were granted.

  Folders, conveniently labeled. Scans, PDFs, of all sorts of documents — emails, receipts, airplane ticket stubs, rental car slips, birth certificates. Several of those. It took me a few minutes to make the connection, and if Paula hadn’t put me on the right track, I doubt I ever would have found it.

  “You know the story?” I asked. “The donor baby story?”

  Joel shook his head. Of course. He didn’t keep up with the news much. But Robin knew.

  “Hans was the miracle baby. Andrew needed bone marrow, and there wasn’t a perfect match, so his mother had Hans, who was just that.”

  Joel went “Eww” and said, “Seriously? That’s fucked up.”

  Robin punched him on the arm. “It’s not. It’s sweet. It’s … amazing.”

  “Even though Hans didn’t get a say?”

  “Maybe he didn’t, but I’m sure he didn’t think about it very often. It’s not like he’s had a bad life.” Robin gave Joel an open-mouthed Duh face.

  I turned the screen around, two of the birth certificates side by side. “I don’t get this. Why would there be more than one? Seriously, what’s going on?”

  Robin leaned closer to the screen, Joel looking over her shoulder. I waited, eyes flicking back and forth between the restaurant’s tw
o entrances. Some of the truckers were pulling out, and some of the area’s ‘night people’, either homeless or insomniacs, began wandering in, then out again, then asking for change, then ordering coffee, then wandering out again.

  “Were they shopping for babies? Out of a catalog?” Robin asked.

  Joel shook his head. “This wasn’t a mainstream adoption. This was some shady black market shit.”

  I thought about it, black market babies, black market organs. What had Paula said about ‘spares’? About the Marquettes ‘breeding’ replacement parts?

  I felt sick. “Oh God. I think, maybe, I think …”

  A squad car pulled into the lot, parked in a handicapped spot, and both guys got out. Of course, I knew them, and they knew Joel and me. I kicked him under the table. “You need to go hide in a bathroom stall.”

  He started to turn his head just as the officers pulled the door open. I kicked him again.

  “It’s Parr and Juice. Go, man, go.”

  He slid out of the booth. “What about you?”

  “They won’t know me, not like this.” I hoped, I hoped, I hoped.

  He slipped into the men’s room before the cops could notice. They were too busy laughing about something else, ignoring us at first, and from experience I knew they would be magnetically drawn to two young white women, moving in on their prey at around three in the morning. Until then, they would be running on autopilot and ‘cop radar’, instinctively going for the night people, especially the black ones. They would look for any opportunity to score, either with us or with an arrest or two.

  So I ignored them and ate my block of hash browns. Robin kept examining the files on the drive. “How did Hans get this stuff?”

  “Some of the notes in there sound like they came from a private eye. Like, a real one. That would make sense. I would think the Marquettes would’ve tried to keep this quiet, but there is always a paper trail. That’s the problem with conspiracies. No amount of money or power can compete with the fact that working people don’t have a reason to keep the secrets of rich folk.”

  “Then Hans is … which one of these?” There were several birth certificates without names, not even ‘John Doe’, and instead of a father, the line was filled in with X’s. “This file says ‘originals’. The other says ‘revisions’.”

  “It looks like you have to start with the oldest one.”

  She opened the revisions file. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  Flicked her eyes towards the cops. “No, no, this isn’t adoption. This is … I don’t know what this is. A goddamn audition?”

  She turned the screen around and I tried to figure it out. These weren’t babies. These were young women, at least five of them. Plus some bank account numbers, some dates, some amounts, thousands.

  I said, “Surrogates?”

  “Why couldn’t she just have another baby? Why not adopt?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe they were too busy? Afraid? Unable to have another?” Another folder. “Medical Records.”

  She opened that one, too. Not only the trail of tests leading to Hans, but also the evidence showing that, after Andrew was born, his mother had had her tubes tied.

  “Wouldn’t someone have said something about what the Marquettes were doing? The doctor? A nurse? I’m sure there would have been a big pay day for that sort of news.”

  I shook my head. “This was in the mid-seventies. If you wanted to make something happen bad enough, and you were rich enough, you could still hide the shady stuff from the public. Besides, this is way ahead of its time. Paying multiple women to have babies?”

  Robin got up and gestured for me to scoot over, then sat beside me. “They all look alike.”

  “I’d bet very much like Mrs. Marquette. I’ve never seen her.”

  “It’s … not natural. They handpicked a baby?”

  “The only way to get what they wanted. These days, it’s not a big deal anymore, the in-vitro stuff, but back then it would have been a massive political powder keg.”

  “No, this couldn’t have been in-vitro, not that early. That’s why the women had to look like his mom to come anywhere close. Same ancestry, same generals like blood type, eyes, all that.”

  One of us had to say it, so I did. “Mr. Marquette fucked five different women to make five babies so they could hopefully choose one that fit the bill?”

  “Looks like it. But then what happened to the leftovers?”

  Good question.

  The cops across the room had trays, definitely scoping us out, coming towards us, then sitting in the booth opposite. Shit, shit, shit.

  Parr, one of those thirty-something conservative chauvinists who loved shaving their head almost as much as walking around with a hand on their dick — sorry, sidearm — gave me a chin. “Mornin’ ladies.”

  We both smiled back, the least amount of energy we could muster. Robin showed me gritted teeth for a second. What do we do?

  Well … nothing. We would keep talking like they weren’t there and roll our eyes a bit if they tried flirting. And if one of them recognized me, then, holy shit, we’d just have to run like hell.

  Parr kept on. “Big report tomorrow? Burning the midnight oil.”

  Robin sighed. “Something like that.”

  Juice, who always looked a little too much like a water balloon, mumbled, “C’mon. Not now.”

  “Just being nice.”

  “I know what your ‘nice’ means.”

  I turned the computer so they couldn’t see the screen. Robin still had the document open with the list of surrogates. I typed at the bottom: PLAY COOL. WE WAIT TIL THEY LEAVE.

  She nodded.

  Might as well keep digging through the mess. I pulled out the handwritten note to Paula, folded in half, and set it on the keyboard. Most of it had been lost, but the bottom left gave us some hints: First one, to sports editor, Pioneer Press. Second one, Al** **n**l* at F*X 9. Okay, both to the media, not the police. But the next line was hard to read: Th** **ver ga** ** a **oice. Nev**.

  I knew Fox 9, the TV station, and I think I knew which anchor he was talking about, a lady from the morning show. He must’ve met her before, somehow.

  The last line, though, that was the saddest, if it said what I think it did.

  They never gave me a choice. Never.

  The rest looked like thanks to Paula for her help, thanking her for seeing “the real Hannah”, thanks for helping with the evidence, and thanks for making something-something-something worth something again.

  Juice’s tray had started with a pile of breakfast burritos, half gone now. He was drinking with a straw from a single-serving bottle of chocolate milk. Parr, most of the way through a couple of Egg McMuffins and a giant mug of coffee, was stealing peaks at Robin — making me relieved and jealous at once. Perhaps because he was being so damn unsubtle, like he was actively trying to get her to notice, and judging by the way he was fondling that mug of his, he was also trying to make her notice just how yuuuge his cock was. Not that I blame him for his obvious favoritism. Robin had one of those faces that forced you to pay attention, with or without make-up, just going to bed or just waking up. And unwelcome though their attention was, at least neither one was sizing me up. I wasn’t all that pretty of a girl, at least not yet.

  The sting in my knees pierced that thought bubble.

  Going on nine minutes since we’d sent Joel to the bathroom. These idiot cops had turned down their radios and acted as if this was going to be a luxuriously long break.

  We kept on. I put the note away and opened the list of mothers alongside the birth certificates, then arranged the windows on the screen so we could look at the list, plus the original birth certificates and the revisions. Three of them in the original file. Three viable babies. Babies X, Y, and Z. Baby X must’ve not matched what they needed. In the revised file, we found that Hans Philip Marquette started life as “Baby Y” on February 3rd, 1975. In the original birth certificate, sex was listed as an X in
stead of an M or F. But in the revised form, it had been changed to Male. Hans’s mother was Mrs. Marquette, but Baby Y’s mother was someone named Fiona Sumner. Hans’s father, Mr. Marquette. Baby Y’s, XXXXXXXXX. Same dates, except Hans now had a name, a new family, and a gender. The other two were also given names, but neither of them were Marquette. Their mothers were Janice Hines and Vivian Reynolds. Their fathers were typos.

  “So … a hermaphrodite? That’s what this is about?”

  Robin cut her eyes to the cops.

  I added, “Like the professor said, we’re not going to find it in the text.”

  She picked up on it. “God, I can’t afford another C in this bitch’s class.”

  “We should’ve started last week.”

  “During Spring Break? Are you shitting me?”

  Robin took the laptop and started going through the other files. Now that we knew it was all on one flash drive, the second being a back-up, we slowed down. Not as much evidence to examine as we thought. I took a sip of coffee, but it had gone cold and nearly made me gag. Or maybe it was what I had read that made me feel sick. This was saying that Hans started life as both male and female, and had one chosen for him. How did that work?

  At long last, the cops seemed to be finishing up. Juice got up and headed for the bathroom. Robin grabbed my knee, a tight claw under the table, then she let go. I was stuck, though. I couldn’t go into the men’s room like this.

  Parr leaned our way. “Hey, need help? I’ve got a Justice Administration degree.”

  Robin gave him a slick grin. “Thanks, but we’ve got it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it. Just saying.”

  “We’re good, officer.” She pointed at the ring on his left hand. “How long have you been married?”

  He dropped it from his coffee to his lap. “We’ve got an arrangement.”

  “Fuck!” A shout from the men’s room door. Juice coming back, coughing. “That’s one seriously sick fucker in there.”

  “What?”

  “Guy in the stall. We’ve got to bounce. I need a stall.”