Spitting Image

by Patrick LeClerc

  “I’m not sure if the world is ready for that.”

  “It’s too bad in a way.”

  “You want kids?”

  “Oh, God, no,” she said. “Not anytime soon, anyway. I just think that a world where more people shared your genes might be a world I’d like to live in.”

  I didn’t say anything. If I did, it would just throw the fact of our odd, partial separation into stark relief. She’d remember why she thought we shouldn’t be together, and her warm, knowing smile would turn fragile, her eyes would slide away from mine and she’d have to remind me that she had asked for space to think.

  Oh, she’d try to do it gently, but some things just can’t be done gently. It would be like getting tenderly garroted with piano wire.

  So I just kept my mouth shut and smiled back.

  If I’m any judge of women, and you’d think the years would have taught me to be, she was thinking something similar. We could bask in the warm glow of togetherness just as long as we didn’t acknowledge it, or look too closely.

  Chapter 28

  “ARE YOU fucking nuts?” asked Pete.

  I shoved back my chair and looked at the group. John stood leaning against a wall, arms folded, a smirk on his lips. Bob sat expressionless, watching reactions and making calculations. Feeling out how much he could depend on each individual to do their part. Nique looked at me with one eyebrow raised. Only Sarah looked convinced.

  “I said it’s our best chance,” I replied. “I never said it was a good idea.”

  “So, let me see if I have this,” said Nique. “Just so we know we’re on the same page. After you were kidnapped and tortured, you are going to have this guy– the same one who did the torture– set up a meeting. And you are going to go along as bait? I just want to be sure I didn’t mishear any of that.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “If you want,” offered Pete, “I could save us a lot of effort and just torture you right here.”

  “Sean, sweetie,” said Nique, “he does work with you for twenty- four hours a week. He’s probably got it down.”

  “My old buddy Brad is our only way to get to them,” I said. “And we need them to bring the whole gang. If we don’t get them all, it won’t work. After what happened the last few times I tangled with them, they’ll want to come loaded for bear. So they’ll show. They won’t know I’m ready, they won’t know I have backup.”

  “Your backup is a hot teacher, two scary old dudes, one incredibly sexy paramedic and Nique,” said Pete. “That’s what you’re going to get when you call the cavalry.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t call me ‘the cavalry,’” said John. “There’s some old issues there.”

  “This is the only thing that has a chance to work,” said Bob, breaking his silence. “There’s plenty of things we could do to annoy them, maybe hurt them a little, but they have a lot more resources and sooner or later, we’d lose. This is a knockout punch. If it works, we win the war, not just a battle.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?” asked Pete.

  “Chances are we all get killed,” said John. “But don’t worry. It is a good day to die.”

  “It’s a better one to live,” I said. “So let’s aim for that and make sure we all have our jobs down pat.”

  “So, still no chance you’re not interested in handing them a sample in a cup?” asked Pete. “Hell, I’ll jerk off in a cup right now and we can pass it off. They probably won’t notice until the kid gets taller than you. So that’s an easy eight years of peace.”

  I let that slide past. I’d gotten used to that one. I hadn’t been short when I followed Napoleon. I’d been tall when I’d followed Caesar, but over the past century or so, everyone has kinda sprouted past me.

  “Not interested. I wouldn’t want a kid raised by these psychos. Not even your kid.”

  “I don’t know,” said Nique. “The amoral opportunism genes would be halfway there anyway.”

  Chapter 29

  AFTER AN HOUR, we had run through the plan, and likely glitches enough to feel as comfortable as we were going to.

  “Ok,” I said. “That’s enough. Now let’s bring Brad his phone and have him make the call. Bob, I’m going to ask you to loom threateningly in case he gets cold feet.”

  We walked into the office. Brad looked up, too quickly. He tried to keep his expression neutral, I could see the battle between fear and hope behind his eyes. As far as he knew, he was only alive as long as he was useful. That wasn’t entirely true. I wouldn’t shoot him just for refusing to help, but if he even looked like he was selling me out, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over putting him down.

  “OK,” I handed him the phone. “Make the call. Tell them you’re going to lead me to the place we told you. Everybody shows up and this goes smooth, nobody has to die. We all get on with our lives like we never met.”

  Brad picked up the phone, scrolled through his contacts and pressed the screen.

  “Hi,” he said in Sarah’s voice. “It’s Brad. I have Danet with me... We’re going to a cabin up north. I’ll send you the GPS location... Yes, just the two of us. He thinks I’m the girlfriend... For now. He’s not suspicious, but hurry... Bring everybody. He’s armed, and he’s wary now... By about six tonight. I have to go.”

  He ended the call. I took back his phone.

  “Good job,” I said. “Just keep selling it. How many people do you think will show?”

  “There are only about six people on her side of the family who know about you. She likes to play things close to the vest, so I would think it won’t be more than that.”

  “OK,” I said. “How are they likely to be armed?”

  “They want you alive. They’ll have guns but they’ll want to get you to surrender, so they’ll try to get in close.”

  That was good, if it was true. If they wanted to capture me, they couldn’t just shoot me from cover a hundred yards away. That’s hard to guard against.

  I left him, walking back out to my friends to finalize our tactics.

  “So if we use this cabin,” I said, “we need to scout the area around it.”

  “There’s not much out there,” said Bob. “It’s not near any good fishing. It’s close to the ski areas, but it’s the wrong season for skiing. See if you can meet on the balcony. It’s a good view of the valley, so it fits the romantic getaway cover story, but it’s also open, and there’s plenty of places I can set up with my rifle and cover it.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. If I have half a dozen guys hoping to capture me, and I don’t know how Brad will react, the more friendly guns the better.”

  “Why bring Brad?” asked Sarah.

  “Because they’ll be expecting him to lead me there.”

  “Looking like me,” she said. “So leave him here and take me. That way, you have one more ally and they have one fewer.”

  Bob and I shook our heads at the same time.

  “Too dangerous,” he said.

  “I don’t like it,” I said at the same time.

  “Turn down the chivalrous act,” she said. “It makes sense. They think you think you’re with me. If you’re with a disguised Brad, you’ll give it away. You’re not that good an actor. Anyone watching you and him will know you’re thinking of shoving him off the balcony. If it’s really me, you’ll be convincing.”

  “I’ve faked my way through things before,” I protested.

  “Go put your arm around Brad. Let your hand linger on the small of his back. Whisper in his ear,” she said. “You do all that, maybe I’ll believe you could fool these people. They’re professional deceivers. They’ll be good at spotting mistakes.”

  “So what if they see you not acting right?” asked Bob.

  “You think Brad does a better me than I do?” she shot back. “Besides, they will be looking for Sean to give himself away, not me.”

  “She has a point,” said John. “You can’t look at the guy who tortured you the same way you look at your girlfriend.”


  “I’ll carry a gun,” she said. “If they get the drop on you, they won’t expect me to be a threat. This will work. And I have a score to settle too, you know.”

  “What if you get hurt?” asked John.

  “I know a guy who’s really good at fixing that kind of thing,” she said with a twisted smile.

  Chapter 30

  SARAH AND I drove to the meeting. She drove, I sat in the passenger seat and tried to force my mind to relax, stop thinking of the thousands of ways this could all go horribly wrong. It must have worked on some level because she glanced over at me and smiled.

  “Are you bopping your head along to the radio?” she asked with a grin.

  “I guess I was.”

  “This is Metric,” she pointed out.

  “I like Metric.”

  “Can you admit that?” she asked. “Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen aren’t going to show up and confiscate your Old Fogey Fossil Rock Club membership card?”

  “I don’t just like old music,” I explained. “I still like old music. Most really bad music doesn’t last, so classic stations tend to play just the better stuff that survived. Hair band music from the 80s is the exception that proves the rule.”

  “I just never saw you as an Indie Rock kinda guy.”

  “My Indie Rock credentials are impeccable,” I said. “I saw Throwing Muses at the Middle East back in about 1987. Mostly because I had a huge crush on Tanya Donelly, but if anything that should increase my cred.”

  She laughed. “I can just see you as a guy groupie. Then you could write a tell-all book and claim Green was really about you. Or that you broke up the band when Kristen Hersch got jealous. You could have been Throwing Muses’ Yoko.”

  I laughed at that. I loved Sarah joking about something. Hearing her laugh was one of my favorite things about her.

  “You really had a crush on Tanya Donelly?” she asked with a smile.

  “Big time,” I replied. “Tanya and Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo.”

  She threw back her head an laughed. “Oh, God. You’re so old.”

  “Sarah my dear,” I said, “I was way too old for Donelly.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but if you talk about women from two centuries ago, it’s different. I can look at old paintings of Emma Hamilton and say ‘OK, I get it.’ But these women are singers I listened to when I was twelve. That’s like you crushing on my aunt.” She laughed again. “Of course, my aunt wasn’t cool enough to be in Throwing Muses, but it’s just hilarious. Oh, man. Bright Yellow Gun isn’t a euphemism, is it?” She had another fit of laughter.

  “Not so far as I know,” I replied. “Not about me, anyway. My crush on Miss Donelly was unrequited. I’m surprised you know so much about them. I’d think they were just before your time.”

  “I was a teenager in the 90s, and I had a big Indie Rock Chick phase. It was a good decade for that. Plenty of girl groups. Even Hole, before we all knew Courtney Love was a trainwreck.”

  “Did you want to be the girl with the most cake?”

  “I did,” she replied. “I had ambitions to get away from my roots, to escape the expectation that I’d grown up to be another working class Catholic housewife. I wanted to lash out and rebel. I did, in fact, want to be the girl with the most cake. So the angry Indie Rock chicks spoke to me. For a young girl feeling stifled and craving independence that stuff was like crack.”

  “Did you own a lot of flannel?” I asked.

  “Oh I had flannel, I had a pair of Doc Martin’s, I even had a plaid skirt to go with my black leather jacket.”

  I thought for a moment. “You don’t still have the plaid skirt and the leather jacket, do you?”

  She laughed again. “Down, boy.” She patted my thigh. “Maybe if we live through this, and everything works out, and I go a year without being kidnapped, I’ll surprise you on your birthday.”

  “I don’t know my birthday,” I pointed out.

  “Then it will be even more of a surprise.”

  I felt a warm glow in the pit of my stomach. And one a bit lower, but that wasn’t as important or surprising. There was a flicker of hope. She could make a joke about us, and about a future. One involving short skirts on my birthday. That had to be a positive sign.

  Maybe she was just joking, my rotten cynical side chimed in. I’d had similar conversations with Nique. But I had never dressed up like a pirate for Nique.

  The talk was a welcome distraction. Soon enough we pulled up in front of the cabin.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  She took a big breath, let it out slowly. “As I’ll ever be.”

  Chapter 31

  PLAYING THE PART of a vacationing couple, we got our bags out of the trunk and walked into the cabin. I just more or less assumed we were being watched. I expected Amelia’s minions to strike at any moment, capturing me with the help of Brad in the guise of Sarah.

  Hopefully unknown to them would be Daniels – or more likely, his people – waiting in ambush. Daniels didn’t seem like the kind of man to get his hands very dirty.

  And last, I hoped, would be my people, in the form of two very scary aging veterans who were like Leatherstocking and Chingachgook if they had been written by Robert B Parker instead of James Fennimore Cooper.

  It was like a Russian nesting doll of deceit and violence, with me and the woman I loved in the center.

  It wasn’t the worst plan. They wanted me alive, so they wouldn’t shoot first. They thought Sarah was one of them, so they wouldn’t shoot her. And I knew they were coming, and they didn’t know that I knew. So it could have been worse.

  “You ready?” I asked Sarah.

  “Do I have a choice?” she asked with a shaky smile.

  My phone buzzed. I looked at the text from Bob. Here they come. 4 to the door, 3 outside.

  “Not anymore,” I said. “It’s showtime.”

  The door burst open and two men charged in, handguns drawn. I stepped in front of Sarah, put my hands up. I didn’t want to do anything to make them shoot.

  “Don’t move!” shouted one of them. “Keep those hands up.”

  That seemed reasonable, so I did. Two more entered the cabin, sweeping the area with their pistols. The leader spun me around and patted me down, finding my .45 in the small of my back. I had expected that. As I hoped, he stopped after finding one gun and never looked for the nine millimeter at my ankle.

  I had to admit, John had a point. I could never have hidden the big Colt there.

  As the men secured the room, the woman from the house in Rowley entered. Amelia, I assumed.

  “Mr Danet,” she said. “It seems the tables have turned. Where is your faithful Indian companion?”

  One of the men handed her my Colt. “Oh, my,” she purred. “What a big gun.”

  I didn’t bother to respond to that.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “You know what I want,” she said. “And I grow tired of asking. So this is your choice,” she placed a specimen cup on the table. “Give us a sample, or my associates will start breaking things until you do.”

  “And then what?” I asked. “Do you expect me to believe you’ll just let me walk away?”

  “I do. I have no reason to kill you. Disposing of corpses is problematic. You probably have people who will miss you and look for you. Some of them are dangerous, and I am tired of this fight. If you, or any of your associates moves against us, we will blacken your names, ruin you reputations and leave you wishing we had simply killed you.”

  I nodded. That was probably true. They could make themselves hard to find, and imitate any of us. I would never be able to feel safe, never know what I might be accused of, be easily proven guilty of. She was telling me that she didn’t have to kill me because she didn’t have a reason to fear me, and I had every reason to fear her.

  I heard Sarah’s sharp intake of breath behind me. I don’t think she realized just how much power they had, how nakedly they displayed it.

&
nbsp; Amelia speared her with a look.

  I didn’t know if they expected her to keep playing along, but I wasn’t supposed to know she was an imposter, so I kept up my end of the charade.

  “It’s going to be alright,” I told her. “They’ll let us go.”

  Amelia looked at me, looked back at Sarah. I could see suspicion in her eyes. I took a deep breath, looked at the men around her, scanning for a weakness, a lapse in readiness. If this went to hell early, I wanted to know who would be easiest to jump. I stepped in front of Sarah, which wouldn’t look odd to them if I were still in the dark that she was an imposter. It also put me between her and the guns. I was pretty sure they didn’t want to shoot me quite yet.

  Amelia returned her attention to me. “Enough games. This is your last chance. Accept this offer or suffer the consequences.”

  I didn’t point out that we’d all been suffering them for a while now, and her offer was pretty unacceptable even without threats. Partly because I’m a gentleman, and partly because I was hoping the cavalry would arrive soon.

  She tossed the sample cup to me. “Choose wisely.”

  I caught it. Looked at the half dozen gunmen in the room. “You mean here and now?”

  “I hate to be this way, but I just don’t trust you to return it to me later.”

  “There are a lot of weapons pointed at me, and this is pretty public,” I said. “Even if I agree, I don’t know that I can do this.”

  She looked at me, thinking. An evil smile spread over her face, starting with a curl of her lip and a glint in her eyes, and finally a subtle shift in her whole carriage. The tension drained away and a cockiness replaced it. She had a plan, and not just a good plan, a nasty one.

  She spoke to one of the other men in a language I didn’t understand. He grinned, opened a closet door and searched it. When he finished, he nodded.

  “Since we have your phone and your gun, and David has just made sure the closet has no secret escape hatch or stockpile of weapons, we can give you a bit of privacy.” She looked at Sarah and her evil grin widened. “Bring your girlfriend. She can help you out. We’ll give you the traditional Seven Minutes in Heaven.”