“Executive? Color me impressed.”
“Oh, family connections, you know.” Wally propped an elbow on the bar and waved his hand. “I’m a little bored with it, to tell you the truth. That’s why I come down here. I need something real. And this jazz, baby — I mean, this is it.”
Reginald couldn’t help but chuckle. Only yesterday, Wally had equated showing up here with certain death.
“What about you?” Wally asked. “What do you do?”
“Oh, I sing here and there.” Reginald tapped his cigarette over an ashtray. “Mostly at the U Street clubs.”
“Hey, that’s perfect! The network’s always looking for new singers.”
Reginald leaned nearer and rested his lacquered nails on Wally’s neck. “I didn’t catch that last part, sugar.”
“I said, the network’s looking for singers.”
Reginald-as-Divinity, who could hear Wally fine, furrowed his brow and shook his head. “I’m sorry, it’s getting awfully loud in here. Listen, I’ve got a place a couple blocks away. Why don’t we go talk where we can hear each other.”
Wally was keen to the idea.
* * *
Reginald showed his elegant back to Wally. “Be a gentleman and take my coat?”
“Take it? Fur’s not my style, but all right.”
Reginald could hear the tremor in his throat. Ever since they’d left the club, Wally had been masking his growing apprehension with ever-thicker layers of slapstick. Probably the first time he’s been alone with a woman of color, Reginald thought, shimmying his smooth, dark shoulders as Wally slipped the coat off him. Wally nearly fell as he stumbled toward the coat rack.
Scratch that — the first time he’s been alone with any woman.
“Why don’t you have a seat on the couch and relax, hon,” Reginald suggested. “I’ll fix us a couple drinks.”
Wally did as Divinity said, hands clasped between his knees, his pale two-toned shoes angled inward.
Reginald strode to the kitchenette and took a couple of small glasses from a cupboard. “Is red wine all right?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I, ah…” Wally licked his lips. “I don’t drink, actually.”
Reginald paused, waiting for the punch line.
“I know it’s kind of square,” Wally said, “but I swore to my mother I’d never touch the stuff. And if you’ve ever had a Jewish mother, you know the kind of guilt they can lay. We can still talk, though, right?”
“Oh, of course, sugar,” he said.
He looked at the dropper poised over what was to have been Wally’s glass and frowned. The only other libation he could offer was water, and water wouldn’t mask the chemical taste of the chloral hydrate. Fortunately, Reginald had a fallback plan.
“Give me a minute to freshen up?”
“I’ll be right here,” Wally replied, his voice beginning to rattle. Reginald noted the way Wally’s fingers were clawing at his trousers, his gaze darting around the slummy room. Not good. All signs pointed to Wally bolting the minute Divinity disappeared into the bathroom.
“You’re not gonna run out on me, are you?” Reginald asked sweetly.
Sometimes the best deterrent was directness. A bit of social engineering they’d been taught in Champions training: make the person want to prove that your assumptions about him are wrong.
Wally laughed as though the idea was the farthest thing from his mind. “Oh, of-of course not.”
“Good.” Reginald winked.
Inside the bathroom, he took a small syringe from the cabinet and drew six cc’s of chloral hydrate from the dropper bottle. Enough to put young Wally down for the night. In the morning, he would administer a second injection, and then a third before leaving for the White House. At lunch yesterday, he had confirmed that Wally lived alone. No one would miss him. Not even his mother.
Reginald capped the bottle and hid it in the back of the cabinet. He tucked the syringe between the underside of his left wrist and a thick gold bracelet. Leaning toward the mirror, he checked his face. The Divinity look had held up well. He pushed a little more darkness into his eyes and pouted out his lips.
“All done, sugar,” he said, cutting the bathroom light behind him. “Hope you’re not—”
In the instant it took for Reginald’s mind to register that Wally was no longer on the couch and that a chair was missing from the kitchen table, something crashed into the back of his head. White branches of light jagged across his vision. The next blow sprawled him to the floor.
Reginald struggled onto this back, the lines of his vision suddenly wavy.
Wally stood over him with what remained of the chair’s backrest, his face shiny with sweat. “You tricked me into coming here.”
Reginald-as-Divinity scooted backward. One of his high-heeled shoes had come off. “Calm down, sugar. What are you talking about?”
“You’re not who you claim to be.”
“I’m … Divinity Childs.”
“No you’re not.”
“Lus … lusten to me…” Why were his words slurring? “Ahm Duvun…”
“No you’re not! Stop saying that!” Wally rattled the wooden backrest, and Reginald braced for another strike. “You’re a — a whore! A dirty, disease-riddled whore. You pretended to be interested in me back at that club so you could get inside my wallet.” His chin quivered as though he was about to cry. “That’s all you wanted. My mother warned me about tramps like you.”
Marvelous. Of all the people he might have impersonated and Reginald had drawn Norman fucking Bates.
Willing Wally back into focus, Reginald sat up, tried to push himself to his feet. The room spun him back onto the seat of his dress. What the hell? He’d absorbed heavier shots in his career and bounced right up. It shouldn’t be taking him this long to recover.
Then he remembered the syringe.
His gaze dropped to his wrist. The needle was poking from beneath the bracelet and into a thin bulge of vein. The collision with the floor must have pushed some chloral hydrate into him. Not all of it, thank God, but enough. He extended his wrist until the needle slid out, and then raised his head.
Wally’s face had become a pale blur, barely there.
“I’m gonna teach you a lesson,” the blur said. “You hear me? Wally’s gonna teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
Reginald strained to hold his eyes open. “Wally … ju-jus lusten to…”
His tongue felt like a giant slug. The back of his head smacked the floor. The final sensation his dimming consciousness registered was of being dragged by the legs toward the bedroom.
19
Wake up.
The voice echoed through him as though someone was calling down a narrow stone well.
Wake up, Reggie.
Maddie?
Wake up, Reggie. You’re in danger.
He tried to open his eyes, but the drug kept them sealed. His body stirred. Sensation prickled into his hands. He was on his back in a bed, arms stretched overhead, wrists bound to something. He tried to shift his legs, but something restrained them. Ankles bound, too. Must not have been out long, though. From the feel of things, his Divinity form had held.
Still there, Maddie? he thought into the space they’d once shared.
No response.
“Did you say something?” a man’s voice asked.
This time Reginald managed to squint his eyelids open. Wally was standing at the foot of the bed in a white shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows. A paring knife glinted in one hand.
Wait, Wally. Listen to me.
But Reginald’s attempt at speech ran into whatever had been shoved inside his mouth — a balled-up sock, from the feel of it. Hopefully not one of Wally’s. Reginald tried to push it out with his tongue, but the sock had been affixed with tape.
“What’s a matter?” Wally asked snidely. “Cat got your tongue?”
Reginald tested his wrists. He was wearing the same cuffs he’d planned to use on Wally, the chain looped through
the metal bed frame. His ankles were similarly bound, though with gray electrical tape.
“Think you’re going somewhere?” Wally shook his head slowly. “Not before you learn your lesson.”
An odd intensity gleamed in Wally’s eyes as he climbed onto the foot of the bed. The metal frame clicked and whined. Reginald struggled to tear his ankles free, but the electrical tape held. And he was still laboring under the depressive effects of the chloral hydrate.
Wally knee-walked to Reginald’s stomach then held the paring knife out. The tip of the blade touched the skin beneath Reginald’s left eye. Wally drew the blade down like a caress.
“Bet you’ve tricked a lot of people with that face,” Wally whispered. “Bet it’s gotten you into a lot of fat wallets, am I right? But Wally here’s a little too quick thinking.” He crossed and uncrossed his eyes a few times rapidly. “What do you say we do a little reconfiguring so that don’t happen again?”
Reginald grunted against the sock.
“Hey, you think I like doing this?”
Yeah, I think you do. Doesn’t sound like your first go-round, either.
And then Reginald remembered something he had seen in the Post a couple of months back. A sidebar about city prostitutes showing up in clinics with horrific scars on their faces. A few had gone to the police with stories of a crazy white man. The “Pumpkin Carver.” But the officials had brushed them off with some variation of, What do you women expect in your line of work?
Reginald winced as the knife bit into his cheek.
“The more you struggle,” Wally whispered, rocking the blade deeper, “the more it’s gonna hurt. And we don’t want that.”
Reginald strained against the electrical tape. If he could only get it to stretch, he could buck Wally toward his hands. Wally-boy hadn’t found the syringe, apparently. And while Wally was busy climbing up him, Reginald had managed to work the syringe from beneath the bracelet and clamp it between his fingers like a cigarette. A quick stick and push and it would be over.
But the tape wouldn’t give him a damned inch.
Wally lay against him, his breath quick and excited, his gaze riveted on the blood Reginald felt welling from the growing cut. Wally’s gaze drifted to Reginald’s eyes, and his mouth straightened. He sat back suddenly, perplexity wrinkling his freckled brow.
“Why aren’t you crying?”
Reginald attempted to buck him, but the oscillation was too small. Above him, Wally barely rocked.
“Hey, I asked you a question!” Wally reared back his free hand. “Why aren’t you crying? What’s it gonna take, huh?”
The pale flash of Wally’s arm registered too late for Reginald to roll with it. The slap knocked his head partway around. As a hot stinging spread over his cheek, he realized he was no longer holding the syringe. He pictured it in the shadows behind the headboard. Beyond his reach.
Another flash as Wally struck again, knocking his head the other way.
“You know,” Wally panted, “my mother has a name for the ones like you — the ones who refuse to learn. Mules.”
Mother.
Reginald fought to think back. They’d stopped at Wally’s desk before heading to lunch. Reginald had gazed over the young man’s meticulous workspace, his attention resting for a moment on a framed photo of a stern-looking woman in horn-rimmed glasses and cinnamon-colored hair.
“And that’s what you are,” Wally said. “A dirty, filthy mule-whore.”
Reginald focused, trying to recall every detail of that photo. The image wavered in and out.
“And all mule-whores deserve what I give them.”
Wally’s face clenched as he raised the knife.
Reginald thinned his lips, tightening them at the corners. The blade of his nose grew out, nostrils sharpening. He fashioned jowls, then drew thin lines across his brow and around his eyes.
Wally hesitated, his head tilting.
Now for the big show. Reginald envisioned his pigmentation changing, cream dripping into a skein of dark coffee. A coifed Barbara Billingsly ’do replaced the afro, going from auburn to cinnamon in the space of seconds. All the time, he referenced what he could recall of the photo in his mind’s eye. Just had to hope that he was in the ballpark.
Wally lowered his arm. “M-mother?”
Don’t rejoice yet, Reginald cautioned himself.
“Wh-what are you doing here…?” Wally shot his gaze around like someone was pulling a number on him. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Reginald just had to keep Wally from sitting still long enough to realize that it couldn’t make sense. He thrashed his head from side to side. “Mmmff!”
“Oh god.” Wally set the knife beside his knee and began picking at the corner of the tape sealing Reginald’s mouth. His face had gone a stricken shade of white, freckles standing out like small sores.
The tape ripped away. The sock came out in a sodden wad. Reginald gasped. Wally began sponging the saliva around Reginald’s mouth with his jacket sleeve, then he stopped, eyes squinting.
He knows something’s off.
“Unbind me!” Reginald screamed in his shrillest voice. “Unbind me, damn you!”
Wally snapped to attention and, nodding his head quickly, picked up the knife and began sawing at the tape around Reginald’s ankle. Having no idea what Wally’s mother wore, Reginald had gone with a floral housedress and a pair of brown flats. If he’d missed the mark, Wally was too busy freeing him to notice.
Just have to keep him from getting another close look at my face.
Reginald felt the tape being peeled from his ankles, tugging at his pantyhose. He kicked his legs the rest of the way free.
“I-I just don’t understand how you got—”
“My wrists!” Reginald screamed.
Wally leaped from the bed and patted his trousers. “Key, key, where’d I put the key?”
“Hurry, you imbecile!”
“Oh, wait, here it is.” Wally fished it from his shirt pocket and stooped over the head of the bed. He licked his lips furiously as he worked. A click sounded and the sharp bite of the cuffs fell from Reginald’s wrists.
Reginald pulled his arms in and rolled away. He stood heavily on legs that felt on the verge of coming unhinged. Wally stood on the other side of the bed, arms limp at his sides.
“What is this, Mother, some kind of test?”
Reginald fought to keep from staggering. If he were at full strength, he could drop Wally with a single blow. Thanks to the drug, he was running on fifteen percent, maybe, and Wally was still holding the knife.
Reginald-as-Wally’s-mother curled his lips in disgust. “Look at you. Going out to clubs. Consorting with filthy prostitutes.”
“No Mother, I wasn’t—”
“Shut up!”
Wally shut up.
“Now get over here and take your punishment. Bend over the bed, not a word.”
Wally plodded around, already unbuckling his pants. Reginald lowered himself to a knee and, sweeping a hand under the bed, found the syringe. Seconds later, its needle disappeared into Wally’s boxers, and Reginald depressed the plunger.
Wally winced, then sighed. “I deserved that, Mother,” he said dreamily.
Seconds later, he was out.
Exhaling, Reginald assumed his own form. He looked around the bedroom and then out into the main room, where chair parts littered the floor. He brought the back of a hand to his cheek and inspected the crescent-shaped imprint of blood.
Could have been a lot worse.
Reginald secured Wally to the bed and prepared a strong pot of coffee. Then he took a sheaf of paper from his dresser and set it on the kitchen table along with a pen. He sat and scooted himself in. Accompanied by Wally’s snores, he took a swallow of coffee and wrote out the first line:
“The man you call your president took everything from me.”
20
Gainesville, Florida
Friday, August 2, 1985
6:20 p.m.
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“What can I do for you, Janis?”
Director Kilmer’s office was as stark as one of his suits. A glossy black-stained desk faced the door, holding a computer and phone. What looked like a flat TV screen took up a section of the wall behind him — for video conferencing, Janis guessed, though the screen was presently dark.
“I’d like to talk,” she replied.
“Of course, have a seat.” He stood and gestured toward the two black chairs facing his desk. “Can I get you something to drink?”
She shook her head as she sat in one of the hard-cushioned chairs.
Director Kilmer walked to a black cabinet against one wall and opened a small refrigerator. “Think I’ll have a Coke myself. Sure you don’t want one? No?” He took a red can from the refrigerator’s wire shelf and clapped the door closed. As he returned to his desk, he cracked the tab and slurped a release of brown foam. “Not crazy about the new formula, but I guess we’re stuck with it, huh?”
Janis put up a wall against his attempted friendliness.
“So,” he said, settling back in his chair, “what’s on your mind?”
“If you remember, I agreed to the summer training. I said I’d use the time to decide whether or not I wanted to be accepted into your program. Only three weeks to go, and I can’t say I’m all that impressed.”
Kilmer’s lips frowned in what appeared genuine concern. “Mrs. Fern says you’ve made tremendous progress.”
“I’ve made progress, but it’s not Mrs. Fern I’m talking about.”
Kilmer brought the can to his lips. He took a sip, nodding as he swallowed. “I hoped your first weeks with Agent Steel would more than demonstrate her dedication to the Program. Her dedication to helping you.”
Janis laughed once. “Helping us? Let me refresh your memory. Four months ago, Agent Steel was in the house above us, pressing a gun to Scott’s temple. I felt her intentions loud and clear. You can deny it all you want, but she was prepared to blow his brains out unless I submitted to her memory eraser.”
“Agent Steel and I have talked,” Director Kilmer said. “She felt her life was in danger. The gun was a calculated bluff.”
Janis rolled her eyes. “Give me a break.”
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 74
