“Well,” Jasper said. If she wanted him to be on board with whatever she was offering, she could’ve chosen a dolphin mask instead of a bunny one.
“There’s someone who really needs help. The same way Voda played with your brain, they played with hers, only much, much worse. There’s a chip in her head.” She wiggled the syringe. “This will deactivate it. You’ll get to do something heroic.”
She pushed the lunch pail toward Jasper. “And I’ll give you back all the money you paid for your operation, plus some bonus money. You’ll have cash to begin repairing your past crimes. If we’re going to help her, we need to hurry, though. Emotionally she’s not hanging in so well. Here, have a look.”
Jasper opened the file and began sifting through pictures. “You mentioned my life would be at risk? Why do you want to help her?”
“Because what they’ve done to her is barbaric? What they’ll do to you, if it doesn’t work or you get caught, is barbaric too. That’s true. But you’ll be rescuing another person—you’ll go, in just one day, from not deserving to live to deserving to live more than a huge majority of other people do. Plus her husband needs to move on. Specifically, with me. Rage leads him to action, so if she can escape from him he’ll be irate and open to coupling sooner than if she dies and he feels he has to publicly mourn. But long-term I’m all about moving things to a more humane-ish place. I have a lot of big plans for the future.”
Jasper looked down at the photo of the woman, who did indeed look very sad. A specific sort of sad that a shower could possibly improve on one level, at least in terms of its most basic outward expression.
“My parents,” Jasper blurted out suddenly. “Can you find out if they’re still alive?”
17
THE RABBIT WOMAN WAS GOING TO SEND A NOTE TO HIS MOTHER and father, both of whom, she researched and confirmed, were still living. The messages were cryptic, but he hoped they’d still be nice to receive. Now that he felt bad about his cons and understood what a terrible feeling that was, he worried that his mother and father were wracked with similar regret in terms of their parenting or lack of a relationship with him. He’d never had an adult relationship with his mother to miss, and it had seemed that his father’s idea of them spending time together was always for Jasper to listen to his father whine about his most-recent heartbreak. So Jasper didn’t long for that either. He didn’t want to be close to them, but he also didn’t want them to feel sad over him or wish they’d done things differently. The letter said, For reasons that are complex but not negative, your son is unable to contact you. But he’d like to ask you to think fond thoughts of him out in the world, and know that he loves you and does the same. It was more true than not? He wanted them to be happy. He loved them in the sense that he cared about their well-being and wished they’d all liked one another more. It felt good to send something that would hopefully be a comfort.
He left Voda a note also, by the door in the casita. I love you, it said. You forced me to but still.
He loved her and he knew he’d never see her again, which felt agonizing—he realized now that this was how the cons who’d loved him had felt when he left. Only even worse because he had their money.
The high sun was strong and now he was driving down the road not to move to a new city or steal or maim anyone’s ability to trust others, but to try to save someone. And if he succeeded, he had duffle bags of money in his car that he’d do his best to return to as many of his past cons as he could find, ringing their doorbells and leaving unmarked packages filled with cash on the porch. He was embarking on a tour of goodwill.
If he made it past this first stop.
The rabbit woman said that from what she’d watched of Hazel’s downloads, the trailer’s back sliding-glass door was the best entry point if no one answered the front. But it looked like there were several people in the bed inside, a few of them very attractive women. Did he have the right house?
He knocked again, more fervently. Why weren’t they waking up? He was wearing a fake parcel delivery service uniform, holding the lunch pail cooler containing the shot. With all the people inside on the bed, it seemed like a setup for a bad adult film.
“Hello?” Jasper slid the glass door open and stepped inside. He felt bad waking people up, but this was pretty important.
“Huh?” Jasper said. Was this a joke?
Two of the people were not people. He touched them just to make sure, but they definitely weren’t.
Then there was the father, and he was not alive. If a “Rose for Emily” scenario was in play here, Jasper would’ve preferred the rabbit woman to have given him a heads-up, but maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe something worse had gone on. She hadn’t told him a lot about Hazel, but the things she did say were easy to sympathize with: her husband was terrorizing her. Her father hadn’t been mentioned much, aside from the fact that Hazel lived with him, and he was allegedly grouchy. She hadn’t killed him, had she? Jasper wanted this to be a clean rescue in terms of justice. Any vibes complicating the good-deed aspect of the mission, such as patricide, were pretty unwelcome.
Then Jasper saw the blue tinge to her lips, noted the discarded pill bottle at her feet. The man’s corpse looked healthier than Hazel did in terms of color. “She’s dead,” Jasper said.
Disappointment flooded through him, then anger. Now what? Did his kick start to a life of atonement have to perish alongside her? What was the right thing for him to do if she was already gone? One idea was to take the dolls with him and move her body to the living room couch so her deathbed would have less of an incestuous group-sex feel to it when the paramedics arrived. That would probably count as a good deed.
Then Hazel made a gurgling noise. A small cluster of bubbly foam came out of her mouth. “Yes!” Jasper exclaimed. “Yes! Hazel, help is here!” He began running through the rooms of the house trying to find a Gogol phone or computer to search what the best steps were for an overdose. He could give her the chip-deactivation injection and call the paramedics, but then Byron would get to her in the hospital; he’d be the first person they called once she was identified. The rabbit woman had stressed that if anything went wrong, hospitals were a last resort. It would be no good to save Hazel’s life only to have her wake up in Byron’s private care and find she wanted to commit suicide even more than before. But probably couldn’t, due to round-the-clock surveillance.
A pool of froth was collecting on Hazel’s chin. It looked fancy in a way, nearly culinary, like whisked foam. “Warm,” he said aloud, only because in movies doctors were always reporting things aloud even if no one was there. If he could only call Voda, or the rabbit woman. “Hazel?” he yelled. “Can you hear me?”
There was a medical action he should be performing. An urgent one. Jasper knew this much. But what it might be he wasn’t sure. To buy time, he decided to go ahead and administer the injection, which he’d need to give her whether or not he called an ambulance. He opened the cooler and removed the long syringe, took the protective casing off the needle.
The shot was gigantic, like something used to impregnate a cow. “Better you than me,” Jasper mumbled.
Then he heard the click of the rifle.
THE GUN’S BARREL PRESSED INTO THE CENTER OF JASPER’S FOREHEAD. He’d raised his arms up in a stance of surrender and knew it was the best practice to never look directly at an assailant, but something was up with the guy’s chest. It seemed like his ribs were opening. The man wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he was wearing something. A vest. But it was also made of skin. Whose skin?
Jasper, he told himself, you do not want to know whose skin it is.
He swallowed. “Gogol sent you, huh.” His lifted arms were trembling. Part of him wanted to just make a go of it, just leap forward and inject her, but he figured his arm would get shot off before he could push the plunger down.
The man spat something brown onto the carpet, which made Jasper cringe. He’d really prefer to die on a clean carpet. “I am not a Gogol user,�
�� the man said.
“You’re not here to kill me?” There was more brown spit, which Jasper willed himself not to acknowledge.
“I might be. Depends on what you’re doing.”
If he told the man the truth and the man was from Gogol, he’d kill him. If he lied and the man was from Gogol, he’d kill him. But if he told the truth and the man wasn’t from Gogol, he might have a chance. Jasper pointed his syringe hand at his non-syringe hand. “It will sound pretty wild when I explain it out loud, but I came to give her this.” Jasper watched the man’s eyes move to the injection needle.
“What is it? I’m not afraid to party.”
“Well, this woman, she has a chip in her brain,” he began, then paused to gauge whether the man seemed incredulous.
“She mentioned something about that,” he responded. “She and I, we’ve been cavorting.”
Jasper’s mouth dropped open a little. This he would not have guessed.
“Is she alive?” the man continued. Jasper found himself on the barrel end of the gun once more. “Or are you planning to kill her for that chip?”
“No!” Jasper screamed. When the man had walked into the room and Jasper was sure he was going to die, that was one thing, and then when the man didn’t seem to be an assassin and Jasper felt certain he’d live, that was another, but he couldn’t deal with going back and forth between them. “I’m here to deactivate it for her so she can escape from her husband. Please, lower the weapon. I got here maybe five minutes ago and found them all on the bed just like this. Her dad’s dead and it looks like she overdosed on pills.”
“Oh, overdose.” The man stepped forward and shoved several fingers down Hazel’s throat until more foam came out, then kept at it. Finally half-digested pills began to appear. “She’ll live,” he said. “You need to find a vein on her for that?”
“No. It’s just like . . . you know, the way they’d do a shot at the doctor’s. My name’s Jasper, by the way.”
The man grabbed the syringe from Jasper’s hand and sank it into Hazel’s arm. “Call me Liver,” he said. “You a fed?”
“Me? No, I’m—” Jasper stopped. What was he? “I’m just trying to make up for a lot of bad things.”
More foamy puke came out of Hazel’s mouth, followed by a belching cough. “Ahoy!” Liver yelled, helping her sit up. “Atta gal. Let’s get you upright here.” Jasper noticed Liver wasn’t overly concerned about disturbing the father’s corpse; as he bent over to grab Hazel, his knee was pinning the expired body down by the throat. “Do you have tales from beyond? Did you get to whiff the air in hell? A buddy of mine was in a coma and swears he saw the eternal lake of fire. Said it smells like cinnamon.”
“You’re alive,” Hazel said. Her speech was slowed. It took nearly a minute for her to get both of the words out.
“Yeah. They had it in for me. Blew my shack to bits then torched the thing. I’d seen them coming, though. Snuck out in the meantime. Didn’t want you to worry, but I thought it was best to lay low for a few days.”
“Dad’s dead,” Hazel continued.
“Yes,” Jasper said. Liver realized he’d been perched atop the man and scooted back, lifting the blanket up over the corpse’s face. Hazel turned and looked at Liver, then turned and looked at Jasper. He cleared his throat. “Hazel, you don’t know me but I’m here to stop the downloads. I just gave you an injection that should disable the chip in your brain.”
Hazel let out a giggle, then made a sad noise. “Byron is going to kill you,” she said.
“Well, we should get moving,” Jasper agreed. “The rabbit woman, she’s who sent me, said we should disappear before your next download.”
Hazel looked down at the blanketed shape of her father’s body, put a hand on its chest. “Rabbit woman? But we can’t leave Dad here,” she said. “Byron’s insane. If we leave him, Byron will get his corpse to use as cryogenic blackmail. We’ve got to take him with us.”
Liver turned away from them for a moment and briefly hunched over. Jasper scowled. Was he snorting something? “Fine by me,” he said, standing back up and thumbing his nostril. “Not my first rodeo transporting a body. But we should ice him down somehow. It is a sunny day and there are people in society who know the smell of death.”
“We’ve got to take him with us,” Hazel repeated. Jasper worried that she’d had some type of chemical concussion, or maybe was going into shock, until she added, “How can we keep him cold?”
“I do have a cooler in my car,” Jasper offered. “It’s big enough to hold an adult human.” Hazel and Liver turned to look at him. “It’s, like, dolphin size.”
“Sounds like we’re good then,” Liver said.
“Wait.” Hazel grabbed Jasper’s arm. “Your car,” she said. “How many can it seat?”
18
MORE THAN HER OWN FUTURE—IT WAS EXCITING TO THINK THE downloads might be over, but she doubted it—Hazel found herself thinking about her father’s wishes in terms of a funeral. Her mother had asked to be cremated for two reasons: the first, because the cancer drugs had made her look so horrible (Cremation, her mother liked to quip near the end, the best diet ever! Think of the weight I’m about to lose); the second, because she wanted revenge (This body has put me through hell. Light it up, Bert). Her dad probably wanted the regular: a hole in the ground, a wake with visiting hours, and a notice in the paper. It wouldn’t be possible. Even if Hazel were able to task someone else with its oversight, or drop the body off at a funeral parlor with a wad of cash, Byron couldn’t be counted on not to find it and have it dug up. It had to be destroyed. She wasn’t sure how, and she knew it would be a disappointment for her pops, so she’d decided to give him a consolation prize. He could exit pharaoh style: he could take the dolls with him.
But for the moment, it was Liver who was king. They’d tried to arrange Di and Roxy in the back of Jasper’s station wagon, surrounding the cooler, but this looked like a suspicious tangle of realistic body parts. It was easier to put aviator sunglasses and baseball caps on the dolls and strap them into the backseat properly. Liver sat between them, one arm around each, a happy grin on his face. “Road trips aren’t my thing,” he said. “But this is a wonderful morning. Your deceased dad and your near-suicide excluded.”
Jasper was all work and no leisure. Hazel noted his clockwise observation schedule of rearview mirror, right-side mirror, left-side mirror, road in front. He was very worried about cops. “Not to pressure you,” Jasper stated to Hazel about forty minutes into the drive. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d left her father’s house, when he’d turned down Liver’s suggestion that they save themselves all a lot of hassle, douse the home and body with kerosene, and make her father’s double-wide a funeral pyre. Hazel had vetoed it due to the flames’ likely spread to other trailers, most of whose residents had mobility issues. Jasper’s rejection stemmed from a healthy desire to avoid police intervention.
“I just think, on the off chance we get pulled over, that it behooves us to . . . send the body to rest . . . as soon as possible.” Jasper’s eyes were locked into a cold stare with Liver’s in the rearview. “Especially since this guy refuses to wear a shirt.” Before they left, Jasper had tried talking Liver into wearing one of Hazel’s father’s button-up polos and some khaki shorts with tiny lobsters embroidered all over them. Liver declined.
“I know,” Hazel said. “I’m just not sure about the best way.”
Jasper fidgeted in his seat. “What do you mean? Isn’t burying him somewhere unmarked okay? I grabbed a shovel from the garage.”
“No, we can’t just bury it. The body has to be completely gone by noon tomorrow. Otherwise, if the deactivation didn’t work, he’ll know right where the body is. And if it does work, Byron will pull out his best tech for a treasure hunt of anything about me he can find, including my father’s corpse.”
“So what do we do with it?”
At this, one of Liver’s jerky-textured fingers rose into the air. “If I
may,” he began. “I fear we’re short the time and equipment to destroy all this man’s DNA via fire. You’ve got to go hotter and longer than you’d think. Even if we were lucky enough to find an empty metal Dumpster, without an oven the burn will take a while, accelerant or no.”
Jasper’s disbelief now directed itself not at Liver but at Hazel—she could see him giving her a horrified stare, asking her how and why she’d coupled with this man. “Compared to Byron,” Hazel said, “Liver is an archangel of virtue.” She turned to him. “What do you recommend?”
Liver didn’t miss a beat. “Consumption.”
Jasper jumped. The car swerved and was reprimanded by the heavy air horn of a bread company’s semitruck; Hazel turned to see its oversize slogan written across the truck’s body in cursive and felt her stomach lurch as well. GO AHEAD—it instructed—ENJOY A SLICE! Suddenly the air in the car seemed very hot, like she was breathing her own recycled breaths in and out of a plastic bag.
“By animals,” Liver clarified. “Birds. Hogs. Gators.” Hazel looked back at Liver as he spoke—when had he placed Di’s legs across his lap?
“No way,” Hazel said. She had ruined her life, and because of her choices, her father’s corpse was going to have a messed-up farewell. Sure there were various hostilities between them that would remain eternally unforgiven, but doing whatever she could to make his funeral the least messed up as possible seemed fair. “I don’t want to feel like I’m disposing of him. It’s not like he’s someone I killed and I’m trying not to get caught.”
Jasper smiled. “So you didn’t kill him? That’s awesome.”
“No. He died. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but we should make this as nice as we can. I want to at least.” If the injection didn’t work, it might be the last thing she got to do.
Liver made some guttural noises. He seemed to be having a private debate in his head.
“I know a place,” he said. “But you need to pull over and let me drive.” He pointed a finger at Jasper, talking to his reflection via the rearview. “And your squirrely eyes have got to be blindfolded.”
Made for Love Page 23
