by Dan Jolley
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Good. Now. Earlier tonight you were in a park in the city.”
He nodded affably.
“What was the name of that park?”
“Uh...I think I saw a sign...Hammer Field?”
“Good enough. You met someone...unusual in that park tonight, correct? Do you remember that?”
Simon squinted and thought about it, and the rest of the night came back down on him like falling masonry. All of the good feelings, the thrill of the teenage girl, the incredible kiss from Brenda, everything went sour.
His eyes started watering and he scuttled back on the bed and jammed himself into the corner, and hugged his knees to his chest and darted his eyes around. His heartbeat went crazy.
“Please,” he said, in a voice like a little boy’s. “Please, she’s not here, is she? The woman from the park isn’t here, is she? I don’t, I don’t wanna see her, I don’t, don’t...” He trailed off, and Brenda scowled.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Simon started crying. He grabbed handfuls of hair and hid his face.
“Hey. I asked what’s wrong with you. Answer me.”
Simon wailed, “I’m scared!” and really started sobbing, and couldn’t talk.
* * *
Brenda counted to ten, very slowly. She’d seen this happen once or twice before, when she dosed someone. Sometimes it brought emotions closer to the surface. If she’d had to predict which of Simon Grove’s emotions would float to the top, though, she wouldn’t have picked fear. After a few moments, when she felt collected, she fixed her eyes on him again. “Simon. You do what I say. Look at me.”
Reluctantly he raised his head. His whole body shook, and tears rivered down his face. She’d never tried what she was about to try, but what the hell, it was worth a shot.
“I can’t believe this,” she muttered. Louder: “Simon. Stop crying.” It took a few seconds, but the tears dried up. He still shook, though, obviously still terrified. She said, “You’re afraid of this woman? It was a woman, you said, right?”
He nodded pitifully.
“Okay, well, no more of that garbage. You’re not afraid of her. Hell, you’re not afraid of anything except me. Got that? Do you understand me? Except for me, you’re fearless. All right?”
She sat back and waited to see what effect that would have. It took a few more seconds, and then—
The change scared her.
Simon stopped shaking, and grew unnaturally still. He partially uncurled from his fetal position and lifted his head, slowly took in the room around him as if seeing it for the first time. Quickly he focused on Brenda, and as he looked into her eyes she sat back a little farther in her seat and swallowed a sudden lump in her throat.
Something in there had shifted, melted, realigned itself, and Brenda understood that she had unintentionally, radically transformed this young man.
She thought for a moment that his features had changed, that he had softened and reshaped his face into someone else’s. But the only difference lay in how he wore his expression. The effect rippled out from there, through everything about him. The way he held his hands, the set of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. As if some outside force had scooped out the old Simon Grove and poured a stranger into the empty shell.
He wiped the tears off his face with his shirt, straightened his back and folded his legs under him, and regarded her with total calm.
“Y’know, I’m not sure what just happened...” This he said in a different voice, even. Lower, better modulated. “But I think I owe you for it.”
“Ah...well. Remember, you’re doing what I tell you to do.”
He arched his back and rested his forearms on his knees. And smiled.
“Oh, absolutely. I’m all yours.”
Thoroughly unnerved and trying hard not to show it, Brenda said, “Okay, back to the park. You ran into somebody in the park tonight?”
“Did I ever! That bitch was something to see! Popping around, all over the place. Wore a mask, too.”
“A mask?”
“Yep. Gray one, black over the eyes. Scary chick. Real badass.”
Brenda flashed on several articles in the paper over the last several days. She groaned and put her face in her hands.
“What’s wrong?” Simon asked helpfully. She ignored him.
Exactly what we need. An augment with an agenda. And right off the scale, to boot. She said, “We need to find that woman. Did you see her without the mask?” Simon nodded again. “Good. All right, come over here across the hall. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Sure,” he said. “But first I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”
Brenda frowned again. It looked as though she’d have to give him another dose as soon as possible. “Such as?”
“Like, okay...how’d we get this way? I mean, you and that mask woman are the first people I’ve met who could, y’know, do things. Like I can do things. So what caused it? This is the first chance I’ve had to ask someone who’d know. Well, I think my mom knows something about it, but she wouldn’t ever tell me.”
“This isn’t the time for lengthy explanations. All right? When I have time I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Okay,” he said. “So give me the abridged version for now.”
Brenda decided she didn’t much care for the new Simon. “The abridged version? Fine. No one knows how it happened. It just did. About one out of every four or five million people got it. Usually people who already had a little bit of it...like your mother. Like you.”
Simon nodded. “I knew Mom had to have something. She couldn’t’ve looked that good for that long without some kind of help.”
“So. Satisfied? Can we get on with things?”
He nodded.
“Good. Now come with me.”
* * *
Janey came dragging back into the LaCroix Building with her eyelids at half-mast. Her side hurt, her chest hurt, she had a swiftly building headache from not having eaten anything in the previous seventeen hours, and the need for sleep weighed her down like an anvil on her shoulders. All the exhilaration from seeing cops crawling over the Troland house that morning had deserted her.
The office door stood propped open, and Tim rushed out as he passed. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Are you okay?” He walked at her side as she headed for the elevator.
Janey couldn’t decide if Tim sounded angry or relieved. He smelled amazing, as usual, and a part of herself she found immensely annoying at the moment couldn’t help but notice how his black eyes sparkled.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She absently rubbed a spot high on her chest, and wrinkled up one side of her face as she did. “Sorry I freaked out. I just came from the police station, gave my statement.”
They reached the elevator, and she punched the UP button.
“Listen...Tim, I know I owe you an explanation, and I’ll give you one, I promise, I’ll tell you everything about last night, but right now I can barely hold my eyes open. Can I call you? And tell you all about this? But, later, I mean?”
Tim cocked one eyebrow up and folded his arms. Janey tried to figure out what was going on in his head, and couldn’t even come close. So she stood and waited and tried not to look too pained.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” he said, finally. “You can call me.”
“Thanks.”
Tim walked away from her, slowly.
The elevator doors opened, and Janey stumbled inside and pushed the button for her floor. On a whim, she stuck her head back out and looked down the hallway at the office. Tim stood in the doorway, and stared right back at her, and he looked...smug.
Janey didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with that, and pulled her head back inside the car. The doors closed.
* * *
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Janey woke briefly around midnight that night, ate some crackers and drank a glass of orange juice, and went back to bed. She hadn’t been an early riser for some time now, but she was accustomed to getting at least some sleep during the night and early morning. When her head hit the pillow that afternoon she’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, and the slumber she fell into swallowed her without a ripple.
She woke again the next morning, a little past eight, feeling remarkably refreshed considering what she’d been through. She peeled off her T-shirt and bra, and examined her chest and side in the bathroom mirror, grimacing at what she saw.
A huge band of repulsive purple and yellow bruises crossed her chest, starting at her left collarbone and tracking down between her breasts—she lifted the right one to get a full view, grimacing as she did it—to the lower right part of her ribcage. Testimony to the firing pattern of the Uzi. Another livid contusion flowered on her side where she’d taken the pistol shot. All of them were too sore to touch in any way but very lightly, and they hurt even more when she bent over. She did a few stretches and discovered that the bruises hurt pretty much whichever way she moved, no helping it.
She could still function, though. Time to get back to the issue at hand.
Simon.
Janey fixed a picture of the young man in her mind and replayed the few words Simon had said to her.
...I’m sorry...
Janey had to find him. Her subconscious had gnawed at it the whole night, and now that she’d gotten some rest it seemed clear as glass: some way, somehow, she and Simon shared some sort of similarity, some kind of kinship. Janey had to know more.
And unless Simon had a good reason for doing what he did to the girl in the park, he not only had to be found, he had to be stopped. Janey decided to head down to the basement and get some preparations done.
She left her phone on the kitchen counter. There was no reception in the basement. Janey took a quick look around the apartment, walked out of her bedroom, opened the door to her empty coat closet, stepped inside and vanished.
As soon as she left, her phone started ringing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The opening sequence cut to the Good Morning Sheree logo over the studio audience as the theme music finished playing. At Camera One’s signal, Sheree Baker shined her best smile into the lens.
“Good morning, Atlanta, and good morning all our Internet viewers!”
“Good morning!” the audience roared back at her, and her smile broadened, accenting the dimples in her cheeks.
In the control booth Ted Swit, her producer, sighed and allowed himself a small grin. Sheree Baker was gold and everyone knew it.
Sheree stood six feet tall, with long, lustrous red hair, carefully-tanned skin and enormous blue eyes, and since Swit had successfully halted the posting of her spread on BigTaTas.com, had no significant obstacles in the way of her career in broadcasting. Swit leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers over his beer paunch and closed his eyes. Sheree’s voice came to him over his headset like hot caramel.
“We’re going for a change of pace today, people.” The words sounded like an invitation to sex. Swit hummed softly.
Sheree Baker’s show achieved success for one reason and one reason only: Sheree Baker. The writing was mediocre at best, and Swit had no illusions as to his own production skills. He’d hired the director away from a children’s show about a petting zoo because the woman worked cheap, and every piece of their equipment was easily five years out of date, if not more. Good Morning Sheree debuted with a segment about professional square dance callers and had gotten only worse from there—or better, depending on your point of view. Sheree herself was the soul of the show. Quite simply, no one could take their eyes off her.
Swit vividly remembered seeing the first click-through numbers to come back. Their show started at seven thousand, moved to three hundred thousand the following week, then hit a million-five and stayed there. It didn’t matter, apparently, that GMS never covered any topic weightier than what to do if you discover your fly unzipped in public. The show became, in the words of the Chronicle reviewer, an “inexplicable hit, in the tradition of Jersey Shore and every living Kardashian.” Swit didn’t care. The ad rates just kept going up.
He felt a little nervous about today’s show, since it departed from their usual meringue-light format, but Good Morning Sheree was never a program to miss exploiting a trend. They had today’s topic operating right here in the city, after all, practically on their doorstep, and with everybody between five and fifty-five fascinated with the Gray Widow, why not do a show about her?
Sheree spoke, and Swit wondered if it really mattered what came out of that mouth, as long as its lips moved just the way they did.
“Our country’s criminal justice system has been criticized more than once, both by Americans and by citizens of other nations.” A few notes lower than one would have expected from her, her perfect voice carried authority without intimidation. With just a touch more steam, it could have been a phone sex junkie’s fantasy.
“Now, here in Atlanta, someone has decided to take the law into her own hands. Our show’s topic today is the masked vigilante the news media has dubbed ‘the Gray Widow.’”
Sheree let her voice drop slightly at the name, allowing it the proper gravity. “Here with us today to debate the Gray Widow’s presence are columnists Greg Thatcher, on the anti-Widow side, and Chinira McCallum, representing the pro-Widow opinion.”
Sheree turned from the camera and moved to the discussion set. Camera Two showed the home viewing audience three comfortably padded chairs in a small half-circle, the center one still empty. Sheree Baker settled into the empty chair and smiled at her guests. Neither of them returned it, but Chinira McCallum nodded courteously.
On her right sat a stocky, aggressively clean-cut white man in his mid-forties, wearing a stiff-looking charcoal gray suit: Greg Thatcher. Across from him sat Chinira McCallum, an African-American woman in her mid-thirties, in a tasteful, expensively-cut blue dress. Thatcher scowled. McCallum wore a pleasant, if somewhat bemused, expression.
“The Clash of the Columnists,” said one of the technicians in the booth, leaning over toward Swit. “How did you get these two in the same room together?”
Swit shrugged. “Wasn’t too hard. Thatcher’s been drooling over Sheree from the start, so he’d take any excuse to get here. McCallum, I don’t know; probably just wants to take a few shots at Thatcher.”
The technician thought about that. “This is not what you’d call a typical episode here.”
“You’re telling me. But let’s see what happens.”
Somewhere between talking to the audience and sitting down, Sheree had disposed of the hand-held, and now used her lapel mic. Thatcher and McCallum were similarly wired. Her electric smile turned about half-way up, Sheree said, “How are the both of you today?”
McCallum said, “Just fine, thank you, Sheree,” and Thatcher grunted. Sheree took a deep breath and asked her first question.
“Chinira, in several of your columns you have addressed the Gray Widow’s activities, always in a positive light. Could you tell us exactly why you’re in favor of someone who so blatantly operates outside the law?”
McCallum cleared her throat softly. “Well, Sheree, I think we have to look at the state of our city since the Gray Widow first appeared. In just a few days, the incidence of street crime has already seen a drop. People are starting to feel safer. Women have begun going out to stores and malls by themselves after dark again. The criminals are still out there, yes, but the Gray Widow is out there with them, and they’re realizing that.”
She would have said more, but Sheree turned to Thatcher.
“Greg, you’ve spoken out sharply against the Gray Widow. What do you think her activity here means?”
Thatcher shook his head, as if sad
and disappointed. “Vigilantism has existed for as long as there have been laws. But the fact remains, she is breaking the law. It’s a slippery slope, Sheree. If one person can disregard the law, what’s to stop anyone else from doing the same thing?”
The audience murmured.
McCallum shifted in her seat. “You’re ignoring half the picture, Greg. Yes, technically, what she’s doing is against the law. But she’s also setting an example. What about Kaveyah Wilson, the girl the Widow rescued from a rapist? According to police reports, the Gray Widow has prevented four rapes so far, and those are just the ones we know about. Who knows how many others we don’t? She was there before they happened, and she kept them from happening. To me that’s worth a hell of a lot more than prosecuting the offender after the fact. And what about Federico Ruiz? In Ruiz’s sworn statement, he said the Widow saved his life, stepped in front of a shotgun for him, and then got him to the hospital so what little injury he did suffer could be treated.”
Thatcher raised one eyebrow. “And who’s to say that if the Widow hadn’t been there at all, Ruiz might not have gotten hurt in the first place? That’s what happens when someone goes on a vigilante kick like this. They step outside the law, and sooner or later, people get hurt. That’s why we have laws in this country, Ms. McCallum, that’s why the public voted those laws into place. We have to have a system. You can’t go out and start making up the rules as you go along, because if you do, someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get killed. What’s going to happen when someone else starts to do the same thing, but doesn’t have those golden ethics you seem to admire so much?”
McCallum tried to answer, but Thatcher talked over her. “I’ll tell you what: we’re going to have someone who hates blacks, or gays, or Jews, or single mothers, out on the streets and hurting people.”
Calmly, McCallum spoke to Sheree: “May I speak now? Or does Mr. Thatcher want to spend more time answering his own questions?”
Thatcher sputtered, but Sheree said, “No, no, please, Chirina.”
McCallum thanked her. “I have a question for you, Greg. What’s the difference between the Gray Widow and George Zimmerman in your eyes?”
