Phantom Effect
Page 1
PHANTOM EFFECT
Also by Michael Aronovitz
Novels
Alice Walks
Collections
Seven Deadly Pleasures
The Voices in Our Heads
Copyright © 2016 by Michael Aronovitz
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aronovitz, Michael.
Phantom effect / Michael Aronovitz.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-59780-846-0 (softcover : acid-free paper)
1. Serial murderers—Fiction. 2. Psychic ability—Fiction.
3. Future life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.R657P48 2016
813’.6—dc23
2015013629
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-846-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-59780-581-0
Cover design by Diana Kolsky
Edited by Jeremy Lassen
Printed in the United States of America
To Ursula Dabrowsky, whose filmatic style of pure grit and astonishing beauty stood as the ongoing influence for the writing of this book.
THE
MATRIARCH
I ain’t scared, asshole.
It’s not like I ain’t changed a tire before, right? It’s just that the bulb light is shot and I got so much shit in the trunk I can’t find the jack. The cold rain is blowing in from the left across the median in dark wailing sheets, and I’m reminded of Jesse James, this little black guy who works in the warehouse moving pallets. We break his balls ’cause his mama named him Jesse, and he ain’t even no sports player like Milton Bradley or Coco Crisp. But mostly we give him shit because he uses these old-school sayings like “stop coming at my neck,” and this is some sweeping, machine-gun, Forrest Gump rain, coming right at my neck, Jessie-boy, and all down my back, straight through to my drawers and I ain’t laughing now, brutha.
I got an empty box for a hubcap in here, a dented toolbox, a fly reel, an old mini-stepladder missing a stair tread, and a blanket with a design of mooses and an elks on it. My mama got it for me when I was like seven, and for some reason I dragged it around all these years. My mama was Lenape Indian. She used to tell me I had the spirit of a warrior, but my feminine side made me cautious. She said this blanket had my dreams wrapped up in it, and that someday I was gonna make some powerful woman happy.
I work for men. I’m six foot five. I got a granite jaw and deep carved lines around my mouth like judgments. I fix gas compressors, slab saws, and power tools. I keep dirty magazines under my workbench, and I wear a blue canvas monkey suit with my name stitched in an oval on my chest.
A truck is coming; I can tell by the drone. Eighteenwheeler. International cab-over shitbucket with a 6V-53, most probably. The lights sneak over the ridge and wash across, and when I look down to the side I see the reflections in the long black puddle snaking along the edge of the breakdown lane, rain making needle dashes in it. He can see it too, I know he can, but the hillbilly-fucker roars right on through, sending up a sheet of gutter flush and road grit.
Prick!
I stalk out to the middle of the highway shouting into the roar of his back-spray. I put up both middle fingers and almost hope he screeches those Firestones, fishtailing and halting there like a ghost-ship on a black sea, exhaust making twists and threads in the air like serpents and omens.
He does kiss the brakes actually, but I ain’t scared, asshole. Rearviews distort but don’t lie. He don’t want no showdown between the slick reflection of his tail lights and my long, slanted shadow, this big silhouette standing out here on the double yellow, arms hanging down, long black hair sketching patterns of rage into the driving rain. No thank you, right? Safer up in the cab there, ain’t it, brutha?
I’m back at the rear of my vehicle, wind rising and moaning, black clouds cutting across the moon, and I see that it’s not just the back left tire that’s pancaked, but the right one as well, pulling a monkey-see-monkey-do, starting to belly down and bulge like some pregnant little immigrant. I only got one spare, but I ain’t scared, asshole. I can ride that bastard for at least a few miles before it’s sunken down to the rim like its twin, maybe a bit after that. Enough to get off Route 476.
Hopefully.
I lean back into the trunk and force myself not to start throwing shit around. Last time I had the jack out, I think I threw the tire iron back by the dented tin that once had three types of popcorn in it. I should have tucked the little black bitch away in the triangular leather pouch that goes in its place under the false-bottom particle board covering the tire well. But I didn’t, and it was irresponsible. That was my nickname growing up: “Irresponsible.” Through dark magic and psychological power of attorney, Mama appointed it godfather to my chores, my hygiene, my attitude, my study habits. I have tattoos that brag of convictions, but I don’t believe them. I have trust, but it’s an old corpse. I have a soul, but I loaned it to the church. I hear they keep it in a basement cage to contrast the robed and polished ivory standing behind the first floor podium.
I lift the particle board and have to put my back into it, considering all the parts stored under the blanket with the mooses and elks on it. Stuff shifts and tumbles a bit off left making muted sounds in the rain, and I paw around in the dark recess. No pouch. Only what feels like a catcher’s kneepad, a gas can lid with old caterpillar webs caught under the lip, and a moldy Garfield toy I won at the Dillsburg Community Fair three years ago, tossing wooden rings into bowls slicked with Wesson Oil.
I ain’t scared though, asshole. I am going to have to drive this shit-can as it is, bumping along the dark highway—just the three of us, a pancake, a pregnant immigrant, and one drenched soldier, pressing forward like a band of bruthas riding this wounded stallion straight into the hardpan. I try to dig for my keys and I can’t get my fingers in, ’cause leather pants fall in love with you when they’re drenched. There are lights coming over the rise now.
They ain’t white and glowing.
They’re circus red and neon blue, rotating in sick pulse up along the slow rise of the craggy rock-face and making the road signs flash like mirrors. Now I’m groping in my pockets a bit more desperate-like, and I’m looking in the trunk, shadows moving off and back like the gauzy wings of some dark beast.
I see the popcorn tin winking through the advancing streaks, the catcher’s kneepad with a broken buckle and “McGregor” written across in white flaked cursive, some empty Deer Park bottles in the outer crevices, a stepladder, a pickle barrel, a length of frayed manila rope, a spade shovel with paint drops splattered up the shaft, a ripping saw, the crinkled edge of an oversized aluminum loaf pan, and an old blanket with mooses and elks on it, wet with more than the rain, only partially covering the parts underneath it now, the most noticeable—the dainty hand with the pale curling fingers sticking out from under the edge by the lock release.
I move the blanket back over her, thinking how much she’d looked like Mama, with those penetrating eyes and imperial shoulders.
They all looked like Mama.
I pull the trunk lid down, but it catches on something, the edge of Mama’s blanket perhaps, and I hear the hiss of her laughter buried in the sounds of the recoiling hinge pistons.
I have been irresponsible.
The blue and red lights wash straight
across my back now, making the landscape grin and laugh and revolve like some lunatic carousel. The engine cuts off, and I hear a door open in the rain. Then there’s the distinct wet grit of boot soles finding purchase on the blacktop, approaching footsteps, the snap of his poncho in the wind, and I can imagine him pulling down the brim of his hat with one hand and the other unclipping the strap across the top of his firearm, The Lone Ranger, Superman.
A ripping saw makes for a poor attack weapon.
I never could find that tire iron.
My secrets are naked.
And I’m scared, asshole.
CHAPTER
ONE
Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto swung back toward the open trunk, and one of the dead cop’s heels struck the tail light, cracking it. The jolt in the rhythm of the pass botched the balance points, and the body started slipping between Deseronto’s elbows, ass-first, arms and legs squeezing up like antennae. He tried to save it with a bear hug and a waddle, but the officer slid through his arms to the street.
There was a wet thump, and the cruiser’s rotating lights washed over Deseronto’s hulking figure and the fallen corpse beneath him, the guy’s face hidden in the shadow of the fender, knees spooned down to the side, shirt pulled out, fishbelly showing. He’d been difficult, pure gristle, and he deserved better than to be left out on the asphalt under a rusted tailpipe.
Deseronto bent, took him by the collar and the belt, and dead-lifted him. The guy’s head did a wonderful imitation of a trap-door on a hinge, and blood from the stringy vacancy his Adam’s apple had left after the ripping threaded off into the swell of rain drumming out toward the highway.
Deseronto threw him in the trunk and got up splash. The ponding had advanced faster than he would have expected, and there were pretty things floating and settling at the edges of the clumsy new baggage. It was Marissa Madison’s collarbone area, her severed head with its long dark hair matted and swirled across the face, her ankle sporting a lovely tattoo etched in a long chained floral design with matching irises. Deseronto had cut that one off high up the calf to get the whole vine pattern.
The radio in the cruiser barked intermittently, farting static and bursts of mechanical orations that sounded as if they were delivered too close to a cheap microphone. Deseronto didn’t have a feel for the coded language, and he had no intention of sticking around trying to interpret how long a non-response went unwarranted before they moved to a backup scenario.
He leaned down and pulled off the decal he’d stuck over the license plate that said “HAR $.” Then he peeled back the Camry logo he’d plastered atop the Corolla insignia. He’d made both in the shop while pressing a sleeve of I.D. stickers for the fleet of rental arrow boards, and he had used a different custom plate configuration each time he had ventured out for a new “dig and bury.” It was a bit too cute, a kid’s trick, but it might have saved his ass here. He’d seen enough television to conclude that even a pullover to help a pedestrian with a flat was called in and logged. If they actually ran the plate they’d know it was a fake by now, but they couldn’t link it to him through license and inspection. Yet. They’d actually have to catch him with the vehicle first, and if he could just make it to Exit 6 beyond the overpass there was a shot at finding an old barn for cover, or an abandoned warehouse, or even a thick stand of trees.
Deseronto snatched at the cop’s legs splayed out over the edge of the trunk, trying to twist them beneath the rear lip, but the moment that he shoved them under, the head and an arm popped out over the front rim and started sliding. He saved the bundle with a knee and an awkward basket catch, the waxy face hanging there upside down in his arms, drops beading on it. And now the feet were sticking up free again in a tangle scraping the inner side of the trunk lid.
Deseronto went into a bit of a fury, thrusting and pressing, cramming and wedging, putting a shoulder into it at one point and then snapping one of the guy’s legs backward at the knee in order to tuck it into the last available recess.
He shut the trunk with a thud and stood there for a second, catching his breath, rain hammering down all around him. Then he heard something join in with the rhythm of the storm, and he looked over his shoulder, eyes widening. The rocky border terrain rose fifty feet high just off the shoulder, stretching back toward town as far as he could make out before a slow curve in the road, but now the receding barrier of slate and shale was gleaming with more than the sweep of the cruiser’s carnival colors. Someone was coming with their brights on, approaching the bend ready to light up the world out here.
Deseronto scrambled for the driver’s side door and folded himself into the vehicle. Of course he hadn’t gotten out his keys, so he had to do the push and stretch, feet pressed to the floorboards, head wedge-cocked against the ceiling. The leather pants were like Saran Wrap, so he had to grope and worm for a red-hot moment, thinking that time was one slippery bitch.
He fumbled out the keys, pawed up the one from the jangling mess, and shoved it into the ignition, calculating. The curve in the highway was a quarter-mile back at the most, and those advancing brights had looked pretty close to the vertex, fifteen seconds at best before the turn of the corner, and then the cushion got iffy depending on the clarity of the sightline.
The cruiser’s flashers would be a focal point for a hundred feet or so, with the Corolla lost in the afterimage. How long did those streaks and flashes stay on your eyes, making shit look like a flickering film negative? How long would it be until the background gained enough perspective to show a cheap car with two flats doing its hiccup and waddle out of the breakdown lane?
Deseronto gunned it twice, next slamming shut the door and snapping off the external sound to a haunt. Then he threw it in drive, pedal to the floor, tires screeching in muted fury out there, back end swerving. He fought like hell to prevent a 180, knuckles white on the wheel, and then he got caught up in a rapid back-and-forth across the paint line dividing the shoulder from the lane. There was a stink of burning rubber, and the more momentum he gained, the harder the back end shook, scraping the undercarriage, dragging the fender.
Working it up to a rough forty or so, Deseronto got to the concrete bridge going perpendicular above him, shadowy agestains watermarked up the pitted underbelly, the Exit 6 sign out front jerking in the flash of his headlights. There were still the remnants of flicker and glare in his rearview, but Deseronto didn’t have the opportunity to determine how much was cop and how much was newcomer. He could only hope the motorist had made a careful approach on account of the storm, rounded the curve too late to have witnessed his exit, and then performed the function we all usually did when noticing old Johnny Law on the roadside.
Slowing down.
Deseronto made the turn at Exit 6, the Corolla cutting across the shoulder and bumping over a concrete drainage culvert with a shock and a bang. There was a bed of gravel that peppered underneath like shot, and the sudden rise of a grassy slope out front filling the windshield with high fern and cattails. Deseronto overcompensated right and almost tipped it, lurching back to the blacktop and hitting a sharp downhill. His stomach flipflopped as the nose scraped, and when the back end came down he lost power steering, stalled engine. At the bottom of the exit ramp fifty feet ahead there was a slow merge left toward a secondary road with a funeral home on the corner and a gas station up a short rise, farther than his momentum was going to bring him.
Dead right, there was a construction site, the dark skeletal ironworks and scaffolding rising from beyond the ridge of the hill that masked its ground area carved into the earth below. Deseronto cut it as hard as he could starboard, almost tipping it again but barely saving it, hurtling between two sections of plastic orange construction fencing that had been pushed flat by prior trespassers.
He was just thinking about how lucky he was that the pounding rain was already smoothing over the gouges his back end was cutting into the landscape, when he shot across the skirt of the slope and went airborne.
SURPRISE<
br />
I ’m flying, asshole.
I was picturing a mild slope, a grassy hill with some bumps and knots of underbrush, not a straight cutaway and free fall into a pool of blackness. I feel the nose dipping and tilting and I can imagine the impact, the hard punch of the steering wheel, the column beneath it blasting through like a jealous bastard brother yanking the ruptured windshield behind for a burial veil. I’m coming, Mama.
Was dying hard?
I see all of us dressed in sulfur-colored gowns and gathered at your bedside last month, looking over the rims of our masks in smiling helplessness. I hear Cousin Suzie-Jean on her cell phone outside the sliding glass door in a muted argument with Uncle Joe, saying that none of us could have seen this coming, that you’d been ready for your chemo holiday for Christ’s sake.
Go figure: all along you were allergic to the treatments, it was that last one that pushed you over the edge, and we lost three weeks chasing our tails deciding who was the most qualified for the updates that only came intermittently as you worsened, withering there on the mattress, going from that skinny complaining bitch trying to catch her breath with the help of a couple of nasal tubes, to the skeleton wearing the ventilator mask, trachea funnel pumping eighteen breaths per minute into you so hard that each blast made your whole body jump, and all you had left between burst and spasm was the ability to open one reddened eye from between the cross-hatch of the black headstraps, point your claw of a finger to the alphabet grid I drew for you on a pad, and spell out the word “H-O-S-P-I-C-E.”
Overnight you went comatose, and we were all holding hands around the bed when the respiratory therapist finally took off that mask. It left purple bruises across the bridge of your nose, and your head lolled toward a shoulder.
Your face was stone on the pillow. A graven idol.
And you were frowning.
But don’t even think it, asshole. Don’t you pull your psychoanalytic bullshit with me, claiming that I’m killing women to go give my mama company in heaven or to get even or something. I was doing the deed long before she went and ate the dirt sandwich, and she fucked my timing, to tell you the truth. I’d seen her face in the faces of a dozen women after she got checked into the I.C.U., and I couldn’t erase any of them. Marissa Madison was my comeback.