by Chuck Logan
“You liked the darkroom, huh? Well, things have changed,” A. J. said.
“What do you mean?” Angel was immediately wary. She reminded herself not to touch anything.
“I mean the darkroom. Like, where is it?” A. J. asked.
Angel shrugged. “But this isn’t your studio, is it?”
“Pretty much.” He swung his camera up on the strap over his shoulder. It was dense black and intricate with knobs, buttons, apertures, a heavy lens. She could tell it was very heavy, just the way he braced to raise it up. “Everything is internal now.”
“Internal?”
A. J. pointed to the computer along the wall. “Like, in there. In the tube.”
“No darkroom? No more chemicals and doing things with your hands, the shadow stuff. .?”
“Dodging.” A. J. bobbed his head. “Yeah, I miss it; the little touch of witchcraft. But then this came along.” He held up the camera. “Nikon D1 digital. Check this out.” He pointed to a small gray window on the camera’s thicker right side. “I press this monitor button, and the most recent shot comes on in this viewing window.”
He smiled when he said that and moved closer so his hip and arm brushed her, casual but intimate. Angel didn’t care; she’d completed her physical trick and didn’t even feel it. He might have been touching a wall. And she’d made up her mind on this. She’d allow him in a lot closer to get a look into his computer files.
But then she stiffened. The picture that popped up in the monitor window was of herself, captured in miniature. That was her, all right, sitting on her towel at the beach. Perfectly framed and perfectly clear. The sonofabitch must have a long-angle lens. He must have taken her picture just before he walked over and started talking her up.
This was not good.
But she controlled herself and said, “A. J., I don’t mind you taking my picture, but I’d like to know in advance; I don’t care for this sneaky candid stuff.”
A. J. placed the palm of his hand on his chest. “I apologize. Habit. What I do. But the thing is” — he smiled- “you can delete it; see the button here, next to Monitor. .”
“How cute; it’s got a little bitty trash can on it,” Angel said, feeling more relieved and seeing her opening.
“All you have to do is press the delete. Go ahead.”
Angel was reluctant to touch the camera. She did not believe that wiping surfaces reliably eliminated all traces of fingerprints. But this was not a time to introduce speed bumps. She put her index finger forward and carefully pressed the button with the tip of her fingernail.
“See,” A. J. said.
A dialog box appeared in the middle of the picture in the monitor. ERASING IMAGES. Underneath it said YES, then a little hand pointing to a delete icon identical to the delete button she had pressed. She pressed the delete button again with her fingernail, and the picture disappeared.
She smiled and pursed her lips. “But how do I know that’s the only picture?”
A. J. acted hurt. “You don’t trust me.”
“I don’t know you.”
Angel pronounced know with just the right suggestion of unfolding revelation. Encouraged, A. J. steered her to the computer table and said, “So why don’t you just edit through all the pix I took at the beach.”
“I can do that, like, just here? Now?” Angel appeared to be genuinely curious. The fact was she knew her away around Macintosh computers and Photoshop software. She smiled.
A. J. smiled back.
He didn’t know she’d smiled because she felt she was getting warm.
A. J. removed the film card from his camera. “Four hundred bucks, one hundred twenty snaps.” It was the size of a short, flat book of matches. He put the card into a slot in a mouselike pad. His screen saver-a goofy dog sailing after a bone-vanished, and his desktop appeared. Then a Nikon D1 icon came on. His fingers flew over the keyboard, and strips of pictures appeared.
“There you go,” he said, “just scroll through them and see for yourself.”
Warmer.
“Show me,” she said. She put her beach bag down under the computer table within easy reach. Then she sat in the chair in front of the Macintosh and kept her hands primly in her lap.
“Just use the mouse to scroll. If you want to magnify, double-click on the checked box in the corner of the frame.” His lips were close to her ear, and she could smell his breath on her cheek. His breath smelled like Tic Tacs. She recalled that the priest’s breath had smelled exactly the same through the grille in the confessional.
“Can I ask you something personal?” A. J. said.
Angel prepared herself. Okay. Here it comes.
But he said, “You didn’t go swimming, did you?”
“No. Why do you ask?” She was still sitting up straight, hands folded in her lap, reluctant to touch the keyboard.
“Because you’re wearing a very expensive wig, and you didn’t want to get it wet.”
Angel turned and looked A. J. directly in the eye. “Tell me, do you think the first time you meet somebody is an appropriate occasion to discuss the Big C?”
Her words were a puff of fire. He immediately stepped back.
“Don’t worry,” Angel said with a brave smile, “it’s under control. And A. J.? it’s not contagious.”
A. J. blushed with embarrassment. Before he could stammer a response, Angel spoke up.
“Now can I tell you something personal?”
“Sure.”
“You did go swimming because you smell like weeds, and there’s this sign when you drive into that park that says you could get swimmer’s itch.”
“Good point. Why don’t I take a shower. You can browse around the computer. Just don’t pull the card out of the reader, okay?”
Angel nodded. “Gotcha.”
He turned and bounced up the stairs and went into the bathroom. The moment the door closed behind him, Angel reached into her bag and yanked on her latex gloves. By the time she heard water running in the pipes, she had closed out of the pictures A. J. had taken today and was racing through his card files.
No categories to help her. Just dates going back a month. Then maybe he refiled them, probably after burning them to a DVD.
She pulled up dates and scanned a few frames. It was routine newspaper filler-head shots, people at events, local-color shots. Minutes passed. Her fingers blurred over the keys; opening files, random scanning, closing them. She almost didn’t want to find anything.
But then, of course, she did.
She scrolled down the strip of frames. This was some kind of fashion shoot because the subject was posed against a light blue background. She got up, went to the hanging scrim mounted on the wall by the equipment rack. Pulled it down and found a matching light blue. So probably these were taken here.
She returned to the desk and studied a picture of a blond teenage boy in a pair of jeans naked from the waist up. He was thin but svelte, with smooth little ab muscles. Some of the shots looked as if he was modeling the jeans, but in others he was clearly modeling himself.
Especially the ones where he had the fly unzipped. In successive frames the jeans were doing a hula down his hips.
Then she double-clicked on the frame where the zipper was three-quarters open and his not-so-little-business was half tumescent, just kind of ready to pop out of its crinkly nest of pubic hair like a just-opened present nestled in excelsior. Clearly, this was a gift waiting to be discovered. And if the boy’s posture didn’t convey the intended message, the expression on his face certainly did; the lower lip sagging, the tongue in motion.
Angel stared at the eyes. The way they absolutely owned the jaded intersection of violation and vulnerability.
Suddenly, she realized that the shower was no longer running. Upstairs, she heard him coming out of the bathroom. Bare feet slapping the hardwood floor, coming down the hall into the dining room. She dragged the mouse up to FILE and selected PRINT. Copies: 5.
Angel reached down, grabbed
her beach bag, and set it in her lap. She slid her right hand in and curled her fingers around the pistol. The chair had casters. It was easy to push away from the computer, so he could see the image on the screen as he walked down the stairs.
She half wondered if he’d presume too much and come back down in a bathrobe; but, no, A. J. had on baggy shorts and a tank top. Halfway down the stairs he saw the picture on the screen, heard the printer coughing out the copies. He did not seem alarmed; more alert certainly, but mainly curious.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know, you tell me. I hit some keys, and this popped up.”
“And the printer?”
“More buttons, I guess.” Angel was willing to hear his argument but she could feel Athena forming in her bones, armored, of the piercing brow, implacable.
A. J. made a reasonable gesture with his hands. “I didn’t invent Madison Avenue, Angela. So maybe I’m a little ahead of the curve, playing with the edges of child erotica. But ads have been published in the New York Times Magazine and in Vanity Fair that are a mere inch away from that.”
“Looks more like about six inches to me,” she said in a flat, deadly voice.
He misunderstood her comment because he grinned and said, “It’ll be mainstream someday, so I’m getting ready.”
“He’s just a kid, for Christ sake,” Angel protested.
“Really. Did you know how old the shepherd boy was who posed for Michelangelo’s David? No? How about fourteen.”
“So this isn’t pornographic? This is art?” Angel felt the trigger along the pad of her index finger, the trigger guard eased against her knuckle.
“I don’t see any sex act, do you? And the statutes are very specific on that. ‘Clear and convincing’ is the rule. ‘Explicit’ is the governing term,” A. J. said.
Angel rolled back to the computer, reached out with her left hand, and selected another frame.
“Why are you wearing gloves?” he said in a challenging tone, and now the first thin quiver of alarm sounded in his voice.
“So my hands don’t get dirty, asshole. Now tell me about the artistic content of this one.” She clicked twice, and the boy was back except now he was unmistakably limbering up to masturbate for the camera.
“Get the hell out of here,” A. J. said. In fast jerky steps he crossed in front of her, closed out the computer file, and turned off the printer.
“Right after you,” Angel said as she came off the chair and started to swing the gun up out of the bag. For a second the Ruger snagged in the material.
A. J.’s trained eye took it all in immediately. He bolted across the room, through the patio door onto the deck. By the time Angel had the pistol free, he was tearing down the steps. As she came out on the deck, his bare feet failed him on the sharp gravel at the bottom of the stairs.
“Ow, shit,” he yelped, grabbing one of his feet, hopping absurdly.
She was on him and walked behind his weird jumping, waiting until he made it off the gravel and fell on the grass. “C’mon, A. J.; you just can’t take a joke,” she said.
“What, what?” he said, pushing himself up, attempting to run. She tripped him, and he fell heavily and rolled over. That’s when she decided to go for the belly shot.
Squeeze, don’t jerk, the trigger.
The muffled clap sounded like applause as she fired point-blank from a distance of five feet and hit him low in the abdomen.
“My God,” he gasped and pawed in disbelief at his belly.
Angel hovered over him, the pistol and its bulbous silencer in plain view. “Hold that thought. Now you get to find out. Is God or isn’t God?”
He tried scuttling away, this painful, ungainly motion on his back. For a few seconds, he was aided slightly by the incline of his property, but after ten yards or so, Angel tired of the routine and swung the pistol on target.
Clap-clap-clap.
The small rounds tracked up his chest, and the last one apparently missed. Coming closer, she saw that her last shot hadn’t missed. It hit him in the mouth, broke some teeth, and exited his cheek. He was still wet-gargling air when she stuffed the medallion in his wrecked mouth. She returned to the house, collected the printouts, came back out, and pasted one of the pictures over his bloody face.
She put the others in her beach bag. She made sure she had one that was daubed with his blood.
Then she placed the silencer against the soggy print of the boy stripper that was stuck to A. J.’s twitching face and squeezed again.
Clap.
She watched the physical systems shut down, muscle spasms, breathing; a few last convulsions and then stillness.
As she got ready to go, she remembered the lie she’d told him. About the cancer. In fact it was contagious. It’s just that the doctors looked for the causes in all the wrong places. Angel knew where the disease came from. It accumulated inside some men’s hearts, and, after a certain amount of time, it drained down and was absorbed into their sperm.
Angel absolutely believed that the cancer that killed her twin sister had been cultured in their daddy’s body, that he had transmitted it into her sister’s twelve- and thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-old uterus, where it rooted and matured into the malignant ovarian tumor that had eventually eaten her up inside and destroyed her body.
Her life had been destroyed much, much earlier on.
So, before turning toward the house, she shot A. J. Scott one last time in the balls just for spite.
Chapter Twenty
Broker drove back to Milt’s with one eye fixed on the rearview mirror. Distracted, he didn’t appreciate the blazing western sky, where it looked like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska had caught fire along with Colorado and Arizona. He turned off Highway 95 and braked his way down Milt’s winding gravel drive, quadrant-tracking the dusk that filtered in through the trees. There were a thousand places up in this darkening bluff where. .
He spotted the maroon Lexus 300 with smoke-tinted windows tucked in the oaks at the bottom of the drive about twenty yards from the house. Nobody said Harry had to be driving Broker’s truck. So Broker pulled over, killed the engine, grabbed the Ithaca.12-gauge and approached the house at port arms with his right thumb on the safety.
All he needed was Harry staggering around, drunk and armed.
He felt the low, slanting sun come through an opening in the trees and hit his back. He saw his shadow stretch out, preceding him on the gravel drive. Stepping carefully on paving stones so he didn’t make a sound, he came in close to the house and lost his shadow in the larger shadow of the overhanging eaves. He flattened himself against the side wall. Ever so slowly, he edged his head around a corner just enough to get a view of. .
Janey Hensen.
Chagrined, he clicked the gun on safe. She sat on the top step of the stairs leading up to the deck, looking trim in a white halter, denim shorts, and tanned skin. She wore no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A fine layer of sweat shimmered on her tan as if she’d just been misted with a spray bottle. She was reading a book.
“Janey? What the hell?” He stepped around the corner holding the shotgun awkwardly at the vertical in his right hand like a high school boy carrying a bouquet.
Janey was unfazed. Always dry on the uptake, she batted her eyes and said, “Jeez, Broker, I figured you missed the old days but not this much.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her shorts. Maybe it was the sunset hamming it up like a Rodgers and Hammerstein background out of South Pacific. Maybe it was the businesslike way she dusted off her bum-but it struck Broker that Janey still bore a resemblance to midwestern ensign Nellie Forbush as played by Mitzi Gaynor.
He hefted the shotgun self-consciously. “Just putting it in the house; just be a sec. Ah, what’s this?” As he went up the stairs he changed the subject by flicking his finger at the book she was reading: Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe.
; “Our own Michael Osterholm,” Janey said.
Osterholm had been the Minnesota state epidemiologist. “Yeah, I know,” Broker called over his shoulder as he slipped into the kitchen through the patio door. He quickly racked the side, emptying the shotgun. He stuffed the shells behind a bag of corn chips on a counter, stashed the gun in the broom closet, and came back out. “I read it.”
“After the anthrax scare?” Janey said.
“No, when it first came out.” He smiled tightly. “Nina brought it home from ‘work.’”
“And how is Xena the Warrior Princess?” Janey said.
“That’s fair. She called you the Stepford Wife,” Broker said. Nina and Janey met two years ago at J. T. Merryweather’s retirement party. They chatted, ostensibly discussing the movie American Beauty. The way Broker remembered it, their words rattled back and forth like long elegant needles, probing for vital spots.
“Really? And we only met once. Do you think she got it right-me sitting in my Martha Stewart kitchen, tapping the mute button when the school shootings and Zoloft commercials come on CNBC in between stock quotes?” She inclined her head and said, “I heard you two separated.”
Broker stared at her as if to say, What are you doing here?
She shrugged. “Drew took Laurie to T-ball, so I went out to the lake to work on my tan. I was in the neighborhood, so. .”
“How are you doing, Janey?” Broker said.
“I’m morbid.” She hunched her shoulders, let them drop, and then held up the book. “He suggests in here that a guy could walk into a big shopping mall with smallpox cultures in an aerosol doodad, set it up in an air-circulation duct, turn it on, and kill over one hundred thousand people.” She raised her eyebrows. “You think that’s possible?”
