by Brian Hodge
A light bobbing to the gun.
“We need a pad of paper and something for you to write with,” Gabe said. “Otherwise, we can’t communicate. Do you have anything like that in here?”
Another frantic little bobble, and Irv slowly lifted his arm to point across the room to an antique rolltop desk.
“Then let’s go.”
He was in no rush now, letting Irv set the pace as he slowly rose from his chair. Siamese twins, joined arm to mouth via gun, the movement of each dependent on the other. Irv’s legs looked as though they could barely support his weight. Knees sagging, and then Gabe smelled it from the man’s pajamas. A stench of piss and fear, acid that set to work on those callous walls separating him from feelings, and down went one brick, two bricks, no no no, couldn’t let a little thing like a loss of sphincter control throw him off track now.
Irv settled into the small chair at his rolltop desk, and over the tape and gun, his eyes begged assurance that this was okay. Gabe nodded and searched the drawers until he came up with a notepad, a ballpoint pen. He clicked it, pressed it into Irv’s trembling hand.
“Ready?”
Irv nodded. Little whispered whines sounding in his throat. Like words were trying to form down there, please please don’t kill me anything you want. There would be no surprises were Gabe to strip the tape away.
“I want the name of the radiologist that ran the tests on Paul Handler this morning.”
A frown of confusion, questions answered with as many or more newly posed, only he wasn’t writing, this would never do, you couldn’t let him shirk obligations. Gabe leaned in hard to push the gun so that the front sight scraped the roof of Irv’s mouth.
“The name!” he screamed, and Irv began scribbling. Trying it in cursive, then scratching it out with a palsied hand and printing careful block letters. A child learning penmanship. Jennilee Philberts, he had written.
“Is she in the phone book?”
Don’t know, Irv wrote.
Well, he could check that later, although if she wasn’t, it could present problems. Then an idea: “Do you have a private directory of hospital personnel?”
At office
Splendid. “I’m going to have to ask for your office keys, now, Irv. To get into the place, and for the cabinet where you filed Paul’s test results. Where are they?”
Preston began to point.
Gabe jabbed him impatiently with the barrel, little tolerance for this lapse of communication. “Write it down.”
Bedroom dresser
Gabe pulled him to his feet, like reeling in a heavy fish. Irv’s eyes crossing as he looked down to check if the finger was still on the trigger. They began to move with their feet shuffling in sync, and Gabe switched off the lamp to put them entirely in moonlight. The curtains were drawn back here, no fear of neighbors or passing motorists seeing through the windows. But move beyond this room, there were no guarantees.
Irv would know his way around.
His bedroom turned out to be across the hall from Gabe’s point of entry, and Gabe pulled down a window blind before flipping on the light. Lots of mauve in here, from the carpet to the fixtures to one of the patterns in the wallpaper. Frilly dust ruffle around the bed. It showed a woman’s touch, and obviously Irv had been unwilling or unable to change the decor during these years of separation. To cling to the past was not a healthy thing.
Gabe shut his eyes, could not feel pity, could not allow pity to be a part of tonight’s vocabulary, and with his free hand he clawed his fingers and dug into the side of one thigh, Get myself straight, he’s distracting me—
“I want those keys now!” he cried, and nearly staggered as Irv led him to the dresser. Preston pulled them from a top drawer, hands jingling them loose of scattered coins and a roll of breath mints. Keys, pressed into Gabe’s free hand like an offering, or a bribe, over a dozen on a Volvo chain, and Gabe made him sort them. Picking out building key, inner office key, file cabinet key. Repeat, again, just to make sure Irv wasn’t trying to confuse him. The desperate would do that if you gave them half a chance.
And the pity was returning, watching Irv Preston, healer, sag onto the bed his wife had bought, cowering with the gun thrusting from his mouth like some terrible form of oral cancer bursting through bandages and tape. Gabe knowing he’d done this to the man, achingly aware that you never push another human being this low, you pull them down to join you. Irv lifted his hands as if to pray, face sauna-steam greasy with the unhealthy miasma of fear and urine rolling off him in unpleasant waves. He knew, he knew, even before Gabe did that there was nothing more to be accomplished. The vision of those near death could be remarkably clear.
And Gabe didn’t want Preston to see him in these final moments. Clothing and flesh made no difference, Irv would see beyond them. Before him, Gabe felt vulnerable and naked, bereft of all armor, the corruption of rot and decay within as visible as if he had sliced himself open and peeled his own incision apart. Preston would recognize his unworthiness.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and Preston began to shake his head back and forth, tiny little arcs, no no no. And Gabe knew he could never go through with this if he saw the doctor for what he was, a frightened overweight man in advanced middle years whose piss was growing cold on his groin.
No, he had to see this man as the enemy, and his voice had become a roar before he even knew it: “You want Paul to yourself and he’s mine, he … is … MINE! You don’t even understand what he is, I know what you’ve been planning and I won’t let you do it! I WILL NOT LET YOU EXPOSE HIM TO THE WORLD AND TURN HIM INTO A MEDICAL FREAK SHOW!”
Gabe bulldozed ahead, legs wide and pushing like a wrestler’s, and he and Irv tumbled onto the bed together. The man was beginning to fight now, and Gabe saw him not for the reality, but for the worst of all possible futures. Irv Preston, Nobel Prize winner for medicine for his discovery of a new breed of human mutation. World renowned, articles in all the medical journals, and Paul, innocent victim of crucifixion by media and experimentation—
And Gabe could truly hate now, screaming inside himself, then outside, the tears no longer letting him see to work as he groped while Irv fought with strength born of mortality. Gabe pulled a pillow free from beneath the bedspread and maneuvered it around Preston’s bloodred face, and sobbed while folding it together into a thick makeshift silencer, and the bedroom filled with the fetor of emptied bowels while Irv floundered with spastic legs and Gabe screamed from the core of his soul, what a terrible place of torment it was to dwell, a prison of his own construction, and he fired the gun through the back of Irv’s skull, one shot and Irv went rigid, two shots and the taped seal blew apart entirely, three shots and the man’s head had become sodden fragments, four shots and Irv was boneless, and Gabe was no longer screaming.
Enough.
The silence was thunder and damnation, and triumph. He had done it. To kill was holy sanction.
Gabe breathed deeply, then coughed. The air was rank with the spoor of the kill. He groaned and rolled off Irv’s body, left the Jericho sunk into the cratered ruins of mouth and skull. It would provide no clues.
And with tonight a double-header, it would be better to work up a different MO.
Blades had definite potential.
Chapter 33
Hospitals and maximum security prisons, Paul saw few differences by late Sunday morning. Equivalent food, and in both places there was a real danger of someone creeping up from behind to stick metal into you. Parole came late Sunday morning, with Gabe showing up to chauffeur him back to the compound. No hundred bucks and a cheap new suit, but he could live with that, and after this confinement, Dawson Ministries would look inviting again after all.
Paul’s first inkling that something was amiss came when his discharge was cleared by another doctor, a stranger, and she looked too frazzled to press for explanations. Hospital halls and staff lounges were abuzz with rumor and innuendo. Dead doctor, shot in his home; dead radiologist, stabbed in
bed along with her husband. Very strange, these two, and the police were not publicly speculating if they felt the murder were related. The shooting looked like an execution of sorts, certainly not a robbery, not with cash on the bedroom dresser ten feet from the victim. The stabbings looked more like crimes of twisted passion; the woman had been violated postmortem with a candle holder.
Paul caught only the barest skeleton of fact and fancy by eavesdropping on hospital conversations. Gabe filled in the rest of what was public knowledge on the drive home. Not all that long ago, Paul’s reaction would have been a gently sinking woe, token sorrow for any brutal misfortune striking a casual new acquaintances. How awful, with maybe a moment of melancholy contemplation, then life goes on.
Now, though, unease squirmed. Irrational, but it would not be denied its due. However briefly, yesterday he had touched both of the decedents. Maybe they’d taken that touch home with them, a magnet for mortality … and just stop it, he had nothing to base this on at all. Volunteering for guilt, getting to be quite the martyr.
“He was a fine man,” Gabe said from behind the wheel, grim and pale. “He’ll be missed by a lot of people.”
“Does Donny know yet?”
“I doubt it. But he will soon enough.” Shaking his head, tight precise movements, fist tapping lightly on the wheel. “I imagine Donny will have to perform the funeral.” Biting his lower lip. “It’s the kind of thing that really shakes your faith, isn’t it?”
A mile of silence, homage to the fallen, Paul supposed. Dear departed doctor, and Paul didn’t want to hurt this morning. It was too sunny, traffic was too light, they were strangers. Any superficial reason was as good as another when the taint of death had been following like a stubborn cloud.
“We need to talk about an idea I’ve been having,” Gabe said. A hopeful smile, and what a surprise, he looked so young all at once. Almost vulnerable. “Do you consider me a friend?”
Paul shrugged easily. “Yes.” Though not terribly close, for he and Gabe were cut from wholly different swatches of cloth, virgin wool versus stone-washed denim, but a bond was there, wasn’t it? “I do.”
“Then humor the ravings of a friend, okay? And keep an open mind, this really will sound off the wall. But I have this idea in my head, and I really want to know what you think.”
Definitely intrigued, Paul held up three fingers. “I won’t laugh. Scout’s honor.”
“Nobody is supposed to know about this yet,” Gabe began, “but at the beginning of next month, we’ll be switching to a live show format for Sunday mornings. It’s a revolutionary move. No evangelist has ever done his regular show this way before.”
“Donny’s never said a word.”
“Oh, he’ll approve, it’s all but official. You know how it is, announcements are never made until everything’s in writing. But you should know, you’re different, you’re entitled to an extra privilege now and then. Especially with the involvement I hope you’ll agree to try.”
Scoring flattery points, but Paul did not mind.
“Here’s the loony part, so get ready,” Gabe warned. “Have you ever heard comedians doing routines about TV evangelists, and healers, and they’ll say something about touching the TV so you’ll be healed?”
Paul nodded and stuttered with light laughter, and then what was really going on here hit him like a bad joke, He wants to try something like that with ME. The mirth caught in his throat, tight as a swallowed bone.
“I think it might actually work,” Gabe said, and Paul was trying not to look at him with as much surprise and disappointment as he felt, for up until now Gabe had possessed one of the leveler heads at the ministry. “Listen to the reasoning behind it, first, fair enough? I told you you’d have to humor a friend’s ravings.”
Okay, true, he had been warned.
“First off, do you know what the human body is, really? One big complex machine running on bioelectrical impulses. At the head of it all is the brain and the nervous system, and the brain is essentially a bioelectrical computer. More specifically, a microwave transmitter and receiver. A weak one, sure, but everybody transmits. You don’t have to cut into someone’s skull to chart brain waves. A few painless electrodes do just fine. Do you have any argument with this so far?”
Paul said he did not. There Gabe went again, confusing him with hard facts.
“I admit that I don’t have any way of knowing if I’m right or wrong, but in your case I’m guessing that you actually transmit something into people when you heal them. You activate their own capacity to heal themselves, you speed it up, you strengthen it, whatever. Because whatever’s inside you, it’s far more advanced than what the average person has. Even more advanced than what’s enabled Donny to heal on a lesser scale.” He frowned in thought. “What I’m getting at, there’s more than a spiritual side to your gifts. There are mechanisms behind them. They work because of properties unique to your brain and body. With me so far?”
Paul nodded. The logic was frightening. In truth, he had failed to look much beyond the mystic wonder in what he was able to do, but it had to work some way. What a lot of people seemed inclined to overlook, especially fundamentalists always ready for literal interpretations, was that God Himself had the greatest scientific mind of all. Because He had established the principles by which life operated. Biology, chemistry, physics, physiology — there was a pattern of order to the miracle.
Creation versus evolution, a battle that would rage as long as people of free will could choose sides. Yet Paul had never viewed the two camps as being mutually exclusive. How great the wonder of a God to Whom geological eons were mere ticks of a clock, Who could set such a process into motion.
A proposition that challenged, and ultimately frightened, a lot of narrow little minds. Static preconceptions were safer.
“So once you grasp the basic principle,” Gabe said, “what’s to prevent you from reaching people through the airwaves?”
Paul huffed with uncertainty. “Oh come on, even if that’s what I’m doing, there’s a world of difference between working one on one, and doing what you’re talking about. You’re talking about broadcasting brain waves!”
“Paul…” Gabe’s voice was that of a patient teacher. “It’s been done.”
He perked up, shut up. Well now, wasn’t this sobering, and perhaps his college radio and TV classes hadn’t been as complete as he’d thought.
“No lie?”
“No lie.” Deep breath, long story ahead. “Back in the sixties, a group of communications experts in Army Signal Intelligence chanced across some odd signals coming in on a radio. They thought it was random interference at first, but realized it was on a steady sweep, not just at a fixed frequency. Up and down a high frequency range of ten to thirty megahertz, steady as a clock, up and down. Constant. So they recorded it and then slowed it down and ran it through an oscilloscope to look at individual wave forms. Found little blips on the waves.”
“Telemetering, sure,” Paul said. “The waves were carrying data.”
“Mmm hmm. Ultimately, they were able to analyze them enough to determine that what they had were brain waves, loud and clear.”
“So where were they coming from?”
“It took some cloak-and-dagger coincidences before all the pieces fell into place. But they were coming from the Soviet Union. There was a scientist named Kokolov working for the KGB, and when he had a meeting with some westerner the KGB wanted dead, they gave him a gun that looked like a cigarette pack and orders to kill. The meeting went off as planned, but Kokolov, he was no killer. He lost his nerve and slid the gun across the table and spilled the whole story. Told his contact he was supposed to kill him, and now he wanted to defect. A Soviet scientist? You’d better believe they made it easy for him. Now he’s a professor in California. UC Berkeley, I think.”
“And he was in on the brain wave deal?”
“Right. He filled in the gaps in what the army knew. What the Soviets were doing was bombarding this e
ntire country with the brainwaves of Russian psychics. They were broadcasting from a couple of installations in the Ukraine.”
“What were they trying to do?”
“Oh, who can say for certain? Trying to undermine American society in some way. The psychics were projecting definite thoughts along those lines. It went on for years. From the sixties into the early eighties.” Gabe chuckled. “I find it ironic that they abandoned the project not long after Reagan went into the White House. Obviously they didn’t swing public thinking too far to the left.”
Paul was trying to pick his way through to a reasonable conclusion. “I suppose it bombed because even though they had sophisticated broadcasting technology, nobody over here was receiving like they’d intended.”
“Probably not. But I wonder if it might not have been successful in at least a few cases. On individuals.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that?”
Gabe hunched his shoulders. “I’m just letting my mind run away with me. But imagine a few people here and there, and maybe they’re more receptive psychically. Maybe they did pick up something but didn’t understand it. Just voices in their heads, telling them to do things. It could have been enough to drive some people insane.”
Paul wrinkled his nose, sympathetic to the rarities who may have been affected, alone in their own crumbling paranoid worlds. “Look at the jump in mass murder rates in those years. Lots of them talked about voices in their heads.” He shook his own. “Scary to think what we’re capable of doing to each other.”
“It is, isn’t it? But don’t you find it exhilarating to think how something like brain wave transmission might be used for benevolent reasons?”
The skeptic in him returned. “Obviously it flopped on a large-scale basis. Any success they had is pure conjecture. What makes you think we could do any better?”
“I don’t know, Paul, I don’t know. I’m just hoping. But for one thing, you’re not a psychic, you wouldn’t be broadcasting thoughts. You’d be sending out something a lot more powerful, and you know it’s been received by people who need it.” A undaunted smile of reassurance. “It wouldn’t be at all hard to patch you into a satellite uplink. A few electrodes, an amplifier to boost your signal. In theory it’s simple, at least in comparison with the technology to get on the air in the first place.”
