Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  “Kidnapping seems a little more physically demanding than any of us are capable of,” Walter said. “Plus, we don’t know where he is.”

  “Yet he knows where we are,” Nina said. “If he’s following us, we need to use that to our advantage.”

  “You’ve lost me again,” Bell said.

  Nina sighed like a teacher dealing with a recalcitrant student. She went over to her desk and slipped a blank sheet into the typewriter.

  “Dear Special Agent Iverson,” Nina read aloud as she typed. “We want to warn you that the Zodiac has been imitating you in order to trick us, so be suspicious of any communication that is delivered by any method other than this, our previously arranged drop spot.”

  “Excellent,” Bell said, catching on immediately.

  “Brilliant,” Walter said. “The bit about him tricking us adds an extra element of credibility.”

  “At this point in time,” Nina continued, “the danger has become too great, and for our own safety, we feel that we have no other choice but to return to the east coast. However, we have an encrypted notebook in our possession which we feel would be invaluable to your case.

  “We will hide the notebook under the third flagstone from the left in the fireplace of a cabin up in Fairfax, CA. There is no address, but it’s the second building on a private, unmarked, and unpaved driveway off Iron Springs Road about 100 yards east of the junction with Timber Canyon Road.

  “Please see included map.”

  “Map?” Walter said.

  “Yes,” Nina said, opening a desk drawer and pulling out a neatly folded map. She opened it and drew a neat red X to mark the location. “We can’t take chances that he might not find the cabin.”

  “You are amazing,” Bell said. “Will you marry me?”

  “Marriage is an outdated relic of patriarchal oppression,” Nina replied, arching a russet brow. “But if you ever need someone to run your business affairs, you just let me know.”

  “Not to spoil your special moment,” Walter said, “but what are we going to do with our friend the Zodiac once he arrives? Chase him through the gate with harsh language?”

  Nina reached into the box of chemicals that Bell had scored to mix the acid blend, and pulled out a large brown glass bottle.

  “Chloroform,” she said. “As soon as he comes through the cabin door, we chloroform him and then toss him through the gate.”

  “We’d need to seriously sedate him,” Bell said. “I mean, chloroform is fine for the initial knockout, but we’ll need to keep him under while we open the gate, and that will take time. It’s not like we can just flick a switch.”

  “Definitely,” Walter said. “It’s been made terrifyingly clear that there’s a direct link between pain or heightened emotion and his strange radioactivity. We don’t want him going off like an atom bomb while we’re trying to put him through.”

  “Agreed,” Bell said. “You go and drop off the trick letter and I’ll work on formulating an appropriate anesthesia blend for our friend. Meanwhile, Nina, we need you to talk to the band, and see if you can get them to join us at the cabin for another epic acid trip.”

  “Free acid in a beautiful pastoral setting?” Nina smiled. “Won’t be that hard to convince them.”

  “But...” Walter stood, pacing. He pictured dumb, sweet Abby sleeping on the couch downstairs. “I mean... well, it’s not exactly ethical to experiment on human subjects without making them aware of the potential dangers inherent to their participation.”

  “It’s even less ethical to let this monster continue to kill without restraint, just because we got squeamish about ethics,” Bell countered. “This isn’t just an ordinary experiment, Walter.

  “Besides,” he continued, “you were the one who always used to say that free acid for everyone would make the world a better place.”

  “Nevertheless,” Nina said, “we don’t want to plant the note for the killer to find until we’re absolutely sure the band will be willing to participate in setting up our chemical trap. They have a gig tonight night at a club called the Downward Dog. We can talk to them when they get off.”

  “Yes,” Bell said. “Meeting them after the show would be the best way to gather them all in one place and, more than likely, in an inebriated and agreeable mood.”

  Walter remained silent. In spite of everything, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of excitement at the prospect of seeing his favorite band live. While it was true that it would have been ideal to see them at the height of their fame, back in ’66, and that their psychedelic folk style was considered by many to be passé, his own inner teenage self was doing a little happy dance.

  He hoped that they would play “Hovercraft Mother.”

  Yet that excitement was tinged with guilt. He still felt that it was wrong to involve the band members in something so dangerous, and he would feel absolutely awful if something were to happen to one of his musical idols.

  It was like mentally weighing the value of the band members’ lives against the lives of Miranda and all the other Zodiac victims yet to come. Could there really be a lesser of these two evils?

  Unfortunately there was.

  There was every chance that the band would come out of the experiment unharmed. But there was no question what would happen to Miranda if they didn’t send the Zodiac back to his own world.

  “I suppose we don’t have a choice, do we?” Walter said.

  “No,” Nina said. “We don’t.”

  26

  Having come to that decision about what had to be done, they still had a whole day to kill before the show at the Downward Dog. They were getting more than a little bit ragged around the edges, and Nina didn’t have to ask Walter to leave her bedroom so she could get some rest.

  He staggered down the stairs and found Abby awake and bustling in the kitchen. He waved to her in a haze and collapsed on the couch that she had recently vacated. It was still warm from her body. Cat-Mandu snuggled up to him, seeming unfazed by this personnel change.

  Within seconds, he fell soundly asleep.

  * * *

  He didn’t budge until Nina shook him gently awake several hours later.

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s get some lunch. A little fuel to stimulate proper brain function. What do you say?”

  Walter stood slowly, brushing an avalanche of cat hair off his sweater and pants. His brain felt as fuzzy as his clothes. He realized that he had slept in his shoes.

  Nina took them to a restaurant called the Swan Oyster Bar. It was a narrow, almost claustrophobic place with a long marble counter and some of the smallest stools Walter had ever seen. He perched reluctantly on the tiny round wooden seat, not entirely confident that it would hold his weight.

  The guy behind the counter was a jovial and burly fellow whose massive hands were surprisingly deft and delicate with the oysters. He shucked them from their rough shells with a practiced twist of the wrist, smiling and joking with the customers while he worked.

  Walter himself was not a big fan of raw oysters, but he loved clam chowder and was pleased to see that they made it there just like they made it back home. He ordered a bowl, along with a large plate of Crab Louie. He tried to remember the last time he’d had a nice bowl of clam chowder, and couldn’t. It was as if his life had not existed before this whole Zodiac thing.

  Nina and Bell shared a huge plate of oysters, and while Walter was tempted to make some kind of joke about the supposed aphrodisiac properties of the legendary bivalves, he just didn’t have the heart. In a strange way, this food felt almost like a last meal.

  “I’ll tell you one other thing that is bothering me about all of this,” Bell said, pausing to slurp an oyster out of its shell.

  One thing? Walter thought. More like everything.

  “What’s that?” Nina asked, adding a dollop of horseradish to her cocktail sauce.

  “Let’s say it works,” Bell said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the band agrees to help us an
d the whole plan goes off without a hitch, and we send that bastard back where he came from. We will have saved an unknown number of lives, no doubt about that, but...” He downed another oyster. “We may never know exactly what he was or where he came from.”

  “So what?” Walter said. “You’re saying we should be trying to capture him and study him? Try to turn him into some kind of profitable commodity? Or a weapon? Are we no better than Latimer?”

  “I’m not saying that studying him is a feasible possibility,” Bell replied. “But aren’t you even the slightest bit curious about him?”

  Walter looked down at the pink mess that remained of his Crab Louie, thinking of that heady moment where he’d actually considered going through the gate himself.

  “Of course I’m curious!” he replied. “I couldn’t call myself a scientist if I wasn’t. I wonder about him constantly. Is he human? If not, what is he? What sort of world is he from? Another planet? Another universe? So many intriguing questions.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” Nina asked, giving Bell an intense but wary look.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Bell said. “I realize that it would be impossibly dangerous to capture and study him. But I’m curious. That’s all I’m saying. I feel as if we’ve stumbled on something really astounding here. Something historic, on the order of splitting the atom. Something that I suspect might alter the course of all our lives, forever.”

  He and Nina exchanged a complex look that Walter couldn’t even begin to interpret. He poked at a shred of crab on his plate, but he seemed to have lost his appetite.

  He was afraid that Bell was probably right.

  What was more, he wondered what would happen to that world on the other side, if they succeeded. Had he been radioactive before he came through the gate? Or were they saving their world by sending a killer to prey on victims in another?

  He shook his head, but couldn’t dislodge the doubts.

  * * *

  They paid their bill at the oyster bar and headed back toward Nina’s house.

  “Do you suppose he’s following us right now?” Walter asked, looking back over his shoulder.

  “He must be,” Nina replied. “But stop looking around like that. We don’t want him to know that we’re on to him. If we tip our hand, he may go to ground or execute a preemptive strike against us. Possibly even kill us. The key here is to make him think that we are totally naive. Lull him into a false sense of security.”

  “Yeah,” Bell said, elbowing Walter in the ribs. “Smile. Laugh. Act like you don’t have a care in the world.”

  Walter cringed away from Bell’s prodding and then tried on a tentative smile for size. It seemed way too small, and tight in the corners.

  “I just...” He started to look back over his shoulder again, but stopped himself. “It just feels creepy to know that someone is watching me.”

  “Remember,” Nina said. “We want him to watch us.”

  “If he’s not watching us,” Bell said, “then our whole plan goes right down the crapper.”

  “Of course,” Walter said. “I understand. I just...”

  They were passing an open-air newsstand, when all of a sudden, there was a loud rumble that shook the magazine racks. A spill of lurid men’s adventure and nudie magazines tumbled down and scattered across Walter’s path. He nearly jumped out of his skin, clinging to Bell’s arm like a scared little boy.

  “My God!” he cried. “Is this some kind of residual telekinetic manifestation from the opening of the gate?”

  Nina smiled and put a calming hand on Walter’s back.

  “No, silly,” she said. “That’s just a garden variety earthquake. Nice one, probably about a four-point-oh. Welcome to California, boys.”

  A pair of tall, broad-shouldered women in extremely high heels had been teetering toward Walter arm in arm when the tremor had hit. They’d paused for a moment, steadying each other against the concrete shimmy. When it was over, they exchanged knowing glances with Nina and the news vendor, an unspoken understanding shared between native San Franciscans and earthquake veterans, and then sashayed away down the street.

  Nina and Bell both bent down to help the news vendor clean up his spilled inventory, but Walter had his hands full trying to slow his own panicked heartbeat. He’d never experienced an earthquake before, and couldn’t imagine that it was the kind of thing that he could ever get used to.

  He looked up and down the block at the other denizens of the city. They all seemed utterly blasé about the whole thing. It was as if he was the only one who’d been the slightest bit scared.

  He couldn’t help but wonder how the Zodiac felt about the quake.

  * * *

  Back at Nina’s place, Walter was playing with Cat-Mandu, dangling a piece of red and green yarn, when Nina came over to him carrying a shirt on a hanger and a pair of pants folded over one arm. The shirt had brown and purple stripes, big blousy sleeves and a large pointy collar. The pants were brown corduroy with a wale so wide he could have played with Matchbox cars in the grooves.

  “You and Roscoe are about the same size,” Nina said. “He won’t mind if you borrow some of his threads for the concert tonight.”

  “Oh,” Walter said, frowning at the flamboyant shirt. “Gee, thanks, but I’m okay like this.”

  Bell appeared behind her in an entirely new outfit, a western-style shirt with red floral stripes and jeans that were a little too loose in the waist and a little too short in the leg.

  “Walter,” Bell said, “she’s just too polite to tell you that you stink. Take the clean clothes and go have a shower, will you? And wash that hair of yours while you’re in there.”

  Walter frowned, pulled a pinch of his sweater up to his face and sniffed it. It smelled fine to him, but he figured he’d better humor their hostess.

  “I’m still going to wear my own jacket,” Walter warned, accepting the clothes. “It’s lucky.”

  Bell rolled his eyes dramatically.

  “Trust me,” he said to Nina. “I’ve been trying to get Walter out of that jacket for ten years. It’s a lost cause.”

  27

  The Downward Dog was a tiny hole-in-the-wall that was barely visible from the street, and made even less visible by the massive throng of brightly clad men and women waiting to get into the crowded disco next door.

  Nina led Walter and Bell down a long, narrow stairway and into the basement club where Violet Sedan Chair would be playing. The powerful funk of old beer and smoke—both legal and otherwise—was as thick as the San Francisco fog in the low-ceilinged venue. A long bar ran the length of the right-hand side, a rococo, turn-of-the-century relic that might have been billed as “antique” if it wasn’t in such sorry condition. Its once sleek wooden hide was now scarred and patchy, disfigured with cigarette burns and scratched-in initials.

  Behind it, the bartender looked just as old and just as badly treated.

  All four walls and even the tin ceiling were covered by layer after layer of old posters advertising bands like Country Joe and the Fish, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Mothers of Invention. The posters were nicotine stained and curling at the edges, and the most recent of them was dated five years earlier.

  There was something sad about the place, as if it had been shoved aside by its gaudy, more popular neighbor. The disco music from next door thumped through the walls, rubbing it in.

  There was a small but devoted crowd waiting for Violet Sedan Chair to go on stage. Primarily single men, but a few couples and one large group of boisterous women who seemed to have come together. The men all had beards and granny glasses and colorful headbands. The women all had ironed hair, handmade patchwork dresses, and blissed-out expressions. This crowd was clearly immune to disco fever.

  Walter fit right in.

  Nina spotted Abby sitting on the corner of the stage at the far end of the room, smoking a joint and talking to another pregnant woman, a plump and pretty bru
nette with pale freckled skin and very pale blue eyes. She wore a white macramé halter-top under a weird, shaggy blue coat that made her look like she had skinned one of the monsters on Sesame Street. There was a peace sign painted on her exposed and swollen belly.

  “Oh, hey,” Abby said when she saw them. “So great that you were able to make it. Roscoe will be thrilled.” She leaned in. “You know how he gets if there aren’t enough people at a show.”

  She held out the joint. Nina waved it away, but Walter accepted it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “This is my friend Sandy,” Abby said. “We’re both due at the same time, around the end of next month. We were just wondering if we would have Libra babies or Scorpios. I’m hoping little Bobby will be a Libra. Scorpios can be so resentful.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy said. “But Scorpios are so brooding and sexy! Charles Bronson is a Scorpio.”

  “That just proves my point,” Abby replied. “Look how he went and killed all those criminals after his wife was murdered. That’s such a total Scorpio thing to do.”

  “So,” Nina interrupted, looking vaguely annoyed. “Is the band set to go on soon?”

  “They should be,” Abby said. “Chick is late again.”

  All this talk about astrology was making Walter think of the Zodiac Killer, and how desperately they needed their crazy plan to work. It seemed like the marijuana was making him feel more edgy, and not less. He passed the joint to Bell.

  Bell took a hit off of it and passed it back to Abby.

  “You ladies want anything from the bar?” Bell asked.

  “No, thanks,” Abby said.

  “You should have a beer,” Sandy said. “The hops are supposed to help you produce more nutritious breast milk.”

  “Really?” Abby said. She turned back to Bell. “Well, then, we’ll take two beers.”

  “Nina?” Bell asked.

  “Whisky sour,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Want a beer, Walt?”

  Walter shook his head.

  “No thanks, Belly,” he said. “I’m fine.”