Spooker

by Dean Ing

  "Me, neither," Gary said. "Uh, one more thing. If I had taken an injection of some kind, without knowing what the stuff was, do you have any way of finding out from blood or urine samples what it might've been?"

  Try as he might, Jim Marcus was unable to keep a judgmental shift from his face. "No way. That's lab work, and I'm not into that, and I don't know anybody who is. It's the chance you take with needles."

  "It wasn't his idea," Swede said protectively.

  Another subtle change in facial muscles. "Well, all I can say is, one of your acquaintances has an interesting sense of humor. Any hallucinations from it?"

  "Not that I can recall, but it put me down fast," Gary admitted.

  "Just hope the needle was clean. Intravenous?"

  "No, intramuscular. In my hip."

  "Then whatever it was, if it had an immediate effect, it was probably strong as hell. You need an expert, and that's not me."

  After a few more interchanges, Marcus slung his fanny-pack over his shoulder and stood. Gary offered him his only twenty-dollar bill, but it was refused, almost curtly. "I'm not sure I've done you any favors, Cromwell," he said, moving toward the door. "If you've got some foreign shit pumping around in you and you still don't know what it is, my advice is to find out. Without mentioning me. And soon," he said, with a glance toward Swede Halvorsen. The man left as if hurrying to avoid further involvement, speaking softly to Swede at the door.

  When Swede had locked the door, Jan came back. "I was listening, and I've watched casts being made.

  Should I chase down some plaster of paris?"

  "If it's all the same," Gary said, "I'd rather you chased down some bacon and eggs first, and maybe a beer. Later, I may need help shaving off this stupid mustache."

  "I'm glad you said that. You look like Pancho Fuckin' Villa," Swede said.

  "Amen," Jan said and turned toward the kitchen.

  So it was old Duane Halvorsen who went after the plaster, while Jan crafted a four-egg omelet, with crumbled bacon and lots of diced green onions, Gary's favorite. Apparently, Janelle Betancourt never forgot anything.

  11

  MAY 1994

  Such a willing boy, Aletha reflected, And oh, such a longing in those hooded eyes.

  That willingness had brought Andy here to the playhouse on a Sunday afternoon when the others had "engagements," as thespians were wont to say - probably engaged in reading the Sunday comics in the Fresno Bee. At the moment those dark eyes of Andy's were guiding a chalk line on the floor, upstage left, to locate a door which he would hang later. "The hinges should be stage-right, Andrew," she reminded him.

  She knew he was already a professional in his mid-twenties with a degree from a good school, a most attractive young man. Yet, like all of the other players, she thought of him as little Andy, too reticent to try out even for a walk-on part. But he had shyly told her of his preference in names once, and once was all it took. Aletha McCarran prided herself on a certain sensitivity to the needs of others, and duly called him by his formal name. Andy could be strangely touchy about that; one of the ingénues, clearly taken with young Soriano, had made the mistake of calling him "Candy." Quietly furious, he would not speak to the girl again for weeks. Crestfallen, she had finally left the troupe. Still, I don't think our Andy is a latent gay, she thought, toying with the single gypsy bangle earring she often wore. Perhaps a mild fixation on mature women. Women like herself, for example. And with a youngster so adroit with stagecraft, where was the crime in turning his fancies to her advantage?

  Presently, lost in the complex scheduling of amateur troupers who had jobs and coursework, she realized with a start that Andy was standing beside her as he shifted the leather tool pouch slung from his belt. "Have I got it laid out to suit you?" he said.

  "We ought to put a bell on you, Andrew, you move so quietly," she said, tossing her long black mane, giving him one of those smiles he seemed to live for.

  She found the correct page of graph paper and stepped down from her stool, taller than Andy in her three-inch heels, her gray slacks defying dust while they hid her legs. When she wore skirts, sometimes Andy Soriano paid more attention to her than to stage management. They moved across the stage, chiefly in silence broken by her murmurs of appreciation as she studied his work. "By George, I think he's got it,"

  she said at last, adapting a line from Shaw.

  "Can I take measurements then?"

  "That's easy: thirty-six, twenty-five, thirty-six," she replied slyly. She would never have risked that quip if any other players had been within earshot, but she had handled innocent flirtations in private before. And, in the case of young Andy, she loved to watch the pupils of his eyes expand in mild shock.

  For a long moment, he simply stood there, unmoving, as though awaiting a cue from the wings. Then:

  "Your timing is off," he said softly. "It's May - and April is supposed to be the crudest month."

  "Oh, Andrew, I'm sorry. You know me - I didn't mean anything by it."

  "Exactly," he said with the faintest of smiles, then turned and drew a Stanley steel tape from his belt pouch. "I'll need to rip some two-bys," he went on, measuring between chalked marks as if they had not shared that brief moment of truth, a moment that now secretly shamed her.

  Minutes later, she flashed on a mental picture of young Andy strapping two-by-fours to the top of his grungy little Pinto. "If you're going for wood, I think Lumberjack in Clovis is open today. You can use the station wagon; I'll be here at least another hour." She rummaged in her bag for keys.

  He materialized beside her again with that wonderful spooky noiseless stride, and reaching out for the keys he held his palm beneath them, a few careful inches from her touch. She dropped the keys and turned away, flustered for reasons she could not identify until she heard the Taurus station wagon scrunch gravel outside. Then she put down her pencil and folded her arms, gazing at nothing.

  He might be terrified of touching her, but no, young Andy was no closet queen. Sensitive, even brilliant with a soft reply that could be all the more devastating for its gentleness. And what if she had taken his hand to transfer those keys? Electric, she thought, fearing the potential lightning of his contact, wondering if that was what she wanted.

  After two years of Andy's tenure with the troupe, she had felt that she knew him well enough for the romantic byplay that so many actors enjoyed. Now, today, she was not so sure of his limits, or of herself. If she was right about Andy, he was a furnace tightly closed, his heat directed safely away, fearful that she would recoil from such energy fully revealed. Had any of her previous dalliances erupted in real passion, she would have done exactly that: pulling back with all the charm she could muster, controlling the damage with mature good sense, even with tender good humor. That's what you did when you were Caesar's wife, or at any rate a prominent broker's wife, not that Frank McCarran hadn't had a couple of hot little affairs himself.

  Aletha had banked the fires of her own furnace, turned them to good advantage on the local stage.

  Casual letches had not been her style. But there was nothing casual about Andy Soriano, and a sudden magnificent hallucination overtook her: legs wrapped around his waist, his face buried between her breasts, her fingers gripping his hair, mutual thrustings to fan those flames until the final quenching - Good God, and I don't even read bodice rippers! What am I thinking of? she asked silently, knowing damned well, trembling with it.

  "Yes, and he'd probably uncork in five seconds every time, or brag about it to all his buddies at Fish and Game," she said aloud, to distance herself from this delightful fantasy. No doubt he had his own fantasies, and more power to him. She would entertain her own, limiting her double entendres but enjoying them now and again with gentle, diffident Andy Soriano. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that she was in control, that the risks she ran were safe ones. It's too bad I can't read his mind, she thought. I'll bet his fantasies are really something.

  12

  MAY 19
94

  He hauled the studs, each piece carefully chosen, out of the Taurus and stacked them properly in his shop to avoid warpage. He had a companion for the moment, a gangling young Labrador female that often roamed the neighborhood in search of affectionate pats. Because he did not know her name, Andy called her "Princess," always giving her attention and perhaps a back scratch, never feeding her though she begged when he drank milk from the fridge, giving her a gentle shove whenever she got literally underfoot in the workshop. With any kind of encouragement, she would climb into his lap. But today he had no time to spare.

  He stored the brads, the half-sheets of plywood for gussets, and finally he removed the ten-mil polyethylene sheeting he had bought to keep Mrs. Glamourpussy's upholstery clean and now folded away on a shelf for another day. Whatever you called it - Visqueen, ground cover, poly sheet - the stuff had endless uses. If Aletha only knew how he used it sometimes! He smiled as he lowered the garage door, shooing the feckless Princess aside so the door would not strike her, then locked the station wagon.

  He took the stairs carefully, testing the drywall screws he'd installed, gratified by the silence of those stair treads. He unlocked his front door; disabled his noiseless alarm with a quick pass of his hand; locked the door again as usual. In a few minutes, he would be taking the Taurus back; but goddamn Aletha McCarran - she would set his imagination on edge, force him to seek relief as Mom had lectured him, and then he could face Aletha again with a steady gaze and hands that did not tremble.

  In a way, aside from his constant learning experience with the Valley Players, he appreciated the woman for the temptation she offered, the testing of his self-control. Because he knew how to handle it.

  There was no real fury involved today, no self-loathing, hence no need to take stronger measures. Andrew was very much aware that those measures had gradually become more extreme. After a sacrifice from among his darlings, the tension would gradually return more pronounced than ever as he damned himself for needing outlets he could never explain to Mom. He was afraid that she would not understand.

  He was afraid that she would understand.

  He was halfway through the front room before his glance at the clock stopped him in midstride. He checked his watch. One hour off. It had to be an electrical glitch but No, it doesn't, either, he thought, a hot wave of apprehension climbing the nape of his neck. He went into a mode he had been trained for, a mode of deadly control: Mom's training.

  You didn't give yourself away by showing fear, you kept on doing normal things but always strengthening your position, all senses hyperacute, waiting for your opponent to reveal himself.

  And when he did, you'd better be ready. Hesitation had killed more people than bad aim ever did, according to Mom, and he knew that even if the intruder were armed with a search warrant, in your own home you could get a finding of accidental death by firing "in fear of your life" the instant you had a target.

  The little semiautomatic Ruger .22 with its folding stock and bipod - almost an assault rifle, though perfectly legal with its ten-round magazine - was stashed too far away, behind the false panel of his headboard. Not optimum at close quarters, Mom had cautioned. The tiny Davis Derringer, then, one of two that he owned, a half-pound palmful of death at close range; four inches long with a pair of .32 rounds, and it was as near as his videotape collection.

  Feeling watched, he glided to the TV and snapped it on, audio muted, and plucked the cassette box labeled TAPE HEAD CLEANER from the stack. The derringer slid into his hand, half-hidden in his palm.

  And now, with the safety off, this was his home again, and he was master in it. But a soft footfall warned him of someone filling the bedroom hallway. As he moved sideways, he saw a face, impassive and shockingly familiar, and he came within a heartbeat of pulling the trigger.

  "Very good," said Mom as he lowered the double-barreled weapon. "Almost perfect, Andrew."

  "I - nearly. Killed. You," he managed to say, clumsy with the derringer as he replaced it in the cassette box, snapping off the TV again. The flood of emotion that washed over him was not relief, but frustration, confounded instantly by the pleasure of a rare, genuine compliment from Mom.

  She seemed completely unshaken, moving into the big room now, nodding pleasantly to him. "You armed yourself immediately. How did you know I was here?"

  You don't have to know everything, he told her silently, enjoying his moment. "I just - just knew somehow. That's all. I didn't know who, though. You think I would've shot my own mom on purpose?" His voice went high, thin - not the tone of command but of vulnerability. Frustration again.

  She ignored his question, as she often did. "That sixth sense is something I've never been able to explain, either," Mom went on, crossing to the kitchen, taking her welcome for granted as she peered into his refrigerator. She chose a diet Coke, made an offering gesture to him, got a head shake, and popped its top for herself. "Just be glad you have it, Andrew." She moved back into the living room, swilling the Coke.

  "I've got to be going," he said, sensing by the way she sat back on his sofa that she was in no hurry. "I borrowed a car to carry some stuff for stage flats." He did not need to ask why he hadn't seen her big Plymouth; she seldom parked within a block of a destination.

  "I won't keep you long. I've spent the day cleansing the Merced rental and it gave me time to think about that scent-tracking device. How soon could we have one?"

  Now it was obvious why she was treating him with such respect. She needed something that only he could provide, something she would not have discussed over telephone lines. He watched her drain the can, thinking, You really don't know everything, do you, Mom? Women her age didn't drink from cans that way, they sipped. When she dressed female, she should keep her gestures female; stay in character. But: Tell you that? Try to teach the teacher? You'd bite my head off, he decided. "The pheromone tracker, you mean," he said. "Well, we're still doing field tests on it, and there's only one completed unit at the lab so far. It can't just disappear, Mom. If it works out, in a year or so we might - "

  "A year! Andrew, I'm surveilling two potential clients, and both of them like to play evasion games.

  One, in Sacramento, always goes through a big open plaza for foot traffic only. I think he's making contacts downtown, but if I can't get near enough to see where he goes - well," she said, shrugging.

  Her surveillances were always cautious affairs, the sort of painstaking research that took several expensive people, or just one of world-class subtlety coupled with independent wealth. And that was Mom, all right. She might need several months of careful observing with a file folder of notes before she felt comfortable with her plans for a client. With Andrew's help and schematics, she had assembled a laser audio pickup that "listened" to the faint vibrations of a voice against a windowpane from over a hundred yards away. With the laser pickup, you didn't need the kind of electronic device that might be discovered by bug-finding countermeasure systems. It was advanced beyond anything she had known in the old days, she'd said, but now Mom had decided she should always be able to copy any new wrinkle.

  "Well, you see, a pheromone tracker actually uses the antennae of a live insect," he explained, "and it won't work if you detach them. It has to be alive, and that takes some doing. The meters just amplify the natural signals picked up when a pheromone, a protein molecule of a certain kind, hits the antennae, but - "

  "You've told me all that, Andrew. And I know the scent molecule isn't noticed by humans. That's why I've got to have this system."

  "Mom, you've got to have it, but you don't even know if it's worth having. They're working on synthetic antennae, but so far, the live bug works best. We'd have to breed our own beetles to keep a steady supply; I'd have to copy some classified schematics and buy sensors from restricted suppliers. I'm sorry I even mentioned the pheromone tracker now."

  "Do they breed bugs at the lab? And do they count them? And if they do, couldn't one get loose now and then? Don't sensors overlo
ad or get broken? We need some positive thinking here, Andrew."

  This was Mom at her worst: faced with an obstacle, suddenly and capriciously determined to scale it, willing to go to any lengths, make any demands, use any amount of her energies. And his. The trouble with his complaint was, sometimes all that endless research paid off; the laser audio, for example. And buoyed by one success, Mom would float past a dozen failures.

  But that was Mom: picky, picky, picky. She would pick you to death, and she always had three more questions than you had answers so, "I'll do what I can," he said, not meeting her gaze, flushing and knowing it, unable to control this sign of his self-hatred which only made it worse. But he was the expert here, and he could be picky, too. "You'll have to be ready to feed the grub of the Malay beetle, Popillia javanica, that's what they're using; it's a pest they're starting to worry about, and it has big lamellate antennae that are easier to work with. The California Department of Agriculture provides the pheromone. Get some little avocado trees - five-gallon pots should do it. And you'll want grow lights."

  "I'll just buy avocados," she said.

  Oh, this was rich! He had some difficulty keeping the triumph out of his voice. "Mom, they eat the roots, not the fruit. That's why you need trees. And if the Malay beetle doesn't work out, they may have better luck with some other insect - no telling which one or what it feeds on."