I don’t know how I made it back to my suite; my last waking image was of rabbit girls solicitously opening a door into ice-cold air. When I did awaken, my head was throbbing and I was sprawled fully clothed across a red satin heartshaped bed. I thought of Ross and got another vacuously handsome model, then a flashback of the evening hit, ringed with question marks and dollar signs. This led to a series of four-figure speculations followed by??? and I comforted myself with the thought that the night was a one-time-only blowout. Then I ran a mental litany of my safe-deposit box balances and key hiding places — and came up three short.
Now Ross appeared in detail, smoothing his mustache with utter cool, murmuring, “Martin, you dumb shit.”
I lashed out at the bed with my fists and knees; Ross was saying, “Thought I let you off easy, huh? Sweetie, who could ever forget a face like mine? Ross the Boss, what a guy.”
I jumped up and tore through the suite until I found stationery and pens on a table by the telephone. With shaking hands I wrote down bank names, figures and hiding places, ending with a total of five boxes and $6,214.00. Simple subtraction gave me the cost of my evening of prosaic debauchery: $11,470.00 minus $6,214.00 equaled $5,256.00.
Ross said, “You’ll never make it as a swinger, Martin. Splitting on the tab’ll save you a few bucks, though. They didn’t see your van when you registered, so all they’ve got is your name... WHICH YOU CAN CHANGE.”
I was back on the road inside of ten minutes, and Ross, faceless but huge, was like a Santa Ana wind behind me.
I never mentally regained the lost money, and I spent a month traveling throughout the West picking my remaining safety boxes clean. I can only describe that month as savage. Driving into cities where I had previously killed felt savagely stupid; keeping the money in the Deathmobile’s glove compartment felt necessary, but savagely risky. Ross loomed all around me — faceless as an advisor, but savagely beautiful and dangerous when I didn’t listen to him.
Other faces were there, always on roadsides. Men, women, old, young, pretty, ugly — they all had big open mouths that shouted, “Love me, fuck me, kill me.” Ross, faceless, only a voice, kept me from wasting them, kept the idea of a new identity in my mind. In the counselor role that Shroud Shifter used to play, he told me to take my time and eschew murder until I found a perfectly expendable man to become, a man who looked exactly like me and who would never be missed. Knowing that Ross would remain sexless only if I obeyed him, I waited.
Reversing directions after picking up my last cache of money, I headed East again, driving all day, sleeping in cheap motels. Ross’s presence was always with me, and his obsession of making me kill for a non-Martin Plunkett persona grew in my brain, buttressed by savage questions:
What if the dead man and his car are discovered in Wisconsin?
What if the troopers remember that you were detained at the same time that he disappeared?
What if the two facts are connected?
What if the spent shells that you discarded by the roadblock are found?
What if the Playboy Club management files on you for Defrauding an Innkeeper, and that fact gets connected to the others, resulting in a fugitive warrant?
Those questions gave me the courage to act independently of Ross the faceless counselor, and surprisingly, the beauty that I thought would descend on me didn’t.
But on my own, I failed.
I spent a week in Chicago, prowling lowlife dives, trying to buy a set of fake ID. No one would sell to me, and after a half-dozen attempts I knew my old criminal touch was fear-riddled — that I came across as a snitch and a fool. I drove out of the Windy City chased by Ross’s derisive laughter and “I told you so’s.”
I was skirting Lake Michigan when I snapped to a compromise plan: settle down for a month or so, alter the appearance of the Deathmobile, re-register it and get Illinois plates to replace my old Colorado ones. I searched out flaws to the plan, saw a huge major risk, and decided to go through with it anyway. The boldness of the measure seemed to please Ross; he said, “Do your own thing” and went faceless as I set to work.
First I pulled into Evanston, found a furnished room and paid two months’ rent in advance; then I drove to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office, boldly displayed my Colorado license and registration and told them I wanted Illinois license plates for my van. After filling out forms, the clerk did exactly what I knew he would — he went straight to a teletype machine and ran my name and vehicle nationwide for wants and warrants. While the man waited for the computer kick-out, I gripped the .38 snubnose in my pocket and watched his face. If I came up Wanted in Wisconsin or elsewhere, he would react, and I would shoot him and the other two clerks by the coffee machine, steal one of their cars and GO.
I did not have to revert to such melodrama; the man returned smiling, and I paid my fee and listened to him tell me my temporary license sticker would arrive in one week, my plates in six. I thanked him and went looking for an automobile paint shop.
I found one near the town dump on Kingsbury Road, and waited reading magazines while Deathmobile II was face-lifted from silver to metallic blue. When it rolled out of the paint barn looking brand-spanking different, a Latin youth sitting next to me said, “Sharp fucking sled, man. What you call it?”
“What?”
“You know, man. Its name. Like Dragon Wagon or Pussy Pit or Fuck Truck. A sled that cool’s gotta have a name.”
Still feeling bold from my DMV office showdown, I said, “I call it the Killer’s Kayak.”
The kid slapped his thighs. “Right on O-matic!”
I settled into Evanston. It was a wealthy town, a Chicago suburb more or less — and there was a profusion of small colleges to give me the protective coloration of the perpetual graduate student. With temporary roots laid down I thought of Ross less and less, and began to realize that his audial and physical presences were no more than mirror forms of self-love — I was infatuated with the man because we both excelled at the same profession and were, Spartan in other aspects of our lives — me always moving, him pursuing a career that obviously entailed long hours of boredom. He came to my aid in times of panic as Shroud Shifter used to, when my own reservoir of self-love was depleted by the exigencies of living on the road. If, symbiotically, I was serving him in the same capacity, fine; if not, I didn’t care. Also, there were other faces to look at; the Evanston campuses were crawling with them. With the Ross face/voice symbolism tagged, I slowly became convinced that giving up Martin Plunkett, transient convicted burglar, in favor of another identity was imperative — and I started looking for a twin brother to kill.
The quiet lucidity of the idea, conceived in terror but time-tested through various emotional states, allowed me to move methodically toward my first fratricide. I fashioned a silencer out of metal tubing and wire and test-fired the .38 at buoys on Lake Michigan; I prowled campuses after dark, the snubnose in my pocket, my game plan to shoot my quarry on a quiet walkway, steal his wallet and quietly walk away. I had four look-alikes spotted and was in the process of weeding them out when I first noticed the idiot.