It was a beautiful, clear morning, with only a breath of breeze. Quinn fired up one of his Cuban cigars. He hadn’t kept up on the Mickey Mouse ordinances he kept hearing about. Didn’t know if the Cubans had become legal yet or not. Whether and where in the city he could smoke any kind of cigar didn’t much concern him. People who robbed and killed and blew up other people concerned him. Not if or where someone somewhere else was lighting up some tobacco.
Scofflaw bastard.
He sipped, inhaled, read.
The press didn’t seem as interested in the particulars of fires or crashing cranes or elevators as they were in the two dead, beautiful dancers who had both been elevated by the media to the chorus line in Other People’s Honey. The producers of the play knew how to wring tears and publicity from their prospective audience. There were plenty of questions to be asked. Had the two dancers died at the same time? In the same way? What were their last words? Did they suffer? Have husbands? children? (Neither was married or a mother.) What other plays or movies had they appeared in? What other celebrities did they know? Who were their favorites, not just in plays or in front of the cameras, but as real and dedicated human beings? Who was going to replace them in their current roles? Was the play now cursed?
Quinn sipped, smoked, and mulled over some of those questions, but not all.
In another part of town, Jordan Kray was avidly reading the same papers, plus the Daily News.
He was famous, all right. Not as his real name, but that didn’t matter. He knew, in the heart and depths of his fear, that at some point his real name would be revealed. It would be engraved on his tombstone or plaque.
Not the brief stint he’d done in the military. That might never be known. Not for sure. He’d joined under another name, another age, another mission.
But he wouldn’t lose his professional name. The Gremlin. The ghost in the machine. He liked the ring of it. It was memorable. When he thought about it, the throbbing in his brain, the relentless thrashing sound, would usually subside.
People would visit his grave. The public would finally recognize the voracious fire of genuine greatness. And how it could consume the bearer of the gift.
They would know real fame, real celebrity, when they saw it, heard it, feared it. Right how it was merely a speck on the horizon, a red carpet unrolled.
Right now.
39
Missouri, 1999
Jordan Kray thought he’d be given a simple instruction by the farmer, whose name was Luther Farr: Get out.
But Luther apparently decided there might be too much risk involved. Things didn’t stop growing, or rotting, because the hired help was . . . precariously balanced. Jordan seemed all right physically. In fact, he was a good worker, and there was still a lot of work to be done around the farm.
Jordan understood that his days and nights at the farm were limited. There was no way the family or any of the other Freedom Farm workers would understand. He had dismembered the goat to investigate its bone structure, see the thickness of the bones and sinew that permitted such butting power in such a small animal. How could anyone not realize that nothing wrong had been done? The goat was one of those animals people relied upon. It was leather, it was insulation, it was meat.
It was also cuter than a cow, and possibly more intelligent. Closer to the human mind if not body of the cow or ox. Or even the horse. When you looked into goats’ eyes, they often looked back at you with a certain calculation. A message: We’re both smarter than the hens. We should be friends and partners.
But of course that wasn’t true. Not the last part, anyway.
You should be food. You should be sacrificial. Like in Sunday school.
What he didn’t know was that the goat was Jasmine’s favorite pet. And Jasmine was the farmer’s favorite daughter.
Jasmine was sixteen, but mature for her age. Jordan was fond of her, or at least saw her as a desirable object. She seemed to return his interest. In fact, he was sure she’d developed a crush on him.
That could be useful.
A few times, Luther Farr had caught his daughter smiling at Jordan in a way he didn’t like. But all that had happened so far were some cautionary, scathing looks. Still, Luther was planting the seed of fear in Jordan. And Luther was on the edge of understanding that a boy like Jordan wasn’t rich soil in which fear might thrive. Something quite different from fear had already taken root.
One evening, at Jordan’s request, he and Jasmine met secretly in a copse of elm trees. They were well beyond the farmhouse and its clapboard addition. The addition was where the help slept. Including Jordan.
There were half a dozen youths living and working at the farm. Jordan wasn’t the only one there who’d had minor brushes with the law. What did people expect, from someone usually alone and with practically no money? There was in the land a catalyst that not many people had to experience: Hunger. Usually it was hunger that drove Jordan to larceny. Hunger and cold sometimes teamed up to edge him toward more serious crimes.
(Though he didn’t think of them as crimes. Not by their strictest definition. If it was about survival, it wasn’t criminal.)
Jasmine, who had ripened that year with the crops, sat with her coltish legs crossed on a small blue blanket she’d brought with her. It was with great reluctance that she’d agreed to meet Jordan this evening. She was still heartbroken over the death of her pet goat, Sadie. Yet still she felt the magnetism of Jordan when he was near her. Like tonight.
“I just don’t understand why you did that to Sadie,” Jasmine said. Just thinking about it made her choke up so she could hardly breathe. But it was something she didn’t understand. She truly wanted to understand.
Jordan moved closer to her. The toe of his shoe was on a corner of the blue blanket, as if it were a magic carpet and with one foot he could hold it down so she couldn’t fly away. “I made sure she didn’t feel anything,” he lied. “I was humane. And you know your dad was going to sell the goat before winter. I saved her from a less humane death. Sometimes you have to be firm to be kind. Anybody grew up on a farm oughta know that.”
“But still . . .”
“Also, I needed to see how Sadie differed.”
“From what?”
“The other goats. I mean, inside. The bone and muscle, how it moved.”
She stared at him with unblinking blue eyes. He could see she was not even beginning to understand.
“I don’t see what the big deal is, if you think about it,” he said. “I mean, we eat goats. Parts of them, anyway. They’re even killed sometimes as part of religious ceremonies.”
“Says who?”
“Says the Bible, Jasmine. You’ve heard of blood sacrifices?”
“Usually it’s lambs that get sacrificed.”
“Well, a goat is a kind of lamb.”
“Not really.”
“Read your Bible,” Jordan said. “There are plenty of pictures of goats being sacrificed.” He wasn’t actually sure of that.
She had to admit that she’d seen such pictures, though she couldn’t recollect when or where. Sunday school, probably, during those services she’d been forced to attend. And he was right, people did eat lambs and goats.
“But not Sadie,” she said with brave certainty.
“It wouldn’t matter to the goat,” Jordan said. “Except in goat heaven, maybe.”
Jasmine suspected he was putting her on, but that didn’t make what he said untrue. Jordan liked to joke sometimes, and not take things serious that were serious. He was just like that, and when you came right down to it, she didn’t mind all that much. He knew more of the world than she did, though he wasn’t always as wise as he thought. He seemed kind of dangerous, even if he wasn’t all that large a man. You didn’t always see it, but it was there. She kind of liked that, too, in a way she didn’t quite understand.