The broad owned more land than Ted Turner in his Montana heyday with Jane Fonda and the Atlanta Braves. Closest road lay twenty miles southeast. Traffic came and went via a helicopter pad. Power derived from generators, turbines, and solar panels. Security? Ex-military goons provided by Black Dog; armed drones; bloodhounds and German shepherds. Land mines. The wilderness and its many teeth waited for scraps.
How did the doctors score this information? Dr. Ryoko claimed a contact on the inside. A spy in the house of love. While this shadowy individual didn’t possess direct access to the formula, the person had provided a detailed description of the item and the combination to the safe where it currently resided.
My natural skepticism asserted itself. Setting aside reservations regarding the veracity of the alleged spy, why in the hell would Averna Spencer, noted recluse, grant me an audience?
“Never fear, we’ll arrange it,” Dr. Ryoko said. “You are the mistress of inevitability. The opener of the way. Occult forces magnetize to you.”
“Spencer delights in taking things apart. Unbreakable individuals are her weakness.” Dr. Campbell actually rubbed his hands when he said this.
“Oh, goodie,” I said.
“If she isn’t familiar with your résumé as a survivor of massacres and slayer of maniacs, we’ll enlighten her. She won’t be able to resist. You’re a blue-ribbon prize.”
“Nice as that sounds, I’d prefer to live a while yet.”
Ryoko said, “The universe built you to destroy human predators as it built the mongoose to destroy serpents.”
“Dang, as a little girl I adored Kipling’s tales to the max.”
I inquired at length as to what they meant by occult forces and got nowhere fast. Slick as politicians dodging press questions, they relentlessly pivoted to the matter of Averna Spencer and her formula.
Charisma, resourcefulness, and grit notwithstanding, Mission Impossible wasn’t my bag. The doctors hung in there with the hard sell. Dr. Campbell said I owed it to the missing persons and their distraught families. Dr. Ryoko insisted I bore a patriotic duty to obtain the formula from Spencer. Heaven help us if the avian flu developed into a more lethal strain.
This dragged on.
“What’s your decision?” Dr. Campbell tried on a hopeful, earnest smile. “Will you help us avert a global catastrophe?”
“Pass.”
“You’re a born meddler,” Dr. Ryoko said. “Consider the stakes—mass extinction of multiple species…”
“Not for all the chickens in the world.” I actually meant, sweeten the pot, you cheap sonsofbitches. They sweetened the pot.
Dr. Campbell said, “Twenty-thousand. Cash. Our entire rainy-day fund.”
“Tempting, but no thanks.”
The doctors exchanged a glance I’ll take to my grave.
“We’ll tell you what really happened to your mother,” Dr. Ryoko said.
Ding-ding-ding. Winner.
The Aughts exacted a hell of a toll on the Mace family. It felt personal between us and the universe.
Mom took a permanent vacation to parts unknown.
My brother, Elwood, stepped on a landmine. Elwood was “technically” the eldest of my fellow brood—he’d plopped onto the hospital sheets about forty-five minutes before me back in 1980. We didn’t share the Corsican Twins psychic bond as romanticized by pop lit. Elwood and I had barely acknowledged, much less dwelled on, the fact we were twins. I was shocked as anyone to get the bad news from Afghanistan.
Jackson Bane, love of my life, went down with his fishing boat.
Dad followed suit in a separate accident on the Bering.
A bunch of friends and colleagues got murdered by the Eagle Talon Ripper. The Ripper almost did me in as well, hence the scar on my neck. Melodrama galore.
Hindsight: Mom’s final disappearance began the unholy countdown sequence. Unlike the many other instances where Lucius slapped Dad and hit the road for a week or a month, she didn’t return. Didn’t call, didn’t write, didn’t leave a hint where she’d gone and after a couple of years, her fate gradually became the stuff of legends.
Flash forward the better part of a decade. When the mad doctors offered to solve the nagging mystery of Mom’s vanishing act, my instincts were to skip the whole middle part where I went off on a fool’s errand into the den of a sadistic murderer. Quicker and more reliable to extract their information with a sharp stick.
Beasley presented a major obstacle. He watched over Campbell and Ryoko with zeal. The adorable brute exhibited a ruthless streak when it came to protecting the codgers. His bulging biceps and handiness with gun, knife, and hobnail boot, gave me pause.
It’s seldom wise to tackle an irresistible force of nature head-on. I played it coy.
He implored me to forget the mission and slip away into the night. No amount of money was worth the risk, he adored me, et cetera. I informed him the old bastards had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—and then refused to tell him what the offer entailed. I asked if he’d ever met a woman named Lucius, real slick like. He shrugged and said yeah, she’d blown into camp a few years back, consulted with the doctors, then departed on an evening breeze.
Innocent, and I’m a decent judge of a man’s soul if I gaze into his eyes long enough after a good hard screw. On the subject of screwing: I didn’t have the heart to ask if he’d banged my mom.
“Spencer is a monster,” he said as we smoked cigarettes in bed and slugged from a bottle of vodka. “She’s protected by the powers of darkness. I’ve seen the file. I’ve seen all their files…”
“Who else are your bosses spying on?”
“Don’t ask questions you’ll come to regret. You’re not a professional. The docs aren’t either. Meanwhile, Spencer is queen of her little mountain fiefdom. Absolutely untouchable. The FBI knows. The Department of Defense knows. Everybody.”
“The government is aware that she’s a serial killer?” I feigned shock. Experience had taught me that we primates were capable of anything, everything. There ain’t no good guys.
“Always room for one more creep on the payroll. Uncle Sam wouldn’t give a shit if Spencer had Joseph Mengele’s brain implanted. As long as she keeps her activities on the property and doesn’t kill anyone important, she’s golden.”
“Golden,” I said. “Reminds me of something…”
I loved Beasley, after a fashion. It isn’t unusual, as Tom Jones might say. Big, sorta-handsome (he looked like a soap star who got smashed in the face with a shovel), mean guys rev my motor, and the Bease had it going on in spades. He loved me back, far as I could tell. Our mutual affection complicated matters; made what I had to do to get close to Averna a dilemma of scruples versus pragmatism. My scruples aren’t what they used to be.
“Since I can’t change your mind, I can show you what you’ve signed on for.” He plugged in a laptop and ran three video clips. Surveillance or home footage as shot by an anonymous someone with Ingmar Bergman’s ice-cold aesthetic.
Clip one, black and white: a man sprints along a seaside cliff toward the camera. The fuzzy shape of an enormous bird sweeps through the frame and plucks him in its claws. The man struggles as the bird cruises toward the horizon. They shrink to a distant blot—the smaller blot separates and plummets into the ocean.
Clip two: an actress clad in an elaborate costume (skintight suit pricked with gemstones; a demented mask with a red and yellow feather plume, a vicious iron beak, underarm webbing, and steely talons) glides the length of a vast solarium. She rebounds from the walls to alter course with horrible grace. Naked men and women scatter beneath her. Every pass, the performer decapitates a victim with the swipe of a talon or the slash of a spur. Viscera streams in her wake.