“Put it away!” the man said urgently. “Mary, don’t you know me?”
“Edward Fordyce had brown eyes.” The trigger needed a quarter-ounce more pressure and the gun would go off.
“They’re blue contacts,” he said. “The glasses are fake.”
The pig was almost upon them. In another moment he’d see the gun. Mary licked her lower lip. “Make me believe you.”
“I got you out. Remember where we hid?” He frowned, his mind working furiously. “We kicked at rats all night,” he said.
The rats. Oh yes, she remembered them, licking at her blood.
The pig was right behind Edward Fordyce. Edward was aware of him, too, and suddenly he turned toward the pig, keeping his body in front of Mary. “Cold out here, isn’t it, Officer?”
“It’s a bitch,” the pig said. He had a square, wind-chapped face. “Snow in the air.”
“We haven’t had a lot of it yet, so we’re due.”
“You can have the white crap! Me, I wanna go south for the winter!”
Mary had no time to debate it any longer. She slid the gun into her shoulder bag, but she kept her hand on the grip.
The pig took a step to the side, and he looked at Drummer. “Your kid?” he asked Edward.
“Yeah. My son.”
“Oughta get him out of this wind. Not good for a kid’s lungs.”
“We will, Officer. Thanks.”
The pig nodded at Mary and walked on, and Edward Fordyce stared at her with his falsely colored eyes. “Where’d you see the message?”
Him. Not Lord Jack. Him. Mary felt a wave of dizziness swirl around her, and she had to lean against the railing for support. “Rolling Stone,” she managed to say.
“I put it all over the place: Mother Jones, the Village Voice, the Times, and a couple of dozen other papers. I wasn’t sure anybody would see it.”
“I saw it. I thought…somebody else had written it.”
Edward glanced around. His eyes might be the wrong color, but they were as keen as a hawk’s. “We’d better split. The boat’s loading up. I’ll carry the baby.” He held out his arms.
“No,” she said. “Drummer’s mine.”
He shrugged. “Okay. I’ve got to tell you, taking the kid out of that hospital was crazy.” He saw her eyes blaze at the use of that word. “I mean…it wasn’t too wise.” She was a couple of inches taller than he, and maybe thirty pounds heavier. Her size, and the suggestion of brute strength in her hands and shoulders, frightened him. Her face had always had a dangerous, sullen quality about it, but now there was something savage in her face, too, like a lioness that had been squeezed into a cage and taunted by dumb keepers. “You’ve been all over the news,” he said. “You drew a lot of attention to yourself.”
“Maybe I did. That was my business.”
This was no place to get into an argument. Edward turned his overcoat’s collar up and watched the cop walking away; the pig was right, there was snow in the air. “You got a car?”
“A van.”
“Where’re you staying?”
“A motel in Secaucus. What about you?”
“I live in Queens,” he told her. Now that she’d put that damned gun away, his nerves were starting to settle down, but he kept an eye on the cop. It had taken him a few minutes to recognize her after she’d stepped off the boat. She’d changed a lot, just as he knew he had, but realizing who she was had been a real shock. The FBI had to be hot on her trail, and even standing next to her made him feel like a target at a shooting gallery. “We’ll go to your place,” he decided. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.” He tried for a smile, but either he was too cold or too scared and his mouth wouldn’t work.
“Wait a minute,” she said as he started to walk toward the boat. He paused. Mary took a step toward him, and he felt dwarfed. “Edward, I don’t take orders from anyone anymore.” Her guts were twisted with disappointment. Lord Jack wasn’t here, and it was going to take her a while to get over it. “I say we go to your place.”
“Don’t trust me, huh?”
“Trusting can get you killed. Your place or I’m gone.”
He thought it over. There was a nettled scowl on his face, and by it Mary saw that he really was Edward Fordyce. It was the same scowl he’d worn when Jack Gardiner had jumped his case about backing into the pig car.
“Okay,” he agreed. “My place.”
He caved in too fast, Mary thought. Something about him put her on edge; his clothes and shoes were Mindfuck State goods, the uniform of the enemy. He bore careful watching.
“You lead,” she said, and he started toward the boat with Mary a few paces behind, Drummer cradled against her and her hand still on the Magnum’s grip.
In the Circle Line parking lot, when they were away from people, Mary slid the gun from her shoulder bag and put its barrel against the back of Edward’s skull. “Stop,” she commanded quietly. He did. “Lean against that car and spread your legs.”
“Hey, come on, sister! What are you—”
“Now, Edward.”
“Shit! Mary, you’re pushing me!”
“Do tell,” she said, and she shoved him hard against the car and spent a minute frisking him. No guns, no wire microphones, no tape recorders. She came up with his wallet, flipped it open, and checked his license. New York issued, under the name Edward Lambert. Address Apt. 5B, 723 Cooper Avenue, Queens. A picture of a young, smiling woman and a little boy who had his father’s long chin. “Wife and kid?”
“Yeah. Divorced, if you want to know.” He turned around, his face flamed with anger, and he snatched the wallet from her. “I live alone. I’m an accountant for a seafood company. I drive an ’eighty-five Toyota, I collect stamps, and I wipe my ass with Charmin. Anything else?”
“Yes.” She put the Magnum’s barrel against his stomach. “Are you going to fuck me over? I know there’s a price on my head.” It was twelve thousand dollars, put up by the Atlanta Constitution for her capture. “If you’re thinking about it, let me tell you that you’ll get the first bullet. Dig it?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I dig it.”
“Good.” She believed him, and she put the gun away but she left the bag open. “Now we can be friends again, right?”
“Yeah.” Said with a measure of new respect and maybe fear, too.
“I’ll follow you. I’m in the van over there.” She motioned to it. Edward started to walk to his red Toyota nearby, but Mary caught his arm. She felt a warm glow of nostalgia rise within her, and it helped to soothe the hurt that Jack wasn’t here. “I love you, brother,” she said, and she kissed his smooth-shaven cheek.
Edward Fordyce looked at her, puzzled and still angry about the frisk. She was off her rocker, that much was clear. Taking the baby had been insane, and put him in as much danger as she was in. He had a pang of wishing he’d never decided to write the message. But Mary was his sister in arms, they had lived and fought and bled together, and she was a link to a younger, more robust life. He said, “I love you, sister,” and he returned the kiss. He smelled her body odor; she needed a bath.
He got into his Toyota, started the engine, and waited for her to get into the van with the baby. Drummer, she called him. Edward knew the kid’s real name: David Clayborne. He’d followed the whole story in the news, but since that plane explosion over Japan the news hadn’t given much coverage to Mary and the baby. He pulled out of the parking lot, glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure Mary—big old crazy Mary—was following. He hadn’t expected to see Mary Terror step off that boat. Placing the message had been a shot in the dark, but he realized he’d hit a target far greater than he’d ever have hoped.
“Twelve thousand dollars?” he said as he merged into traffic heading for the Williamsburg Bridge. He glanced back; she was still with him, following closely. “Babycakes,” he said, “you’re going to make me a millionaire.” He grinned, showing capped front teeth.
The Toyota and the van crossed the bridge, along
with the flow of other cars, as small flakes of snow began to spin from the clouds.
V
THE KILLER AWOKE
1
Damaged Goods
“I THINK WE WERE followed,” mary said for the third time as she stood at the window of Edward Fordyce’s one-bedroom apartment and looked down on Cooper Avenue. Snow flurries rushed past, shoved by the wind. A pile of trash bags on the street had burst open, and garbage and old papers fluttered along the sidewalk. Mary was feeding Drummer from a bottle of formula, the baby staring up at her with his blue eyes as he suckled on the nipple. She looked left and right along the dismal avenue. “It was a brown compact car. A Ford, I think.”
“Your imagination,” Edward answered from the kitchen, where he was fixing them canned chili. The building’s radiators moaned and knocked. “Lots of cars in this city, so don’t get paranoid.”
“The driver had a chance to pass us a few times. He slowed down.” The nipple popped out of Drummer’s mouth, and Mary guided it back in. “I don’t like it,” she said, mostly to herself.
“Forget about it.” Edward came into the front room, leaving the chili to bubble on the stove. He had taken off his overcoat and the jacket of his suit. He was wearing red suspenders—“braces,” as he called them. “You want a drink? I’ve got Miller Lite and some wine.”
“Wine,” she said, still watching out the window for a brown compact Ford. She hadn’t been able to get a good look at the driver. She remembered the Knicks fan: he’d come across on the boat with them, and so had the blond-haired girl in the leather jacket. A lot of people had come across too: a dozen Japanese tourists, an elderly couple, and about twenty others as well. Had one or more of them been a pig on her trail? There was another possibility: that someone had been following not her, but Edward. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?
He brought her a glass of red wine and set it on a table while she finished feeding Drummer. “So,” Edward said, “you want to tell me why you took the baby?”
“No.”
“Our conversation isn’t going to get very far if you don’t want to talk.”
“I want to listen,” she said. “I want you to tell me why you put the message in the papers.”
Edward walked to another window and peered out. No brown compact Ford in sight, but Mary’s insistence that they had been followed gave him the creeps. “I don’t know. I guess I was curious.”
“About what?”
“Oh…just to see if anybody would show up. Kind of like a class reunion, maybe.” He turned away from the window and looked at her in the dank winter light. “It seems like a hundred years ago we went through all that.”
“No, it was only yesterday,” she said. Drummer had finished the formula, and she rested him against her shoulder and burped him, as her mother had demonstrated. Mary had already taken stock of Edward’s apartment; he had some nice pieces of furniture that didn’t go with the place, and he was dressed better than he lived. Her impression was that he’d had a lot of money at one time, but his money had run out. His Toyota puffed blue smoke from its tailpipe and it had a bashed left rear fender. His shined shoes, though, said he had once walked on expensive floors. “You’re an accountant?” she asked. “How long?”
“Going on three years. It’s an okay job. I can do it with my eyes closed.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I got a business degree from NYU after I went underground.”
“A business degree,” she repeated. A faint smile stole across her face. “I knew it when I saw you. The Mindfuckers got you, didn’t they?”
That familiar scowl creased his face again. “We were kids then. Naive and dumb in a lot of ways. We weren’t living in reality.”
“And now you are?”
“The reality,” Edward said, “is that everybody has to work to live. There are no free tickets in this world. Don’t you know that yet?”
“Has my brother turned into Big Brother?”
“No!” he answered, too loudly. “Hell, no! I’m just saying we thought everything was black and white back then! We thought we were right and everybody else was wrong. Well, we were fucked up. We didn’t see the gray in the world.” He grunted. “We didn’t think we’d ever have to grow up. But you can’t fight time, Mary. That’s the one thing you can’t put a bullet into or blow apart with a bomb. Things change, and you have to change with them. If you don’t…well, look what happened to Abbie Hoffman.”
“Abbie Hoffman was always true to a cause,” Mary said. “He just got tired, that’s all.”
“Hoffman got busted selling cocaine!” he reminded her. “He went from being a revolutionary to being a drug salesman! What cause was he true to? Jesus, nobody cares who Abbie Hoffman was! You know what the true power of this world is? Money. Cash. If you’ve got it, you’re somebody, and if you don’t, you get swept away with the garbage!”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Mary said, rocking Drummer in her arms. “Sweet baby, such a sweet sweet baby.”
“I need a beer.” Edward went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Mary kissed Drummer’s forehead. He had an air about him; his diaper needed changing. She took him into the bedroom, laid him down on the bed next to her shoulder bag, and began the task. There was only one more diaper. She was going to have to go out and buy another box of Pampers. As she changed Drummer, she noticed a typewriter on a little desk in the room. The wastebasket had crumpled-up paper in it, squeezed like white fists. She took a wad of paper out and opened it. There were three lines on the paper: My name is Edward Fordyce, and I am a killer. My killing was done in the name of freedom, a long time ago. I was a member of the Storm Front, and on the night of July first, 1972, I was reborn.
Drummer began to cry, uncomfortable and sleepy.
Behind Mary, Edward said, “The publisher tells me I need a snappy opening paragraph. Something to hook a reader with real quick.”
She looked up at him from the wrinkled paper. Drummer kept crying, the sound hurting her head.
Edward sipped his beer. His eyes seemed darker, his face tight with pressure. “They say they want a lot of blood in it. A lot of action. They say it could be a best seller.”
Mary crumpled the paper again, into a hard little ball. Her fist clenched around it as Drummer cried on.
“Can’t you get him quiet?” Edward asked.
The killer awoke. She felt it stir within her, like a heavy shadow. Edward was writing a book about the Storm Front. Writing a book to tell everything to the Mindfuck State. Going to spread the Front’s blood, sweat, and tears out on the woodpulp pages to be licked by dumb jackals. A reunion, he’d said. I guess I was curious.
No, that wasn’t why Edward Fordyce had put the message in the papers and magazines. “You wanted to find the others,” she said, “so we could help you write your book.”
“Background material. I want the book to be a history of the Storm Front, and there’s a lot I don’t know.”
Mary’s hand went into her bag. It came out with the Magnum, and she trained the gun on him, a stranger in enemy colors.
“Put that down, Mary. You don’t want to shoot me.”
“I’ll blow your fucking head off!” she shouted. “No way are you making us whores! No way!”
“We were always whores. For the militant press and the rabble-rousers. We did what they dreamed of doing, and what did we get for it? You’ve turned into an animal, and I’m a forty-three-year-old failure.” He swigged from the beer again, but his gaze stayed on her gun. “I was a stockbroker a few years ago,” he said with a bitter smile. “Making a hundred K a year, living on the Upper East Side. A fast-tracker. Had a Mercedes, a wife, and a son. Then the bottom fell out of the market, and I watched everything go to pieces. It was like that night in Linden, but even worse because it was a house I’d built getting blown apart. Couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t. I spiraled down to where I am right now. So where do I go from here? Do I figure the books for Sea King the rest of m
y life and retire to an old folks’ home in Jersey? Or do I take a gamble that a publisher might be interested in the Storm Front’s story? It’s past history, Mary. It’s ancient and dusty…but blood and guts sells books, and you know we waded through the blood and guts together. So what’s so wrong about it, Mary? You tell me.”
She couldn’t think. Drummer’s crying was louder, more needful. Her brain was full of machinery that had lost its purpose. One squeeze of the trigger and he would be dusted. Everything was a lie; Lord Jack was not here, and he couldn’t receive his son. This thing standing before her in Mindfuck State clothing vomited out bile and brimstone, but one fact remained: he had saved her life on a long-ago night of pain and fire.
That alone kept her from killing him.
“I’ve got an agent,” Edward went on. “Big knocker in the business. He got me a contract on an outline. The manuscript’s due at the end of August.”
Mary kept the gun aimed at him as Drummer wailed.
“I don’t want it to be just my story. I want it to be about all of us. Everybody who died and everybody who got away. Do you see?”
“I see a traitor,” Mary said, “who deserves execution.”
“Oh, crap! Forget the drama, Mary! This is the real dollars-and-cents world!” He slammed his bottle down atop a bureau, and beer sloshed out. “If we can make money off the hell we went through, why shouldn’t we? I’d be willing to share the profits with you, no problem.”
“Profits,” she said, as if tasting something vile.
“Jesus! Can’t you shut that kid up?” Edward walked toward Drummer. Mary stopped him by putting the Magnum against the side of his head and grabbing his red power tie at the knot. She wrenched at his tie, and Edward’s face reddened. “…Choke…” he gasped. “Choking…me…”
Brrrring.
Telephone, Mary thought. Again: Brrrring.