Blood Test Read online

According to the journals, he’d kept his wife informed about the progress of the experiments. Initially, she’d offered faint protest, then stood by, passively acquiescent. Following orders.

  Impregnating the girl hadn’t been an accident. On the contrary, it had been Swope’s ultimate goal, calibrated and calculated. He’d been patient and methodical, waiting until she was a bit older— fourteen—to fertilize her so that the health of the fetus would be optimized. Charting her menstrual cycle to pinpoint ovulation. Refraining from intercourse for several days to increase the sperm count.

  It had taken on the first try. He’d rejoiced at the cessation of her menses, the swelling of her belly. A new cultivar had been created.

  I told her what I knew, wording it gently and hoping the empathy came through. She listened with a blank look on her face, drank Southern Comfort until her eyelids drooped.

  “He victimized you, Nona. Used you and discarded you when it was over.”

  Her head gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  “You must have been so frightened, carrying a child at that age. And being sent away to have it in secret.”

  “Bunch of dykes,” she muttered, slurring her words.

  “At Madronas?”

  She took another drink.

  “Fuck yeah. Las Fucking Madronas Home for Bad Little Fucking Girls. In Mexi-fucking-O.” Her head lolled. She reached for the bottle. “Big fat fucking beaner dykes running the place. Screaming in beaner. Pinching and poking. Telling us we were trash. Sluts.”

  Maimon had remembered vividly the morning she’d left town. Had described her waiting with her suitcase in the middle of the road. A scared little girl with all the mischief knocked out of her. About to be banished for the sins of another.

  She’d come back different, he’d noted. Quieter, more subdued. Angry.

  She was talking now, softly, drunkenly.

  “It hurt so bad to push that baby boy out. I screamed and they covered my mouth. I thought I was coming apart. When it was over, they wouldn’t let me hold him. Took him away from me. My baby, and they took him away! I forced myself to sit up to get a look at him. It near killed me. He had red hair, just like me.”

  She shook her head, baffled.

  “I thought I could keep him after I got home. But he said no way. Told me I was nothing. Just a vessel. Just a fucking vessel. Fancy word for cunt. Good for nothing but fucking. Told me I wasn’t really the momma. She’d already started being his momma. I was the cunt. All used up and tossed in the trash. Time to let the grownups take over.”

  She dropped her head on the table and whimpered.

  I rubbed the back of her neck, said comforting things. Even in that state she reacted reflexively to the touch of a male, lifting her face and flashing me an intoxicated, come-hither smile, leaning forward to expose the tops of her breasts.

  I shook my head and she turned away shame-faced.

  I had so much sympathy for her it ached. There were therapeutic things I could have said. But now was the time to manipulate her. The boy in the back room needed help. I was prepared to take him out of there against her will but preferred to avoid another abduction. For both their sakes.

  “It wasn’t you who took him out of the hospital, was it? You loved him too much to endanger him like that.”

  “It’s true,” she said, wet-eyed. “They did it. To stop me from being his momma. All these years I’d let them treat me like garbage. Stayed out of the way while they raised him. Not saying anything to him about it cause I was afraid it would freak him out. Too much for a little kid to handle. Dying inside all the time.” She raised one slender hand to her heart, reached down with the other and drained her glass.

  “But when he got sick something tugged on me. Like a hook in my guts with someone reeling in the line. I had to reclaim my rights. I stewed about it, sitting with him in that plastic room, watching him sleep. My baby. Finally I decided to do it. Sat them down in the motel one night, told them the lies had gone on too long. That my time had come. To take care of my baby.

  “They— he laughed at me. Put me down, told me I was unfit, a piece of shit. A fucking vessel. I should get the hell out and make it better for everyone. But this time I didn’t take it. The pain in my guts was too strong. I gave it all back to them, told them they were evil. Sinners. That the ca—the sickness was God’s punishment for what they’d done. They were the ones who were unfit. And I was gonna tell everyone about it. The doctors, the nurses. They’d kick them out and hand my baby over to his rightful momma when they found out.”

  Her hands trembled violently around her glass. I walked behind her and steadied them with mine.

  “It was my right!” she cried out, whipping her head around and begging confirmation. I nodded and she slumped against my chest.

  During Baron and Delilah’s hospital visit, Emma Swope had complained the cancer treatment was dividing the family. The cultists had construed it as anxiety about the physical separation imposed by the Laminar Airflow room. But the woman had been worrying out loud about a far more serious rupture, one that threatened to rend the family as irreparably as a guillotine on neck-flesh.

  Perhaps she’d known, then, that the wound was too deep to heal. But she and her husband had attempted to patch it anyway. To prevent the leakage of the ugly secret by taking the child and running...

  “They snuck him out behind my back,” Nona was saying, squeezing my hand, digging in with the green nails. The anger was percolating within her once again. A thin film of sweat mustached the rich, wide mouth. “Like fucking thieves. She dressed up as an x-ray technician. In a mask and gown they swiped from the laundry bin. Took him down to the basement on a service elevator and out a side exit. Thieves.

  “I came back to the motel and all three of them were there. My baby was lying on the bed, so small and helpless. They were packing and joking about getting away with it so easy. How nobody had recognized her behind the mask because none of them had ever looked her in the eye. Putting down the hospital. Him going on about smog and shit. Trying to justify what they’d done.”

  She’d given me an opening. It was time to renew my pitch. To convince her to come with me peaceably as I carried her son out of there.

  But before I could say anything the door burst open.

  24

  DOUG C ARMICHAEL crouched in the doorway like a commando in a martial arts movie. The arm that extended into the room held a rifle. The other hefted a double-edged axe as if it were balsa. He wore a black mesh tank top that exposed lots of hypertrophied muscle. His legs were thick and corded, carpeted with curly blond hair and encased in tight white swim trunks. His knees were misshapen and lumpy—surfer’s knots. Rubber beach sandals cushioned large rough feet. The reddish-blond beard was neatly cropped, the thick layered hair precisely blow-dried.

  Only the eyes had changed from the day I’d met him. That afternoon in Venice they’d been the color of a cloudless sky. Now I looked into a pair of bottomless black holes: dilated pupils surrounded by thin rings of ice. Mad eyes that scanned the trailer, shifting from the Southern Comfort bottle to the drowsy girl to me.

  “I ought to kill you right now for giving her that poison.”

  “I didn’t. She took it herself.”

  “Shut up!”

  Nona tried to straighten up. She swayed groggily.

  Carmichael pointed the rifle at me.

  “Sit down on the floor. Up against the wall, with your hands under you. Good. Now stay put or I’ll have to hurt you.”

  To Nona: “C’mere, Sis.”

  She went to his side and leaned against his bulk. One massive arm went around her protectively. The one with the axe.

  “Did he hurt you, babe?”

  She looked at me, knew she was my jury, considered her answer, and shook her head woozily.

  “Naw, he’s been okay. Just talking. Wants to take Woody to the hospital.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” sneered Carmichael. “That’s the party line. Pour more p
oison in and rake in the bucks.”

  She looked up at him.

  “I dunno, Doug, the fever’s no better.”

  “Did you give him the C?”

  “Yeah, just like you said.”

  “What about the apple?”

  “He wouldn’t eat it. Been too sleepy.”

  “Try again. If he doesn’t like the apple there are pears and plums, too. And oranges.” He tilted his head at the shopping bags on the counter. “That stuff is super fresh. Just picked, totally organic. Get some fruit and fluid down him along with more C and he’ll cool off.”

  “The boy’s in danger,” I said. “He needs more than vitamins.”

  “I said shut up! You want me to finish you off right here?”

  “I don’t think he means any harm,” said the girl, meekly.

  Carmichael smiled at her with genuine warmth and just a touch of condescension.

  “You go back in there with the little guy, Sis. Work on nutrition.”

  She started to say something but Carmichael silenced her with a flash of white teeth and a reassuring nod. Obediently she disappeared behind the shower curtain.

  When we were alone he kicked the trailer door shut and moved opposite me, his back to the counter. I stared up into the twin barrels of the rifle—a deadly figure eight.

  “I’m going to have to kill you,” he said calmly, then shrugged apologetically. “Nothing personal, you know? But we’re a family and you’re a threat.”

  The last thing I’d wanted to display was skepticism and I was sure I hadn’t. But his psychic radar was hot-wired to go off unpredictably, the scrambled apparatus of the truly paranoiac. He squinted angrily and lowered the rifle, aiming at the tender concavity between my eyes. Hunching his massive shoulders he stared down menacingly.

  “We are a family. And we don’t need a blood test to prove it.”

  “Of course not,” I agreed with a mouth full of cotton. “It’s the emotional bond that’s important.”

  He looked at me hard to make sure I wasn’t patronizing him. I molded my face into a mask of sincerity. Froze it that way.

  The axe swung loosely, whetted blade abrading the floor.

  “Exactly. It’s feelings that count. Our feelings have been forged in pain. We’re three against the world. Our family is what it should be—a sanctuary against all the craziness out there. A safe zone. It’s beautiful and precious. And I’ve got to protect it.”

  I had no plan for escape. For the time being there was no hope but to buy time by keeping him talking.

  “I understand. You’re the head of the family.”

  The blue eyes heated like gas flames.

  “The only one there ever was. The other two were evil, parents in name only. They abused their rights. Tried to destroy the family from within.”

  “I know, Doug. I was over at the house this evening. Saw that greenhouse. Read some diaries that Swope kept.”

  A terrible look oozed onto his face. He lifted his arm and swung the axe in a blinding parabola, letting it smash into the counter. The trailer shook as the plastic shattered. The movement had been effortless, not even budging his rifle arm. There was stirring behind the curtain but no sign of the girl.

  “I was going to destroy that shithole tonight,” he whispered, jerking the blade free. “With this. Shatter every fucking pane. Take the house apart board by board. Then burn it to the ground. But when I got there the lock had been tampered with so I came back. Lucky I did.”

  He sucked in his breath, let it out with a hiss. Iron-pumper’s breathing. He was sweating heavily, sizzling with agitation. I fought back the fear, forced myself to think clearly: I had to steer his attention to the crimes of the Swopes. And away from me.

  “It’s an evil place,” I said. “Hard to believe people could be like that.”

  “Not hard for me, man. I lived it. Just like Sis did. My old man diddled me and beat me and told me I was shit for years. And the bitch who called herself mom just stood by and watched. Different theaters but the same movie. When I said forged in pain I meant it.”

  As he talked about the abuse he’d suffered, lots of things fell into place: the arrested development, the exhibitionism, the hatred and panic when he’d talked about his father.

  “It’s destiny, Nona and me,” he said, with a satisfied smile. “Neither of us could have made it alone. But some kind of miracle brought us together. Made us a family.”

  “How long have you been a family?” I asked.

  “Years. I used to come up summers, worked this field, rough-necking, sinking wells. The old bastard had big plans for this place. Carmichael Oil was gonna rape the land, carve it up, and squeeze every greasy drop out of it. Unfortunately, it was dry as a dead woman’s tit.” He laughed, banged the axe head against the floor.

  “I hated the work. It was dirty and demeaning and boring but he forced me to do it. Every summer, like a jail sentence. I snuck away any chance I got, went hiking through the back roads, breathing clean air. Thinking of ways to get back at him.

  “One day I met her while I was walking through the forest. She was sixteen and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, sitting on a stump and crying. She saw me and got scared but I told her it was okay. Instead of running, or talking, she started to—” The handsome face darkened and distorted with anger. “Put it out of your filthy mind, man. I never touched her. And that story I told you and the cop about the freeway blow job was bullshit. I was just trying to throw you off.”

  I nodded. Another explanation for the fantasy suggested itself: wishful thinking. But for now his sexual impulses toward the girl he called his sister were safely repressed and I hoped they’d stay that way.

  “It was because I treated her differently from the other men that something special grew between us. Instead of jumping her bones I listened to her. To her pain. Shared my own. All summer we met and talked. And the summer after that. I started looking forward to working the wells. We got to know each other bit by bit, discovered we’d been through the same thing, realized we were alike— two halves of one person. Male and female components. Brother and sister, but more. Know what I mean?”

  I strained to look sympathetic, wanting him to keep on talking. “You formed a common identity. Like some twins do.”

  “Yeah. It was beautiful. But then the old bastard closed down the wells. Locked everything up. I drove up anyway. On weekends. During holidays for a week at a time. Crashed right here—used to be the night watchman’s place. I cooked for her. Taught her how to cook. Helped her with her homework. Showed her how to drive. Took long walks at night. Always talking. About how we wanted to kill our parents, erase our roots. Start fresh, with a new family. We had picnics in the forest. I wanted the little guy to come along, so he could be part of the family, too. But they wouldn’t let him out of their sight. She talked a lot about him, how she wanted to claim her rights. I told her she should, taught her about liberation. We made plans for next summer. The three of us were gonna run away to some island. Australia, maybe. I’d started collecting brochures to find the best place, then he got sick.

  “She called me as soon as she got to L.A. Wanted me to help her get a job as a prize girl on one of the game shows, but I told her you needed heavy connections for that. Besides, I’d already lined up the gig with Adam and Eve. Got Rambo to let us work as partners. The skits went smooth as silk. We didn’t need any rehearsal because each of us knew what the other was thinking. It was like working with yourself. We got big tips and I gave them to her to keep.

  “Then one night she phoned me in a panic. Said she’d confronted them and they’d snatched the little guy out. I’d never liked the idea of him being in that hospital in the first place but I was afraid they were gonna disappear south of the border, take him where she’d never see him again.

  “I rushed over and got there just as they were leaving. Swope was coming out the door when I opened it. I’d never met him, but I knew damn well what kind of shit he was. He starte
d mouthing off and I hit him in the face. Knocked him out. The woman came at me then, screaming, and I hit her, too, along the side of the head.

  “Both of them were lying there, grokked. The little guy was kind of dazed, mumbling in his sleep. Nona got pissed all of a sudden and started to tear up the room. I calmed her down, told her to wait right there, and managed to load both of them in the ’Vette. Stuffed her in the back, put him in the front seat. Drove ’em to the beach at Playa Del Rey and when one of the planes passed overhead, finished ’em off. Then I hauled them to a place I knew in Benedict and dumped them. They deserved to die.”

  He twirled the axe handle like a baton, chewed on a strawlike mustache hair.

  “The police found the remains of another body up there,” I said. “A woman.” I let the question hang in the air.