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CHAPTER 17 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.
Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.
As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.
Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or even “Jingle Bell Rock” would deeply offend those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.
Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.
By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men’s room. Unobserved.
He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.
None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.
These days, most public restrooms featured push-down faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.
At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.
A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him. He moved the large waste can, half full of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.
He picked up his shopping bag—which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network—and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.
Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.
One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.
To the music of splash and splatter—and thinly spread Pearl Jam—Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.
The hall serving the men’s and women’s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.
From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician’s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.
He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn’t need to apply additional tape.
From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.
Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.
The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.
Corky’s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.
Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he’d not been captured on videotape near the crime.
The L-shaped corridor serving the restrooms led to the second-floor mall promenade, which was under constant security surveillance. Previously, Corky had scoped out the positions of the cameras that covered the approaches to the lavatory hallway.
Departing now, he casually averted his face from those lenses. Keeping his head down, he quickly blended into the crowd of shoppers.
When security guards later reviewed the tapes, they might focus on Corky as having entered and departed the lavatory corridor in the approximate time frame of the vandalism. But they would not be able to obtain a useful image of his face.
He had intentionally worn nondescript clothes, the better to fade into the rabble. On videotapes recorded elsewhere in the mall, he wouldn’t be easily identifiable as the same man who had visited the restroom just prior to the flood.
A gorgeous excess of spangled and frosted holiday decorations further compromised the usefulness of the cameras, infringing upon the established angles of view.
The winter-wonderland theme avoided both direct and symbolic references to Christmas: no angels, no mangers, no images of Santa Claus, no busy elves, no reindeer, no traditional ornaments—and no festive lengths of colored lights, only tiny white twinkle bulbs. Festoons of plastic and shiny aluminum-foil icicles, measured in miles, glimmered everywhere. Thousands of large, sequined Styrofoam snowflakes hung on strings from the ceiling. In the central rotunda, ten life-size ice skaters, all mechanical figures moving on tracks, glided around a fake frozen pond in an elaborate re-creation of a winter landscape complete with snowmen, snow forts, robot children threatening one another with plastic snowballs, and animated figures of polar bears in comical poses.
Corky Laputa was enchanted by the pure, blissful vacuousness of it all.
On the first escalator to the ground floor, on the second to the garage, he brooded over a few details of his scheme to kill Rolf Reynerd. Both as he had shopped and as he had enjoyed his destructive escapades in the mall, Corky had carefully laid a bold and simple plan for murder.
He was a natural-born multitasker.
To those who had never studied political strategy and who also lacked a solid grounding in philosophy, Corky’s capers in the men’s room might have seemed at best to be childish larks. A society could seldom be brought down solely by acts of violence, however, and every thoughtful anarchist must be dedicated to his mission every minute of the day, wreaking havoc by actions both small and large.
Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.
If somehow Corky could have carried the black plague without risking his own life, he would have enthusiastically passed that disease to everyone he met by way of sneezes, coughs, touches, and kisses. If sometimes all he could do was flush a cherry bomb down a public toilet, he would advance chaos by that tiny increment while he awaited opportunities to do greater damage.
In the garage, when he reached his BMW, he shrugged out of his sports coat. Before settling behind the steering wheel, he donned the yellow slicker once more. He put the droopy yellow rain hat on the front passenger’s seat, within easy reach.
Besides providing superb protection in even a hard-driving rain, the slicker was the ideal gear in which to commit homicide. Blood could be easily washed off the shiny vinyl surface, leaving no stain.
According to the Bible, to every season there is a purpose, a time to kill and a time to heal.
Not much of a healer, Corky believed there was a time to kill and a time not to kill. The time to kill had arrived.
Corky’s death list contained more than one name, and Reynerd was not at the top. Anarchy could be a demanding faith.
CHAPTER 18 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS and wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.
The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.
If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.
For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.
Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.
He might as well die here, die now.
Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn’t deep at all.
In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.
He leaned forward. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.
Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.
He triggered puff two.
He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.
A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.
Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge.
Two puffs. He’d taken two doses.
Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.
Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman’s noose.
Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.
Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.
Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.
Screw the doctor.
He triggered a third puff.
A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.
Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.
He dropped the inhaler on his lap.
Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.
Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur gradually gave way to clarity.
Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.
When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.
He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in this meat locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.
The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated children.
On closer inspection, he had seen that the stainless-steel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.
That’s when he’d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the interior lock release, however, had proved this theory wrong.
As his wheezing quieted, as breath came more easily, as the tightness in his chest loosened, Fric studied the hooks, the brushed-steel walls, trying to arrive at a third theory regarding the purpose of this place. He remained mystified.
He’d told no one about the pivoting section of closet shelving or about the hidden room. What made the hidey-hole so cool was less its exotic nature than the fact that only he knew it existed.
This space could serve as the “deep and special secret place” that, according to Mysterious Caller, would soon be needed.
Maybe he should stock it with supplies. Two or three six-packs of Pepsi. Several packages of peanut-butter- and-cracker sandwiches. A couple flashlights with spare batteries.
Warm cola would never be his first choice of beverage, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded in the Mojave with no source of water, forced to save and drink your own urine.
Peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, tasty under ordinary circumstances, would be unspeakably vile if accompanied by urine.
Maybe he should stock four six-packs of cola.
Even though he wouldn’t be drinking his urine, he would need something in which to pee, supposing that he would be required to hide out longer than a few hours. A pot with a lid. Better yet, a jar with a screw top.
Mysterious Caller hadn’t said how long Fric should expect to be under siege. They would have to discuss that in their next chat.
The stranger had promised that he would be in touch again. If he was a pervert, he would call for sure, drooling all over his phone. If he wasn’t a pervert, then he might be a sincere friend, in which case he would still call, but for better reasons.
Time passed, the asthma relented, and Fric got to his feet. He clipped the inhaler to his belt.
A little woozy, he balanced himself with one hand against the cold steel wall as he went to the door.
A minute later, in his bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the handset from the telephone. An indicator light on the keyboard appeared at his private line.
No one had phoned him since he’d answered his Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo in the train room. After pressing *69, he listened while his phone automatically entered the number of his most recent caller.
If he’d been a brainiac trained in the skills required to be an enormously dangerous spy, and if he’d had the supernaturally attuned ear of Beethoven before Beethoven went deaf, or if one of his parents had been an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to crossbreed with humans, perhaps Fric could have translated those rapidly sounded telephone tones into numerals. He could have memorized Mysterious Caller’s phone number for future use.
He was nothing more, however, than the son of the biggest movie star in the world. That position came with lots of perks, like a free Xbox from Microsoft and a lifetime pass to Disneyland, but it didn’t confer upon him either astonishing genius or paranormal powers.
After waiting through twelve rings, he engaged the speakerphone feature. He went to a window while the number continued to ring.
The billiards-table smoothness of the east lawn sloped away through oaks, through cedars, to rose gardens, vanishing into gray rain and silver mist.
Fric wondered if he should tell anyone about Mysterious Caller and the warning of impending danger.
If he called Ghost Dad’s global cell-phone number, it would be answered either by a bodyguard or by his father’s personal makeup artist. Or by his personal hair stylist. Or by the masseur who always traveled with him. Or by his spiritual adviser, Ming du Lac, or by any of a dozen other flunkies orbiting the Fourth Most Admired Man in the World.
The phone would be handed from one to another of them, across unknowable vertical and horizontal distances, until after ten minutes or fifteen, Ghost Dad would come on the line. He would say, “Hey, my main man, guess who’s here with me and wants to talk to you.”
