Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus Page 7

  “He’s working right now, but I can get him if it’s important.” Maggie paused. “What am I saying? You picked up a phone. This isn’t just important, it’s cause for a ticker tape parade.”

  “I don’t think they have those anymore,” I said dryly. “As to the rest, I take your point, and will try to be in touch more often, if only so you don’t decide to mount some sort of expedition to my place of work and take me out. Now, can you please put Alaric on the phone?”

  “Just a second.” There was a soft click as she put the phone on mute. That was something I actually missed from working at the Canadian branch of the CDC. We had all used heavy handset phones, holdovers from the pre-Rising world that could be hit with a hammer and still function. With those, putting down the phone would invariably make a loud clunking sound, keeping everyone aware of what was happening around them. I didn’t trust phones that could be put on mute. They created too much opportunity for plotting.

  A few seconds passed before the line beeped, and Alaric’s familiar voice said, “Dr. Abbey? Is that really you?”

  “You should learn to trust your wife,” I said. “She said it was me. Ergo, it was me. Why is that so difficult to believe?”

  “Because you never call. You write sometimes, but you never, ever call. Not even when we got married. You sent a fancy blender via courier. It would’ve been nice to hear your voice.”

  “You’re hearing it now, and all you’re doing is complaining about it.” I sighed. “It’s nice to talk to you, too, Alaric. Now, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

  “What?” Alaric sounded genuinely baffled for a moment. His tone turned quickly wary as he continued, asking, “Why do you want to know? Why are you calling me?”

  “Because I can’t call Mahir—it’s too difficult to synchronize time zones, and even voice over IP is risky when you’re bouncing it between continents. No one has a number for the Masons. Becks is dead. That leaves you.”

  “No, not just me. Hold on.” There was a soft scuffing sound; he hadn’t put the phone on mute, he had put his hand over the receiver. “Maggie! Come in here, and bring the splitter.” The scuffing sound was repeated, and his voice was suddenly back in my ear. “Maggie’s getting the headphone splitter. You need to talk to both of us. Her because she has data, me because I’m not going to sit here eavesdropping in my own home.”

  “I love how suddenly my actions are being dictated to me,” I said sourly. “Why am I talking to Maggie, and not to you? You’re the Newsie. She writes smut for a living.”

  “I write excellent, extremely literate erotica, thank you very much,” said Maggie primly, her voice coming through as clearly as her husband’s. “It pays more of the bills than his reporting ever will, so you should respect the pornography.”

  “Your father pays all your bills,” I said, without rancor. “Since Alaric says I should be talking to you, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

  “He was a controlling narcissist who didn’t allow for any resistance or deviation from the relatively narrow roles he dictated for the women who came into his orbit,” said Maggie without hesitation. “He’d had extensive plastic surgery at some point: No one looks that generic unless they’ve designed themselves to look that way. I wish I’d been able to get the number for his surgeon. That work was amazing.”

  “You’re perfect just the way you are,” said Alaric. “You don’t need a plastic surgeon.”

  “Maybe I don’t right now, but it’s always good to have a few numbers on file,” said Maggie serenely. “I may want to cover the scars on my stomach someday. Pancake makeup and concealer are good for a lot, and yet sometimes I’d like to be able to hot tub without tinting the water beige.”

  “This is a fascinating conversation, and I’m just thrilled beyond words to be able to be an unwilling participant, but can we please get back on track?” I asked. “I need to know about the Monkey’s girls. I understand that he had two. Can either of you describe them for me?”

  “The Cat was tall, thin, brown hair, cold eyes. She did a lot of the grunt work for him. I get the feeling she was a computer genius, but I didn’t get details,” said Maggie.

  “Her name was Jane,” said Alaric. His voice was much more subdued. “We dated for a while back in college. She was always a little cold, but I figured that was just the sort of person she was, you know? Not everyone is physically demonstrative.”

  “The sex was apparently amazing,” said Maggie. “Seriously transcendent. I did get details about that, but to be fair, I asked for them. The woman should’ve written a book on fucking, instead of going into the business of fucking people over.”

  “I am thrilled to be learning more about the intricacies of your marriage, and will send you my therapy bills,” I said flatly.

  “I’m good for them,” said Maggie.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “So that’s the Cat. Jane. I’ve heard reports that she didn’t make it out of the Monkey’s compound alive.” Even if she had, she wasn’t the woman in my observation room. My guest could have been a natural brunette, and she could have had cold eyes when she wasn’t drugged to the gills, but no one, however charitable, was ever going to call her “tall.” I’d met taller teenagers. “There was another woman, though. Tell me about her.”

  “You mean Foxy?” asked Maggie. “She was little. Red hair. Blue eyes. Violent as all hell. She seemed like she was only really happy when she was hurting something—although she was the one who really got upset when we found out that the Cat had betrayed us. The Monkey was angry when he found out. But the Fox was sad. She was disappointed. It was sort of like she was a little kid in some ways, and she didn’t want to believe that the people who were important to her could actually do anything that was really wrong.”

  “There’s more.” Alaric’s interjection was soft enough that I almost missed it.

  Good thing I have good ears. “What do you mean, there’s more?”

  “I mean…do you keep up with the site at all? The articles, I mean, not the op-ed columns or the updates from the Masons.”

  “Not as much as I should,” I admitted. “Running a lab is a full-time job, even when you can do it legitimately. Under these conditions, it’s a full-time job for three people, and there’s only one of me. My reading for pleasure has sort of fallen by the wayside.”

  “Okay. I wrote an article a few months ago that I really think you should read. Send me a currently valid e-mail address, and I’ll send it over to you.” Alaric sounded hesitant—more hesitant than normal. “It’ll explain a lot about the Fox.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I show you a picture?”

  “Sure,” said Maggie. “Send it to my submissions account. We both have access.”

  “On it.” Cradling the phone between my cheek and shoulder again, I pulled up the video of our mystery guest—who was growing less mysterious by the second—and clipped a single frame that showed her face in cool, silent repose. The lighting was good, highlighting the pallor of her skin and the purple shadows under her eyes. I attached it to an e-mail, sent it off, and waited. The connection was good. I didn’t have to wait for long.

  “Mother of God,” said Maggie.

  Alaric, who had spent more time in my lab than she had and knew exactly where that room was in the facility, was less restrained. “Dr. Abbey, what the fuck is the Fox doing in your observation room?”

  “So you’re both identifying her as the woman from the Monkey’s compound?” I asked. “Please be clear in your answers. I need to be sure.”

  “If it’s not her, she has a twin sister,” said Maggie. “That’s not okay.”

  “It’s her,” said Alaric.

  “Okay. That’s what I needed to confirm.”

  “Dr. Abbey, I don’t think you understand.” Alaric was sounding more alarmed by the minute. “She’s a killer. That’s what she does. It’s what she lives for. She may have been upset when the Cat broke the rules, but that wasn’t go
ing to stop her from putting a bullet in anyone who got in her way. You need to get her out of there. You’re not safe while she’s with you.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement. In the meantime, Alaric, send that article over; I need all the help I can get in dealing with this situation, so if you’ve got something you think will help, I want it. Both of you, congratulations again on your wedding—I hope you’ll be very happy together. Give everyone my best, and don’t call back.” I hung up without saying good-bye. Farewells weren’t really my style, and hadn’t been since my husband died. Maybe it was a silly superstition, but I live in a world where the dead walk: I can be superstitious if I want to.

  Alaric’s e-mail had already arrived, shunted though a dozen layers of increasingly sophisticated software to reach my inbox, where it waited for me to open it. I clicked. I opened. I read. And somewhere in the middle of his report, titled “Unspoken Tragedies of the American School System,” I began to cry. Thankfully, there was no one in the room with me but Joe, and Joe was loyal. Joe would never tell.

  4.

  “Is she awake?”

  “You asked us to notify you as soon as she woke up. I have not notified you. I value my position here in this lab, rather than outside in the wilds with no weapons and no references to show the next evil lab that I want to work for. Ergo, she has not woken up.” Jill didn’t look away from her computer as she spoke. Apparently, even being her boss didn’t put me above blood test results in her estimation. That was actually heartening. I signed her paychecks, but science was her real employer. That was exactly as things were meant to be.

  “The lab isn’t evil, it’s ethically challenged,” I said. “We do good things.”

  “I bet Frankenstein told himself the same thing,” said Jill, still typing. “She’s asleep, but she’s not deeply asleep. You could probably wake her up, if you wanted to go another five rounds with Sleeping Beauty: the horror movie edition.”

  “Were you always this rude and disrespectful?” I asked.

  “Not until my boss told me that talking back would help me on my annual reviews,” said Jill. She finally turned to look at me. “Do you want me to call Tom to come and play backup? He’s just down in his lab, playing with cannabis. You know, like he does every day.”

  “Yes, but this time he’s doing it because I asked him to,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I don’t think she’s here to hurt me. I think she’s genuinely here because she needs help, and because the last person she trusted to help her used her instead. Used her hard, and put her away broken.”

  “We’re not the Island of Misfit Toys,” protested Jill. “We can’t be responsible for every broken doll you come across.”

  “Why not?” I asked, amiably enough. “I decided to be responsible for you.”

  Jill didn’t have an answer for that, and so I turned away and walked out of the room, heading the few feet down the hall to the observation room where our mystery woman—who was becoming less mysterious with every moment that passed, even if she was becoming somewhat sadder at the same time—was waiting for me.

  She didn’t stir as I opened the door and stepped inside. I shut the door behind me, walking calmly to the seat I’d been occupying earlier. Routine was important when dealing with people who had every reason to be suspicious of you: It both made you predictable, which could be comforting, and it lulled them into a false sense of security. It was amazing how many people took “doesn’t deviate” to mean “can’t deviate.” If I could build that assumption in her mind, however subtly, I would put myself in a much better position.

  “Elaine,” I said. “Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

  The woman on the cot flinched. That was all I needed to know that she was awake, and more importantly, that I was right. She was the Monkey’s faithful killer, the one he called “the Fox,” but before that, she had been a schoolteacher from Seattle named Elaine Oldenburg.

  “I could sell your location to a lot of people. There are still warrants out for your arrest, thanks to the things that happened at your old school. None of the parents of the surviving students want to press charges, but you know how parents are. They’re always looking for someone to blame. The way you disappeared sure did make you a person of interest.” I leaned back in my seat. “I could sell your location, and I’m not. That should be enough to earn me a little conversation, don’t you think? Stop pretending to sleep, and talk to me.”

  “Nothing here is worth saying,” said the woman. Her voice was very small, and it lacked the lilting edge that it had held before: Now it was filled with a deep resignation, like this was the ending that she had always expected but had somehow been holding out hope would be avoided. “I was, I wasn’t, and now you’re telling me that I am again. It’s not fair. When I took the cup and sword, he promised me I’d never have to be again. That was the deal. Give myself over to service, and never be anyone I didn’t want to be ever again, no matter what happened, forever and ever, amen. That was the deal.” Her voice took on a plaintive edge that cut through the air like the whine of a bone saw slicing through flesh. “He wasn’t supposed to leave me.”

  “Do you mean the Monkey?” I asked, trying to keep my own voice as neutral as possible. All those drugs that she was on…some of them could be used to induce a dissociative state. If Elaine had gone to him because she had heard that he could supply her with drugs that would do that, then his death could have seemed like the greatest betrayal of all. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if you know this, but the Monkey is dead. He died in Seattle.”

  “I know he’s dead.” Now she sounded almost dismissive. I was giving her old information, and she didn’t have time for that. “I saw him die. I didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re asking. I could have done it, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t mad at him. Everyone is just as they’re made, that’s all, and he made himself into what he was one inch at a time.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

  “I mean he made me with drugs and promises, and he made himself with drugs and surgery and blood and women who would do whatever he wanted them to do. His only mistake was the Cat. She was a hunter. He didn’t want hunters. He wanted killers. They’re not the same thing, you know.” She smiled beatifically, her eyes still closed. “They never have been.”

  “He died two years ago,” I said. “A lot of people thought that you had died, too. How did you not run out of drugs until now?” Because that should have happened a long time ago. There was no way she could have been maintaining the levels of chemical modification that Jill had found in her bloodstream. Some of those compounds had short shelf lives; they broke down too quickly for her to have been traveling with any kind of a supply. Others were just hard to make, and dangerous to carry. The only way our girl had made it through the past two years was by finding another supplier—and that didn’t fill in any of the gaps that were starting to open around her. She wasn’t telling her story. The story I’d been able to uncover had some holes.

  “The Monkey always used to say, ‘If something happens to me, go here,’” she said, and finally turned her head toward me, opening her eyes. They were fathomless and cold. I could have fallen forever into those eyes. “He gave me names. Addresses. Safe houses I could run to. But some of them weren’t as safe as others. Some of them had problems that had to be solved with fire, and with screaming.” She shrugged a little. “It’s a living.”

  “So these safe houses, they gave you the drugs that you needed? How did they know what you needed?”

  “Monkey told them. He always knew he might die someday. Dying someday came with the job, like getting cavities comes with eating too much sugar, or breaking toes comes with dancing ballet.” She sounded so calm, like she wasn’t talking about her own life. “So he gave the safe houses lists of what I was on, and told them that they could have me if they’d keep me nice and gone. I trusted him. I believed he wouldn’t give me to bad people.”

  “Did he give you a copy of that
list?”

  Now she sighed, shaking her head. “He said knowing what I needed would just make me unhappy, because then I’d be able to see just how broken I really was. I guess he was trying to protect me again. He loved me best, you know. Out of all his girls, he loved me best.”

  “Is that so?” I asked, as neutrally as I could. I didn’t recognize what she was describing as love, but I had been around long enough to understand that sometimes love doesn’t look like anything you would expect. Sometimes love is a spider hiding in the corner of the room, dark and brooding and terrible to anyone who doesn’t experience love in the exact same way. That’s what makes love so dangerous, and so impossible to destroy. You can’t kill what you can’t see.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I wasn’t the first, but I was the best, and all I had to do was spend most of my time not being anyone at all. That was what I wanted most, and he gave it to me. He let me not be anyone at all.” Her face fell. “I’m becoming someone again. I don’t like it.”

  It was hard not to get frustrated with her. It was half like talking to a child and half like talking to one of the fragile attempts at artificial intelligence that people like Tessa periodically pushed out onto the greater Internet, hoping that the sheer flow of data would transform them from particularly well-designed Chinese rooms into actual people. But getting mad at those programs didn’t make them function any better, and neither would getting mad at her. “Why don’t you like it? You were a person before the Monkey got his hands on you.”

  “I was a bad person,” said the woman. I couldn’t decide what to call her. She wasn’t the Fox anymore—and it wasn’t like I would have ever used such a stupid name for a flesh-and-blood person; even at my most understanding, I have my limits—but she hadn’t turned back into Elaine yet. Assuming she ever could. Some of those drugs had permanent, long-term effects, and those were just the compounds I had heard of before. The experimental cannabinoids, who knew? “I was supposed to keep the children safe, and I didn’t. Why would I want to be her ever again? All she was good for was losing. The Monkey made me stronger. The Monkey took all that pain away, and he gave me laughter and happiness instead. I miss him.”