When Colesceau hung up he was already brooding about women and his sexual capacity and he could feel the faint stirrings of desire down in his pants. It was difficult for him that his thoughts about sex were linked to his thoughts about castration, but the two went everywhere together, like twins, one beautiful and one ugly. Castration. The word sent a chill through his nervous system. It was one of the few English words with the power to do that.
Colesceau had done his research into chemical castration. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a detective who went and found things out. Depo-Provera was a brand name for medroxyprogesterone acetate, a chemical reproduction of the female hormone progesterone. Injected into males it was a hormone inhibitor, and it affected people differently. In some males it nearly eliminated the sex drive; in others it diminished it; in still others it seemed to have little or no effect. Recidivism rates were between 3 and 8 percent, depending on who you believed. It encouraged breast growth, hair loss and a loss of overall energy and strength.
Only some of this was disclosed in the State of California Department of Health protocol agreement between Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and committed patient Matamoros Colesceau.
Since he’d been released three years ago, they’d injected the stuff into him at the end of his counseling appointment every week. What a strange feeling to sit there and watch that swarthy female nurse jab the needle into his arm and make small talk about sports or the weather while she pushed the plunger down: all this to remove from Matamoros the keen fury that brought such pain to women and such pleasure to himself.
What he discovered was that the people giving him this drug had no firm idea of what it would do to him. Which was why he got a special deal for joining the protocol — a slightly early release from Atascadero and parole terms rather lenient for a twice-convicted violent sex offender. The privileges of the lab rat, he had thought.
But the larger reason he was chemically castrated was because there was no more space in the mental hospitals, because his prison term was satisfied, because he needed — according to current budget-tightening policy — to be “reintegrated into the community.” So they’d given him a choice of castrations: chemical or surgical. The chemical was temporary; the other permanent.
Now that was funny. Which one would you take?
Infuriating, too.
In the upstairs spare bedroom he took off his shirt. He hated the way the silver duct tape cut red furrows into his side. He hated the way the edges became slippery after only a few minutes — sweat and adhesive oozing down his ribs. He hated the smell. He’d actually tried a corset but it made him feel more female.
But what he hated even more was the way his breasts stuck out after just six months on the Depo-Provera, and the way his complexion became smoother. He couldn’t do much about his skin, but he could do something about the tits.
Three full wraps, all the way around. Through his shirts, you couldn’t even tell, he was pretty sure.
But he could certainly tell now, as he pulled off the tape and watched his skin peel away and then sag back, reddened, to his body. As the tissue fell to the floor, his pubescent girl’s breasts jiggled into view. He knew there was something not completely usual about this thing he was forced to call himself.
In fact, there was something drastically not usual about it.
He saw all this and he thought about what had been done to him and it made him even more furious than he’d been to start with.
Colesceau had learned one more thing about Depo-Provera as a castrator. It might be 92 % effective 100 % of the time, or 100 % effective 92 % of the time. But it wasn’t all effective all the time. Because sometimes, although not often, his rage and his lust would join fists like in the old days. Every couple of months, say.
Sometimes it would only last ten seconds. Sometimes a few minutes. Nothing like before, when he could sustain himself at peak levels for hours at a time then go again with only a little rest.
But that was all right, because Wednesday he’d be through with this hell on earth and on to the next destination, whatever that might be.
Nine
Merci could hear the dogs yapping in the distance, deep in the Ortega brush. She pictured Mike McNally in hot pursuit like some flummoxed jockey in charge of three horses at the same time. By the sound of the dogs they were half a mile away from the Kane site.
She looked at the hole in the ground where Hess had taken out his bucket of earth. She pictured Janet Kane dangling from the oak branch as Hess had described.
How did he see that before discovering the notch marks on the tree? She meant to find out and learn to do it herself.
It took her a few minutes to get positioned for a good view of the branch and she almost fell off for her trouble. But she found what the old man was talking about, the shallow groove worn through the bark into the softer pulp of the living tree, eroded away by rope — or perhaps chain. She hadn’t done a pull-up since the Academy.
She had also forgotten how tiring it is to operate a handsaw. Standing on her toes she huffed away at the first branch, realizing she’d probably bought the wrong kind of tool. Wasn’t this big flat-bladed thing for boards? It had run her $18 at the hardware store — still another expense she’d be hassled over by Payroll. There was already the car fax. And the good body armor. And the “Italian” stiletto made in China she carried in her purse. And the dozens of swap-meet admission fees she accumulated on Saturday and Sunday mornings when she roamed for bargains and stolen merchandise rather than develop what Joan Cash would call a meaningful social life.
The new saw seemed to cut about one-one-thousandth of an inch deeper with every labored cycle of her arm. Five minutes later her coat was on the ground, her rolled-up shirtsleeves were collecting pulp dust, her hair was stuck to her face with sweat and she was still less than halfway through.
By the time it cracked and splintered and finally crashed to the ground, Merci had the idea that she could barely handle the Heckler & Koch right now, let alone shoot a tight group at fifty feet in less than ten seconds.
She looked down at the branch and realized with some anger that she’d made the cut nearest the trunk first, instead of the cut farthest from it. Now, in order to cut the section she needed, she’d have to climb down and try to hold the branch still with one hand, or stand on the damn thing, while sawing it with the other. Unless she wanted to bring the entire twenty-foot branch to the lab with her.
That’s what Hess was talking about, you stupid bitch.
Things like this — little things like this — revealed to Merci her true character. Your stupidity could fill volumes. It made her wish she could change everything about herself, totally reinvent her personality, her IQ, her looks, her voice, her name. Her only consolation now was that nobody — especially wiseass McNally or the old fart Hess or her quietly disapproving father — was here to see this act of total, unconscionable and absolute stupidity.
“You will do dumber things than this in your life,” she muttered. “If you’re lucky.”
She dropped to the ground on the uphill side, her duty boots sinking into the bouncy layer of leaves.