These men were masters. They hadn’t wounded the professor. It was silent. Their movements, balanced like one-legged cranes in shallow puddles. They’d killed him and left nothing to be found. Especially a body.
There was oil…barely visible in the light.
Alred touched the warm wetness. It wasn’t oil.
The air escaped her lungs as she stood again, examining the parking lot exits, the quiet streets beyond them, the night birds…they would tell no tales.
The moisture in her mouth evaporated.
Ulman had disappeared months ago.
No one would ever find him now.
7:40 p.m. PST
“You shot Porter, Mr. Smith. We’d like to know what you were doing with him.”
Smith sat tall in his leather chair. “Who here understands Mormons better than I do?” He looked around the dark table.
“You have been our lead operative on LDS studies for the last fifty years. What does that have to do with Porter.”
“Our young troublemaker does not fit the cultural norm in the Mormon society,” said Smith without moving. The air, a cool broth of sweet roses, stirred around him. “Porter is what Latter-day Saints deem a fanatic. His decisions would be condemned by most members of his faith. He intrigues me.”
Andrews cleared his throat. “Your personal interests could jeopardize our careful and long existence.”
“On the contrary,” said Smith with a scarecrow grin, “my actions could preserve our investments for another century. You know the Mormons believe they live in the last years of the Earth’s present existence. Their long-awaited Millennium is near, according to their own living prophets. John D. Porter is an abnormally unsociable member of his church. We see how endlessly and powerfully his fire burns.
“Now what if a man arose among the Latter-day Saints who possessed the same inner strength, unstoppable endurance, and passionate intelligence John Porter exhibits before us. Add to that description…popularity.”
Smith waited a moment to let the old committee stew over the disturbing vision.
“A Porter who is highly esteemed among his spiritual colleagues…could crack the Earth and change Mormonism in the eyes of the public forever. We need to understand John Porter. I need to comprehend him fully in order to recognize other prodigies when they are still in embryo.”
“You put two bullets into him,” growled Andrews.
“And the men behind Porter were not about to do the same? Porter thought he knew me to some small degree. A polite old man was I. I have given him…paranoia. He will trust no one from this day forth.”
“We wanted KM-3,” said the man at the end of the table.
“That’s why I shot him. Porter would not reveal its location. I did not kill him, however, but immediately summoned an ambulance…an anonymous maneuver. He has been chased, so he’s scared. But even the hardest men, who have never been tortured, will change their minds after real pain. Porter has received his first bullet wounds. He knows what to fear now… Imagine if we put the tip of a revolver between his eyes. Young people often feel immortal…until they are hurt badly. I have made John Porter…moldable.”
8:59 p.m. PST
When Alred was eighteen years old, she tried alcohol for the first time. The taste surprised her…she thought it would be good. Her older friends laughed when she drank the clear liquid, shushing one another as if someone could hear them doing what they shouldn’t be doing, when in reality the parents of the friend whose liquor cabinet they had raided had been gone for days on a second honeymoon and weren’t due back from the green hills of Ireland for another week. They’d never be caught; there wasn’t a chance.
As the night progressed, Alred remembered the sinking flame in her chest. Her head throbbed as if she had a headache, but there was no pain. There was, however, the mild experience of flu symptoms after a time, her head swimming one way and then the other. Someone had lubricated the connection between her spine and the base of her skull.
She laughed with her friends, but felt a grayness around her, unspoken echoes she could never later explain. Then came the sickness. The running. The embarrassment of making a mess in the cream-carpeted hallway. The accusations and bawling out her friend gave her, along with all the guilt of what would happen next-how could they clean it up right before the parents returned. And all this in an unfeeling haze.
Alred remembered the desire to cry, the tears coming all the way to the bottom of her eyelids…but refusing to come out. She was so sorry for it all. Yes it was true, she couldn’t “hold her liquor.” Yes, it might have been better if she “hadn’t come over at all.” But she couldn’t cry. She chose to show no emotion. No sincerity in her words. Forced apathy.
She drove home inebriated and stupid with a “Don’t Drive Drunk” sticker on the back of her Plymouth. She’d never drink again. She hated herself and her friends. But as time passed she hated herself for making the choice…
Stumbling from her car toward Bruno’s cafe, Alred had the same sensation she’d suppressed so many years ago. She knew the fire inside her had to be heartburn, but she couldn’t explain the dullness surrounding her head. She didn’t understand why the world had gone foggy, when she knew the air was clear. Why couldn’t she cry…when she felt it rising inside?
Well, she’d never wept in public and rarely at all-proud of her control over emotion. But she wouldn’t be able to let it out now if she wanted to. It was the same as so long ago…
And Alred couldn’t stop thinking of her dead dog, Dorado, who’d run away never to return.
This had nothing to do with pets.
She’d look for Porter and take his approach to life, drowning herself in a few cups of the old man’s hot chocolate.
Her dog was dead.
“Alred!”
She stopped, but her head continued to sway, filled spontaneously with synapse-destroying poison. Her eyes dug through the dark of the alleyway that bent between the cafe and another building and then behind Bruno’s place.
“Back here!”
It was a shouted whisper.
Sighing with a drunk groan, Alred was thankful she was on friendly terms again with Porter. But she wished he’d stop all this spy vs. spy garbage. Didn’t he understand no one could do anything to him if he stayed in a populated area? Bruno’s would suit, but inside was where all the people were, not behind the place.
“Hurry up!”
She took a step into the alley. Her head rocked on her soft neck. Her mind seemed lighter, her brain somehow warmer than normal.
Then Alred felt a hand against her, holding her away from the alley. But there was no one there, no one keeping her from walking alone into the darkness, away from the streetlights, away from the populated area where she was headed. It was as if all the molecules that made up her figure began leaning in the opposite direction, attempting to keep her out of the darkness.
Was she losing her equilibrium?
She’d found Ulman. Finally. But now…
Putting a hand to her forehead, she closed her eyes and leaned against the cold wall. “Porter,” she said, not loud enough for him to hear, however, “I…think I’m in shock. I need to sit down.”
“Alred!”
“All right!” she said, throwing her body against the current.
Weaving to the end of the alley crowded with rolled debris that looked like discarded carpets, garbage cans in perpetual use, and heaps of broken tiles and forgotten paint cans, she came out behind Bruno’s where there was little room but for the rubbish and the dark.
Something moved among the filth. “Where are you,” she said, not afraid to talk out loud. She tried to examine the cans, the soaked boxes, the plastic bags with nifty ties that were already busted open to wait for the scavengers flying around Stratford. Opposite the back of Bruno’s, an ancient chain-linked fence protected an older wooden fence rising some seven feet behind the first. The rear door to a ‘70s style hair salon pinched off any other exit from the darkness. The black wall hugged Bruno’s building. Some useless two by fours were piled up against it, as far as she could see. Large boards leaned against the black wall behind her, which climbed another two stories. There was no light.