Primal Scream (31 page)

The ultimate feminist.

Looming over Sparky was a hermaphrodite from hell, a Frankenstein monster stitched together out of warring sexes. Boots, spurs, and stockings rose to white thighs down which ran red garter lines. Bare below the corset where thighs joined, her black bush glittered with gold rings. The rings that pierced her labia were laced shut with a black thong, sealing her sex around the phallic Horns of Venus. One horn was buried deep in the womb that had carried Sparky to term, the other jutting from her crotch as proud as the engorged prong of any sexist male.

The twisted mouth beneath the bald head high above spat words:

"Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me? Prove you're mine, and no one will hurt you. Unlace me, Sparky. Pull it out. And kiss your Mother's loving lips."

Wind in the smugglers' cavern off the Mississippi snuffed the lamp.

Flash forward:

. . . snuffed the lamp.

"Freeze! Police!"

The rearming of the Mounties had yet to work its way up to DeClercq. First to get the new Smith & Wesson 9mm sixteen-round semiautomatic were Members on the street: the thin red line. The higher in rank, the less likely a cop would need a gun, so a chief superintendent was almost last to rearm.

The dying flame of the hurricane lamp burnished the .38 on the sanguinary floor. DeClercq's fingers closed around the butt as the vault darkened. He still had the advantage of surpr
ise, though the gun in his fist
was a six-shot relic the Force had used since 1954.

"Freeze! Police!" he ordered.

Switching on the flashlight, he shone it directly at the Headhunter's eyes.

Earlier tonight flashed through Sparky's mind:

"I'm dead, child, yet I live on. Death is a door to afterlife. If he comes for you, come to me. Promise you won't let him take you alive."

"I promise, Mommy."

"Good. Give 'em hell."

Sparky dropped the blade, head, sack, and dyke's prong. She ducked out of the blinding light and whipped the Smith semiauto from the holster at her waist. Black was the void before her unadjusted eyes, but the flashlight blazed as bright as an exploding sun.

There was the target.

The flashlight in DeClercq's hand.

The 9mm barked in Katherine Spann's fist. A fiery tongue licked the darkness enveloping DeClercq. A sonic boom thundered in the close confines. The slug ricocheted off the bunker walls,
ping . . . ping . . . pinging!
around the hellhole. Before the ejected casing hit the floor, a hail of lead erupted at the black halo ringing the white, bullets blasting as fast as Spann could pull the trigger.

The flashlight exploded.

DeClercq cried out.

Shards and blood sprayed the dark.

The sun extinguished.

Into a black hole.

As Spann pumped more lead at where the light had been.

DeClercq was there.

He was hit.

And if he wasn't dead, this volley would take him down.

Superior firepower.

The reason for rearming.

The round from the .38 was lost in cannon booms. A popgun fart compared to the semiauto's blast. The slug, however, found its mark: the face of the Head-hunter lit by rapid muzzle flashes. The slug drilled the inspector between the eyes, dropping Spann from her crouch at the foot of the stairs.

Five shots left.

It took just one.

For Spann was up against a military strategist.

DeClercq had taken a hit, but he had held the line, drawing enemy fire into the void where he should be but wasn't.

He stood in the dark with his gun arm extended out front, his wounded arm extended straight to one side at ninety degrees, the shattered flashlight held as far away as possible.

Corporal Alfred Spann had taught him that trick.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Vancouver

Wednesday, January 10

Feeding frenzy.

Never was DeClercq as thankful as he was thankful this morning that E Division Headquarters of the RCMP stretched
four
blocks along Heather Street in Vancouver from Thirty-seventh to Thirty-third avenues. Media Relations was officed in the Operations Building at Thirty-seventh, while Special X was way down here in the old Tudor-style Heather Stables at Thirty-third. So much blood had been shed last night between the dog-sled patrol north of Totem Lake and the shoot-out in the bomb shelter on Finn Slough that multimedia sharks by the carload were closing on H.Q. Both morning papers and all the audiovisual feeders had plumbed their "morgues" for background ties between him and Katherine Spann, as if squaring them off
after the fight
for a heavyweight bout.

The sharks sniffed blood at Media Relations.

With cameras and mikes and videocams, they circled Operations up the street.

How long till they sniffed blood down here?

So many links.

So many stories.

So many columns of print and minutes of airtime to fill.

He hoped to get some work done before they swarmed him.

Climbing to his office on the second floor, Robert told his secretary to hold all calls and turn away any civilians. He shut the door, shucked his coat, removed his hat, and hung them up on the antique stand. Then he rounded his horseshoe desk and sat down in the U on the barley-sugar chair crowned with the Force crest. As he eyed the morning papers on the leather in front of him, the first thing he did was phone Bob George at the Hazelton hospital.

"How's the leg?"

"Painful. It'll be crutches for me."

"In for a while?"

"Couple of days. The wound's infected."

"I'll go after Winterman Snow until you're back on your feet. An excuse to get away from here will suit me fine."

"Spann?"

"Fooled me."

"Fooled us all. Did you know her dad served in the area where Winterman Snow went to school? Close to the Alaska panhandle. The boy's in a class picture taken in 1955. So is Corporal Alfred Spann."

"Residential?"

"St. Sebastian Catholic. Run by a pedophile named Reverend Paul Noel. It's being investigated by the task force. The allegation is Noel raped the native boys in his charge. He bent them over a desk in his office so they faced two pictures on the wall. One was of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, the other of Rector Luke Noel, a missionary last century, draped in a Tsimshian headhunting blanket."

"Noel around?"

"Hanged himself. Autoerotic asphyxiation. Dressed in lingerie."

"And Snow?"

"Disappeared. He's not in class photos after 1955. Corporal Spann retur
ned runaways to the school. If
Snow fled, he got away."

"To become a headhunting archer preying on whites in the woods?"

"It seems. The task force has no file on Snow. All I have to send you is the master file. But I wired an e-mail search request to all native task force members in the field, and one just replied that he found the village from which the albino boy had been seized and sent to Noel's school."

"Need a pen. Okay, shoot."

"Gunanoot. A Gitxsan village. North of the Skeena. West of Totem Lake."

"Dodd will know it. I'll fly tomorrow. You take care. I'll keep you informed."

"Strange thing, Chief. The Mad Dog came by. To ask if I'd be his best man."

"Surprised?"

"I thought he was racist."

"Last night I learned
never
to assume you know how someone thinks. Going to do it?"

"Of course," said George. "A man saves your life, you owe him his."

"Even if
you
saved
his
life two days before?"

"We're blood brothers, I guess."

The second call DeClercq made was to Zinc Chandler at the Command Center in New Hazelton.

"How's morale?"

"In tatters, Chief. We're not trained or equipped to fight a war, and may be forced to hand command over to the military. I don't know who's dug in deeper, the rebels or us. Hawks are demanding we storm the camp and take them down. Local whites are losing business by the millions. Herb McCall's grandson was beaten because his complaint to us about his land began the standoff. Hear the drums outside? Native supporters. They think we're provoking the rebels so we can shoot Indians and turn public opinion against them. The media have our Command Center under siege."

"Tell me about it. You should see here. Sharks are coming at us from all sides."

"The gunfights and living conditions have taken a toll, but what really sank morale was the arms slipping through last night. If they've got Stingers, down come our planes. If they've got mortars, Zulu base will be hit. If they've got armor-piercing shells, the APCs are tin cans. The military is jerking us around. We had to pull teeth to get four Bisons out of them, and only did so when we pledged to put our decals on. In front of me is an unsigned memo from Land Forces Western Area telling why: 'If anything goes wrong, we will not be seen as failing.' "

"What's your feeling?"

"We hold the line. This is law enforcement, not a civil war. The army will take over only if we give them total command. They're in enough shit over Somalia, and don't want this. We use their reluctance to get them to send technical support like eye-in-the-sky surveillance of the no-go zone. Meanwhile, I've asked Gitxsan elders to gather here for a powwow tomorrow. There must be a way to peace this."

"Consult Ghost Keeper."

"I have and will."

"Can you spare Dodd tomorrow? I need wings. To fly to Gunanoot re Winterman Snow."

"If you send him on to Fort St. James. One Gitxsan elder needs flying in. After he ferries the chief, Dodd can pick you up."

"Good," said DeClercq.

"Spann's a shock, huh? The amazing thing is that she slipped the net for so long."

"Not really. We're conditioned to be blind. Try an experiment and you will see. Pick an older person-man
or
woman—and ask if he or she heard about a traffic accident. A man and his son were driving down a highway in California when the car flipped; the man was killed, and his son was injured. An ambulance rushed the son to the local hospital. The surgeon scrubbed up, then froze, scalpel in hand. 'I can't operate on this man. He's my son.' Who's the surgeon?

Even today you'll be stunned how many people have no idea. The surgeon is his mother doesn't enter their minds."

"Kipling got it right," said Zinc. " Spann told me herself.

"And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,

That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

"Prophesy?" he added.

DeClercq was about to phone the Mad Dog at Zulu base to praise him for a job well done in saving George when his secretary buzzed. "Civilian to see you, Chief. Says it's important."

"Damn media. They'll use any ruse."

"It's Dr. Carlisle."

"Oh," said DeClercq. "In that case, have Security send her up."

His heartbeat quickened when the psychiatrist came hi, looking very businesslike hi a designer suit, the jacket pinched in at the waist to hourglass her figure.
God, she looks like Genny!
A second chance? Before Anda left, he swore he'd muster the courage to ask her for a date.

"I see you made the papers. Front page," she said. "It isn't every day you stop a woman from plucking men off the streets to rape."

"No," said Robert. "Spann turned the tables on us. Being a man, I've been free to go anywhere I please at any time without the fear of a sexual predator grabbing me. Until now I doubt any man grasped that fear. What it's like to have that in the back of your mind every day of the year."

"There will be women who identify with Spann. She
did
something to take back the night. I don't think men realize the anger in us. Remember that fellow last year who caused a bar fight between two women by two-timing them? When patrons tried to stop it, he waved a Magnum around, then stuck the gun down the front of his pants and accidentally blew off his cock and balls. To women it wasn't a tragedy of poor guy, but a cause for jokes like 'You can have him,' 'No, you can have him,' as if said by those two-timed."

"I agree," Robert said. " The world would be safer if every punk with a gun blew his genitals off."

"To many Spann struck a blow for us."

"I think that's why it's called the battle of the sexes. What Amazons who voice that forget is Spann also killed
them
."

"That's why I'm here. I brought the missing link." In her hand Carlisle waved an audiocassette. "This was among the monologues George Ruryk taped in his sessions with patients."

They sat around the horseshoe desk and listened to the tape:

". . . but what I remember most of all is those rings piercing her lips.

"Suzannah's lips.

"Suzannah was my Mother.

"It was Mardi Gras time in New Orleans ..."

". . . we arrived from Canada, after she killed Dad, by poisoning him to watch him die before cutting a hole in the lake. ..."

"... I watched her walk toward me through the penis of the keyhole. Have you ever noted a keyhole's phallic shape, the knob at top for the rod of the key and shaft below for the teeth? As she neared, candelabra in hand, her head and feet, then breasts and knees, then stomach and thighs disappeared, until all that filled the penis was her thatch of pubic hair. ..."

" '. . . Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me? Prove you're mine. Unlace me, Sparky. Then kiss your Mother's lips.'