Assassin's Apprentice: Chapters 1-2
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The Unbearable Truth of What Really Happened…
2008 CE
Part One
“things fall apart”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
1.
It had taken Brett Stuart his entire senior year of high school to get Karla Easton alone, and there was no way he was leaving this meadow today without somehow touching her breasts. One or both, left or right, direct fondle or accidental brush, it didn't matter. It would happen. He had a foolproof plan.
“You find any yet?” Karla called from over by the oak tree.
“Nope. Nothing yet.” Brett pretended to look all around him for a hemp plant, though he knew none grew here. That was the devious beauty of his plan. He rustled a few scraggly weeds for effect.
“Dude, I’m burning up out here,” she said. “I wish I’d thought to pack some Gatorade. How you holding up, Brett? Need some more sunscreen?”
“I’m fine,” he replied, wishing she’d stop being so damn thoughtful. He looked at his watch. They’d been out here two hours already. If he didn’t make his big move soon, they’d both go home empty handed.
“Hey, I think I found one,” Karla said, but her voice was more hopeful than certain.
“Really? Let me see.” Brett jogged across the field, not too fast, because when he ran, his thick, lumpish body fell into the girlish waddle that he was always being teased about in gym class. One of the many things he was always teased about. Christ, where would the list begin? His weight, his overbite, his thick Mr. Peepers glasses, the dark purple birthmark on his cheek that looked like a June bug squashed against a windshield. He was a walking catalogue of every outcast mannerism or physical oddity that tattooed loser status on a kid. He had a wheezing laugh, a nasal voice, and the clothes—he shook his head woefully as he ran—don't get me started on these sissy clothes my mother picked out of a goddamn Spiegel catalogue. This isn’t Philadelphia, he’d told her, it’s godforsaken Wyoming! Her icy reply was always the same: “Good taste is not geographical.”
“What have...you got there...Karla?” he asked, wheezing as he ran up to her.
“Johansson’s private stash, I hope.” She pointed to a cluster of weeds circling the tree. She had scissors in one hand and a plastic baggie in the other. “It looks like the photograph in the book. I think.”
Brett pretended to examine the plant carefully, not wanting to hurt her feelings for making such an obvious mistake. Not even close. “Good guess, Karla. Very, very close. But the leaves of the Cannabis sativa are serrated, like a bread knife. See, these aren't. They’re more scalloped than serrated.”
“Damn, what is wrong with me? I know that. Duh!” She smiled at him, teeth straight and milk-fed white. “Sorry, Brett. I'll try harder. I promise.” She shoved the scissors and baggie in opposite hip pockets and wandered off through the meadow. She wore bib overalls and a long-sleeved t-shirt and walked bent over so she could better examine the plants. He could see her breasts bounce slightly against the denim bib. Not bounce so much as bob. Her breasts weren't especially large (his own were probably bigger), but they were here and he'd never touched any before.
He leaned up against the oak tree and watched Karla diligently zigzagging through the weeds. Her apple-scented shampoo lingered, and Brett inhaled deeply. For God’s sake, what was he thinking? She was a sweet and trusting girl who'd come to him for some help and here he was like those drooling Neanderthals from school, scheming to dehumanize and humiliate her. He punched his thigh hard. Pain burned down to his kneecap. He punched himself again and the thigh went icy numb. That helped.
Brett looked around. Thought he'd heard something. He wasn't sure what. Something. A rapid ticking followed by a screeching zing, like a guitar string snapping. A bird maybe, or insect. “Karla?”
“Huh?”
“You hear something?”
She straightened up and looked around, her hand shading her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I don't know. Listen.” He listened. Nothing unusual. Probably just his imagination prodded by fear. They were trespassing on private land and his father would ground him until his pubes turned gray if he found out. His father had never broken a law in his life, as he was fond of reminding Brett about a billion times a day. Never sped, never ran a yellow light, never cheated on his taxes. He didn’t jaywalk, curse, or even spit chewing gum out the car window. Once, he drove six miles back to a grocery store to return a dollar in change they’d overpaid him. He was a pharmacist, he explained, and people had to know they could trust their pharmacist. Sometimes Brett thought about secretly switching some customer’s sleeping pill prescription with a strong laxative. See what happens to that old trust factor then, eh, Pop? But he knew he never would. Just like he knew he’d never touch Karla Easton’s breasts today. Or ever. He sighed heavily at the realization.
“I still don’t hear anything, Brett,” Karla said. “What did it sound like?”
“A series of ticking followed by a zing.”
“A zing? Like a harp?”
“Not exactly.” He shrugged. “It was probably nothing.”
Karla went back to her plants and Brett looked at his watch. He'd let her poke around another five minutes and then call the whole thing off. He'd figure some way to make this up to her. Even though she was enormously popular, she had come to him because he was the best science and math student in the school and she was a straight-A student except for the B she was getting in Mr. Connors' biology class. If Karla wanted to get into Stanford, she knew a B wouldn't cut it. She'd asked him for help on her final project—a definitive study of local flora—and he'd told her about the old Johansson farm that used to be right here where this meadow was. The Bishop County library had the Swede's old diaries on display, which Brett had read one afternoon while his mother was getting her hair bee-hived and shellacked. Back in the early 1800s, Johansson had grown acres of marijuana, or hemp as they called it then, as a major source for rope. Supplied most of his neighbors with it too. He also grew quite a bit of catnip, which he made into a tea to soothe his nerves. It was common practice back then. Today they’d toss his ass in jail and he’d be making tea while wearing a frilly apron for some no-neck named Bubba.
Anyway, Brett hadn't been the only one to read those diaries. Ms. Enders at the library had finally read them and insisted that the sheriff look into it. Everyone knew the sheriff had gone to college at Berkeley out in California and had probably smoked a ton of pot herself, so she’d know what to look for. The sheriff had rounded up a posse of volunteers, including Brett’s father of course, and searched through the area for any telltale plants to destroy. None were found. But Karla hadn't known that and it had seemed like good bait to get her up here alone.
Then what, dummy?
“Ow!” Karla's voice yelped.
Brett looked around but couldn't see her. “Karla?”
“Ow! Shit, that hurts!”
“Karla, where are you?”
“By the creek.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Kinda. Something weird just happened.”
Brett waded through the chest-high weeds and around a thicket of brush until he came to the grassy banks of the creek. Karla was kneeling by the water wringing out the white scrunchie she’d pulled from her ponytail. She pressed the wet cloth against one eye. He pulled the scrunchie away. The skin around her eye was puffy and red, as if she’d been slapped. And the eye itself was no longer blue like the other, but a yellowish-gold. The sight of it turned his stomach sour. “Jesus, what happened?”
“I don’t know, really. I was just kneeling here, looking at plants. Suddenly, I had this sharp pain.”
“Can you see?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t even hurt anymore. Kinda itches, though.” She pressed her palm against the eye and rubbed the wet scrunchie around for relief.
Brett watched her carefully for signs of sickness, but she seemed strong. The eye color thing was probably just an allergic reaction, a sting maybe, or some badass pollen. Either way, the cold creek water would help. “You want to leave, Karla?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Not after all the trouble you went through to help me.”
Brett smiled weakly. Resolved: Karla must never find out what a pig he was. He would spend the next week, every single day, gathering local flora, researching everything he could. He’d call in sick to school, grab a bus to Bishop County library. His parents would never know. He’d write the whole damn report if she’d let him. “Well, we’ll just rest here for a minute and see what—”
A sound. Heavy footsteps.
They both looked toward the sound. A person, maybe a quarter of a mile away, dressed in some kind of glittery aluminum foil spacesuit like an astronaut was coming toward them. He had a round fishbowl helmet on, tinted black so they couldn’t see his face. A small video camera was mounted on top of the helmet and affixed to the tinted visor was a pair of hi-tech binoculars of some kind. A metal tank rode his back, with an attached hose and spray nozzle that he held in one hand like a gun. He waved at them.
“What's he doing?” Karla asked, waving back.
“I don't know. Roasting to death, probably.” Brett figured he was spraying the plants with some kind of insecticide or weed killer. Perhaps the sheriff had found marijuana after all and they were killing it before the kids found out.
“We should make a run for it,” Karla said. “I don't want to get picked up for trespassing. Stanford definitely frowns on that.”
“Maybe you're right,” Brett said. The two of them turned and started to run up the embankment and through the high weeds. Karla quickly pulled ahead of Brett but then slowed down so he could keep pace with her. That small gesture of kindness made his heart ache for her. He no longer wanted to touch her breasts (well, not as much), he just wanted to hold her hand. Just hold it. Was that asking so much?
Karla stopped suddenly and backpedaled so abruptly that her elbow cracked Brett on the jaw knocking him down. She was screaming louder than any human sound he had ever heard. Dazed, Brett lifted his wheezing, sweaty head to see what had startled her. Probably a snake or a fox, maybe a bat....
But it wasn’t a snake or fox or anything he’d ever seen before.
Brett wet his pants.
Even as the warm urine ran down his thighs, he stood, grabbed Karla’s hand, spun her around, and pulled her back toward the creek. She stumbled along beside him, her face contorted in silent crying. Brett tried to think, to do the one thing in the world he was good at. But his mind was in some form of shocked stupor. Thoughts were fragmented nonsense, like a needle skipping across a scratched record. Yet somehow a sliver of a thought worked its way into his stunned consciousness: I’m doing something brave—and I’m holding her hand.
They ran blindly through the tall weeds for a couple hundred feet before Karla tripped and pitched forward, thumping hard against the ground. He tried to help her up, but she just batted away his hands and crawled away on all fours, whimpering. Her head was lowered like that of a charging bull as she plowed through the weeds.
Brett ran beside her, tugging at the back of her overalls, trying to pull her to her feet. “Get up, Karla! Please get up! We can run faster on our feet.” But she twisted her torso free from his grip and crawled away. Her left eye was nearly swollen shut now but she wasn’t whimpering anymore. Something primal had kicked in, and she was actually moving pretty fast. He was having trouble keeping up with her feral crawl. Brett turned to see if they were still being followed, but before he got his head all the way around, a sharp pain stabbed his left eye as if a hypodermic needle had just been thrust into it. The pain buckled his knees and he dropped to the ground. He clamped a hand over the eye and started his own panicky crawl after Karla, but he could no longer see her. The weeds had closed in around her. He lowered his hand from his eye. He could still see and the pain was gone, except for an annoying itch. He heard a rustle in front of him and scampered on hands and knees in that direction.
Brett clawed through the weeds with a desperate momentum. He cleared his mind of whatever was behind him and concentrated on forward movement. Toward Karla. The sharp edges of the weeds nicked at his face like pecking birds. His palms were raw and bleeding and he could feel the shredding flesh on his knees where his pants had torn open. But he ignored the pain and focused on moving. Nothing but hand-leg, hand-leg. Move forward, fatty. Move forward and find Karla.
He crashed through the weeds like a locomotive, surprised at his own power and speed. His actions were smooth and athletic in a way he never was while standing on his feet, balancing all that lumpish weight. His barrel body churned through the weeds so fluidly that he felt like a fish darting through tropical waters. For the first time in his life Brett didn’t hate his body. He now knew the elation other boys must feel when they run a touchdown, finger-roll a lay-up, blast a home run. How Karla must feel when she wins a race. Mastery over time and space. A flash of holy grace.
Suddenly, something had a tight hold of his ankle and Brett’s forward momentum sent him sprawling face-first into the dirt like a speared frog. Terrified, he tried to kick his foot free and claw his way forward with his broken and bleeding fingernails. The grip on his ankle seemed to loosen and his body tingled with hope. One more lunge...
Then something snagged his other ankle too and he was flipped over onto his back like a turtle. Fat and powerless once again.
Three figures in tin foil astronaut suits stood beside him. They each had those tinted helmets, weird binocular visors, and spray guns. The bottom half of their black-tinted helmets had some kind of data projected on it, like a computer screen. The data kept shifting between words and charts and maps. One of the astronauts held Brett’s ankles like wheelbarrow handles. “Where is it, son?” he asked calmly, dropping Brett’s legs. Brett relaxed; they were here to help. He tried to describe the thing he and Karla had seen, to warn them, but his excitement made the saliva splash around his mouth and he stuttered and sprayed garbled syllables as he had during the state spelling bee when he was nine. It had cost him the championship. Garbanzo, so simple.
One of them, the one who had held his ankles, suddenly kicked Brett hard in the hip. “Goddamn it, where!” she demanded, her angry voice booming from the speakers on her helmet. Her anger seemed to invoke a flurry of new data scrolling across her helmet. Again Brett tried to speak, but again it came out mush. Frustrated, he pushed himself to his knees and pointed furiously over his shoulder toward where they had just run from. But in mid-gesture he felt a cool mist against his face and he crumbled to the ground. Garbanzo: G-A-R....
2.
When the Queen of England refused to put on her clothes and come along peacefully, Sheriff Harper Shale grabbed a dirty dishtowel from the bar and snapped her naked ass so hard, it sounded like a wet palm slapping a watermelon.
“Oww, you bloody bitch!” the Queen howled in an English accent so muddled that it just as easily could have come from South Carolina as from South London. She jabbed a finger at Harper’s face and scowled. “I could have your head on a pike for this!”
“Put your panties on first,” Harper said. She handed the Queen the flimsy blue thong she’d snagged from atop the jukebox. The matching bra was dangling from the dusty moose antlers on the wall, out of reach.
Tim Hardy, sitting at the bar gripping his third bottle of Coors, snickered. “Yeah, put your panties on, Your Heiny-ness.” He cackled at his joke.
Harper snapped his arm with the towel.
“Goddamn!” he yelped, rubbing his scrawny bicep. “I could sue you for that, Harper. Police brutality.”
She snapped his other arm.
“Damn!” He jumped off the bar stool and backed away. “What’s wrong with you?”
Deputy Herb Devon, who’d also been deputy to Harper’s father for twenty years, appeared in the doorway and chuckled. “Some folks are just slow learners.”
“Gimme a hand, would ya, Herb,” Harper said.
Herb nodded, his black skin glistening with sweat from the short walk from the patrol car. He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his uniform and began gathering the rest of the Queen’s clothing. Faded jeans flung over a bar stool. White tank top kicked under a table where the Dooley brothers were busily eating hamburgers and steak fries, not paying attention to anything but the sports magazines they were reading. Herb held up the tank top. The word “Celebrity” was outlined in pink sequins on the chest.
“My daughter’s got this same shirt,” Herb said.
“Not bloody likely,” the Queen sniffed, snatching it from Herb’s hands. “I got mine in London. Saville Row. Very bloody expensive.”
Herb shrugged. “Starla’s must be a knock-off then.”
Harper smiled at her aging deputy, whose slow descent to his hands and knees was accompanied by a chorus of joint cracking and muffled grunts. She watched him crawl awkwardly under a table through greasy napkins and mashed cigarette butts, searching for the Queen’s Reeboks. All the other cops in neighboring counties wore obsessively pressed uniforms and mirrored aviator sunglasses they’d ordered from Sharper Image. Herb wore cheap flip-up sunglasses, the kind that when you flip the lenses up there's nothing underneath but the flimsy plastic frame riding on your nose. His khaki deputy’s uniform was wrinkled and sweat-stained, as always. Same as when she was a little girl and her father would bring her to the station after school. Herb would reach into his pocket and look surprised to find a Tootsie Roll, which he’d sneak to her with a wink.
“Men are shitheels,” the Queen of England said.
“Given half a chance,” Harper said. She steadied the Queen’s elbow as she hoisted her tight jeans over wide, reluctant hips. Harper felt no urgency in dressing the Queen. Everyone in town had seen her naked body before. Many times before. Every time she caught Garrett cheating.
The Queen of England’s real name was Lacy Grendal. Ten years ago she’d spent her high school senior year as an exchange student in England. She’d returned with a strange accent she’d insisted was English, and which she argued was not an affectation but rather the inevitable result of being exposed to so much superior culture. Wyoming folk didn’t take well to that attitude and soon dubbed her “The Queen of England,” which she defiantly named the beauty parlor she now owned down the street. She was twenty-eight, married three years to Garrett Grendal, who sold DirecTV satellite dishes. His job took him to a lot of rural houses, and it was pretty common knowledge that at some homes he left a little more behind than a warranty and remote.
“Well, Garrett?” Harper said to the handsome man at the end of the bar. “What are you going to do?”
He was drinking a Coke with three red cherries in it, the stem of a fourth cherry sticking out of his mouth. He stared at the TV behind the bar. Seinfeld was on. He turned at the sound of Harper’s voice as if aware of her or the Queen for the first time.
“Hey, Harper,” he grinned. His bright charming smile made it clear why he’d had so many opportunities to cheat on the Queen. “You gonna snap me with that towel too?”
“I’d like to snap you,” the Queen growled. “You know where, you sonofabitch.”
Garrett stood, straightened his short-sleeved white shirt and adjusted his shiny gold tie. He looked at the Queen for a long moment. She glared back with a fierce scowl, barefoot, holding one Reebok in her hand, her large breasts bundled under the too-small tank top. Eyeliner trails raked across her cheeks. Harper was surprised at Garrett’s expression. He wasn’t angry or embarrassed, as he had been in the past. Rather he looked disappointed and defeated, ashamed at his own inability to fix what was irretrievably broken.
He sighed, tossed a five-dollar bill on the bar, and walked out the door.
The Queen of England ran after him.
Harper turned to the bartender and owner. “Billy, will you get her bra down from there? No need for her being more embarrassed.”
“Will do, Harper,” Billy nodded.
“And can I get a cup of water to go?”
“Sure thing.” He filled a Styrofoam Coke cup and handed it to her. “For Mikey?”
“Yup.”
“Just bring him in next time.”
“Against the law. You know that.”
Billy shrugged. “There’s the law and there’s the law.”
“Hell, if you can’t break the law, who can?” Tim Hardy winked.
Billy grabbed the dishtowel Harper had used and snapped Tim Hardy in the arm.
“Fuck you do that for!” Tim barked.
“Pay up your tab, deadbeat.”
Herb and Harper walked out the bar and got into their ancient police cruiser.
“See what you started,” Herb said. “Now kids’ll be snapping each other with towels, saying, ‘It’s okay, Sheriff Shale does it.’”
“Jeez, Herb, when did you turn into such an old fart?”
“About two crow’s feet, one hemorrhoid, and a slipped disk ago.”
Harper leaned over the back seat and let Mikey slurp from the cup of water.
The radio crackled and a man’s voice began hollering hysterically: “Herb, goddamn it, come in.”
“It’s Stinkfinger,” Herb sighed, reaching for the mike. “What’s the boy done now?” Into the mic he said, “What’s up, Jimmy?”
Jimmy “Stinkfinger” Early, Harper’s only other deputy, and part-time at that, was hollering so excitedly that Harper couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Jimmy,” Herb said, “for crying out loud, calm down. I can’t understand a word.”
Harper grabbed the microphone. “Jimmy? It’s Harper.”
“You gotta come, Sheriff! Right now!” Jimmy was sputtering. “It’s bad! It’s very bad! It’s call-Vin-Diesel-for-help bad!”
“Calm down, Jimmy. Is anyone in immediate danger? Are you injured?”
She could hear him suck in a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “No, ma’am. No immediate danger. Not a Code 3, more like a Code 20 or Code 30, maybe a 187...”
“Forget the code number, Jimmy. What’s wrong?”
“At least one body. Not natural causes, neither. That’s for damn sure. Damn unnatural, if you ask me.”
“Whose body?” Herb asked.
“No!” Harper interrupted. “You’ll show us when we get there.” She didn’t want Jimmy revealing too much over the open airwaves. Lots of the old folks who couldn’t get around much listened to radio scanners all day, hoping for a little disaster the way farmers hoped for a little rain. Word of dead bodies getting around could cause some panic.
“Okay, Jimmy,” Harper told him, “we’re on our way. Just sit tight till we get there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said. He took several more deep breaths, forcing himself calm. “I’ve secured the crime scene area. I’ll start taking notes while it’s still fresh in my mind.” Jimmy had hopes of becoming an FBI agent one day, which Harper knew was about as possible as J. Edgar Hoover coming back to life. But who was she to step on his dreams just because she didn’t have any of her own anymore.
“Jimmy, don’t let anyone ‘just take a peek,’ no matter who they are. And don’t be calling anyone else.”
Meaning, of course, Granger. The first person everyone around here went to in a crisis. Not this time.
She turned to Herb. “You think of anything else?”
“Hell, Harper,” Herb said with stunned awe in his voice. “Looks like we got ourselves a genuine murder. Maybe we should stop by the library first and check us out some kinda book on murder investigations.”
“We don’t even know for sure it’s a murder. Jimmy gets excited sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Herb nodded. “Probably an accident and he’s looking to score some points with the feds.”
There hadn’t been a murder in Lenning County since Harper had taken office. This was in no way due to any law enforcement expertise on her part. Nobody around here got worked up about anything enough to kill someone. In fact, the last murders in the county had been six years ago. Harper’s parents.
“Sheriff?” Jimmy said. “Anything else you want me to do?”
“That’s all, Jimmy,” Harper said. “Sit tight and we’ll be there in about twenty—”
“Oh shit!” Jimmy’s voice boomed through the mic in panic. “Jesusfuckinghell!” A loud cracking sound filled the car as if Jimmy had thrown the mic against the dashboard.
“Jimmy, come in! Jimmy!” Harper called his name a few more times. Nothing.
She stomped the gas pedal and Herb steadied himself against the dash.