This spot was probably too close but Mickey was tired, tired of years on the road, of napping in his car and sleeping in cheap motels and crashing in the homes of strange “friends of the cause” whom he didn’t entirely trust. When you’re tired you get careless, and he supposed sitting in this chair was exactly that, but screw it. He’d earned the right to take a few chances. Earned the right by accomplishing so much and not getting caught. He and Byron Bonavita.
Byron was probably dead, rotting away peacefully and undetected high in some Blue Ridge Mountain tree house, Mickey supposed, although only he and a few others in the Hands of God guessed as much. The FBI now suspected Byron in twenty-six clone-clinic killings, but Mickey had done all but five of them. Byron Bonavita might have been famous, but in truth he wasn’t prolific. He was a bogeyman made out of government incompetence and fed like a casserole to the starving and witless media.
Mickey the Gerund enjoyed his freedom, but in the moments when he was most honest with himself, he resented the credit Byron got for his work. Of course, the victims were the point here, not the perpetrator, but wouldn’t it be better for the cause if the public weren’t able to pin the killings on a single lone-wolf radical? If they thought there was more than one Byron Blakely Bonavita out there taking a courageous stand against the evils of humanism and science and technology, wouldn’t they be forced to confront the issue of cloning, to take a stand, to say I’m for this or against it and here’s why? Wouldn’t some senator or congressman or even president have to stand before the people and say, While I deplore the tactics used by groups like the Hands of God, their actions represent a strong popular sentiment in this country that something must be done about immoral acts being committed in our name by doctors and scientists all across this great land of ours, et cetera, and then democracy could do much faster what Mickey and, at one time, Byron were doing oh-so-slowly, on a case-by-case basis.
That’s why Mickey started mixing things up. He still shot the occasional doctor when the situation called for it, but more and more he was using other tactics. He cut the brake line on a Lexus once, and poisoned a bottle of water with arsenic and slipped it into a clinic fridge. Neither of those were kills, but the point was the same. There had been a few that had been even more personal. In addition to the twenty-one dead, Mickey had wounded more than thirty, many of them patients and secretaries and support staff. He took credit for eleven retirement cross-outs on Harold Devereaux’s Web site, and in some ways those were better than kills. There was something extremely satisfying when a clone doctor cried uncle. It was like a man repenting, although the doctors were never contrite, always issuing a statement instead that claimed they were doing it for the safety and security of their family, et cetera. That was part of Mickey’s job, too – intimidating the wife or husband and their kids with threatening letters and e-mails and phone calls. Occasionally he’d get close enough to whisper in some kid’s ear. No one appreciated how diverse and effective his tactics had been. That was the price of success for a covert soldier, he told himself.
This coffee shop, named Gimbel’s, had the best little chocolate pastries, airy French ones, which was why he was sitting at this window counter for the third straight day. No one thinks anything about it now, but later, when the girl behind the counter is being asked by the cops if she saw anyone or anything unusual lately, she’ll tell them, There was this guy in here for the last couple days and I’d never seen him before, and then they’ll show her a picture of Byron Bonavita and ask her if it could have been him, keeping in mind that this photo is over seven years old now, and she’ll say, Yeah it could have been this guy, maybe a couple years older and heavier, and the papers will run the Bonavita manhunt on its front page again tomorrow. It was all becoming so predictable.
An hour ago he had walked into the clinic across the street and asked for some literature. It was a cool northern California day and he could see why people paid a fortune in rent to live here. If it weren’t for the earthquakes and the fact that his job didn’t permit him to take a permanent address, he might think about moving here himself to enjoy the temperate bay climate and the French pastries. There would be other things to consider, however. Like his neighbors. There were like-minded folks in this part of the country, but you had to look hard to find them.
After the receptionist handed him a stack of information ( disinformation, he would prefer to call it), Mickey asked to use the rest room. Security was unusually lax here, probably because he’d never been to northern California before. They probably thought they were off Byron Bonavita’s radar. The bathroom smelled like alcohol and oranges. When he finished his business he washed his hands and walked out of the men’s room and across the street and ordered a coffee and a pastry and read some of the clinic literature. The brochures pictured happy families, unburdened of recent stresses, which might have included infertility or hereditary disease or just the unpredictable timing of bearing children the natural way or the inconvenience of adoption or all of the above.
Fifteen minutes ago, a nurse from the clinic had entered the shop and picked up an order of six coffees, which she must have phoned in. She did a double take when his eyes met hers. Maybe she had seen him in the clinic, or maybe she saw that he was reading the clinic’s brochures. It couldn’t have been so unusual for prospective patients to stop in the coffee shop after a visit to the clinic. The only way it might have gone pear-shaped, really, would have been if the nurse had conferred with the girl behind the counter and they had lumped their private observations together to make a suspicion, but the nurse didn’t do that. She gathered up her coffees in a cardboard box, checked the integrity of the lids, and rushed back to the clinic, crossing the four lanes ladder-style, one at a time, in stops and starts. Mickey’s carelessness wasn’t really carelessness after all, when you considered the remote chance that any person might put her two together with someone else’s two and come up with a conspiratorial four.
When Mickey finished his coffee he looked at his watch. It was later than he thought and he wished every town with a fertility clinic also had a place as nice as this coffee shop, where the pastry was so good and the time passed so quickly. He gathered up the brochures and folded them into the pocket of his green windbreaker. With a wave to the girl behind the counter – Holy shit, Officer, I sure do remember Byron Bonavita. He sat right there by the window, looking across at the clinic, and he even waved at me friendly-like when he left! – Mickey passed through the glass door into the sea-seasoned air that was just the right temperature and began the walk to his car, which he’d parked far enough away that he wouldn’t have any problems with fire engines and black-and-white traffic.
When the clinic men’s room exploded he was half a mile on, his back to the concussion, which sounded like a steel drum being struck inside a giant pillow. He turned with the others on the sidewalk, exchanged with them puzzled glances and What on earth s? Then after a pause he continued on to his car, where he looked like just another guy rushing home to the evening news to find out the source of that nasty black smoke in the distance.