Sonia’s right, but I wish she weren’t and that proves my own judgement is suspect. I’m out of whack, off balance. I have only enough blood in my body for a penis or a brain, never both at the same time and the effect this woman is having on me is starving my brain of oxygen. Time spent with an MCI Consultant has always been enough to alleviate the demands of my hormones but that’s all changed.
Casting about for some lifeline that can pull me back to the shores of sanity, I say, “Graham, we haven’t heard much from you.”
He turns to face the woman and studies her for a time. “Chase, I think it’s a crock and you know I’d never mistreat a lady,” he says. “However, apart from the three women in this room we know and respect, I see no other lady. Therefore, I volunteer to take out the garbage. There’s a dumpster a block or so away but the gutter would serve the purpose as well.”
Why does that answer displease me? Have I no objectivity left?
Looking to my head of security, I say, “Diane, have you anything more to add?”
“I’ve already voiced my concerns that she could be part of an elaborate con,” she says. “But, I’m also big on intel. I want to hear whatever she has to say. If she convinces us she’s on the level and can serve as an asset, we can offer her our continued protection and a cot to sleep on. If not, we can let Graham decide between the gutter and the dumpster.”
“Ai-Ling?” I say.
“Ms. Palmer has guile,” she says, “and I would have no problem disposing of her. In pieces preferably. But I agree with the boss.” She dips her head to the side in Diane’s direction. “Let’s see what the woman knows and, if the boogie man exists as she tells it, I only ask that she let me know where I can find him and remove the threat.”
Gordon raises his hand and says, “Ai-Ling’s got my vote.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Violence? Really? Let’s keep it civilized, okay?”
“Raff?” I ask.
“I prefer to reserve my assessment for now,” Raphael says. “But first, I think we need to hear Ms. Palmer out.”
“There you have it, Ms. Palmer,” I say. “We’ve not totally decided between us if you are worth our time. You’re living on a knife edge. Let’s see if you can come down on the right side of it without cutting your own throat. So far, you’ve said we’re in grave danger. We’ll go with Sonia’s suggestion that you share with us this something that will convince us you’re the genuine article.”
The woman lets out a long breath. Then, looking Sonia dead in the eye, she says “You’re right. I do know how to use my skills between the sheets. But not on the streets as you imply. My skills demand a far higher price than you’ll ever get because I get paid in, not cash, but with information. If the information I require is not given to me directly, then I am given the means to attain it. Either way, I gain access to the most sensitive digitally stored data in the world.”
Turning to me, she says, “The real records of that terrible night, the night you lost your mother, Chase, had been tucked away in an ultra-secure database within the Oregon Justice Department. Have you any idea how desperate a man can be for female attention? And I don’t mean a guy who’s like some stereotypical computer geek. I’m talking about a man above any reproach, whose very status is determined by his perceived integrity. Never would he bend to the wiles of a woman. Unless—”
She smiles broadly. “I targeted a man whose honesty, his moral rectitude, had never been doubted. I took over his mind, his heart, his very soul and twisted them into a tool I could use to satisfy my own needs so that I had him begging to give me what I wanted. And now I have the real records of that night, Chase, and it does not agree with the truth that everyone thinks they know.”
Focusing in on me with piercing, laser like eyes, the woman says, “Your mother didn’t stab your father that night, Chase, you did. You, a 12-year-old boy, picked up the knife as the raving maniac who caused your birth was hitting your mother not realizing, in his frenzy, that he’d already killed her. You came to your mother’s rescue too late, didn’t you, Chase, to make any difference.
“It was Sheriff Williams who arrived first on the scene. That part is true. But the official story, the one I told you before, is not what he found. That was a story concocted by the Sheriff, the social worker and the judge who agreed that what really happened would be buried so deep behind the firewalls in Salem that no one would ever learn the truth.
“When he got there, Sheriff Williams walked into a bloody horror where the little, underfed boy in rags was still trying to plunge the dull knife yet again into his father. The sheriff pried the knife from your hands, Chase, but you went on blindly hitting your father with your now empty fists. Covered in blood, you were trying to make sure he could never come back to life and again threaten you or anyone you care about. You’re still trying to kill him. Only now your weapon of choice is not a dull knife but the massive intelligence you were born with and, since that night, honed to a razor’s edge. With it, you kill off the monsters of business who brutalize others who are defenseless and unable to protect themselves.”
She pauses, her face moving fractionally forward as if to study me more intensely, before saying, “Tell me, Chase, do you have some tiny bit of compassion and empathy for your father? Wasn’t he, too, a victim? Do you see, in the business world, people at the top who think nothing of using the backs of men like your father to enrich themselves, only to toss them out like garbage when they are no longer useful? Do you feel some deep satisfaction when you save some small corner of the environment from the clutches of such men? Do you feel you are giving back to people their dignity? The dignity stripped from them when they are forced into bankruptcy, drunkenness, broken marriages and violence by unemployment and welfare and then tossed upon the ash heap of human refuse?”
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