Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Gregor and Pete, the other partners in New Tech, sat in chairs equidistant from her, the three of them facing different directions. No one spoke. They were worried about Davis (although, secretly, Joan suspected that she cared for his health more than they did, even if they’d known him longer), but there was another element to their concern: it could be any one of them bleeding out in the operating room just now.

The clinic building was on the television, monitored by a rerouted traffic helicopter. From the air it looked institutional and generic, which is what Gregor and Pete and Davis had in mind when they moved in, Joan guessed. The building was nonthreatening, its cube shape unobjectionable to anyone but an architecture critic. Deliberate police paced the lawn in front. She could see yellow evidence flags stuck in the ground at varying radii to the spot where Davis fell. Curious bystanders assembled at a safe distance. A banner of text across the bottom titled the events “Clone Clinic Terror.”

Frantic nurses had led Davis’s sobbing wife and daughter to another room inside. Joan was thankful for that, mostly because she wouldn’t know what to say to them. She had always been uncomfortable around Jackie Moore. Even under these circumstances, every glance between them would be loaded with subtext in Joan’s mind.

Davis had confided their occasional troubles to her in intimate detail. Ever attracted to older men (Joan’s graduate school relationships consisted of a series of affairs with professors and residents), she reciprocated in an empty, flirtatious way, knowing the aspects of his character that made Davis most desirable – loyalty, confidence, empathy – were the very traits that would keep him tethered to home, even (or rather, especially) if home was making him miserable.

Joan had had three sexual relationships with married men in the past, and she eventually regretted them all. Two of those men were now divorced, and that assuaged and compounded her guilt in equal amounts. The third was still married, and when she was reminded of their affair – by a photograph, or a printed reference to the Garfield Park Conservatory (which he had admired), or by the exit to his home on the Edens Expressway – an icy shiver consumed her. Never again, she thought.

The status quo in her relations with Davis suited her fine. He liked her and she liked him, and except for a touch on the arm that lasted two seconds too long when he was helping her with her coat at last year’s Christmas party, it remained unphysical. She could enjoy the vicarious attentions of a smart and handsome and fit older man, and she could sneak looks at him in the office and imagine, in the car on the way home or alone in bed at night, what might have been possible between them had they met at another time, in some other place.

When Gregor appeared through the swinging doors to the trauma center, Joan realized she hadn’t noticed he’d been gone.

“It looks good,” Gregor said. “He’s going to be fine.”

“Thank God. Lord. Christ,” Pete said. “Are you sure? Can we see him? Can I call that reporter?”

“What reporter?” Joan frowned.

“Channel seven. I’d have to look up her name. She promised me she’d keep the cameras away from the hospital if I called her as soon as we knew something.”

Gregor nodded. “Yeah. Call her. In a minute.” He looked at the TV. “Any news? Have they caught the guy?”

Pete said they hadn’t.

“Bonavita!” Gregor growled. “Fucking Bonavita for sure. He’s going cross-country. Memphis, Chicago, probably Saint Louis next.”

“I have to call my wife,” Pete said. “She’s at her cousin’s house in Barrington.” He slid a hand flush to his forehead, under his short bangs. “Can we go home, do you think?”

Joan said, “We can’t hide.”

Her partners gave no indication they agreed.

An hour or so later, after Pete and Gregor had made their calls and they had waited again in silence for a nurse to tell them it was okay to come back, they walked through emergency to an elevator that took them to the third floor and Davis’s private room.

Davis was unconscious, tubes pushing out of his nose and mouth like the legs of an oversized translucent insect. His thin, taut blond wife, her almost comically round blue eyes tethered to the dressing on his wound, leaned over his bed with the weightless control of an ex-gymnast.

“He needed a lot of blood,” Jackie said. “He needed a lot of blood, but he’s going to be all right.”

Joan suggested New Tech set up a temporary Red Cross donation center at the clinic, and all three doctors agreed to give blood the next day. Joan gave red-eyed Anna Kat a stiff squeeze with one arm, which she answered with a wet, worried stare.

At home, in the dark morning, alone in bed, Joan relived her own years-ago encounter with unchecked evil and told herself, as she would say again in a few months’ time when evil would come again, for Anna Kat, that at least the stuff it took from Davis could be replaced.

Mickey the Gerund was over three hundred miles away, in a forty-dollar-a-night highway motel room near Alexandria, Minnesota, before he knew Davis Moore had survived.

Moore had left the office a little earlier than he had the past few days, but Mickey was ready, barrel pointed, scope tuned to the proper focal length. He recognized Moore in the shadows of the foyer, disappearing momentarily into a conference room, where, for some reason, he opened the vertical blinds. Mickey thought about taking him out at the window, and even tensed on the trigger when he knew he had the shot, but decided it was better to be patient. They wouldn’t let photographers inside the clinic to see the body, and this was, after all, a media event. He wanted every mad scientist in the world to see Davis Moore bleed out on the ground, and for that he needed to drop the body where the helicopters would have an unobstructed view.

Of the four doctors at New Tech, he’d picked Moore because he was the worst sinner. He was one of the country’s most vocal advocates of reproductive cloning, testifying before Congress and writing papers for the journals, and newspaper editorials. He was handsome and eloquent and he helped give the procedure respectability. One of his colleagues had said, after one heated battle in Congress, that if it hadn’t been for the advocacy of Davis Moore, the cloning procedure would be unavailable to the thousands of parents who needed it. Somewhere in the backseat of the Cutlass was a torn photo from a magazine, mailed to the Hands of God by a sympathetic acquaintance, that celebrated the smiling physician as if he were a movie star. Davis Moore was near the top of the Hands of God hit list.

“Shit,” Mickey spat when the woman on the news said Moore was in stable condition, recovering. The sinner would live to ridicule God another day, and the Gerund’s pride was hurt on top of it. He considered himself a good shot at that distance. Still, Mickey had fired a bullet, the bullet had struck flesh, and news of the event was right now on televisions in Minnesota and California and Washington and probably even Hong Kong. Cameras were showing the yellow-bordered crime scene and reporters were describing to the world the diabolical things Davis Moore did for money and how his assailant clearly wanted him and doctors like him dead. That was the point, after all. There wouldn’t be many “fertility” doctors or researchers or even drug manufacturers getting good, sound sleep tonight.

Mickey liked to be philosophical at moments like this. It might be a while, years even, but someday he’d get another crack at Dr. Davis Moore, God willing.

A twenty-four-hour news network, one of only eight channels beamed into this cheap motel, interviewed a pair of advocates, one pro-cloning and one anti-cloning. Mickey sat at the edge of the queen-sized bed holding a bowl underneath his chin and spooning oatmeal he’d made on a hot plate. The ugly pro-cloning woman was ranting about the radical right wing and terrorism and how even her life had been threatened recently by these fanatics. It sounded like an empty, pathetic cry for sympathy but Mickey knew the claim was true because he had done the threatening, plucking her name and dozens of others off the screen during interviews just like this one.