Brian Hodge - Prototype

He would never have admitted it to anyone, but sometimes Valentine wondered if he wasn’t a better man for having lost his testicles. Really. Looking back before the cancer, he wondered how much time he had spent just trying to protect them, relieve them, meet their incessant demands. They could be worse than even the worst children he could imagine, because those little monsters you could at least ship away for a weekend, or even walk out on the rest of their lives. With gonads, you had no options.

Naturally, he had mourned their loss. Years of anguish and grieving it had taken, but eventually he had realized it was like being liberated from, well, a ball and chain.

It had bestowed upon his mind a clarity of vision he had never known outside of dreams. He could track a line of thought and wring from it all he hungered for. Without that distracting flood of hormones, ideas came to him like smiles from the gods.

Like this game. This new game. This indulgence. The old fantasy had continued to burn strong enough to force him to seek a compromise, making of it a variation on a very old theme, but even this middle ground had unique thrills all its own.

One gun, a Colt Python .357 revolver. One bullet, hollow point. Which chamber in the cylinder? He would leave it to chaos to sort out those one-in-six odds.

When the moment was right.

He met Teddy where Boston met the Bay, along the wharves and the plaza before the New England Aquarium. Teddy the family man — stand downwind of him when he belched and you could catch a whiff of yesterday’s meals. A numbing Atlantic wind swept in off the water, encountered the city’s first rank of buildings, and whipped itself into confusion. It roared, nature’s scream at mankind’s impudence.

“Think you could’ve picked someplace windier?” Teddy cried above the gale. It made a wreck of the careful sculpting he did to conceal early pattern baldness. “I hear at MIT, they got this wind tunnel, check aerodynamics, that kind of shit.”

“Let’s go in, let’s look at the fish,” Valentine said.

They crossed the plaza, leaning into the wind, while out in the harbor it chopped the water into low whitecaps. Farther out, a pair of freighters chugged and rolled against a horizon gray as iron.

Friday afternoon and the aquarium was doing slow business. The day after Thanksgiving, most of the human herd had holiday shopping on their minds. Couldn’t wait to spend their money, feed the machine, instead of learning about these creatures that owned the other seventy percent of the world.

They strolled past exhibit tanks, stocked with fish from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, glassed-in replicas of their home seas. Floating along with rippling gills, or nosing the glass to peer out at the fragmentary world on the other side, sometimes those fish looked wiser than most people he had met.

“Look at that one,” said Teddy, pointing. “Looks like Bob Hope, doesn’t he?”

Present company included, Valentine feared. But Teddy was a good employee, and there was business to do, the sort of business it was never wise to discuss over telephones.

“What’s the status on the Alabama shipment?” he asked.

“Lydell says he’ll have the last of the M16s converted by tonight. I got a van and driver lined up to run them down from his place to the Chelsea drop until the launchers get here.” Teddy maneuvered back and forth before a tank of lionfish and checked his reflection; couldn’t quit worrying about that hair. “Sunday at the latest on those. Breckton says he made the payoff and got the armory keys last night.”

They took their time along a coral reef and went over the logistics of moving the shipment south. Frequently, the real money to be made from selling arms wasn’t so much in the merchandise itself, but in its transportation. For smaller shipments such as this, he liked small vans, because they attracted little attention on the highway; but the big problem with vans was that, once loaded with all that ordnance, they rode down low on their shocks. State troopers noticed that sort of thing, so the suspensions had to be rebuilt ahead of time.

It was a panic shipment all the way: white supremacists in the thick of Alabama, sure their world was close to caving in. They had committed nearly all of their war chest to a shipment of M16s to be converted to full automatic fire, and M79 grenade launchers with crates of both smokers and explosive rounds. Valentine had already been able to lay hands on the cream of their order: four Gustav 84-mm recoilless rifles, originally designed to penetrate a Soviet main battle tank at up to 400 meters, and enough to inflict grievous fuckage on any armored vehicle that any federal agency might roll onto their compound.

They expected this as a matter of due course. Everybody had an Armageddon hard-wired to some damn timetable — these backwoods lads because they’d been unable to control one of their own.

The incident had made national news three weeks ago, each network trumpeting it as Exhibit A of national disgrace and more proof positive of a barbarous age. Valentine remembered it well, having savored every telecast. A bigot named Hardy Sutton had, late one night, drunkenly run his car off the road and into a swiftly flowing creek. Drowning amid the beer cans would have been imminent, had a passing motorist driving home from the late shift not stopped to dive in and pull him to dry ground.

Afterward, Sutton had apparently been unable to live with himself, knowing his rescuer had been black. Co-workers reported behavior of a man in rapid deterioration. Within the week, Sutton had taken a small submachine pistol and not only killed his savior, but also wiped out the rest of the man’s family before reserving the final trigger pull for his own head. A trace on the weapon pointed a finger back to members of an Aryan resistance faction.

Some people simply could not withstand a challenge to their preconceptions, for which Valentine was eternally appreciative. It led to a more interesting world. And people spent billions to give muscle to their hatreds.

Once he and Teddy had the details worked out, Teddy decided to skip out on the rest of the aquarium, and Valentine continued alone. His topcoat hung well-fitted to his frame, and he walked slowly, back straight, every step smooth and deliberate. Hands in his coat pockets, the right one caressing the Python revolver.

On one of the aquarium’s many levels was an exhibit known as “The Edge of the Sea" — rocks and shallow water, like a small tidal pool. They kept it stocked with durable, crusty little creatures, while an employee stood by encouraging curious visitors to pick them up, examine, learn. Kids loved it.

Here Valentine lingered, standing a couple of feet behind a father and two grade-schoolers, a boy and a girl. It smelled like a long custody weekend — Dad’s got the kids, got to make every moment count or they would hate him one day. With the kids’ attention distracted, Dad had that look of sad, weary panic: Am I doing the right thing, are they having fun?

Inside his roomy pocket, Valentine maneuvered the revolver, trained it on Dad’s back. Thumbed back the hammer, heard a click too soft for anyone else’s ears, like a whispered secret.

One bullet, the cylinder spun more than an hour ago, waiting like a stilled roulette wheel the dealer had yet to check.

Blond-haired boy, braces already, holding up a horseshoe crab and wiggling it in his sister’s face. She only laughed.

Valentine’s hand, slick on the grip — if this moment could only last forever. The anticipation, the perfect and delicious element of random chance, a stranger selected on a moment’s whim, with a one-in-six chance of a magnum bullet tearing his spine in two. He might even live to appreciate the irony.