Payback Page 3

  "I am merely a guest here," Damon said. The sparkle in his eyes was reminiscent of the fiery young Damon, the charismatic man who brought the white supremacists he led to national attention during the middle-class upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies. "The lake belongs to Justin Threllkiss and the guards are in his employ."

  It figures, she thought, pausing to take off her white leather pumps before trudging across the sand. She knew Threllkiss; most LA reporters did. The eighty-three-year-old industrialist and archconservative was always good for a headline-grabbing quote or two about the inferiority of Jews, homosexuals, Mexicans, women, and, most of all, blacks. Threllkiss' gnarled, squat body, pale freckled skin, and thick, tortoiseshell glasses made him appear to all the world like a harmless eccentric made senile by time and conservative by wealth. Articles about him were given the same serious consideration readers gave Broom-Hilda and the Wizard of ID.

  Mordente was wary of his infirmed, elderly persona. Threllkiss' multinational oil, construction, and chemical corporations were among the world's largest, and he was still very much in control, directing them all while he scooted around his private Palm Springs golf course in a customized cart larger than some midsize sedans.

  He had groomed his son to take over, but he was killed a decade ago in a helicopter crash. Now all Threllkiss had under his thumb was his grandson, a nervous twenty-three-year-old with a taste for PCP, Marilyn Chambers movies, and Hollywood parties thrown by local Republicans.

  So the White Wash became Threllkiss' paternal interest. Threllkiss was the financial heart that pumped life into the White Wash, even when most thought the cult was dead and buried.

  "You, of course, are the only one who knows I'm here," Damon said, leading her onto the dock. "I trust you have stuck to the agreement my lawyers reached with your editors."

  "Of course," she said. "Your location is still a secret."

  "Good," he said. "You know how nasty those civil rights activists can get."

  The dock's wooden planks groaned under the weight of their footsteps. A twelve-foot-long aluminum barge rocked on the lake's tiny swells, bouncing against the side of the dock. Four foam-rubber boat pillows covered in colored plastic had been tossed haphazardly on the boat's three benches amidst a clutter of fishing tackle.

  Mordente shrugged. "They think you volunteered for the bone-marrow transplant with the Jewish child as a blatant parole ploy," she said. "And no one has forgotten the Kallahan slaughter that put you behind bars in the first place."

  Damon held the palms of his hands out in front of him and gave her a Santa Clausian guffaw comprised of three quick ho-ho-hos. "Now, that's a loaded remark full of leading questions and ill-advised charges. I'll tackle that once we're out on the lake." Damon stepped into the boat and sat on a pillow next to the dirty white outboard motor. She heard the air sigh from the pillow beneath him.

  "Out on the lake?" she asked.

  He grinned mischievously. "This is a fishing expedition, isn't it?"

  "Cute." She smirked.

  His grin didn't waver. "Nothing relaxes me more than still-fishing on a sunny afternoon. You'll enjoy it."

  Damon reached his hand out to her. She ignored it and got into the boat on her own, settling down on the center bench. Damon untied the boat and yanked on the cord. The engine roared and churned the water. He looked past Mordente to the open lake and switched the engine from neutral into forward gear.

  The boat sliced into the water with a sudden jolt, the bow rearing up. Mordente grasped the rim of the boat to steady herself. The rush of clean mountain air was exhilarating after weeks of being trapped in the sweltering heat of Los Angeles by a sludge laver of car exhaust and industrial filth. Suddenly, this assignment wasn't so miserable after all.

  "I know a spot on the lake, an underwater hole, where the trout like to hide," Damon yelled over the grind of the engine. Mordente nodded mutely. Big deal. She had never fished in her life. As far as she was concerned, that was Mrs. Paul's job.

  Damon killed the engine and let the boat glide on its forward momentum as he dumped a cement-filled coffee can attached to a rope over the side. He clapped his hands together.

  "Now we're all set." Damon lifted up a fishing pole and plucked a five-inch-long night crawler from a jar on the floor. It wiggled between his thumb and forefinger. "You know, when I was in prison I used to dream about fishing, the solitude of it and the freedom, the thrill of feeling the rat-a-tat-tat of a fish on the line."

  Mordente pulled the tape recorder out of her purse and set it on the bench beside her as she watched Damon thread the hook through the head of the night crawler. Yellowish goo spurted out of the worm where he inserted the hook.

  Damon pointed to a light band around a portion of the worm. "You can cut a worm anywhere but here, separate it into a dozen pieces and it will live as dozen new worms. But break this band, and the worm dies. This is band is the creature's bond with life."

  He pinched the worm apart just below the band and tossed the remainder back in the jar. The hooked worm squirmed, the hook running up the center of its body.

  "My dreams weren't enough to fill the emptiness of prison life," he continued. Judging by his paunch, Mordente figured exercise wasn't enough, either. "I realized I had to start life anew, I had to go back in time and rebuild my wayward life. I dedicated myself to becoming reborn in mind and born again in spirit through Jesus Christ."

  He handed her the pole. She took it and let the hook tap the surface of the water. She could see the worm wiggling in the water.

  "Hit the switch on the reel to release the line and let it drop until it goes slack, then reel it up three times," Damon said, baiting his hook.

  She pressed the switch with her thumb. The hook dropped into the water, and line spilled out of the reel. Looking over her shoulder, she could see a guard on the nearest shore spying on them with binoculars.

  His own line baited, Damon faced the water and let his line fall over the side of the boat. When his line curled slack, he reeled it up until it was taut.

  Damon sighed, pulled a handful of peanuts from his bulging pocket, and popped two, shell and all, into his mouth.

  "So, Ms. Mordente," he said, crunching on his peanuts, "I suppose you'd like me to talk about those people I dismembered."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He didn't look like the same Anton Damon who had butchered Dr. Martin Kallahan, his wife, Emma, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Angela, on that muggy afternoon in 1968. He didn't look like the man who chopped them into pieces with an ax and scattered their remains over a dry riverbed.

  Kallahan was the first black University of California chancellor, a man who encouraged the sort of minority achievement the White Wash abhorred. Damon took it upon himself to correct that.

  The nation was captivated by his sensational murder trial. It was a Damon tour de force. He sat in the courtroom like a bird of prey perched on a sharp ledge, with his legs drawn against his chest, his head resting on his knees, and his intense eyes trained on the judge. Damon's outbursts were sudden and vicious, unpredictable. He would hiss insults at witnesses, launch into passionate speeches about racial inferiority, and, as he did twice, leap on the defense table and try to piss on the judge.

  The Anton Damon that was forever emblazoned in Jessica Mordente's mind was the defiant, sweat-dampened face that stared back at her from the cover of Newsweek magazine, the eyes that dared you to read the stark white type in the banner headline across his chest:

  GUILTY!

  This Anton Damon munching peanuts in the boat seemed like a different person. Gone was the intensity, the violence, the hate that oozed from every pore.

  "I'm not the same man," said Damon. It was as if he had read Mordente's mind.

  "You aren't? What's different?" Mordente asked. "While in prison, you wrote Supremacy, and the doctrine preached in those pages differs little from the doctrine of your White Wash days. You still seem to believe that inferior human beings, ma
inly blacks, gays, and Jews, are unjustly obtaining positions of social power over superior whites in order to destroy white civilization. You still believe they must be stopped."

  "I don't advocate violence. Once I did. I've learned the value of human life," Damon replied, shoving another handful of peanuts into his mouth. His chewing sounded like someone stomping on gravel. "Most importantly, I've found Jesus and redemption through him. I'm a new person." His crammed two fingers into his mouth and searched for a sliver of peanut shell that jabbed his cheek. Mordente tried to remember if those were the same two fingers that had impaled the night crawler on the hook.

  "And what about the Kallahans? You did murder them."

  He flicked the shell particle into the lake and wiped his mouth across the back of his wrist. "All men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Damon sighed. "I have sinned more than most. But the only sin that is not forgiven is the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Any other sin, including murder, including the vile mass murders for which I do repent, can be forgiven and is forgiven."

  Without warning, a thunderous bellow erupted from Damon's throat and he yanked his pole back towards him. Mordente jerked with surprise and nearly dropped her pole into the lake. Damon began reeling quickly. The reel buzzed electrically, like a swarm of bees, as it dragged in the thirty-five feet of ten-pound test line. Mordente sat still, her gaze fixed on the expression on Damon's face. She recognized his expression now as the same crazed one she'd seen on the cover of Newsweek.

  "Come on, come on," Damon urged, his eyes aglow, his face flushed.

  She heard a splash and shifted her eyes to the water. A fish danced on its tail fin along the top of the water, trying to break free. Damon brought the line in steadily.

  "It's a two-footer, look at that, a two-footer," Damon boasted. He reached for the net with his right hand and thrust it into the air under the fish. Capturing it in his net, Damon brought the fish into the boat.

  "Damn, it's a two-footer all right." Damon said. "A beautiful rainbow. I'll let you take it back, Ms. Mordente. They're good eating."

  Mordente felt the interview slipping away. Luckily, the agreement his lawyers had struck with her publisher was for two separate interviews. She knew now she'd need them. "You still believe blacks are inferior, don't you?"

  "My beliefs are irrelevant in the light of God's indisputable truths." Damon pulled a long knife out of his shoe-box-size plastic tackle box with one hand and picked the fish up by the gills with the other. The fish convulsed madly in the air between Mordente and Damon. "Blacks, it has been proven, are genetic mutations weakening the human species. The trend toward racial integration does not bode well for the future strength of Christian society."

  Damon jammed the knife into the fish's belly and sliced up towards the gills. Blood spilled out of the fish's gut and painted Damon's arm in dozens of creeping crimson stripes.

  Mordente swallowed, her throat dry. The fish was still alive, squirming and splashing it's blood on Damon's shirt in tiny specks.

  "You have to bleed them," Damon said, regarding the fish and giving it a disgusted scowl, "or they rot." He dropped the knife, yanked out the fish's organs, and tossed them over his shoulder into the water.

  "We, as Christians battling the forces of Satan, are severely outnumbered by the forces of disbelievers." Damon opened the Styrofoam ice box and dropped the fish onto the block of blue ice. He stared at it a moment. Mordente could see the fish's gills were still trying to suck in some water.

  "Stupid things. You tear out their guts and yet they still aren't smart enough to know when they are dead." Damon looked up at her. "Oh yes, anyway, if you use simple mathematics and combine the number of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus—not to mention the pagan cultures of the American Indian and African tribesman—you can see that the minions of Satan far outnumber the followers of the Lord."

  Damon splashed lake water on his hands and washed the blood off his arm. "However," he continued, "Jesus says fear not, little flock, for He is our good shepherd and the ravenous wolves will be powerless to render any harm to those of us who recognize Him as our Lord, our savior, and our commander in the never-ending battle against those who would turn the cross upside down."

  "Doesn't Jesus also say love your enemy?" Mordente asked.

  "But I do, Ms. Mordente." Damon, eager to get his line back in the water, quickly stuck another worm on his hook. "I love them so very, very much. That's why I don't want to see them harmed by misplacement in society. To make someone live in a way contrary to their nature is the greatest injustice you can inflict." Damon was about to drop his line in the water when he froze, intently watching Mordente's pole.

  "What weighed most in the parole board's mind was not your history as a model prisoner or your renewed devotion to religion. It was, they say, your willingness to volunteer for an extremely dangerous bone-marrow transplant to save the life of a Jewish girl," Mordente said. "Why? You must admit it seems contrary to your doctrine."

  "I brought a lot of pain and misery to society. The least I could do was undertake one unselfish act that might help an innocent child." Damon nodded towards Mordente's pole. She followed his gaze. The end of her pole bobbed madly towards the water.

  "I think you've caught something." He grinned.

  # # # # # #

  Damon entered the house as Mordente's RX-7 bounced back along the roadway towards the gate. Two fish were on ice in the Styrofoam cooler on her passenger seat. He figured the suffocatingly dense heat in the car would melt the ice by the time she was down the hill. Soon the car would smell like a trawler, the fishy stench clinging to her body like a lustful drunk.

  "How did you rationalize giving your marrow to a Jew?" asked the stocky man at the dining room table, removing a set of headphones from his ears and setting them on the listening device in front of him.

  Damon shrugged indifferently. "One step back, two steps forward."

  # # # # # #

  Saturday evening, 11:37 p.m.

  His hard-on strained against his red leather jumpsuit towards the jiggling ass that bounced up the stairs in front of him. The stairwell had the acrid stench of urine, the wails of hungry babies echoed down the halls, and the wallpaper was peeling off in ragged sheets that exposed the cockroaches scurrying along the decaying wooden framework.

  The black whore in front of him was oblivious to it. The tiresome responsibilities of the business at hand and a life spent in this familiar terrain shut out the environment. Her world for the next fifteen minutes would be the loser in the bullshit outfit behind her.

  She had met him only a couple of minutes ago, outside of her apartment building.

  "What you s'posed to be? Huh? Halloween ain't happenin' yet, honey," she had told him when he approached her on the street, the $20 bill balled up in his hand like a wad of used Kleenex. "Sado" was written all over this wimp, dressed up like some kind of funky Batman, utility belt and all. She figured she was in for a slap or two and then a quick, meager ejaculation. Five minutes, tops.

  Behind her now, the sound of him lustily dragging in the air was like the ragged noise a dull saw blade makes against wood.

  His eyes, jade oracles in a raccoonish dark band of makeup, took in her body. Her buttock-hugging, black polyester minidress accented the garters that held her red lace stockings over her rippling thighs. The dress was cut low down her sway back, clear to the dark mole that rested atop the curve to her jaunty rear. She had black pumps with three-inch heels that thrust her butt up so high he figured a satellite could fly right up her ass. Or—he grinned to himself—my powerful love rocket. She'd like that.

  The merchandise, though, the stuff he paid the $20 for, was up front. And he got another look at that as she turned from the stairwell and walked back towards him along the hall. Her gargantuan breasts hung low and unrestrained, swaying lazily from side to side with each step.

  When he emerged in the hallway, she had already disappeared into the room, leav
ing the door open behind her.

  He unzipped his jumpsuit as he walked and unclipped one of the plastic pouches on his belt. When he entered the room, she stood facing him, her back to the bed, which was a sunken mattress on a rusted spring frame. The water-stained acoustic tiles on the ceiling were yielding to gravity and threatened to drop at any moment. The double-sashed window was propped open with a brick.

  She looked at the pale flesh revealed in the wide V of his open jumpsuit. If it hadn't been for her wealth of anatomical knowledge and the two nearly indiscernible dots of sickly red on either side of his torso, she would never have known it was a chest. She lowered her eyes and saw the red leather cone jutting between his legs. At least, she thought, there was something vaguely manly about this guy.

  "You got the biggest cock I ever saw," she intoned. The words sounded as decayed as the room. "I can't wait to feel it inside me."

  He closed the door softly behind him and swaggered over to her. Five minutes, tops, she told herself. He put his hands on her shoulders, his penis pressing against her stomach, and peeled her dress down, letting it drop in a heap at her feet. Her breasts were two drooping sandbags hanging from her shoulders.

  His eyes followed her breasts to the rolls of her waist, then down to the tuft of pubic hair fluffing out of her crotchless underwear.

  The man pulled down his jumpsuit so that it cupped his testicles and then slammed the palms of his hands against her saucer-size nipples, making her tumble backwards onto the bed. As her body hit the solid mattress, he watched her breasts bounce and then sag to her sides.

  "Nigger," he hissed.

  She stared up at him. One of those slave masters, she thought, fear tickling her between the shoulder blades. They were always the worst.

  He dropped on top of her and jammed himself into her, delighting in the way her body buckled defensively. His thrusts began immediately, hard and fast, his breathing locomotive.

  She expected him to come in an instant. He didn't. His body twisted and squirmed with each thrust. She raked his back with her fingers, going through the motions of faking pleasure, surprised at the tremendous perspiration that already soaked his skin.