Page 4
Story: Saint of the Shadows
3
Rich, Radioactive, Or Alien?
M arisol clasped the silver chain around her neck and shifted the cross pendant forward. She had lost the greater meaning of the cross, but because it was Abuelita’s, she ached a bit every time she had to take it off. Her latest shift was a case-in-point that looping things around one’s throat was not recommended at the ER. She ran her thumb over the pendant and let go. The pendant hung right under the V of her clavicle, shining against her own brown skin the way it shined against Abuelita’s.
Rossi collapsed on the bench in front of the lockers. “What’re you up to this weekend?” She shoved one foot into a wool-lined boot.
Marisol slid into her shabby overcoat. The pilled fabric turned the herringbone pattern into disarrayed zigzags. A pull of an oncoming smile threatened to give her surprise away. “Have a hot date to the children’s hospital ball Saturday. ”
“I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.” Rossi’s hazel eyes widened. “Do I know him?” she asked before she grunted, jamming her other foot into its respective boot.
“You do. Her name is Annie Park.” Marisol slammed the locker shut. “She said she’s above performances of hetero normativity. In other words, we’re having a girl’s night out.” She fluttered her eyes, joking.
Marisol wasn’t exactly straight as an arrow, but if she ever did come out, she imagined there would be cake, tequila, and a smidge more sacrilege to make Mom go apoplectic, not the beat-up locker room after a long third shift. Nope, Ma Novotny’s disappointment in Marisol would come from wasting the childbearing hips she inherited with her standard case of spinsterhood.
Rossi pulled on her trapper hat. “A trip to the Varian estate? Could you spill a glass of really expensive champagne for me? Or chew up and spit out some caviar?” Finished with her layers, Rossi resembled a snowman.
All Marisol had to withstand the cold were pockets. “You got it,” she said.
Beyond the automatic doors, the air bit into her already dry skin. Rossi nodded to her and headed in the opposite direction. The morning sun blasted against Marisol’s back as she hunched her shoulders to her ears and stuffed her hands inside her pockets. First stop was the corner store to get her sunrise special .
The electric bell sounded as she stepped inside the store. It stank of old cooking oil and brewed coffee. Not the freshest coffee, but it was the best zap of caffeine for a person’s dollar. She filled one large paper cup with it and the second with hot water.
To Marisol’s amusement, the spirited conversation between the cashier and a customer overpowered the twang of the Greek guitar playing over the store’s speakers. She plopped a bag of chamomile tea into the second cup, sealed the drinks with a lid, and headed to the counter to pay, having assembled her sunrise special.
“Who reads actual newspapers, anyway?” the cashier said in an exasperated tone. “People read the news on their phones.”
“I still read it!” The customer tapped his finger against the counter—the counter he blocked. If Marisol waited any longer, she’d receive third-degree burns holding her beverages. The kook continued, “You can always tell what the rich and powerful are hiding from you with a physical paper. Not so with algorithms, links, and headlines they control.”
The cashier motioned for Marisol to step forward. She scooched behind the dramatic customer and dropped a few bucks in the metal tray under the scratched plexiglass partition.
The customer shook his wrinkled copy of the day’s paper. “Backpage and below the fold. That’s where the real news is. That’s what will screw us over.”
The cashier tossed the change into the tray. Marisol mouthed, “Thanks” and moved on.
“Look here,” the customer continued, “not even two inches of text about the W.H.O. losing a virus in Manila. Mark my words! That’s what we should pay attention to, not Vincent Varian and whoever he’s bringing to a party.”
Vincent Varian again! Marisol couldn’t escape his vapid idiocy. The less space he occupied in the news or in her mind, the happier she’d be. She exited the store with the same sing-song bell that greeted her. The winter air provided welcome relief to her bare hands from the piping hot drinks. Though outside, she heard the conversation inside, building to a crescendo of a full-blown argument. Something about free refills being free as long as someone didn’t annoy the cashier.
Marisol hurried down an alleyway next to the hospital. Not too long ago, she and Annie would usually meet for a post-shift breakfast on one of the hospital’s well-hidden fire escapes. That was, until the morning Vincent Varian interrupted them, dry heaving over the ledge.
Annie’s heart-shaped face poked out of the cocoon of her thickly knitted scarf. With a mouthful of breakfast, she shouted, “Dude! Are you okay?”
In sunglasses and a wool coat, he was the epitome of refined cool despite his failure at ejecting his stomach’s contents. A half-chewed morsel of English muffin dropped from Annie’s lips as she whispered, “Holy Mother of God. It’s Vincent Varian.”
Marisol handed him the last of her lotion tissues to wipe his mouth. She had splurged on the fancier ones to help her during Abuelita’s time in hospice and Caz’s arraignment. As she offered them, she said, “Some days you need the good stuff. If you swipe the toilet paper from here, you’ll sand your nose clean off.”
He gaped, dumbfounded, as if the help had never spoken to him before. “Just a hangover,” he said.
Her tissues had been there for her during the hardest part of her year, and their final use was assisting this rich bitch, who couldn’t party like a grownup. He mumbled a thank you and left.
Annie had finally swallowed her bite. “I feel like I just saw Santa Claus.”
Marisol and Annie agreed to meet in Annie’s lab, far from interruptions.
Now Marisol found an unmarked door and used her keycard to unlock it. The electronic screen welcomed in an unnatural cadence, “Hello, Marisol Novotny,” and she entered the research labs of the Varian Family and Research Hospital.
As a lowly nurse, her keycard should never have given her access, but she discovered the glitch in security shortly after her Varian sighting when she inadvertently leaned against the door, waiting for Annie after a shift. It always worked, and no one cared to wonder why a nurse visited the labs.
Inside, she walked a few paces before smacking on a set of lights and stormed through the empty hallway toward the elevator. The elevator doors, scuffed and dented by carts and gurneys, opened feebly. After elbowing the up button, Marisol reached the sixth floor, and she followed the meager light from the lab of Dr. Annie Park.
Marisol tapped at the wired glass of the window and watched Annie’s pineapple-stem of an up-do bob while she continued at her computer.
The bespectacled doctor clicked an image of a chromosome pair. With each strand she clicked, a box of different molecular structures appeared in the screen’s corner. Marisol attempted another desperate knock. Finally, Annie noticed her and scooted her office chair to the entrance of her lab and opened the door without standing.
“Morning. I thought I’d find you here.” Marisol handed Annie the coffee.
Annie snatched the drink before wheeling back to her computer. “Morning? I always lose track of time.” She sipped the coffee, uttered a thanks, and returned to clicking.
Marisol sauntered around the counter island behind Annie. Notes and scientific journals scattered among rainbow-colored gossip magazines graced with the handsome mug of Vincent Varian. Some covers varied—his shit-eating grin on one, his posh pout on the other. Marisol read over the headline VINCENT VARIAN: LATE BLOOMER OR AFFLUENZA? and felt like setting it afire with the Bunsen burner. She picked up a magazine, dangling it like dirty underwear. “Really Annie? These rags?”
“I’m the woman who has it all. I can have my serious science discoveries and my celebrity gossip too.” Annie glided back in her chair and yanked the magazine from Marisol’s hands. Annie continued, “I’m actually following Varian’s secret off-the-books side project, and the media tend not to write about Vincent Varian in Scientific American, unfortunately.” She moved her bejeweled cat-eye glasses up from her face and rubbed her eyes.
Marisol shook her head and mocked in a fake deep voice, “Secret side project?”
“My ego would like to think the project they refer to is my work, but most think he’s funding the police’s super-cop program.”
The chamomile hadn’t kicked in yet, so Marisol had time for an Annie rant. “What do you actually think?”
“One of those rags said he has a home outside town deep in the Micah National Forest, never filmed nor seen.” Annie exaggerated her facial expressions like she was telling a spooky campfire story. “Now, none of those magazines have said it, but I think it’s home to his secret lab where he’s developing a weapon. Consider it the Manhattan Project’s sequel. ”
Marisol grazed her finger across a photo of Vincent and drew an invisible mustache. “Sounds diabolical. He doesn’t seem to have the brains for that kind of project.”
“He doesn’t. But he can buy the brains.” Annie leaned toward her computer. The massive, messy topknot on her head pulled her closer to the monitor.
The computer screen shuffled through the squiggly shapes of chromosomes and the geometric shapes of molecules. Chromosomes, molecules, chromosomes, molecules.
The pattern scrambled Marisol’s brain. She failed to imagine how Annie spent hours staring and clicking. “Can’t you get an intern to do all that mindless work for you?” Marisol asked, teasing, unsure how electronically filing old samples propelled the medicine world forward.
“I want the utmost control.” Annie patted the keyboard.
“I just wouldn’t want to go through years of an M.D.-Ph.D. just to file.”
“You say file. I say coding genetic traits into chemical compounds. Tomato, tomahto.”
Marisol set her cup of tea down and covered Annie’s eyes to pull her away from the computer. Annie pushed Marisol’s hands away and whirled away from the desk on the chair. She cocked her head. “I’ve told you my theory. ”
Marisol lip-synced the next words, ones she heard time in and time out.
Annie said, “The cures for most ailments have been around for many years, but a global conspiracy suppresses the research.” Marisol stopped her mockery before Annie said, “By going through important past research of Dr. Victor Varian, I will find the exact point in time that the cure suppression occurred. I found one of Dr. Varian’s promising formulas, though the mice metabolized it quickly. Not to mention the unpleasant side effects. But if I learn the right combination…”
“You’ll discover the cure to end all cures,” Marisol said. She unbuttoned her coat and flicked it behind her as she hoisted herself up on a counter next to a glass cage where a white mouse scurried. The mouse mattered more than the Varians, and the poor thing plodded around with tumors drooping like swollen teats. Speaking of giant boobs devoid of life: the Varians. “Victor… which one is he?”
“Vincent’s long-dead father. The doctor. Not to be confused with the nuclear physicist grandpa who died last year.” Annie coasted to a file cabinet and traded one box of slides for another, loading them into the computer. “I’m nearly a year into this project. I’d be further into this thing if the law would allow some stinkin’ human cloning.”
Oh, no. Annie warned Marisol to slap her if she sounded too much like a mad scientist. Instead of a slap, Marisol asked, “What’s our mission, Dr. Park?”
“People over ambition.” Annie sank into herself and sighed. “But I will get my eureka in the bathtub by god.” She waved her finger in the air for emphasis.
Marisol looked up from the mouse cage. “I met a guy last night.”
Annie stopped clicking and reclined in her chair, swallowing one gulp of her coffee. “Do tell.”
“We had another Patron Saint in the hospital last night. But this time, he snuck into the clinic. I caught him trying to treat his own stab wound.” Her brain crackled with another rush of dopamine, revisiting the images of a well-built torso and scorching blue eyes. “I helped him like some back-alley surgeon.”
Annie choked on her coffee. “Are you insane?”
“There was something about him.” Marisol nibbled her lip to counter her rising embarrassment. “I’m about to risk professionalism, but this is my safe space, right?”
Annie signaled for Marisol to confess in a parody of a priest’s blessing.
Marisol breathed through her teeth and shook her head. “No man has ever given me that spark.”
Annie released a low, throaty laugh. “It’s the mask thing. Behind it, anyone can be anything, and you hate when things get familiar. ”
“I don’t”—Marisol prepared for the oncoming rebuttal—“always hate when things get familiar.” She looked at her dry nail beds. “I work too much to get close with anyone.”
“That’s a pattern. Now that you’re a woman of a certain age, you’re escalating. I just didn’t think your kink journey would take this long to begin. First, it’s masks, then ropes, and then, ‘Oh Annie, don’t go back there. That’s the sexy playroom.’”
“Ha ha. The world’s escalating. I pulled a blade out of him. A whole blade.” Marisol raised her hands with a six-inch gap to show how long the knife had been. “He should’ve bled out or at least ruptured his spleen or kidney, but he was fine. A knife wound was nothing but a paper cut. And when I turned my back, he disappeared into the night.”
“Let me guess. You’re picking up extra shifts?”
“I am.”
“You’re hallucinating.”
Marisol’s skin tingled from the lingering memory. She rubbed her arms for warmth. To be warm and solid like him. “He was real.”
“Or he’s rich, radioactive, or alien.” There went Annie, committing a continental shift in conversation.
Failing to follow along, Marisol asked, “What?”
“Superheroes in the movies. They’re rich, radioactive, or alien.” Annie shrugged. “Which one is he? ”
“I’d sooner believe in the latter two than the rich giving even the most constipated and tiniest of shits about Shadowhaven. Besides, our man’s middle class.” Marisol drew out the beat-up business card the detective gave her. She handed it to Annie.
“The crazy person gave you his business card?”
“I think so.” But after Marisol said it, she wasn’t so sure.
Annie read the card. “Detective Tobias Quinlan is your Patron Saint? Why would a detective play dress up?”
“Because there are too many rules to follow and too many boxes to check. Maybe by putting on a costume, he finally serves Justice.” Marisol plopped her empty cup loudly on the counter for emphasis. “My brother’s rotting up at the Hill because they can always scrounge up a case against the pawn but never the king.”
Although the state had charged Caz with at least one murder he had actually committed, the string of murders he confessed to was not his handiwork. He took the fall for the gang, so everyone else in the Shadows stayed clean. And the free birds were always Shadowhaven’s worst: sinister and powerful men who had the right family names to keep their dirty meat hooks jabbed into the city for over a century.
Despite the huge hole Caz’s absence had ripped into her family, nothing changed in the city. A new enforcer, who dirtied his hands with blood, took his spot. That guy would inevitably be caught or killed himself, and the cycle repeated. The shitty ouroboros of it all tugged so hard that Marisol rested her elbows on her lap until her hair fell into her eyes.
Annie’s chair glided over the vinyl floor. She brushed the hair away from Marisol’s face. “You really think a mask makes a difference?”
Marisol lifted her head and attempted a pathetic smile. What did she have to lose?
Annie pushed her glasses to her nose and peered over the top of them. “Maybe I should wear one.” She laughed and handed back the card. “Call him. At least he’s not boring.”
Maybe Marisol would in a few days—to let the intensity from last night wane a bit. She wouldn’t want this Tobias Quinlan to believe that all it took was a mask and a quick-to-heal knife wound to bring out her clingy side.
Buzz! Annie’s cell phone rattled next to Marisol’s leg. She picked it up but noticed the message.
I need it. Give it to me now.
“Your phone. I didn’t mean to read it.” Marisol held it out. Annie turned red and snatched it from her.
Annie, a self-described asexual, exchanged embarrassing, saucy texts? Who was the messenger? The reincarnation of Rosalind Franklin? Marisol teased, “Who is she? ”
Silence.
“They?”
No response again.
“He?!”
“It’s nothing.”
“What’d he do to get you to join the dark side? Whisper sweet nothings about the human genome? Show you his long, thick strand of DNA he isolated? Spit on your dry, neglected petri dish?”
“I minored in double entendres, and you’re grossing me out.”
“Are you sure you want to go to the ball with me? Your messenger doesn’t want to take you?”
Annie tucked her phone in her lab coat. “I’m sure.” The redness lingered in splotches down her neck. She clicked louder through more chromosomes and hexagonal molecular compounds.
Obviously, the messenger was a sensitive subject. Marisol rubbed her lips together and uttered the beginnings of an apology.
In the middle of Marisol’s first vowel sound, Annie kicked her chair back until it slammed into the island with a thwack ! “Holy shit! Uh, I mean eureka? This specimen only has forty-four chromosomes!”
Despite Annie’s excitement, some humans existed absent a pair of chromosomes, twenty-two pairs versus the typical twenty-three. “Could be fused— ”
“Nothing’s fused. Look at it. It’s gorgeous.”
Marisol bent over the computer screen too. Her shoulder bristled against Annie’s. On the monitor, there was nothing but slightly bent chromosomes resembling larvae. “And?”
“The chemical compound at its fifteenth chromosome? Haven’t seen that level of cellular regeneration in humans. Starfish, however…”
Ridiculous. Marisol chortled. “This person is part starfish?” She faced Annie’s profile.
“This person might not be homo sapien. What we might be looking at is the next step in our evolution.” Annie turned to Marisol. Behind her glasses, a single eye twitched. It probably was from screen strain or a nutrient deficiency from living off microwavable noodles and sugary yogurt, but Marisol shuddered to think the twitch meant Annie found her loophole in stinkin’ human cloning.
“Remember the mission,” Marisol reminded Annie, tapping her friend’s nose before stretching her arms overhead. With the amount of energy spent on the stretch, she was due for some shut-eye. “See you tomorrow.”
“I rented a gown for you. They’re delivering it right to your door.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I did. You’d get so busy, you’d forget.” Annie adjusted herself back in the chair.
Marisol hugged Annie, resting her chin against Annie’s shoulder. “You’re the only one who looks out for me.”
Without breaking her focus on the computer, Annie said, “That’s because the last time I remember a man giving you an orgasm, I wasn’t dyeing my grays.”
Marisol stepped back and cataloged her love life. “I’ve had...” Nope. Flatline. “Didn’t you say science made men obsolete?”
“I said almost obsolete. Don’t cherry-pick what a doctor says to you.”
Marisol laughed. “You don’t have gray hair.”
“Because I dye it.”
Marisol kissed the top of Annie’s head and straightened up, readjusting her coat before heading out into the cold.
“I’m not putting on a mask for you,” Annie said. “I’m not prepared to escalate our friendship. Yet. And don’t be stupid. Help detectives play dress up off the clock.”
Marisol nodded and left. Ultimately with Annie around, men, even the ones dressed like the Patron Saint, could go suck eggs. Marisol lived her best life—the opinion of ailing old shopkeepers be damned.
In the hallway, she tapped the button for the elevator. The sorry doors opened, and she stepped in until—Jesus! Her heart leaped to her throat as she gripped the door frame. Her foot hovered over nothing but metal cables and a long, dark drop. Vincent Varian, or whoever was in charge, really needed to fix this thing.
She rushed back to the lab and smacked the glass.
Annie cracked the door open and spoke through the space. “Elevator again?”
“That thing is a deathtrap.”
“I’ll put in another maintenance request. They insist nothing’s wrong. It only happens to you. You’re probably irradiated.”
“That might explain it. I’m not rich or an alien.” Marisol headed for the stairs.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4 (Reading here)
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
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- Page 27
- Page 28
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- Page 30
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- Page 37