In Laymon's Terms

“I’m not paying you for your opinion, Al. Just do the goddamn flags, ok?” He shrugged under her glare, and finished the coloring.

It took much longer for the flags to heal than the rest of her body. The lettering had been easy to take, no extra shadowing or fancy stuff that would bleed for several weeks, but when she turned around and looked over her shoulder at the waving wings of distress, she smiled more widely than ever. It was perfect, she thought. I’m an angel of liberty.

She looked down at her list of phone calls to make. There were five names, and she began with the blonds first:

“Hi, this is Mara. From the Dime Dame? I remember you too...Do you remember what we talked about? Right. 7 o’clock—and don’t be late, or I won’t be there.” She hung up the phone and dialed the second number, changing the time to 7:30, giving herself just enough time to kill the first one and hide him before her next guest arrived.

When she got to the last name on the list, she felt an adrenaline rush blushing her cheeks. Gun was it: the last one. The hard part was over. The killing and cleaning of the fish was just another chore that her medical classes at Johns Hopkins University gave her the grace to finish, and finish well. Daddy would be proud of all I’ve learned, she thought.

Mara scattered kitty litter about the barn to soak up the blood, got her rusty Ford truck ready for hauling, and tied the wagon-cap tarp down, fastening the flap to either side of the rear of the pickup. She’d close it up later, once the bodies were all inside, and in the boat. Mara and Gun would have to make quick work of things later, and she hoped he had the sense to make arrangements on vacating the scene. Once they’d backed her Ford into the river, there would be no turning back, and they would only have a twenty-minute window to work with before the next patrol would be by along that stretch of river.

Nick stared at the scene in awe. He was humbled by it, enraged by it, and completely gutted of all emotion, much like the four men littered about the crude rowboat that had long-since lost its oars, long since lost its purpose in the modern world.

He watched the photographer taking his pictures, pausing grimly when they lifted the soft white linen of the woman’s gown, fashioned like the statue of liberty—only her crown was a crown of thorns that had been wedged into her head-skin long before death, then wrapped in a head piece that looked distinctly Middle Eastern. The boat had drifted about a mile down the Potomac before landing on an inlet quite fitting of the killer’s plans—a small inlet near the Mall, where the Washington Monument stood only several hundred yards away.

As before, the four blond businessmen had been murdered, and Nick suspected the Aces would be fish-hooked to their hearts too, but their heads had been shaved in a priest-like way, and they were cloaked in the fashion of Middle Eastern women. They were positioned like anchors on each side of the dead girl, Mara Benton, but their legs were shackled to her own. They had been killed almost twenty-four hours before her death. She’d been shackled to four dead men while she was still alive...and for a moment, he thought she might have been a victim.

The thing that disturbed Nick the most had been the tattoos. He’d been looking at them when the Feds circled like cockroaches or vultures—he couldn’t think of which—to scoop up their jurisdiction and tell his boys to back off, and get the hell out. How many people have seen the body of the girl, they’d asked. What are their names, what positions do they hold...Give us more to file. We’ll be watching.

The case had been closed immediately and dismissed when they picked up Samuel “The Gun” Johnson, a petty theft and arsonist who was a paid hit man on the side for local gangs and drug runners that didn’t want to get their hands on the dirtier, lower scum of the pond.

He knew the truth, however, when he read the name that had been etched onto the prow of the boat, like something out of a Tennyson myth. It said, Shenandoah, the Indian translation of which was Daughter of the Stars. As if that weren’t enough, he’d gotten a look at the names she’d tattooed all over the front of her body—a blatant cry of anarchy summed up in one giant pentagon: every congressman and woman was listed. Every single one of the same that had stood on the steps of the Capitol Building and sung American anthems after the Twin Towers collapsed and the fires weren’t even out in their own offices...It was funny, he thought, how they were all on the other side of the building at the time of the crash. None of them died.