Chapter Two
He closed and re-taped the door to his makeshift clean room, then downloaded identity details and property information from his new Proxy, Darkest Knight, into his double-encrypted laptop. Now they were Daniel and Diana Cazador. He repeated the names several times and marveled at the likenesses in their new passports. Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” on guitar filled his headphones, and he nodded to the rhythm. He viewed his screen through dark glasses and a clown ski mask. Red lighting and red paint on the walls eased the itch on his eyes. He could use the computer’s voice feature, but he preferred music. He didn’t want his sister to hear anything about their new Proxy. Her recent lapse in judgment had launched them into retreat, safe mode, new identities. Daniel knew his job was on the line, a job he’d managed well for two months. It allowed them to survive and to lay low. But they’d squeaked by too long this time, and with too much sacrifice. His twin’s lack of self-control escalated by the week. Now her selfishness had cost them a Proxy, their current identities and the backup identities arranged by the Proxy. Truly anonymous Proxies who fit their needs were hard to find, even through the dark web.
And now we have a dead guy in my freezer and an untested Proxy with a dramatic flair. “Darkest Knight,” my ass!
Their new contractor’s test run began with disposal of the dead Proxy’s Lincoln, photoreconnaissance of their new property up north, and rental of a new private, secure warehouse storage. Through internet contact and money transfer he’d purchased an unfinished house on a bluff before they had to go dark this time. Now he’d have to finish the work himself that he’d wanted to hire out from a distance.
Daniel’s present clean room was a dark, hot, and humid closet lined with four layers of aluminum foil and aluminum tape, nowhere near the copper mesh clean room he’d installed in their San Francisco home. That home was now very expensive rubble on a prime hillside lot overlooking the San Francisco Bay. His sister’s indiscretions forced their move to Portland and this decline in creature comforts in their ratty apartment overlooking the river. New sheets of copper mesh for their next clean room lined the interior of their box truck holding the Empty and most of their immediate needs—tools, lab equipment, electronics, a made-up bed for emergencies. After work, he’d use a Puerto Rico IP address to summon furniture and their other large items from POD storage in Mendocino, California and Chimayo, New Mexico to Washington state.
Diana secured their new passports and drivers’ licenses with his puzzle-box just before she violated security rule #1: Never meet the Proxy in person. Daniel had spent his free time for the past three days repeating his new name, “Daniel Cazador,” and Daniel Cazador’s life narrative over and over. He readied their immediate belongings for a nighttime bug out. He used their same birthdays to make the ID switch easier on his twin but changed the year as needed. She hated the change, even when she caused it. They would have to perfect an adjusted family narrative immediately.
I have the plan to save us both—permanently. Just one more month to perfect it … and she just couldn’t wait.
She’d begun to unravel in San Francisco like a common junkie, her incidents coming closer and closer together, more and more indiscreet, to the point of photos in the Chronicle and attention from that DJ in Pahrump about new cases of “spontaneous human combustion.”
Darkest Knight uploaded floor plans and new photos of their house. Daniel had bought the two-story Victorian knock-off at a county auction up in northern Washington. The original owners, from San Francisco, had disappeared. No next of kin and no bodies, so the legal nightmare was handled remarkably fast by a bank that only wanted money. Daniel’s last Proxy had negotiated a very good price. The house itself was basically complete except for their appointments, paint, and furnishings. Their attached garage was framed up with a roof and utilities but no exterior walls. Daniel had hoped to have it completed before Diana forced another move. Now they wouldn’t have the time to wait, and another interim hideout was impractical. Lately her appetite had forced him into some stupid moves of his own.
A co-worker at Harbor Hospital had a supervisor searching lunchboxes, so Daniel planned to quit tonight and make the move. He’d wanted another month to build up provisions and to contract the job for the garage exterior. Lately his sister’s patience shortened and her anger smoldered more every day. She’d already spent her first waking day in her room, not memorizing her new ID, “Diana Cazador.”
Daniel called up the satellite photos of their Washington property and said, “Bigger.” The gray on gray on gray speck on his screen enlarged to a sprawling community at the northernmost tip of a peninsula on a peninsula. A two-lane road separated cranberry bogs on one side from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Canadian islands on the other. The Strait, the road, the roofs on the buildings and the sky oozed gray. Sand dunes, gravel driveways, budding alders and willows all framed the blood-red cranberry bogs in that somber, gray veil. A tongue of white fog licked at the red heart of the bog.
He homed in on the house and their twenty wooded acres right on the bluff and hoped that storms off the Strait wouldn’t send driftwood through the picture windows. In the daytime that could be a disaster. He made a notation on the photo: “Rigid blackout blinds?”
He printed a hard copy for Diana.
Portland’s closing in on her. On us.
She’d blundered into a dark and reckless desperation. He’d blundered into carelessness at the hospital. Twice the shift supervisor had double-checked inventory in the cooler behind him, always a bad sign. A rural move meant more limits on Diana. His twin’s special needs and expensive tastes kept their catastrophe bags packed while Daniel negotiated their next safe place. His technical expertise slipped them past lawmen and others who lately employed shiny new tools of their own.
We have to end these flights-in-the-night!
He printed out the website photos of the house’s interior, much more important to Diana than the beautiful stand of trees. High ceilings, open floor plan with two bedrooms, each bigger than the apartment they now shared, each with a bathroom and an adjoining office, fully wired. The large living room and dining room presented a fresh gallery for their art collection, too long in storage. The kitchen was small, but only Daniel was interested in cooking. Walls glared flat white latex that Diana wouldn’t abide for long.
Good. Get her painting instead of pouting.
The tingle from his computer monitor morphed into itchy eyes and cheeks, the backs of his hands. He switched off his machine and told himself, “Don’t rub!” He’d lasted almost an hour at the screen this time, and believed he’d made progress.
It works on kids with peanut allergies.
He took off his face protection and left his clean room. A string of red LEDs illuminated the living room just enough and immediately relaxed his eyestrain. The combination of flickering fluorescents and intense incandescents at work was torture already; he didn’t need advanced aggravation. He set the property photo onto his TV tray for Diana and circled a large, partly-skeletal blob of a building at the northernmost margin.
Daniel had paid their dead Proxy to buy the building at a tax auction. They couldn’t accumulate things over the years, except what they’d abandoned in POD storage under different names from Chimayo to Chico. But they did have money. Multiple bank accounts languished in seven states and two Canadian provinces; so many identities now that he kept a logbook with his cedar puzzle-box of extra passports. Diana wanted things again, so he’d dangle things to fill their new house.
“If I’m spending my life in prison, then I want a nice one,” she’d said, and agreed to the deal.
“Cazador,” he said, then repeated, “Cazador.” He liked the feel of the new name on his tongue, strong with an air of mystery. He riffled the pages of their new passports, one set Canadian, and admired his new Washington State driver’s license with its “enhanced” ID, good for Canada, just in case. He would have to refit the truck in case of a run to Canada. He never knew who took these exams for him, but exams—real or hacked—and insertion of their likenesses onto passports and other ID cost ten thousand dollars. The Proxy took care of their stand-ins. Once out of Portland and up in Washington, Daniel would deal with his new Proxy, self-proclaimed “Darkest Knight,” always a great risk.
Getting a new Proxy is riskier, pricier, he cautioned himself. Especially in the boonies.
Dark drapes and electrical tape squeezed the last of the sunset out of their living room, and three blasts from the riverfront ferry warned Daniel he had less than an hour before his shift at Harbor Hospital a mile away.
One way or another, my last shift.
Diana had slept for three days, and Daniel’s anger kept her pouting in her room for the rest of the week while he fine-tuned an exit from their situation. His gaze took in their living and kitchen area: bare, off-white walls and slate-gray linoleum tiles peeling back from their edges at the floor. Moving cartons and two large backpacks lined up against the wall. Wooden TV trays and fold-up chairs. Their extensive collection of Japanese paintings remained unpacked in their white, unmarked box truck alongside his tools and lab gear and the dead Proxy in their freezer.
Daniel’s new custom-made appliance with polished stainless steel sat atop a second TV tray. His best work, this fresh drink dispenser, waited with a clean martini glass under a serpentine stainless spout. Their new, real lives awaited. He let out a tense breath and pushed the recurring image of the frozen Empty out of his mind.
He must’ve been a helluva talker, Daniel thought, and shook his head. Not much of a thinker.
Diana slammed the bathroom door in her bedroom, his cue to prepare the drink that should last her through his shift. He placed a two-fisted pink glob of dough-like material he’d dubbed “Matrix” into the hopper atop his drink dispenser. She was not happy with her new name, nor that this time the new name and everything that would follow was their shared fault.
“Bloody Mary,” he said. A low, vibrating hum swallowed the Matrix down and drizzled out a perfect serving. The other side of the machine extruded a coil of gray paste.
“Shouldn’t be a martini glass,” he grumbled. “But that’s how she wants it.” He finger-wiped a hesitant drop from the lip of the spout and took a critical taste.
She’ll say it’s too bland, he thought. She’ll say Matrix sucks out the spice.
She’d been ungrateful, edgy, and dangerous for these few months she’d had to keep to her room, waiting for a new safe house and for his perfection of Matrix and its appliance. She couldn’t be trusted alone, though he had to trust her, even now. Two moves ago, he’d given up locking her bedroom door when she’d burst through it one night to prove a point. Their situation required trust, and anger burned up energy he couldn’t afford. Neither could afford real trouble with the other, twins forever linked by their unique malady.
Might as well be Siamese twins sharing a heart, he thought.
While he waited for Diana to dress, he rolled up his sleeves, slathered SPF 50 sunscreen onto his arms and face, then slipped on his sunglasses and peeled back a crack in the drapes. He held his trembling hands into a last triangle of sunset for the few quick breaths it took for hives to crawl up his arms and across his face. He taped the drapes shut tight when he heard the bedroom door handle click.
Diana took a tentative step into the room, her head and shoulders swathed in blue silk scarves atop a white, slinky cocktail dress by Lauren, her most treasured thing that she refused to pack. The breath she’d been holding came out in a long hisss.
Daniel tossed her a new passport, and she let it bounce off her chest onto the floor.
“You’re Diana Cazador now,” he said. “Practice this time.”
She ran a trembling finger down his greasy arm and said, “You’re crazy. You can’t make yourself one of them. Why do you even want to?”
“You should be grateful that I get as close as I do. You keep us on the run. I keep us alive.”
Diana stalked around the TV table, her gaze focused on the drink he’d prepared.
She swept an arm to take in their drab, nearly empty apartment. “You call this ‘living’?” she asked.
“I call it ‘alive,’” he said.
“This time it’s your fault!” she snapped, her voice petulant as a two-year-old’s. She sat on the corner of a packing box, faced her drink at eye-level, peeled off her extra layers of scarves and dropped them to the floor. Both hands gripped her knees.
“I got careless at work because you couldn’t manage your intake,” he countered. “Which came first?”
Daniel set his sunglasses aside and toweled off his sunscreen.
“That crap you invented just doesn’t make it for me,” she said, still fixated on the glass. “I’m dying here.”
“It gets us by,” he said, “and I have a plan.”
“Uh-huh. Beauty parlors. So you can get laid while I ‘get by.’ I thought you said that ‘phlebotomist’ was the Plan of plans.”
He tossed his towel at her but hit the TV tray. Her reflexes snatched up the martini glass without a drop lost. She sucked down her drink and licked the glass.
Daniel pulled on a long lab coat with “Harbor Hospital” stitched above the pocket. His ID tag read:
Hunter, Darius
Phlebotomy
He flicked a finger against the tag and said, “Remember, after tonight, no more ‘Darius,’ no more ‘Dolores.’ We’re Daniel and Diana. Practice.” His phone pinged an alert that his Uber driver waited outside.
Diana’s eyes closed, and she swayed on her perch like a slender, pale bird.
“Hey!” he snapped, and shook a finger at her. “You hold off till I get back. I’ll bring you something straight from work.”
Diana growled, “Next time you shake a finger at me, Brother Dear, I’ll bite that fucker off!”
He checked his watch, chanced a glimpse through the drapes to be sure that the sun was down. He put on his hat, overcoat and black goatskin gloves, snatched up his leather briefcase and slammed the door behind him without a glance back.