Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Bradley Denton (best thriller books to read TXT) 📗

It was invisible to X-rays, and he felt a strong empathy for it.

“You have a cute butt,” the woman said. She had let down her guard; her accent was almost distinct.

Richter hesitated and then straightened, leaving his pistol under the bed. He had obtained all of the information from the woman that he was required to obtain, so he should put a bullet below her ear and toss her body into a dumpster on the way to the airport. But she was only a flunky, hardly a real Bad Guy at all, and if he let her live, she might be useful in the future.

He was rationalizing, and he knew it. Still, he decided to indulge himself this once. He would make up for it in Topeka.

He blacked the television screen so that the woman would not see his pistol in its glow, then dressed and armed himself in the dark.

“Are you going out?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Richter answered. He took his prepacked bag from the closet and left. The woman wouldn’t want to be seen coming out of his condo by light of day, so she would leave soon too. The condo would lock itself behind her, and the computerized security system would see to it that she didn’t get in again.

He really should kill her, he thought again as he stepped out into the cold, wet District of Columbia night.

Except…

He was fifty-two years old, almost bald, and gaining weight despite his workouts. He was still the best operative in the Company, but he could feel the day coming when that would no longer be true.

He should kill her….

But he had a soft spot for any woman who told him that he had a cute butt.

SKYVUE

In the concrete-block snack bar/projection building of a drive-in theater near El Dorado, Kansas, two men wearing flannel shirts and bearing strong resemblances to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev were standing at the grill. The theater was closed for the season, so they had the building to themselves.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” Khrushchev asked.

“As long as it takes,” Eisenhower said, tossing a raw hamburger patty onto the grill.

“What does that mean?” Khrushchev asked angrily. His jowls shook.

“It means what it means.”

Khrushchev brought a fist down on the grill beside Eisenhower’s cooking burger. “Circumlocutionary situation-comedy bullshit!” he shouted. “We were supposed to conduct this project together—”

“You helped with the preparatory work, Nick.”

“—but now you’ve done this Buddy Holly thing without so much as a word to me! And as for ‘helping with the preparatory work,’ it seems that what I thought I was doing wasn’t what I was doing at all! I thought we were opening their fleshbound little minds gently and slowly, when all along you were planning this!”

“I am the leader of the project,” Eisenhower said. “As my assistant and companion, you have been invaluable both in your work and in helping me to survive the isolation of being temporarily fleshbound. However, because our anti-flesh opponents have been watching, it has been best that you not know the entire plan. Besides, you were but a child during our people’s transformation, and I was a great-grandfather. Have some respect for your elders.”

“Elders, shmelders,” Khrushchev said. “I’m fifteen thousand and twenty-two and you’re fifteen thousand one hundred and seventeen. Big difference!”

Eisenhower chuckled. “Bigger than you think, Seeker-child.”

Khrushchev crossed his arms across his tremendous gut. “All right, moot point. But—_Buddy Holly?_ Just what do you hope to accomplish?”

Eisenhower shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“Terrific. If you ask me, constant airing of the same not-regularly-scheduled program is just the sort of thing that could send the fleshbound masses over the edge. We’re talking major wastage.”

“I know,” Eisenhower said, flipping his burger. “Would you like one of these?”

“You know I’m on a diet. And don’t try to change the subject. I’m still pissed.”

“A consequence of your current form, no doubt.”

Khrushchev rolled his eyes and breathed deeply. “Look, at least tell me this: Why did you single out that one poor jerk to take the heat?”

Eisenhower smiled. “I didn’t. His mother did. She bought and used the dish, you’ll remember. She almost understood.”

Khrushchev shook his head. “No. She was a flake whose flakiness looked like almost understanding. She fooled you just like she fooled the anti-flesh infiltrators who moved in next door to her.”

Eisenhower said nothing.

Khrushchev’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute,” he said, uncrossing his arms. “I think I know what you’re doing.”

Eisenhower dropped a limp slice of American cheese onto his burger. “No, you don’t,” he said. “But if you pay close attention, maybe you will.”

Khrushchev grinned. “I’m all ears.” His immense body began to sprout.

“Stop that,” Eisenhower said.

“All right, then. I’m all tongues.”

“You’re making me lose my appetite.”

One of the tongues hit the grill and sizzled. Khrushchev yelped.

2

OLIVER

My grandparents moved to Topeka, taking Mother with them, in June 1959. Mother had turned eighteen and had finished high school. Her graduation picture is of a sad-eyed, narrow-faced young woman with dark, cheek-length hair. Below the border of the photograph, she was almost four months pregnant and starting to show.

On the first page of Volume II, she wrote: Mama says we’re moving because Daddy can get a better job at the Goodyear plant in Topeka, but when I asked Daddy if that was true he just gave me a dirty look and went to get another Falstaff. I shouldn’t have asked, because I know the real reason. They want to get out of town before people know about C.‘s baby. When we get to Topeka, they will no doubt tell folks that I was married but that my husband died a tragic death, which is true in a way, so I suppose I won’t deny it.

I feel bad that they are leaving Mikey in Des Moines to live with Grandma. He is a brat, but he is also my brother and I don’t like knowing that he is being left because of me, although he says he wants to stay anyway. But since when does an eleven-year-old boy know what he wants? I don’t know whether he knows about the baby yet, but if he did come to Topeka he would find out soon, and I guess Mama and Daddy don’t want to put him through the humiliation. I feel angry with them, but really, they are acting about as well as could be expected. At least they haven’t thrown me into the street, although I can’t say that I would be surprised if they did. What better place for a whore than on the street? Not that I would know.

Mother never saw Uncle Mike again. He finally started answering her letters in 1967, after he was drafted, and the two of them became closer than they had ever been when they’d lived in the same house. They probably would have seen a lot of each other when he got back from Vietnam, except that he didn’t. Someone turned a Claymore mine the wrong way, and Uncle Mike, who was huddling right where he was supposed to be safe, was killed anyway.

Long afterward, I learned that some Claymore mines were stenciled on one side with the words DO NOT EAT; apparently, they looked a lot like field rations. When I related this fact to Mother, she sighed and said, “That probably wouldn’t have made any difference to Mikey.”

After moving to Topeka, my grandfather took a job at the Goodyear plant as planned, and the fractured family settled into a small house in the Highland Park section of town to await my arrival. Mother didn’t write much in Volume II during that summer or fall, so I have only a vague idea of what those months must have been like for her. From what little she did write, I know that the tension between her and my grandparents increased in direct proportion to the size of her belly. Her sole entry for the month of August reads: It is so hot that the insides of my thighs are covered with prickly heat and I wish I could die. Mama is a sweating, complaining bitch. Daddy drinks too much beer and smells like burning tires. I am fat and my hair is stringy. C. took the easy way out. I am going to listen to “Heartbeat” on the record player again even though Mama says it is driving her loopy. The flip side is “Well All Right” and she likes it no better, so I’ll play it too.

With Mother in this state of mind, it should have come as no surprise to her that I refused to emerge on time. I was safe and comfortable where I was, and I had no desire to splurt out into a world where prickly heat existed and “It’s So Easy” hadn’t even made Billboard’s Top 100. I was due in early November, but Thanksgiving came and went with me still barricaded in the uterus, ignoring the fact that I was getting bigger all the time and causing Mother considerable discomfort. Seventeen years later, she told me that I had been extremely selfish in my refusal to be born, and I apologized. (I was humoring her. She was wrapped up in her UFO/Atlantis “research,” and I had serious doubts about her stability.)

Finally, on the eighteenth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mother decided that it was time to teach me some discipline. That evening, she wrote: This is it, you little bastard. I’m going to fake contractions and scream bloody murder until Mama and Daddy take me to the God Damned hospital. I’ll figure out what to do next when we get there, but count on it, your ride is over. Ten months is about three months too many if you ask me. I want to remember C., all right, but not to the point where I fucking explode. There, I used the f word, and if you read this, Mama, f you too.

Mother did not record the details of the following twenty-four hours, mainly because she spent much of the time anesthetized. All I’m certain of is that everybody eventually gave up on the idea that I would ever comply in a normal fashion, and the doctors performed a cesarean section.

I was dragged out of the wound into the open air on the evening of Tuesday, December 8, 1959. I wasn’t happy about it. The only silver lining was that now I might get to hear something besides “Heartbeat.” My birth certificate lists my official name as Oliver C. Vale. According to Volume II, Mother had already chosen my first name and initial (no full middle name), and my grandmother lied to the hospital about my last name, which has nothing to do with Jerry Vale. It’s Vale as in “of Tears.” Needless to say, I grew up less than crazy about my grandmother.

Buddy was singing “Everyday” out in the living room while I was in the bedroom pulling on a sweatshirt and swapping my sweatpants for jeans. The song didn’t sound quite right without the celeste, but a celeste was probably hard to come by on Ganymede. Buddy tried to make up for it by plinking his guitar strings, and it almost worked.

I decided not to change from my worn Nikes into cycle boots because I didn’t want to waste time with laces. Sharon Sharpston, convinced as she was that I was the mental equivalent of mashed graham crackers, would worry if I took too long getting over to her place. There was no way, though, that I was going anywhere on a cold night without first zipping myself into the Moonsuit. It was