Parts & Wreck Read online

  “Are you all right?” Wade asked.

  “I am. I am. I’m so sorry.” She stood up, flushed and flummoxed and in desperate need of a do-over. “I’ve been so ridiculous, Mr. Crowson. Of course, you didn’t have a hard-on earlier. I can see now that the can is out of your pocket.” Before she could stop herself, she gestured toward the flatter lay of his pants. “I can see that you’re perfectly normal in that area. Even perhaps, regular? I know that some bigger men, like larger, taller, and wider simply have regular-sized equipment and because the rest of them is so big, they don’t necessarily look so…impressive.”

  Hitch shook in silent laughter, having circled around to get a good look at Luce’s total fucking breakdown into idiocy. Could she, Luce would have grabbed the words from the air and crammed them back down her stupid throat. Had she really just suggested the man who was about to interview her, who she would have been working with—emphasis on the past tense, because clearly a job was out of the question—possessed a small dick?

  Dear God. She slapped her palms to her face. “So, sorry. Jesus!”

  “Are you done dissecting my anatomy?” he asked with a slight and not unwelcome smirk.

  “God yes,” Luce spat. “I should just leave. I really should.”

  “No, no, no. Now calm down. You just need to relax. You’re here because Thorwald thinks you’re the best person for the job and I trust him. We’re just going to forget all about this and do the interview and move on.”

  “We are?”

  “We are.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Crowson.”

  “It’s Wade. Apology accepted and the whole thing is forgotten.”

  “As long as we’re clearing the slate—” she started.

  “No twin?” he guessed.

  “Of course not.”

  “All right then, follow me.”

  As she followed Crowson into the depths of The Parts Department, Luce found herself focusing as much on Wade as the strange surroundings. If not more. Rooms filled from floor to ceiling with the same kind of jars she’d seen the woman hefting, vast halls of cubicles, but mostly closed doors with red warning stickers affixed to both door and frame like a crime scene seal.

  Strangely, these things went by in her periphery.

  They just didn’t seem as important as his back, the way his thin cotton dress shirt fit him almost too tightly, or the way his butt moved under those pants. In a word: mesmerizing.

  “He’s probably not the best choice to prove your point, you know?” Hitch said, interrupting her perusal—one of his many irritating talents.

  And what point is that? Luce thought rather than said. They were far too close to Wade to vocalize this particular discussion, or any for that matter. There probably wouldn’t ever be a good time or reason where revealing her relationship with Hitch would be beneficial to anyone, except possibly her biographer. Though, if she thought on that idea too long, “biographer” became “psychiatrist” and “book” became “case study.”

  She shuddered.

  “I mean that silly thing you keep telling yourself about getting a job or a man and keeping them meaning you’re not crazy. Which is, of course, ridiculous.”

  Or maybe it’ll just mean I’m the craziest of them all.

  He paced in front of her. “There’s a strong likelihood. But I like to think of your behavior as a unique and abundant set of eccentricities. I’ve made a list, would you like to hear them?”

  I have a list of ways you can be an ass, would you like to hear those?

  “Oh, I know that list. I’m quite proud of it. Maybe one day you’ll embrace your own as much as I have mine.”

  This is one of those moments where I wish you were like everyone else’s imaginary friend and simply disappeared when I got my period.

  “Oh, I did, if you’ll remember. You were absolutely atrocious.”

  I could recreate that…any time.

  “Easy, princess, don’t upset yourself.”

  Shut up, Hitch.

  “And back to your regularly scheduled ogling.”

  Wade pointed toward the vast cavernous maze of cubicles. “So this is the hub of the place, and we keep most of the research manuals, historical reference, and procured incunabula out on the tables so you’ll see just about everyone spending at least a portion of their day out here, going through lists of parts, locations of repos, etcetera.”

  “That means absolutely nothing to me,” Luce said, smiling politely.

  “Yeah, well, it will eventually.”

  They kept moving through the room to a large arch, the scent of burning toner wafting out of it in a chemical haze. The hall was filled with copy machines, each surrounded by a minimum of three people, hanging onto coffee cups, looking hungover, and alternately gabbing and rolling their eyes at each other. As Wade and Luce were slipping past, a tall gentleman in a short-sleeved striped shirt with a pocket and yellow pit stains stopped Wade and reminded him of a potluck that morning.

  “You remembered to bring a salad, right? And not tuna salad, this time. Vegan includes fish,” he said, snidely.

  Wade recoiled. “I said I would chip in.”

  “Fine, another slacker.” The man’s lip curled back in disgust. “But it’s a full four dollars, not a handful of change and a coupon for some Advil.”

  “I’ve never done that.”

  “Well, whatever. It’s been done and I can’t keep track of who stiffs the potluck committee.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Wade crammed his hand in his pocket and pulled out a money clip, retrieving a ten and slapping it on the copier. “Put the rest toward my tab.”

  As they hastily exited the scene, Luce heard the man hiss to the two women standing with him. “Is that the new one? Hope she survives the week.” Followed by a round of snickering. And then, “Man up with some bulgur, next time, Scalpel!”

  “Jesus.” Wade groaned. “How about next time I shove some quinoa up your ass?”

  “It’s the supergrain of the future!”

  “I got your quinoa.” Wade spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Avoid them, they’re nightmares. Especially Victor, he’s the sturmbannführer of the Vegan gestapo. So if he sees you with beef jerky, you’re pretty much in for a diatribe of propaganda that’ll have you reaching for a handful of sleeping pills. They’re all potluck-obsessed and I can’t vouch for the cleanliness of their home kitchens.”

  “If that guy’s lack of armpit-bleaching is any indication, I’d say it’s probably a quarantine situation.

  “I’d rather starve.”

  Luce was still stuck on that last bit. The survival part. She hoped Vegan Victor meant figuratively. But something told her otherwise.

  Chapter Four

  At the far end of yet another depressingly gray hall, they came to a sparsely furnished room. Table, chairs, small bar set and its primary consumer, a stylish and very tipsy woman in a man’s suit. “This is Sister Mary-Agnes Albright, formerly of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, currently absentia.”

  The woman offered her hand, halfheartedly, limp at the wrist.

  She didn’t stand.

  Luce stared at it for a moment, trying to reconcile the severe and quite secular-looking woman before her with a woman married to God. She even tried to imagine her in a habit, in winged headgear, but each time there was something off. Red lipstick smeared on the virginal white underscarf, rosary twirling like a pimp chain.

  She just didn’t fit the character.

  “That’s quite a title, sister,” she said, finally, offering her own hand. “Lengthy.”

  Albright pushed herself to a shaky footing and took Luce’s hand, not to shake it but rather to turn it in hers, to examine her palm. Heavy-lidded and lips agape, Sister Mary-Agnes drew her pointy index finger along the lines in Luce’s palm, occasionally reacting in a series of slow blinks and grunts. Luce glanced at Wade who stood near the door, arms folded across his chest and clearly annoyed.

  “You don’t have to wear the
habits, I take it?” she ventured.

  Sister Mary-Agnes cackled. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, no. They stripped me of those years ago. I just keep the title for show. Like stage makeup.”

  “Why would they do that?” Luce asked, though from the smell of the room, she could have been in a distillery.

  “Oh you know.” The woman waved her hand. “The usual.”

  She shook her head. Sister Mary-Agnes did, too, mimicking her. Though her eyes were gauzy and she seemed to make herself dizzy and had to shake it off.

  “The usual,” she repeated and then leaned in close and whispered. “Sex scandal. You know how it is. Sometimes a defrocking is just what the archdiocese ordered.”

  Luce glanced around the room to touch base with Hitch. She was used to things not making sense in her everyday life, but this was someone else’s life and it seemed all sorts of messed up. Here was a clearly disturbed individual who was able to keep down a job. Luce smiled at her and leaned in to watch as the former nun assessed her palm for whatever it was she was looking for—hopefully not suspicious moles.

  Wade slouched in the chair opposite and grumbled, “Sister, can we skip the palm reading and get to the interview?”

  “This is all part of it!”

  “It isn’t,” he sighed.

  “It is!” The woman slurred, digging her nail too roughly across Luce’s lifeline.

  Luce winced and pulled away, jarring the woman into a moment of clarity.

  “I’m so sorry. Do you care for a drink?”

  “No thank you, I’m fine.”

  “Good answer,” Wade said.

  Sister Mary-Agnes sneered in his direction and settled back into her seat, a pleasant smile floating around her lips and eyes drifting closed. Wade took the seat across from her and gestured for Luce to have a seat. “So, first thing first. Mr. Thorwald vets all of our potentials here at The Parts Department. He’s very good at his job and despite some misgivings I have about you, I’m confident that you’re qualified.”

  Luce winced but decided to let his comment slide. Hell, she had misgivings about her own behavior most days.

  Wade sat up and reached for a remote control. A screen appeared on the wall as though a PowerPoint presentation would begin, but instead a startling photo appeared. Linda Blair, tied to a bed surrounded by grim-faced priests.

  “Um…is it movie time?”

  “No, this is the most basic entry point for most people. You see, The Parts Department began decades ago as an offshoot of the Catholic Church. A select group of priests and nuns were designated to man an antidemonic possession effort.”

  “Wait, what?” She glanced between Wade and Mary-Agnes, but neither appeared to be joking. “Are they slipping crazy pills into your organic, fair-trade coffee?”

  Sister Mary-Agnes tipped her glass in Luce’s direction. Wade ignored her. “As a result of the heightened interest in demonic possession in the late sixties and seventies, brought on by films such as The Exorcist, the legion of infiltrating demons became much more subtle. Clever. So much so, that many possessions flew under the radar, ending in some rather unfortunate fatalities. This in and of itself was not that big of a concern. Until…”

  Wade clicked the remote and a picture of the Department of Motor Vehicles, waiting room full of sour-faced detainees with limp tickets in their clutches, popped into view.

  “A national push for organ donation created an unforeseen crisis. Some of the undocumented—that’s what we call the folks who die as a result of possessions that don’t come to the church’s attention—actually, many of them were organ donors. At the time, the Church wasn’t aware that demons could travel via organ transplant or split themselves among various organs in a human body. But, well, when they scream out, “We are Legion,” during exorcisms, they really aren’t joking. The little buggers can hide individually on a cellular level and so those unfortunate souls became, in essence, dirty bombs of evil incarnate.”

  “Soo.” Luce’s eyes narrowed as she remembered the organ floating in the jar. “The parts need to be repo’d like a deadbeat’s car.”

  “Exactly!” Sister Mary-Agnes cried. “She picked up on it immediately. She’s a natural.”

  “Hmm.” Wade narrowed his eyes with uncertainly.

  “So there’s a clinic here, you check ’em in, fit them with a nice new kidney or liver or whatever and they’re good to go. Sounds pretty noble.”

  Wade and Sister Mary-Agnes shared an uncomfortable smile. Wade broke the silence. “Well, no. We don’t really have the funding or medical resources for all that. Mostly just the repo.”

  “Wait a minute. So you just leave the people to die?”

  “They’d likely die anyway. The infection isn’t easily curable and the entity isn’t about the healthy living.”

  Sister Mary-Agnes took over. “Absolutely not. Let’s just say, Abraxas—to pull a demon out of my ass—uses up the body of whoever, John or Jane Doe, and then splits off into whichever parts are taken out at the hospital. Once they’re plugged into another body, they start sending suggestions to the host. Weird stuff. The kinkier the better. Disgusting and often dangerous. It’s never compulsions to drink wheat-grass smoothies or train for triathlons. It’s murder and suicide and forcing women to go to monster truck rallies.”

  Luce shuddered. “Jesus.”

  “Exactly. Jesus weeps for those hillbilly bastards and the people forced to mingle with them. And the infected parts can be, let’s say, unusual. Why Wade once had to repo a skin graft from a burn victim.”

  “The demon was hiding in a YOLO tattoo. That the charlatans who did that discount surgery couldn’t find clear skin for the graft was really amazing. As for your original question, no. We don’t just leave them to die. We give them every opportunity possible. We contact an ambulance. We chill the body.”

  “Oh…hold up. Chill? Like in a hotel bathtub filled with ice?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “No way.” Luce thought back to a TV show she used to love. Urban Legends Revealed with host Ernelle P. Loestra. Apparently, somewhere back East—it was always back East, unless you were watching it on the East Coast, then it was probably somewhere out West and don’t get started on the Midwest—a string of bizarre organ thefts left plenty of chilly tourists kidney-less and on the rocks. Not pretty. “That’s just an urban legend.”

  “Also rural, as it turns out. But I assure you it’s quite true.”

  “And the Vatican funds all this?”

  “Oh God no. Our program is, what would you say?” Sister Mary-Agnes snapped her fingers in Wade’s direction.

  “Rogue.”

  The nun nodded, raised her glass in a toast to Wade before going on, “They see what we do as predominantly secular. We dispense with the ritual and get straight to the meat of the matter while the church clutches its incense and peppermints tight to the vestments like an old lady with her pearls. When we proceeded without their blessing and independent funding, they cut us loose, even as we were exorcising demonic tumors.”

  The seconds following Sister Mary-Agnes’s speech dragged by. Luce looking from the cocktail-swigging nun to Wade—who seemed to believe what was going on—and back. The entire thing sounded completely nuts and therefore, oddly comforting.

  “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds delightful,” Luce said. “Where do I sign up?”

  Sister Mary-Agnes ignored Luce’s sarcasm and continued, “It was the origin of The Parts Department that led to my defrocking, as it were.”

  “So not a super-hot sex scandal.”

  “No…that came later.”

  Luce laughed. She loved a snarky, old lush when she could find one.

  “So what makes you think I’d be good at cutting unsuspecting people open and stealing away into the night with their organs?”

  The sister drained her glass, set it down on the table, and stroked the circle of the lip before returning her gaze to Luce. “We understand you may have had some experience wi
th possession in your distant past.”

  “What?” Luce shook her head, not certain she’d heard the woman correctly. Possession?

  Hitch popped up in the corner, suddenly intrigued. “What did the penguin say? You were possessed? I don’t remember that!”

  Shut up. And then to them, “I can’t say I recall any experiences. I did see those found-footage horror movies recently, maybe that’s what Thorwald picked up on.”

  “I don’t think so, but never mind. He’s not always accurate. Would you say you were squeamish?”

  Luce thought about that for a moment and couldn’t remember a time when she’d shied away from bodily fluids—don’t get crazy, she practiced safe sex and wasn’t into any kind of act that ended in the word “shower.” But people bleeding or vomiting didn’t really bother her.

  “Nope.”

  Wade added, “Are you easily frightened?”

  “Not unreasonably so.” Though she could remember a time when the very thought of public transportation sent her on an extreme couponing binge for antibacterial wipes.

  Sister Mary-Agnes pursed her lips and nodded, handing off the questions to Wade. “What are your thoughts on what we’ve told you? What you’ve seen?”

  “I can certainly see the need to eradicate the demonic infection, and I don’t believe the authorities would take kindly to your operations. The secrecy is reasonable.”

  “How are you at keeping secrets?” Wade asked, eyes locking on hers. The question might have been on the standardized form in front of him but that wasn’t what he was asking; he wanted to know if she’d be discrete.

  Luce glanced past Wade into Hitch’s smiling face. She’d been keeping his secret for so many years. “Fair to above average,” she said.

  Wade stared at her a little longer before breaking his gaze and scribbling a note.

  “I’m just joking, I’ve got secrets I’ve been keeping since childhood.”

  Sister Mary-Agnes cleared her throat. “Preaching to the choir, sister!”

  “As for specifically how we know you’re the one, Thorwald’s investigation report was all we needed.”