Body Surfing

serious consideration to Q.’s prospects as a hunter. Whatever strengths he had—fortitude of character, superhuman resistance to injury—the boy was fundamentally a hedonist. Perhaps that was just another way of saying he was a seventeen-year-old boy, but it didn’t matter how you spun it: Q. liked to be flattered. He needed to be seduced. Pleasure was his operating principle, his prime motivator, and that made him susceptible. A threat not just to himself, but to anyone who worked with him.
    “It could just as easily have been Leo calling,” the huntress told him. “He would have gleaned all that information from his time in your mind. Did the caller say anything else?”
    “Like what? Hey buddy, let’s catch a movie Friday night?”
    There was the question of the sigil as well.
    Ileana could not imagine that this boy—who, despite the echoes of ancient Persia in his appearance, was modern through and through—would ever submit to such a drastic procedure. Look at him. Rocking back and forth on the silk upholstery of J.D. Thomas’s living room couch, knees clenched together to protect the jewels of his manhood, eyes full of hopeless pleading. Ileana doubted whether the fey doctor had ever possessed a set of balls, let alone still had them,but Q. even in this vulnerable state, was not and would never be a eunuch.
    The boy squinted. Ileana knelt down before him. “What?”
    “It’s probably noth—”
    “What?”
    “I, um, I think I recognized his voice.”
    The boy waited, as if he wouldn’t divulge the name until Ileana asked him to. There it was again. The neediness. The fear of what he knew to be true. Ileana stared at Q. until he said: “I think it was this guy we knew. Jarhead. Mason ‘Jarhead’ West.”
    “Do you know where he lives?”
    Q. shrugged. “I’m sure he’s in the phone book.”
    Ileana’s nod could have broken a block of wood. “Then we will start there.”
    She smiled as kindly as she knew how.
    Cobras had offered more convincing grins.

5
    H is dad hadn’t fixed the chair or the table. In fact it looked like he’d taken a hatchet to them. Splinters of wood were scattered all over the kitchen. In the place they’d formerly occupied sat a lone TV tray, tin, rusty, dented, a flimsy symbol of how reduced his dad’s life had become.
    “You want bad luck? I’ll tell you bad luck.”
    The old man sprawled in one of the three remaining chairs, legs splayed, bottle clutched between them in both hands. “Son gets killed in a car accident, and while you’re at the hospital identifying his body somebody breaks into your house and destroys your kitchen table. Now that’s bad luck.” John Van Arsdale took a pull from the bottle. “I mean, why the kitchen table? And a chair. Just one chair. Jasper’s chair. That was my son’s name. Jap. Japster.”
    Jasper’s mouth—or, rather, Lawrence Bishop’s—was filled with the starchy contents of a Hungry Man TV dinner, which was the only food John Van Arsdale had in the house.
    “Bad luck all my life. Lost my wife and daughter in ’94. Spent two and a half miserable years in the Navy before that. Got the bends twice and the clap once. My pa left me nothing but debt. My ma run off when I was in high school. Bad luck I tell you. Bad luck my whole life.”
    “He left you the orchard,” Jasper managed to spit out, along witha bit of Salisbury steak. He put the first tray on the floor and picked up the second that waited there, steaming.
    The old man stared at the nearly naked stranger in his kitchen for a moment.
    “How’d you know about the orchard?”
    Jasper’s mind raced.
    “I saw the signs. On the barrel. ‘Van Arsdale’s Home-Brewed Apple Brandy. Brewed From His Own Orchards.’” His fork poised over a stack of turkey slices covered in glutinous gravy.
    John Van Arsdale seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation. “I’m John Van Arsdale,” he said, as if he needed reassurance.
    Jasper almost reached out and took his dad’s hands. But all he could do was nod his host’s head.
    “You are. You’re John Van Arsdale. Your son…your son was Jasper.”
    A long moment of silence passed between the two men. John Van Arsdale’s eyes were glassy and distant. Finally he took another drink, and, fork trembling, Jasper dug into the second TV dinner.
    “Hungry man, ain’t you?” John Van Arsdale laughed. “Get it? Hungry Man?”
    Jasper grunted. “I’ll pay you. For the food.”
    John Van Arsdale waved