For years she’d invaded my psyche. She was a shadow cast by something I couldn’t see, an inexplicable shift of air, a sound that made no sense. I lived with the constant expectation that my phone was going to ring and I’d get the next bad news. I waited for her to torture and murder someone else, to partner with another deviant and go on another spree. I constantly looked for her when I was with Lucy and when I wasn’t. Then I stopped.

“You want a hit?” Marino offers me his cigarette. “You look like you sure as hell could use it, Doc.”

“No thanks.”

“I wonder if the music’s still playing and what the Feds are doing about it because you can bet they aren’t laughing.” He inhales a lungful of smoke and blows it out the side of his mouth.

“Lucy and Janet didn’t blast music and turn off the lights because they wanted to amuse anyone except themselves,” I reply.

Lakes and forests spread out on either side of us as we pass the town of Lexington now.

“You sure it was them who did it?” Marino asks.

“Well it wasn’t Desi.”

“You’d be surprised what little kids can do with computers. It wasn’t all that long ago that one hacked into the FBI database. I think the kid was like four or something.”

“Desi had nothing to do with what we just witnessed. It probably was Lucy’s idea. It’s the sort of thing she’d find funny.” Even as I say this I think of video links I’m supposed to believe were sent by her ICE number.

I’m convinced Carrie is spoofing Lucy’s phone. There’s no telling what else Carrie may have hijacked, broken into and appropriated as if our lives are hers to manipulate, trifle with, damage and destroy. I’m reminded of how skilled she is at creating implosions, internal failures, strife and catastrophes. If she can cause us to self-destruct what could be more gratifying to her than that?

She’s trying to script our behavior, and that’s how it starts.

“I’ll never get over them hiring her.” Marino is talking about Carrie with no prompting from me. “When you really think about it the Feds created Carrie Grethen like Frankenstein,” he adds and he’s right in a sense.

In some ways she was conceived, nurtured and transformed into an amoral monster by our own government. Then she decided to turn on what took care of her, to demolish any fairness and safety she’d been entrusted to ensure in this world. She’ll take any side that suits her at any given time because she has no loyalty or love for anything or anyone except herself.