THE KILL RIFF
By David Schow
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
© 2012 / David J. Schow
Copy-edited by: Kurt Criscione and Paulo Monteiro
Cover Design By: David Dodd
Cover artwork courtesy of: Joe DeVito
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1
This time he would pull the trigger without blinking. Training permitted him to lock his eyes open so he could watch the face in the crosshairs. As it imploded, blood would flush, brains would splatter wetly backward, two ice-blue eyes would fly violently away from each other. And the equity most people ascribed to an indifferent universe would be demonstrated. Balance would be restored.
That was how it should have gone.
Kristen's eyes are glittering.
He was sliding into the nightmare again, reliving her death for the thousandth time. His slumbering mind acknowledged that the recurrent dream was purely a product of his brain, neural impulses with nothing to do but spin their wheels, revving aimlessly, juxtaposing bits of data—always the same information, endlessly repeated.
His hair is white blond, floating dreamily.
The dreamer's knowledge that this was a dream did nothing to dispel or dilute it; he was transfixed, a tiny desert animal trapped and hypnotized by the nova glow of oncoming headlights. There was nothing anyone could do about what was going to happen…except live through the whole terrible sequence one more time.
Encore: one more time!
Behind closed lids, the rapid eye movements characteristic of the dream state tracked avidly along to follow the actions in the sleeper's mind.
Kristen's eyes are glittering. It's encore time.
He had not been there. The expression on his daughter's face was what his brain deemed correct for the circumstance. Reflected in her upward gaze were equal parts awe, joy, apprehension, confusion...and yes, let's admit it now, shall we? A taste of lust. Or what passed for lust, in the sixteen-year-old hive mind. She was surrounded by acolytes experiencing the same emotions, swaying as one with the group. Her peers, the sleeper supposed. All their lust was directed at the man on the stage, the one with the power over them. The aggregate desire was as sheer and clean and blameless as honed steel.
His perfect mane of white-blond hair floating dreamily, the man onstage exhorts his congregation, teasing and beckoning. He makes a flailing, wildman leap and lands precisely on one knee, triceps jumping boldly as he brandishes his cordless radio microphone. It is scepter-like, gleaming like chrome. Sweat has popped forth to decorate his face in animal dots. His pupils are tiny, stopped down and aimed like sniper sights. He genuflects to his people. And they gobble it up. It is a spectacle in the true Roman sense, an onslaught of macho posturing, tribal rhythms and down 'n' dirty sexual amplitude, motive energy to spot-weld the musicians into their role as the ultimate Party Band.
Upstage, subordinately placed, the men with the instruments contort through a repertoire of the expected poses, forcing sounds out of their equipment as though in intense pain, white-knuckled, grimacing, all dead black leather and cinder-block chords in four-four time, pushing and reshaping enormous masses of air within the bowl of the arena—sculpting the very atmosphere so that the thump of the bass guitar is a physical thing that punches the diaphragm, and flesh is electrified by the tingle of the guitar solo, keening and soaring.
The percussionist is invisible behind his barricade of drums. His tom-tom lies face flat so that when he strikes it, his accumulated sweat flies up from the taut plastic in a spray. He is battling his drum kit, pummeling his sticks to shards, snatching up replacements without missing a strike, tossing the dead sticks into the imploring, grasping hands of the audience. Fistfights erupt over possession of the blessed splinters, pieces of the true cross of heavy metal. The fights flare and die like the flame of a sulfur match. The pieces are tasted by the crowd, digested, and found to be good. Hands in fingerless gloves and studded wristbands are clenched and raised. Finger symbols entreat the next offering.
Kristen glances to her left as a doubled fist lands hard on a kid's head. The impact drops his jaw. His eyes vanish into shock wrinkles; his lank yellow hair jerks upward as he is sucked under. The chunk of drumstick wrested from his grasp is held high. Kristen thinks of Neanderthals pounding each other over stinking tidbits from some half-charred prehistoric bird—hey, I want the drumstick, brontosaurus breath! Once again she has the fleeting thought that perhaps she is getting too old for the concert scene. Too often, she winds up next to hippie flotsam whose last bath was at Woodstock or gets vomited on by some thirteen-year-old who ate too many Quaaludes with his Cheerios that morning. She hates festival seating. Open arena floor, no seats, also called "dance concert" seating, seating that isn't seating at all. How fucking stupid. No room to breathe, let alone dance. As the music and crowd fervor intensify, so does the elbow room vanish. But she is a veteran at these things by now. She can handle not seeing a restroom for the duration of a four-hour, three-act show. From where she stands, she can reach forward and touch the wooden security barricade, just two yards distant from the heroes onstage. That is her compensation. Shoulder to shoulder with the die-hard fans, she dismisses the fight (too gross to bother with) and keeps her attention on the show. Enraptured, she watches.
Too old at sixteen—now there's a giggle.
The show is so pat that it could offend nobody but a fundamentalist. Bad boys doing the reform school strut, grunting primal lyrics, cranking out the moves as smoothly as millionaire bikers with platinum drive chains. It is harmlessly evil showbiz, a high-volume urban diversion, audience pleasing, good box office. The sleeper knew this. He liked rock, good and loud, an aural assault that could cleanse away tensions and allow you to boogie off the dead ass that came from sitting and working for hours. The music was blameless.
But the crescendo was coming. His body knew but it did not bother arguing with his brain.
The rollicking gusher of music vibrates through their bones and prompts frantic clapping, in cadence. A hand slides up between Kristen's legs from behind, squeezes, and is gone. The usual crap. She doesn't even bother to turn around. She is submerged, getting off on the sheer sound. And then—
Whores in Saigon. They did not care what you filled your hand with, as long as you had American money.
And then he looks directly at her, all shimmering white-blond curls and hooded adder eyes, the ice pick stab of a come-hither glance, his glowing ice-blue irises locking on to her brown-green ones. She feels heat at her temples, a surging at her groin. Yum. She imagines his hand filling up with her. The masses feel her up with their closeness, their lemming-like forward momentum. Though she no longer sees them, she is pulled along by their riptide. Her eyes are captured. Green spikes of color in them flare and become prominent, as they do whenever she is excited or happy. Her feet shuffle forward. One step. One more. Two rows of crushed-together people, two thicknesses of human corpus, separate her from the plywood barricade.
He thought of taking those damnable nameless hills at night, a foot at a time. Six hours of fighting to gain a few yards of distance. Toting up the yardage in the gallons of blood you used to buy it. It was never worth it. The flame pots a lot of bands now used in their concert shows shot up columns of fire, like plumes of napalm. One such had fried off Michael Jackson's hair during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. A trench of gasoline could do a hell of a job.
God, she thinks, he must work out two hours every day, just like Doc Savage. He peels off his sequined gold vest to bare a professionally conditioned physique that is granite hard and as flowingly smooth as dry ice. She watches his pecs pump as he wheels the winking vest around and around overhead, lasso style. The crowd is more vocal now, the herd pressure escalating, a banzai charge in slow motion.
I think he's going to throw it. Oh, god. He's going to throw it at me. She has never had a rock star look at her before. Oh, my god....
Rock god. Like the toadish, squatting stone idols in the jungle. Abandoned, forgotten gods, who evaporate for lack of followers. Gods need sacrifices. They rather insist on them. Gods always do. They are immovable in that respect. Like rocks.
Sinews snap into tight relief as the vest is hooked into a flat spin. Kristen's eyes do not follow it. The crowd breaks with fearsome suddenness, a tidal wave hitting a sand castle.
Despite the floodtide of articles in psychological journals, there is no simple sociological explanation for why such things happen. There is no pinpointed cause for the effect beyond presumed catalysts for the hive mind. These things happen spontaneously. Sometimes fires start the same way.
As in battle, some hazards come with the territory. A simple release clause on tickets for festival-style concerts could solve potential problems. Remittance of purchase price could constitute an agreement to waive one's right to police protection during a show. Every fan for themselves. The core truth was this: As a solution, all such measures could do was cover asses, not heal fractures, not bring back the dead. Sometimes concerts erupted. Sometimes not. Reasonable predictions could be assigned to a particular band's appeal.
Whip Hand was an extremely popular heavy metal group.
Concert security is a bad joke. They're big, and they're bad, but they're also outnumbered. They are highly visible in yellow bodybuilding jerseys with broad black horizontal stripes bordered by studs. They want deeply to bull it out from behind the wooden partition, but once they see the charge, they break for the stage level. This is misinterpreted as free license to jump the stage, become one with the performers. The tidal wave back swells for thrust, and then surges forward. The center of the barricade bows inward with an unheard groan; the sides collapse and are stomped down. On his knees at the lip of the stage, one bouncer reaches into the front rank of rock 'n' roll commandos, grabs a face, and bangs it into the metal superstructure of the prefab stage. Blood spatters his jersey. The victim goes down and is seen no more. Like army ants, the crowd turns its brief but lethal attention to the bouncer, who is overwhelmed. His backstage pass is snatched as twenty arms pull him from the stage. His tattered shirt flies into the air. Maybe it was the blood that was the catalyst.
Over one hundred strong for the Civic Auditorium show, the sheriffs are up in the aisles, totally impotent. Bashing with batons toward the center of the arena floor will only reap them a full-scale riot. They are already at the limit of their competence trying to restrain the concertgoers seated at the periphery of the open floor from joining in the melee. Commotion is always a good excuse for working off aggravation against the minions of law enforcement. They represent authority and retribution and are untouchable —except in moments like this. One deputy turns his back to the stage, and a swinging fist crushes his rimless glasses into his face, mashing his nose flat. Blood spurts. Two more badges lay into the assailant with truncheons, and mace mist fills the air. One kid gets his eyes pasted shut from the whack of a baton. The blood dribbling from his nostrils makes him look as though he has a real mustache for the first time in his life.
Whip Hand was a seasoned combat team. They had a preplanned escape contingency for just such a situation as this. By the time the bouncer had been yanked off the stage and devoured by the crowd, the music had stopped and the band was gone, vanished into the labyrinthine convolutions of the Civic Auditorium's tunnel maze. In an underground garage, they piled into a Datsun station wagon with refectory sun-screened windows. A radio cue dispatched two decoy limousines, diverting the gullible. Back at their hotel, the band could play the game of defeating their own security by sneaking through their chosen sex partners and other privileged hangers-on. There was security, after all, and there was SECURITY.
The audience had gotten rowdy; no problem. Party animals, all. A little healthy teenage catharsis. Three days later the band would be in a new state, on a new leg of the tour.
The heel of someone's hand smacked into Kristen's brow, scattering sparks across her vision. She was rudely shoved from behind and stumbled sideways between the two people in front of her. She went down on one knee, in a clumsy mimic of the genuflecting rock star. Her hand found the support of the barricade, now caved in at a forty-five-degree angle to the stage. Abrupt, numbing pain shot through her; people were walking on her legs. Heels dug into her calves. The panic roar of the crowd had drowned out the music. She could not even hear herself scream. Heavy weight bulldogged in on her from behind, and she felt the plywood crack beneath her stomach. She collected splinters in her chest as she slid down, clawing for purchase as the wooden partition collapsed.
Viet Cong regulars would scramble over the barbed wire of American encampments by using the corpses of their dead buddies hung up in the wire as miniature bridges. The barbed wire had been manufactured in Philadelphia; the dog soldiers were constantly admonished not to waste it. All it took to defeat this feeble shield was one dead Cong. It seemed like such a monumental waste, in both directions.
Kristen's spine stretched, then cracked apart like the slatting of an orange crate as a motorcycle boot stomped into the small of her back. Her breath whooshed out as though she were deflating.
Gas from a balloon, she thought. My life hissing out. Then came the waterfall of arms and legs and weighty bodies, the crunch point of herd chaos.
Maybe if I yelled fire—
"Your mom's always hollering fire," He had said to Kristen following the divorce. He shrugged.
"The girl who cried wolf," Kristen had said. "The original. I think she just feels deprived of her flaming youth—y'know, the sowing of wild oats, all that great crap she thought she was supposed to have done before twenty-five? You guys just. . . I dunno...used each other up. Time to move on." She had shrugged, groping for clarity. During the entire acrimonious split-up, everyone had done a great deal of very important shrugging.
"We outgrew each other in different directions." He had stuffed his hands into his topcoat pockets.
"Let's see if we can scare up some lunch."
Kristen paced him, linking arms. She wore bright red woolen mittens. "Don't want to talk about it, huh?" Her words had puffed out into the December air in chilly white clouds.
"Daughters are supposed to look like assholes when they learn from their mistakes in life. Not daddies. Daddies should know better."
"Christ, don't be so sensitive." Then she had pounced on the straight line: "You're my favorite asshole, Dad."
He had made a face at her choice of words. Limousines whispered past them in an endless, taxpayer-funded procession. There were more limousines in this tiny city than at the Academy Awards.
Kristen kept wearing her mischievous grin, working to distract his mind and counter his glum mood. She could be frighteningly wise and manipulative—traits of her mother's—but she lacked Cory's meanness of spirit.
He forced a wan smile. "Lunch, huh." He was staring at the Capitol dome in the hazy distance.
"Yep. We can venture forth into the great primordial stone swamp."
"Interesting return address."
She puckered up her face. "Better than writing Washington, D.C., on your letters. Like you live in a city that's gay or something."
"Whoa." He was mocking her now. "You're not supposed to be conversant in that stuff, yet."
"Next you'll tell me I'm too young for a gigolo."
Teasing each other, they strolled on, blending with the cold. Eventually they scared up some seafood. Nine weeks later, Cory, Kristen's mother, died of a barbiturate overdose. The whole time she was going down, down, she had lain in a hotel room bed, staring at her reflection in the desk mirror. She had left a note that concluded DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
Shriek of feedback. A kid with a magenta Mohawk and a torn green leather coat achieves the stage and manages to grab an unmanned mike stand. He catches a shock from the coaxial connector and springs back. The stand tips over and THUNKS on the stage. Amplified feedback loud enough to shatter teeth reverberates from the back wall of the arena.
Bloodied now, Kristen attempts to turn her head to stare up through the assaulting chaos of bodies. Her double string of crystal beads, her dad's most recent Christmas gift, is cinched tight, cutting off her wind, strangling her. Another stomping foot crunches into the hollow of her neck, at the place where her ear and neck blend delicately together. The force pushes her through the remnants of the barricade. She sees sparks and tastes floor dirt. There is no sound beyond a medium-pitch roar—perhaps her own rushing, oxygen-starved blood, still pumping.
A final thought: Is this what dying feels li
Kristen had left him a note, too.
DADDY—OFF TO SEE "WHIP HAND" (OBSCENE, NO?) WITH MARTA AND SUKI. PROMISE TO BE BACK BY NEXT THURSDAY (HA HA). LOVE YOU. K.
His life, summed up by two scraps of paper.
His mind almost craved the pain of playing it all back again. It was important not to forget a single detail. Seeing Kristen on the brink of her death, over and over, was better than never seeing her at all. The dream never changed. Things were shaded differently sometimes, but she always died. Twelve other concertgoers had died with her; the goddamned disaster had even made the cover of Time. He wondered whether a less notorious group than Whip Hand would have rated a cover spread. The band's lead singer, the iron-pumping blond with the Grecian profile, had made the Wall Street Journal a year previously, when Lloyds of London decided to cover him for $1.5 million in paternity suit insurance.
The hospital-sterile sheets were gummed with sleep sweat; the man groped them in the wide, retarded motions of deep yet troubled slumber. His breath began to hitch. He was almost gasping.
What he needed was the ability to change the dream, to alter the configuration of the past.
The rock god strips away his golden vest like a carapace. The new vantage point is distant, higher, providing a godlike overview of the arena. At this distance the vest resembles a sheath of a thousand gold doubloons, polished, metallic. From here, Kristen cannot be seen. He can see the rock show, but not his daughter.
He sees his feet, realizes he is standing in a spotlighting nest or on a girder high above the broad crescent of stage. Too far away to grab the singer, or save his daughter, or prevent the whole sequence from happening one more time.
I'm packed, he thinks.
He feels weight in his hands. Looks down, resenting the necessity to tear his vision from the imminent tableau below. He would miss the horror of Kristen's death. He saw in his grasp an abbreviated, foul-looking machine gun, a nasty, ventilated thing reminiscent of a Russian AK-47, with a curved banana clip.
And he thinks, Thirty slugs should take the bastard down all right.
He sockets the weapon into the hollow of his shoulder. His index finger brushes the trigger. Squeeze, don't snap. Be ready for the gun's tendency to kick toward the sky.
Write a jerk-off wet-dream child-molesting love ditty about this, you overpaid baboon...
He cut loose.
(Don't fritter away your ammo. When you see the lead goon drop, chop the reinforcements. Fire selectively to generate panic and confusion. Make sure you've maximized disorder by the time you have to reload —you may need the extra two seconds.)
He was holding a longer, lighter weapon now. A rifle with a powerful Leupold stretch target scope. Better. His marksmanship medals were no joke.
Light flooded in, spoiling his aim, startling him, making him wince.
Blood dribbled from the rock god's head. Spatters of it despoiled his gray three-piece suit. His palms were skinned from his abrupt tumble down the rough-cast stone of the courthouse steps. He is surrounded by bodyguards. Just like Reagan. Guns materialize from nowhere.
The gentle gush of unconscious orgasm warmed the sleeping man's belly.
He is standing on the courthouse steps below the rock god and his throng. He drops the pistol he has brandished. It is plastic. It cracks apart on the stone. He smiles a bitter smile of loss. Then they swarm over him.
Lucas Ellington huffed mightily and woke up.
"Do you want the candle?"
"Yes," he said. The candle was a bit of mumbo-jumbo he had requested. It helped him focus his thoughts.
"The same dream again?"
"I did it again, Sara. More explicit. Jumbled details. Scary, like a roller coaster. Almost a helplessness—as though I had no say, no control."
He stared at the wavering flame of the strawberry-scented votive candle. Near the desk, Sara fired up one of her filtered Salem l00s. He could smell it. The leather of the Stressless recliner crunched as he shifted around, eyes on the candle flame, riffling mental indexes to recapture the salient emotional high points of last night's hellish internal videotape replay.
"I'm afraid that while I was wielding all that phallic firepower in the dream, I came all over myself." He noted this unselfconsciously. Sara understood.
He heard her get out of her chair while he talked. Now she was behind him somewhere, near the office door. He heard her hose swish together as she moved. She was adorned with some light, spicy scent that was easy to pick out in the dark. She had a unique insight into his clockwork, he thought. Or, at least, she was convinced of that.
Clink. Her coffee mug on the glass desktop. The dark, the candle, seemed to open up all of his senses. "You ready for tomorrow?"
"Ready for tomorrow. . ." He sounded almost wistful. "Yes. It's time I got back in the world. That was what we used to say. The place where the bad stuff was going down was not the world. And I think I can successfully leave the bad stuff here." It was his speech from yesterday and the day before.
"The nightmares?" She was interested. In more ways than one.
"Those, too, Sara. I really think I can do it. And you've done all you can for me here. It's time for me to prove myself to the world." He sensed she was waiting, so he added, "Besides, I can't invite my shrink to dinner while I'm still a patient, can I?" It was a good diversionary wedge.
"Mmm-hm."
On her desk was a small stand-up calendar, courtesy of Mission Street Flowers. The next Monday was circled in green felt tip. That was the day Lucas had decided to become normal again.
"This'll be the acid test of your ministrations," he opined lightly. "Technically, how am I?"
"Good. Not self-destructive. Not suicidal. The extreme fits of depression are no more. There's just the nightmares to worry about. This place focuses your attention on them. I think you just need to get back to work." In a more conversational, personal tone, she said, "I'll have you know I've pored over your files for hours coming up with this brilliant summary, sir. And I think this place has done all it can for you."
"And I've managed to develop a good healthy lech for my doctor, as well."
Lucas did not know how important a factor that had been in his progress. His death wish, the product of the suicide of his wife and the death of his daughter, had finally been elbowed aside by something more life embracing.
Sara had felt the attraction, too, a reciprocal force that manifested itself in a thousand little flirtatious gestures. One reason she wanted to get Lucas back in the world had nothing to do with his files and charts.
"Like, I had this other dream. I was getting gobbled up by a big green iguana with a name tag that read 'Sara' on it. Mean anything, doctor?"
"Ho, ho, ho," she said, deadpan. "That does not deserve the satisfaction of a retort."
"Is it time for lunch yet?" It seemed Sara had been satisfied. Or adroitly misdirected. It was all the same to him.
Papers rustled at the desk. The orange coal of the cigarette swooped from mouth level to light on the edge of a clunky geode ashtray.
"We're done. You've given me everything you can on the dream. It fits with all the preceding."
Lucas smiled to himself in the dark. It was time to stop dreaming. And start doing, at last.
2
The North Hollywood offices of Kroeger Concepts, Limited, had maintained an unchanged facade since the completion of its construction, some seven years past. On Vineland Avenue, a stone's lob from the Black Tower of Universal Studios, Kroeger had flourished with Lucas Ellington on their squad. Without him for the past year, it had fared comfortably enough. Or that was how it seemed. The facade leaked no secrets.
Lucas stood on the curb of the Vineland crosswalk through four changes of the traffic light, watching the building. Nothing had altered unduly here. At least nothing obvious enough to hurt him.
Kroeger Concepts had been born in 1970 as Burton Kroeger's ticket to the movie industry. Burt was a film buff, mesmerized, like many, by the idea of actually dipping into the filmmaking mainstream. Then he discovered the truth about his fourth favorite thing (after sex, spicy food, and sports cars). By daylight, the industry was a fetid cesspool of graft and lowball deals, a sausage factory run by soulless accountants and bankers who chewed and spit out creative talent like old chaw. In Burt's deathless, impassioned words, the business "spent all its time whoring with starlets and snorting dream dust and fellating the unions and bending over for the Mafia." Upon acknowledging this Great Truth, Burt had opted to make the giants approach him, rather than go begging to people he despised. He founded his own company, a publicity and promotional outfit, and things were bone lean through 1974, when two fundamental changes were implemented. The company got mixed up with three promising movies. Burt hit the technical journals hard, with a series of creative advertisements that built on reader familiarity with the previous ad. The spots were aimed not at the public, but at the professionals. Kroeger's ads for film stocks and new camera lenses tripled the company's revenue in eight months. How to induce executives to seriously consider recruitment drives from other studios? How to prove that saving the imbibition Technicolor process could be made cost-effective, so current color films would not fade to red within the decade? Then the promising movies carted off a number of minor Academy Awards. All that was the first thing that happened to the company. The second thing was Lucas Ellington.
By 1978, Lucas' drafting table served more for strategizing and less for drawing. By 1978, Kroeger Concepts commanded industry respect in the only way that counts in Hollywood—they were making money fist over pocket with high-quality, deftly targeted promotions. By 1978, Burt Kroeger was telling the studios how to go about their business, and he was happy. Disillusioned, but gruffly happy. Lucas remembered a sweltering August afternoon when he and Burt had bellowed laughter at a trade article detailing Kroeger's "meteoric rise" to prosperity.
"I thought meteors fell down, not up." Burt clinked his glass with Lucas'. Perrier-Jouët.
"Yeah, and they flame out on the way." Kroeger had founded its reputation on beheading clichés like "meteoric rise."
Lucas took time off to function as an independent contractor, redesigning Kroeger's offices for renovation. On a boulevard of eyesores, the new Kroeger building caught the eye the way a snappy commercial is intended to. It rose from a man-made hummock of real greenery that was landscaped to blend with the planes of the structure. The reflecting wall of windows was either ahead of its time or still a mistake. The structure was flat and efficient without being a cracker box. The rectangular, high-tech, soft-lit sign had anticipated the new billboard ordinances. Kroeger's self-proclamation did not despoil what remained of the city's skyline. It was mounted on a sandstone planter base next to the redbrick front walk and was modest enough to hint quietly at the company's true level of success. It prompted a tiny pang in Lucas now.
The receptionist's switchboard rig was new, too, and no larger than an electric typewriter had been in the olden days. The office decor had been logically reconsidered. In the beginning it had been a riot of paneling and hanging plants. There seemed to be an unspoken office pact around Hollywood that required the maintenance of a lush indoor jungle in every building. Maybe it was to counteract the smog level in the valley. The jungle wearied Burt quickly. It too readily reminded him of the jungle of paperwork cluttering up his office. In sober tones the employees later recited as a sort of company punch line, Burt bustled into the foyer one afternoon and made his pronouncement.
"The Black Lagoon has got to go."
Today there were still decorative plants to be seen. But each one drew the eye to it. They were more individualized. Burt's instinct for arrangement and subtle dramatics had prevailed. Now, the reception area left on visitors the impression that here was a company lacking even an ounce of fat.
Burt himself left a similar impression. He was a compact, honed man topping off at a neat five feet eight.
His eyes were hawk-like and direct, oiled ball bearings of intensity, a soft gray that accommodated a variety of moods and complemented the iron-colored thundercloud of fluffy hair that seemed to float around, rather than issue from, his head. Around the office, his voice always preceded his entrance. It was his advance guard now, booming from the corridor leading back to the office maze. Lucas knew he did not need to be announced.
"Emma, is he here yet? It's ten after, and the son of a bitch hasn't—"
"The son of a bitch beat you to the punch, Burt," called Lucas, feeling light-headed and happy.
Burton Kroeger burst into the reception area just behind his own pleased blurt of laughter. He was wearing a big, stupid country grin, and his eyes were alight with welcome. "Lucas! Goddamn my eyeballs, son, it's great to see you!"
Lucas executed a modest bow. He couldn't chase the smile off his own face.
"Emma, Lucas and I are out to lunch for the rest of the day." He clapped his hands around Lucas's shoulders; big, facile hands that could smother a grapefruit. "This is one of them extravagant business lunches you've heard so much about, Lucas." He was genuinely charged up by getting his cohort back.
"You mean you're going to spring for real food?" Lucas asked this with arched eyebrows, mostly for Emma's benefit. She was still trying to puzzle him out.
She was new, and he was an unknown sum to her. All she would have heard was that this was the guy who'd spent time in the psychiatric hospital. Her expression was unruffled, amused, interested. Lucas trusted that she was sharp. After all, she had to put up with Burt on a day-to-day basis.
"Real food?" said Burt. "Hell, no! It's Dos Equis and Mexican chow from Ernie's for you!"
"Should I alert the police?" Emma put in. Lucas snickered while Burt flushed a brief red.
"The touch is yours," Burt allowed her grandly. After a precise beat, he continued: "That proves people who work here are touched. Touché!"
"Gasp." Emma rolled her eyes. They were brown, heavy-lidded, sensual. "It was nice meeting you, Mr. Ellington."
"Oh, yeah," Burt said. "Emma, this here is Mr. Lucas Ellington, my partner. Lucas, Emma. Now can we dispense with this amenities crap and please haul ass outta here? I need to discover some food! God damn, it's good to see you!" Another hearty whack on the shoulder staggered Lucas. Then Burt had his aviator shades on and was out the tinted-glass doors.
Lucas tossed Emma a little salute and chased the whirlwind.
Every third booth at Ernie's Taco House was occupied with fallout from the lunch-special crowd. Burt steered Lucas as far away from the jabbering TV sets at the bar as was feasible. The first uncapped round of beers with salted glasses came, and it took no time for Burt to boil their conversation down to a lean series of questions and answers. Lucas was prepared for it.
"Hope you understand about the...visits." For this, Burt had toned down the volume of his usually brash public persona.
"Don't think about that." Lucas tilted his glass and watched the dark beer form a thin diagonal head. "There aren't many pleasant, euphemistic ways you can tell people you're visiting a friend in the psycho school."
For Burt, one or two such visits to Olive Grove would be all his sense of loyalty and friendship could stand. Burt hated situations he lacked the power to grab in both hands and amend. Lucas had decided long ago that Burt did not need to be slapped in the face or hammer-locked into unproductive guilt. The choice of Olive Grove, over a hundred miles north of Los Angeles, had neatly abetted his decision to absolve most of the people he knew. The drive was just far enough to be inconvenient. This guaranteed a measure of privacy, without an overt edict demanding that no one was to see him. Lucas had not committed himself so that his friends could see him in a stimulating new environment.
"I'd prefer that everybody just continue with the gentle fantasy that I was on an unspecified, extended leave of absence," he said, "not squirreled away for my own good because a lot of bad publicity and bad events had inspired me to do myself in." He spoke calmly, rationally. Now it was Burt who had to be convinced, won over. He had to see that the topic was not taboo. Discussion would upset no fragile latticework of sanity. There was no insanity here. That was something all the folks in smocks had insisted upon. Even Sara, bless her heart.
Burt surfaced from his Dos Equis. It had always been his contention that conventional beer bottles were not designed to hold enough. The food came too fast; it always did at Ernie's. The mustachioed waiter bade them to enjoy. Burt's eyes bored into the man's back as he zipped away. The waiter stiffened, as if stung by a bolt of psychic energy, then returned with two more beers.
"Do I have to be nice to you?"
Lucas was slightly taken aback by this. "No, Burt, of course not. Fire away."
"Just between you and me. As buddies and vets and partners. If it was me, my daughter, I'd've blown that fucker away." He dug into a mess of green chili enchiladas and rellenos stuffed with beef as he spoke. His grave delivery had no perceptible influence on his appetite.
"Those times I did see you, I was afraid to talk about stuff like that. Or mention how the papers seemed to ignore everything that happened. Let some homo actor croak from AIDS, or some director get caught dipping a kindergartner, and its page one, lots of embarrassing tape on Hollywood Weekend Wrap-up. Thirteen kids dead at that concert, and they treat it like a plane crash. One mention, and onward to the happy news." He bolted a vast gulp of beer, to clear his pipes. "Ridiculous. No investigation. No nothing."
"I heard the band broke up," Lucas said. His voice was very quiet, without irony.
"Hm. And I repeat—if it'd been me at that courthouse, I'd have blown the fucker away. I don't think I could've controlled myself the way you did."
A ghost of a smile made a brief visitation on Lucas's face. He sawed into one side of a deep-fried chimichanga, and steam perked out. "What would that have accomplished? It would have made me the heavy. Big bad distraught daddy blows away rock star in fit of passion. Very sordid, Burt. Unclean. I had the effect I wanted, I think."
He chewed food as his mind chewed memory, and he saw it all happen again: Gabriel Stannard, Whip Hand's top gun, was striding down the steps of the Beverly Hills Courthouse, flanked by his attorneys, gofers, munchkins, and teeny-boppers. He was wearing a severely cut European suit with a plain shirt and tie, all business. But his vest was a metallic LSD paisley, and on his feet were bright red cowboy boots with wiggly gray snakes stitched across the tops. The snakes had emerald eyes.
The tragedy at the concert of April 18 had translated into a staggering amount of baksheesh to be paid out to local law enforcement. The concert should have been Whip Hand's last, but there was no way the flacks working for the band were going to ignore the drawing power of death. After a respectful hiatus, Whip Hand continued with its American tour. Every show was packed. No festival seating, as there had been at the disastrous L.A. show. No further L.A. dates. The deaths brought out the news media, yes, but their function became that of unwitting publicity. The first concert of the renewed tour recouped most of the cost of getting out of L.A. alive, and the band completed their cross-country schedule as very rich men. A few token appearances in court amounted to minutiae, a quick and noiseless sweeping up. End of narrative.
Except for Lucas. Representatives from band management had expressed weighty and meaningless condolences. He remembered the schmuck attorney. Woodberry. Or Washburn. The guy's name was a blur, like his face. Only his bit part mattered. Lucas's inspiration had come at the moment he'd chased Woodburn-or Washberry out of his office at Kroeger.
There were fewer cameras in attendance at Beverly Hills than Lucas had expected. More groupies than reporters. It didn't matter. What mattered was the expression on Gabriel Stannard's face when he glanced up and saw Lucas waiting for him on the courthouse steps. There was a hint of familiarity behind the mirrored sunglasses—the heartbeat of time that precedes actual recognition. It was enough.
Lucas had spoken the band leader's name clearly enough to shut everyone else up for a second. Time took a snapshot. Lucas drew the gun, pointed it at Stannard's face, and said, "Bang. You're dead."
But no one had heard him. They were too busy falling all over each other, scrambling to evade the line of fire. Lucas recalled an enormous bald black man, Stannard's watchdog, jumping to shield, with killer's eyes. A girl with purple hair and spangles shrieked and went rolling down the stairs. She was wearing a cartridge belt. It clinked on the concrete.
Lucas dropped his gun before Stannard's bodyguard could do real damage. It hit the steps and broke. It was plastic, a toy.
Stannard had hit the deck with too much panic and broken his mirrored shades. A silver sliver protruded from a gash on his forehead, and blood was coursing from burst scalp veins. It was messy but superficial. It accomplished what Lucas had desired.
Stannard's PR elves and attorneys knew the positive value of not prosecuting Lucas. They did, however, recommend psychiatric treatment, "in his own interest."
That was when Lucas had gotten a second inspiration.
"And then there's all that crap about suicide," said Burt around another mouthful. "Jesus, Lucas—you're the last guy in the world who'd try to off himself. A guy like you and suicide don't blend. Sorry. You confront problems. You're the solution man. That's why we interface so well." He gestured with his fork, point making.
"No, Burt. Grief can overload anybody's circuits. And I didn't actually try to kill myself. But I did think about it, and that scared me. So I checked in at Olive Grove. Even the dummies working for Whip Hand were pleased; they thought they'd done it. I admit it wasn't in character. I never believed in therapy."
"Hashing over your fuck-ups with somebody who went bananas themselves to snare a sheepskin."
"Sara used to say it didn't matter what side of the food slot you were on. If you weren't nuts before you went in, you'd certainly be nuts by the time you came out ... or your money back."
Burt chuckled. It was going well. But he did not look at Lucas's eyes when he said, "And were you? Nuts, I mean?"
"Cory's suicide, then Kristen's death," he said gently. "Yeah, Burt. I guess you could say I was a little bit nuts."
"Stronger guys have killed themselves over far less. If it was me, and I lost Diana, I might just swerve off an overpass on a whim."
"She's a terrific lady. Can't wait to get together with her."
"I'm sure she'd drop everything to see you now," Burt said. "I can give her a call—"
"Not just yet," Lucas overrode him. "I have plans. We'll get to them in a minute." He saw in his friend the eager need for everything to be okay, to be normal again.
Burt slid his Dos Equis bottle to the edge of the table. Another dead soldier. His plate was scraped bare. "Tell me about this Sara person."
"She's the one, Burt. She grabbed my lapels and yanked me up out of that suicidal depression. It's her fault. No group sessions baring my soul to loonies, none of that pro forma psychiatric bullshit like gaming or primal screaming or any of your garden-variety southern California cult craziness. Just understanding. My doctor and my friend."
"A whole year, though. . ." Burt clearly disapproved of what he saw as a waste of time.
"What do you want me to say, Burt? It took a year. It might take more. In sum, not even enough time to pay for a new car. Definitely an investment. I got the rest of my life back." His palms were open in entreaty, the sort of gesture one might use to assure a policeman that one was not packing any artillery. "I have returned. I'm okay. Past that it gets pretty dull."
"I'm no analyst," said Burt cautiously. "But like you, I was never patient with group anything."
"All the more reason to seek help when I finally smashed into a problem I couldn't resolve by myself. Everybody eventually hits one they can't take on alone. Cory did. It ate her alive. And I don't blame myself anymore for what she did. My feelings on that cancel out to zero. She was a very disturbed person. If she could've known somebody like Sara, gotten help…she might still be around." Half his chimichanga grew cold on the plate. It was cheap but good.
"Do I detect a note of interest in this Sara person? I mean, beyond her professional wonderfulness?"
"More than a note. More like a whole goddamned symphony. She redeemed me. She didn't have to do it. Now Olive Grove is behind me. We've arranged to get together after a few weeks. In a nonprofessional capacity. And then we'll see if there's anything to exploit."
"Good for you."
"Hell, we're already more compatible than Cory and I ever were."
"You mean she hasn't tried to stave in your head with an ashtray or cut off your balls with a butcher knife?"
They both knew how violent and unstable Cory had been toward the end. No apology needed to be made for Cory. Lucas tried anyway. "She changed, Burt. After she had Kristen, she changed. I really think motherhood doomed her. She watched herself get old while Kristen got young, and it was too much for her." She'd watched herself right up until the end. Her last sight had been herself in the hotel room mirror, dying.
Burt cleared his throat.
"So," Lucas said, to break away from the topic. "So what?"
"So do I still have a job at Kroeger, or what?"
"Oh." Burt jerked abruptly as though hit. "Oh! Of course! Jesus, Lucas, I thought that was a given." He looked embarrassedly before him and saw no plate, no beer, and nothing to fiddle with. He immediately signaled the waiter again.
"Nothing is as it seems," said Lucas. "Venerable old ad-pub rule. And you're still looking at me as though you vaguely suspect I might suck babies' blood or something." His smile stole any sting his words might have imparted.
Burt sent the grin right back. “Fuck you very much."
The waiter looked nervously from man to man until Burt pointed at his empty Dos Equis bottle. Then he fled. "Thanks." Lucas nodded. "Now we move on."
"As we get older," Burt grumbled. He pawed around in a coat pocket until he fished up a nicotine-colored prescription vial. It took him half the ice water in his glass to get the tiny pill down.
"What the hell is that?" Lucas said. His eyes went stark at the thought of information not shared between friends.
"Nothing. Blood pressure's too goddamned high, so the jerks at Cedars Sinai informed me. They cited studies on stress, as if those would change the way I do things. So here I am—not even fifty and putting down pills. Shit."
Lucas's eyes stayed on the vial until it was stashed. The pills Cory was full of when she died were fat Seconals. Different pills, similar container. Autopsy noted she'd swallowed at least seventy-five of them.
"I don't like the idea of taking any kind of medication," he said.
"At least God created alcohol to wash it down with. These chalky little things remind me what pigeon shit must taste like." He put away a huge draft of the newly arrived beer, settled back, and eased out a belch. Except for two other couples, they were the only people left in the restaurant. The hazy color set above the bar burbled sports trivia.
"What do I need to know?"
"Hm. Well, I've converted your office into the executive powder room..." Burt laughed at his own joke. "Nah—it's just as you left it, dusty and encased in plastic until your return."
"Divine," Lucas hummed. The beer was making him stupid. Beer wasn't on the menu at Olive Grove. He'd never exactly been a beer fan, just an occasional glassful of something dark and thick and imported. Now he had developed a positive lust for the taste. It was delicious. What the hell, his imp of conscience told him. If he wasn't entitled to get a bit saturated now, then when?
Burt picked up the threads of update quickly. "Emma, the princess of the switchboard, you met. She's been in Monica's berth since...well, she was pregnant when you left, right?"
"I swear, Burt, we were just good friends."
"Not to worry. She had twins, and neither of them is as ugly as you. Then her husband got a job working on the space shuttle. Engineering. Trying to find a way to keep the damned thing from blowing up." Lucas watched a dozen space shuttle jokes of the gallows-humor variety flash through Burt's memory, behind his eyes. "But you know," he said, suddenly thoughtful, "if they gave me a chance to go up in the thing and do stuff in space, and told me it would blow up on the way back to Earth...who knows? I'd probably go anyway."
Lucas did not ask him what that meant.
"We overhauled the drafting section. Figured you wouldn't mind."
"I'm tangentially interested. Like to keep a hand in." Bingo—another bottle of beer was gone in no time. His newfound thirst was definitely intriguing.
"Tower and Barrington are designing shopping malls now. The wave of the future. You know they're calling it 'Southern Californization'? Fuckheads. May they be crushed in the elevator shafts in the malls those two designed for the video drones."
Barry Tower and Stanley Barrington had amicably parted company with Kroeger Concepts just over a year back. Lucas scanned backward for a second. "How's Sean?"
"He's not here, either. He's off discovering Europe on a budget, and to hell with the terrorists, he says. Probably becoming sexually notorious throughout Scandinavia while you and I sit warming this booth and getting smashed."
"That's good. Sean Markesson was the worst workaholic I've ever seen. What stopped him?"
"Me. He was embarrassing us all, making us look bad." Burt often exercised his prerogative as a self-made success to ignore all the rules of bossdom. Now he and Lucas shared the laugh. It was partly the beer, partly the release of pressure. Lucas was reassuming his place in the order of things. So far, the fit was smooth.
"When Sean first moved to L.A., he was the most self-effacing man you'd ever meet," said Lucas. "A really nice guy. Then he hit Hollywood and bam! He became a slavering monster. Mister Tinseltown. Whoo."
Burt continued laughing. "Yeah, he got wound pretty tight. Much longer, and we might've had to book him a bed next to yours in the—" The happiness on his face curdled. He actually winced. "Ah—sorry?"
"Stop being so goddamn careful. Funny-farm jokes are okay by me. My sanity is not an egg in a paint mixer. I'm not going to fracture and rape the barmaid before your disbelieving eyeballs. Trust me."
Burt cast a glance toward the bar. "He's not your type, anyhow." He let go a beery sigh. "Just let me acclimate. You can scare up a lot of misconceptions about mental health, even in a short time."
"Stop apologizing. You're a friend, you don't need to apologize to me. Now get up off your knees and tell me what's become of our ad pool."
The ad pool was the profit nucleus of Kroeger Concepts, the conceptual salad bowl where budgets and brainstorms were combined to yield profits and please the bankbook honchos of Hollywood. When the department was first formed, Burt and Lucas were two-fifths of the combine.
"Charisse and Evelyn are as you remember them. Only better. Evelyn had herself a showdown with a muckety-muck at Universal over violent sexist advertising."
"For or against?"
"Against. But it wasn't what you think—not that censorship rap, not the Bible belt's definition of pornography. The VP she had it out with was Derek Windhover."
"Oh, Jesus…" Lucas recalled an earlier run-in with the estimable Mr. Windhover, an executive infamous for forcing oral sex on demand from actresses who came in to read for bit parts. Mr. Windhover was history, Universal was blameless, but the stench of memory lingered. "What a guy. Winner of Mister Congeniality, three years running."
"Evelyn shouted him down. Oh, boy, it was embarrassing. We lost the account. We got it back after Windhover left. Guess who marched into Universal and sold it?"
"Here's to Evelyn. The sprite with the sword." They clinked mostly empty glasses. Evelyn had always been painfully polite to Lucas and everyone in the office, as though straining not to offend. She was the facet of the ad pool that never understood Burt's grotesque jokes. But it seemed she had found a cause and erupted from her chrysalis. Good old Evelyn, at the advanced age of thirty-three, had finally loosened up.
"Charisse concocted the campaigns for The Nam and The Interloper."
"I saw the papers," affirmed Lucas. "Yes, indeed." The Nam was a surrealistic film about the Vietnam War—not the real war, but the fantasy version presented to the American viewing public throughout the 1960s and 1970s on television. It walked off with a wagonload of Oscars. The Interloper had been a science-fiction thrill ride about a horny alien trapped aboard an interstellar freighter. The creature spent ninety percent of the film's running time raping the female crew members and eating the males. The kicker was that once the ship was completely subjugated, it charted a course for Earth, piloted by a new crew of insectile alien monsters and the final woman survivor turned hunter and bumped off the aliens, ten-little-Indians style. What made The Interloper notable was, largely, the promotion cooked up by Charisse Hope. The film grossed $3 million every two days during its first three weeks of release and secured a prime position on Variety's "Top Ten Moneymakers for the Year."
The fifth member of the pool was Gustavo de la Luces. Gustavo of the Lights, as he often signed his name—an energetic and volatile man Burt had signed on after incorporating as Kroeger Concepts, Ltd. Lucas had expected him to burst forth at the office, with his dark, twinkling eyes and generous, fraternal smile. Burt was obviously holding the news on Gustavo back for last. He and Lucas had been close co-workers and fair social buddies…before.
"Gustavo's out there in the smogscape, ram-rodding with the Randell and Kochner boys."
Lucas whistled. "The billboard mafia?" Randell and Kochner owned half the billboard space in Los Angeles County. Kroeger Concepts dealt with them not through choice, but through necessity. "I take it from your tone that Gustavo is not absent from this party because he is dickering over cost per foot on ad space."
"Nope. He's in court with a platoon of lawyers from Marina Del Rey. Randell and Kochner pulled a little game of hide the financial salami with us. Gustavo found out, and he's sinking some finger holds into about a quarter of a million bucks that should be ours."
"When you want to claw something out of the hole, you send in a badger. Those suckers haven't got a chance. But like I said, I saw the papers. How'd I miss that one?"
"Ha, ha—are you serious? You'll never see this case covered in any paper." Burt let it hang until Lucas caught on.
Lucas banged his temple with the heel of his hand. "Right. I got it now. They got deep hooks in newspaper advertising. Right."
"You can bet the Times is gonna look for something else to cover, rather posthaste." He picked out a cold nacho chip from the appetizer basket and nibbled, more out of frustration than culinary interest. His hands needed something to do beside hoist his pilsner glass. He'd tried tracing patterns on its foggy surface, but that was unfulfilling. "You want anything else?"
"A Coke, maybe. All that beer makes me thirsty —it's the alcohol, dehydrating away."
"Caffeine will do the same thing."
"Don't chide me or I'll tell you you're too old to play my dad."
Burt beamed crookedly. "Me, I think I'll have a straight shot and blast it down with another brew. You?"
Lucas shook his head. The thought of swallowing a shot of Black Jack (which was what Burt would demand, he knew) was chased by the unexpected thought of vomit. "No hard booze for me. I'm such a sicko that liquor unleashes my bête noire. One whiff of booze turns me into an instant werewolf."
"Smartass. Knock that shit off." Pause. "Beta what?"
"Bête noire. The 'black beast' that croucheth behind the revolving hotel door, or some such biblical hoohah. Kind of like a rampant force of id. Your basic, uh, primitive hostility, as opposed to your rational, civilized mind. Well...mine, anyway."
Burt repeated "Smartass" in a low, sardonic growl. "Just the same. You sure you're any different?"
"Just being an asshole, at your expense. You react so readily; it's hard to resist. At least you've stopped apologizing. But, Burton my lad, I can read your deceitful eyes. I tell you again not to worry. Your reaction to me is cautious. It is natural. I've got several centuries of clichés to buck against, and yes, it's made me a little sullen."
"Cliché busting is our business."
“I am the guy who's just gotten out of what you normal folks call the 'fruit bin,' after all. . .”
"You mean the nut hatch," amended Burt, deadpan. "Now you're apologizing."
After Lucas got his fizzy Coke inside himself and Burt chased his shot, Lucas said with mock astonishment, "What? We're not staying for coffee?"
"Urp. No way. I'm sloshing as it is. And the coffee here would take the paint off a tank. They make one pot at ten A.M. and keep it at the boiling point all day." He looked around at the nearly empty interior of the restaurant, as if seeking someone to blame.
"I'm supposed to break the news to you," said Lucas.
Burt's eyebrows went up. "What news?"
"That you will not see me bright and early tomorrow morning, on the job. I'm not dashing back to my desk to get gung ho with the new dawn. My first official act is going to be taking time off."
"A characteristic Los Angeles affliction." Burt's words indicated mild surprise, but no objections. "Where, when? You have ETA and coordinates?"
"Remember my cabin?"
Burt furrowed his brow. "Cabin . . ." Then his eyes lit. "I didn't think you were serious about buying that cabin. Geez, Lucas—that's going back a ways."
"Oh, I bought it all right, and the plot of land under it. I was serious about investing some money because the IRS was serious about taking it away if I didn't."
Burt inspected his empty shot glass. "I don't even remember where. . ." His voice trailed away. Losing this memory clearly upset him. Or maybe his emotions had been exaggerated by the drinks.
"It's up around Point Pitt, below San Francisco. It's backed up into a mountainside, and there's a half-hour stroll down to a natural rock jetty. It's very pleasant; isolated and nice. Very private." His gaze defocused as he imagined the setting.