“Horus, turn that shit off, huh?”
Gabriel Stannard had once done a promo dub for KRZE-FM. They meant so much to the fans, those simple little station IDs, and they had a lot of recognition value. They cost zero—audio tape, no more—and took less than sixty seconds if done right, in one take. Stations were eager to have the voices of the top guns plugging them.
This is the man your mommy warned you about, Gabriel Stannard of Whip Hand. So what station could this be but KRZE-FM in Los Angeles, right? The supercharged 101.7 is gonna help you drive it in deep!
History now.
Now “Drive It in Deep” was coming back to taunt him, and he did not care to be razzed by some asshole DJ’s idea of a ratings grabber.
Horus was doing fixed isometrics against parallel bars that were bolted to the poolside deck. He disengaged to flip off the radio remote. Sunday morning programming was usually all jabber, and he preferred something rhythmic to counterpoint his workout. His oiled ebony torso gleamed like dark, polished wood, intricately carved with sinew. He exercised wearing only a Grecian wrap. Stannard thought it looked like a potholder on a string, insufficient for covering his dong.
Stannard sat cross-legged on a tanning lounger near the deep end, with a tall Long Island iced tea and a couple of monster magazines to occupy his hands. He looked pale and ill and had snapped his order for the radio talkshow to be cut off. The tone of the calls had sunk a prong of fear into his gut. The song was the last straw.
Sertha Valich, who had accompanied Stannard to Jackson Knox’s hurried funeral in San Francisco, emerged from the sauna hutch. She too gleamed, with perspiration from the steam. She wore a beach robe and had her magnificent hair wound up in a towel. Stannard watched her cross the terrace on slender, elegant feet.
“How’s your head? Eyes still hurt?” Sometimes her accent came on strong. She stooped to clear a spot on the table so she could sit right next to him. Under one of the monster magazines was Stannard’s .44 Magnum.
The blunt gray noses of the bullets were visible in the cylinder. “I wish you would put this…thing away. It frightens me. I dislike firearms, Gabriel.”
“It’s mine. I’ll do with it what I want. You don’t like it, cover it back up.”
Sertha had stayed with him since Knox’s death. She’d been there when the news about Brion Hardin came down. She’d been sitting in Stannard’s office when Horus had delivered the news that Josh, the private detective, had lost track of Lucas Ellington, who had bought a brand new Bronco and vanished up the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving no tracks.
A knee poked from her robe, so he reached to stroke it. His blue eyes sought the blue water of the pool. Words came, but he could not force himself to speak. He was glad she had chosen to remain. Guns scared her, but he was pretty frightened himself. He dared not show it. That would be contrary to his established persona. He had put armed guards on the gates of the estate and was packing his Magnum to and from the bathroom, but he could not say he was afraid, any more than he could admit just how much he needed her to be around. Gabriel Stannard was not, could not, be pussy. Fickle fans were eager to judge him; should they even get a hint that Gabriel Stannard was not the macho wild man he purported to be, they would be just as eager to forsake him.
His mind raced around like a lab rat in a puzzle box. Two accidents, sure. When Lucas Ellington braced me it was with a plastic gun, for christsake. Coincidence. Two unrelated tragedies. Right.
He had begun to have nightmares about his own death. Shadow figures appeared at the foot of his Playboy bed to shove him off this mortal coil. See this knife? Stannard exeunt. Next act, please. Twice he had awakened with a yelp. Sertha’s concern for him was not only genuine, but justified.
She kissed his cheek and spread a towel on a vacant lounge, dropping the robe and unfurling her hair. She was trying to work up a full body tan and would want him to rub her down with cocoa butter.
He held the first dollop between his palms to warm it. “Top or bottom first?”
She smiled and lay down on her stomach. “Save the front for later. Back rubs lead to front rubs, and you know what front rubs lead to.” She finger-combed her damp hair so that it hung off the end of the lounge.
He was performing badly in bed, too, and he knew it. He wondered what she thought, and whether she was disappointed, and would endure. He worried, which was unlike him. Before, he had never worried about anything.
Right now, just putting his hands on her body to grease her up was giving him a nice, healthy hard-on. He thought of the way he fit into her, snug as a living glove, of the crisp abrasion of her pubic hair against his.
He massaged her methodically. Before he was done, he would touch every inch of her thoroughbred body.
But his eyes never left the loaded Magnum on the table. It sat there, likewise awaiting his pleasure.
13
El Granada was a wide place in the coast highway, tacked onto a bedroom community. Lucas phoned Burt Kroeger, collect, from a phone carrel outside the local hardware store.
“… and so I just told her that you’d headed north to camp out for a while. Meditate. Violate furry forest animals, that sorta thing. And that you’d be back soon, and that you’d get in touch with everybody when you did. No specifics, no maps. Okay?”
Burt had done well. Lucas had been apprehensive about Sara checking up on him.
“You positive you didn’t mention Point Pitt? I mean, I like Sara a lot, but she might get overzealous, and I’m doing fine up here all by myself.”
“You want a signed guarantee? Don’t worry about it.” For some reason, it occurred to Lucas that Burt had taken up his cigarette habit again. He could not hear him puffing, for the noise of the ocean, but the image of Burt sucking on a cigarette between sentences locked in and held. “But let me ask you something, old buddy. What the hell difference would it make if Sara did know?”
It was obvious that Burt now felt yoked with the responsibility of being the middleman. “I sometimes think that Sara is a bit too eager to deepen our relationship, Burt. She’s a valuable person. But she’s in a hurry. I don’t want to screw things up by rushing. You know.”
Burt replied that he did, in fact, copy and understand. The same sort of thing had happened during his courtship with his wife, Diana. Only in that mad race, it had been Burt doing the pushing. He was sensitized to the idea, and Lucas knew it.
“I’ll get you off the hook, though, since you’re such a swell guy.”
Burt blew a politely brief raspberry into the phone.
“Give me the phone numbers Sara gave you. I’ll call her myself, set her mind at ease, and that’ll subtract you from the whole equation so you can go back to worrying about how much to screw Randell and Kochner out of on Gustavo’s lawsuit.”
Burt laughed and recited the phone numbers Sara had given him for referral. His response was concerned as ever, and helpful, and tinged with relief. He typically hated meddling, especially in other people’s emotional entanglements. Tacit, well-intentioned interference was still interference, what he called Mary Worthing.
“And since you haven’t brought it up, I’ll do it for you,” Lucas continued. “Sara put you on the spot, sort Of. You did what a good friend should. Thanks.”
“You don’t have to be so nasty about it. As long as you don’t cop out on the dinner commitment. Besides, Diana is dying to see you again, too. This is costing me money, so have yourself a time, son, and we’ll see you…whenever.”
“A week or two, yet. You can leak that to Sara if she bears her burden to your doorstep again.” They both chuckled, not cruelly at Sara’s expense, but merely as two friends sharing a confidence. Burt had accepted Lucas’s image of Sara and bore her no malice.
Far to the south, Burt hung up and allowed himself to feel at ease. It looked like Lucas was going to be okay. Everything was fixed, at last.
Across the narrow side street from the phone, the El Granada post office stood neatly closed. Next to
the hardware store a small local eatery called the Village Green was still open for business. It was a short hop to the ocean, a city block or so away over a bit of vacant scrubland between the fire station and the highway. On top of a phone pole, right above Lucas, were the fire station’s sirens in two collars of flared, multidirectional horns. It looked like an alien weapon from some weird science fiction saga.
Lucas decided to give Sara a miss. If he called, she would try to nail him down on the location of the cabin. If she was in Los Angeles, that meant she was already looking for him, and he would need all the time anonymity could buy.
Even if Sara knew what she was looking for, he could still outrace her. By the time she figured out the details, it would be finished. How many reliable starting points had he given her? How many times had he actually recounted the Whip Hand dream to her or the recurrent danger images in the Kristen nightmare? She had needed to see patterns in his dreams so badly, to justify her skill as an analyst. So he’d given her patterns to see.
The nightmares had been real, however.
Had she seen the news reports on Jackson Knox, on Brion Hardin? Would she associate them with a rock band that had not existed for years? Would the various news media make the association for her?
Would the police start using the same logic?
There were enough maybes falling out of the whole argument, left and right, that Lucas felt reasonably secure. His planning was so comprehensive that even if the killings were linked—which he did not mind and, in fact, desired in the long run—and even if he was exposed as having a prime-cut motive, there would still be an utter lack of concrete evidence to damn him. His vendetta had been blueprinted with the same conscientious eye he had used for so many successful promotional campaigns. It was a campaign. Battles were called campaigns. And time was his ally in this battle.
Time, in fact, was going to force him to miss some sleep, if he adhered to his schedule. Schedules were crucial to campaigns; timing was everything. Yesterday had been the Electroshock date in Denver; in about forty-eight hours he’d have to leave for the ’Gasm date, in Arizona. When the police tried to link homicides from state to state, they used the “connect the dots” method. By the time they had enough dots to connect, the line would lead nowhere. San Francisco to Denver to Tucson, Arizona. The shape of a big question mark.
He left the fire station and high-stepped through the muddy marsh grass, crossing Highway 1. North, to his right, was an imposing microwave dish perched on a spur of land run by the U.S. Air Force Missile Command. The electronic ear was tilted straight up, toward space. Nearer was a pull-over area for tourist RVs and campers. The beach led to a stone jetty that extended into the water as far as a good-sized pier, forming an enclosure known locally as Pillar Point Harbor. The jetty stone was a jackstraw piling of quarry waste in different colors, like a long bridge made of broken tombstones. Lucas jumped cautiously from rock to rock. The granite surfaces were slick with spume, and he tried not to squash the tiny crimson-and-black crabs that huddled in the million crevices.
When he reached the nose of the man-made breakwater, he threw the Randall combat knife into the sea, sheath and all, with a hard overhand swing. He was too far out for anyone to badger him about littering. Sea mist and the crash of waves pounding the jetty drenched him. From the sling bag he withdrew the spray-paint can and likewise gave it up to Neptune. Maybe the god could write an underwater graffito or confound some uppity octopus with a cloud of red ink. The surgical gloves had been burned back in Denver. He was about to weigh the sling bag with one of the smaller jetty stones and give it the heave-ho as well when he saw that the plastic trash can liners he’d used had kept the interior of the bag spotless. Innocent. Cass would see him return carrying the same two bags with which he had departed. Perfect.
The Randall was a monster, but it was no match for the Pacific Ocean. There was a little bloop and a weak geyser of saltwater, and that was the end of it. Case closed. Neptune (or Poseidon, as the Greeks had it—but then, there were no horses around, either) must have been cooping on the job. The ocean did not accuse Lucas of any wrongdoing.
He stared abstractedly at the water and the horizon for a few moments, the way most people do when evaluating themselves in relation to the sheer vastness of the sea. Then he turned back toward the parked Bronco.
He was anxious to see Cass again.
“You talk in your sleep. Did you know that?”
Caution jumped into Lucas’ heart with a thud. “Oh? Nothing too provocative, I hope.”
“Mostly incomprehensible.” Lacking chores per se, Cass was moving kitchen stuff around in a ritualistic pattern, trying to find an arrangement that suited her idea of order. “Kristen’s name. Something about teaching her a lesson.”
Impossible. Teaching them a lesson, yes. But if he’d had the Whip Hand nightmare again, he did not remember.
“Oooh—if you could see the frown on your face right now,” she teased. “Don’t worry. I learned early never to try to read dreams.”
Her facial swelling had dwindled, and her movements were regaining some of the natural grace Lucas had suspected, as the muscles relaxed and healed. She was now seeing with both eyes, though the left one still had not completely opened. It gave her the attitude of someone with a perpetual half wink, like a comic delivering a sly punch line.
Say, have you heard the one about the doomed rock group? One bit a big blade, and then there were three….
“I used to have a recurrent dream, when I was seventeen,” she said. “I was being chased through a field of very tall grass, like reeds, head-high stuff. Maybe a wheat field. I never see what’s chasing me, but I know it’s big and ugly and hungry. And it’s after me, specifically. The monster knows who I am, and it wants me. And I’m terrified that if I part the grass to either side, I’ll be looking right into its face, all steaming and fanged and snorty, and a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt will scoop me up, and that’ll be the big finish. The end of me. The grass is both my protection and my greatest hindrance. If I was stranded on the fifty-yard line of a deserted football field, at least I’d know which way to run, see? Sometimes the monster is far away, sometimes it’s closer, but always nearby. And I’ll meet it inevitably, and that scares me, but I keep running. I’m determined to go down fighting.”
Cass smiled slightly, gesturing with her wounded hand, getting into her own story.
“I come to a tree, a tall tree, a eucalyptus tree, maybe, something solid I can put between me and the monster. Maybe it can’t climb trees. Or I can get high enough to survey the field and figure out where I am in relation to the monster. All I’d have to do is look for the swath it’s cutting through the grass. As I reach out to grab the lower limb and swing up, that big fucking paw lands on my shoulder, puffing dust and fleas into my eyes… and I howl and wake up. End of dream.”
Lucas had dumped down two Dos Equis without feeling a thing. Cass said the alcohol made her raw throat feel better. He returned to the table with two freshly uncapped bottles.
“So. My father, wheeler-dealer that he is, forks over money so I can go see a psychiatrist. Eight sessions. I rattled off my history, some of the exciting stuff, then I laid out the dream. Know what he told me?”
“That you were sick, sick, sick,” he said. They clinked bottles.
“He told me I was afraid of losing my virginity. That the hungering, slobbering monster was phallic. The field of impenetrable grass was my fear of sex. And the tree was a biblical perversion of a celibacy facade, or something. I half expected him to pat me on the thigh, paternally.”
It was what Lucas expected to hear. Cass’ shrink had been another Freudian basket case.
“But the joke was on him, Lucas. This is what I meant about not trying to read dreams. I’d lost my cherry a year and a half before I’d ever had the dream, and gotten laid a couple of dozen times. Enough to think, even at seventeen, that there wasn’t any mystique to sex, and certainly nothing that I was scared of. I
’d lied to the shrink about being a virgin. I didn’t want my father to know—don’t ask me why, ’cos that’ll waste a lot of time. So the shrink turned out to be full of it. End of story.”
A conclusion reached as a result of faulty input. It had the fascination of a box puzzle. Lucas thought of Sara and her quest to figure him out. He had so enjoyed leading her where she wanted to go. The blackly depressed widower, the suicidal father of the victim daughter. He wondered whether Kristen had ever had sex before her death. He thought he knew the answer, but it kept being overshadowed by the weaker idea that a father should not consider such things.
“My recurrent dream was about Kristen, right before she died,” he said. “Very stylized. Nothing useful there, either.” His hands made an aimless effort to twist the air into something descriptive.
“How did she die? Kristen.”
It was asked considerately but caused Lucas to worry his lips together a beat too long before he said, “An accident.”
“Sorry.” Cass looked at him directly. “Sometimes my big nose gets my big mouth in trouble.” She regarded her empty bottle. “Want to switch off to coffee?”
He was pleasantly in half focus and willing to accede to nearly anything. He had not felt this good, this at peace, in a long time. Cass was really a remarkable young lady…no, a remarkable woman, with a tact and maturity that exceeded his low expectations of what twenty-three was supposed to look and sound like.
She fiddled gingerly with the coffeepot over at the sink. She still moved very carefully, as though afraid she might shatter. “And no, I did not spend my time engaged in domestic chores while you were gone. I’ve had a lifelong phobia about lapsing into housewifery. The Great American Dream. The white picket fence that imprisons you.”
“White picket fence?”
“Yeah. All that stuff I’m supposed to want from life, but don’t. The house in Malibu. An El Blando hubby who busts his balls to stay inside a six-figure adjusted income. A station wagon and matching Porsches. Two point five blond kids. An afghan hound that shits more than it eats, two spayed cats, and one exotic pet—a toucan or a tortoise or an aardvark. Hired minorities to swab the toilets and polish the jockey on the front walk.” She shrugged and made a face. “You know the life, Lucas: birth control pills, diet pills, sleeping pills, antacid pills…pills to counteract the draining effect of the other pills…vitamin pills to give you enough energy to swallow the sixty other pills you wind up taking every day. Yuck.”
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