He thought of pills and of Cory. Pills could do good things, like expunge a harpy from your life. Like make a bad relationship into a good one. Cory had chided him about his performance in bed. After she was gone, he had done better. Maybe it was the pills.
“You get your first nervous breakdown at twenty-seven, first facelift at thirty. Then you move on to your first serious extramarital affair, having had a bunch of tacky minor ones already. Then a tumor at forty, a stroke at fifty…and a nice white picket fence around it all. You put it up so the serfs will steer clear of what’s yours, and you paint it every third year, and it’s always white and pristine and unspoiled. And when you die, it’ll be sitting there, like some kind of perverted legacy to the world. This is what I was, neat and attractive and forgettable. And then you and the rest of your neat nuclear family get put in the ground, and somebody new comes along and puts up their own white picket fence after they’ve uprooted yours and recycled it, and that’s the end. Dark, ugly nothing.”
“That’s sad,” said Lucas as she brought him a fresh cup of coffee. She’d added cinnamon.
“That’s why I’m giving it lots of room to avoid me. If anyone uses the word ‘lifestyle,’ it’s a pretty good indication that they don’t have one. Maybe they bought one. But they’re trapped by the white picket fence.”
“The WPF.” He grinned. Despite the age-old cliché of the woman’s touch, the coffee was really much better than his own brew.
“Life with good old Reese the psycho may not have lasted long,” she mused, “but there was no white picket fence to worry about.”
I’ll be goddamned, he thought. Cass was talking about him and his old life. With Cory, his life had been aimed down the very path Cass was lampooning. And two people had died, and he had gotten a clean slate at a mental hospital in exchange for a year of his life, and things were much better now, thank you. Overseas, he remembered, there were no abstruse reasons why, no political fluff to cloud reality. You were there for one reason only—to stay alive. Yes, sir, I’m out there offing dinks for a damned good reason; the only reason. Staying whole.
“That’s all done now,” he said, as much in response to his own thoughts as Cass’ abrupt stormcloud of depression. He was aware that he was examining what she said in an attempt to generate guilt over Cory. Guilt was his biggest enemy, Sara had told him. Guilt must not even enter into the equation.
The sun was falling. In another day he had to be packed and gone again.
“You’re right,” Cass said. “Another mood to slide into.” She touched her fingertips to her face, appraising her shrinking bruises for the thousandth time. “Sometimes a traumatic experience forces you to become a better person. Sometimes you have to put up with infinitude of assholes, and just when you’re ready to give up, you stumble across somebody worthwhile, by purest luck.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe you’re due for a good guy.”
“Well, you’re a pretty decent guy. Do you count?”
“Of course not,” he said, getting up to refill his mug. “Wait till you know me well enough to really despise me.”
She gave that an editorial hmmm, but intercepted him. “By the way, look—no more Ace bandage. Check this out, doctor.” She unbuttoned her chambray work shirt and opened it up. Her breasts were unbound.
They obviously did not pain her as much as before. Yellowish smudges were all that remained of the bruises there, except for some dwindling dark patches where the impact had been the worst. She took his hand and made him touch them; a caress for each.
He gulped, more than a little surprised. “That’s good,” he said, feeling dumb.
She held his hand to her chest while she stood up and kissed him. Her lips pushed his apart; he felt the hard little rind of scab brush his mouth. The contact was galvanizing. There was the briefest, delicious touch of her tongue, making tentative introduction, then she withdrew.
“Thanks, Lucas.”
His voice had dried up with amazing speed. “Uh… don’t worry about it.” His brain scampered madly, seeking some new subject. “Are you tired?”
“That’s my good-night.” She smiled her restricted smile. “I’m still too crippled for any heavy-duty action, if you know what I mean.”
He was just far enough ahead of her, in years, to be embarrassed. “Oh, wait, I didn’t mean—”
“I did. Lucas, you’re blushing.”
And that, of course, brought on the blush full blast. Cass could be very evil when the mood arose.
He sought a graceful escape and found none. “Oh fucking hell,” he mumbled.
“It’s cute,” she said. “Attractive, I mean. Men hate looking sensitive, I know. Get your coffee. It’s not as if I’m a princess, and I’m repaying the White Knight for his chivalry by fucking him blind.”
“That’s nice to know.” He drew the words out broadly, playing with her now.
“I just wanted to make sure you think about me occasionally. While I’m snoozing. Over there. In my bag.”
“I do. And not wholly out of worry, not anymore. I’m glad you’re getting better. I’d like to steal credit for it. But…you have noticed that I’m old enough to be your—” He was thinking of Kristen again.
He was thinking of fucking Kristen.
“Oh, just barely,” she cut in. “Besides, I don’t recall bothering to ask if you were of age or not. Nor does that matter. You have to leave tomorrow; I just wanted to make sure you’d come back for some other reason than to make sure your cabin hadn’t been stolen by a UFO.”
“I’ve already got more here than I ever had,” he said. He kept his distance from her, idling near the sink. “Wait. All right? Just wait a bit.” His smile was genuine. Soon everything would be perfect. But not tonight.
“Sure.” She limped over and held his face in her hands, touching, examining the planes, friendly. “Good night, Lucas.”
“Night.” Her eyes seemed to glisten at him. The cabin had grown uncomfortably warm.
She broke from him but kissed him again before she did, deeper, speaking volumes, and he enjoyed it.
White-faced haircut boys
They got their fags and expensive toys
So-ror-i-ty pin
He gets her cornered and he sticks it in
White Trash!
Money to burn
White Trash!
You only yearn for
Cold cash!
Let yo’ dollar bills fly
But rock and roll will never die!
While ’Gasm squirmed through the middle set of Throw Down Your Arms, Lucas put the finishing touches on the now assembled sniper’s rifle, the lethal Dragunov.
Cass slept soundlessly nearby, unthreatening, uncurious. Now, if only Cory had been more like her…she wouldn’t have taken the high dive into the pill bottle. And Cass wasn’t like Kristen. Not really. Not yet.
With the barrel attached, the Dragunov was a few inches over a yard long and weighed a neat ten pounds fully loaded. The stock was an outline of wood, shaped like a wire stock but firmer on recoil.
Throw Down Your Arms spun out on the small Sony screen. Lucas listened through headphones at reduced volume. He watched Tim Fozzetto, the bassist, zip out of his outrageous checkerboard jumpsuit and expose his ass to a wildly cheering audience. Boom!—throw down your pants. Just quick enough to give the crowd a thrill, then all the onstage lights snap to dead black for Pepper “Mad Max” Hartz’s big solo.
The solo spot was the part that interested Lucas.
A cobalt-blue spotlight picked out Hartz on his special stage dais as he writhed and belabored his Stratocaster. The Fender Strat was the guitar Jimi Hendrix had annoyed the world with.
Back in the good old days, Lucas thought, guitars had a hard time displacing the saxophone as the centerpiece solo instrument of rock ‘n’ roll. Solos were expected to have an inner consistency of structure that made them startling or notable. A natural outgrowth of this approach, due to the outspoken lack of tal
ent in copycat bands and encouraged by the field hands of punk in the mid-1970s, was to use the guitar not to solo, but to provide the most grating and discordant noise of any individual instrument present—a kind of Big Stick theory for music. This begat the school of guitar abuse in which the strings were kicked, bitten, hammered with the fist, subjected to wine glasses and viola bows and chainsaws and anything else that could help produce a loud, obnoxious noise. Sometimes this was innovative. Most times it was tiresome.
Hartz pulled out the few stops he could manage. But he was a product of the bar-band rock gristmill that mistook energy for ability and desperation for outrageousness. All that was left to him was showbiz. Using a chromium phallus that dangled from his codpiece and tights, Hartz jacked his guitar off, bottleneck style.
The stage remained in blackness, except for Hartz’s spotlight, for the duration of his solo. Using the digital stopwatch function on his Seiko, Lucas had timed the solo at three minutes and three seconds. Disorganized musical support was audible but ever-changing, as one band member or another sneaked offstage for a towel, a toot, or a quick gulp of something cold. Nothing was visible except Hartz, bathed now in scarlet light as the gels on his spot were rotated. He ladder-walked his fingers up and down the fretboard. It was an embarrassing cliché by now. Lucas was almost glad Hendrix had died in his prime and was thus spared this degrading of his style.
Rock and roll would never die, the lyrics reminded everybody. It would never grow up, either, apparently.
Embittered, Lucas thought of the bottom-line groups, the hackers, the clone bands who ripped off anything original and blanded it out. The creators of clichés, with their exhausted vocabulary of tired lyrics. You still heard the age-old lyrics today, but they no longer held any meaning; they were square pegs that fit into the square holes of building-block, formula rock: We were made for each other. Love at first sight. Together forever. All I want is you. Softened, obfuscatory versions of songs that now bore titles like “Slitlicker.” Or, on the ’Gasm live disc, “Bend ‘n’ Spread ’Em” and “Cock Knock.”
Gonna drive my skin bus Gonna drive it on down
Right on down into Tuna town.
The Rolling Stones, god bless ’em, had cut a song called “Starfucker.” And FM deejays to this day chickened out by referring to it as “Star Star.” So did the album cover. It looked like something innocuous, but it was really a werewolf.
The sentiments expressed by this music, and the motives for writing it, were no different from those that had produced “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” a century earlier. When you thought it out, it was all a lie.
Lies kill people. Lies killed Kristen.
Kristen had swallowed all the hype and horseshit and gotten road-ganged into a concrete floor. The lies of love had nearly gotten Cass murdered. Lies had given Whip Hand a comatose following of apostles who were so unaware of the field’s premier stylists that they actually believed the assault and battery committed on a guitar by a Jackson Knox or a Pepper “Mad Max” Hartz could stop the rotation of the Earth on its axis. In two decades, “Maybe Baby” had become “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
All the great bluesmen were laughing in their graves.
Boom—the stage flooded with light, and ’Gasm reappeared. The conjurers had returned for the magic show. Their stage moves were so pat they virtually carried a factory warranty. Lucas fitted the sniperscope onto the Dragunov, lifted the weapon, and socketed the rubber pad to his eye.
He was looking through a four-power scope with an integral rangefinder and a battery-powered rectile illuminator, enhanced with infrared. The whole cylindrical package was fourteen inches long. He loaded a magazine with ten rounds of 7.62-millimeter rimmed ammo and smacked it into the underside of the rifle. The Dragunov featured a flash suppressor and recoil compensator that helped to keep the barrel targeted. Muzzle velocity was 2,700 feet per second. It could kick a hole the size of a dinner plate through an oak door at eight hundred meters and made the M- 16 look like a popgun by comparison. If he’d wanted truly outrageous firepower, he would have used one of those monstrous Remington riot guns—twelve-gauge pump-pumps with twenty-inch barrels and folding metal stocks. The Dragunov favored skill and accuracy and was for deadly jabs in specific places, not industrial demolition.
“What’re you burning?” Cass had asked him yesterday when she’d caught him disposing of the Brion Hardin Electroshock discs in the brick maw of the barbecue. He’d told her garbage, and she’d returned to the cabin, satisfied. Cass didn’t pry. That was so good.
The rusty paring knife still jutted from the midsection of the Gabriel Stannard poster. Lucas leaned forward and levered it out. It reminded him of the way things had gone in the hotel room with Hardin—badly. Panic had come too close. He’d gotten scared, almost thought the son of a bitch would refuse to die. Not good. Expediting Stannard himself would have to be done differently, with no gutters for error. Lucas dumped the paring knife into one of the supply boxes, out of sight, and with it disposed of his thoughts of near misses and screw-ups. No lie.
Lucas killed the audio from the VCR and substituted another Doors tape. “Love Me Two Times” spun out while ’Gasm jumped and gyrated amid their smoke pots. He thought of the colorful smoke canisters he’d used during the war.
He recalled Burt Kroeger’s loopy theorizing about the administration and the economy. Financial patterns had much to do with Lucas’ personal war as well. It had been a mediocre year for the music business, preceded by a bonafide bad year marked by a buying slump. Consumers had hoarded their pennies. Bands were compelled to be more visible, less eccentric. They needed to tour more. Well-organized bands could blitz through three hundred concert dates in a year. This edict meant that Jackson Knox, Electroshock, and ’Gasm were all on the road and, conveniently, all in the West concurrent with Lucas’s own liberation. Gabriel Stannard was not touring, but Lucas knew the singer maintained a palatial eyrie in Beverly Hills that was a twenty-minute drive from the Kroeger Concepts building. No rush there.
Stannard’s ears would be pricked following the ’Gasm hit. His guard would be up. Maybe the best procedure would be to make him sweat for a year—two, perhaps—make him hire security guards out the wazoo, bleed him before finishing him off. Make him live in fear. It was already assured that it would be impossible to take out the ’Gasm boys in their hotel. The Hardin job had been a one-shot-only technique.
Security would be tight. Eyes would be open. The plan would have to be seamless. The war was heating up.
Lucas touched the VCR remote and scanned backward to Pepper Hartz’s solo spot. The band jerked in spastic fast motion; 78 rpm shock treatment. He played the sequence through several more times.
After locking up the Whip Hand room, he toted the Dragunov out for a bit of practical acid testing in the dark.
The main room of the cabin was still and quiet. In her sleeping bag, Cass rolled to one side. He heard her breathing in sleep cadence. A tiny trill of desire for her tickled his guts as he stepped out the rear door.
He was ready for Arizona, and his predawn target practice proved it.
14
“Does that suck as much as I suspect it does?” Logan McCabe growled as he bent to peer into the viewfinder of the big Panavision camera on its dolly. He cut loose a disgusted snort from beneath the visor of his baseball cap. “Yep. It do.”
Gabriel Stannard slouched in the slingback chair embroidered with his name in golden glitter script. Does rock ‘n’ roll suck as much as I suspect it does? He thought to himself. They were even using metal music for beer commercials now.
David Lee Roth had Geronimo’d out of Van Halen. Eddie and the boys had gone reeling into mediocrity. Now Dangerous Dave was playing it safe, doing Sinatra, doing his ultimate party animal routine, lining up nubiles to ogle on one of Mery Griffin’s sound stages. Dangerous Dave was playing it rich and safe, and he and Stannard didn’t swap words much anymore. Time had defanged and neutered Ted Nugent. Sammy H
agar’s plug had been pulled by the Springsteen brand of knee-jerk patriotism. Motley Crüe had degenerated into a gang of prancing glitter faggots—chicks with dicks, as Il Duce, lead revoltoid of the Mentors, had observed on live radio.
Gabriel Stannard thought about the Mentors for a second.
The Mentors did puke-rock better than anyone else. Songs like “Clap Queen” and “Golden Shower,” catchy little ditties concerning anal rape, venereal disease, pus, and other social issues guaranteed to make the elegantly circle-pinned ladies of the PMRC shit Tiffany cuff links.
On your face I leave a shit tower! The Mentors’ novelty was exceeded only by their gross-out factor; Dr. Demento would never spin their songs. But if it was inevitable that someone do tunes about herpes sores and killing queers, then Il Duce and his rat pack did them better than anyone else, with a gruff metal edge. The only company that would take them on was Brian Slagel’s infamous Metal Blade Records, home of the napalm-attack speed metal act Slayer.
Gabriel Stannard sat watching, half-asleep, thinking bitterly about how bad boys invariably aged badly. His hair was acetylene-torch white and teased out. Lace gloves ran to midbicep. The fingers of the gloves had been sawn off. His top was designer-shredded, and his pants were Spandex. Boots, rags, hankies, all tied in the right places. He had done it a million times. It was comfy and secure. Rock ‘n’ roll was not comfy and secure. When bands grew comfy and secure, you got formulaic, torpor-inducing metal Muzak good for nothing beyond stringing commercials together on the AOR stations. What Stannard craved was a way to stay dangerous.
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