“You remind him of what happened to him—of what he was, as opposed to what he has become. You’re not at fault. But you’re going to be the one who pays if you permit this to continue.”
“I know.” At first the sanctuary of Stannard’s estate had been a warm blanket against a cold, insectile world. Here she could be anonymous, and cleave to another human being, and build, because there was time. Lately the hounds were at the gates, and her privacy had become the victim of Stannard’s newsworthiness. The sole advantage to staying was that she had the house all to herself. Stannard would inevitably be returned, and what would happen then was something from which her body urged her to flee, now.
If she remained, she would be finished. Emptied. She was sensitive to the one-way flux of energy from her to Stannard. Perhaps it had taken the extreme of his gruesome hunting sortie for her to recognize it, but she was smart enough to disengage before she was drained to a husk. Physically, she had become irrelevant to his existence, and later in the hospital his touch put her in mind of leeches, of ticks trying to thieve lifeblood as unobtrusively as they could. So she had choked off the conduit, pulling away to save herself… and she saw that he hated her, if only on the level of instinct, for not being more self-sacrificing.
Her looks were on the mend. First, the sclera of her eyes cleared, returning to vein-less white. The flush of blood mellowed her lips and shaded her flesh. Her cracked and ravaged cuticles repaired themselves; the long nails were on their way back. She could walk out to the pool without feeling as though she had been used as a sandbag during a flood. On the worst of her days, she still had the power to turn heads, but only within the last few weeks had she stored enough surplus beauty to enable her to radiate. It was an effect that could only be gauged by the reactions of strangers; in a way, her own kind of feeding. To get this, she had to reenter the world. It was not too late, but what Robert had just told her was true: if she tarried here, paying the bill that would accrue would make her evaporate.
Two phone calls to New York City was all it had taken. The Objet d’Art perfume account, which had given up on securing Sertha Valich, proved more than eager to grant an eleventh-hour reprieve. “Actually,” Joanna Traxson, the firm’s head, had confided, “this is more like eleven fifty-nine and forty-five seconds, Sertha love, but for you…”
The second call had been to Robert, because beyond the work Sertha needed a friend, and there was no time to make new ones when her personal battery was critically low. She did not want to step off a plane at JFK and be alone. She had been with Stannard, and alone, for too long.
Now that it was done, Stannard was like a blown dynamo, circuits fused by one glorious overload. It was the way his eyes roamed over her and saw nothing that hurt the most.
Her luggage, all matched top-grain hides, was ranked and filed in the front hallway. The limousine would wait just as long as she wanted. This call might have been more expediently made from the mobile phone tucked into the vehicle, but Sertha purposefully wanted a more positive sense of disconnection. This was the final call she would ever make from this house, making up her next bed totally before jumping into it.
“Horus is coming back here today,” she said. “He can handle this place with much more panache than I.” It was time to divert Robert. “And it will be so nice to see you again. Since the new times are nothing to talk about, we’ll talk about old times… and dinner, at least the first one, will have to be on your Gold Card.”
“Platinum Card,” he corrected proudly. “Ever see one? They issue merchants a booklet of special instructions on how to treat anyone who hands over a Platinum Card. It’s quite outrageous. Yes, by all means, take advantage.”
It was his tone she needed more than his words. He had assured her that he was still there for her, and beyond that it was all cute upper-crust banter, a social whirl she could dance in her sleep. What they had once shared had stayed with her, not growing cold and dead, but glowing with a minuscule core of heat that had been the cause for many pleasant reflections through several years. Now that she fanned the memory, she was just as pleased to see it respond, and warm. Realizing that people just did not fade out when you were done with them was new to her, and frightening. But now she was also willing—and that will sustained her.
“It’s settled, then.” He sounded glad. “I’ll send my car to collect you when you arrive at JFK.”
She cut directly to the goodbyes, but with an honest smile on her face. Before the tears could fill her eyes again and meddle with her thoughts, before unsaid words and regret could foul her logic and make her tarry one more day in a string of added days, and kill her that much more, she hung up the phone, closed the ornate double doors of the manse behind her, and walked out into the light, into the next chapter of her life.
36
It was Wednesday, and it was raining.
The TV set in Sara Windsor’s Olive Grove office broadcast dazzling rainbow snow and the steady, soothing hiss of off-the-air static. The rain had returned, after two days unbroken by sunlight. She needed no special permission to be here this late at night, with her thoughts zeroed in on the flickering flame of the votive candle on her desk.
Staying home was too much of an ordeal.
The police had taken their time, enjoying themselves in their analysis of her living room. They excitedly compared bullet hole evaluations, and strung their trajectory wires, and dusted for prints, and their calm methodology nearly drove her into a screaming fit. Her home had been raped, in a way, and now the cops were getting their jollies by feeling it up instead of giving her healing time.
Holing up in an anonymous hotel room somewhere would be inspirational enough to make her use her Colt Diamondback revolver on herself. No, thanks. Faceless rooms reminded her of too many assignations with faceless men who drove expensive, faceless cars.
The most tempting possibility was to sell the house and move on. Her ex-hubby, Spence, had done it; career-obsessed Dr. Christopher Rosenberg had done it; and, in the most extreme fashion possible, Lucas had done it—and in so doing, had betrayed her.
The same ambulance had removed both Lucas and Stannard from the premises; how was that for a black little irony. By the time the stretchers were slotted into the waiting van, the two paramedics were besmirched to the elbows in thick, gelid blood. Two types.
Lucas’ throat wound, though messy and serious, was not automatically fatal. The carotid artery is nearly as big around as a Magic Marker, and there had been enormous loss of blood complicated by secondary hemorrhage from the posterior branches of the artery. Quick incisions were made so that ligatures could be tied around the external carotid. Lucas was pronounced dead on arrival with the ligatures still professionally in place.
Lucas should not have died, and did. Stannard, who had absorbed more bullets than a being of meat and bone and blood had any right to, had survived.
She had seen it in Lucas’ eyes, at the window. With his blood on her hands, she saw that the Lucas Ellington she knew had died long before Stannard had fired his surprise shot.
The deal makers in New York and Hollywood had sleuthed out her home number, but not the office number at Olive Grove. For the time being, she found sanctuary from the battering-ram siege of book and movie offers. “Based on a true story”—now there was a magical phrase. People would swallow anything prefaced with it. What difference did it make, when they were incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality in the first place?
Across the room, on the TV, reality had signed off until the farm report, at five A.M.
The thing Gabriel Stannard had been packing in his crotch, the police had informed her, was a High Standard hammerless two-shot derringer. Then followed the jokes about concealed weapons, ho, ho, phallic symbols, yuk, yuk. Lucas had been dispatched—as they say in Victorian detective stories—by a tiny, ridiculous-looking thing that would be decorative adorning a Mississippi riverboat gambler’s vest pocket.
Claremont Street was just as
aversive. Men and women in official cars picked apart the dead end, the “goat path,” the Grace Methodist cemetery, and the spot in the street where a man had died. There was plenty of paper for Sara to read if she wished. One preliminary report described the way in which a guitarist named Cannibal Rex—real name, Martin Killough Beecher —had been killed.
It had happened while Sara was hugging the floor in her towel. Just as Lucas’ M-16 chopped apart Stannard and the living room wall, Cannibal Rex opened fire with his Auto Mag. The gunfire in the house had touched him off like a bomb, and the heavyweight slugs began to punch spectacular holes in the flanks of the foremost police cars as a general firefight erupted. The Charger began to come apart a chunk at a time as the cops brought their own firepower to bear. When Cannibal ducked down to change clips, a stiff-fingered blow from one of Horus’ schooled, lethal hands had caused his brain to burst. Horus had not been held in custody very long.
The rounds from Lucas’ gun had also perforated a switchplate for the ceiling light fixture, a china vase sitting on the mantel, and a framed photograph of Sara with her parents at graduation. The center geisha in the Takamatsuzuka reproduction, the one in the orange kimono, had a bullet hole in her exposed left hand.
A lot of the paper Sara saw concerned the cabin up at Point Pitt and the dead people discovered there.
Burt Kroeger’s wife, Diana, had insisted on cremation, followed by a scattering of ashes in the Pacific Ocean. Sara supposed that meeting Diana was inevitable. She had no idea what to say to her.
In one pocket of Lucas’ garrison belt, investigators had discovered a string of crystal beads, the kind that caught the light and divided it up into rainbow hues. No one could figure out their significance.
In Tucson, Arizona, the machines monitoring the life functions of Jackal Reichmann went steady and shrill. Eldon Quantrill lost his entertainment value and went to trial for triple homicide.
In San Francisco, Ralph “Sandjock” Trope, manager of the Rockhound nightspot, bagged himself another headline by positively identifying a photograph of Lucas Ellington as the mystery roadie with the diamond eyepatch he’d spoken with on the day guitarist Jackson Knox died. Ralph could not actually match the roadie’s face with Lucas’, but he could read the papers and knew a promotional opportunity when he saw one.
Since no positive proof against Lucas Ellington had been unearthed in the Denver murder of keyboardist Brion Hardin, he was blamed anyway. He had become convenient.
The news media gained a full nelson on the legend of Lucas Ellington, the rockstar assassin. The police earnestly plugged their forthright protection of innocent bystanders in Dos Piedras. It would be irrelevant to point out that the two men who died were the only ones who would have died under any circumstances.
Now, sitting in her darkened office, toying with desk knickknacks and staring at televisual snow, Sara realized that Lucas had forced her to do nothing. It had been his plan. Her only part had been to play yet another surrogate Kristen in the presence of Stannard, to complete Lucas’ reenactment of his nightmare.
She had not thought herself a killer, yet she had picked up the pistol and certainly would have shot Stannard in the head had the police not bashed through her door at that moment. She was not a killer, yet hadn’t she killed Lucas by failing him, by not seeing the gun in Stannard’s pants? She had surely spent aeons watching the singer draw and fire.
The ways in which normal people were compelled to kill was a mainstay of her field of study. The yellow legal pad was on the desk in the pool of dim light, mostly doodles.
Would Lucas have killed her?
Would she have killed?
And if so, what was the difference between them?
Lucas represented what could almost be termed another evolutionary step—Psychopathic Man, possessing the mechanisms to cope with what living has become, to survive in this world. That capacity was present in everyone. The difference was that the mechanisms finally turned on him and consumed him. But those mechanisms could not be scoured out of the human psyche; they were part of our genetic makeup. And despite the nasty implications of being surrounded by a sidewalk full of latent killers, Sara thought, we’d better be thankful for those mechanisms. Someday, they might mean our survival.
Nevertheless, she would go to her grave thinking that she had created a monster. In a way she had, but the monster was not Lucas Ellington, who was dead and gone. The monster was her.
And now there were so many new graves.
Sara toed off her shoes and left them on the carpeted floor. Eventually she dozed off on the narrow sofa she kept in her office for the purpose, pulling a knit afghan around herself as her body temperature dropped. The candle burned down and extinguished, sending aromatic smoke curling into the air and flavoring away the harsher smell of the dead Salem l00’s butted in the ashtray. Outside, the rain poured down with a vengeance, as though trying to drown the whole state.
When she was fast asleep, she had a nightmare about Stannard, and Lucas, and the events she might have changed. It was the first.
37
Gabriel Stannard poised the muzzle of the automatic riot shotgun on a thick cable brown with rust and fired round after round until the magazine was exhausted. His laugh was victorious and slightly mad. Strong sea winds knocked his hair about and rippled his clothing. Beyond his perch on the high steel, the night was shot through with stars like sharply defined gemstones. Snaky golden reflections from the water far below writhed across his face. He reached around to a back pocket. No more ammo.
Slugs panged off the cables and girders around him, and he flinched. High-velocity death was throwing itself at him. The shooters below had him targeted now. This high up, it was difficult to spring from one perch to another. He was trapped, and he knew it. Imminent death showed in the tension in his jaws, the bulge of his muscles, the glaze in his eyes. He hoisted his shotgun aloft like a bannerless standard and shouted that rock ‘n’ roll would never die.
In response, a hot slug ripped through his shoulder, spattering the ironwork behind him with blood.
“Cut, cut, cut, cut!” shouted Logan McCabe from the stage floor. His expression was designed to inform his crew he was forcing himself to be tolerant. The special effects honcho, Jake Morrison of Firepower Unlimited, ambled over to pow-wow. The charges designed to scratch white ricochet trails off the simulated metal behind Stannard’s head were so brilliant that they lit up the sky cyclorama behind him and cast shadows, revealing that the backdrop of sea and starry sky was fake. McCabe cocked back his baseball cap. Since the advent of Spielberg, all directors who desired success made sure to wear their baseball caps. McCabe’s bore a Dr. Pepper logo. He decided to deemphasize the background by adding more fog—this was supposed to be San Francisco, after all, and every time McCabe had seen the Golden Gate Bridge for real at night it had been shrouded in thick mist.
McCabe’s first AD, Louis Katz, called for new setups in twenty minutes. Time was burning up too fast to track.
Stannard rode a cherry-picker arm twenty feet down to the stage floor, where a grip handed him his cane. It was a dark hickory walking stick with a gold lion’s head. By now, he had gotten pretty good with it. His limp was obvious but not overt, and he attracted no gratuitous notice as he moved to his slingback chair, the one with which McCabe had gifted him during the Maneater shoot. This where the star enthroned himself. The golden words on the canvas chairback said SO.
A cold glass of Sweetouchnee tea found its way into his hand, and Stannard looked up into the eyes of Aki Blair.
She bent at the waist to peck him on the cheek. Her passage across the set attracted much more notice than Stannard’s. Aki was lately notorious for a series of Levi’s 501 jeans ads. She was leggy, curvy, almond-eyed, with very long, straight, glossy black hair. Her attentions to Stannard were designed to be seen. She was being well paid to pretend to be his lady.
The oil-based special effects fog was acrid and tended to settle in the back of the
throat with a taste like cigarette ashes. Stannard drank half the tea and plucked out a pulpy-wet lime wedge to suck on. His icy-blue eyes assessed Aki. Quite a piece. Look but don’t touch.
He decided not to be kind. He was in no mood.
“I’d appreciate it, love, if you weren’t so fucking obvious,” he said just as she turned to wave at one of the gaffers, a beefy dude Stannard knew as Blackie.
She jerked around as if on a leash, eyebrows up. “Just flirting,” she said innocently.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean you and McCabe.”
“Hm?” Her face, her manner, were so smooth and plastic that he suddenly wanted to smash her skull in.
Lowering his voice, he rasped, “You were fucking McCabe last night. You can’t.”
A shot of pain, like internal gas, bit him inside and made him grimace. His pipework was intact, but tender, delicate, and heavily scarred. A lot of healing had occurred since the debacle on Claremont Street, and none of it had gone fast or easily. The Teflon bullets from Lucas Ellington’s M-16 had caused a hairy blood-poisoning problem. Then came massive trauma, blood loss, heavy shock. The artificial kneecap would allow him to regain about 50 percent of his right leg’s flexibility. Of the five slugs he had stopped, one had lodged deep in his pelvis. One had punctured his left lung after splintering through a rib strut. One had chewed a four-ounce hunk out of his left triceps, near the armpit. The skin graft to replace it had been sliced from his once cute ass. Another bullet had skinned his neck, biting the tissue hard and opening up a lot of capillaries. The blood had flown. And the remaining bullet, the first one to hit… number one with a bullet, as they proclaimed on KAFC’s venerable Heavy Metal Hour of Power…
He watched Aki, head to toe, as she pretended to register indignation at his accusation. Jesus, he thought, every move she makes, she pretends there’s a goddamn camera right there, eating up her image. Like McCabe had been eating her up last night. He imagined her hooking her slim, graceful hands around her knees and spreading wide so McCabe could gobble her. Her clitoris was large and medium sensitive; it was a lot of worthwhile work to bring her off. Stannard’s tongue had done some time at that post, and although she could be played like a violin orally, those skills alone would not suffice, so she had assumed a variety of fascinating and not-very-photogenic positions for Logan McCabe, now the driving creative force behind Shakedown, coming soon to a theater near you. Stannard knew about the positions because Joshua Knopf, ace detective for hire, had done a bit of filmmaking himself. What it lacked in style it made up for in content, and Josh had supplied glossies faster than any commercial lab.
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