But the wall-length picture window with the panoramic view of Los Angeles was what got to everyone and still continued to take her breath away. That big front room seemed to jut out over the edge of the world. It was night, and the lights of the city blazed in the valley below like a milliontrillion scintillating stars, each one proffering a universe of its own.
Turning to face him, she grabbed a pre-opened liter bottle of Bordeaux, yanked out the cork with her teeth, and took a deep drink. She handed Danny the bottle and emptied the cheeses, black olives, crackers and signed book onto the big glass oval-shaped coffee table.
“Jules, why the fuck have you flown here all the way from L.A.? It wasn’t to give me wine, cheese and a book, was it?”
“I want to find out what’s wrong with you. Why you’re such a hateful prick, why you don’t see or even talk to your old friends anymore. Why have you stopped performing? I want to know what the hell’s going on, and I’m not leaving till I get some answers.”
“And I don’t give a fuck what you want to know.”
“Danny, it’s me, Jules. We go way back, and we’re going to talk.”
He stared at her a long moment, his eyes expressionless, void of any feeling.
“Talk to me, Danny.”
“Oh, fuck you, Jules,” he finally said. “Why should I see people I don’t want to see? Why should I work if I don’t want to? Nothing’s fun anymore. I got plenty of money. I hate all of it, and I don’t need the stress.”
“You can’t turn your back on your friends.”
“My so-called friends can all bite me. They’re all just a bunch of moochers, ass-kissers and starfuckers.”
“Say that about Elena and Jamie, I’ll buttkick your sorry ass through that window and straight over that cliff.”
“I’d never say that about Elena and Jamie. They rescued me from hell.”
Jules let out a deep sigh and shook her head slowly. “I hope you aren’t feeling sorry for yourself. I mean about what happened back in Pakistan, in that compound? I know it had to be bad, but it can’t be undone. It’s nothing you can’t get past. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“I understand Raza did something to you. Maybe she even took something from you—some pride, some dignity, some belief in yourself.”
“Jules, what fucking business is it of yours?”
“It’s my business because I’m pissed. You haven’t hit on me once,” Jules said, fighting to keep her voice from cracking. “You aren’t smiling, smirking, giving me all those cute little Danny McMahon looks. You aren’t coming on to me, and it’s hurting my feelings.”
“It’s not you, Jules. To tell the truth, I never want to look at another woman again for the rest of my life.”
“What in hell did Raza do to you? I know you two were getting it on.”
“It was more a rape on her part, and, yeah, we had sex—sex from hell—and with a little luck it’ll be the last sex I ever have.”
“In that case,” Jules said, getting up, “fuck the wine. Let’s do some serious drinking.”
She walked into his kitchen. He could hear her banging around in his pantry where he kept most of his wine, liquor and his beer refrigerator.
“Hey,” she shouted out to him, “I found a seventy-five-year-old unopened bottle of Macallan’s single malt. I didn’t know they even made seventy-five-year-old single malt. Let’s drink it, okay? The whole bottle.”
“Why the fuck not?” McMahon shouted back at her. “Let’s put it out of its misery.”
“But I warn you, Danny,” she yelled back, “I’m not letting this shit slide. We’re getting to the bottom of all this tonight, even if I have to kill you.”
He heard her bang around some more, collecting glasses, Lord knows what. Then there was silence.
He turned to study the lights of L.A.
Get to the bottom of it, huh? Jules was as good a friend as he’d ever had, but he couldn’t tell her what was really going on. How could he tell her about hours of uncontrollable crying jags or the endless nights spent laying in his bed late with the muzzle of a .300 bolt-action Weatherby rifle between his teeth, jiggling the trigger’s last bit of tension with his big toe, working that infinitesimal amount of play, teasing that final micro-ounce of slack before the spring snapped and the round detonated—lying there late into the night balanced between life, the trigger’s engagement, the hammer’s fall and the Final Gift of … Death?
But then he also heard that still, small voice, whispering to him:
“Not yet.”
And then his own voice also whispering, arguing in response:
“Why the fuck not?”
How could he tell Jules that Raza was right—that life was a pile of shit, not worth the living, a ghoulish practical joke played on the pathetic human race by that sick sadistic psychopath otherwise known as God—or Allah or Odin or Whoever the Fuck He Was—and if he, Danny McMahon, had his way, he wouldn’t have stopped with vaporizing J. T.’s Tower of Power, he would have nuked the whole fucking universe, beginning to end—the Big Bang, the Big Rip, the Big Crunch, the Almighty included—so that when he was done, the whole thing never would have been.
Yes, Raza had taught him to understand her world.
How could he tell Jules that she was right, that Raza and that horrific torture-hell had broken him, destroyed him, had taken everything from him? That all he wanted now was to stop the terror, end the nightmares and erase the pain? How could he tell anyone about that kind of horror—show what his heart had become—especially someone he cared about and who cared about him? How could he tell Jules that he was finally beaten, whipped to the bone and that all he was looking for was the first good place to die.
Fuck it. The Hollywood Hills was just as good as any other place.
“Danny,” Jules yelled from the pantry, interrupting his thoughts, “I’m talking to you!”
He had to say something.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said loudly, directing his voice toward the pantry. “I’ve been thinking about moving to where I can be by myself, maybe find a place out in the Mojave Desert, some place desolate, hard to get to, some place where I can be alone. What I’d really like is a redoubt surrounded by attack-trained dogs and electrified chain-link fences, no visitors allowed.”
Then he looked up and Jules was standing in front of him. Her suit was gone, and she was only wearing her black high heels and her matching bra and lace panties.
Shit, they looked like Raza’s panties.
Goddamn, she was wearing Raza’s black lacy panties.
She handed him a rock glass filled to the brim with seventy-five-year-old Macallan’s single malt.
“Fuck you and that paper asshole you’ve grown and that pussy you now have where your cock and balls used to be,” Jules said, taking a long, slow, savoring pull, then swirling it slowly around her mouth before swallowing it. She then put her empty glass down on the coffee table, swung a long leg over his lap and sat down, straddling his crotch.
“Bottom’s up,” she said, smiling.
He slowly savored and drank the ancient scotch.
“Now Danny,” Jules said, “let’s get down to business. You told me once that you liked me with bright scarlet lipstick and that you’d love to watch me put it on. You said watching women put on bright scarlet lipstick turned you on. Well here it is.”
She took a gold lipstick tube out of her bra, formed her mouth into a large sensuous O and began coating her full generous lips with layer upon layer of crimson, all the while her eyes glinting with wicked wanton lust.
She began rotating her hips on his groin, moaning softly:
“Come on, baby, come to Jules. We’ll work through this. Stay with me, Danny. Jules can fix it. Jules can fix anything.”
He turned his head and looked away, unable to make eye contact with her.
“Don’t you look away.” She grabbed his chin and turned his head, forcing him to stare
at her. “Come on, baby, keep your eyes on me. Tell Jules. You can tell me anything. I’m not leaving till we take care of this. You think Raza took your strength, your heart, that she broke you? Well Jules is here now, and Jules is putting Humpty back together again.”
He looked up at her, and she was still giving him that slow, soft smile, the eyes still glitteringly playfully but also filled with mean mischief.
Suddenly, for the first time in months, he found himself getting aroused—uncontrollably aroused.
“Oh, my, and here you said you weren’t interested in the feminine gender, but that’s not true. You are the rampant male tonight, aren’t you? All that talk about not wanting women—I hope that wasn’t a ruse to get Jules between your sheets.”
His brain was so thick with lust he couldn’t speak, and his vision was starting to twitch.
Taking his head in her hands, she bent down and kissed him—a long, probing, languorous kiss. When she pulled away, he was breathless.
“Danny,” she whispered in his ear, “it’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be all right.”
She began rotating her hips against his crotch again, harder and harder with infinite inexorable indolence, all the while smiling that sly omniscient this-is-just-for-you smile, her eyes locked unblinkingly on his.
“And here you said you weren’t interested in women,” she whispered again to him, her breath hot and sweet, her tongue darting in and out of his ear, then returning to his mouth, lazy arduous kisses, her tongue lively and licentious. “I think you’re interested. At least something down there thinks he is.”
She lifted his legs onto the couch and undid the belt of his short black robe.
Then she was lowering herself onto him, kissing him all the while, lewdly now, luridly, making her way down his stomach with her lips and tongue, taking her time, caressing him with her mouth, eternally, languidly meticulous in its myriad ministrations, whispering over and over:
“It’s going to be all right, Danny. Jules promises it will be all right, and Jules is never wrong. Jules will make everything all right.”
He lay his head back, his eyes locked on Jules’s.
“That’s right, Danny. Keep your eyes on me. Keep them on Jules. Don’t look away. It’s going to be just fine. I promise Jules will fix everything. Jules always makes everything … fine. Jules always makes everything … all right.”
Yes, he believed it now. Jules would do it. It was going to be all right. Jules was here, and Jules would make it all right.
Yes, Jules would always make everything … all right.
AFTERWORD
“There is no present or future—only the past endlessly repeating itself…”
—Eugene O’Neill
1
Back in the early 1980s, I wrote a series of thick, heavily researched westerns that featured a dozen or so actual historical figures. My main character, outlaw Torn Slater, was fictional, however, and throughout the five books he went through his own horrendous version of The Odyssey.
The West’s quintessential desperado, Slater had the perfect résumé for his profession. Adopted and raised by the legendary Apache war chief Cochise, by age fifteen Slater was a genuine virtuoso in the fine arts of raiding and killing. At the age of sixteen he’d fought for the South at Shiloh and then teamed up with Quantrill, Bloody Bill and the James–Younger Gang in Kansas, where he further refined his warrior/bandit skills. After the Civil War, he returned to the West, but in a sense, he never stopped refighting his earlier conflicts. Refusing to rob individuals, he focused on holding up banks and trains. Slater was no Robin Hood—quite the contrary—but his war was with Big Money, not ordinary men and women. He was happy to leave the mass of humanity alone—as long as they left him alone.
For the second Slater novel, Savage Blood, I created a couple of larger-than-life villains who continued through the rest of the series. One was the real-life dictator of Mexico for over thirty years, Porfirio Díaz. Brutal beyond belief, he was the Josef Stalin of our neighbor to the south. He exterminated or subjugated its indigenous Indian population—far more ruthlessly than Generals Sherman and Sheridan ever dreamed of doing in the U.S.—driving most of them into early graves or hacienda slavery. At the same time, unlike Slater, Díaz pandered to the super-rich. At one point, it was estimated that less than 1 percent of the population owned 85 percent of the land.
Still Díaz’s apologists argue that he convinced his oligarchic backers to build railroads, a profitable mining industry, big banks and spectacular, if oppressive, haciendas. To that extent he did drag Mexico, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. Díaz ran much of the country on forced labor, however, with most of the citizenry living in abject poverty.
In my novels, Díaz is obsessed with hunting Slater down, not to kill or imprison him but to convince him to rob U.S. banks and trains for Díaz. In return, in Savage Blood, he offers Slater sanctuary in Mexico, his personal protection from all law enforcement on both sides of the border and lots of money. Slater naturally declines his offer. He is not without his principles.
The series’s other chief villain was James Sutherland, a highly eccentric English billionaire. He is also obsessed with Slater, and when Savage Blood begins, he is leading a team of bounty hunters through the scorchingly hot Sonoran canyonlands in an attempt to track Slater down. Here is a description of Sutherland as seen through the eyes of the hard-bitten trail hand John Henry Deacon, who is ramrodding the expedition:
Sutherland—the dapper limey in the crimson bowler with the silver and turquoise hatband. The rich bastard was putting on a fresh, ruffled white silk shirt, tucking the tails into his red whipcord jodhpurs. The dandified riding pants bloomed outrageously around the thighs, then tapered tightly against the knees. They were tucked into black riding boots of imported calfskin, which were heeled with sterling silver buzz-saw rowels. He carried a British swagger stick under his arm. He was smoking his black, ubiquitous, fruity-smelling, tailor-made cigarettes, and his eyes glittered maniacally. They always glittered maniacally. He made Deacon sick. He made Deacon sorry he’d ever signed on.
While Sutherland loves making money—lots and lots of money—his primary ambition in these novels is more dramatic than that. Sutherland’s plan is to kill the outlaw in a most outrageously horrifying way for the most outrageously avaricious of reasons. As Sutherland explains to James Deacon, the grizzled old trail hand:
“Mr. Deacon, I’ve shot game for hides, for food and for the trophies. I’m killing Slater for the trophy. You see that hogshead of water? After I kill Torn Slater—the most wanted marauder in thirteen states and territories—I’m cutting off his head, bleeding it like a stuck pig, putting it in the barrel and then mixing a large flask of concentrated formaldehyde with the water.”
“Why?” Deacon asked in stunned disbelief.
“Sir, I shall put Torn Slater’s head in my Wild West Show and take it across the country in a clear glass crock. I shall build my show around that head, and around my live-on-stage reenactment of how I impaled the outlaw with my compound bow and my quiver full of tribladed broadheads. I shall perform for millions, make tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and be even richer than I am now. All of you—who will, of course, be actors in my Wild West Extravaganza—will be rich. We’ll be bigger than Halley’s Comet.”
Such sadistic greed and malignant hubris will not go unpunished.
In the sequel, Hangman’s Whip, I let Díaz capture Slater and incarcerate him in a slave-labor silver mine. The Spaniards dug thousands of such mines throughout Mexico as soon as they discovered in the early 16th century that the country was one vast mother lode of silver. They mined that ore with a savagery that knew no bounds; to be consigned to one of those hellholes was a death sentence. Ironically, all the silver and gold that the Spaniards ripped so violently out of the earth and at so much cost in human life never even went back to Spain. It went straight to their Dutch bankers. Even then, bankers were the real powers behind th
e throne and the preeminent profiteers.
Since I’ve always believed that the relentless pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake was inherently wicked, I made Slater’s prison mine truly miserable. I wanted to show where uncontrollable greed ultimately leads: straight to hell. Here is how I described Slater’s prison mine in Hangman’s Whip:
Monte de Riqueza, the Mount of Riches—a tremendous treasure trove of a hill, filled with enough gold, silver, oil, copper, iron, nickel, lead, zinc, magnesium, coal, sulphur, potassium nitrate and methane gas to make half the adult population of Mexico millionaires.
For untold centuries Mayan and Aztec slaves mined its dark depths. Equipped with pick-axes, driven by the cuarta’s lash, these dumb engines of flesh honeycombed its vast interior from one end to the other, trailing the veins and drifts and mother lodes like rock-chewing moles.
Monte De Riqueza is a living hell. For the subterranean fires, whose upwelling countless eons past, thrust forth this massive mountain, bake its rocky bowels like a kiln. And the deeper the descent, the hotter hell becomes. The air temperature rises two degrees for every hundred feet, until at three thousand feet down, water does not drip from the facings but hisses, pops and detonates, as steam clouds blind the eyes.
Yes, for Slater, Monte de Riqueza is an inferno of methane gas, falling rocks, cracking timbers and raging cataracts. But the worst nightmare is fire.
Spontaneous flash fires fed by dust, endless gas detonations and blazing coal seams and runaway oil fires combine to create howling conflagrations that scream through the interconnected timberwork of the tunnels, caving in the walls, bringing down the overhead rock, sucking the air out of the tunnelworks like pressure whooshing out of a bursting air hose.
Slater, however, is sentenced to a very special inferno, a uniquely hideous hell-of-hells, where the chances of surviving more than a month approach nullity. Defying the odds, however, Slater has survived two years. He mines sulphur in the so-called Sonoran Pit.
The Evil That Men Do Page 39
