“Where are the actors?” Barona looks around.
“Upstairs at the servant entrance. Waiting. As instructed.” Johnny Teeze’s beady eyes are sunken in his face and a sheen of sweat breaks out over his high, pockmarked forehead. He’s high as fuck on coke, the Countess can smell it on him.
“Bring in the ten with the largest members. Into the gallery. Have them undress and I will examine them shortly. Here is the girl.” Barona snaps her fingers and Janosh brings the wriggling Lily forward.
“Holy shit,” the director breathes taking in the basketball-player height human cyclops before him. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“Quite.” Barona is pleased with herself indeed.
“This is gonna be a hit, I can tell you right now. You, little girl, are going to be a star.” The director, whose head only comes to Lily’s chest, reaches up and caresses the skin around her perfectly formed eye. She flinches away. Johnny Teeze frowns.
“Get her to costuming and make-up.” He claps his hands, beckoning his assistant, Sugar. Face blank, she obeys. “Just relax,” Sugar whispers to Lily. “It’ll be over soon.”
“Please help me!” Lily whispers, begging Sugar with her weeping eye.
The Countess roars, “Your job is to listen! Not to SPEAK!” Sugar jumps out of her skin, her face dropping blank once again, dragging Lily behind her to the make-up and costume department.
“Get her ready. I will be back post haste.” The Countess sashays out of the basement as the make-up girl/aging porn star, Jenna Juicy, fusses over Lily’s wardrobe: a schoolgirl dress, pigtails, knee-high socks, Mary Janes, and crotchless underwear.
“Please don’t let them do this to me,” Lily’s eye tears up again, smearing her makeup.
“Don’t you dare cry,” Jenna says, her voice ice daggers. “You’ll ruin all our work.” Nobody was kind to you on your first day, so you’re not kind to anyone on theirs. Fuck ’em, is your motto. Literally.
Lily’s tear spills over. Jenna slaps her good across the face. Lily cries out, reaching for her cheek. Jenna Juicy grabs Lily’s wrist hard enough to leave fingermarks for bruises. “Don’t you dare. Touch. Your fucking face.” Jenna finishes her work.
The costume mistress, Tawny Porthole, is kinder to first-timers. “It’ll be done before you know it. Have you ever had sex before?”
Lily shakes her head, nails digging into her palm so as not to cry. Tawny fishes around in her bag, emerges with a bottle of pills and hands one to Lily. She considers, taking in the girl’s massive size, and then hands her a second. “This’ll take the edge off.”
“What is it?” Lily blinks away her tears, not wanting another slap from Jenna Juicy.
“A muscle relaxant. It’ll help. Trust me.” Tawny Porthole hands Lily a bottle of water and watches while she drinks the pills down.
Johnny Teeze
You look around the makeshift set, pleased as the donkey in Tijuana live sex shows. You hate that the Countess won’t let you make this current masterpiece out at your lot in The Valley, with its perfection of light design and the myriad ready-made scenes in which this giant cyclops girl could become a real star, but you’ll let it go: this film is going to be your bestseller. You can feel it in your boner.
You miss the good old days when your movies were made on actual 8mm film and not this straight-to-VHS crap. So much of the artistry lost in the transition, as well as perception of your movies as cinema rather than smut. Good luck finding a movie theater that’ll show one of your works now. The world has moved on, and you do what you do to maintain.
As you survey the aging porn stars working behind the scenes instead of cunt and center, their faces and bodies visibly weathered from gang bangs and drug abuse, you feel grateful to be a man in the industry, and a producer at that.
Jenna Juicy has worked for you since back in the 8mm days, but after her anus prolapsed on set a few years back and she lost her looks from the meds and depression, she’s about as useful to you in a movie as a canker sore on a starfucker. You felt for her though, and that’s why she’s over there now being a bitch and doing makeup instead of on the street hooking or whatever she’d be up to out of your purview. You fancy yourself the good guy in this scenario.
You watch as Tawny Porthole, another of your butt babes from way back when, hands the cyclops a pill from a small medical bag. A trick she learned from John Holmes himself, famous for carrying a suitcase of meds for his co-stars to help them accommodate his fourteen-inch member. Nobody ever fucked John sober. Now that you think about it, the female stars are rarely sober at all. How many times you’ve walked in on them shooting up or snorting or whatever. You don’t understand why. Never did. Like they need to be in an altered state to have sex, which makes no sense. You would’ve given your left nut to get paid to fuck, but you didn’t have the looks and God didn’t see fit to endow you with a pornworthy penis. So you’re in the director chair instead.
Not that you’re complaining. Next best thing to getting paid to fuck is getting paid to watch. You’ll be getting one of the most memorable fuck sessions of your career in just a few, and you can’t wait. Your dick throbs with anticipation, and you wonder if there’s time to rub a quick one out before the show begins.
6:45 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital
“So, Connie,” Detective Red Feather says settling into the last survivor interview, “tell me what you remember about the rave last night.” Red Feather can feel his exhaustion to the tips of his hair and eyelashes.
Connie Jones runs her hand through her blonde afro, closes her silver eyes, takes a deep breath and relates the now-familiar tale of superladies, haphazard parking, drugged water, Lily the cyclops’s kidnap by Charles Wallace Crane’s goons, the pink ooze emitted from between a Powerpuff Girl’s legs, the evil DJ, and finally ravers convulsing with blood pouring from their ears. Kaboom. The rest is silence.
Red Feather hands her the Polaroids of all the survivors. “You recognize anyone here?”
Connie ID’s her friends Lisa Wolverton, the werewolf, and Teresa Chalmers, the middle-aged screamer still in an induced coma. The rest of the women she cannot identify by name.
“Is there anything else you can think of, anything at all?” Red Feather looks at her expectantly.
“Well…” Connie isn’t sure if she should.
Red Feather raises an eyebrow.
“I guess since you’re not against dreams, I do remember dreaming about the party and the explosion about a week before.”
“How do you know it was the same event?”
“Because some of these women were in my dream. Like this one,” she holds up Lily’s picture, “and these three,” she holds up the photos of the alien girls NRG, Secrete, and Chamelia. “And this is DJ Fetish, but him I recognize from all the posters.”
Connie’s eyes fill with tears. “It was so vivid. I woke up and had no idea where I was. I mean, really. I’ve lived in that apartment for four years and it was like I’d never been there before. I have strange dreams all the time but this was one of the worst.”
She takes a deep breath. “In the dream I was at the party, but at the same time not. Floating above everything. There was so much weird stuff going on. Like those crazy flashing sort of scenes in Fight Club? Just bambambam, weird image after weird image. But then, all the kids were bleeding from the ears, screaming. Then I saw a car driving away from the mansion, a Volkswagen Rabbit. The driver got outside the hill’s gates and then pushed a button. Other cars also drove away at the same time, they all pushed buttons. Boom! And I was inside again, and I was dead.” She shudders. “Freaked me out. They say if you die in your dreams you die in real life. I was fucking scared. And then I guess I did die, huh?”
“All we found was your head, so yeah, you were dead for about six hours.”
“Mental.” Connie turns the new
s over in her mind, hand at her throat, imagining she can feel the scar that should be there.
Red Feather makes note of the Volkswagen Rabbit.
“I freaking know that my dreams come true. I’ve no idea what the hell I was thinking going there.” Connie shakes her head. “I never much believed in God, it was a huge thing in my house. Southern Baptists. But it never made sense to me. Even after the visions started.” She looks at Red Feather, her silver eyes flashing and intense. “But something had to have brought us all back, right? I mean, how else can you explain it? Spontaneous regeneration? Science will never be able to explain it alone.”
Günn feels sick, sicker than she’s felt all day. The thought of the cyclops girl Lily with that evil crone makes her want to go postal. And Connie’s words clang inside her head: Science will never be able to explain it alone. Everything is spinning. Shit, I’m gonna faint.
“Fuck that,” Günn says, not realizing she’s spoken aloud. And yelled.
Red Feather and Connie turn to her, puzzled. “What is going on with you?” Red Feather grabs her arm. “You’re acting totally nutso. And the camera is still rolling.”
“I’ve had it with all this supernatural bullshit. I’m going to get Lily before that monster does something we’ll all be held responsible for.”
Red Feather breaks with protocol and pauses the tape, seeing the desperate urgency in his partner’s eyes.
“Syn, think about this. You know how well-connected she is, she’ll ruin your career, everything you’ve worked for.”
“I don’t fucking care. Don’t you feel it? She’s up to something, and I won’t let her get away with it. I need to do something real today, and this is it.” Günn’s breathing is labored, and Red Feather notices her hands over her belly again in a protective gesture.
“Stay here if you want. I won’t let something happen to her.” Günn’s breath comes out ragged.
“Let’s go outside for a sec, catch a moment, talk—”
“No more talking. I’ve had it with fucking talking. You coming with me or not?”
Red Feather thinks about the Roswell Institute, the alien girls and the supersoldiers they said are coming. “I can’t, Günn. You know we have to stay. Just calm down and we’ll get through it together.”
“Fuck.” Günn is torn: a rock and a hard place. Lily’s sweet, one-eyed face, tears streaming, flashes through Günn’s mind. “Nope. I’m getting that girl from that wicked old hag. I’ll come back if I can.”
“Well shit,” Red Feather sighs, and moves to hug her but she flinches away. “Be safe, partner. I’ll cover for you.”
“Thanks. You, too. Don’t get killed.” She refuses to meet his square gaze.
“Do my best.” Red Feather hands her the keys to their squad car.
“And, RF?” Günn says, palming the keys.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
Red Feather nods. Günn does an about face and forces herself not to run to the elevator. Hold on, Lily. I’m coming.
6:50 PM LAPD Headquarters Hollywood
Assistant Chief Gabriel Ortiz knocks on the door of Special Agent Quatro’s makeshift office. “How’s it going?”
Quatro nods and takes a big breath. “I’m going to start interrogating the ‘Bad Vibe Kids’. They been Mirandized?”
“Sure have,” Ortiz says. “Only the one lawyered up, so we’re good to go with the other two, at least until they do as well.”
Quatro nods, putting the files in order. “I have what I need here. What I came for. I’ll go in alone first. Tap on the glass when you get into observation.” Ortiz nods again, admiring Quatro’s cool composure as she collects a huge stack of documents and leaves the room. His adrenaline makes his heart feel like a symphony of drums on speed. He’s getting too old for this shit.
Frank Cullen, the oldest of the four Bad Vibe Kids, now known as domestic terrorists, sits in Interview Room 1 with his arms crossed, leaning far back in his seat and sporting the most smug of smiles. He’s enjoying this too much.
Special Agent Quatro walks in and introduces herself. She doesn’t ask to shake his hand. She already knows.
“I didn’t think foreigners could be in the FBI,” Frank Cullen smirks.
She ignores his question. “Is this you?” Quatro places a photograph of the Crane mansion crime scene in front of him, pointing to a face behind the gaggle of reporters, one with the same sarcastic visage.
“I don’t know. Is it?” His insolence is palpable.
Quatro raises her hand and smacks the grin off his face.
“What the fuck, bitch! You can’t fucking hit me!” His shock reverberates.
“Then what did I just do? And it’s Special Agent Bitch, you little asshole. Let’s try this again.” She pushes the photo closer to the Bad Vibe Kid. “Is this you in the picture?”
He struggles to regain his arrogant demeanor. “So what if it is?”
Agent Quatro sits down and opens Frank Cullen’s police file. Not as thick as a serial rapist or career thief, but thick enough for a young man of twenty. “Since you were born you have been arrested thirteen times for arson. Minor and major.”
“So? I like to watch things burn. When I’m outta here I’ll find your place and watch it burn, too.” He laughs loud and prolonged, a forced sound.
Quatro looks at Frank Cullen long and hard. Frank doesn’t know why, but he begins to sweat and averts his eyes. Quatro smiles and opens another manila file. “In 1997, you tried to burn down a house with someone inside.”
“That was an accident. It was abandoned. I didn’t know there was anybody in there.” Not true. Frank hooted and hollered as the homeless man screamed for help and for his life.
Quatro sits back in her seat, studying the boy.
“Who paid you to blow up the mansion?”
“Nobody paid me, man, it was all my brother’s idea.” The smug smirk returns with yet another fabrication. Quatro doesn’t need Günn to tell her this boy lies through his teeth.
“Your brother, Tommy? Who we also have in custody?”
“The one and the same. Captain Obvious wins 100 points.” He puts his hands together in a series of sarcastic slow claps.
“Really? You’re telling me your seventeen year old brother orchestrated this entire thing.” Quatro’s voice is venom.
“Yup. He’s worse than me.” Frank smacks his gums, but continues sweating, a new shine breaking out over his nose. He waits for her to look down before wiping it away.
“So can you explain why does your police file look like this,” Quatro raises the inch-thick file and compares it to another empty one, “and his looks like this?” She throws the empty folder across the table and Frank jumps in his seat.
“’Cuz he just never gets caught. He kills things, you know. The neighborhood pets. Tortures them, too.” Frank lies, again. “Yeah, a kid went missing in our neighborhood. Can’t prove it, but I know Tommy killed her. Probably tortured her first. He might’ve even raped her if he weren’t such a little bitch himself.”
Quatro pictures the sniveling, skinny little Tommy Cullen in the next interview room, thinking about how patrol told her he’d wet his pants while being fingerprinted. Quatro changes tacks.
“So, how did you hook up with the other Bad Vibe Kids?”
Frank laughs, a sound that is fast getting on Quatro’s nerves. “Tommy took me to a rave and it was so fucking gay, it pissed me off. Then I was talking to some dude I met, don’t remember where, and he told me about them. That they’re about taking the scene down from the inside. You know, waiting in parking lots and jumping those ravey little faggots after parties. Selling bunk drugs. Poisoning candy. Going to parties and fucking with people’s trips, picking fights and shit. Raping raver sluts. Sounded like hella fun so I
joined. Tommy was already a member.” After I beat his ass and forced him, Frank leaves out.
“And when did you decide to blow up the rave?”
“Tommy started making the plans a few months ago, when Crane announced the rave would be in his mansion. Yup. All Tommy’s idea.” The more he says the lie the more he believes it. Let them try and poly me now. “A chance to watch the biggest fire of my life? Hell yeah. So I agreed.” Frank grins.
“And that’s why you went back to the crime scene?”
Frank Cullen nods.
“And why you didn’t leave the state like the rest of your buddies?”
“I was gonna, we was gonna leave after I went out there, but y’all were just too clever. Bully for you.” He coughs out a loogie and spits it on the floor. Quatro is tempted to smack him again.
“Oh, and by the way: I want a lawyer.”
The magic words.
“That’s the first smart thing you’ve said today, Mr. Cullen. Do you need a court appointed one or will you be hiring your own?”
At the question of money Cullen’s face drops. I haven’t been paid yet. Fuck.
Quatro smiles and leaves the room. He’s no longer her problem. And it doesn’t matter that the holes in Frank Cullen’s story are as big as the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica, Special Agent Rosario Quatro has the feeling that his brother Tommy will be more than ready to confess, especially when he hears the recording of his brother’s take on the explosion.
Assistant Chief Gabriel Ortiz
You have always been a man of faith—it runs in your family and your blood—so you wonder why all today’s miracles and monsters are so hard to wrap your brain around. Isn’t this what Christians, Muslims, Jews have always wanted? Empirical proof of God? Scientific proof that we are not alone in this universe? Someone up there watches over us and intervenes in our lives?
Crime Rave Page 28
