L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  Fifty-Six

  The throbbing in my balls was easing off, but it still hurt to walk and hurt more to walk fast. I did my best, half striding and half trotting through the shadowy woods. The rushing sound of the stream rose as I got close; the spring runoff was down from its earlier peak, but there was still plenty of it and the water was high and swift. The pond above the bridge was high, too, with turbulent swirls and wavelets lapping at the granite boulders that ringed it.

  As I broke out of the trees into the clear moonlight, I could see two figures on the bank. One was Lisa, stretched out on her back on a flat rock, with her dark hair spread around her head.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize the other one, a man crouched over her.

  Dustin Sperry.

  What?

  My first wild thought was that he’d snapped under all the pressure on him and brought Lisa to this lonely spot to take out his rage on her, rape or even murder her.

  “Get the fuck away from her!” I yelled, breaking into a run.

  He straightened up and took a couple of steps back, but he didn’t speak or otherwise respond, just stood there with his hands at his sides. If anything, he seemed confused, and I started to realize that this had to be staged, part of Cynthia’s setup—just like the first time I’d encountered Lisa and Sperry here. Still, whatever was going on was wrong, and there was something dangerous about his vacant, troubled face and his stance; even his backsteps seemed to be more repositioning than retreat.

  I knelt beside Lisa, keeping him warily in sight. She was dressed in the thin gown she’d worn in her priestess scene. Her eyes were open, but her face and body were as still as the stone she lay on. I put my ear close to her mouth and found the carotid artery in her neck with my fingertips. Her breath and pulse were both okay, slow but steady, and there was no visible blood or other signs of injuries. It looked like she’d been drugged, and while she didn’t seem to be slipping away in an overdose—at my touch she responded slightly, lips twitching and eyelids flicking like she was trying to focus—I couldn’t be sure.

  Or was she faking, with this just another part of the act?

  “How long has she been like this?” I called out to Sperry, raising my voice over the sound of the stream.

  He still didn’t speak, but his eyes were changing as if his blank mind was coming to life—and it wasn’t a pretty look.

  Abruptly, he convulsed, with a strangled howl bursting from his throat. He clapped his hands against his temples, his body jerking and his feet frantically stamping the ground.

  I stared, frozen with shock. It was like seeing Nick again on the Malibu cliff—right before he’d attacked me and damned near thrown me over the edge.

  And in that instant, I understood what Cynthia was doing. She had lured or forced Sperry up here, same as me. She was sending signals to enrage him into attacking me. If either of us survived, she would adroitly finish us off. When we were found, it would look like a fight between two men who were known to have a grudge over a woman they both coveted.

  Sperry’s head swiveled toward me, and the rest of him came right behind it, lunging at me with his fists windmilling ferociously, big sloppy swings that would have dented a car. I scrambled back, rising to my feet and running for the pond. In the water, berserk though he was, I could handle him.

  I’d had time for only the briefest glimmer of wonder as to why Cynthia wasn’t sending the rage signals to me, too. I should have known better—her timing was perfect. A blinding jolt seared through my skull, like the one that had hit me in Lisa’s swimming pool but even worse.

  I staggered, knees buckling, and then Sperry slammed into me. His weight threw us both into the numbing cold, roiling pool. With the sickening writhing in my head, my strength and motor control were gone. I could only thrash feebly while he clenched his fists in my shirt, drove me under the surface, and held me there. The pain kept coming in vicious waves, and the need for breath tightened like a vise in my chest. Spots started flickering at the edges of my vision and expanding to fill the field—the final warning sign before I blacked out and my lungs sucked in their last fill—of water.

  I had never imagined that I would die by drowning.

  Then, in that timeless half-dream state, I felt a distinct inner presence—infinitely distant and yet right there at the core of my being, utterly alien and yet as hauntingly familiar as my mother’s voice from birth.

  It was the same sense I’d gotten when I’d pulled the lever of Gunnar Kelso’s mad scientist slot machine—that a group of august, otherworldly entities was watching all this and passing judgment. As suddenly as it came, it was gone.

  And so was the agony in my head. Just like that, I was in control of my body again.

  I got my feet under me, found the bottom, and burst up through the surface with my head under Sperry’s chin like an uppercut that snapped his teeth together and his neck back. My lungs were so desperate for air that it shrieked in my throat as I sucked it in, but I managed to drive a fist up under his nose, my knuckles crushing into it and his upper lip. He roared with pain and let go of me, his hands flying to clasp his face.

  Now I had him.

  I dove away into deeper water and kept backing up, luring him deeper still as he came after me wild-eyed with fury and with the dark glisten of blood streaming down over his mouth. When his feet lost touch with the bottom and he started paddling clumsily, I dove down and grabbed his ankles to pull him under. He kicked like a son of a bitch, but he was no strong swimmer, and his rage just wore him out faster. A last few seconds of frantic struggle dwindled off into spasmodic twitching.

  By now we’d gone most of the way across the pond—and a flicker of chance had appeared in my mind. Cynthia was expecting me to drown. She had to be at least fifty yards away, and the water was dark and turbulent. If I stayed under and Sperry came out alone, she just might let down her guard and assume I was dead.

  I came up behind him, keeping my body hidden, and got his face above the surface while he hacked and sputtered his lungs back into working order. He’d pull through okay, but he wasn’t going to be in shape to cause more trouble anytime soon. I kept us moving toward the far bank, thrashing around to make it look like there was still a struggle going on. When we got to where we could touch bottom, I started hyperventilating, the longest, deepest lungfuls I could take in.

  Then I let him go and dropped to the bottom, shoving off the rocks back toward Lisa. I made it about twenty yards, clawing my way along on my belly like a lizard, before my aching lungs forced me to flip on my back and cautiously raise my face just high enough for a breath and a quick look around.

  Sperry was dragging himself up onto the far bank. Lisa was still lying motionless on the rock. I couldn’t see Cynthia.

  Which meant that she might, after all, have seen me.

  I went under again and made it almost to the bank, in water that was only knee deep and a few yards from Lisa. When I came up this time, Cynthia’s dark lithe figure was striding across the bridge—toward Sperry and away from me. I got my feet under me, ready to move, but I waited; every step she took increased the distance between us.

  As she reached the opposite bank, her hand rose to point at him, but she wasn’t holding that big, bulky pistol.

  Then he flopped back into the pond, letting out a shriek that carried sharp and clear over the sound of the rushing stream. It was a transmitter that she was aiming at him—shocking him with the same agonizing jolts she’d used on me, driving him mercilessly farther into the deep, swirling water. Exhausted and panicked as he was, racked by blinding pain, he’d sink like a stone.

  Much as I disliked him, it sickened me. But there was nothing I could do for him.

  With Cynthia focused on murder and the pistol not in her hand, now was the best chance I was going to get. I came up out of the water on the run, scooped up Lisa in my arms, and kept on running in a crouch for the woods.

  Fifty-Seven

  The gunshots started withi
n seconds, muffled whumps at quickly spaced intervals, but by then we’d made it to the nearest trees and Cynthia was on the other side of the pond, a good sixty yards away. Even so, she didn’t miss by much—the bullets crashed through the branches around us, and one blew a chunk out of a pine trunk so close I felt bits of bark sting my face.

  Then the shooting stopped. She was coming after us.

  We had the head start, and I knew the turf, but Cynthia was going to move a lot faster than me carrying Lisa. We had to disappear.

  I ran on to a place where the stream was only calf deep and cut sharply across it, then along the base of the cliffs to a deer trail that led up a ravine. It was just a track, barely visible even in daylight, and the rushing water covered the sound of my footsteps as I scrambled up it. After a hundred feet, I stopped and collapsed, panting, behind a rock outcropping. If Cynthia hadn’t caught sight of us, we still had a chance.

  Lisa was starting to stir, and her eyes had gone from glazed to scared and confused. Her mouth opened like she was trying to speak. I touched my forefinger to her lips—the sound of a human voice would carry far more than footsteps.

  “Not a peep,” I whispered into her ear. “You understand?” Her eyes stayed wide, but she gave me a tiny, tentative nod.

  Voices carried, all right. Cynthia’s cut through the night air like a whip.

  “I know exactly where you are! If you try to run again, you won’t get three steps.”

  My body jerked, and I felt Lisa shudder, too. My arms tightened around her. It sounded like Cynthia was still on the other side of the stream, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Don’t make things any worse than they already are,” she called. “Come out. We’ll get this over with—quick, painless, and that’s the end of it. But if you drag it out longer, I’m going to get very angry. You know what that means for your family.”

  Very, very slowly, I eased my face to the edge of the outcropping until I could get a glimpse down to the streambed. Long seconds passed before I could see her, a shadow moving stealthily along the opposite bank—a single measured step at a time, holding the pistol outstretched in front of her with both hands, sweeping it in a searching arc.

  But still searching. My eyes closed briefly in thanks—to whom or what, I wasn’t sure.

  I eased back to look at Lisa and gave her the all okay sign with my circled thumb and forefinger. She answered with another tiny nod, but it was firmer this time, and her eyes told me that she was starting to grasp what was going on.

  We stayed as still as the rock that hid us while Cynthia worked her way upstream. She was silent for the next couple of minutes, then called out her threat again, her voice now muffled by the water.

  It was time to move. She was bound to realize that we couldn’t have made it much farther and start coming back.

  Lisa was still too unsteady to climb up the steep, rough trail, so I gave her a whispered apology and carried her the rest of the way slung over my shoulder, uncomfortable for her but easier on me and leaving me a hand free to help pull us along. Fear and adrenaline gave me the strength to make it, but barely. When we got to the cliff top, I was so drained I thought I might pass out. I unloaded her onto the ground as gently as I could, then half fell down beside her and pulled her close again. My clothes were still sodden, and I’d gotten her wet, too, but I was giving off heat like a furnace and she was cold from inaction. Next step was to get her moving on her own, as soon as I could get myself up off the ground.

  “Do you remember what happened?” I murmured to her.

  Her voice was weak and halting, but it still managed to convey sheer feminine outrage.

  “She had a gun. Made me come here with her. Made me drink a roofie. Then I went blank. That bitch.”

  Despite how insane and terrifying it all was, my lips actually curved in a smile of relief. Lisa was still Lisa, coming right back and fighting mad.

  “Can you walk?” I said.

  “I think so. I might need some help to start.”

  I got us both to our feet, then steadied her while we paced around for a minute or so. When she seemed okay, I told her to keep going and went to the cliff edge, staring down at the dark valley floor and trying to figure out what to do next. I wanted to keep moving; I didn’t think Cynthia would look for us up here, but I couldn’t be sure and there might be wild cards in the mix, like Venner or other accomplices who would join the search. The nearest phone was at a neighboring ranch, a good four miles away over the rugged mountain terrain. It would be tough on Lisa, but it looked like our best bet.

  Then a sound erupted into the quiet night—the throaty roar of a high-powered motorcycle starting up. I’d heard it before.

  Cynthia’s motorcycle.

  The bike was already moving fast when the headlight flicked on, a tiny glow like a shooting star, and it kept gaining speed as it headed up over the ridgetop toward the highway.

  She could make it to L.A.—and to my mother and sister—in an hour.

  Now I needed a phone fast.

  Fifty-Eight

  We still couldn’t risk going back down to the Lodge; she had probably cut the landline and taken my cell phone from my car, anyway. But my gaze stayed on the city set. If the security system was breached, it would instantly alert a central office, and they would dispatch sheriff’s deputies. It would take more than lobbing rocks at the fence—the sensors would be set to ignore minor bumps like small animals brushing against it. But a big animal—like a man—would do the trick, and the cameras would pick me up, too.

  And if Venner was down there waiting, or Cynthia had dumped the bike and come back on foot, so would they.

  I strode over to Lisa. She was looking better, her walking stronger and more controlled.

  “I’ve got to go take care of something,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. But just in case I’m not, you’ve got to get out of here. Start walking that way.” I pointed northeast. “Stay up here on high ground and follow the stream, you can see it below. After a few miles you’ll come to a ranch. It’s a rough hike, but be careful and you’ll do fine.”

  There was no describing the look she gave me.

  “Okay, Tom,” she said, “but promise me one thing. Don’t ever say ‘Don’t worry’ to me again.”

  It had probably taken fifteen minutes to climb the trail carrying Lisa. Going back down alone took three or four. I crossed the stream and trotted quietly through the woods to the rear of the film set. At the tree line, I crouched to watch and listen for anyone moving. There was nothing—yet, anyway.

  I took off in a sprint for the chain-link fence and jumped up onto it, shaking it furiously like an enraged ape in a cage. The entire area lit up instantly with powerful floodlights, along with a shrieking wheep wheep wheep like a megadecibel smoke detector. I waved furiously at the nearest camera, a beckoning get the hell over here gesture. Then I dropped to the ground and raced back to the woods, zigzagging like a broken field runner. This time I went right on past the deer trail—if somebody was following, I wasn’t going to lead them to Lisa—and kept going another few hundred yards before I hid again to watch.

  Mercifully, it looked like the area was clear. I gave it another ten minutes to be safe, then climbed a different trail back to the cliff top. Only a few minutes later, we saw the first flashing red and blue lights in the distance, coming our way fast.

  The deputy was on the scene and starting to search the area, pistol in hand, by the time we got to him. He assumed, understandably, that we were the ones who should be arrested, and it took some fast talking to keep us from getting cuffed and thrown into his car. But he smoothed out when he realized who Lisa was—and he started taking our story a lot more seriously when I led him to the pond and showed him where I guessed Dustin Sperry’s body would be, trapped by currents against the base of the dam.

  The deputy’s flashlight beam was powerful enough to pierce to the bottom and pick out the pale face and sodden shape, moving with eeri
e gentleness as the currents tugged him this way and that.

  He got on his radio, calling for backup, arranging for L.A. cops to escort my mother and sister to a hotel—and putting out an APB for Cynthia Trask. Within a very short time, there were a lot of law enforcement agents looking for her.

  But by morning, it was becoming clear that she had vanished.

  Epilogue

  The summer faded into autumn, and the madness faded with it until, at least outwardly, things seemed pretty much back to normal. Lisa and I had been seeing each other steadily; we kept our separate lives, and she was working on another film, but we usually spent the weekends together and a couple of nights in between.

  My mother seemed to be fine; Erica was married; Paul was home being a husband and father again. Hap had finally checked in from Singapore, sending a short note that was outwardly an apology for his abrupt departure, but was really testing the waters to see how much trouble he was in. My mother hadn’t answered, and I didn’t know if she ever would. I still hadn’t heard from Drabyak.

  One evening in November, Lisa and I took a drive up to my family’s Malibu property. It had recently been put up for sale, so this was probably my last visit there, but there was no sentimentalism involved. I could have done without ever seeing the place again. It brought back all the pain about Nick, the more so because Nick was gone.

  Our mother and I had made the decision to take him off life support at the end of August, when it was clear that he was already dead in all the ways that mattered. I couldn’t really articulate this, but I knew that Audrey felt the same—what it came down to more than anything else was dignity.