The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  ***

  It was a two-hour drive back to Point Pitt. Lucas did not notice the time.

  He was amazed at how easily his combat senses had slipped back. His body hummed on high burn. No mistakes had been made.

  Sapping the dude with the marine corps buzz cut had been child's play. Lucas had checked the guy's wallet to get a useable name, ditched the unconscious body, and pulled a perfect fakeout with the effete club manager. The eyepatch, cowboy hat, bush jacket, and all other props were knotted into a neat bundle on the seat beside him. In the center of the bundle was the sap. And the backstage pass, folded carelessly into quarters.

  He had looked right into the eyes of the enemy.

  Are you Jackson Knox? You've been looking for Gunther?

  The enemy had even identified himself. Egomaniac. If he had known that Mason Kellogg's handshake had been his final chance to beg for his own life, he might have been more polite, less the rockstar. Courtesy was an almost nonexistent idiom in the rock scene. Perhaps if Whip Hand had ever stopped to consider the safety of their fans, Kristen would be alive now.

  But then, so would Jackson Knox.

  Knox might have begged harder, too, if he had known just what degree of damage could be done by a directional antipersonnel mine. They were designed to be unforgiving. The only touch-and-go part of the whole operation had been slipping the mine into the monitor cabinet and wiring it to the pedal board. The device was a crescent of steel with the detonation works on the back. Stamped into the metal was the most basic instruction of all: FRONT TOWARD ENEMY. The alligator-clip connections had been quickly made. Things had to be done quickly and quietly in the jungle. There had been time for a fast costume change (no one had noticed that "Mason Kellogg" was wearing "Gunther Lubin"'s pants) and a final, tasty gloat.

  Mission accomplished.

  There was a phone carrel outside the Licorice Pizza store at the intersection closest to the Rockhound. Lucas pretended to converse with a dial tone for fifteen minutes. He hung up when he heard the muffled boom half a block away. And when the vehicles with the flashbars converged on the Rockhound, he bought a can of Pepsi from a machine and took his leave. Specifics he could get from the news. There was no rush, now.

  Back at the cabin, all was tranquil and ordered. It was late, but Lucas decided to grill a steak after cleaning up the hand-built brick barbecue outside the rear door. He added a delicious ash-baked potato and six bottles of Dos Equis. Again, his almost ravening thirst surprised him. When he had checked in at Olive Grove, he had certainly had nothing approaching this sort of passion for the brew. It seemed the perfect complement to his food. It seemed just the right amount. Everything was extremely balanced.

  He burned the bundle of clothing after dousing it with gasoline. The burning gas smelled like napalm. Then he tossed in the cardboard jackets of Jackson Knox's two solo albums. The shrink-wrap hissed and shriveled. The vinyl discs smoked and sagged down into a topographical mimic of the pile of coals. The record labels blackened and ignited. The polychloride plastic bubbled hotly, releasing evil tendrils of carbonized waste floating into the air like fibrous black snowflakes from hell. Maybe the crackpot fundamentalists could use that. When you burned the cursed records, black demons fled into the air, momentarily visible, like a spirit relinquishing possession of a Haitian. Like a soul or animus departing a human corpus at death. That ought to be good for at least two newspaper articles full of ignorant outrage. And free publicity for folks like Ralph Trope. As an employee of Kroeger Concepts, Lucas never failed to consider the publicity angle of anything. Perhaps this knowledge might be used in some way back in L.A. The very idea almost prompted a tolerant little laugh. Lucas wanted no truck with religious nuts or their devils.

  The records dissolved away to black puddles of plasma on the coals. One down.

  7

  THE KNIFE WAS A MONSTER.

  Lucas jerked it from its heavy sheath. The noon sunlight sneaking in through the cabin windows made the blade glimmer. It was a matte-finish Randall combat blade, one of the type smithed up especially for the Green Berets. Everything about it was in aid of a single purpose-to help human beings quit this mortal coil. Catalogs called it a "survival knife." Survival, in combat, meant knowing how to kill people quickly and silently. The nine and a half inches of edge were honed discriminatingly enough to halve a piece of toilet paper floating in the air with one downward swipe. The blade was nearly four inches across at its widest point. Its backbone was serrated for gutting. At the butt of the haft, a screwcap sealed a tiny, waterproof compartment in the handle. The underside of the cap contained a tiny compass.

  In unskilled hands, the weapon could do little more harm than, say, a large butcher knife. Lucas knew this. Back in 1965 the government had devoted two weeks to instructing him on how such a knife might be used skillfully. It had all come back to him. It was like swimming or bicycling-something your body never really forgot how to do.

  Grab the enemy's head from behind. Seal off his mouth and snap his neck across the blade. You hardly move the knife at all. Let the blade do the work. Jam it between the ribs from behind. Twist and rip it out at an angle thirty degrees radical to the entry. Or plunge it into the V just below the solar plexus. Uncork your enemy and let his life dribble out. If they stab at you, shield yourself with your forearm. If the attacking blade penetrates your forearm, twist your arm so the bones trap the blade and you can take it away from your attacker.

  He replaced the knife in its scabbard and left it on the spool table by the fireplace after tucking the little whetstone on its hide thong back into the secondary sheath. Hanging above the fireplace embers was a cowboy coffeepot besooted with lampblack. He used a rag to insulate the metal handle while he refilled his cup. Coffee steam was an excellent aid to contemplation and reflection.

  That morning he had dumped all of his Jackson Knox ashes into the sea.

  The trail leading up to the cabin door from the highway cutoff began as a dirt road, then narrowed to a rarely used path. After a hundred yards or so of careful footing, the path steepened into a virtual goat track. It had been a challenge for the Bronco to hump its way to the front door.

  Out back were water and kerosene tanks. When the cabin foundation had been laid, Lucas had also sunk a well with a rudimentary pump and spout. Elbow grease worked the spout, and the water tanks were topped off a bucket at a time. They fed into the kitchen's tub sink and a wooden-partitioned outdoor shower. Power sufficient to Lucas' needs was provided by the butterfly-winged solar panels on the roof. For light there were kerosene lanterns, the fireplace, the sun. A pair of boxy battery lamps were racked by the rear door. Trying to find the outhouse in the dark without one had provided for some comic moments in the dark, which up here was totally unspoiled by light unless the moon was out.

  A tiny collegiate refrigerator was wedged between the kitchenette shelves and the counter. It chugged softly to itself. Lucas found the background purr comforting; it provided just enough noise that he did not go buggy for want of solid, urban aural pollution.

  ***

  After returning to the cabin from the beach, Lucas had opened up his Whip Hand room. That was what he'd unconsciously begun to call it.

  The tiny locked cubicle had become a cramped control room. All of his audio and video equipment was wired together on a shallow workbench of four-by-fours and plywood that ran the width of the room. The Whip Hand discs and tapes were stacked to one side of the cassette player. Whistling tunelessly, Lucas detoured through the room to switch tapes from the Temptations to Jean-Pierre Rampal. Beneath the workbench was the exhumed footlocker, broken lid and all. Above it, thumb-tacked to the split log wall, was the garish poster of Gabriel Stannard that Lucas had purchased at On the Brink. He had found a paring knife that had gone to rust in the kitchenette and used it to nail Stannard's liver to the wall. The blade looked like it belonged there. Next to the workbench he had managed to crowd in a card table to provide an additional work surface, which left
a minuscule square of space for a creaky folding chair. Balanced across one corner of the card table was a fully assembled M-16 infantry rifle with a Nitefinder scope and flash suppressor.

  The lead sap with the braided handle that he'd used on Gunther Lubin was the first thing Lucas had removed from the sealed plastic package inside the footlocker. The monster combat knife was second. Third had come the M-16, broken down into components, greased in cosmoline, coated with silicon, and wrapped in more plastic. It was absolutely cherry. Still unassembled was a special Russian sniper's rifle, a 7.62-millimeter Dra-gunov semiauto.

  Jean-Pierre was blowing flute sonatas. Handel.

  Then had come the flat boxes, packed against one side of the footlocker, each about the size of a brick, with designations like CAUTION and EXPLOSIVE and ANTIPERSONNEL stamped all over them.

  In a box under the card table was new ammunition and a squeaky-new leather shoulder holster with nylon web straps. Gun-cleaning tools; jeweler's textured cloths; solvents and lubes. Empty clips awaiting their loads. All innocuous items easily purchased without bothersome signatures and ID.

  Lucas picked up the forty-five auto pistol and shoved in a full clip. The gun was a large-frame Llama ACP with a blue finish; the slugs were steel-jacketed hollow points. He snapped the action, and his eye sought the loaded chamber indicator out of habit. Then he popped out the clip, inserted one replacement round, reloaded, and thumbed the slide lever safety. The shoulder holster had snap pockets for two extra clips.

  The guns had come into his hands without signatures as well.

  Every man in every war meets good old boys heavily into ordnance. In Vietnam Lucas had met the sons of such men. A standout was Big John Lawson's second son, Billy, a hotshot ranger with an Olympian finalist physique and a cocky, lopsided grin. In 1978 Billy Lawson, beer in hand, had led Lucas down to a paneled basement room lined with some of the most awesome and frightening firepower conceived by the paranoid mind of humankind. And Billy Lawson had said, "Pick one"-such was his admiration for the man who had saved his father from being sawed in half by sixty-caliber fire a decade earlier.

  Lucas had chosen the Dragunov, and Billy had smiled. It was a classic.

  The rest of the hardware he had accumulated with time, like barnacle building. The flash suppressor and accouterments for the M-16 he had picked up from a gun dealer who was more than happy to sell the stuff i under the counter for no other reason than Lucas's status as an adult Caucasian and a veteran. It was ridiculously easy to acquire a federal firearms license, and Lucas was eventually surrounded by men who were surrounded by guns. If they didn't have a specific item, they could tell him in seconds where one could be had… and at a discount, in exchange for the underground referral.

  That was the how, Lucas thought as he snaked into the holster rig to size it up. But what about the why?

  Why had he kept the weaponry all this time? In a way, collecting such instruments of harm was done with the same fascination people experienced when they thought of swerving into oncoming traffic. You knew you wouldn't. But. You knew you contemplated the way a knife in a kitchen drawer might be put to malevolent purpose, but you would never do such a thing unless you got yourself a damned good, defensible reason. Or were insane.

  Lucas was not insane. He had had the procedure by which he had been cured carefully explained to him. His mind was not aberrant. They had even showed him pictures proving that his physical brain was perfectly normal.

  And he had a reason. He understood that you kept such lethal tools close as an acknowledgment of control. There was life, there was death, and there was the tightrope between. Hefting the heavy pistol, Lucas felt a pang of revulsion, followed by a cleansing aftershock. The feeling of reaffirmed control. That was why people kept guns at hand-to constantly test themselves and to remind themselves that control kept them civilized.

  Until the moment when violence was the only option. Pow, as Burt had said. That was the big But that had consumed nations, redivided continents.

  CAUTION. EXPLOSIVE. ANTIPERSONNEL.

  He had stacked the remaining mines on the far end of the workbench, holding them in reserve. There might be some slip-up. It was conceivable that the mines would have to be seeded around the cabin as a fortification or as a booby trap to cover his absences.

  Last night he had watched the late news on the convex-screened Sony Trinitron. The mountains made reception a hunt-and-peck session with the antenna, and he'd pulled in a multicolored chaos of static. But he did not need to see, only to hear Jackson Knox's name. The TV was mainly for use with the videotape deck, anyway.

  Beside the TV, behind a stack of yellow boxes containing 5.56 cartridges for the M-16, was a framed photograph of Kristen. A professional portrait, done two months prior to Cory's suicide.

  Kristen was looking frame left, head up, about to laugh. She had just turned sixteen; her honey-colored hair long and straight, and her very light brown eyes with predominant spokes of an almost lime-green color. She had Cory's eyes and snubbed nose. She had her father's jawline, but that wasn't too much of a handicap, though it squared off her face rather harshly. Lucas remembered thinking that soon every glandularly hyperactive male within range would start doing handstands. As it turned out, he never got the chance to fend them off. As Kristen posed, he had told her to say "cheesecake." The shutter had trapped her just before she'd made a face and said, "Say what?" She was wearing a dark blue blouse with several strands of liquid silver around her throat. The blouse had given up an extra button's worth of distance to highlight the silver.

  Lucas, standing there in near reverie, strapped into his.45, thought it was an enchanting picture.

  He opened the windows and swept out the cabin again. He finished repairing the shower stall and the seat in the outhouse, nailing in fresh lumber. As a little reward for his industry, he lugged in two cases of Dos Equis from the Bronco. Let's see how long this passing obsession with the taste of mere beer lasts, he thought, amused. He chilled them and cracked one and studied his new collection of videos by the ex-members of Whip Hand.

  'Gasm's feature film debut, Throw Down Your Arms, was intriguing. Lucas slotted in the cassette and slid the sound pots to zero-zero. Jean-Pierre Rampal played on while he watched the screen. When the flute sonata stopped, Lucas substituted Bob Seger.

  For now he wanted to concentrate on the visual aspect.

  First came a tiny corporate logo on a black screen. This was canceled out by a violent eruption of smoke and fire, as a frond-thatched hooch was obliterated by napalm. Cut sharp to an extreme close-up of the lead guitarist's hands abusing the strings on a mirror-finished guitar. Lucas recognized the instrument as the Ibanez imitation of the notorious Gibson Flying V. It had been customized, or "hotrodded," to pack in a bunch of DiMarzio humbuckers and "Mega-Drive" pickups, plus a cheap Kahler whammy bar with a locking nut. The strings had to be Ernie Ball Super Slinkies, just as the amps had to be Marshall stacks. It was all in the manual for heavy metalists.

  The windmilling, finger-skinning attacks on the Ibanez were by a working class Aussie screecher named Pepper Hartz, alias "Mad Max," 'Gasm's front man. The rest of the band was just as bodacious; nasty-ass wolf boys on the prowl.

  Hartz's manic playing was intercut with film of Latin American guerrillas executing captives via the one-bullet-per-one-head method. Bang. A snap of impact, and the spies or enemies or traitors dropped like cut puppets. Bang. Cut to Hartz, wanking away. The rest of the band gyrated on their stage marks; on fast video scan they would look like monkeys jumping around in an electroshock cage. Bang. Bob Seger sang "Turn the Page" over Lucas' headphones. A saxophone crooned. Then came a tight shot of 'Gasm's lunatic drummer, Jackal Reichmann, formerly of Whip Hand. He stood up from behind the octave drums on his monster kit and sprayed the concertgoers with mock death from a gangster-style, drum-fed machine gun. The brilliant flashes of discharge betrayed the loads as blanks. Planted squibs blew paper chaff all over the stage, to heighten the gunfire effe
ct.

  It would be interesting, Lucas thought, if someone was to fill Jackal's heater with a bit more oomph right before curtain time. He knew that blanks by themselves could do plenty of damage if there was a lapse in 'Gasm's quality control. He was willing to bet that the ticket buyers were ignorant of this risk.

  He had not experienced the Kristen nightmare since leaving Olive Grove, not once. Sara, the good doctor, had been right, as always.

  He clumped to the fireplace to lay kindling. The air chilled as the afternoon waned, and he locked windows and secured shades all around. When the fire was simmering he dropped to his sleeping pallet, a thick swatch of foam covered with a down sleeping bag. The slithery nylon hissed as he reclined, lacing his fingers behind his head. Fatigue settled in heavily, as though his body craved all the sleep it had squandered in the turbulence of nightmares. He no longer feared sleep, as he had just a few days previously.

  Sleep had become unthreatening. And there was no rush. Brion Hardin, Whip Hand's ex-keyboardist, had proven absurdly easy to locate.

  Alone in the mountains, close to the sea, Lucas lapsed into a totally untroubled slumber. Sara would have been pleased.

  8

  THE ROADRUNNER AND SPIDER-MAN held no giggles for Gabriel Stannard this morning.

  Sertha Valich, a Vogue cover girl of good Russian aristocrat stock, peeked naked from the bathroom and was concerned. She was heavy-breasted for a model. Stannard enjoyed a good pair of firm pillows. Yet he had not been with her while they made love in the huge circular bed with the slippery silk sheets. His blue eyes had been flinty and distant. He had pounded into her for a very long time, and while she enjoyed this, she knew part of his control had come from distraction, not passion. Her perfect, ten-thousand-dollar teeth bit down softly on her perfect, million-dollar lip, and she was concerned.

  Stannard was bunched up on one end of the bed, half-dressed. He wore a ruffled white shirt and socks. Cartoons unspooled on the monitor, ignored. He had discarded a vintage Marvel comic, abandoning Spidey in the clutches of Doc Octopus, to play with the pistol from the nightstand, a forty-four Magnum with an unbelievable eight-and-a-half-inch barrel. Sertha knew the gun only as the kind popularized by the mythic American law officer, Dirty Harry Callahan.