The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Click. Snap. Click. Snap. Stannard picked off the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, dry firing. Six cartridges lay in a brass heap in the sheets. He thumbed back the wide spur of the hammer and fired at the screen, methodically, mechanically.

  "Put that away," Sertha told him sternly. Stannard responded to mommy commands because he was spoiled, and he knew it.

  His eyes went to hers, ignoring her fabulously nude body. She had hoped to coax him back into the real world with sex a bit friendlier than last night's session. She drank down six ounces of fresh orange juice from the breakfast tray and scooted over to him, her slim hand gently arresting the gargantuan revolver.

  "Stop it," she said. He released the gun. She was unprepared for how heavy it was, even empty. Her hand was pushed down and mashed into the bedding.

  He didn't respond. He was busy pouting.

  She guided his hand to her bosom. Her moonstone-white skin set off dark brown nipples as large as Stannard's thumb. They became instantly erect. But Stannard's caress was still robotic, his eyes hazed. She paused to do two lines of coke off the breakfast tray. Stannard shook his head at her offer of the straw. Sertha swept her cascade of hair to one side and took his flaccid penis in her mouth. She heard him release an annoyed sigh, but his heart beat faster, and in another moment she was pumping her face up and down on his firm, slick shaft. He didn't make a sound when he came, and it took a long time.

  Once Stannard's rocks had been gotten off, he became a bit more contrite. Sertha expected this; it was a strategic weakness. He kissed her and tasted his own ejaculate. Then he took a swallow of coffee and stabbed at the projection screen's remote control. The time appeared in the upper left-hand corner in square blue digits.

  "Got to go," he said.

  Sertha nodded. "All right, my love." She retreated to the bathroom to prepare.

  Stannard stepped into a pair of leopard-patterned bikini undershorts, then into black leather pants and a pair of off-yellow cowboy boots. He mussed his hair in the mirror until it framed his face evenly, then donned a leather dress jacket. He tried on several pairs of mirrored racing shades from a drawerful until he found a good, dense pair that totally concealed his eyes from the public.

  Thus attired, he was ready to attend Jackson Knox's funeral.

  Responsibility for the Rockhound bombing had been claimed by a group calling itself the Mideast League Against American Fascism. The news showed two people wearing berets under heavy police guard, being escorted to judgment. Horus had watched the coverage with dour, unblinking eyes. The news drones always asked if terrorism would ever come to the United States. And every time it did, they asked again, as though purposefully ignoring the evidence before their eyes. As though this bombing or that bombing didn't really count.

  When a commercial jetliner had crashed into the Potomac River, Horus had suggested that the whole thing was a grandiose attempt to assassinate the president. What better way, he opined, than to ram a jet right into the White House? And the conspirators had missed. When it came to political mop-up, it appeared Americans had lost their knack for killing.

  Sertha emerged resplendent in black lace. Horus had Stannard's Cessna warmed up and waiting on the private strip.

  They were back from San Francisco by dinnertime and toasted Knox's memory with Cristal champagne.

  Sertha made sure that Stannard got plastered enough to be more romantic. That night the Magnum stayed in its drawer, unloaded.

  Stannard and Sertha made love while Overkill, Whip Hand's first album, played full blast through the bedroom's tall Infinity monitors.

  ***

  At first Lucas thought that the pounding was in his dreaming mind, that the voice commanding his attention was Kristen's, in a sneaky attempt to suck him back into the arena nightmare through a new mental breach point. He tried to roll over and ignore it. There was a flash image of Kristen's face, and for one second he felt a father's anger and wanted to smash the face down with a fist. Daughters should never try to trick their fathers so cruelly.

  "Somebody be here. Please." The voice was enfeebled by the heavy wooden door, a solid-core job that could body-block a car. The voice was weak, drained, dissipated.

  The knocking weakened too, dwindling away to a halfhearted scuffing against the timber of the door, as though the visitor had conceded to the evidence that a loud knock on a small cabin, plus no response, equaled nobody home in the middle of nowhere. There came a watery sob that sounded like a cough.

  It was the voice of a girl. A young woman. That helped shock Lucas to wakefulness. He rolled to his feet still fully clothed; he had not even gotten around to shucking his boots. He looked down at his hand. Even asleep, he had reacted automatically, and he paused a moment to congratulate himself. His hand had a positive grip on the.45, and the weight of the gun was instantly reassuring. When he had rolled, his hand had thumbed back the hammer on the first of eight waiting rounds and dropped the muzzle into the firing line on the door, dead center.

  "Hello?" She had heard him moving around. She might naturally shift to the window to check. Thank gods for the curtains.

  "Just a minute!" he called, his cover blown. "Got to get my pants on!" In two big strides he was across the room, closing the door to the Whip Hand room and hooking the open padlock into the hasp. When he cracked the cabin door, his right hand waited behind his back with the cocked automatic. No telling what kind of scam a scavenger might try to pull. It really was the middle of nowhere.

  It was dark outside. He had dozed into the A.M.

  "Thought there was nobody here," said the voice as he opened the door.

  Lucas missed a breath in surprise.

  The young woman outside looked like the survivor of a train wreck. In the firelight spilling out the door, Lucas saw that her auburn hair, pulled back into a ragged cable braid, was streaked with dry blood from the left temple backward. An enormous shiner had closed up her left eye completely, and a dark, melanotic patch darkened her swollen cheek. It was dotted with blood. The skid marks of abrasion made crazy zigzags all over the left side of her face and neck, as though her head had been used to bark a pine tree, Her nose did not appear broken, but thick blood was clotted at the base of both nostrils. Her lower lip had sustained a hairline split, blood-crusted, and there was a track of cranberry-colored scabs where she had bitten down hard on one side. She was clinging to the door frame, dirt and wood pulp beneath her nails, and fairly collapsed into Lucas' arms.

  "Jesus Christ!"

  He caught her as she pitched forward. He supported her until she could drop into the nearest chair, then dashed to the Bronco for his first-aid kit. The damage he'd seen was nearly twelve hours old, maybe more. If she had a skull fracture, she might be dead in another thirty minutes.

  "I saw your light," she said thickly. Her tongue tried to moisten her lips and retreated at the sting.

  "Wait," he said. "Don't talk. Don't say anything unless I ask you." He checked the dilation of her pupils, touching the blackened eye gingerly. Her eyes were very light green, with dark rings around the outer iris. "Can you inhale through your nose? Don't try too hard. Don't force it. Go easy."

  Carefully she sniffed, watching him.

  "I know it hurts. But it's not broken." He freed much of the clotted material using a cotton swab dipped in hydrogen peroxide. The abrasions on her neck and face were already scabbed over and did not look infected. She could focus her eyes rapidly. "I know this is stupid, but I want you to tell me how many fingers I'm holding up."

  She might have smiled, if not for the pain of striating her lips. "Three," she whispered.

  "Now?"

  "None."

  "And now?"

  "Three again."

  Lucas ran half a cup of tepid water, which she was able to take using a drinking straw from the medical kit. Lucas had included the straws himself. Whenever he was ill, he drank using straws. It was something he'd never paused to fathom. Perhaps it was more controlled or required less active particip
ation of the mouth. Certainly the girl would be grateful for that.

  "God, that's good," she said when the cup was dry.

  "More?"

  She swallowed again. "In a minute."

  After examining her a few moments more, he was fairly confident he could risk giving her painkillers. She choked down a Percodan with more water. She had not swallowed any of her teeth, though some were loosened.

  "You're going to get woozy. Don't try to do anything except fall asleep, okay?"

  "I wish." Her voice was hoarse, pathetic.

  Her arm moved weakly around his neck as he lifted and carried her to the pallet. He laid her down gently, like an Oriental making a careful composition of flowers. He unzipped the sleeping bag so it would better serve as a comforter and covered her.

  "What's…" Her consciousness was already flickering. It was best. "What's… your name?"

  "Try to sleep." He hovered above her, a dark silhouette by firelight.

  "What's your name?…" Her uninjured eye narrowed to a slit of white, and her respiration was coming in slow cycles, drawn orally. Her need for help had bested her automatic distrust of strangers, and now that she was convinced Lucas intended no foul play, her guard relaxed and the final barrier to sleep was removed. When the drugs kicked in she would numb pleasantly. Her body craved deep sleep as part of the healing process, which was abominably slow in the human animal, but at least marginally reliable.

  Lucas knelt at the foot of the pallet to unlace her hiking boots. She was as still as a cadaver on an autopsy table, her legs dumb weights to be lifted and dropped. She had appeared on his stoop wearing a red plaid lumberjack shirt, flannel, over a violet sweat shirt, and faded denim jeans thinning at the ass and knees. The clothes had been stale for a while; she probably had not been out of them in two days or more. They radiated that peculiar aroma that combines great physical exertion with the crisp damper of fresh mountain air. The knees of the jeans had been muddied, dried, and muddied again. Burrs and foliage clung to the shirt and were confused into the weave of her hair, which was a ragged horsetail of flyaways and tangles. Lucas stripped away her socks and tossed them out the back door. Her feet were tapered but supple and grayed with dirt. She had been mucking around on foot for a long time, but her ankles and calves looked used to such exercise. She could be outfitted in substitute clothing without too much compromise. A few marks on her face still glistened with drainage, and he touched them up with medication. By now her chest was rising and falling in uninterrupted rhythm, and the bite of the antiseptic did not stir her. He spot-checked her pockets. No wallet, no money, no identification. The questions would have to wait.

  She had never even noticed the pistol.

  He had dropped it on the low table near the kitchen, forgetting it himself. Now he slipped the automatic into its black spiderweb of leather and nylon and stashed it in one of the kitchen drawers.

  Above the sink, a single mirror tile was glued to the wall. He grimaced at himself in it. There was sleep crust in his eyes, and his own hair looked like a tumbleweed festival. A wretched, bilious taste lurked in the back of his throat. His fingertips and toes were as cold as moon rocks. He agitated the fire in the hearth and added lumber, then hung the coffeepot to warm whatever was left over. As the air in the cabin grew dense with the warmth, he dragged out a box from under the sink and rummaged. He found a dusty pair of overalls that had once belonged to Cory, now forsaken for future service as cleaning and polishing rags, but which had never gotten ripped up. Like his memory of her, they had simply lain for years, waiting for him to notice them again. There was also an old merchant marine sweater that was baggy but serviceable. He stepped out the back door to shake down the overalls. On the butt, right pocket, was an applique of a fat pair of lips and a red, lolling tongue-the icon of Jagger and the Stones. He added a pair of his own white tube socks to the folded pile of clothes and took a hot mug of coffee into the Whip Hand room.

  The amplifier was still idling, indicators glowing in the semidark. He sat down and pushed the door to. He resumed his study of the 'Gasm videotape, Throw Down Your Arms. Several times he rose to check on his sleeping charge, but there was never so much as a change in her position. She breathed, and that was all.

  Kristen's portrait was bluely illumined by the light emitting from the screen of the Sony. Lucas' instincts informed him that there was some similarity between his daughter and the girl unconscious in the next room. They did not look alike; this he knew even with the girl's face bashed in and bleeding. Their eyes were.vaguely similar. They would have been contemporaries; Kristen would be twenty this year, and Lucas put the girl in the same age bracket. The tug in his gut told him there was something more obvious, more basic, that the two shared.

  On the screen, Jackal Reichmann hoisted his gangster's chopper and sent sham bursts toward the audience. The bullet squibs detonated, shooting up mock ricochets.

  He imagined Kristen looking up toward the arena stage in entreaty, mangled, bloody.

  No, that wasn't it. Go slow. Let the subconscious do the work for you.

  He thought of packing the girl into the Bronco and breaking speed limits to get her to the nearest emergency ward, but he decided to wait until morning to see if there was any damage that might require hospitalization. Taking her in for care would make him visible. He wanted to hear her story, find out how and why she had arrived at such a state. There was time, and he didn't want to share.

  He might have been a bit more concerned, had he known that Sara Windsor, his friend and confidante, his doctor and budding lover, was already searching for him in Los Angeles.

  9

  "SOMEBODY NAMED SARA WINDSOR SAYS she's a doctor, and she knows Lucas Ellington, and needs to talk to you."

  "Ask her to hold for a second, will you, Emma?"

  Burt Kroeger pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. His patty-cake with Lucas at their luncheon had been difficult. He had hated assessing whether his old friend was bonkers or not, or cured, or had never been bonkers at all. Maybe just a little confused? Rather like the way Burt felt now-confused, wearied. He never dug up dead bodies once they were buried, and if Lucas' psychiatrist (or doctor or whatever the hell she was) was now calling for Burt specifically you could just bet it was to ask nosy questions and request impartial, objective opinions, and dredge up all the sludge Burt hoped he had sealed and delivered at lunch with Lucas.

  Burt's desk was modern, glass-topped, open. On the wall facing him were rows of framed glossies and awards of merit-plaques and thank-yous. Tiny gold seals glittered. Kroeger Concepts had taken a Rubens Award in 1980 for a technical ad showing a stupendously ugly hound dog on a rural road, head in paws, face sagging into the most melancholy expression imaginable. Looming over him in the light of a country dusk was an empty mailbox-the barn-shaped type, with a little red flag. Nothing else for miles. The caption read: THERE MUST BE WORSE THINGS THAN MISSING THE LATEST ISSUE OF RAW FOOTAGE… The dog was Evelyn's, the suggestion had been Lucas's, the game form of the ad had been Burt's.

  Here was Burt shaking hands with Ned Tanen of Universal Pictures. Here was Burt with Steven Spielberg at a reception, a shot captured by Gustavo de la Luces. Here were Burt and Lucas arm in arm, frozen in a vaudeville pose, stopped in midkick, flourishing T squares in place of tap-dancing canes. The good old days. Before Lucas had taken his "vacation."

  The pill bottle sat on the glass desktop, waiting for him, and Burt shot a pill down with water. Everyone wanted to remind him that Lucas had suffered a small mental setback. Burt wanted to forget and continue as before. The hold light on his desk phone blinked at him accusingly, rushing him. He already resented Sara Windsor. Lucas had said she was a friend, intimated that she might become even more-a stabilizing, healing replacement for Cory, a lover to fill the emotional hole left by Kristen. She probably knew volumes about Lucas. So why was she calling?

  Why all this prodding, just when Burt's doubts had been comfortably filed away?

  He sighed, th
en lifted the receiver. "Burt Kroeger here."

  "Hello." Her timbre indicated she was used to being put on hold, not thrilled, yet aware of its necessity.

  He could have made a grunt of assent or an encouraging noise, but he didn't. Let her set the tone, he thought.

  "Once upon a time, Lucas told me that if I ever needed anything, and he was incommunicado, Burton Kroeger could, quote, get it, do it, or fix it, unquote."

  Burt chuckled despite his mood. "That's Lucas all right. What can I do for you?"

  "Well… I won myself some unanticipated time off. I thought I might drive down to L.A. and spend some time with Lucas, you know, without the oppressive professional atmosphere up here. We'd planned to do the town, but set no schedule. I gather he filled you in?"

  "In broad outline, yes."

  "He told me that you are a happily married man, that your wife's name is Diana, and she wrangles real estate. Also does stroganoff worthy of the czars."

  "I'm surprised he didn't set us up for a free dinner and invite you," said Burt, settling in. "I'd better be careful. You might already know enough to put me away."

  She laughed politely. "He only said good things about you."

  "And a smarmier tale you'll find nowhere. Except maybe in the pages of Hustler, which isn't one of our accounts right now. Which is a shame, because they bill high."

  "Did Lucas mention his plan to get together with me once he'd gotten back to Los Angeles?"

  There it was-the direct probing Burt had expected. He had to devise an answer that would not sound as if it were coming from a castle sentry on the safe side of the moat. What was it Lucas had told him? We've arranged to get together later, after a few weeks. In a nonprofessional capacity. He'd treated the trip to the cabin at Point Pitt as a matter of personal confidence, as if he didn't want Sara butting in, at least not yet. If she wasn't supposed to know where he was-and it sure sounded like she didn't-it was not Burt's place to spill any beans.