The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  "I'll get you off the hook, though, since you're such a swell guy."

  Burt blew a politely brief raspberry into the phone. "Give me the phone numbers Sara gave you. I'll call her myself, set her mind at ease, and that'll subtract you from the whole equation so you can go back to worrying about how much to screw Randell and Kochner out of on Gustavo's lawsuit."

  Burt laughed and recited the phone numbers Sara had given him for referral. His response was concerned as ever, and helpful, and tinged with relief. He typically hated meddling, especially in other people's emotional entanglements. Tacit, well-intentioned interference was still interference, what he called Mary Worthing.

  "And since you haven't brought it up, I'll do it for you," Lucas continued. "Sara put you on the spot, sort of. You did what a good friend should. Thanks."

  "You don't have to be so nasty about it. As long as you don't cop out on the dinner commitment. Besides, Diana is dying to see you again, too. This is costing me money, so have yourself a time, son, and we'll see you… whenever."

  "A week or two, yet. You can leak that to Sara if she bears her burden to your doorstep again." They both chuckled, not cruelly at Sara's expense, but merely as two friends sharing a confidence. Burt had accepted

  Lucas's image of Sara and bore her no malice.

  Far to the south, Burt hung up and allowed himself to feel at ease. It looked like Lucas was going to be okay. Everything was fixed, at last.

  Across the narrow side street from the phone, the El Granada post office stood neatly closed. Next to the hardware store a small local eatery called the Village Green was still open for business. It was a short hop to the ocean, a city block or so away over a bit of vacant scrubland between the fire station and the highway. On top of a phone pole, right above Lucas, were the fire station's sirens in two collars of flared, multidirectional horns. It looked like an alien weapon from some weird science fiction saga.

  Lucas decided to give Sara a miss. If he called, she would try to nail him down on the location of the cabin. If she was in Los Angeles, that meant she was already looking for him, and he would need all the time anonymity could buy.

  Even if Sara knew what she was looking for, he could still outrace her. By the time she figured out the details, it would be finished. How many reliable starting points had he given her? How many times had he actually recounted the Whip Hand dream to her or the recurrent danger images in the Kristen nightmare? She had needed to see patterns in his dreams so badly, to justify her skill as an analyst. So he'd given her patterns to see.

  The nightmares had been real, however.

  Had she seen the news reports on Jackson Knox, on Brion Hardin? Would she associate them with a rock band that had not existed for years? Would the various news media make the association for her?

  Would the police start using the same logic?

  There were enough maybes falling out of the whole argument, left and right, that Lucas felt reasonably secure. His planning was so comprehensive that even il the killings were linked-which he did not mind and, in fact, desired in the long run-and even if he was exposed as having a prime-cut motive, there would still be an utter lack of concrete evidence to damn him. His vendetta had been blueprinted with the same conscientious eye he had used for so many successful promotional campaigns. It was a campaign. Battles were called campaigns. And time was his ally in this battle.

  Time, in fact, was going to force him to miss some sleep, if he adhered to his schedule. Schedules were crucial to campaigns; timing was everything. Yesterday had been the Electroshock date in Denver; in about forty-eight hours he'd have to leave for the 'Gasm date, in Arizona. When the police tried to link homicides from state to state, they used the "connect the dots" method. By the time they had enough dots to connect, the line would lead nowhere. San Francisco to Denver to Tucson, Arizona. The shape of a big question mark.

  He left the fire station and high-stepped through the muddy marsh grass, crossing Highway 1. North, to his right, was an imposing microwave dish perched on a spur of land run by the U.S. Air Force Missile Command. The electronic ear was tilted straight up, toward space. Nearer was a pull-over area for tourist RVs and campers. The beach led to a stone jetty that extended into the water as far as a good-sized pier, forming an enclosure known locally as Pillar Point Harbor. The jetty stone was a jackstraw piling of quarry waste in different colors, like a long bridge made of broken tombstones. Lucas jumped cautiously from rock to rock. The granite surfaces were slick with spume, and he tried not to squash the tiny crimson-and-black crabs that huddled in the million crevices.

  When he reached the nose of the man-made breakwater, he threw the Randall combat knife into the sea, sheath and all, with a hard overhand swing. He was too far out for anyone to badger him about littering. Sea mist and the crash of waves pounding the jetty drenched him. From the sling bag he withdrew the spraypaint can and likewise gave it up to Neptune. Maybe the god could write an underwater graffito or confound some uppity octopus with a cloud of red ink. The surgical gloves had been burned back in Denver. He was about to weigh the sling bag with one of the smaller jetty stones and give it the heave-ho as well when he saw that the plastic trash can liners he'd used had kept the interior of the bag spotless. Innocent. Cass would see him return carrying the same two bags with which he had departed. Perfect.

  The Randall was a monster, but it was no match for the Pacific Ocean. There was a little bloop and a weak geyser of saltwater, and that was the end of it. Case closed. Neptune (or Poseidon, as the Greeks had it-but then, there were no horses around, either) must have been cooping on the job. The ocean did not accuse Lucas of any wrongdoing.

  He stared abstractedly at the water and the horizon for a few moments, the way most people do when evaluating themselves in relation to the sheer vastness of the sea. Then he turned back toward the parked Bronco. He was anxious to see Cass again.

  ***

  "You talk in your sleep. Did you know that?"

  Caution jumped into Lucas' heart with a thud. "Oh? Nothing too provocative, I hope."

  "Mostly incomprehensible." Lacking chores per se, Cass was moving kitchen stuff around in a ritualistic pattern, trying to find an arrangement that suited her idea of order. "Kristen's name. Something about teaching her a lesson."

  Impossible. Teaching them a lesson, yes. But if he'd had the Whip Hand nightmare again, he did not remember.

  "Oooh-if you could see the frown on your face right now," she teased. "Don't worry. I learned early never to try to read dreams."

  Her facial swelling had dwindled, and her movements were regaining some of the natural grace Lucas had suspected, as the muscles unstiffened and healed. She was now seeing with both eyes, though the left one still had not completely opened. It gave her the attitude of someone with a perpetual half wink, like a comic delivering a sly punchline.

  Say, have you heard the one about the doomed rock group? One bit a big blade, and then there were three…

  "I used to have a recurrent dream, when I was seventeen," she said. "I was being chased through a field of very tall grass, like reeds, head-high stuff. Maybe a wheat field. I never see what's chasing me, but I know it's big and ugly and hungry. And it's after me, specifically. The monster knows who I am, and it wants me. And I'm terrified that if I part the grass to either side, I'll be looking right into its face, all steaming and fanged and snorty, and a paw the size of a catcher's mitt will scoop me up, and that'll be the big finish. The end of me. The grass is both my protection and my greatest hindrance. If I was stranded on the fifty-yard line of a deserted football field, at least I'd know which way to run, see? Sometimes the monster is far away, sometimes it's closer, but always nearby. And I'll meet it inevitably, and that scares me, but I keep running. I'm determined to go down fighting."

  Cass smiled slightly, gesturing with her wounded hand, getting into her own story.

  "I come to a tree, a tall tree, a eucalyptus tree, maybe, something solid I can put between me and the mons
ter. Maybe it can't climb trees. Or I can get high enough to survey the field and figure out where I am in relation to the monster. All I'd have to do is look for the swath it's cutting through the grass. As I reach out to grab the lower limb and swing up, that big fucking paw lands on my shoulder, puffing dust and fleas into my eyes… and I howl and wake up. End of dream."

  Lucas had dumped down two Dos Equis without feeling a thing. Cass said the alcohol made her raw throat feel better. He returned to the table with two freshly uncapped bottles.

  "So. My father, wheeler-dealer that he is, forks over money so I can go see a psychiatrist. Eight sessions. I rattled off my history, some of the exciting stuff, then I laid out the dream. Know what he told me?"

  "That you were sick, sick, sick," he said. They clinked bottles.

  "He told me I was afraid of losing my virginity. That the hungering, slobbering monster was phallic. The field of impenetrable grass was my fear of sex. And the tree was a biblical perversion of a celibacy facade, or something. I half expected him to pat me on the thigh, paternally."

  It was what Lucas expected to hear. Cass' shrink had been another Freudian basket case.

  "But the joke was on him, Lucas. This is what I meant about not trying to read dreams. I'd lost my cherry a year and a half before I'd ever had the dream, and gotten laid a couple of dozen times. Enough to think, even at seventeen, that there wasn't any mystique to sex, and certainly nothing that I was scared of. I'd lied to the shrink about being a virgin. I didn't want my father to know-don't ask me why, 'cos that'll waste a lot of time. So the shrink turned out to be full of it. End of story."

  A conclusion reached as a result of faulty input. It had the fascination of a box puzzle. Lucas thought of Sara and her quest to figure him out. He had so enjoyed leading her where she wanted to go. The blackly depressed widower, the suicidal father of the victim daughter. He wondered whether Kristen had ever had sex before her death. He thought he knew the answer, but it kept being overshadowed by the weaker idea that a father should not consider such things.

  "My recurrent dream was about Kristen, right before she died," he said. "Very stylized. Nothing useful there, either." His hands made an aimless effort to twist the air into something descriptive.

  "How did she die? Kristen."

  It was asked considerately but caused Lucas to worry his lips together a beat too long before he said, "An accident."

  "Sorry." Cass looked at him directly. "Sometimes my big nose gets my big mouth in trouble." She regarded her empty bottle. "Want to switch off to coffee?"

  He was pleasantly in half focus and willing to accede to nearly anything. He had not felt this good, this at peace, in a long time. Cass was really a remarkable young lady… no, a remarkable woman, with a tact and maturity that exceeded his low expectations of what twenty-three was supposed to look and sound like.

  She fiddled gingerly with the coffeepot over at the sink. She still moved very carefully, as though afraid she might shatter. "And no, I did not spend my time engaged in domestic chores while you were gone. I've had a lifelong phobia about lapsing into housewifery. The Great American Dream. The white picket fence that imprisons you."

  "White picket fence?"

  "Yeah. All that stuff I'm supposed to want from life, but don't. The house in Malibu. An El Blando hubby who busts his balls to stay inside a six-figure adjusted income. A station wagon and matching Porsches. Two point five blond kids. An afghan hound that shits more than it eats, two spayed cats, and one exotic pet-a toucan or a tortoise or an aardvark. Hired minorities to swab the toilets and polish the jockey on the front walk." She shrugged and made a face. "You know the life, Lucas: birth control pills, diet pills, sleeping pills, antacid pills… pills to counteract the draining effect of the other pills… vitamin pills to give you enough energy to swallow the sixty other pills you wind up taking every day. Yuck.''

  He thought of pills and of Cory. Pills could do good things, like expunge a harpy from your life. Like make a bad relationship into a good one. Cory had chided him about his performance in bed. After she was gone, he had done better. Maybe it was the pills.

  "You get your first nervous breakdown at twenty-seven, first facelift at thirty. Then you move on to your first serious extramarital affair, having had a bunch of tacky minor ones already. Then a tumor at forty, a stroke at fifty… and a nice white picket fence around it all. You put it up so the serfs will steer clear of what's yours, and you paint it every third year, and it's always white and pristine and undespoiled. And when you die, it'll be sitting there, like some kind of perverted legacy to the world. This is what I was, neat and attractive and forgettable. And then you and the rest of your neat nuclear family get put in the ground, and somebody new comes along and puts up their own white picket fence after they've uprooted yours and recycled it, and that's the end. Dark, ugly nothing."

  "That's sad," said Lucas as she brought him a fresh cup of coffee. She'd added cinnamon.

  "That's why I'm giving it lots of room to avoid me. If anyone uses the word 'lifestyle' it's a pretty good indication that they don't have one. Maybe they bought one. But they're trapped by the white picket fence."

  "The WPF." He grinned. Despite the age-old cliche of the woman's touch, the coffee was really much better than his own brew.

  "Life with good old Reese the psycho may not have lasted long," she mused, "but there was no white picket fence to worry about."

  I'll be goddamned, he thought. Cass was talking about him and his old life. With Cory, his life had been aimed down the very path Cass was lampooning. And two people had died, and he had gotten a clean slate at a mental hospital in exchange for a year of his life, and things were much better now, thank you. Overseas, he remembered, there were no abstruse reasons why, no political fluff to cloud reality. You were there for one reason only-to stay alive. Yes, sir, I'm out there offing dinks for a damned good reason; the only reason. Staying whole.

  "That's all done now," he said, as much in response to his own thoughts as Cass' abrupt stormcloud of depression. He was aware that he was examining what she said in an attempt to generate guilt over Cory. Guilt was his biggest enemy, Sara had told him. Guilt must not even enter into the equation.

  The sun was falling. In another day he had to be packed and gone again.

  "You're right," Cass said. "Another mood to slide into." She touched her fingertips to her face, appraising her shrinking bruises for the thousandth time. "Sometimes a traumatic experience forces you to become a better person. Sometimes you have to put up with an infinitude of assholes, and just when you're ready to give up, you stumble across somebody worthwhile, by purest luck."

  "Maybe not," he said. "Maybe you're due for a good guy."

  "Well, you're a pretty decent guy. Do you count?"

  "Of course not," he said, getting up to refill his mug. "Wait till you know me well enough to really despise me."

  She gave that an editorial hmmm, but intercepted him. "By the way, look-no more Ace bandage. Check this out, doctor." She unbuttoned her chambray workshirt and opened it up. Her breasts were unbound.

  They obviously did not pain her as much as before. Yellowish smudges were all that remained of the bruises there, except for some dwindling dark patches where the impact had been the worst. She took his hand and made him touch them; a caress for each.

  He gulped, more than a little surprised. "That's good," he said, feeling dumb.

  She held his hand to her chest while she stood up and kissed him. Her lips pushed his apart; he felt the hard little rind of scab brush his mouth. The contact was galvanizing. There was the briefest, delicious touch of her tongue, making tentative introduction, then she withdrew.

  "Thanks, Lucas."

  His voice had dried up with amazing speed. "Uh… don't worry about it." His brain scampered madly, seeking some new subject. "Are you tired?"

  "That's my good-night." She smiled her restricted smile. "I'm still too crippled for any heavy-duty action, if you know what I mean."r />
  He was just far enough ahead of her, in years, to be embarrassed. "Oh, wait, I didn't mean-"

  "I did. Lucas, you're blushing."

  And that, of course, brought on the blush full blast. Cass could be very evil when the mood arose.

  He sought a graceful escape and found none. "Oh… fucking hell," he mumbled.

  "It's cute," she said. "Attractive, I mean. Men hate looking sensitive, I know. Get your coffee. It's not as if I'm a princess, and I'm repaying the White Knight for his chivalry by fucking him blind."

  "That's nice to know." He drew the words out broadly, playing with her now.

  "I just wanted to make sure you think about me occasionally. While I'm snoozing. Over there. In my bag."

  "I do. And not wholly out of worry, not anymore. I'm glad you're getting better. I'd like to steal credit for it. But… you have noticed that I'm old enough to be your-'' He was thinking of Kristen again.

  He was thinking of fucking Kristen.

  "Oh, just barely," she cut in. "Besides, I don't recall bothering to ask if you were of age or not. Nor does that matter. You have to leave tomorrow; I just wanted to make sure you'd come back for some other reason than to make sure your cabin hadn't been stolen by a UFO."

  "I've already got more here than I ever had," he said. He kept his distance from her, idling near the sink. "Wait. All right? Just wait a bit." His smile was genuine. Soon everything would be perfect. But not tonight.

  "Sure." She limped over and held his face in her hands, touching, examining the planes, friendly. "Good night, Lucas."

  " 'Night." Her eyes seemed to glisten at him. The cabin had grown uncomfortably warm.

  She broke from him but kissed him again before she did, deeper, speaking volumes, and he enjoyed it.

  ***

  White-faced haircut boys

  They got their Jags and expensive toys

  So-ror-i-ty pin

  He gets her cornered and he sticks it in White Trash!