The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  He wore steel-toed mountain climbing boots, tight, roughed-up jeans, and his favorite denim vest. No shirt. His solid pectorals bulged to fill the gap between the vest's thonged button slits like sculpted rose-colored marble. The vest's bone fasteners dangled with nothing to do. A wild, lightning-bolt scar interrupted the hard muscle of his abdomen. It was a keepsake of some long-ago buck knife fight, and Reese's recently begun tan made it obvious, a white zigzag etched into his flesh. What his brain waves must look like, Cass thought. Bound to the hollow of his throat by a strip of leather was a lozenge of ivory, cold and alabaster. It held an opaque disc of jade in a pewter setting. It was the only thing close to personal jewelry she had ever seen Reese wear.

  His tongue slid behind his teeth like a snake in a chuckhole. "Miss me?" The viper's gaze, unblinking, sought and engulfed her. "Sugar daddy ain't home. I know. I watched for a whole day, just to make sure. Your other pals drove away, too." He was talking about Sara and her companion, Mr. Hyde. Reese's mouth pulled back slightly at the right corner-his version of a casual smile. "The mountains just ain't for them, puss."

  His right leg arched up and back with a practiced aikido motion, and the door crashed shut; Cass heard loose jam sifting down out of the frame from the impact. He took three measured strides forward and straddled her at the waistline, gazing down at her, the axe off to her right, hanging like the pendulum of a lethargic grandfather clock.

  Her mouth tried to moisten, to form words. "How… how did you know I was here?"

  Interest glinted in the metallic eyes; they ceased their random scanning of the cabin to nail her. "I'm a timber wolf, puss. I followed your smell." The eyes flickered to the kitchen, then back. "Any food here?"

  The normalcy of the request allowed Cass to flush away some of her terror in favor of anger. "Why don't you just get the hell out of here, Reese? Leave. Just leave me alone." She did not unclench her teeth; they might start chattering.

  Again the peculiar glint came and went in his eyes, as though he was receiving orgasms in his brain via electroshock. "Or what? You'll kick me in the nuts again? Hey, make your move. I'm even spread out for you. Give it another shot." His tongue tested the cutting edge of his incisors.

  She didn't want to try. She needed to maximize whatever time she had left, not to touch off his fuse. She visualized him crouching in the forest cold in the middle of the night like some genetically mutant Indian guide, bare-chested and not feeling the temperature. Kick me, sure.

  "That's good." The hooded gaze started to mesmerize her. "We don't want to fight. We want to make love, don't we?"

  She remembered the time he'd swerved the Datsun long-bed across two lanes to splatter a darting rabbit all over the grille and front bumper. Blood and viscera shaded the headlights and steamed on the pebbled glass. All Reese had said was got him. He had just said make love in the same tone, rippling stalactites of ice into her spine.

  "Forget it, Reese, no way."

  "Sorry I got pissed at you. You shouldn't've kicked me." He planted the thick tread of one boot against her shoulder and pressed until her back met the planking again. Then he leaned on it until her face tightened in pain. "Bad girl." He gripped her jaw and squeezed, mashing her mouth until it parodied that of a goldfish. He examined her head like a melon. "You healed up nice." He bent closer; something popped wetly in her shoulder. His unblinking eyes filled her universe. "Remember Jonathan?"

  "Oh, no…" Her world was coming to an end.

  "Poor guy. I feel for him, puss. Because you had to spread your legs for him, he's gotta spend the next four months in intensive care." He asked, released her face, and stepped back. "Terrible thing. Poor dude."

  She lost it. "Motherfucker! What did you do!" She was halfway up, the door at hand. She tried frantically to calculate the success potential of running.

  A pained look stabbed his features. "Don't be so crude, puss. Watch your language. Jonathan had himself an accident. Little accident. Can't move his head, has to piss through a tube for a while… that's all."

  Cass' imagination spun grisly stories as she got to her feet. Her hands brushed off her backside to keep from shaking.

  Reese has spotted Lucas' tapedeck, on the kitchen table. "Nice," he said. That meant the deck would leave with him. "Are we going to eat something, or what?"

  Buy time! Do something! "Right," she said dully. To move toward the sink she had to pass Reese.

  He caught her quick glance toward the door. "Don't run." His voice was quite calm. "Don't even think of running. You can't outrun a hungry wolf." The cocked twitch-smile came and went.

  Mechanically she untied her bindle and pulled out the paper-towel-wrapped sandwiches. She pulled open the first kitchen drawer and took stock of the knives there. No good. He'd dare me to try, and I'd need the fire department and a gynecologist to get the knife out of me. Behind her, Reese leaned on the axe and propped one boot on a chair.

  "What's inside the secret room with the padlock?"

  "I don't know." She moved to the fridge and considered Lucas' stock of Dos Equis. Maybe if she could get enough alcohol into him…

  And then? Take the axe away, or bash him with something solid, or run? Run where, with him chasing her? Distract him enough to sneak out a knife? Sure. She swallowed hard; it felt like trying to swallow a votive candle. You can always kick him in the crotch again-hadn't that worked out great?

  "Sugar daddy's big secret, hm? Hey-pass one of those beers over."

  He twisted the cap off. She didn't know if they were twist-tops or not. She pulled open another drawer. Plastic bags, a knife sharpener, batteries in store packages, a flashlight, a card of thumbtacks. Useless.

  "Let's take a gander. Maybe more tapedecks and stuff. You got the key?"

  "No."

  He drew off half the brown bottle in a gulp. His dark hair was strewn lankly across his forehead, making his eyes glow chromium. "You sure the key ain't in your pocket? Or on a string around your neck?" He stroked his ivory pendant. "Or stuffed into your underpants? Sure I shouldn't check you out, puss?" He licked his lips. Wolfishly.

  Her minimal control was eroding fast. Reese was revving himself up to pummel the shit out of her, this time for keeps. That was why he was so calm. He was going to catch her face in his hand with big, molar-loosening slaps, then punch her in the stomach until the fight leaked out of her. Then shove himself into her, fuck her till she bled, as he was fond of saying. He would rape her until he'd come three times. For Reese, it was three orgasms or it wasn't sex.

  And then, if she wasn't dead, he'd kill her.

  "I don't have the goddamned keys, Reese!'' she shrieked. Fear was what he wanted to see. She was certain that if she looked down, she would see the erection prodding forth inside his pants. If she saw that, he'd win the fear he craved. She kept her eyes locked on his.

  A humming sound stopped halfway out of his throat. It was almost a laugh. "No prob," he said dismissively.

  Cass recalled telling Lucas about Reese. Somewhere along the road, she'd told herself that life would never be dull with Reese around.

  The hasp on the door dented into a crooked V with Reese's first roundhouse swing of the axe. With the second, the door splintered loose. Flat-headed screws chocked with wood pulp hung like pulled teeth. Reese gave the door his boot, and the whole cabin shook as the top hinge ripped free. The door skewed inward on the bottom hinge and rasped across the floor. The padlock hit the floor with a clank, tangled up in the bent hasp. Reese peered inside but did not step over the barrier. "Looks like good stuff," he said. "Nice." He set the empty beer bottle gently on the floor-Reese did not believe in littering-and motioned for a fresh one.

  Cass' sandwiches sat on the counter, hardening and looking ridiculous. Her pupils were stopped down with shock. Mechanically, she pulled another Dos Equis from the fridge. Then she remembered the gun in the kitchen's third and last drawer.

  She nearly dropped the bottle to shatter on the floor. Instead, she moved very methodically, f
ighting for control. She used a church key to open the beer. They were not twist-caps. This was going to be touchy.

  I certainly don't have to touch the icky thing…

  At the sound of Reese's footsteps crossing the cabin, she turned and held the beer out to him. He touched the mouth of the bottle to his forehead, saluting her. Toasting her imminent death, perhaps. Time to find a new girl. Then he turned back to Lucas' cache.

  The drawer was missing a knob, and she had to jiggle it open. Confused into the candle stubs and wads of tinfoil was-it. The crossgrained butt of the.45 jutted from a contraption that looked like some kind of leather knee or shoulder brace, with tiny sawtoothed buckles and loops of nylon webbing. A shoulder holster, that's what it must be.

  Touching the butt of the gun made her want to wet her pants.

  In one more second, Reese's attention would be back on her, wondering what the hell she was doing by the sink. In that eyeblink of time, too many questions froze her. Is it loaded? What do I have to do before I shoot it? Can I get it out of the holster? Does Reese see it? Do I want to get it out of the holster?

  She pushed the drawer halfway shut. Dumb, careful Cass; since when did she have to make sure of something before she went ahead and did it?

  She just might get that forest burial she'd mentioned to Lucas-today.

  Reese tilted the axe against the door jamb, gulped some more cold Dos Equis, and started to swing one leg over to enter the tiny auxiliary room. That might have been the moment, but he was still facing her. Brilliant-one blown free turn. What if he found another gun in there?

  "Don't go 'way, puss." He ducked his head inside.

  Cass' hand dropped back to the drawer. The thought of Reese's cock being the last thing she'd see before she died gave her a rush of strength. One strap was wound around the pistol, binding it to the holster. Swiftly her hands untangled it and slid the automatic free. It took days to get all of the barrel out. God-it must weigh twenty pounds.

  She put her back between Reese's vantage and the gun she now held above the counter, struggling to remember what little she knew about such a thing. This sort of gun was clip-fed. The clip held the bullets. She'd seen movies with supercops adroit at fast clip changes. The clip dropped from die butt of the pistol as the supercop whacked in a new one. She tilted the butt and saw the bottom stoppered up with metal-the end of the magazine. Ergo, this gun must be loaded. If it isn't loaded, then why does it weigh so goddamn much?…

  The change in the resonance of Reese's voice told her that he had stuck his head back out through the door. Careful, now.

  "All kinds of nice stuff. Too bad the Datsun won't make the climb. Might have to use you as a pack mule, puss.'' She heard a stack of plastic cassette boxes rattle as they fell to the wooden floor. Lucas' tapes. "Check this out,'' commanded the low, graveyard voice.

  Suddenly her mind insisted that this was hopeless and futile. In the movies, they fired these things with both hands, grimacing while they did it. One of her hands was still crippled.

  "Hey." She still had not turned, and now the reptilian eyes were sought on her, drilling into her back through the merchant marine sweater, seeing her secret prize with some alien form of X-ray vision.

  She took casual chances with her life; she'd told Lucas so. Now she had to live up to the brag.

  "Just a minute." She tried to sound irritated, thinking phony normalcy would buy her another half second.

  She turned. Reese was standing, one foot in, one out of the doorway, holding Lucas' portable Sony Trinitron television. Wires trailed from it back into the room. Reese wrenched them free with an irritated expression; more stuff clattered as it was swept off the table inside.

  Cass finished her turn by raising the pistol and pulling the trigger in a single smooth motion. Her left hand braced her wrist, as she had seen in the movies.

  Reese's eyes locked on the gun. Instead of widening in surprise, they narrowed as his whole body tensed. Recognition was instantaneous, and his reaction time was blindingly quick, juiced by the speed in his system. His lips curled back over his teeth, and his body had already jerked to shield itself within the tiny room when he realized that nothing had happened.

  The trigger was frozen solid; it had not budged. Cass' eyes were squeezed shut, but the expected booming report and the slam of recoil had never come. Her finger jerked on the trigger again. Nothing.

  In that second Reese, still holding the TV set, decided to take her down. Four sure steps accelerated him across the room, and he swung the TV wide to extend his reach. To him it weighed nothing.

  As Reese took his first step, Cass' brain screamed that there was a thing called a safety, that it immobilized the trigger, that it was a little thumb lever on the left side of the butt. She turned the big Llama ACP sideways to shove up the safety with her good hand, and when she glanced up she saw the TV set swooping down in Reese's hand like some damned ICBM targeted right between her nice green eyes.

  The pistol seemed to go off by itself.

  It kicked, almost snapping her wrist bones, and yanked itself violently to the right, jerking her arm out straight. The steel-jacketed hollow point mushroomed as it plowed into the blank glass eye of the Sony. The TV exploded like a magician's jack-in-the-box with an eardrum-compressing pop, peppering them both with whizzing slivers of glass from the disintegrating vacuum tube. Reese collided heavily with the counter where Cass had been standing before the recoil had jerked her out of his path. His free forearm shielded his eyes. Flying pieces of the TV set made an incredible hailstorm din all over the cabin in the aftermath of the gun's loud and obliterating voice.

  An animal roar jumped out of Reese as he pushed himself upright against the counter, amazed that he was still alive. His right ear was a ruined casserole of tissue that sparkled with fresh blood. His eyes, fixed and gleaming, caught Cass, and his face split into a hungry grin that showed all his teeth. His forehead was lacerated; blood began to bead there instantly. The sticky mass that was once his ear welled red, and blood coursed down to drip off his chin like candle wax.

  And he smiled at her, saying, "Okay, you cunt."

  And he reached for her.

  Cass forgot the agony in her arm and fired again, from a distance of less than four feet. There was no time for aim or thought; her fingers simply snapped shut around the gun.

  The noise and flame and impact stunned her again. Tears ran from her eyes and wove cold webs on her face. Reese was yanked backward. He hit the table, collapsing two of its legs. His right arm flailed out and slapped the floor as he slid diagonally down. His left arm, the arm with which he had just tried to grab her, had been blown off at the elbow. It was lying in the sink, fingers still trying to close.

  She heard him breathing as he lay there on his back, his blood starting to pool around him on the floorboards. His second Dos Equis had rolled off the table and was upside down in his lap, gushing yellow foam, mixing with the blood, making the liquid orange. Blood jetted from his left elbow joint in gruesome arterial gushes.

  The trick with the gun, it seemed, was to keep it from launching toward the ceiling when you shot it.

  Reese was trying to get up, making guttural noises of effort. With one arm gone and needles of glass sticking out of his forehead, he fought to lift himself, watching her as she stepped closer. There was no fear in his eyes. If there was any expression, it was that of a robot who dumbly tries to complete a programmed task as more and more of its parts fall off. His breath husked in and out, becoming labored.

  The gun trembled in Cass' raw and throbbing hands. He was halfway up, sitting now, reaching for her. She became aware that she was murmuring under her breath in a nonstop litany.

  "Stop it… stop… stop it…''

  It looked as though Reese had been bashed in the side of the head with a meat-tenderizing hammer. His ear was pulp. Cass thought she could see a white bit of skull exposed to the air. He chocked a boot under himself and leaned forward.

  "… stop breathi
ng… stop…"

  He looked at his left arm, which ended at the elbow. No reaction. He looked at her. She saw in his eyes what he wanted for her. His right hand stretched toward her, a bloody claw.

  "… stop… bleed to death… stop… die, goddamn you, Reese!"

  One more shot reverberated through the forest, quieting the chatter of the birds. Then stillness.

  Except for the gentle sobbing.

  19

  GULLS TRIED TO TILT INTO the buffeting wind, and gusts hurled them around like so many scraps of dirty white paper. As the day had darkened, it had turned surly and hostile. A gale-force storm had blown in with the dusk, soaking everything in mist, stinging the eyes and ears with the chill. The sea churned, shifting itself massively and pounding the beachfront with vast, frothing breakers. Here and there a lone vehicle-a municipal safety rig, or highway patrol blazer, or some hapless, behind-schedule traveler-inched its way south against the hurricane of motive force, motor grinding with strain, door and window seals leaking.

  He was a free man.

  The realization replayed for the millionth time in less than twenty-four hours. Free. And, as Burt Kroeger undoubtedly would have added, exonerated. Free. And forced at last to admire the fortuity of absolute coincidence, free to concede the existence of luck, as a rational man would have to under such circumstances.

  Pain still ossified his hands. Steering the Bronco against the whipping wind trying to shove it off the road was a necessary torture. His leg fought the accelerator the way his hands fought the wheel. It shot pain through the roof of his head in regular tick-tock jolts. His kneecap had been crowbarred off and nailed back into position with a rusty cement spike. The backbeat of pain made his complexion look drained and cheesy in the green glow of the dashboard telltales. His stare was fixed, his jaw clamped, as he made slow but inexorable meatgrinder progress toward home base at a careful forty miles per hour.