The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  He still felt that if he could see Lucas, meet his eyes, the whole potpourri of events would assume a sensible configuration. If not, and if Sara was right about Lucas… the ugly alternatives scraped away at Burt's composure like a planer defeating a sticky door one peel of wood at a time.

  The Jeep's CB chattered sporadically, its tiny bank of red LEDs freezing whenever they caught a stream of good, pungent nonsense: Big Fat Firestone, you've snared the Hub snatchin' two flatcases smokiri it signwise hip deep and fast asleep; lay it down for me if ya dupe, rebound!

  "Goddamn truckers,'' muttered Lubbock.

  "Sounds like a Russian code or something," Burt said.

  Lubbock sighed. "The Hub is setting up a deal. He's in a citizen car, pacing a truck, on the lookout for highway patrol speed traps so the truck can cut ninety miles-plus without a bust. It's still cheaper for the truckers to pay off pace cars than to bribe the hypos."

  Burt nodded. The stuff coming out of Lubbock's mouth wasn't much clearer. A sign flashed past on the right: POINT PITT: 10 mi/6.2 km. Two miles past that was a scenic lookout.

  Burt was trying to figure out how he was going to suggest to Lubbock that they just might be dealing with a killer today. Lubbock shoved a cassette into a dark slot on the dashboard, and the cab filled up with an old J. J. Cale song, "They Call Me the Breeze." The Ranger's hands tapped the wheel in time, and the speedometer oozed past seventy-five. The coiled cord for the CB mike swung between them from the top of the cab. Competition with the music kept Burt quiet for a few more miles until Lubbock just spat it right out: "Why is it we need to visit this fella, Mr. Kroeger?"

  They passed the place where Burt remembered parking the day before.

  Burt hoped his nonchalance quotient was up. "Mostly to make sure he's okay, if he's still up here at all." He said "atall," unconsciously lapsing into Lubbock's good-ole-boy speech pattern. "I scatter-assed up this anthill once, after I got lost twice before that. Figured I needed some local help. A guide; one with a four-wheel drive to get me up the hill in the rain, and get my friend out if he's hurt."

  "I can do basic rescue," Lubbock said as he twisted the stereo's volume knob down a notch. "Used to work as a paramedic for an ambulance service." That brief gig had come during a hellish eighteen months Lubbock and Norma had spent in a jerkwater piece of nowhere called Bisbee, Arizona-another misstep in the long haul from Roswell, New Mexico, to Los Gatos and the trailer court.

  "Well, we might have to restrain him," Burt said. "Or pull him out of the cabin bodily. You see… er, he was recently released from a…" Mental hospital, his brain screamed at him. There was no nice way to pussyfoot around it. Acid boiled sourly in his stomach. "Uh, institution."

  "Oh-this guy Ellington is a Mental?" Lubbock's tongue was digging furiously inside his right cheek, trying to dislodge some ancient morsel of breakfast. "I've handled Mentals before. No sweat. Hadda restrain this fella we hauled out of a bar brawl once. Kept hitting us while we were trying to hold his guts and brains in. He didn't feel no pain; he was lubed to the crow's nest. Thought we was trying to boost his wallet, which had nine hundred and eighty bucks in cash falling out of it. We finally put him down with an injection. Technically we can't give 'em a needle, that was a job for a doctor. But we did-I did. We were trying to keep him alive, and he wanted to kill us on behalf of his billfold, so we compromised and spiked him to settle him down. I don't drink, myself, not after seeing that." Lubbock's lush caffeine habit did not count as drug use. Burt noted with perverse amusement that the Ranger omitted mentioning the fate of the fella's wallet. "Yeah, I've done Mentals. Single guy, you 'n' me, shouldn't be no problem. No sweat, like I said. Why you checking up on this guy? 'Cos he's a Mental?"

  Lubbock's cruelty was astonishing, but Burt could not allow himself the luxury of protest. It would be dangerous to argue the point before they knew whether Lucas was in the cabin or not. "His doctor is worried."

  Lubbock let it ride. He was more interested in conversation than in motives and investigative logic. He'd checked Lucas' cabin for signs of vandalism many times over the years and never noticed anything provocative. Teeth clenched, he bucked the Jeep up the rain-washed hillside and over the slippery obstacle course of limestone shards.

  Burt grabbed the chicken bar bolted over the glovebox, and a few stomach-lurching moments later they were looking at the front door of Lucas' cabin. Lubbock killed the Jeep's motor, and the sound of the downpour became unnaturally loud. Droplets speckled the windshield and obscured their view. No lights were on inside.

  Lubbock pawed around behind his seat and located a holstered.357 revolver stopped up with six Light Special police loads. He strapped it on beneath his rain slicker. The look of alarm on Burt's face was almost comical, and Lubbock overrode the protest he saw coming out of his passenger's mouth. "Mr. Kroeger, you say this guy's a Mental, then I'm walking up to that front door with my good buddy here. Don't worry. I ain't never had to draw this thing seriously."

  "My friend gets nervous around guns," Burt blurted out. "Better not flash that firepower." He had a nightmare preview of Lucas and Lubbock swapping lead; of Pretty Boy Floyd getting a high-caliber calling card from the Feds. What if Lucas got his head ventilated by this cowboy?

  "He won't even see it." Lubbock patted the slicker. It was fairly clear he could not be argued out of packing his gun. His sunburn was even starker against the danger-yellow of the rain slicker.

  Burt didn't like the light in Lubbock's eyes.

  He thought of the murderous calm that would enshroud the dog soldiers in his unit whenever they got tapped to flush Vietcong snipers out of the trees on night patrol. At first the newcomers gobbled up battle duty, but after about a week of nightfighting with no sleep they became glutted with death, and their eyes would gleam in the same wet, fixated way that Lubbock's were right now. Burt's stint in Southeast Asia was the history of two decades past, but memories of it were keyed too damned easily. The steel slivers he felt in his stomach were battle jitters. He and Lubbock were poised to jump into the unknown and find stuff out… for good, bad, or worse.

  "Let's do it," Lubbock said, and dismounted.

  Burt began to sense that the young Ranger might be a more dangerous piece of machinery than Lucas at any depth of madness. Lubbock was dangerous because he was bored. He thought he craved action. Let's do it-that was what Gary Gilmore had quipped on his way to the frying chair. Burt climbed down from the cab of the Jeep, and his city topcoat speckled with dark raindrops.

  As they approached the front door, he felt absurdly like a gunfighter stepping his way to the final showdown.

  Nothing happened.

  Burt wet his lips. "Lucas?"

  Rain pattered the forest, hissing on the trees and rocks. He felt totally removed from civilization. Maybe Lubbock's hogleg was a good idea after all. Emboldened by the lack of response from inside, he called again, louder, thumping a fist against the door.

  The door creaked open three inches.

  There was a huge eye-level gouge in the blank wooden face of the door. The axe was missing from the chopping stump out front; Burt had noticed it there yesterday. But only a boob would,leave a good axe out in the rain. Right?

  "Hey, Lucas. You home?" He spread his fingers against the door planks and pushed gently. Peripherally, he saw Lubbock's hand travel beneath the slicker to unlimber the pistol. His head was tilted forward, and a tiny stream of water spouted down from his saran-wrapped hatbrim.

  They could both see inside now. The axe was leaning against the counter near the kitchen sink. The fireplace was black and cold.

  "Lucas! Yo! It's Burt!" Disappointment began to slow his heartbeat.

  Lubbock pushed past in a swish of plastic, stiff-arming the pistol out into the open. "Come on."

  Burt scanned around. Nice and dry inside. No wet footprints on the floor. Bits of broken glass strewn near the fireless hearth. Sleeping bag bundled up in one corner-unused? No cups or plates racked in the dish drainer. A table wit
h only two legs leaned face-into one wall.

  "Outhouse out back," announced Lubbock. After a fast glance out the kitchen window, he shifted his aim to cover the door to their right. It stood open just a crack. Serious gouges tattooed the wood, as though a monster cat had tried to claw its way in. The hinges had been ripped out and reset. The frame was splintered in axe-sized bites.

  Halfway to the door Lubbock stopped and wrinkled his nose. "Smell it?"

  All Burt had noticed about the dead air inside the cabin was that it was wonderfully dry. Now he caught an underlying scent, like rotten stew.

  Lubbock's brain shifted into overdrive. Part of his pseudo-paramedic job had been collecting the bodies of elderly people who had died alone in their homes. Sometimes they sat for days, weeks, before they were discovered and reported. When bodies settled, they leaked. He and his hundred-hour course mates picked them up from bathtubs whose water had long evaporated or peeled them from their stained deathbeds. A surprising number of deaths occurred while the victims were sitting on the toilet. Bones crackled inside papery skin envelopes stiff with rigor mortis and plum-purple with dependent lividity. Their homes always smelled the way Lucas Ellington's cabin smelled now-clogged with the reek of slow decay.

  Burt had been one of the first of Bravo Team to discover the Viet Cong body pit. He had nearly done a somersault into it in the dark. It was at least three bodies deep. Most of the bodies retained scraps of American olive drab, and none had kept all their parts. The rush of smell was rich and heady. Think of fresh shit, think of acetone, think of steaming, greenish-black maggot oatmeal plugging up your throat. Burt had turned away and blown his Type-B combat meal. He spent an hour cleaning vomit out of the Stoner rifle he had been carrying. You could catch hell for a dirty weapon. He had not been one of the unfortunates assigned to clear the pit or reassemble the corpses of his comrades, like grisly jigsaw puzzles. He hadn't been able to keep food down for two days afterward. The pressed mystery meat inside the combat meal tins reminded him of ripe hanks of human flesh; its smell was too much like the miasma of rot that hung like a malign thundercloud over the mass grave. The smell in the cabin now was a soft echo of that long-past stench. Burt's intestines shivered.

  With a hard swallow, he thought that now was no time for cowardice and barfing. Here were two grown men dicking around in an obviously unoccupied cabin, skittish of a closed door and a funky smell.

  He crossed the room and pushed open the door.

  Lubbock yelled, "Wait!" and Burt heard the.357's hammer click back twice, into full cock.

  Burt forgot the sickly vibrations of his body. All of his perception centered in his eyes, and the fleeting image they were able to absorb in the quarter second used up by the swing of the door. Even in that brief piece of elapsed time, he recorded too much, visually overloading, thinking that in front of him was the most shocking thing he would ever see in his life. He was too correct.

  His last sight was of the tripwire on the door twanging taut as he pushed it all the way open. Then the booby-trapped mines waiting at chest level blew him and Lubbock clear across the cabin.

  25

  SARA'S ATTITUDE WAS PRAYERLIKE. SHE bent her head and watched soapy rinse water spiral down the bathtub drain as the massage spray pounded the kinks out of her thickly knotted neck and shoulder muscles. Funny, she thought, to step from the hostile shower outside, freezing and uncontrolled, to the one inside, which was rejuvenating and hot as a sauna. A force she could control with the twist of a spigot. That was the essence of civilization-control over nature.

  Her drive down from the bay area had been monstrous, like touring the ocean floor at a crawl. She stopped often because of the null visibility. Once the rain ceased, she hit fog so dense it reflected her headlights hard enough to sting her eyes. It was tough to shake the idea that Burt's undeniable utility became more lost to her with each mile, a lantern flame of sanity bullied by an ever-stronger wind.

  At Olive Grove she had checked in early and clocked out late. During all those hours, Burt had not called, as he'd promised. Not a peep from Lucas, either-not that she expected a windfall like that. By midafternoon her concentration was destroyed every time the phone sounded off. By six o'clock she felt ready for the gibber and slobber ward. Anticipation could turn even a doctor who recognized the patterns into a basket case. She thought of the anecdote told of Cleckley, author of The Mask of Sanity. One day while in court, he looked up to see the psychopath in the docket dutifully reading his book. Knowing the rules didn't mean you were immune to them. Defining a psychopath did not cure one.

  She hated the idea that Burt had let her down or forgotten her as soon as she was out of range. You go on home; we men can fuck this up all by ourselves, thanks. At dusk she had moped home to nurse an entirely self-indulgent drunk of defeat.

  There had been one call. From the police. It had not brightened her day.

  Gabriel Stannard, rock singer and sole intact surviving member of Whip Hand, had neatly vanished from his Beverly Hills manse and could not be accounted for. Now everyone who had been alerted was engaged in damning mathematics: Stannard was gone. Lucas was gone. The rest of the Whip Hand members were dead, except for poor Jackal Reichmann, ex-drummer of the ex-'Gasm, who was busy becoming a veggie. Two and two usually equaled four… and four, in this case, was not the devoutly dedicated Eldon Quantrill, who was still in custody in Tucson.

  While at work, calls to Sara's home phone were automatically forwarded to her office; another line was added to her monthly GTE phone bill. Her home phone had remained inactive. Dead was such an ugly word.

  She had even thumbed the little adjustment wheel on the bottom of the phone to make the bell ring as loudly as possible. So, naturally, it did not ring… until she was in the shower. She jerked her head from beneath the spray and heard the end of the brassy ring, then listened until it rang again to verify that the sound had not been her imagination in fifth gear. Then she was through the plastic curtain, planting soapy footprints on the blue plush of the bathroom rug, ignoring towels as she came out of the door in a burst of trapped steam. It took her one more ring to traverse the hallway, naked and dripping, and snatch the receiver from its cradle.

  "Hello?" Her breath quickened.

  "Hello. Is this, uh-787-8821?"

  She did not recognize the voice. "Yes?"

  "Congratulations. You have just been selected as a potential winner for over two thousand dollars in services, food, discounts at local retail outlets, even expense-paid trips to Las Vegas and Hawaii. Sound good?"

  Soap sneaked into her eyes, hot and stinging. A sudden plunging feeling overcame her stomach, and her vision began to spot. Her constitution did not agree with this sort of prolonged suspense.

  The phone solicitor took Sara's befuddled pause as a license to forge ahead but had obviously lost his place on his spiel sheet. "Then you can… no, wait. Are you over eighteen years of age?"

  "No." Disgust finally surfaced. "But I fuck like a guinea pig anyway, my father tells me."

  "Beg pardon?" The minimum-wager was not sure he had just heard what he had just heard.

  "Listen, ace. This is a crisis number, not a residence. You've just called the Emergency Heroin Addict Suicide Prevention Hotline. My board is lit up, and somebody out there is probably dying right now because you're tying up the line." The water all over her had gone cold, and she was freezing.

  "Oh. Huh. Geez, really?"

  Sara had worked the phone-soliciting scam in college, suffering three and a half psychologically degrading days in the name of extra income. It had made her I eel like a burglar, a rapist, invading people's privacy and trying to sell them stuff they did not want. She'd finally quit without earning a single pie-in-the-sky commission and virtually had to drag the sleazy ringmaster of that telephonic circus to small-claims court to get her base wages. Now she could hear the other callers in the booths beyond her boy and knew they were all hungry and desperate enough to spend eight hours with phones in their
ears, breaking and entering. It was shit work, strictly steerage class. She suddenly felt sorry for the guy and added, "I know the phone number lists are all random things, computer-generated. Sorry. Hope you find a real job soon."

  The other voice stayed silent for a moment, then: "Yeah, lady, so do I. If you've done this, you already know it sucks the canary."

  "No harm done. Bye now."

  She almost hated hanging up on the poor slob; he would certainly hate disconnecting from a sympathetic voice since now he'd have to dial another total stranger… unless he did what Sara had done when the phone game became too much for her, and she discovered how she could pretend to be doing her spiel with one end of the receiver cord disconnected.

  The minute or two she'd wasted on the line, however, was ample time for Burt or Lucas or the police to get fed up with a busy signal and hang up for another five minutes before trying again. Or ten. Or half an hour.

  Her breasts and back had been dried by the air. Outside the bathroom it was definitely chilly, and she wanted to get back into the shower, embrace the steam, pull it deep into her lungs, and let it cleanse her. She belayed a moment to stare at the phone, daring it to ring again. That magic would not work until she was back in the shower. Fate was a sadistic bastard.

  It was dark outside. Burt had mentioned taking the ranger up to Lucas' cabin. Surely something had happened by now.

  She shuddered despite the renewed gush of steaming water. Yeah, maybe something had happened all right. Maybe they had dragged Lucas out of that tiny locked room at the cabin, kicking and frothing. Maybe Lucas had opened them both up with gunfire at the first sign of approach. Maybe everybody was too dead to pick up the phone. Or maybe Lucas had taken his adolescent wonder girl and shagged ass to Vancouver hours before Burt knocked on the door. The options all seemed as ugly as that word. Dead.

  There was no telling what the new improved Lucas was capable of.