The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  On the other hand, maybe Burt was on his way to a phone at this very moment. The nearest-available pay phones were a good drive from the cabin, not counting the hike up and down the mountain or the progress-retarding factor of the storm that was still slamming down full bore, drowning everything. Maybe he was punching in her number right now.

  Each thought of the young girl at the cabin hollowed her stomach, achingly.

  Sara was not a believer in precognition, but as soon as Lucas took leave of Los Angeles, she swore she had felt a string break between her soup can and his. Had she foreseen the derailment of her budding relationship with Lucas so soon, and was the girl at the cabin culpable? The wily little bitch was young, young enough to be a surrogate daughter and a substitute wife… Kristen and Cory, all back in a single package. Sara knew that while that conclusion held a thousand intriguing possibilities, she did not yet have the right to draw it.

  She had to talk to Lucas. That was the wall she kept bashing into. She wished Lucas were here. He could explain the mysteries and the dropped-out puzzle pieces that were now making her head hurt as well as her stomach. Even if his answers were crazy, they'd at least I'ive her more information so she could play analyst and invent the real answers, yes?

  And there was angry jealousy, too, a hot rivet of it sizzling in the wall of her stomach. The girl was competition; preferred company for Lucas. Sara could not rationalize her way around that one. And had she blinded herself to the extent Burt had suggested because she wanted Lucas-wanted him enough to ignore obvious danger signals? A pang of guilt settled in next to the hot rivet.

  Soap-clouded warm water rose over the tops of her feet. She bent to clear the drain mesh of loose hair and felt the hot water flow begin to pale. It was time to trade the warmth of the shower for that of the fireplace and her favorite chair, the one with the broad, work-area arms.

  There were other kinds of warmth, too. She toweled off slowly, catching her breasts in a humid double handful of terrycloth, her slim hand sneaking between her legs to investigate the droplets suspended in the fine down there. No gray hairs, she thought, feeling amused and a little scandalous.

  She reached back into the shower to crank both taps to full stop. The hot water spigot sometimes leaked. The faucet shut-off that diverted water to the showerhead clinked down with a loud echo, and the phone rang again. She turbaned her hair in a turquoise-colored towel and left the bathroom door open to defog the mirrors.

  She actually had one arm extended to the phone on its antiqued comer table before she registered the dark figure leaning on the kitchen doorway.

  A yelp of surprise forced its way out of her, and her body tried to backpedal, her feet still wet and treacherously slippery. She was totally naked except for the towel on her head. Reflex thoughts of rape defense scurried through her overloaded brain as the man at the end of the hallway stepped into the light.

  "Hi, Sara," said Lucas.

  He was clad in black from top to bottom. There was a neutral grin on his face. And crooked into one arm was the largest automatic rifle Sara had ever seen.

  26

  AT FIRST, TRACE LUBBOCK THOUGHT that his own faithful.357 pistol had gone off prematurely in his face. He did not recall pulling the trigger. Second thought: No round in the world makes a muzzle flash like that!

  That PR fella from Los Angeles, Kroeger, had rushed a closed door and wrested control of a potentially hazardous situation from Lubbock. Lubbock had thought he was the authority here. But that Kroeger fella had jumped the gun and relieved Trace of all responsibility for what had happened next. Lubbock had learned to think this way while working ambulance duty. The country was gorged with scam artists who loved to pin lawsuits on public service guys like paramedics. Or Rangers. It all boiled down to the placement of responsibility, and Trace judged himself blameless.

  His eyes had filled with so much white light that his pupils had snapped shut before his eyelids. The blast erased reality. His ears were slapped into deafness by coarse hands. He was lifted, turned, and spat out; he'd caught a glimpse of the cabin ceiling whirling past underneath him.

  Underneath him?

  His senses had popped all their fuses, shutting him down. This was death, he had thought, the Big D. So long, Norma, babe, wish you'd come off your period a week sooner…

  As Lubbock floated up toward the light, toward consciousness, the images that were compressed into a corner of his brain began to push apart. They were too packed, too fast in coming, to permit individual review. Now they broke away and resolved into separate impressions.

  … stupid civilian-don't charge a closed door!

  … bodies-oh, god-like the old folks we used to collect-a man and a woman?

  … a co-op suicide, that's what it looks like-he killed her, then killed himself, but why are they-

  … blood oh jesus blood their heads are all red and dry their eyes are still open-

  … is this guy the Mental?

  … the wire on the door's gonna snag hey don't-!

  … Holy FUCK!

  … that fella whatsisname Kroeger flying toward me-

  … he's hit he's hit MY EYES!

  Without opening his eyes, Lubbock saw the bodies again. They had been sitting on the workbench in the tiny room, feet dangling, leaning together like a pair of winos, the girl's head on the man's shoulder in a sort of postcard lover's pose. The caked brick color of long-dried blood had transformed their faces into shining masks punctuated by the unseeing, dulled jewels of their dead eyes. Their garments-or lack of garments-went unnoticed. They seemed drenched, entirely dyed in that horrible brick red, which had dried to a metallic crust. Lubbock had been surprised that there had not been more flies, nibbling at this feast with their microscopic proboscises. Maybe the rain had kept them away.

  Now the pain faded up, as though on some volume control knob. Goodbye J. J. Cale, hello five-inch woodbiter corkscrew-twisting agony into each kidney.

  Lubbock uttered his first strangled cry of pain. Air whistled past his broken front teeth. His next convulsion was motionless and silent, an internalized shot of pain. He did not know that he had bashed himself in the mouth with his faithful.357, the ramp sight shattering his two front teeth and his left canine at the gumline. His mouth had filled with blood, but since he was facedown on the floor, he had not strangled on it while unconscious.

  Look, Ma, no hands…

  One of the corpses had been missing an arm. A strange disc was fastened to its throat, winking through the dry blood like an evil-eye fetish. A vision that transcended death; the All-Seeing Eye that Lubbock's Paiute grandmother had told him about. Lubbock's mind classified the other corpse as a woman because he saw her breasts; everything else was hideously androgynous. Her hair was very long and completely shellacked with blood. Most of her right brow was reversed inside-out, and a huge ditch in her head had pulled one side of her face up into a ghastly bogus leer. The man wore a vest and jeans. The woman was completely naked… naked, bludgeoned, and dead. As dead as you could act.

  Then he remembered Kroeger flailing toward him, end over end, and the hot birdshot of pain clipping his ankles, and the din of shattering glass, and long splintered chunks of the door Kroeger had just opened flying at them like a jagged fusillade of arrows. Kroeger's airborne body had formed a black silhouette surrounded by a corona of blast-furnace white. A rush of broiler heat had puckered Lubbock's skin, followed by moving air, like the slipstream of a freight train going full throttle. He had been picked up and laundry-bagged on his head against the far side of the cabin. More pain began to pound at his skull in new and torturous ways.

  Trace Lubbock stood exactly five-five, with two inches added by his cowboy boots. He couldn't know that if he had gotten his lifelong wish and been taller, by even two more inches, the top of his head, eyebrows included, would be splattered all over the cabin's front yard.

  Before he risked opening his eyes, he indulged in the frivolity of wishing he was still kicking back at the Los
Gatos station, swilling down cruddy coffee from Ajax Ballard's shitty Mr. Coffee machine. Ajax was probably weighing down a counter stool at Paulette Barnum's diner out on Route 152. He wasn't due into the Los Gatos station until… late. Trace had warned Ajax about Paulette. She was out to snare herself a Ranger with those fabulous plastic tits of hers. Trace had dented the mattress a few times with her; it was comforting to know she was willing whenever Norma got cranky. Paulette Barnum's sexual needs were basic and uncomplicated. Trace figured that was why Ajax Ballard was so hot for her-maybe he wasn't any bull in the sack. Old Ajax, with his marine corps haircut and his beer belly… he was doubtless swapping lewd remarks with Paulette and wolfing down his never-changing order of two double cheeseburgers and cottage fries… and he was probably nowhere near the radio in his Jeep… the Los Gatos station had put in an order for those portable FM units that holstered to your belt, but those would not be a reality until after next February, so for now it was the old game of catch and listen…

  The radio!

  He had to get to the CB in the Jeep. Call. Anybody. Send out a mayday before the pain got so bad he could not move… if he could still move at all.

  Trace Lubbock opened his eyes. His panic and alarm held just below the frothy boiling point. Only one of his eyes still worked.

  A swimming image of the cabin came into cloudy focus. His yellow rain slicker was sprinkled with gelid slops of blood-whose blood, he could not estimate. Burt Kroeger was on top of him, an unmoving mess, one hand extended toward Trace's face in a petrified claw, the other twisted beneath his body. He was sprawled face up over Lubbock's legs. Face up, that was a laugh. Burt Kroeger's face was gone.

  Trace tried to scream, but nothing came out. His vocal works were locked. Rust choked off his gullet, and his tongue sat like a dead blowfish in his mouth, swollen and dry and spiky. He saw his right hand shaking uncontrollably, knuckles knocking on the floorboards. His right leg throbbed with hot cactus prickles of pain, nerve endings shrieking. His left leg was completely numb and dead.

  Crippled! Oh, jesus god, crippled, no! Better off dead.

  The rain outside sheeted down with Olympian vengeance, scrubbing Trace's rawed eardrums with lemon glee. It was a miracle he could hear anything; the concussion had punched out every window in the cabin. I le did not yet realize he was hearing the rain with only one ear. The left one, on the same side as his dead eye, was sealed up with a gooey bloodscab and was as useless as a dustball.

  He grabbed with his right arm and pulled. Kroeger's leg rolled to the floor, the heel of his shoe timnking. The foot toed in and was still again. Kroeger's oilier shoe was twelve feet away.

  When Trace tried to sit up, the chopping blades of tiyony in his back cut him down to floor level.

  Try that one again.

  It took him half an hour.

  He reached, this time with both hands, tendons bitching, hooked his fingernails into the grain of the wood on the floor, and pulled. He shifted two or three inches. The lower half of his body was dead freight. But he moved two or three inches. It was only a hundred inches more to the cabin door, maybe two thousand inches more to the Jeep. Piece of cake, if he didn't die in the next five minutes or pass out from the floodtide of pain eroding his consciousness.

  Pull, sonofcibitch, pull! Pretend you're grabbing a bedpost and fucking the tits off Norma or Paulette. PULL!

  He bought five more inches, then ten, sliding like a snake with a broken back. Kroeger's other leg spilled off. Thud. Softer sound-no shoe.

  He reached, and pulled, and reached. The reach was restricted each time by the vise-grip of pain in his arms, the stakes penetrating his skull, the horrifying numbness below. At least he could not feel his scrotum sanding against the floor as he dragged himself along, a primal amphibian crawling out of a prehistoric sea for the first time, its undercarriage useless on land.

  Breathing quickly became torture. Something was ruptured. Expanding his chest hurt. The air touched off his broken teeth in the way candy foil shocks a filling.

  His hand filled with little round white pebbles that ground to powder when he pressed down. They were all over the floor. Pills, miniature pills. His hand closed around half of a smashed, nicotine-colored vial, and Trace read BURTON KR on the ripped label. He'd seen Burt pop one of the high blood pressure pills while in the Jeep. Medicine was a wonderful thing; it was supposed to keep you from dying. Right.

  Six, maybe seven more repetitions of the Paraplegic Two-Step would win him the door prize. He reached out. His fingernails were peeling back and bleeding. Something in his chest broke apart and voided hot fluid.

  Trace's good eye rolled up and his forehead hit the floor when he blacked out.

  ***

  It took a long time for him to come back up.

  It would be wasteful for Norma to get insurance money. She'd just buy a bigger TV set and spend the rest of her life in front of it, growing fatter and paler. It was his responsibility to pull them both out, to start over. He wondered if the dying were always so repentant. I'll fix everything this time around, just give me that second chance…

  The pain switched from memory to reality, no less potent. Tears were streaming from his eyes. His eye. But he was awake and alive, and still facing his objective. Outside was the dark, the rain. The storm had not paled at all.

  It took centuries to make his slug's progress. As a reward for curling his fingers around the rough texture of the cabin door, his body kicked in its final shot of epinephrine.

  Trace dragged himself out into the rain.

  It was totally dark, the all-enveloping, suffocating deep forest dark that only nocturnal hunters could penetrate with their lemur eyes. The moon was just a sliver, and thunderheads blanked out the starscape. The unseen rain sang down like ball bearings on sheet tin, it pattered on Lubbock's uniform cuff to darken it as he tried to grab his first handful of distance. Clammy moss and mud clogged up his fingers.

  Outside, it was quite cold.

  The darkness helped him blot out the horrors available to the eye inside the cabin, the cavern of death he was slowly leaving behind. Reach. And. Pull. Now he was squirming in the mud, a dung beetle, lolling and caking himself with swampy cesspool grime. It was better than looking at all the blood in the blurred depth perception of his surviving eye. Dogs rolled in bank mud when they were wounded, didn't they? Better mud than blood. Crawl, you jarheads! Grovel, worm, locomote with your fucking upper lip, but get closer to that dim curve of Jeep canopy.

  Lubbock prayed the Jeep was no illusion.

  The storm wanted to press him to the ground, tempting him to stop, relax, and leak his life away into the mud. In the morning, all signs of abnormality would be rinsed clean. He could sink into the earth, return to the loam to nourish the trees. The ecosystem of the forest was slow but inexorable. Relax; become one with nature. If he gave up; if his body gave up for him.

  He cursed himself for being lax on the calisthenics, for giving up jogging-too Marin County for his taste, for not giving up Norma's starchy meals and the fried goodies hashed up by Paulette Bamum. Mud insinuated itself into his pants, filling his holes, making him more ponderous. It topped off his Tony Lama cowboy boots with thick sluice the temperature of morgue-slab marble.

  Perhaps the mud might set and solidify, like hot-top on a roadway, a poultice to seal his wounds. He was using this fantasy to occupy another five seconds of pain when his fingers brushed the bas-relief pebbling of the Jeep's left front tire.

  There was no relief, no surprise. This job was still far from coffee break time. The thought of a shot of good, dark, steaming coffee nearly made him swoon. He fastened on to the hub rim and pulled… grabbed the chassis and pulled… grabbed the running board and pulled… and rose… and reached, and missed, and fell on his ass in the mud.

  The second try took longer. He thought he' could feel ligaments snapping like rubber bands as he tried to extend his reach. Two fingers hooked on to the icy silver of the driver's side door handle.r />
  The CB rig was inside, mere feet away now. Inside, there was a padded seat, and dryness, and the miracle of a heater. From his wounded splay in the mucus slime of mud, the interior of the Jeep looked like Valhalla.

  Let's DO IT-

  First pins and needles, then scalpels and icepicks invaded his arm from elbow to fingertips. His traitorous limb rattled on the door handle, and Lubbock felt himself plunging again. He ate a double mouthful of mud spiced with the sharp taste of his own fresh blood.

  Lubbock screamed.

  With a backbone-rending shriek, high and uncharacteristically feminine, he swung at the door handle with his other hand and smashed it down. He strained but could not see if his blind strike, his last chance, had mattered. It was so damned dark, and getting darker…

  Hanging drunkenly, he nearly lost it when the door glanced off his temple. He groped out with his nearly useless right hand and felt the vinyl seat cover, which yielded to his weak grip.

  The CB unit was mounted above the wide bar of the wraparound rearview mirror. It was far enough away from his reach to be a cruel joke. Its pinhole LEDs blinked importantly, ignoring his emergency. Why hadn't he mounted it on the dashboard? Why did he have to be so fucking cool all the time? The blinking row of red lights was almost hypnotically seductive.

  Red means stop. Stop. Give it a rest. Go to sleep.

  His eyes began to hinge heavily shut. At last. The LEDs blurred into a thin red line, glowering at him.

  Redline. DANGER-

  He pulled his good leg beneath him and shoved hard. Something else burst apart, and the agony that flamed upward through him made him sure his guts were trailed behind him in gray, slick runners. A new scream died in his throat. His good leg was no longer that.

  He went facedown into the driver's seat. He fancied he could smell his own ancient butt sweat.

  Now roll. Roll one more time and grab the mike cable.

  His dead legs tried to pull him back toward the ground, a viscera-covered infant sliding forth from a metal womb. He got the edge of the seat in his mouth and bit down hard with his broken teeth. The pain was beyond description.