The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  But he did not slide out of the Jeep.

  Unable to look toward the CB, not daring to release the seat, he pawed overhead. There was sudden sharp pain in his fingers.

  The black microphone was knocked from its cradle and fell with the coiled cable accordioning out behind it. It struck Lubbock behind the left ear. His consciousness tried swimming for the deep end of the pool one more time.

  His remaining front teeth had bitten through the vinyl, and the foam beneath was dark with his blood. He could not hold, so he let go. Gravity hauled him back out the open door of the Jeep. The mike hung, touching the rubber mat by the accelerator, and Trace's hand slapped at it as he fell out. He caught it and took it with him.

  The coiled cable payed out to full length and twanged tight enough to jerk the plug out of the CB unit. Trace was sure that would happen as he collapsed back into the slime. But when his body went down, his arm was suspended by the still-connected cable.

  If he sneezed, the cable might pop out.

  He managed to slide around until he was sitting with his back to the Jeep. He could feel the running board digging into his back just below the shoulderblades. And the mike was still in his hand, a marvel to behold. His broken face tried to smile, but there was no victory, not yet. No Pepsi break until he finished his job.

  Close the mike in your hand. Don't let it go. If it's connected, it'll spring out of reach. If not, it'll go into the mud, the dark. Depress the button. Make your face talk. Call in the ATVs, the evacuation crew, the choppers. Talk. Talk now. Do it as though your life-

  The cabin had been so nice; it had never been any trouble. Why had all this happened now? There were two dead people in there, one of them a girl with no clothes on. This was not normal. He and Kroeger had walked in and boom-now there were three dead people in there. Three going on four. And nobody knew about it.

  Medic! Medic! Corpsman!

  Corpse-man, he thought.

  Lubbock tried to raise the mike to his face. He tried to depress the talk button. Alone in the dark, dying by the second, he tried.

  27

  JOSHUA KNOPF WAS AN EXPERT at sitting on his duff and waiting, patiently. He often mentioned this singular talent to people as a means of procuring employment.

  Joshua sat, waiting, while the rain eased up and showed some mercy to his Honda Accord. He snapped off his book light to conserve its batteries; the flexible pen-lamp was clipped to a paperback copy of James Crumley's Dancing Bear. Cheeseburger detritus littered the passenger seat, and a huge silver thermos of coffee warmed his thigh. The coffee was thick with Kahlua, and Joshua was relaxed, glowing warmly. The sound of the rain was soothing. None of this was sufficient to lull him into a doze, however-sleeping was not part of his job. Waiting was.

  North Claremont Street in Dos Piedras was badly in need of a bit of slurry sealing. The pavement was ruptured and ancient. The property, however, was upscale. North Claremont allowed access to eight homes on the soft eastern slope of a hill; on the west side of the street the hill flattened into open scrub field. The street was a dead end terminating in a yellow-and-black-striped barricade dotted with orange reflectors. Part of the hillside had been gouged away to accommodate the street. If some drunk lost control and rammed the dead end, Joshua thought, he'd be nosing his car into a berm of dirt ten feet high. It had long since become overgrown with brush as it settled into the local ecology. The field and the open hillside were seeded with paths; past the dead end one trail led down into the little cemetery behind Grace Methodist Church on Weaver Avenue.

  Maybe, Joshua reflected, if the drunk hit the berm hard enough, they could just tote him right over the hill and into the graveyard's next vacancy.

  KNOPF FOR HIRE, read the business card clipped to the visor above Joshua's head. He had a whole glove compartment full of business cards pinpointing expertise in a dozen occupations, from contributing editor to Soldier of Fortune magazine to insurance adjuster to IRS representative to the clergy. None were bonafide. All had served at one time or another to get Joshua Knopf the things he needed in the course of his work. Below his name-it annoyed him that clients rarely got the pun-in maroon ink on the gray card was the line PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS, with his phone number.

  The P.I. license had come by mail order seven years earlier. Joshua was retired military (navy, seventeen years starting in 1960). He had also tried, as a tax dodge, a card-carrying ministry in the Universal Life Church. Before opting for the correspondence course, he had decided that a calling as a letter carrier for the post office, a night watchman, a shoe salesman, and night manager of a convenience market was not for him. Thus KNOPF FOR HIRE.

  At first he had been astonished at how dull it was. Hut as he moved away from domestic surveillances and automobile repossessions, he developed a modest measure of pride in his closed-case load. He did all right.

  Then people began recommending him to other people. Joshua Knopf was your man for a taste of discreet fact finding. Joshua Knopf got the job done.

  One of Joshua's night-watchman stints had been for the huge Holiday Inn that overlooked the sea on the coast road to Santa Barbara. One memorable weekend, the tenth floor had been invaded by a band called Whip Hand, and Joshua had been the man tapped and tipped for twenty varieties of midnight errands. Gabriel Stannard, leader of the band, had remembered Josh Knopf and ever since 1981 had kept the detective on a yearly stipend, so his services would remain on call. Stannard was always businesslike-he always discussed his needs with Joshua in person, not through intermediaries like some of these rock and roll guys-and always paid well. The money took the pressure off. Joshua was always happy to work for Gabriel Stannard.

  And Stannard had apparently been able to use the file dug up by Joshua on Sara Windsor, psychiatrist at Olive Grove Hospital and resident of 7764 North Claremont Street.

  The neighboring dwellings were dark, shut down for the night. The residents here were professional people with things to do in the evenings, or well-to-do older folks who rose with the dawn and were abed by nine o'clock. No one had taken note of Joshua Knopf, private investigator, sitting in his car in the rain, doing what he did best.

  Detective fiction tickled the hell out of him. TV programs ditto. Fat chance he should ever wind up rubbing elbows with Cybill Shepherd or waving around firepower like one of Robert Parker's hapless characters. No-detective work was mostly sitting. And waiting. Occasionally one was mistaken for a burglar or peeping tom.

  Another pleasant thing about working for Gabriel Stannard was that the singer never imposed complex instructions. So many clients who resorted to the use of private investigators felt the urge to gussy up their assignments, pump them full of wind and mystery and speed, to make their cases seem more significant, more like the cases they experienced in fiction. Stannard's instructions regarding Sara Windsor had been specific and succinct.

  Joshua sat in his car and watched Sara Windsor's house. He'd been logging reports ever since Sara had returned home. When Stannard had advised him he would no longer be available at the Beverly Hills number, Joshua had been given an emergency number that he had not yet used.

  Every hour or so, Joshua unhorsed himself from the Honda and trekked up the slight incline to Sara Windsor's house to play voyeur. Missus Windsor was quite a good-looking woman. For the most part she had spent the evening puttering around the house in a robe. The first time Joshua had spotted her wearing the robe, he had experienced a sudden lack of maneuvering room inside his jockey shorts. She logged a lot of time in a comfy chair by the fireplace, making notes. This was a woman who brought her work home with her. She seemed a bit antsy whenever she got near the phone. She was waiting for a call. Joshua did not feel the need-yet -to attach his lineman's handset and tap in. He had it in a case on the backseat if he changed his mind or something drastic went down.

  In the glove compartment of the Accord was a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson automatic. The clip was in. Joshua carried a permit for the gun. In his entire career as a pr
ivate investigator, he had drawn the gun once and fired it never. So much for romantic notions of Bogartry.

  The blue neon digits of the dash clock told him he'd have to do a spot check before he could help himself to more Kahlua. At dawn he'd call in Mickey Rounds, his partner. Mickey would park in the brush on the hillside, between the cemetery and Claremont Street, and use binoculars until Joshua told him to stop.

  He shrugged up his collar and ducked out into the rain, which had receded to a light, miserable drizzle. This leg of Claremont had a single streetlight planted in front of 7041, and most of the houses were dark. The street glistened. The only sound was the ambient hiss of moving air-like a stereo turned way up with nothing playing.

  Joshua's chosen vantage was a crack in the curtains near the kitchen on the north side of the house. It was dark enough for him to pick his way through the shadows there with no fear of being spotted by chance from the neighboring house. His rubber boots squished in the saturated grass; the incline from the street to the front porch-about forty feet-made footing iffy, and he would skid if he wasn't careful.

  It had been forty-five minutes since his last check, and the same lights were blazing in the house as before. Joshua assumed his half crouch at the window. There were steam beads on the obverse of the cold glass. Maybe she was bathing.

  The thought of catching a fast cut of Sara Windsor in the buff inspired him to tarry. His basic requirement was to note, each time, that she was alive and moving around and nothing overt had transpired.

  The curtains stirred. Air had moved inside. Joshua's automatic thought was of a door opening and closing, shoving interior air around.

  Through the window, he heard the phone in the hallway ring. He could almost see the little phone table from his position. When Sara talked on the phone; she usually leaned against the opposite wall of the hallway -where he could see her just fine-or dragged the unit on its twenty-five-foot cord to another part of the house. Once, twice, three rings.

  A shadow blocked out the light from the kitchen. It was a man, a big man, clad in black. He had an M-16 with a large nightscope cradled against one arm. He wore black leather gloves.

  Sara stepped out into the hallway, totally naked but for the towel on her head. Joshua saw her from behind. He thought her ass was a touch on the large side, but nice and soft. She had good, long legs.

  He sighed. He was not being paid to intercede.

  As soon as the pair began to exchange words, Joshua humped down the hill to his car. If the guy had come to kill her, he would have wasted her in the hallway and left. They were going to spend some time talking-like the characters in mediocre private-eye fiction always did, explaining the plot to each other.

  The emergency call number was clipped to the visor next to Joshua's spare business cards. Stannard's very curt instructions had not included anything about gunplay, or violence, or maverick risk. Joshua did his job. He would not fire his gun tonight, either. He would do what he was being paid to do. He was good at his profession.

  ***

  Sertha Valich watched Stannard mutter monosyllables into the phone, his body english gradually torquing up. He punched the extension for Horus' quarters, said, "Tell Cannibal we're a go," and hung up.

  The horrifying thing to her, in retrospect, was that during the whole sequence he did not look at her, not once.

  From the moment he had answered the call on the first ring-"Yeah?"-her mind began recording every In-ling. Time would allow the moment to resonate, so she could interpret all of it later.

  Stannard's mad little gig was on, and she was not admit of it. By design or oversight, he was excluding her. In an American movie, at least, this would be the scene in which she would reel off expositional dialogue, explaining for the dullards in the audience all the deadly reasons why Stannard should not embark. You can't go!

  Instead, she thought of the term tactical fuck. She had learned it from Stannard. For him, it meant strategic gain via sexual favor.

  The single memory that stood out-not burning with pain, just there, like a clog in a pipe-was of a rotund and depthless man named Greg Seligman. He had been overweight by fifty pounds, not so much fat as puffy. His shirt buttons put up with a lot of stress. His clothing always appeared fully packed and two sizes shy of comfort. Any exertion, such as rising from his desk chair, caused him to exude sour sweat. To Sertha the droplets always looked yellowish. He insisted on wearing dark plaid shirts that showcased a plague of saltgrain dandruff wildly out of control even though his hair was fluffy and looked as if he washed it once a day. She remembered how the heels of his Bass Weejuns were worn down on the insides because he walked with a slight pigeon-toed cant.

  She also remembered the time Greg Seligman had instructed her to sit on his green desk blotter and raise and spread her legs this way, pointing her toes. She recalled the clamminess of his grip on her hipbones as his undernourished peenie sniffed its way in. His bulk hampered penetration despite her buffet position. He bumped against her pelvis and squirted without making a noise, and the next day Sertha became a client of the Bache Agency. A week after that, she was posing for men's cologne advertisements, and her snowball started rolling apace.

  Greg Seligman had made a big mistake. Thinking the reverse, he had given her power over him. Her air was superior the next time they crossed paths, and he had flushed crimson to the roots of his flaky hair in front of twenty people.

  There was no pain attendant to the memory, no psychological rent, no sense of rough trespass avenged. As a localized memory it was as silly and insubstantial as Greg Seligman himself-an absurd, plump, tiny-minded man who once had something Sertha needed and whose sweat still stank of desperation. Sometimes even the most highborn must swab out their own toilets. At least when you are done the thing is clean again.

  This aligned with Stannard's definition of a tactical fuck.

  The extra access permitted by the conditioned suppleness of Sertha's leg muscles gave her pleasure beyond human speech when Stannard went to work on her. When she thought of making love with him, she always smiled. Now, watching him realizing that the time of madness and firearms was at hand, she saw the power she had given him over her.

  One part of her could appreciate the comer he was in. It was a career crisis-the kind sometimes solvable through tactical fucks. He was facing a showdown with his own public image. The rest of his professional life might depend on how he dealt with Lucas Ellington and how visibly brave he was when he did it. He really had no choice, if he wanted his fans and the media to keep treating him just so. The Rock Wrap incident was a pale hint of the nightmare to come if he did nothing and let "the authorities" take their meandering procedural courses. Running down Lucas Ellington like a cheetah was Stannard's own form of tactical fuck.

  But Sertha had not been consulted, let alone asked.

  So instead of playing the movie scene, with its hyperadrenalated hysteria and bad speeches, she waited until he cradled the receiver and had to look up at her.

  The look in his eyes was defiant, committed. He expected her to protest.

  What her eyes saw was different, and as ominous as a lump in the breast. She saw in his eyes the possibility that she might be used up completely to fuel his mad need for retaliation. He had been burning protein at an astonishing rate and dropping body weight to match. He seemed to exhaust whomever he spoke with. He was taking it anywhere he could get it… and he had not spared her. She extrapolated the sore and scarified condition of her body into the husk it would become if she tried to oppose him now.

  She backed off, lowering her eyes, hating herself for rolling into a surrender position so quickly. She had known physical power games for too long to permit herself anything but an instinctive survival response.

  He took that for an answer and stalked out of the bedroom. Wordlessly.

  Sertha felt weaker than ever. Her knees did not want to bend in the correct directions. A nasty, ice-pick headache made itself at home behind her left eye.


  She stared dully at the telephone. The light board was dead now, inactive.

  Enough time had passed that she would have to unearth her book and page up the number she knew she had to call.

  28

  NO POLICE AWAITED THEM AT the Oildale airfield, but what eventually happened was not pretty.

  Stannard jumped from the Cessna before Horus wheeled it around to full stop. His blood sang with electricity as his white-gold hair flew in the backwash from the twin props. "No cops!" he shouted into the wind. "We caught 'em circle-jerkin!"

  Cannibal Rex refused to budge from the aircraft until it was stilled down to the engine vibrations. He climbed out with a large zippered nylon duffel slung over one shoulder. The finger-bone earring jogged spastically as he wrestled with the bag's weight. When both boots were solid on runway tarmac, he scanned the night and the tiny airstrip from within his murky wraparound shades. So what.

  Before them were two dilapidated hangars of rusty corrugated steel. Fastened to the side of one like a moray on a whale was a battered, single-wide mobile home-a sixteen-footer whose traveling days were long past. Inside it Stannard found a middle-aged fellow tucked into a greasy jumpsuit, feet propped on an old army-issue desk, attention funneled into a dogeared copy of Penthouse that was two years shy of current.

  Above the man's head was a mimeographed sign that read WE DON'T GIVE A DAMN HOW IT S DONE IN LOS ANGELES.

  Stannard knew he should play it broad, firm, and definite. "Hi there." He nailed the man with the intense, ice-blue gaze he kept powered up for the shutterbugs from Rolling Stone and thrust his open hand unavoidably forth. Hicks always thought you could take handshakes to the bank.

  George Kellander's wife, Margie-Marie, had always told him that he tried to do too many things at once. Right now George needed to get his big engineer boots down from the desk, finish dislodging a stray piece of ham from between his two front teeth, put Stacey Butterick (August's Penthouse Pet, a couple of birthdays removed) on hold, and deal with the stranger who'd barged into his little office. George was zipped inside of what Margie-Marie called his "overhaul overall." An oval name tag sewn to the breast declared him to be Georgie O.-O for Oswald, his middle name-in embroidered red script.