The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  "Then that crazy religious nut chanced along, and I said to myself, perfect. Perfect. I could stop with clean hands. Except for…"

  "The girl at the cabin." She was gambling, and she knew it. "You were avenging Kristen, and all of a sudden you got Kristen back. And that meant you'd get your old life back. And that might lead all the way back to Cory, and Cory wasn't good for you, so-''

  "You're not so smart, Sara," he snapped. "You think you know every goddamned thing. Well, you don't." The M-16 swung back up, and Sara felt as though she had attracted the unwanted attention of a cobra. "You don't at all. You just don't understand. Kristen was…" He stopped, sighed, then refocused on her with something like anger. "You made me forget things at that hospital. You took away elements that I needed to remember. You convinced me, with your psychiatric horseshit, that my little girl Kristen was perfect and I was mourning her loss so bad I wanted to kill myself. You took Kristen out of my head and laundered her and stuck her back in."

  He had seemed so broken, so consumed with guilt. Sara had wanted to help him up out of the black well of depression. The man's wife had overdosed on pills and left him a note reading DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT. Then his teenage daughter had gotten killed at the Whip Hand show. This was all true, a matter of record. And Lucas had pulled that stunt on the courthouse steps with the plastic gun, as if in deadly presagement of what was to follow a year later. Gabriel Stannard had been scarred, marked by his future murderer. Lucas had been driven by love for his daughter.

  Hadn't he?

  Cory had committed suicide. Remember, Burt had said, he was seeing other women after she died.

  What other women? Where were they now?

  Pow! The pine knot exploded in the fireplace, scattering embers.

  "Kristen had to be watched constantly. Or she'd tell. Eventually, she'd tell. She was not the little angel you reinvented her as, Sara. You messed with my head. You changed my reality. And look what has happened."

  "Lucas." She tried to stay calm, level, reasoned. "Lucas, what did Cory's suicide note really mean?"

  He thought about this, like a man who sees the inevitable barreling toward him and realizes he'll have to tell because time is leaking away. No force could stop it.

  "I wrote the note," he said.

  Lucas had written DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT in a flawless mimic of Cory's hand. She was blamed. What was all her fault?

  "We don't have a whole lot of time, you and I, Sara," he said after checking the windows again. "He's coming here. There'll be cops and noise and madness."

  "Lucas-listen to me. What did you have to do with Cory's death?" The idea that Lucas had killed his wife rose like a ghost seeking trouble. "I'll take care of you. Nothing'll happen to you if you just-"

  "I didn't kill Cory," he overrode, working up anger. "Killing Cory was Kristen's idea."

  He knew about the nightmare glitter in Kristen's eyes. It was the same queer golden light he'd seen in her eyes as she watched him hold the knifepoint to Cory's temple and feed her the red pills, one at a time…

  "Kristen never really came back, not really, not back up from the grave," he said. "I would be crazy if I believed that. The girl's name was Cass. She was everything Kristen could not be. More, really." Then, almost as a whimsical afterthought, he added, "She was much better in bed than Kristen. She wanted to take care of me. She didn't care if I killed people…"

  Sara's stomach became an elevator car that dropped into freefall for twenty floors, then got hung up in its own cables and bounced to a gut-imploding halt. Mere feet from the fire, she began shivering. She thought of Lucas' mind, literally evolving to a malignant third level while the technicians at Olive Grove watched, secure in the knowledge that they were curing him. And the truth had backed up so far in his brain that the pressure was seeking any vent. It was pouring out of him now and reminded her of her pathetic assessment of her own love life. Once it had been Lucas who was going to help save her. Now she watched the fragile jackstraw structure of her planned future begin to drop parts and buckle.

  "It was rage, at first, I was so angry with Cory. Then I was angry at Kristen. I…"

  Sara's imagination sketched in a picture in nightmare chiaroscuro, of Lucas attacking his thirteen-year-old daughter following their murder of his wife, then-

  "I was going to stop, but I wanted to… and I thought she would stop me, and instead she wanted it, she liked it, she begged me for it…"

  - then becoming trapped by Kristen, who had clearly been the product of her parents' union, the sum of both their minds and personalities, a combination of potentials for disaster and tragedy patiently waiting for the right catalyst-

  "And I got Kristen back, just like in the dream; in the dream I was able to change things if I put my mind to it, and I changed what happened at that concert and got Kristen back again. I did it in the dream a million times, then I did it in real life. And it worked. But I…''

  - to cause an explosion.

  "Sara, I didn't know what to do next. It got all foggy. So here I am. Help me."

  He sagged into the plush chair across from her, the M-16 across his knees now, perhaps her biggest victory so far in this exchange. Sara had to remind herself how to inhale.

  "Maybe we program flaws into our lives," he said. "Maybe it's just another pattern, another cycle moving through predetermined motions with nothing to stop it. Once it starts, it has to play itself out. And now he's coming here. Don't ask me how I know. I know."

  ''Lucas, if you're talking about Burt, that was probably him on the phone a moment ago. He was going to get a Ranger to take him up to your cabin to check on you again the day after we both went up. I thought the girl there might be lying."

  "Then Burt is probably dead now." Lucas said this with a lack of inflection that was chilling. It was just another cog turning in the clockwork pattern.

  She couldn't let it faze or stop her. "Then the police, Lucas. I spoke with them in San Francisco. They've probably guessed you'd come here."

  "They don't matter. The firepower's mostly for them."

  "Then who-" Sara caught herself. "You mean Gabriel Stannard? But how would he know to come here?" She had not thought of this before, and now, inexplicably, it scared her. "Why come here, especially if he knows you're after him?"

  "He has to. He's a self-made badass. He has to prove himself, walk through the fire now, or his fans will vanish. He has to take me on and win. He wants to kill me for the same reason I wanted to waste the rest of Whip Hand… and with that kind of motive, I'm sure he knows just as much as, if not more than, the police do. And that's another reason for coming here, Sara. In ruse I don't survive. I'll need you to tell everyone what happened. You're the only person I can really trust, you know."

  "He's coming here?" Disbelieving, Sara was out of her chair without thinking. This madness had to be cut out, and now.

  "Sit down!" he roared in her face, springing up, the M 16 ready to rip her in half with its deadly Teflon loads. In an instant his face had turned vulpine, wolfish. Before Sara now was an unstable and heavily armed man who had not twitched an eyelid at rape, at incest, at murder, at the thought of the death of his best friend.

  Sara sat back down as though yanked, the blood draining away from her complexion, her knees watery and quaking. She was going to die, and she was trapped in her favorite chair with no clothes on.

  Lucas simmered for a couple of beats, nearly panting, reining his control. "Just sit. We sit and we wait for this cycle to finish itself. And don't worry, Sara- You're doing your job in the best way. You're helping me to eliminate those nightmares for good."

  As he spoke they heard the first sirens, distantly.

  30

  THE CHARGER ENCOUNTERED THE HIGHWAY patrol roadblock just as the rain turned nasty again. Two growlers were nosed into a V formation with about three feet between their grilles. Two men in yellow rain slickers reluctantly got out to do their duty, as th
ey had for every car on this road for the past hour. Datafax copies of Gabriel Stannard, Horus, and Lucas Ellington were clipped to the visor in each car.

  Stannard geared down, cutting speed to fifty. "Poor fuckers,'' he mumbled. The battle light had settled into his eyes. "Get the Auto Mag."

  Cannibal Rex dug through the black duffel and brought up the blued automatic.44.

  "When I do my trick, cripple those." His manner indicated the police cars; his eyes could just as easily have been saying "Kill them." Cannibal grinned and worked the action to chamber the first slug.

  The officers in their frisbee-brimmed, Glad-bagged hats had split to approach the Charger from both sides as Stannard slowed. Their reaction time when he shifted into first and stamped down was good. The car's fat radials ate wet pavement, and the cops backtracked several paces. Stannard stood on the brake and cranked the doughnut steering wheel sharply.

  The Charger was a pre-oil-shortage extravagance, a gas gobbler big on size and performance. The trunk must have been weighted with cinder blocks, because the mags barely squeaked whenever Stannard laid on the petrol. Old Clyde Kellander had hot-rodded his car well.

  The car spun sideways. The cops were uncertain. It could be a loss of control on the wet road.

  The tail of the Charger swung like a hammer and demolished the right front fender of one cruiser, folding the metal and jamming it through the tire, which burst with a gunshot noise and flattened. The cops dived for the embankments on either side of the road. Next they would be clawing for their service revolvers.

  Cannibal Rex leaned out the window on Horus' side and put a huge Magnum slug into the engine block of the second cruiser, right through the hood. Only the monster Magnum was capable of penetrating all that heavy metal.

  The cops ducked for cover, squirming around in the slimy mud of the embankment as Stannard put the car in motion. The Charger charged, slewing around the leftmost cruiser and tearing twin traction ruts out of the shoulder. Bilge spewed skyward and came down in a brown rain. Stannard saw one of the patrolmen's eyes go as big as tea saucers when he concluded that the Charger was trying to flatten him. He dove facedown into the pool from which he had just risen.

  Another spin of the doughnut, hard over, and the Charger fishtailed back onto the road with a dragster screech of tires and instantly generated distance, farting thousands of highway stripes. Before the hypos could run for their radios, it was slot-car size in the dim, rainy distance on the road to Dos Piedras.

  Quiet approval settled over Horus' face. He enjoyed violence that solved problems without loss of life. His right hand was firm on the door handle, to maintain equilibrium through all the thrashing around. "You do know where we are going," he said, "don't you?"

  "I think I bought my grandmother a house up here," said Stannard, his forward view unconcerned with obstacles. The Charger's needle crawled back toward the century mark. "There's street, Claremont, that runs parallel to Center Avenue on the other side of a hill. Claremont is backed into the hillside. The house we want is about two-thirds of the way up Claremont." Joshua Knopf's directions had been very specific. "He's holed up in there. By the time those cops back there call us in, we'll be there. The rain'll slow 'em down. There's a goat path that dumps into Claremont from the far side. I think we can get away with using that. Hope it's not flooded."

  Four blocks shy of the right turn that would put them on Center Avenue, a county sheriff's vehicle ass-slid into the rearview mirror, lights and siren popping on in an all-out, berserk maniac code three, making tracks behind the Charger like a puma running a rabbit to ground.

  "Shit." Stannard was actually amazed their luck had carried them this far. His hands tensed on the doughnut wheel, and the Charger charged again, a bull seeing red.

  ***

  Miles behind, in the trailer office of the Oildale Airstrip, George O. Kellander finally got around to phoning his son Clyde. With the conspiratorial glee of a twelve-year-old, he told Clyde that his news was man-to-man stuff and not for the ears of his mom, who would not understand anyway.

  "You remember that gashog Charger with no muffin?"

  Clyde's teenaged sigh said, Why shouldn't I remember my own fucking car? But he was still living at home, at least until next summer, and in the Kellander household the fathers still used three-inch belts. "You place the ad, finally?"

  "Better." George had Stannard's hundred-dollar bills lined up, two bills high, eight bills across, sixteen hundred bucks' worth of good news right next to the fingerprinty centerspread of Stacey Butterick. "We don't need no ad. I just sold it to some hippie queer from Los An-gee-lees for a thousand bucks. Split it with you, fifty-fifty."

  Clyde whistled through his teeth. His mother was in the front room dozing through a movie on CBS and probably could not overhear, but he whispered anyway. "You want me to come pick you up? You ain't got no wheels there." He wished he'd had the opportunity to strip some of the frills from the Charger's powerhouse before his dad had sold it. But five hundred bucks was more than twice what he expected his cut to be, and delays often made for no-sales.

  "Come on in about ten o'clock. I got paperwork."

  Clyde knew that this meant his dad was most likely going to spend the next hour warming a toilet seat. "I'll bring the Camaro," he said.

  "Good." George hung up.

  George Kellander had not lied to Stannard about his truck being in the shop. What he had neglected to mention in his quaint rural way was that he and Clyde owned five other functional automobiles between them, including a refurbished 1968 Mustang with a police chaser engine and a classic 1967 Camaro with Nauga-hyde buckets and fuzzy dice.

  Clyde wondered whether he'd left half a lid of stale marijuana in the Charger and decided it did not matter. He was already spending his five hundred bucks in his mind, wondering how in hell his father had really wrangled a grand for the Charger.

  ***

  They burned intersections and red lights like a seven-year-old gobbling potato chips, and when Stannard's cold blue eyes checked the mirror again, he had to look hard to make sure he was not seeing a double image. A second sheriff's car had sprung into view, bobbing in and out behind the first one. They'd been whistled up by the highway patrol. Stannard was willing to bet cash that the call-in had neglected to mention how he had turned two chase cars into scrap steel back on Route 5. Two more junkers wouldn't change the course of history. He put his foot down. The acceleration mashed Horus and Cannibal Rex into their seats.

  The cop cars hung on about a block back and would have gained had they not slowed and swerved twice for other cars and once for a pedestrian in the rain. Stannard didn't bother.

  The turnoff on DeLacy had to be sacrificed. Stannard kept his contingency plan foremost in his mind as he burned up Fifth Street and hung a gliding, smoking skid turn past the One Stop convenience mart on northbound Weaver Avenue. The One Stop clerk, a college student named Abel Langtry, gawked at the car chase as it hurricaned past in the rain. His only customer, a ten-year-old named Dennis Chambers who had tarried late to fill the store's Slime Wars videogame with quarters, took the opportunity to pocket three Milky Ways free and clear.

  It could be said that religion was the buffer between Olive Grove, where the stores were, and Dos Piedras, where the residences were. Weaver Avenue featured five houses of worship. Their differences were cosmetic. The last church on Weaver Avenue was the imposing Grace

  Methodist, which was backed into a scenic, rolling hilltop. Grace Methodist Church was Gabriel Stannard's contingency plan. He'd seen it once and known immediately what might be done with its layout.

  The church was at the end of the street. From there, one turned right onto Center Avenue to get over the hill and onto Claremont, or left, which led to a winding, tree-lined drive of five minutes that emptied back onto Highway 5. When Stannard caught Weaver Avenue, the chase cars would assume he was headed back for the highway. Other units were already enroute to Claremont. If he was foolish enough to hang a right, h
e'd find cops waiting to scoop him up.

  The pilot of the lead chaser was alone and busy calling in his hot pursuit when he was forced to drop his mike and match the speed turn Stannard had made onto Weaver Avenue from Fifth. The two sheriffs in the second car, as well as One Stop clerk Abel Langtry and ace shoplifter Dennis Chambers, all watched as the lead car angled into the rain-slicked, double-wide street, slid wide, and started spinning. It plowed into a row of three cars parked slantwise in front of the post office and mangled all of them. Fiberglas and chrome shrapnel sprayed into the street. The first car was goosed up onto the sidewalk. The police crash bumper banged a mailbox loose from its bolting; it fell onto its wide-mouthed face with a loud ashcan noise and lay there like a dead robot, bent feet sticking out. The car settled creakingly onto its left rims as the driver tried vainly to focus his vision on the passenger door and crawl out of it. A pair of late-night postal customers, checking their boxes, peeked timidly out to see how their cars had been customized.

  Several blocks away, the convoy of police vehicles-from Vista View Park piled through the intersection of Fifth and DeLacy, bearing down on Center Avenue and, beyond it, Claremont Street. Everybody's target.

  Watching the deputy ahead of him botch it caused the pilot of the second chase car to think hard about his repertoire of aggressive driving techniques. He nearly clipped the ass of the wrecked cruiser as Weaver Avenue tried to spin his car, too. It almost ended ugly, right there. Nearly and almost, he thought as he began to hydroplane, only counted in mortar attacks. He corrected deftly, then put his pedal down on the straightaway just as Stannard had. Churches blurred past.

  Stannard saw in the mirror that he had dropped a cop. Only a single chaser was sniffing his tailpipes. Then Weaver Avenue suddenly ran out for everybody.

  The Charger scorched up the inclined parking verge of Grace Methodist and hit the front walk at one hundred miles an hour. When the pavement quit, the wheels left the ground and the car spent a scary half second in flight over a row of concrete planters. Stannard cut loose a throat-rawing war whoop as Clyde Kellander's pet Charger went airborne, and everybody aboard clamped on for dear life. A planter clipped by one of the rear wheels exploded. The highballing half ton of Detroit steel crashed down and chewed turf, destroying a decomposed fence and spitting white pickets rearward. Sod and mud fanned out in the car's wake as traction was wrenchingly reestablished. The headlights played over the oncoming row of graveyard markers, throwing jittering shadows.