The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  The casting genius who had proposed Stannard for the role had opened up a big and enticing door. Parts for rock stars were nothing to write Variety about; it happened a lot. But most were one-shots. David Bowie had been one of the rare exceptions. Tonight, a hero scene in Dos Piedras against a basket case would cinch his movie career and deliver him unto his entire future. Bad boys aged badly, he knew… unless they were versatile enough to switch hit, to shift gears, to ride the breakers of change.

  It could be the perfect melding of fantasy with real life, after which the public would not bother trying to distinguish the difference. To stick his neck up to the knife this way was a fearsome gamble. He felt the physical ache of bluff and bluster versus sinew and gristle. Audiences never believed performers were real people. But tonight the Gabriel Stannard everyone saw on MTV could come to life by daring the old Reaper to do his worst and pulling off a typically audacious Stannard stunt. He would become immortal. Archaeologists would dig up his records and recognize him instantly.

  Yes, he wanted this risk. The kickback would be as staggering as the danger. Past this event, he could relax from proving himself. The words of Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up's Mardi Grassley taunted him: Was Gabriel Stannard sizzle or steak? He promised himself that if he prevailed tonight, he'd toast Mardi Grassley with some ultrafine Taittinger in the back of a limousine. Then he'd charm her clothes off. Then he'd kick her smug rump out into the middle of die intersection of Doheny and Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night. He wondered how tough it would be to have a camera crew waiting there in readiness.

  What he was about to do could pave the road to bigger and better lies for all and enough media attention to get supremely drunk on. He could ride the afterglow for a decade. If he won.

  He shoved all this from his head. Get ice, as Jackson Knox used to say constantly. Get control.

  "Too bad there aren't any decent rock stations in this neck o' the swamp," he said, pointing at the Charger's dashboard radio. Now that he had located the hillside path, he would arrive at his destination in less time than it took to listen to one of his own hit singles.

  Reflectors winked just ahead in mirrored crimson. Everybody steeled for impact, but Stannard decided to slow down. A car was parked on the path. The single headlight revealed that it was unoccupied. It was a metallic-brown, mud-splattered Bronco, pulled over with its port wheels in one of the road ruts, leaning against the rise of the hill at an angle that barely

  permitted passage on the right side.

  "Be a shame to get traffic jammed now," Stannard grumped. Horus craned to peer inside the Bronco as they passed. In the backseat, Cannibal Rex snapped the action on the Auto Nag again. He loved doing that; it sounded so bad.

  The door handles of the two vehicles whispered within two inches of each other. "Probably teenyboppers," said Horus. "Fucking or doping."

  "My fans." Stannard hollered. "My boys, my girls, my lovely leather ladies. Hope they're banging each other to 'Maneater.' "

  Just ahead was a barrier of posts twined with barbed wire. A rusty NO TRESPASSING sign hung from one comer. Beyond that was a brief drop to the dead end of Claremont. The street was quiet, utterly suburban… except for the sheriff's car and the two uniforms hunkered down behind it.

  "Aww, shit." Stannard seemed let down and pumped up at the same time. He geared the Charger into reverse and backed up, killing his single headlight. "Cannibal, let's do it."

  Cannibal Rex laid the Auto Mag on the seat beside him and opened up the black duffel, handing Horus the laser-sighted American 180 plus an extra clip. Horus checked it swiftly and professionally. He preferred a light rapid-fire weapon if it had to come down to guns. Cannibal withdrew the SPAS-12 riot gun and began slotting rounds of number-three buckshot into the magazine. Then he chambered the first shell and handed the gun over the seat. Stannard tucked it barrel down between the door and the bucket he was sitting in. Cannibal hooked a few of the flash-pop stun grenades into the button holes on his fatigue jacket. Then he handed over something small and heavy Horus had not seen before. The dark man's eyebrows went up.

  Stannard unzipped his jeans and rummaged around inside his leopard panties, nesting some small and deadly failsafe right next door to his notorious penis. Then he buttoned up, and Cannibal handed over an inhaler from which Stannard took several long, deep draws.

  "Rocket fuel," Stannard said, exhaling slowly, feeling his bloodstream run through the high RPMs. "Okay, we got cops. Don't kill anybody. But let me get to the house."

  "Let's do some crimes," Cannibal muttered, anxious to get on with it.

  "That's it?" said Horus.

  "That's it." Stannard grinned. They all sat unmoving for a beat, idling; then, with all the power his rockstar vocal chords and deep-dish diaphragm could expel, he screamed:

  "Banzai!!"

  -and with a brain-rattling roar the Charger sucked up the slack on the trail, plowed through the fence, and crashed down onto North Claremont Street in a landslide of bushes, rocks, and mud-fill, accumulating speed in a crank-spiked flurry, ass-whipping right to left, smoke billowing from the wheel wells, long whiskers of barbed wire streaming backward from the car's chromium teeth.

  The cops less than a block away were already pulling their iron as Stannard floored it and the opposite end of the street filled up with speeding police cars.

  32

  CHRIS CARPENTER HAD NEVER SEEN his dad's buddy K. C. Dew move his fat old ass so fast in his life.

  The ululation of approaching sirens had suddenly been flooded out by the crash of splintering timber and the screech of bumper steel scratching sparks on blacktop. Chris looked up, and a lone headlight like the demon eyeball of the Hellhound Train lit his face, a fiery meteor coming at them full speed from the dead end of Claremont Street.

  "Jesus H.," yelled K. C., sounding as though a manure truck had just unloaded into his swimming pool. "What the Christ have we got here?"

  Then the fanfare of engines drowned him out.

  K. C. put the flat of his hand in the center of Chris' chest and shoved, wresting away the riot gun in the younger man's grip. Chris sprawled butt-wise in the rainwater as the single headlight nailed them, trailing sparks, singing THE END.

  K. C. rolled and brought up the shotgun, allowing that critical quarter-second to verify intent, a deadly eyeblink of calm reserved for the violently baptized. When there was no mistaking the lethal trajectory of the Charger, he pumped and discharged 2 three-inch rounds right down its throat in less than a second. The car went nose first into the street, collapsing onto its front rims and yawing wildly around to the left. One wheel disengaged and rolled off into the brush. K. C. was already loping toward it as it completed its one eighty and ground to a stop, leaving its parts in a trail behind it. A mag wheel bent into a potato-chip shape spun on the street like a fat silver dollar, clanging. Smoke rose from the rims, and the perforated radiator pissed steam into the wet night air. The phantom sniper in the front window of 7764 North Claremont had been momentarily upstaged, and as K. C. approached the crippled Charger, the far end of the street became clogged with a convoy of police cars. Chris was still sitting on his ass in a puddle.

  Then everything lit up.

  The men in the car ducked and covered as the flash-pop stun grenade dropped out the window by Cannibal Rex did its blinding trick. Chris Carpenter got his head slapped against his cruiser by the concussion and slid into unconsciousness with supernovae blotting out his vision. K. C. was lifted into the air, arms swanning, and landed spread-eagled in the street. When he was still, blood began to trickle out of his ears.

  The final treat out of Cannibal Rex's goodie bag was Stannard's standby Magnum revolver. Stannard gripped it in one hand and the SPAS-12 riot gun in the other, kicked back his door, and began to sprint for the front lawn while everyone was still reeling.

  Horus and Cannibal Rex piled out of the far side of the wrecked Charger and brought their weapons to bear just as the police convoys shrieked in, nose-to, i
n defensive slide stops. Officers hurried into position; weapons were aimed back.

  Stannard dodged around the front of K. C. Dew's cruiser, his biceps feeling dumbbell stress from the hardware he was lugging while trying to run. He paid no attention to the voice that now barked at him through a bullhorn. It told him to stop. Jesus, how pat could you get?

  Then it told him to drop his weapon, and he did. As he passed the front grille, the short barrel of the riot gun whanged crookedly off one of the ram bumpers and spun beneath the car. There was no time to scoop it up. Stannard did not break speed; half the front lawn was gone now, and he still had his trusty Magnum. The bullhorn told him that the lawn was dangerous. No gun-waving cops tried to intercept him even though the odds were tilted and he was wide open.

  Providence could be questioned later. For now, he ran-building to a full-bore fullback charge, his muscular legs gnawing the distance down to nothing, the leather thongs on his deerskin shirt whipping his face.

  The cops already had a million problems. They had to secure the street, to protect residents and themselves from the firepower in the hands of Horus and Cannibal Rex as well as Lucas Ellington. Would they blow him down on the lawn, a moving target in the dark?

  Apparently not. The bullhorn wailed on, echoing in the rain, but he no longer found it intelligible. He took the porch steps two at a time, hit the planks, and rolled, his boots crashing into the wall and rattling the front door. He crouched below the porch rail, between the windows, where the cops would not be able to pick him off if they changed their tiny minds.

  As he was fond of saying to his concert audiences, it looked a lot like it was showtime.

  "What do you think?'' Horus said.

  "Mexican standoff," said Cannibal Rex, grinning like a person who has truly lost his mind. His wraparounds captured the strobelight glare of the police flashbars, and his deformed picking hand now caressed the trigger of the Auto Mag. He wanted to play a killer solo in the worst way.

  From his crouch near the wheelless right front well of the Charger, Horus knew the police could see his laser spot dancing around on their cars. The rain and atmospheric conditions might hamper the sight; fog was murder on lasers. He also saw the bright blue flashbar of an ambulance, riding higher than those of the police cruisers, pull up and stop far to the rear. Major badness was slowly forming out of the storm, taking a shape, making ready to do violence. "No shooting," he admonished the coke-snorting maniac next to him. "Not unless we have to. Our job is to hold them back, keep them from interfering-that's all."

  "He made it to the front porch," Cannibal whined. "He's got his piece. What the fuck. Let's rock'n'roll." The bone earring caught random light as he mock-sighted the big pistol.

  In Horus' brain, the options had already been weighed. Stannard had burdened him with Cannibal as backup. Cannibal was too hyper, not reliable, but Horus would do what Stannard asked. He was therefore a free agent to render Cannibal expendable if he proved to be a hindrance. The adrenalated jabber coming at him was not a good sign. If Cannibal Rex wanted to play bad guy, Horus would see it in his eyes, in the slight jump of his finger on a steel trigger. There was plenty of time to kill Cannibal Rex with a head blow before he got the chance to hurt someone.

  Oblivious to everything but his gun and the game, Cannibal Rex emptied his inhaler into his skull and tossed it away. It clicked and rolled on the street.

  "That's littering," said Horus.

  "Aw, another law broken. Damned shame."

  Then the music started, and everybody on both sides shut their traps. It was loud and distorted, the bass notes penetrating the rainfall, and it was blasting out of Sara Windsor's house.

  The singing voice was Gabriel Stannard's, and the song was "Riptide," Whip Hand's first hit single.

  Raindrops rolled forward off the gray sedan as it stopped sharply, its headlights inches from the rear of a van-type ambulance. The sniper saw two paramedics in orange jerseys leaning against the port side of their unit, smokes in hand. They seemed unconcerned, wanting nothing to do with gunfire or blocking strays. They were here only to plug up the bleeding or body-bag the dead and so turned their backs on the standoff to stare into the empty field on the far side of Claremont.

  ***

  The sniper sniffed trouble up at the point, the head of the cluster of law enforcement vehicles. If he ventured forward to scope things out, the locals would involve him… and he might not get to do his job. The paramedics saw him and decided to squat down to continue their conversation. Past that, they gave him no notice as he stepped off the pavement and was swallowed up by the rain-sprinkled darkness of the open field.

  His boots grabbed the mulch, and the ground soon began to slope away and become pocky. No fun, to blunder into a chuckhole out here and maybe turn an ankle.

  So many deadly weapons had come out into the chill night air. It was time for him to unsheath his own, in the name of civil good.

  He fixed on Sara Windsor's house. He'd scanned the available maps and diagrams. He made his way toward his predetermined optimum vantage, unshouldering his waterproof case.

  Most police tactical teams favored bolt-action Remingtons in the 800 series for sniper duty, but modern firearms technology was working to unseat bolt guns and forward thinking was important to the sniper. Most sniping ops, he knew, were within a hundred yards of the target, and his weapon of choice was a nightmare of accuracy for three times that distance. He unsleeved it with practiced-in-the-dark precision, careful not to snag the premounted opticals.

  The sniper was an adept. He knew his job, and he respected history.

  Once upon a time, in the late 1950s, a team of designers under Eugene Stoner fabricated a rifle-and-cartridge combination and pushed it hard at a government anxious to provide its dog soldiers with a weapon more modem than the standard field issue of the Second World War. The gun was designated AR-15, and used high-velocity.22-caliber ammo. The Air Force Security Police used it to replace a variety of rifles and submachine guns, and the army followed suit by ordering the guns for use by Special Forces trainers. In Indochina they achieved the status of legend. The Viet Cong offered rewards in gold to anyone who captured one of the fabled Black Rifles. The mythos was pumped by horror stories of the buzz-saw damage the AR-15's whirling slugs could wreack on a human body. President Kennedy kept one of the guns on his yacht, for shooting sharks. As the war escalated and Indochina began to be called Vietnam by the news personalities, the military's need for a smaller and more manipulable infantry weapon caused the AR-15 to be tagged for service use under the new designation M-16.

  For the Dos Piedras assignment, the sniper had chosen a customized Insight Systems AR-I. It was based on the AR-15. Its power was guaranteed by the heavier 7.62-millimeter cartridges it fired; its accuracy, by the sniper's personal hot-rodding. He had replaced the "vanilla" plastic stock with one of glass-filled, injection-molded polymer. It was padded by a thick neoprene collar that could warm his cheek and make the whole package less slippery. He had covered the front grip with a steel-backed National Match handguard of dense, shock-absorbing foam. The position and terrain denied him the use of the Harris bipod, his "crutch." This shot would have to be made from a free-standing position.

  He flicked on his optics and test-sighted the Windsor front porch. The gridwork of the Thompson Contender scope came alive in red-another personal modification. His line of fire bisected the no man's land currently in force between the crippled Charger and the barricade of police cars thirty yards away. At this range, the sniper could have turned Cannibal Rex's bald head into lasagna with a single shot. But that was not what he had come for.

  He tracked the reticle across the front windows, right to left. All were shaded. A shadow scared briefly across the one nearest the front door.

  He saw Gabriel Stannard move.

  The shooting gloves kept his hands warm and his fingers free. Just as the sprinkles of rain began to get more ambitious, he shouldered the AR-I, maneuvered his toothpi
ck around to the far edge of his mouth, and sighted.

  God, he thought, I love my job.

  ***

  Lucas knew a Gabriel Stannard entrance when he saw one.

  Pinning the two sheriffs down behind their own cruiser had been simple. While one end of the street choked up with blinking gumball lights, the opposite end had filled up with the furor of Stannard's arrival. Mild surprise was Lucas' only reaction as he watched the jacked-up, overpowered street machine vault from nowhere, from the place of graves, to touch down in his field of fire. Guessing who was at its helm was no quiz. He felt sorry for the cops-those poor suckers were caught in the eye of a shitstorm they could comprehend only in the broadest procedural terms. They would not care about his back-story or the neat fit of the events about to happen. Now they were faced off by Stannard's own assault force, two men holding twenty-five at bay. Lucas had factored the police into his scenario, and it looked like Stannard had, too. The authorities were not stupid… they just had no idea of how it was supposed to go.

  Lucas kept shy of the windows to avoid possible sharpshooters. The police had information, and none had dared to intercept Stannard on the front lawn because they were aware that at Lucas' Point Pitt cabin a man had bought the farm courtesy of a land mine, and they had seen how Jackson Knox had died. None of them would be eager to step down hard on turf that had not yet been swept for explosives.

  There were no mines salted into Sara's front yard.

  The older sheriff had been a man with a considerable bag of cojones. Lucas had watched him face down the oncoming Charger with the steady cool of a toreador dispatching an uppity bull. Through the Nitefinder scope, Lucas had seen K. C. Dew's tongue protruding from his lips in concentration as he gunned down the vehicle, tearing away its front tires with his second expert shot. Then Claremont Street had come alive with cop cars.