The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Sara was still mute in her chair by the fireplace. Soon her fear would kick over into anger, and he would not be able to cow her. She would attack.

  Several times she had started to speak, then fallen silent. She was still mustering strength. He did not want to kill her.

  The brilliant phosphorous white-out of the flash-pop had frozen everybody. Stannard's men were well packed, and Stannard had come upon the house with the speed of a Fury… but almost no weaponry. Lucas' eyes had recovered from the grenade burn in time to see him drop the shotgun. Soon he would be without his six-gun as well.

  More sirens, distantly. Backup; maybe the fire department.

  He ripped open a black Velcroed flap pocket on his pants leg and produced a cassette. It was time to get down to it.

  Stannard's cheek was almost admirable; he'd made it, the crazy son of a bitch.

  The phone in the hallway began to ring again, and Sara's now-sunken eyes sought it each time it made noise. Lucas walked over to where she sat.

  "That'll be the police, outside," he said. "They want to know if you're all right, what I want, all that good B-movie stuff. Let's give them a little easy listening instead." He handed her the cassette. "Play it loud."

  She reached, then snatched her hand back to reinforce her falling towel. Then she slotted the tape into her stereo, notched up the volume, and hit Play.

  There was a huge piece of smoky quartz on the glass shelf next to the cassette deck. It was a hexagonal chunk with bubbles inside of it. It would make an awkward weapon, and Sara estimated she would get halfway across the room before Lucas chopped her down with his unstoppable Teflon slugs.

  Lucas was nearly gone from the world, totally removed. A changeling had been substituted, a malign, alien creature that looked like Lucas and had his voice… but one that found more joy in the passion play about to enact than any salvation she might offer. It was Lucas with his emotions deleted, or, more to the point, Lucas with his emotional equipment reduced to the level of tools, used to get what he wanted. Needed, now.

  She wanted to say no, to say that it had to stop now. But the stereo emitted an abrasive opening riff, and

  Gabriel Stannard began to screech about getting caught in the riptide.

  She knew what her mind was doing. It was converting Lucas into an enemy so she could goose herself into action and dispose of him. It was converting him into something she would not mind eliminating. Deep love relationships frequently evoked a similar pattern. Broken lovers circumvented trauma and the depression of loss by redefining the former partner in the most repulsive terms possible-not exactly a healing process so much as a survival mechanism. Her mind whittled away at him inexorably, changing him as much as he was changing himself. It was like a steadily brightening light. Soon it would be blinding.

  Surrender would accomplish Lucas nothing. The police were obviously girded for a massacre; they wanted shooting to start, because it would simplify their options. There was no leniency in the face of a SWAT madman. At this point Lucas was armed, dangerous, homicidal. The only reason the police had not stormed her house was because they needed to know if she was alive; that was why the phone had started ringing. Their need for her to be alive would diminish as time ground onward.

  Even if Lucas got what he wanted, he could never escape. Why was he stamping PAID IN FULL on his death certificate this way?

  Lucas had mentioned cycles closing. He had no plan beyond what was to transpire here in her house, tonight. Unless…

  Stannard came juggernauting in to impact with the wall opposite the porch balustrade outside. Lucas hurried to crack a shade and take a peek.

  … unless Lucas survived, and was hospitalized, so the cycle could start all over again.

  She realized, abruptly and defenselessly, what

  would have befallen her if she and Lucas had gotten together in Los Angeles, "gotten to know each other better," as the lie went, gone to bed together at the time she had craved it, made love at the moment she needed tactile reassurance worse than any ache she had ever felt. She would not be breathing now.

  He raised his voice to penetrate the raucous Whip Hand tune and beckoned her to the door. The rifle came up. "The man of the hour is at your front door, Sara. Why don't you let him in?"

  33

  THE DOOR OPENED TO A slit of light, and Gabriel Stannard saw a nude lady. Already things inside him were fighting to jump their hinges.

  "What you want to do," said a voice, "is to crawl inside slowly, on your hands and knees. Push the gun ahead of you with the knuckles of your hand. Any frills, and I'll blow your spine out your asshole. Stick your head up any farther, and the cops down there will probably do the same."

  A hot animal odor pulsed from him, the smell of lions on the sedge coming right out of his pores. Astrologically, he was a Leo; Sertha had told him that one day he would have to live up to it. The audiences did not know Gabriel Stannard was for real. Now he could feel how real his blood was. Cannibal Rex's dope charge fizzed away in his veins like champagne.

  Conscious that the eyes watching him were wired to a trigger finger, he set the Magnum down uncocked and scooted through the doorway as instructed.

  Hard, stringy, seesaw guitar riffs cranked hard into the night. Behind them, his own voice, seven years younger. His heart had begun its own manic drum solo, and his system throbbed with the onrushing intoxication he felt in concert, where he controlled his audiences, got them to show their hands and jump up and down. When he exhorted the ladies down front to toss him their underwear, by Christ, they stripped down and did it.

  The naked lady shut the door, and before he could ask what kind of weird fucking scene this was, the M-16 was sniffing the bridge of his nose.

  The woman, the doctor, had a look about her that said she had seen two autopsy films too many. There was a fire going in the hearth. And towering above him, armed and all in black, was the man who had given him the permanent scar through his right eyebrow.

  The moment was perfect for him to tuck his elbow, roll, pluck up the Magnum, and blow the psycho's gray matter all over the foyer. The drugs, twanging and rippling through his muscle tissue, cut loose.

  At the instant Stannard's body moved, Lucas stomped down hard on his other hand, anchoring him to the polished wood floor and arresting any hope of momentum. The muzzle of the M-16 swung away as a booted foot shot around to shut Stannard's face with a thud and the click of chipping dental work.

  The singer fell back onto his butt, both hands clamped over his mouth and muffling a guttural noise of rage. His eyes shone at Lucas in the firelight, a bright, glazed blue. Lucas' eyes assessed him in turn and found no threat.

  He stooped and easily retrieved the revolver. At the sight of his own blood oozing between his fingers, Stannard made another inarticulate growl and almost charged. The M-16 kept him right where he was, huddled against the front door. After a second he searched his gums with his fingers and came up with a chunk of broken tooth. He stared at it as though it were a sliver of ice from Saturn's rings.

  "You shouldn't swear with your mouth full," said Lucas, motioning with the gun. "Over by the fireplace, back to the wall. And stay on your hands and knees. Now."

  The bass beat from the stereo made the floor buzz. Stannard was aware that as he crawled, he was almost able to sneak his hand down into the crotch of his jeans. Almost.

  "I expected more," Lucas half shouted, enunciating so his voice penetrated the instrumental bridge of the song. "Don't you have a speech? Something more flamboyant?"

  Stannard's jaw felt like broken concrete. He slid around, backed against the warm bricks near the fireplace. With effort, he said, "You saw the video. Or you wouldn't be here. You're the same way…"

  More of his cockiness leaked away when the expression in Lucas' eyes told him that he had not seen "Maneater."

  C'mon, bad man-take me down if you can

  The message had gone unreceived.

  "You're totally in the dark, aren't you?" Luc
as said. "You're so self-involved you don't even know why you're here. Is this the persona, the phony image, the lie you foist on children that makes them die?"

  Stannard knew that explaining his movie deal and his need to maintain his record as the singer with the most covers in the history of Circus magazine would not serve. Behind that, a thought that chilled him like a shot of liquid nitrogen-the thought that this was not the man who had accosted him on the steps of the Beverly Hills Courthouse. This was a different guy who only looked like Lucas Ellington, and the image of the man Stannard had come prepared to call out started to flake at the edges.

  "You're going to die in the dark," Lucas said.

  Stannard had a cold flash of Jackal Reichmann as he had looked in intensive care, his stare fixed, his lungs filling and emptying rhythmically, as though his respirator were wired into a drum machine. The woman wearing the towel wore the same blank, zomboid expression. Now, as his backbone went clammy against the bricks in preparation to catch a bullet, the woman came to life and moved forward, nearer the fire, to protest.

  "No," said Sara. "The dying, the killing-it stops, and it stops now, Lucas. Listen to me. You and I can go back. We can fix everything that went wrong. We can obliterate all of this. Look at me. I know what I'm dealing with now. This poor son of a bitch can't help you. His dying can't help you. See? He doesn't even know what's going on…''

  She stopped talking when the muzzle of the M-16 rose to zero in on Stannard's forehead. The singer tried to take the only opening he could see.

  "Uh… better listen to her, Lucas… I mean, I can help get you out of this mess, man-maybe she 'n' me are the only people who can help you now." Sweat trickled freely from beneath the white-blond hair. Blood slicked his chin. The scar splitting his eyebrow stood out, bloodlessly pale against his tan.

  Lucas aimed at the scar, the mark he had placed on Stannard so long ago, and thought about the greasy attorney Whip Hand's management had sent to buy him off with a settlement. "You're going to tell me about trials, and media coverage. Devices by which I am supposed to attain leniency and freedom in return for sparing your life now." He shook his head with the helpless grin parents reserve for excessively stupid children. To Sara, he added, "I've brought my entire life together, right here in this room. I need no further help. I've woven the threads just fine, and to my own satisfaction. Now I must hurry. This moment cannot hold."

  Sara thought the only thing Lucas had woven together was a quilt of total insanity. Yes, he had achieved his various purposes-he'd gotten wife and daughter back in a multiform configuration. He'd reconstructed the past so it came out with an apocalyptic punchline.

  A banshee wail from Stannard-the Stannard on the tape, wrapping up "Riptide"-cut them all off. Lucas quickly checked the front windows. The next song on the tape commenced.

  "Recognize it?" said Lucas.

  Stannard knew Jackson Knox's badass intro to "Hit Man" by heart. They'd banged out the tune together, with Brion Hardin contributing lyrics. The hit man of the title was Stannard, who onstage would prance through his King of the Hit Singles routine. The song was always a spike point of their live show; they built toward it, working the crowd, making them wet for it; then Whip Hand would deliver with a bang.

  About a hundred newspapers had recorded with fact-mad fervor that "Hit Man" had been the song performed by Whip Hand at the moment the Los Angeles riot broke out and people started dying.

  "Sara-get on your knees, please, and face him. Now."

  "What?"

  "You have to be looking up at him. And you, songbird, Mister Hit Man, you have to sing now. Sing for your life. Sing along with yourself. That should appeal to someone with an ego as huge as yours. Perform. You are here to perform for everyone, to show off. So do it. Don't laugh, because your life really does depend on your performance now."

  "Go ahead," Stannard said quickly to Sara. "Get down just in case he fries a gasket and pulls the trigger."

  She wanted to object, but her heart threatened to burst from her chest if she did not comply. She got onto her knees before the rock god.

  "Maybe you could toss the audience a moon," said Lucas, savoring it now. "Drop your pants in public, like your buddy."

  Stannard knew of Tim Fozzetto's ass-bearing routine for 'Gasm. That brought the rage surging back.

  "Timmy's dead meat because of you."

  ''If I were you, I'd worry about my ass instead of his."

  "And Jackal Reichmann's a vegetable! You really are one berserk motherfucker. You need a vet to put you to sleep."

  "Can't hear you." Stannard's "Hit Man" vocals buffered the three of them from the outside world. "Come on, superstar. Gyrate. Entice the women in the audience. Touch your crotch."

  Stannard's mouth stalled, but only for an instant. His mind shifted gears behind the ice-blue irises. "Sure. Whatever you want. Just don't hurt the lady, okay? Be cool with that piece, and you'll get whatever-"

  "I already know that," Lucas said, finger whitening on the trigger. The females in the audience did not have to fear him. He was not the danger.

  "Watch this." A lascivious stage smile cut across the singer's face. He had assumed his serpentlike concert masque. Slowly, methodically, with a practiced hand dance he had executed hundreds of times in hundreds of bedrooms, the ex-front man for Whip Hand opened up his pants. The yellow and orange and black of his leopard bikini briefs radiated from the V of his jeans.

  Sara tensed, shutting her eyes, shaking. The gun barrel hovered too far behind her to grab. She was the no man's land between the two antagonists.

  She could not see Lucas' face as he said, "Perfect-hold it right there." And fired.

  Certain she was hit and killed, she yelped and hugged the floor. Certain she had felt the bullet hurtle past her face close enough to skin her nose, she stayed down.

  Stannard screamed, drowning out his recorded self as the bullet shattered his right kneecap. He toppled to the left, his hand in his pants, with a grunt. His head knocked over the iron rack of fireplace tools, and a poker clattered on the hearth. Every particle of his Tarzan persona evaporated in that instant; Lucas saw it leave the singer's expression like a fleeing ghost, like a corrupt soul abandoning a drained corpus.

  Lucas took one step closer, flipping the M-16 from single to rapid fire. From waltz to rock and roll.

  Stannard's taped voice pealed into high screech, telling millions that he was the hit man, baby…

  The wounded man jerked his hand out of his groin, and Lucas caught a fast flash of black onyx in Stannard's fist. Sara, who had recovered hands and knees and was trying to scrabble out of the way, saw the singer wince as the thing in his hand made a flat bang-spack!-and unleashed a flash of light.

  The slug from the three-and-a-half-inch Magnum derringer, the fail-safe Stannard had tucked into his pants back on the goat path, took Lucas low in the left side of the neck and failed to erupt from the far side. He made a watery strangling noise that went unheard past the music and absorbed the momentum of the bullet with four anvil-heavy backward steps. His eyes squeezed shut in pain, then opened in time to see Stannard making for the.44 Magnum, which Lucas had discarded on the sofa a safe distance from Sara's reach.

  Lucas clamped his hand tight around the pistol grip of the M-16, and the hammering din of the clip emptying itself obliterated all other sounds. The muzzle kicked up and up as a jagged, zigzag path of Teflon slugs tracked from the floor between Stannard's legs, through him, and up the wall above his head, finishing with four holes blown out of the ceiling. The light kick of the gun was enough to steal what remained of Lucas' balance, and he went backward through one of the front windows in a shower of glass, his throat gushing fresh blood.

  The Whip Hand tape went dead between songs, and in the moment of abrupt silence Lucas' hand released the M-16. It clattered to the floor. He hung, seesawing on the window frame. Shards dropped from him and clinked.

  Then Cannibal Rex snapped his own trigger, and all hell busted loose out
side.

  Gravity arranged Lucas, sliding him back into the room. His body settled into a slack sitting position, eyes opaque, his head lolling to the right like an infant's, exposing the pumping carnage of his torn carotid.

  Sara opened her eyes and saw Gabriel Stannard curled into a fetal ball on the floor, soot from the shovel and poker blackening his face in streaks. A puddle of his own blood was widening around him. His hand twitched without instructions; he groaned. It was all he could manage. She could not tell how many times he had been hit.

  She crawled naked to the window as "Killer Guitars" commenced with a rattling Jackal Reichmann snare drum flourish. Glass splinters stuck into her knees and the balls of her feet as she reached to Lucas and got spattered when he exhaled. Her hands came away thickly coated, crimson.

  He was still alive. But there was no more of Lucas in his eyes. Lucas had been all used up.

  She closed her eyes and tried to hold without breaking. Outside, people were still firing guns. It seemed noisy and furious.

  Very deliberately, she got up and walked to the bathroom on bleeding feet to fetch her robe. That was important. It felt wonderful on her skin, drinking up her nervous sweat. She bent over the motionless but living form of Gabriel Stannard to upright the tool rack and arrange shovel, whisk brush, and poker into position. Above the mantel, the melodramatic eyes of the women in "Girl's Portrait" watched. They looked like nothing human. The Japanese painted for different values; there were almost no Oriental photorealists. Jesus god, she thought, I'm going into shock now; I've lost my mind, and I'm losing time…

  She stepped over to the sofa and lifted Stannard's.44 Magnum. It was much heavier than her Colt Diamondback. She checked the cylinder to verify the gun was loaded while Stannard's voice sang of the glories of the killer six-string, the electric axe, the fret master, the guitar hero. The new Pantheon. The shooting outside had stopped, and people wearing body armor and toting shotguns were running double time up her front walk.

  She pulled the hammer of the Magnum back to full cock and aimed at Stannard's right ear. The weight of the gun caused the muzzle to waver, so she took two steps closer until it was impossible to miss. It felt correct now. Stannard had helped remove Lucas from the world; the Lucas she knew was gone. Her hopes had been erased, her work had been destroyed, and her chance for redemption by setting things right had been stolen. Lucas had wanted Stannard dead, and Stannard was still hanging on.