Shadow Games (15 page)

After taking the credit cards and the money,
Cobey
started to put the guy's wallet back in the overcoat, but then he noticed the color photograph of the guy with his wife and two cute little daughters. He felt sorry he had to mug a guy who was probably as nice as this one—but nobody had ever said that being existential was easy.

He closed the car door and hoped the guy didn't freeze his ass off. And then
Cobey
started running, running.

2

H
e found an all-night drug store and bought some Lady Clairol rinse, a good pair of scissors, two different kinds of sunglasses, a blue vinyl bombardier jacket with some plastic lining designed to look like down, two pairs of underwear and socks, an Ed
McBain
paperback and a carton of Lucky Strikes.

Five blocks east, on a deserted corner where the traffic light flashed yellow and lonely on the rain-slicked street, he found a motel, just the kind of place Norman Bates would really go for. The newest car in the lot was a 1982 Ford, and that had its back window smashed out, cardboard filling the hole.

The desk clerk was sleeping. The lobby smelled of rain and piss and wine. The desk clerk jumped, startled to life and
said, "Help you?" With his rimless glasses, pockmarked face and pinched, feral mouth, he looked like a composite photo of every serial killer
Cobey
had ever seen.

"I need a room."

The clerk looked him up and down. "You got a bag?"

Cobey
hoisted his sack. "Sack."

"Oh," the clerk nodded, "right." Apparently, lots of people checked in here with big paper sacks.

The room was the sort of place you went to die, a tiny cell with a tiny bed, a white sink discolored with rust, a TV with the channel selector missing and a pair of pliers to turn the little
dealie
, a cracked mirror, a carpet scuffed and worn clear through to the poured concrete floor, and a bureau with two drawers, one of which contained one of the most vile porno magazines
Cobey
had ever seen, color photos of two naked, black, four-hundred-pound women doing each other and, later, taking turns with this dildo with some kind of African totem on it. Oh, yeah, and the toilet didn't flush very well, either. Two dark brown
turds
floated in it to greet him.

Cobey
turned off the light and got beneath the covers. The sheets stank of sweat and
jism
. He didn't care. He just wanted to sleep. He was tired of trying to make sense of things. Things made so sense at all.

Finally, fitfully, he slept...

3

B
y the time Anne came awake in the morning, Puckett was not only up but dressed and opening the door for the bellhop who wheeled in a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and two large pots of coffee—Puckett was a caffeine junkie. And the day itself was just as invigorating, one of those sudden spring
days in the Midwest that hit the high eighties. It was already seventy-six degrees and sunny.

While Anne was in taking a shower, Puckett called the Los Angeles office of his investigation service. Since it was only seven o'clock there, Puckett left a message for an operative named Kevin McCoy. A former assistant to a gossip columnist, McCoy was the best "backgrounder" on the staff—meaning that with his computer and phone skills, he was able to learn more than any other six operatives pounding the pavement. Or had been, anyway.

A year ago, McCoy had told everybody at the office that he had AIDS. He had lost a lot of strength in the ensuing months and was now working out of his apartment and phoning in for messages...

After hanging up, Puckett read a few more of Anne's pen-name articles. They were first-rate, all of them.

When Anne came out of the bathroom, her copper hair was dark with water and her white terry cloth robe was almost blinding in the sunlight.

Over breakfast, she said, "You sure you want to get involved?"

Puckett smiled. "
Cobey
needs all the help he can get, and you're forgetting that I used to be a cop myself—I know how their minds work. They've already got
Cobey
convicted."

"How about the case you were working on?"

"I've already arranged for somebody else to tail my wandering husband."

He finished his coffee, stood up, went over and kissed her on her freckled cheek and said, "He really does need some help. I want to talk to the people around him. See what they know."

She took his hand and held it tight to her cheek. She felt soft and warm, and he felt a desire that was a mixture of sweet affection and rampaging lust.

"I know you're right, Puckett," she said. "It's just that I won't have much time to spend with you."

"I'll keep checking in."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

Then he got out while he still could.

4

W
hen
Cobey
got up, the first thing he did was take out the Lady Clairol and rinse his hair several times until it was a deep black, far different from his usual blond look. Then he took a shower, cold water being the only type offered, so cold that his balls shrank up and he shivered as he toweled off.

Then he put on the sad, cheap, vinyl jacket and the dark glasses and then he kind of assumed (good old Actors' Group method training coming in handy here) the punk stance of a Slavic kid from the inner city, nowhere near as cool as his black counterparts, just some blown-out high school dropout hanging out in pool halls and comic book stores busting his ass for nickel-and-dime day labor jobs, and maybe thinking vaguely of joining the Army if he could get them to give him one of those equivalency tests.

There.
Cobey
had created a new persona for himself. He packed up all his stuff and shoved it into the paper sack and left the room. He'd rather sleep in an
effing
alley than in this place again.

He left the motel and started walking. It was sunny and warm and he wasn't quite sure where he was. All he knew was that there were a lot of dead and dying factories around him, rusted monuments to the good old days when a lunch bucket life had had dignity and meaning, the same kind of lunch bucket life
Cobey's
father, a factory worker, had enjoyed. But now...

He found this tiny-ass tavern where the sign advertised
Blatz
beer (what a name,
Blatz
, it sounded like a fart) and, incredibly enough, breakfast and lunch and where, incredibly enough, the breakfast was good, if you didn't mind a few cockroaches running back and forth on the bar. He had four eggs over-easy and tried not to notice as the six old guys across from him, drinking
Blatz
in mugs and chain-smoking cigarettes, watched him with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They weren't sure where this kid fitted in—shit, he left his sunglasses on even inside this dingy place—they just knew he didn't fit in here. He ate fast and left fast.

He was thankful for the sunlight.

He spent the next hour-and-a-half walking.

The sun started getting warm and the surroundings started getting pretty. Old Victorians, newly refurbished, Yuppie land. After where he'd spent last night and just had breakfast, he was jubilant at seeing cliché Yuppie mothers transporting their cliché Yuppie children around in their cliché Jeeps and vans.

He found a small shopping center with a clean, sunny restaurant and he bought a
Tribune
and went in there and had himself a second breakfast, this one without the cockroaches. All the people looked smart and clean and attractive. He didn't ever want to go back to last night's motel, and he wondered now if he hadn't taken some kind of Rod
Serling
diversion from reality last night and checked into some other dimension, some motel hell for real.

The Chicago police were playing it very coy for the newspaper people.

They admitted that, yes,
Cobey
Daniels had abruptly left a meeting in which a Detective Cozzens had been asking the young star questions about the woman's head discovered in a refrigerator, but the Chicago police were in no way trying to intimate that he was a bona fide suspect. They just wished ole
Cobey
would give them a call and then maybe they could all go out and have burgers or something.

Right, you bastards
, he thought.
You'd put my ass in jail and then plant me in the electric chair about a week later
.

Somewhere in the middle of his fourth cup of coffee, he decided to give it another try. He'd tried it last night but then he'd gotten scared and given up.

Now, feeling better, feeling more confident, some food in his belly and a pretty decent disguise hiding his real identity, he got up and paid his bill and asked the waitress for some extra change. Then he went out to the center of the mall where there was this long line of pay phones and he went over and looked up the right number.

He called and asked for Mr. Puckett's room and then he waited.

He waited a long time. The phone rang maybe twelve times. Nobody home. He hung up.

He had to talk to Puckett,
had
to. Puckett was his only hope.

He looked out at the mall, all the happy women shopping, and he wondered with sudden bitterness and high, pure terror, how the hell he'd ever gotten here.

He was a former teenage TV star, he wasn't any killer.

Or was he?

He fled the mall, going God-only-knew-where.

5

W
ade Preston had spent the past week trying to get out of it, but in the end, he relented and said he'd show up to meet his fan club, as they'd requested, at eleven a.m. sharp. On the way over, he thought of excuses he might use to leave his fan club early.

He smiled bitterly to himself. A few days ago he'd given Anne Addison a key to his yacht on the off chance that she'd
use it some night. That would be a good excuse to leave—a beautiful woman waiting for him on his boat.

These fans probably didn't think the Marshal ever got his ashes hauled, the dumb bastards.

They were the usual geeks and freaks—and Wade Preston, the last of the cowboy heroes, had to force a smile when he saw the pack of them moving toward him in the lobby of the suburban hotel.

The one in front, the one who had the full cowboy outfit on—including brown leatherette chaps and a silver belt buckle the size of a hubcap and this huge, six-pointed town marshal badge on the breast of his leatherette vest—this guy had to weigh in at four hundred pounds, including all twenty-seven of his chins, and he of course was the spokesman for the whole group.

"Happy sunsets, Marshal!" the man cried across the lobby.

A dapper young man in a blue lawyer's suit, hundred dollar razor cut, and mean, blue gaze was waiting for a bellhop to take his bags upstairs. He smirked at the geeks, and his sneer said it all too well: how pathetic all this sort of thing was—
THE WADE PRESTON FAN CLUB, CHICAGO CHAPTER
, as read the sign one of the geeks carried—and then he was joined by a pretty, young girl whom he was probably bopping. She sneered in much the same way he had. Grown people carrying on this way. My
God
.

The Starlight Hotel and Lounge was out near Skokie, and at eleven in the morning the lounge was mostly occupied by salespeople. In the old days, it would have been mostly men here, but now that Xerox and IBM and the big pharmaceuticals hired fifty percent women, Happy Hour places like this rang with female laughter, the women just as hard and frantic and vulgar as their male counterparts. One more reason Wade Preston was against libbers, as he still called them. Why would women—clearly the superior of the two sexes—want to be like stupid, boorish men?

"Marshal Drake, it sure is good to meet you," said the fat man as he grabbed for Preston's hand.

"Why not just call me Wade?" Preston said, blushing.

"That's my real name. 'Marshal Drake' was just in the show."

The guy looked crushed. "Uh, sure," he said. "Sure."

Then the others encircled him.

Thank God only one of them was fully in costume. The others wore just bits and pieces, Stetsons or tinny little badges or western string ties over their plaid, working class shirts.

A skinny woman with badly discolored teeth
leaned
in and planted a big, wet, smacking kiss right on his cheek. "I've wanted to do that for twenty-five years!" she said.

The others giggled and applauded and patted both the woman and Wade Preston on the back.