Shadow Games (29 page)

2

T
he parking lot adjacent to the harbor was empty as the Yellow cab emerged from the fog and mist and stopped just below the high, wooden stairs leading to the water. The mercury vapor lights, enshrouded in swirling silver clouds, resembled the glowing heads of aliens.

The rear door opened and Puckett emerged, throwing a fifty dollar bill at the driver, slamming the door shut behind him.

As the cab backed away, its reverse gear whined as if under a terrible strain.

Puckett ran through the fog, his footsteps making flat, slapping sounds against the wet asphalt.

When he reached the hill, he paused to glance down along the harbor. He smelled the polluted lake and his own heat and sweat. He was trembling.

No lights shone on Wade Preston's yacht.

Puckett drew his service revolver and began running for the pier, slipping once and nearly pitching forward.

He ran along the slippery pier, the ghost boats lining it little more than vague shapes in the fog, the hoot of tugs faint.

He jumped from the pier to the Preston yacht without slowing down.

Only then did he stop, his breath coming in hot, lung-aching gasps. He listened for any human sounds below deck, but all he could hear was his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

He approached the cabin, revolver ready, and stopped.

He put his ear to the door. Heard nothing below.

He put the weapon in his left hand and tried the door handle with his right. Unlocked.

He opened the door, pushed his head in a few inches. With the curtains drawn, the cabin was pitch dark.

He went down the four steps and stood in the open room, his feet spread wide to absorb the pitch of the yacht.

Gradually, his eyes began to define certain shapes: couch, bar, small refrigerator. Gradually, his nose began to define the terrible odor filling it.

A terrible thought came to him, then, just standing there, just trying to give his body time to calm down, just trying to understand the revelations of the past hour-and-a-half.

He tried to dismiss the thought, tried to persuade himself that he was only being ghoulish or silly, tried to fix his mind on something else.

But the thought would not go away. He knew that there was only one way to dispel it. He had to prove to himself that the thought was nonsense.

Feet crossing the dark carpeting, knees giving a little to accommodate the sway of the craft, he went directly to the small, kitchenette-style refrigerator and opened the door.

The interior light was very, very bright.

Staring up at him were the blue, blue eyes of
Cobey
Daniels...

Somebody had sawn
Cobey's
head from his shoulders and then placed the head in the refrigerator, just as Beth Swallows' head had been placed in a refrigerator.

That had been the stench, of course, the way
Cobey
had been butchered so as to fit his head into the refrigerator. The white bottom of the refrigerator was a mess of blood. The white walls were badly splattered, too. A bottle of 7-Up was painted a dark red with the stuff.

There was no mistaking the sensation he next felt. Even bending over, even unable to see the instrument, he knew what it was and he knew who wielded it.

"Put the gun on the refrigerator, Puckett," Anne said behind him.

She had pushed the butcher knife so hard into his back that it had cut through his London Fog and his sport coat and his shirt.

He put the gun on the refrigerator.

"Did you know he killed our child?" she said.

He didn't know what she was talking about. In fact, there was only one thing at this moment that he knew at all. He knew that Anne was insane.

"Those nine months he was missing?" she said. "He was with me."

"I want to help you, Anne," he said quietly. "I want to help you."

She laughed. "Oh, Puckett, I wish you were a shit like all the other men I've known. Why do you have to be so decent?"

"I'm afraid for you, Anne. I'm afraid of what might happen to you."

Slap of waves; pitch of ship; high, wet stink of human meat.

"Stand up and turn around," she said. "Slowly."

He complied.

When he got turned around and saw her standing there, the butcher knife huge and terrible in her fine, small hand, he was shocked at the amount of blood splattered across her face and white blouse. It even tainted her coppery hair. She looked as if she'd worked a hard, pitiless shift on a killing floor.

She held the knife out straight at his chest so that he would not be inclined to lunge at her. Then she stooped slightly and reached around him and picked up the gun from the top of the refrigerator.

In her hand, the weapon looked outsize, even comic, like an ugly German handgun in the tiny hand of a little girl.

"I wish it could have worked for us, Puckett," she said. "I really do. But it was too late. Everything was already set in motion. Inside my head, I mean. A lot more than I knew."

She looked right at him, pretty, delicate, mad. "I want you to help me, Puckett."

"I want to help you, Anne."

"I want you to hold me."

There was no evidence of fear, no evidence of sadness. He had never seen her more controlled.

"All right," he said.

"Don't try to take the gun from me."

"All right."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

He took a step forward, letting more of the
backglow
into the room.

The refrigerator light was unkind to her face, gave her hollows and angles where they were not becoming. And all the while, he could feel
Cobey's
blue eyes on them, staring, staring.

"I really was starting to love you again, Puckett. I really was."

She walked toward him one, two steps, and he slid his arms around her and gently took her to him, lover, brother, father, priest.

He heard the knife hit the floor.

He held her even tighter.

"I love you, Anne."

"Even after all I've done?"

"Yes. I think I loved you the first time I ever saw you. It was just—that way. Nothing I could do about it."

"I'm sorry, Puckett."

"It's all right."

"You know what I'm going to do?"

"Yes."

"Will you help me?"

"No. No, I couldn't do that, Anne."

"But you said you loved me. You'd help me if you loved me."

"I'm sorry, Anne. You'll have to do it yourself."

"I'm afraid..."

"I know."

"Hold me tighter, Puckett. Hold me tighter than you've ever held me before."

And so he did, there on the pitching yacht in the rolling, foggy, isolated darkness. He held her until he felt her get the gun set in the proper direction, and slip her finger against the trigger, and jerk backward as the bullet ripped through her ribs.

"Oh, Puckett," she said. "Oh, Puckett..."

And then he thought she might cry, but of course, it was too late for that.

She was dead.

3

"I
suppose she loved him," Veronica said at O'Hare the next day as Puckett was headed west and she east. "Even though she killed him. I mean, just because you kill somebody doesn't necessarily mean that you don't love them."

And what, exactly, was one to say to that?

4

T
here were a lot of nasty jokes in Hollywood that next week about how
Cobey
Daniels had lost his head over the woman who'd killed him.

There were three hundred people at
Cobey's
funeral, six hundred if you counted press, and Puckett and Veronica stood in the front line graveside, right next to Lilly Carlyle and Wade Preston, both of whom were dressed in dramatic black outfits straight out of
Sunset Boulevard
. Lilly kept shooting angry glances at Preston.

The grass was very green and the sky very blue and there was a sweet, soft, April breeze.

By now, Puckett knew everything that had happened. Anne had left a letter for him and the police gave him copies of the tapes
Cobey
had made.

Veronica had admitted, just as they'd entered the church in Beverly Hills, that she'd "stoked up on franks." She seemed almost oblivious to everything that was going on. He envied her.

After the ceremony, Puckett gave her a ride to LAX, where she gave him a chaste kiss good-bye.

In the afternoon, Puckett went to a pet store and bought the tiniest, most heartbreaking little kitten he'd ever seen and he wasn't even sure why.

He took her back home and set up her food bowl and her water bowl and her litter box.

And then he spent the rest of the day following her around like some moonstruck adolescent.

He did not consider it sentimental to call her by the name of Anne...

From the December 2, 1994 edition of
The National Tattler

"
Starmaker
" Finds New Youngster

Discoverer of
Cobey
Daniels says new boy "even more appealing and handsome"

Lilly Carlyle, the Hollywood talent agent who discovered and built the late
Cobey
Daniels into a teenage mega-star, says that five-year-old Brad Cudahy will soon be the "biggest child star to ever hit TV."

As she did with the late
Cobey
Daniels, Carlyle sought permission to take the boy from his parents on an Illinois farm. After getting their agreement, Carlyle, who first saw Brad on a Chicago talent show, flew the boy to Los Angeles where he will live with her and receive the same kind of "special treatment" that
Cobey
Daniels enjoyed.

Of Daniels, all Carlyle would say was, "The pressures of fame were just too much for him."

Cobey
Daniels was killed last year in a grisly Chicago murder.

"I'm really looking forward to living with Brad," Lilly Carlyle told our reporter enthusiastically. "There's so much he can learn from me."