The Kill Riff (27 page)

    
(During his first visit to the local cathouse, the country hick forks over five bucks and gets so excited when the lady of the evening takes his hand to lead him upstairs that he ejaculates in his pants. "Now what do I do?" he says, aghast. The painted lady, her mission prematurely accomplished, says, "Now you find yourself a ride home, lover. Y'all come again real soon.")

    Here, below Lucas, as in that ancient joke, the conditions of an unspoken contract were being fulfilled. 'Gasm did not have to be innovative, not by a mote. So what?

    So had that meant that Kristen had known exactly what she was getting into that black night? Was she as responsible for her death as Whip Hand?

    Rolling fog, pink in the glow of the sniperscope, began to congest the stage as "Rip Me Off" wound up. The cobalt-blue spotlight perked on and singled out Hartz, who lashed into his solo with an earsplitting feedback whine that brought another breaker of wild applause.

    Lucas was still scanning the audience, stunned, thinking,
Impossible!

    He shifted up hurriedly through the total darkness in the auditorium. Too hurriedly. It made him sloppy. He zeroed in on Fozzetto.

    
Where are you, you bastard… there. There, gotcha.

    He was positive he'd seen Kristen in the crowd below. The nightmare and the reality had fused, blurring into each other. Long blond hair, Cory's nose and eyes, his own square, definite jawline, crystal beads, silk shirt, looking adoringly up at Hartz in his deep blue circlet of light. Goddamned little slut would spread her legs for anyone, anyone, and she had to be watched constantly…

    No, impossible. The girl was not Kristen. From this distance, under these conditions, Winston fucking Churchill would look like Kristen. There must be at least two thousand clear-skinned heartbreakers here tonight who looked vaguely like Kristen. Yet the sight-the imagined sight-had shaken him.

    
Five seconds gone.

    Fozzetto was unstringing himself from his bass guitar, dipping from under the Fender's broad, tooled strap and poising it on a nickel-plated stand next to the drum riser. As soon as the stage lights changed to favor Hartz, Fozzetto was apparently bound for the wings. Maybe he had to take a quick leak. Lucas would have to tag him before he crossed behind Rick Hicks. He felt like swearing, but that would have bollixed his aim, and he would only have this one chance.

    Lucas squeezed off, and the Dragunov bucked against the hollow of his shoulder. The flat crack of the expelled bullet was lost in the ear-pegging keen of Hartz's gorilla axe-handling. Fozzetto's hair flew apart on the far side of his head, and he stumbled into the drum riser as though shoved. One hand thumped the bass drum. Lucas put a second slug into him before he could collapse. No sound. The bass player's white mop of hair began to darken as soon as he hit the stage floor.

    
Nine seconds gone.

    Jackal Reichmann's face was like the fifty-point hole of a bull's eye. It would be fast and easy to plant a slug right into his mouth, which was now hanging open in a black oval that sat at ground zero in the tinted crosshairs. He was the only band member who had seen Fozzetto's head come apart, who had watched him crumple to the boards. Lucas gave him one extra second of life, to react. He might decide to stand up and provide a bigger target. Manufactured smoke billowed up behind him, and he was framed in the red light of the scope. During his bit with the gangster-style machine gun, red spotlights were used. This time the red light belonged to Lucas, and the shells were not blanks.

    
Eleven seconds.
Lucas' finger pulled back on the steel tongue of the trigger.

    
Write a wet-dream love ditty about this, ratfuck. Hope you enjoy hell.

    Before he could shoot, he saw something astonishing through the scope. A stuttering line of black dots punctured the double bass, then corrected trajectory and quilted upward into Reichmann. Five dark holes blossomed in a diagonal across his bare chest as he rose to take a look at his unmoving comrade on the stage below. His face scrunched up, and he did a backward tumble off the drum riser, dragging the long rack of brass gongs with him as his white-booted feet flashed in the air and he disappeared out of sight behind the platform. The gongs made a hell of a racket going down.

    Rick Hicks had half-turned to see what in blazes was going on when a fan of hot slugs tore through both him and his guitar, impelling him into a clumsy pirouette.

    
Fourteen seconds gone.

    Pepper Hartz's solo hitched and died. He had just turned his attention to Reichmann's fall when a fireline of bullets stitched toward him, blowing plastic and canvas splinters out of the prefab stage floor. There was zero time to react. He caught the burst in both legs and folded up, screaming. The blue spotlight was still on him, and in its light the fresh blood looked like chocolate syrup. Hartz's Strat thudded endwise on the floor and sent a thrumming bass tone careening through the Arena.

    Lucas broke through the panic freeze of his total surprise and turned his head to fix on the bright flashes of light.

    Somebody was standing on the stage-left catwalk, less than sixty feet across from him, cutting the band apart with an M-16 on rapid fire. Lucas remembered what he and every other soldier had called the rapid-fire setting in Vietnam.

    Rock and roll.

    

    

    THE URGE TO SPEND SOME time near the ocean struck Cass as she was picking her way down from the outhouse. Going to the bathroom in the woods was never less than an adventure, and however cleanly maintained, the outhouse nevertheless hosted a scary variety of curious life forms.

    The clothes she had hand-washed in the kitchen basin hung, dry now, from tree limbs behind the cabin. She pulled them down and sniffed.
Ahh
.

    There was ham and swiss cheese and tuna salad in the fridge, and she constructed a pair of thick sandwiches on seven-grain bread and folded them into a bindle made from one of Lucas' large kerchiefs, which she had also washed. She used the sandwiches to cushion two clinking bottles of cold Dos Equis beer and added a spiral notebook she had discovered in the kitchen drawer. Under the gun.

    Finding the gun had sent a tiny lance of surprise spearing into her heart. It was some kind of huge pistol, wrapped up in a holster with a lot of nylon webbing. Her hands had absolutely refused to even touch it; she hated guns. She'd slid the notebook out from under it as though the pistol were radioactive. It had dropped back into place with a heavy thud-even the sound had been dark, weighty, ominous. She'd slammed the drawer shut and refused to look inside again.

    Guy has a cabin in the mountains. Has a gun. Almost logical, for out here. Frontier security. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean lots of normal people don't have them. I certainly don't have to touch the icky thing. Case closed.

    After she wiped off the surface of the notebook (
what, me, compulsive?
), she put the gun out of her mind. She did not feel much like reading, though Lucas had socked in plenty of paperbacks. Today she wanted to ruminate on the pad or just doodle by the sea, which held a degree of bohemian attraction for her. A pity Jack Kerouac was stuck with the squalors of suburbia and skid row for inspiration.

    Thus provisioned, she checked the padlock on the door of the cabin's auxiliary room before leaving. She could not pinpoint the reason why she did this, other than her desire to be responsible on Lucas's behalf. It was secure. When she let it go it clunked against the plank door and shined at her. It was new, recently bought, as was the hasp on the door. The other hardware and cabin fixings were all worn or broken in with age.

    It was none of her business.

    If there was a single fact she had learned about men-whose weird body chemistry made them the closest thing to alien beings on earth-it was that men were addicted to the cultivation of their private little caches of secrets. The thing that had put the whole country in such a balls-up was the machismo hormone. That was why the backbone of politics was the mud-slinging smear campaign, why there were so bloody many nuclear bombs buried all over the map, why

    Tanya's biker boyfriend T-Bone and Cass' own Reese had apocalypse written in their eyes. The machismo hormone. Lucas seemed immune, so far. At least he had not been demonstrably male in the Teutonic, patience-abrading fashion that kicks the female's automatic alarm system on like a fire klaxon. He seemed to live his life in balance, to know what he wanted. He seemed in control of his circumstances, and for that Cass envied him. At least he hadn't gotten himself puddled by a homicidal screwball like Reese.

    She had taken stock of herself that morning and thought she was mending with fair speed. The left side of her face no longer stung abominably when she spoke or rolled onto it in sleep. Her crushed hand had freed up, and her grip was back to about three-quarter strength. Her shiner had deflated. The discoloration in the socket of her eye now resembled an inept makeup job. If she glanced at her face in the mirror tile above the sink fast enough, she looked normal. The progress pleased her.
You'll be back on the cover of Vogue in no time, kiddo.

    She used a flexible wire brush on a wide wooden paddle to brush her auburn hair straight back, then braided it into a single, thick, twisting rope that she secured with a rubber band at the bottom. It looked rather like the bell pulls used by the filthy rich to summon butlers and handmaidens in the mostly awful 1940s films that ran in the predawn on Channel Five or Thirteen, back in the city. It no longer hurt to comb her hair. She did not yelp with pain in the course of washing or drying it. Just a few days before, it had felt as though she was yanking blood vessels right out through her scalp.

    She laced up her hiking boots and cuffed the slightly large coverall legs to fit. Then she hit the trail.

    Near the cabin you could make out natural depressions in the ground that meant walk here, others do. But the footpath vanished almost immediately, giving way to a forty-degree slope of limestone bluff littered with rock chips a foot deep in some places, which led down to the timberline. She speculated that a huge chunk of limestone stratum had pushed its way to the surface and made a big scab where trees could not root. Only stubborn scrub plants poked up through infrequent cracks. It killed traction. Sometimes it allowed deceptively easy climbing. Right when you thought you'd gotten the swing of dancing downward, high-stepping, it would slip your foot and dump you on your ass. No wonder Lucas needed a tank like the Bronco to scrabble all the way to his stoop. From a postcard distance, it was picturesque. Up close, it was just a bitch of a hill.

    She watched a squirrel watching her.

    "Yeah, laugh all you want, buckaroo. I need the exercise, and nobody invited you to watch. Whoops!"

    Cass slid feet first down five feet or so of the rock surface. Pathetic miniature avalanches of chalky rock trickled around her. Fifteen feet away, another squirrel joined the first on the branch of a crooked, dead tree. The soil could not nourish the tree here. But the squirrels could gather there to make bad squirrel jokes and watch the human burlesque.

    "Fine. Wonderful." Her butt was sore, and her calf muscles were already twanging. She felt like throwing a rock until she remembered this wasn't her neighborhood.

    Doggedly she continued downhill, bobbing and weaving and sliding only occasionally. She thought triumphantly, At least I'm not falling around as comically as those two city slickers on their way up…

    She petrified, a cat on freeze mode.

    Two people had just emerged from the treeline far below her and were valiantly fighting their way up the inhospitable incline. They were about a hundred yards distant, mere specks. But it was obvious they were bound for her position as though homed in via radar.

    She turned and bounded back toward the cabin. Going up was more of a challenge, but she did not fall, and her legs greedily welcomed the work. In the rare times she noticed her legs thrumming with strength, she would reflect that maybe the eight years of dance classes inflicted on her by her parents had been worth it. Her legs hit stride and propelled her upward with gazelle sureness.

    She could lay for them inside the cabin.

    Twenty minutes later the two visitors knocked on the cabin door. It was a city knock, no different from that of a group selling highschool band candy or proselytizing for the Seventh Day Adventists.

    Cass opened the door fully prepared for a confrontation with Lucas' fabled ex-wife.

    She met eyes with a tall woman whose conservative brown hair was windblown. Her tan boots were newly scuffed from the climb. She had removed her dark glasses to unveil direct, authoritarian eyes, also brown, which she narrowed in the sunlight.

    "We're here to see Lucas,'' she said as though it explained everything. Then, less sure: "Lucas Ellington."

    Ellington. Nice name. Cass had not known it. Yes, this had to be Sara, and the bulldog type with the fluffy gray hair, standing a respectful distance behind and to the left, that had to be her attorney, as Lucas had forewarned. Any residual fear drained away. She had this ex-spouse's number. No problem. She folded her arms and squared her body. She'd actually been rehearsing the routine in her head.

    "Too late," she told them sweetly. "Lucas is long gone." If the legal bloodhound knew his business, il wouldn't be any use to try and convince them that this was not Lucas' cabin. "He expected you guys to show up a week ago.'' Just a hint of derision there.
Perfect.

    Bulldog stepped forward to flank Sara. "Do you suppose you could tell us where he is. Miss-?''