Desperation (42 page)

4

“Why'd you stop?” Steve asked.

He stood in the center of the improbable onstage living room, beside the elegant old wetbar from the Circle Ranch. His strongest wish at that moment was for a fresh shirt. All day he had been baking (to call the Ryder van's air conditioning substandard was actually to be charitable), but now he was freezing. The water Cynthia was dabbing onto the punctures in his shoulders ran down his back in chill streams. At least he'd been able to talk her out of using Billingsley's whiskey to clean his wounds, like a dancehall girl fixing up a cowpoke in an old movie.

“I thought I saw something.” Cynthia spoke in a low voice.

“Waddit a puddy-tat?”

“Very funny.” She raised her voice to a shout. “David?
Dayyyy-vid!
”

They were alone onstage. Steve had wanted to help Marinville and Carver look for the kid, but Cynthia had insisted on washing out what she called “the holes in your hide” first. The two men had disappeared into the lobby. Marinville had a new spring in his step, and the way he carried his gun made Steve think of another kind of old movie—the kind where the grizzled but heroic white hunter slogs through a thousand jungle perils and finally succeeds in plucking an emerald as big as a doorknob from the forehead of an idol watching over a lost city.

“What? What did you see?”

“I don't really know. It was weird. Up on the balcony. For a minute I thought it was—you'll laugh—a floating body.”

Suddenly something in him changed. It wasn't like a light going on; it was more as if one had been turned out. He forgot about the stinging of the wounds in his shoulders, but all at once his back was colder than ever. Almost cold enough to start him shivering. For the second time that day he remembered being a teenager in Lubbock, and how the whole world seemed to go still and deadly before the benders arrived from the plains, dragging their sometimes deadly skirts of hail and wind. “I'm not laughing,” he said. “Let's go on up there.”

“It was probably just a shadow.”

“I don't think so.”

“Steve? You okay?”

“No. I feel like I did when we came into town.”

She looked at him, alarmed. “Okay. But we don't have a gun—”

“Fuck that.” He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. “
Now.
Christ, something is
really wrong.
Can't you feel it?”

“I . . . might feel something. Should I get Mary? She's back with Billingsley—”

“No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself.”

He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.

The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. “We've been looking out at the street,” Johnny said. “The storm is definitely . . . Steve? What's wrong?”

Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold. Most of him was just scared.

“
David!
David, answer if you hear me!”

Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove. Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here. Yet he had a clear sense that there
had
been, and only a short time ago.

“David!”
he shouted.

“Steve? Mr. Ames?” It was Carver. He sounded almost as scared as Steve felt. “What's wrong? Has something happened to my son?”

“I don't know.”

Cynthia ducked under Steve's arm and hurried down the hallway to the balcony entrance. Steve went after her. A frayed length of rope was hanging down from the top of the arch, still swaying a little.

“Look!” Cynthia pointed. At first Steve thought the thing lying out there was a corpse, then registered the hair for what it was—some kind of synthetic. A doll. One with a noose around its neck.

“Is that what you saw?” he asked her.

“Yes. Someone could have ripped it down and then maybe drop-kicked it.” The face she turned up to his was drawn and tense. In a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “God, Steve, I don't like this.”

Steve took a step back, glanced left (the boss and David's father looked at him anxiously, clutching their weapons against their chests), then looked right.
There,
his heart whispered . . . or perhaps it was his nose, picking up some lingering residue of Opium, that whispered.
Up there. Must be the projection-booth.

He ran for it, Cynthia once more on his heels. He went up the narrow flight of stairs and was groping for the knob in the dimness when she grabbed the back of his pants to hold him where he was.

“The kid had a pistol. If she's in there with him, she could have it now. Be careful, Steve.”

“David!”
Carver bawled.
“David, are you okay?”

Steve thought of telling Cynthia there was no time to be careful, that that time had passed when they lost track of David in the first place . . . but there was no time to talk, either.

He turned the knob and shoved the door hard with his shoulder, expecting to encounter either a lock or some other resistance, but there was none. The door flew open; he flew into the room after it.

Across from him, against the wall with the projection-slots cut into it, were David and Audrey. David's eyes were half-open, but only their bulging whites showed. His face was a horrid corpse-color, still greenish from the soap but mostly gray. There were growing lavender patches beneath his eyes and high up on his cheekbones. His hands drummed spastically on the thighs of his jeans. He was making a soft choking sound. Audrey's right hand was clamped around his throat, her thumb buried deep in the soft flesh beneath his jaw on the right, the fingers digging in on the left. Her formerly pretty face was contorted in an expression of hate and rage beyond anything Steve had ever seen in his life—it seemed to have actually darkened her skin, somehow. In her left hand she held the .45 revolver David had used to shoot the coyote. She fired it three times, and then it clicked empty.

The two-step drop into the projection-booth almost certainly saved Steve at least one more hole in his already perforated hide and might have saved his life. He fell forward like a man who has misjudged the number of stairs in a flight, and all three bullets went over his head. One thudded into the doorjamb to Cynthia's right and showered splinters into her exotic hair.

Audrey voiced a ululating scream of frustration. She threw the empty gun at Steve, who simultaneously ducked and raised one hand to bat it away. Then she turned back to the slumping boy and began to throttle him with both hands again, shaking him viciously back and forth like a doll. David's hands abruptly quit thrumming and simply lay on the legs of his jeans, as limp as dead starfish.

5

“Scared,” Billingsley croaked. It was,
so far as Mary could tell, the last word he ever managed to say. His eyes looked up at her, both frantic and somehow confused. He tried to say something else and produced only a weak gargling noise.

“Don't be scared, Tom. I'm right here.”

“Ah. Ah.” His eyes shifted from side to side, then came back to her face and seemed to freeze there. He took a deep breath, let it out, took a shallower one, let it out . . . and didn't take another.

“Tom?”

Nothing but a gust of wind and a hard rattle of sand from outside.

“
Tom!”

She shook him. His head rolled limply from side to side, but his eyes remained fixed on hers in a way that gave her a chill; it was the way the eyes in some painted portraits seemed to stay on you no matter where you were in the room. Somewhere—in this building but sounding very far away, just the same—she could hear Marinville's roadie yelling for David. The hippie-girl was yelling, too. Mary supposed she should join them, help them search for David and Audrey if they were really lost, but she was reluctant to leave Tom until she was positive he was dead. She was
pretty sure
he was, yes, but it surely wasn't like it was on TV, when you
knew
—

“Help?”

The voice, questioning and almost too weak to be heard over the slackening wind, still made Mary jump and cup a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry.

“Help? Is anyone there? Please help me . . . I'm hurt.”

A woman's voice. Ellen Carver's voice? Christ, was it? Although she had been in the company of David's mother for only a short time, Mary was sure she was right almost as soon as the idea occurred to her. She got to her feet, sparing another quick glance at poor Tom Billingsley's contorted face and staring eyes. Her legs had stiffened up on her and she staggered for balance.

“
Please,”
the voice outside moaned. It was in the alley which ran behind the theater.

“Ellen?” she asked, suddenly wishing she could throw her voice like a ventriloquist. It seemed she could trust nothing now, not even a hurt, scared woman. “Ellen, is that you?”

“Mary!” Closer now. “Yes, it's me, Ellen.
Is
that Mary?”

Mary opened her mouth, then closed it again. That was Ellen Carver out there, she
knew
it, but . . .

“Is David all right?” the woman out there in the dark asked, then swallowed back a sob. “Please say that he is.”

“So far as I know, yes.” Mary walked over to the broken window, skirting the pool of the cougar's blood, and looked out. It was Ellen Carver out there, and she didn't look good. She was slumped over her left arm, which she was holding against her breasts with her right. What Mary could see of her face was chalky white. Blood was trickling from her lower lip and from one nostril. She looked up at Mary with eyes so dark and desperate they seemed hardly human.

“How did you get away from Entragian?” Mary asked.

“I didn't. He just . . . died. Bled everywhere and died. He was driving me in his car—taking me up to the mine, I think—when it happened. The car went off the road and turned over. One of the back doors popped open. Lucky for me or I'd still be inside, caught like a bug in a can. I . . . I walked back to town.”

“What happened to your arm?”

“It's broken,” Ellen said, hunching over it further. There was something unattractive about the pose; Ellen Carver looked like a troll in a fairy story, hunched protectively over a bag of ill-gotten gold. “Can you help me in? I want to see my husband, and I want to see David.”

A part of Mary cried out in alarm at the idea, told her that something here did not compute, but when Ellen held up her good arm and Mary saw the dirt and blood smeared on it, and the way it was trembling with exhaustion, her fundamentally kind heart overruled the wary lizard of instinct living far back in her brain. This woman had lost her young daughter to a madman, had been in a car-wreck on the way to what would have most likely been her own murder, had suffered a broken arm, and walked through a howling windstorm back to a town filled mostly with corpses. And the first person she meets suddenly succumbs to a bad case of the jimjams and refuses to let her in?

Uh-uh,
Mary thought.
No way.
And, perhaps absurdly:
That's not how I was raised.

“You can't come in this window. There's a lot of broken glass. Something . . . an animal jumped through it. Go a little farther along the back of the theater. You'll come to the ladies' room. That's better. There are even some boxes to stand on. I'll help you in. Okay?”

“Yes. Thank you, Mary. Thank God I found you.” Ellen gave her a horrible, grimacing smile—gratitude, shoe-licking humility, and what might have been terror all mixed together—and then shuffled on, head down, back bent. Twelve hours ago she had been Mrs. Suburban Wifemom, on her way to a nice middle-class vacation in Lake Tahoe, where she had probably planned to wear her new resort clothes from Talbot's over her new underwear from Victoria's Secret. Daytime sun with the kids, nighttime sex with the comfy, known partner, postcards home to the friends—having a great time, the air is so clean, wish you were here. Now she looked and acted like a refugee, a no-age warhag fleeing some ugly desert bloodbath.

And Mary Jackson, that sweet little princess—votes Democratic, gives blood every two months, writes poetry—had actually considered leaving her out there to moan in the dark until she could consult with the men. And what did that mean? That she had been in the same war, Mary supposed. This was how you thought, how you behaved, when it happened to you. Except she wouldn't. Be damned if she would.

Mary crossed the hall, listening for any further shouts from the theater. There were none. Then, just as she pushed open the ladies'-room door, three gunshots rang out. They were muffled by walls and distance, but there was no doubt about what they were. Shouts followed them. Mary froze in place, pulled in two different directions with equal force. What decided her was the soft sound of weeping from beyond the unlatched ladies'-room window.

“Ellen? What is it? What's wrong?”

“I'm stupid, that's all,
stupid
! I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on!” The woman outside the window—she was just a blur of shadow on the frosted glass—began sobbing harder.

“Hold on, you'll be inside in a jiffy,” Mary said, and hurried across the room. She set aside the beer-bottles Billingsley had put up on the windowledge and was lifting the hinged window, trying to think how best to help Ellen into the room without hurting her further, when she remembered what Billingsley had said about the cop: that he was taller.
Dear God
, David's father had said, a look of thunderstruck understanding on his face.
She's like Entragian? Like the cop?

Maybe she's got a broken arm,
Mary thought coldly,
maybe she really does. On the other hand
—

On the other hand, hunching over like that was actually a very good way to disguise one's true height, wasn't it?

The lizard which usually kept its place on the back wall of her brain suddenly leaped forward, chirping in terror. Mary decided to pull back, take a moment or two and think things over . . . but before she could, her arm was seized by a strong hot hand. Another one banged open the window, and all of Mary's strength ran out of her like water as she looked into the grinning face staring up at her. It was Ellen's face, but the badge pinned below it

(I see you're an organ donor)

belonged to Entragian.

It
was
Entragian. Collie Entragian somehow living in Ellen Carver's body.

“No!”
she screamed, yanking backward, heedless of the pain as Ellen's fingernails punched into her arms and brought blood.
“No, let go of me!”

“Not until I hear you sing ‘Leavin' on a Jet Plane,' you cunt,” the Ellen-thing said, and as it yanked Mary forward through the window it was still holding open, blood burst from both of Ellen's nostrils in a gush. More blood trickled from Ellen's left eye like gummy tears.
“Oh the dawn is breakin', it's early morn . . .”

Mary had a confused sensation of flying toward the board fence on the other side of the lane.

“The taxi-driver is blowin' his horn . . .”

She managed to get one blocking arm up, but not enough; she took most of the impact with her forehead and went to her knees, head ringing. She could feel warmth spreading over her lips and chin.
Join the nosebleed club, babe,
she thought, and staggered to her feet.

“Already I'm so lonesome I could cryyyyy . . .”

Mary took two large, lunging strides, and then the cop (she couldn't stop thinking of it as the cop, only now wearing a wig and falsies) grabbed her by the shoulder, almost tearing one arm off her shirt as it whirled Mary around.

“Let g—” Mary began, and then the Ellen-thing clipped her on the point of the chin, a crisp and elementary blow that put out the lights. It caught Mary under the arms on her way down and pulled her close. When it felt Mary's breath on Ellen's skin, the faint anxiety which had been on Ellen's face cleared.

“Gosh, I love that song,” it said, and slung Mary over her shoulder like a sack of grain. “It turns me all gooshy inside.
Tak!
”

She disappeared around the corner with her burden. Five minutes later, Collie Entragian's dusty Caprice was once more on its way out to the China Pit, headlights cutting through the swirls of sand driven by the dying wind. As it drove past Harvey's Small Engine Repair and the bodega beyond it, a thin blue-white sickle of moon appeared in the sky overhead.