End Time (3 page)

And when the victim's friends and family finally saw her again, presenting herself in her new clothes on a fancy veranda of a seaside restaurant, they were astonished, pleased, and awed at the cool maturity of her new look.

Yeah,
now
she'd be somebody you'd want to hire.

But this time around, Mr. P. thought he'd have a little fun at the poor young woman's expense. Rewriting and directing the episode as he saw fit, a favorite game. Rewrite the Rerun. Every time the hussy went to a rack of clothes he murmured, “Nope, not that one. Nope. Try again.” And dutifully she picked one lousy outfit after another, finally settling on a bright red gaucho vest with silver bangles and a black crepe skirt with a band of pleats about the hips that made her look like a gussied-up fighting bull ready for the sword.

“That's the ticket, darling.”

While Stacy and Clinton gave each other a knowing glance—
What a hog
—but Stacy said sincerely, “I think we're getting somewhere.” And Clinton, “Very somewhere.”

At the conclusion of this rewritten power-of-mind episode the hosts led the calf to the slaughter, presenting her once more to friends and family on the stone patio of a swank local restaurant overlooking the ocean. But this time the admirers, the poor gal's thirty closest friends, shrieked in dismay, all in unison. A savage rejection. And the poor, distraught girl ran from the restaurant patio in tears, breaking a three-inch heel on the way.

From his seat in the battered leather club chair Mr. P. nodded in approval. “Save to file.”

The Zenith went to commercial.

Now every time the cable company played the rerun it'd be as Mr. P. tweaked it. A mysterious glitch in the system. Would anyone notice the change? Who knew? But since everyone in sight, on or off the camera, had signed a full release all the fuss might go to the lawyers with nothing resolved. A job well done. Still, the gaunt man felt slightly deflated. This was all whoopee cushions and giving hot-foots to bums on park benches. Well, better times were right around the corner.

The Piper didn't know exactly what he wanted to do just yet, at this exact point in his extremely long life, but he knew he wanted to make a difference. Set the top to spinning, and that meant making the biggest mess of things he could. Not simply reconceptualize TV reruns, but rewrite the whole damn system. First things first: Make that grinning cat face famous all over again; plaster Felix from coast to coast, spread him like a pox across the fruited plain. High time people in this soft land of milk and honey learned that when Felix grinned,
a dog's breakfast of human scum was going to hit the whirring fan.

His stomach rumbled. Hunger.

He picked up the telephone from the floor by the chair. He'd found it in a pawn shop, a stage prop, not a real phone, where the label claimed the item was:
Billy's Telephone
—Twilight Zone Episode “Long Distance Call”—Talk to Grandma Collect.
He'd never bothered to call Grandma, though; he used it mostly for takeout. Tonight, a pizza night.

He dialed, it rang, the man at the other end answered, “Stromboli's.”

“Yeah, you delivering yet?” Mr. P. rasped. “I'd like a pie. With everything.”

 

3

Divorce American Style

How did it come to this? How did it all go wrong? It started so perfect.
Cheryl “Chippy” Gibson had come up from the valley, parking her California Highway Patrol motorcycle on a lip of a canyon in Ladera Heights to think things through. She took off her CHiPs helmet and let the warm air rush across her face. She caught sight of herself in the bike's side-view mirror.

If you took away the uniform, the holster, the radio, the BMW copper chopper—just another black face in LA. Praline cocoa skin, a few shades lighter than fancy molasses, and glinting eyes that always looked warm, even in chilly weather, even in the shadows. But wearing the britches and 17-inch knee-high Chippewa boots, helmet, and shades she was bitchin' on wheels, deadly nightshade and nobody with whom you'd dare to mess.

LA at night, city of light. Long tracks of streetlights on a black pan leading to the Pacific, the moon silvering the waves. The cars coming and going, red and white, the occasional siren, racing to an eventuality, all so distant from this spot it almost seemed benign. She and Rachel used to come up here just to hold hands. From a swanky house down below, the sound of a radio playing faintly out an open window rose into the air. That Bob Seger song,
Hollywood Nights
; curiously, the music was right but the words sounded all wrong, the radio blatting out twisted lyrics from the famous oldie.…

Oh, how Hollywood Bites

Those cute Hollywood Jills

She was looking so dead

With her needles and pills

That wasn't how Cheryl remembered the song at all. The signal wavered in and out until the song finally ended. Then the announcer came on—nobody Cheryl had heard before, no gruff Wolfman Jack, but a silky voice, the kind that enchants the ear if only reciting the phone book.

The voice crept up the canyon walls.

“This is the Piper on Night to Night—” the announcer said. “Your favorite Oldies as Newbies, in ways you've never heard.…”

Down below someone killed the radio and the seductive voice died. The silence felt even creepier.

Her and Rachel.

How had it all gone so wrong?
When it started so right?
I know your face better than my own
, Rachel once told her. Going from lust to romance to building a life. Eyes and mind and heart for no one else. African-American lady cop and Hollywood Jewish lady lawyer; married on Nantucket not a year ago. Somebody even found a miniature California Highway Patrol chopper to put on the cake, a mini-Cheryl in uniform standing next to a mini-Rachel in a dark black suit. Blue and black. Good fit, good yin and yang. But then it somehow turned black and blue. The first time Cheryl slapped Rachel's face she wasn't even that drunk.

And what was so important about the argument that somebody needed a bitch-slapping? What color to make the window treatments? Spoiled milk in the fridge? An unpaid parking ticket? Did Rachel work herself into high Hollywood lawyer dudgeon, about Cheryl never paying attention and not caring? Bringing the job home at the end of her shift? What then was so provoking?

Well, actually a life-and-death thing. A creep died while Chippy Gibson lived.

And all Rachel had to ask was a simple question, an innocuous question—with the wrong choice of words. Nothing to get angry about. Nothing at all.

But all Cheryl could think about was what came before, life and death. A bad day on the job.

The Felix Kidz. It all came back to that.

For some time now a strange bit of graffiti had been popping up in all the hoods. Sometimes spray-painted in bubble-letter style, sometimes in chalk—Felix the Cat, grinning for all he was worth from alley wall or pavement.

And sometimes this bit of scribble wasn't simply limited to South Central or the weirder parts of West Hollywood. At first, like most things that suddenly appear out of nowhere, nobody really noticed it. Not like the President as the Joker that got noticed real quick. This one, just another bit of urban effluence, of questionable significance, easily overlooked in the general chaos of LA's freewheeling freeway culture.

Felix's goofy face appearing on walls in alleys strewn with empty crack vials, wine cooler bottles, and condom wrappers. Then his wild grin showed up on the crack vials themselves, and meth bags.

Surfacing again as a tattoo on a Jane Doe—some nameless young woman, her body dumped in a concrete spillway of the LA River. Like so many of the hopefuls coming to the City of Angels for a modeling job, for a bit part, to get away from Daddy who called her “the best kisser in the trailer park,” to finally a waitress, then hostess in some strip dump, to finally get her big break in the movies—but this time bent over, ass up, and really acting like she meant it.

But not moaning up to snuff and tripping down to Hollywood Boulevard for a real spell of Stanislavski method acting. And failing at that, finding the needle or the powder. All ending somehow in a damp storm drain, missing a high-heeled pump with her skirt over her waist. Felix the Cat grinning at Chippy Gibson of the California Highway Patrol from the Jane Doe dead body, the DB's pale, cold rump. The uniformed cops who always found these innocent gals gave them a nickname, Sweet Jane. And the authorities finally started to notice these girls turning up dead in the general vicinity of a grinning cat face.

Three or four days before Rachel's face slap, Cheryl's sergeant chalked up a version of Felix's mug on the blackboard in the ready room for their shift briefing.

“I guess you've all noticed the new cat on the street.…”

He shrugged a little. “Puss 'n' Boots here. And I'd like to tell you we know what the hell it is. We can't. Gang Task Force tell us it's spread across territory lines, Crips, Bloods, over to the Spanish, M-13, La Surenos, Los Zetas, and even the Wah Chings—there just doesn't seem to be any locus we can put our finger on.”

The sergeant shrugged again. “So what can I say today? What I say every day—you see one of these marks, in an alley, on the sidewalk, on a routine stop—exhibit extreme caution. Ladies and gentlemen, don't try to figure it out on your own, but take a picture on your cell, take some notes, and we'll shoot it all back to Intelligence for the big brains to cogitate.”

Here, the sergeant wiped Felix's grinning puss from the board, swiping it into a faceless mush of chalk dust. “As the saying goes …
Exercise extreme caution
.”

*   *   *

So later in her shift, Cheryl showed extreme etcetera when she flagged a smoking hot Lowrider on Interstate 10 out by Redlands, belching exhaust; but the pull-over didn't go down easy. The souped-up Impala ignored her, sped up, and ripped down the I-10 off-ramp, jamming a side street and blasting through the chained gate at Pharaoh's Lost Kingdom, a quarter mile away. Thirty seconds of tear-ass, Cheryl's legs turning to water as she clung to the bike. The defunct amusement and water park was dead as the great Sphinx of Giza. Lawyer carrion had been fighting over its carcass for years, one of LA's dead zones—and this was no good.

Cheryl heard her own voice, a trifle too urgent, talking to Dispatch: “Officer 62, I-10, WB, Pharaoh's Lost Kingdom Parking lot, reckless speed, ignoring instructions. Request other units or local PD.”

Dispatch came back, “Pharaoh Parking.”

“That's affirm.”

The vehicle screeched to a halt with a smoke of rubber, but its engine still belched exhaust. Cheryl stopped her BMW copper chopper twenty feet behind.

“Mid-sixties bright orange Chevy Impala, California Vanity Plate, FLX22.”

Dispatch came back again. “Local San Bernardino, black & white ETA three minutes.”

Three
minutes. A prompt response window, but still an ice age in real life real time. Cheryl dismounted the motorcycle, unclipped the safety strap from her Glock 9mm, held her right hand on the grip, ready to pull the gun from the holster. She always hated the way the thing felt in her hand. Always blood-warm, since she drove around in the sun all day, and then clammy at night.

“Please shut off your engine, sir.” Her voice came out strongly now, no room for argument. The engine died with a last burp of exhaust. She approached the orange Chevy, five steps away. “Please put your hands on the wheel, sir.”

But the driver's hands were
already
clamped on the steering wheel, yet something was decidedly wrong. Cheryl took in the man in the front seat. A Chicano, about age twenty, Laker's B-Ball Jersey, yellow, number 24, Bryant—with the wrong kind of hands on the wheel. A
woman's hands
; a pair of lady's hands sat at ten and two o'clock, normal driving position—but the driver's own hands—young-man hands—sat on his thighs, a finger going tap-tap-tap as if impatient with everything.

The young man was wearing an extra pair of arms.

Wearing.

It seared into the back of her skull in all of a second. The top section of a human body had been skinned, the shoulders and arms, specifically, cut from the torso; a large hole where the neck used to be, a broad flap from the spine, leaking blood. From inside the bloodstained Laker's Jersey, the dead arms protruded from the arm holes, gripping the wheel. The driver wore the skinned mantle like football shoulder pads, so he could steer from the 6 o'clock position with his real hands.

The rest of the body lay on the backseat. Head and trunk intact; only the arms and back flap of skin missing. Lovely, angelic face. Another Sweet Jane.

The young man looked around from his place at the wheel. “Buenos Dias, Officer.” A small round tattoo of Felix the Cat grinned at Cheryl from the Chicano's forehead.

“Sir, please put your real hands on the steering wheel.” Chippy felt her voice about to crack, but somehow it didn't. Flat, even, controlled.

“No problemo.” But just before he placed his hands on the wheel, his finger flipped a switch on the dash, powering up the hop-and-dance feature of the hydraulics. The radio blasted to life at the same time, the tune from the funk band War way back in the 1970s. The late Charles Miller's black tar voice rumbled out the car window, the thumper “Low Rider.” Perfect choice as the musician had been murdered in LA and the killer never found, perfect Hollywood.

Now that she thought back to it, she seemed to remember the words coming out of the radio were wrong here too. Was this the first time she'd heard the wrong words coming out of a radio? Cheryl couldn't quite remember—not with a dissected Sweet Jane in the back of the car, a guy wearing an extra pair of hands, and that hand over her Glock.