P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 02 - Exile on Slain Street (28 page)

“Fuck this,” Tortoise said. “I’ve been to prison, and this ain’t no prison.” He walked out the front door.

Greg decided it was his turn for a nervous breakdown. “I just want to eat at a nice restaurant! And smoke real cigarettes! That’s all I fucking want!” Then he directed his words at me. “I am sick of this stalker bullshit!”

At that moment, a bullet struck him in the gut. He looked as stunned as I felt. Hare, whose reflexes were as fast as his nickname, ducked down and grabbed Greg’s legs before another bullet whizzed by. That one would have hit Greg in the head. Hare climbed on top of Greg and covered him.

“Agggh!” Greg screamed. “God, it hurts! I’m gonna sue!”

“Hang on, man!” Hare screamed.

I heard running and shouting as I made my way back to the elimination room and ducked behind a tuffet, where I could hide and get a decent aim at Lorelai if she came out of the passageway behind the armoire. I could see Greg bleeding all over the floor, and Hare looked so vulnerable.

Tortoise yelled from outside, “You okay?” Maybe the rest of the crew made it out, maybe Topaz. Patrick was probably still in the bathroom. And where was Shane?

I heard the noise of stilettos on the floor and wondered how Lorelai got out of the passage so quietly. I hissed to Hare, “Play dead!”

Hare was a pretty good actor. He went limp, and Greg’s blood soaked his shirt. I thought Hare might make it out alive. But I worried about Lorelai picking off anyone standing in the yard.

Then I saw Topaz in the entrance to the hall. She was one of the few I hadn’t seen or heard during the fray, and Topaz was never quiet for long. She had a gun.

She looked at my gun.

I looked at her gun.

The look on her face suggested she might be thinking I was the stalker. Greg sobbed, “Don’t hurt me!”

Topaz’s eyes narrowed. “What happened in Patrick’s bedroom? You tell me now!”

Then I saw a white arm smeared with blood loop around Topaz’s neck. Her torso jerked backward, and then she disappeared into the doorway between the elimination area and the bar. “Before you do that, Lorelai — ” Topaz pronounced each syllable clearly, and I knew that was for my benefit “ — you should know I am not alone and someone can take your ass down.”

I heard a scream, a gunshot, and a grunt from Topaz. A body hit the floor. I fired my gun into the doorframe, hoping that maybe I would hit Lorelai since it sounded like Topaz was the one who took the shot. I wasn’t worried about taking a bullet myself. Lorelai had been so busy firing that she just might not have any bullets left.

“Get the message? I said I wasn’t alone. Now let me go into the other room, Lorelai,” Topaz said, “or I will have Katherine pump you full of holes.”

Topaz staggered in, blood gushing from her leg. Her gun was gone, and Lorelai emerged, fully loaded, a gun in each hand. She was shaking, her face was contorted, and a trickle of red ran from her ear, where I’d hit her with the chair.

All the time I had suspected Topaz, Greg, Wolf and even Cookie at one point. I had been an idiot. Topaz was the second mole in the house. Wolf wasn’t bluffing. He really did hire a professional. And Lorelai just about killed her.

“You!” Lorelai screamed at me. “You? You’re the fucking one who is going to stop me? Country Kathy?”

Greg was whimpering. Hare didn’t move. Topaz crouched down by me.

“Drop it,” Lorelai said.

I wasn’t dropping anything. She was trembling. The worst that could have happened was for her to have a nervous twitch and shoot any one of us. She got Greg and Patrick, but she must not have been that good if she only hit Topaz in the thigh, and the head wound I gave her wasn’t helping. “I’m a better shot than you, Lorelai,” I told her. “Now, we need to talk before anyone else gets hurt.”

“Drop it,” she said again.

“I can put a bullet in between your eyes right now,” I said. I was exaggerating slightly, but I could certainly shoot her somewhere that mattered. “You can try me, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You may have been lucky so far, but you won’t be lucky this time.”

Lorelai leveled both guns. “Nothing personal, but I will get this done.”

“Was it worth Kevin? Dawn? Patrick and Greg? If you wanted an eye for an eye, it seems like you’re going for the whole face,” I told her. I could see Topaz twitch from her position. She had landed at a good angle and could come at Lorelai from the side. Had I been doing enough to stall? I could tell Topaz was supporting herself on her good leg. Lorelai was emotional and didn’t have the sense to cover herself properly. She wasn’t even looking at Topaz, assuming Topaz had been subdued. But she forgot that Topaz wasn’t a quitter.

Lorelai snickered. “Honey, it will never be enough after what they did to Sean Morgan.”

All the stalker stuff was actually a cover. Lorelai started out as a stalker, and then she shifted over to vengeance. Stalking was merely what she was good at, so she just transferred her skills to Patrick, throwing out a red herring while she went after Kevin.

“This is all about Sean Morgan? You think Sean Morgan killed himself because of this? He killed himself because he had bigger problems than television!” I yelled. “Ask Patrick — he’ll tell you!”

Lorelai’s face twitched.

“Why didn’t you stop with Kevin? What about Dawn?” I asked. “Why’d you make Fred go to sleep when you were in the Hummer? You could have died that day!”

“It doesn’t matter if I die! I want to stop this whole business!” she screamed. “This whole business is wrong! When I pushed Dawn, I thought you people would finally listen, but nooo… I didn’t hurt Dawn! This business hurt her! Not me!”

Topaz asked, “You’re pissed off about Sean?”

Topaz had been with me, step by step, except for that one point. That was the one place in which my forest friends helped. Then again, Lorelai had us all fooled. She might have fooled us the whole way if she could have controlled her rage.

“Nuclear Kings Sean?” Topaz asked again, as if she couldn’t believe anyone would kill just for the sake of Sean Morgan. “The one who killed himself? You gotta be shitting me.”

I understood Lorelai’s source of her anger, but she had unleashed a fury that she couldn’t put back in the bottle. She wasn’t going to stop getting revenge for the death of Sean Morgan until we stopped her.

“Shut up!” Lorelai screamed. “He’s not Nuclear Kings Sean! He’s just Sean! And he didn’t have to die! Patrick betrayed him, he betrayed the music, and so did you! You don’t really love the music!” Her voice quavered, and she waved the guns, almost as if she wanted to wipe a tear from her eye.

The moment was brief, but it was more than enough. Topaz and I locked eyes for a split second. I ducked down, and Topaz flew through the air, propelled by the strength of her good leg. “Nobody shoots me and gets away with it, bitch!”

Apparently Topaz had been drawing on her real personality the whole time. For someone who got on my nerves for so long, she was a good person to have in my corner. She slammed Lorelai in the nose with her fist, followed by a brutal head butt. Lorelai tried to shoot, but she couldn’t steady herself to get a breath. I dove for her and grabbed her by the knees. She fell back and dropped the guns. “Sean, Sean…” she cried.

Hare came to life and grabbed Lorelai’s weapons. He ran off with them, toward the pool. I guessed he was going to send them to a watery grave.

“Show’s over!” Topaz yelled.

I struggled with Lorelai and tried to pin her down, but I had to hold on to my gun. The blood coming from both her and Topaz made us slippery, and Lorelai managed to stand up. “Hare! Camera guy! Get me something to tie her up with, and get a doctor!” I yelled.

Topaz staggered slightly. She was tough as all hell. She wasn’t just talk. But she was losing blood. She came toward me like she wanted to help, but she collapsed.

Lorelai wasn’t done yet. Even with all the blood spurting from her nose, she punched me in the stomach. I wrapped my arm around her body, but she managed to slip away from me, and she took off for the front door. I followed, and I heard Tortoise screaming.

I wasn’t as fast as I thought I would be because Lorelai’s elbow drove the air out of my lungs. She was already heading down the front stairs toward the driveway and the road. Of course she had no reason to worry. She knew which stairs she had greased and which ones she hadn’t. I went down as fast as I could, and I aimed the gun. I was going to have to shoot her in the back to stop her. If she hadn’t killed so many people, I might have felt guilty about it since shooting someone in the back never seemed fair.

Luckily, I didn’t have to worry. As soon as she made it to the road, Shane, who was still naked and muddy, leapt out from the bushes. He rammed into Lorelai, leaving her in a crumpled heap on the side of the road. Andi and Muriel, both wearing crowns of leaves on their heads, were close behind, and they piled on her. Muriel began pounding on Lorelai with her fist. “I never liked you, and I don’t like your brownies!” she screamed. “They taste too much like cake!” Andi started biting Lorelai’s ankles. The whole time, Lorelai chanted, “Sean… Sean… Sean…”

I ran down to try to pull all parties involved out of the road before they were creamed by a car. I just grabbed an arm and a leg — I didn’t know whose was which — and started pulling, and I sent a silent “thank you” to our little forest creatures right when I heard screeching brakes.

My body stiffened, and I braced myself to meet my maker, after all that trouble of going on a reality show and corralling one seriously messed up Nuclear Kings fan.

The car screeched to a stop, and I saw that it was the production van, which must have come from the main driveway. Tortoise and Hare jumped out. Tortoise pushed off Shane, Andi, and Muriel, snatched Lorelai from me and lifted her right up by her arms. I thought I heard her shoulder dislocate. She screamed, “Sean! Sean! It’s the cameras that killed him! Sean!” Her legs flailed, but it was useless. Hare, who was covered in Greg’s blood, was already tying her up with some electrical cord in the van.

“Who are you?” Tortoise asked Muriel, whose crown of twigs was skewed.

Hare laughed. “It’s the babe in the woods. Half the crew is in love with you!”

“She is the Queen of the Forest, and you should thank her right now.” I hugged her quickly. “That crown looks good on you. And, Shane, I’ve never been so happy to see a muddy naked man in all my life!”

I couldn’t tell if Shane blushed, but he nodded and hid discreetly behind Muriel, who was much thinner and didn’t cover him up very well.

While Tortoise and Hare dealt with Lorelai and got Shane some clothes, I ran back into the house to check on everyone else.

Once I entered the door, I began to hear sirens, and I saw Wolf carrying Patrick down the stairs. Patrick lifted his head slightly and smiled at me. His shoulder was wrapped up tightly in sheets, and he was bleeding through. “It’s okay. Wolf knows what to do.”

Grunting, Wolf laid Patrick down by Topaz, who was lying on her back on the floor, but she had elevated her leg on one of the tuffets. “Hi, Patrick,” Topaz said. “Ain’t getting shot a bitch?”

“Oh, hell yes,” Patrick said.

“This your first time?” she asked.

“Yep,” he sighed.

Between deep breaths, Topaz said, “It’s okay. I’ve been shot before. It hurts every time.” She bit her lip. “Wolf, I’m sorry, man. I tried.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Me three!” Greg cried out from his corner of the room.

Wolf said, “Sometimes, the encyclopedia doesn’t have all the answers. Especially if we refuse to read the pages.”

Patrick said, faintly, “That’s a good one!”

At that moment, cops and EMTs swarmed in.

Chapter Thirty-Three:
Got You Good

A
fter all the interviews and the mess, I had the chance to go home to South Park. Harold fed me a comforting meal of macaroni and cheese and let me cry for a long time. I was a pro. I’ve seen violence, but I hadn’t seen that many people shot at once. Not only had I been in danger, but Shane, Wayne and Muriel put themselves out there for me. And, when you’re up against a crazy person like Lorelai, you don’t know what to expect.

The next day, I drove my car up to the Marin County Hospital, hoping to see Topaz and Patrick at least. Much to my surprise, Cookie and Wolf were in the waiting room where Patrick was staying. Cookie grabbed me and started crying, apologizing all over herself. “I am so, so sorry,” she sobbed. “You must hate me.”

“About what? You’re not the killer.” I hugged her back.

“About not being straight with you about Wolf! And not kicking Lorelai’s ass when I had the chance! If I tore her down, maybe I could have stopped her…”

I hugged her back. “I kind of figured out the Wolf thing, you know. I saw your thong in the cabana, and you were the one who said you were barking up the wrong penis.”

Wolf blushed. “Dogs don’t grow on trees,” he said. At least he extrapolated dogs from barking, but I still had no idea what the hell that man was saying. As long as Cookie loved him and he looked at her like she really was made of sugar, I didn’t care.

“I never could resist poetry.” Cookie sighed.

“So, what made you snap?” I asked. “Did you have an idea that Lorelai was bad news?”

“I knew she was a fake-ass, but not a murderer. And you and Topaz thought I was a stalker! Hell, no! I do love the Nuclear Kings, but… Wolf and I… we got together on the first night. He thought that if I won, I might at least get my own show.” She looked at Wolf, and he took her hand and kissed it.

“I thought you wanted your own show, Wolf?” I asked.

Wolf shrugged. “Everyone wants to be a star. And Cookie is a star.” He took her hand again.

“Did Patrick know?” I asked.

“Oh, hell, yeah — with his blessing. We told him the second day, after Wolf got hurt by the light.” She patted Wolf on the behind. “Patrick is the second-nicest guy in the universe. You really should try to date him.” Cookie nodded her head. “He does like you. That was real.” She laughed. “Probably the only thing that was real!”

Then Wolf asked, “What about this?” He swooped in and gave her a long kiss.