The Kill Riff (31 page)

    He had tossed his knee out several times in his life. Each time it was about ten days before he could stop walking funny. Now his leg was bitching that gas pedal duty was just too goddamned much to ask. The cure for the hurt had been an even worse hurt. His knee was black and swollen. Before the storm, he had tried to glean some information from the radio news. He had seen the face of his alter ego last night, on Tucson's News on Nine, thinking perhaps he should sue KGUN-TV for defamation of character.

    The only person he encounters while limping back to the hotel is a wino, loitering on the tiled patio of a mercantile adjunct to the Holiday Inn called La Placita Village. It is a short walk from here to the Community Center, something Lucas had factored into his plan. The wino looks exactly like the ones he had ignored in Denver. He sits with his feet in the pool of a novelty fountain that only operates during business hours. He has pissed in the pool, and his coat front is caked with vomit. He stinks of sour alcohol and hydrochloric acid. He laughs at Lucas and mumbles something in Spanish.

    He recalled thinking that he probably looked worse than the wino, and even though his vision was spotting and he could barely stand, his universe fuzzing apart, then reestablishing in near-total blackout, he could not let any of the hotel employees see-and remember-his state.

    The wino laughs as he gimps onward. Come back and shoot the motherfucker later, he thinks. Later. He peeks through the patio entrance to the hotel, then edges through the glass door with his rifle bow-slung, shapeless in its sleeve. He whangs into the door and draws a few fazed titters from the lounge. There is a stairwell door that permits him to bypass the lobby and any more questioning glances. He feels like Sisyphus, clopping up seven flights of stairs one by one, acrid bile crawling up his throat at the same pace. In the room he stays on his feet long enough to gobble painkillers-the same ones he'd given to Cass -and wrap his hands in damp hotel-issue towels. He wakes up facedown on the bed five hours later, rolling over and staring into the recap of the ten o'clock news. The towels have grown pink with juice.

    The Bronco's cab windows seemed to melt under the onslaught of the high-velocity rainfall. Beyond them, the ocean seethed and swirled, inviting fast death, anxious to wash over its borders and come to a boiling point. Ten more miles… then Cass could nurse him, for a change.

    His original plan had been to shovel out a final resting place for the Dragunov on the roadside somewhere between San Francisco and Point Pitt. The storm and the uselessness of his hands had erased that idea. It was too agitated out there to stop at El Granada and heave it off the jetty. Disposal of the evidence would have to wait. It seemed an acceptable risk, more sane than his previous slips. Even if they noticed the difference in caliber between the slugs that holed Fozzetto and those that took down the rest of the band, the guys hunting for the mystery gun would be a time-zone distant. Perhaps they weren't bothering to search or to mess with lab workups, since they thought they had the killer in custody. His alter ego. Perhaps they wouldn't see the gloves or consider their importance.

    But there was still the nylon line, dangling from the north end of the arena, stiff with Lucas' blood. He'd had to ditch at least five blood-saturated towels (they weren't dry and were too many to burn discreetly). People had taken notice of his injured hands. Even innocent notice was too much attention. The Holiday Inn staff would remember that "John Case" had slipped away without officially checking out, the day after the tragedy. Maybe the predators clogging the hotel's lounge would recall the man walking headfirst into the closed glass door. Maybe they had seen blood.

    A double baker's dozen slips, on this job.

    The color on the room TV is cockeyed. The hawkfaced man on the screen has a chartreuse face and dayglo orange tufts of ear hair. His American Gothic go-to-meetin' suit is obviously black, but it swims with poisonous rainbow patterns, like the moire of an oil slick. With the suit he wears combat boots. An aging urban middle-class country punk? He flashes the video news crews a peace sign from within a ring of six Pima County sheriffs who aren't laughing. The cuffs, linked to a steel waistband, restrict the man's reach as he is escorted away. The voice-over labels him a ''right-wing fundamentalist." His story, told by robotic, blown-dry news mannequins (one for each local station) is "a simple one."

    Eldon Quantrill, of Clifton, Arizona, enthusiastically noted for the record that he was a close personal friend of both the ghetto-blaster pastor who'd engineered the abortive book burning on the patio of the Tucson Community Center and of the voodoo-obsessed Falwell clone Lucas had seen on the same TV screen the previous night. Each of these worthies disowned Eldon with hot blushes of embarrassment when a TV camera was shoved into their faces for comment. This upset Eldon's kilter not a particle. Such rejection, he said, was another facet of his lifelong penance.

    
What penance?
he was immediately asked. Lucas thought old Eldon was a lot more canny than he let on. He played the news media like a fiddle from the first.

    God, it seemed, had instructed Eldon. God had told Eldon what needed to be done. God had told him to do it using his trusty M-16 and home-loaded mercury-tipped ammunition-poison bullets left Satan that much less leeway. Eldon did as he was told. Any devout man would have, but Eldon was eager to atone for his past. He obeyed God because it was God who had marked him with a large, ungainly facial mole that sprouted thick white bristles as punishment for having carnal knowledge of his farm mother at age fourteen. "Knowing her," as Eldon put it. Now, at age fifty-two, he was still trying to make up for that sinful goof… or rather, those eight sinful goofs over a one-month hell of gracelessness. Since that grand yet troublesome time, in the final year of the Second World War-(Eldon's father had bitten the big one at Anzio Beach, thus his mother's distress)-Eldon had tried to keep himself pure and await a Sign. The Sign had finally come via God's instrument on earth, television, in the divine form of the Old Time Gospel Hour, which Eldon watched religiously. It had been Father Dunbrille's words less than twenty-four hours prior to the 'Gasm date that snapped everything into focus, and Eldon did not hesitate to exercise his Second Amendment rights and mow down that godless zoo of pagan troglodytes who suckled the Devil's bilious teat, unquote and exclamation point! His path was clear.

    Police, attorneys, and professional interrogators would unearth reams of such trivia during Eldon's intense and protracted debriefing. The investigation would ultimately consume a six-figure sum in man hours and squandered taxpayer dollars, all because one of the cops had asked Eldon if he had any knowledge of the similar incidents in Denver and San Francisco.

    "Why, certainly, shorty," Eldon said with a grandfather's jaunty grin. "His will be done. You just tote that microphone back over here, and I'll tell you all about God's plan to eliminate that Gabriel Stannard guy, next."

    Eldon Quantrill remained a darling of the media for about two weeks before the truth became known, the ratings dropped, and audiences moved on to seek other diversions.

    And Lucas was a free man.

    Stannard was the Whip Hand member in whom Lucas had the most interest. His plan had been to let the singer wilt on the vine, mulling over the deaths of his former comrades for a long, destructive time. Let paranoia erode his life. Let him fear imminent death for years; poke him, prod him regularly, keep Eldon Quantrill's devout fear of a god singing high in his veins. Eldon's holy inspiration had come along at just the right moment to make Lucas consider altering his plan.
Call it luck,
he thought.
Call it divine intervention.

    It had been common sense, not a magnificent constitution, that had denied Lucas the services of T-doctors. His blood, on the nylon rope, would be discovered eventually. It had been luck that had let him choke down enough room service protein to permit his damaged body to catch his outbound flight on time, with bandaged mitts and a noticeable limp and another suitably opaque alias. All luck.

    His muscles burned mordantly, particularly the hamstrings behind his knees and the bundles on the inside thighs connected to the groin-pectineus, adductor longus, gracilis. The tension of maintaining uncomfortable, stressful positions on the roof, in the air vents, and on the catwalks for hours had caused sweat to flood out of him. He had lost seven pounds last night, and today he hurt. He hoped the pain also meant that he was on the mend.

    Despite the slithering lime chips and rainstorm mudslides, the Bronco valiantly billygoated its way up the slope to the cabin. The idea of stumping up the hill in the storm and the dark held no attraction. When his lights finally splashed across the face of the cabin, he tooted the horn twice and dismounted carefully. Icy sleet stung his face. But he was not in pain anymore.

    

    

    She almost started shooting out the front window without thinking at all, like an Al Capp cartoon hillbilly filling a trespassing "revenoor" full of rock salt. If Lucas' former
wifey
and her bulldog-faced lawyer wanted to harass her in the dead of night, let them swallow some lead hospitality. She had major problems to solve before she could be sociable, or even snide.

    
Thank Christ or Allah or whoever was in charge for this good storm,
she thought.
Rain could rinse away so much.

    She had fled. She had run as fast as she could downhill, toward the coast road, because her body needed to flee. It had been straining to run ever since Reese had come axe first through the cabin door like the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Hi, puss. That awful whisper of his had been the charnel sound of graves and gallows. It could make snakes shudder.

    
Run!

    At the bottom of the hill, back in the real world, her brain had decided to check back in. She found Reese's Datsun, hidden in a stand of brush and camouflaged to be undetectable from the road. She smashed the driver's side window to silver-faceted dust with a stone. There was no way in hell she was going back to the cabin to dig through Reese's pockets for keys. The monster might open his eyes and seize her wrist with his teeth.

    Her saddlebag purse was still in the back, most of its contents mingled into the sleeping bags and camping gear. Reese had sacked it, taken fifty in cash, and ignored the rest. Her favorite hairbrush was MIA. Damn-of all things, he would have to lose that…

    What astonished her the most was not dropping the gun after she and it had sung their duet. Horrified heroines always dropped the gun, especially after it fired. She had clutched it as she ran, a heavy metal throttle to steer her mad flight. Its solidity, its presence would make returning to the cabin a lot easier.

    She found Reese still capsized in a wide pool of tacky blood, his position unchanged. Maybe he did not require a stake through the heart. She stood and looked at the corpse for a long time, as day shaded into twilight.

    It was hours before she actually crossed the room, to touch it.

    She had been certain that Reese would be gone. That she would return to find a pool of blood and no body. It's Friday the thirteenth, and Jason Voorhees never dies, not really. And now that she saw the body, she was equally certain that it would roll over, grinning and hungry, capture her in a rape both physical and spiritual, and drain away her life force like some weird paranormal leech.

    Reese remained very dead as she dragged him out the back door by one leg. The dark swath of semicoagulated blood left in his wake reminded her of the wide water trails left by street-cleaning machines. The body seemed to gain two hundred pounds in death-another of Reese's little jokes. Just try to move me, puss.

    She stripped the tarps from Lucas' lumber stack and shrouded the body, partially to obscure the fact that this lump was a dead body, but mostly to kill her fear that those inhuman metal eyes were going to snap open while her back was turned. She weighted down the comers of the tarp with firewood, fighting to quell the voices in her head.

    
You have to bury them before they can rise from the dead.

    She backed away, sneaking glance after glance at the unmoving lump.

    In a perverted burlesque of dull routine, she restored the interior of the cabin to normal. Try this: Just ignore the fact that the mess you're scraping up is shell casings, an exploded TV, and moist body parts. Ignore the fact that you're doing it with a roscoe stuffed in your coveralls, and your heart is stopping at every tiny noise. Ignore the fact that when you mop, you're mopping up blood and tissue. To mop, she had to use the sink, and to use the sink meant lifting Reese's arm out of it, hoping madly that the fingers did not close on any part of her while she did it.

    She worked methodically, with an utter lack of expression.

    Thank hell I got the body out before it started to… uh, stink. What if animals smell it and wander down to snack? What if Lucas' wife-ex-wife-and the lawyer saw Reese? Why haven't they come back? Maybe I could put Reese into the Datsun; drive the Datsun into the sea?

    
I wish you were here, Lucas. Luke.

    When she checked Reese again, he was still dead. Her insides finally began to uncoil.

    She thought of Reese's grizzly bears, making themselves known at last, closing a circle. Then the cleansing storm had rolled in and cleared up that qualm. She was inside, where it was warm and safe and there were food and weapons, and Reese… Reese was outside.

    While neatening up, she made a conscious effort not to nose into what Reese had called sugar daddy's big secret-the room with the invitingly skewed door. Certainly Lucas' big secret was not the Trinitron. That caused laughter to jump from her, a bit too shrilly:
My big secret is that I'm a idiot, Cass. Forgive me. I have to watch Green Acres reruns. I have no choice.
The portable Sony had been the first thing Reese had spotted. He'd pulled it out to show her, then tried to kill her with it.