The Kill Riff (42 page)

    Nothing ever happened around a place like Olive Grove or Dos Piedras. When something did, it became the stuif of gossip, and legends, for decades to follow.

    

    

    "HE'S COMING," LUCAS SAID AS the rain started again. "He's coming here."

    In his eyes, Sara could make out her own darkling outline, defined by the bathroom light behind her. Her hand, stalled halfway to the phone, still hung, reaching, from the end of her arm. The phone had stopped ringing.

    His eyes moved up, then down, cataloging her body with mild curiosity but no discernible interest; not at all the way most men looked at her. He was seeing her naked for the first time. "You'd better find a towel or you'll be sneezing your way into next December."

    It is more than bravery not to broadcast raw fear when one is buff-ass naked, dripping, with a towel lopping sight from one eye, with a phone blowing reveille every five seconds, with a heavily armed killer sharing your hallway. It has to be on the level of autonomic reflex, like breathing. One holds or one folds. One cannot train for it. For a moment she feared a shot of urine would be startled out of her, to course doher leg and pool on the hardwood floor. That would have broken her. Instead she locked fast, heedless of her nudity, careful to appear nondefensive, Dr. Windsor, not just Sara.

    Her hand withdrew. "Lucas, that was probably Burt Kroeger on the phone just now-"

    He closed his eyes and nodded as though he knew this. His hands seemed thick with padding beneath the black leather gloves. He wore a bulky ski sweater, also totally black, and black fatigue pants with combat pockets on the thighs. The butt of the Llama automatic poked from its brown leather nest in his left armpit. The black woven canvas garrison belt around his waist was filled with clips for the M-16. Was it even legal to strut hardware like this? She had voted for the handgun control initiative in the 1982 election, when California was supposed to set the trend for the entire nation. Instead,
Proposition 15
had been humiliatingly trounced, and the gun lobbies had been victorious. Citizens shrugged. She thought of her own gun, the Colt Diamondback revolver, still at the bottom of her overnight bag. In the bedroom. Miles away.

    She had to wrest more control. "Lucas, I want my robe."

    "Later," he said, with no pause to think. "I want every psychological advantage I can get right now. Nudity is a great deterrent to rash action. Go sit by the fire, Sara. Get warm." He motioned with the M-16. The enormous Nitefinder scope looked like a space shuttle sitting atop a 747.

    Sara's dinner roiled in her stomach. She pulled the towel from her hair and tucked it around her torso, defying Lucas to do anything retaliatory about it. He did not protest. Thank god for large towels. She swept her damp hair back to keep it out of her face. Warm air from the fireplace tingled her skin and tried to make goose-losh; it didn't need much help.

    "I browsed a little while you were in the shower," he said, following her into the front room, his gaze constantly jumping to the windows and back. From the sofa he picked up a cloth volume Sara recognized as
Psycho-Therapeutics
, by Robert Collier Young. It was tented open to a particular passage, which Lucas read aloud for her, " '… psychotherapy, like meteorology and economics, is an art rather than a science,' " Lucas recited. " 'There are psychiatrists and psychologists who have had some success with a certain type of patient under certain circumstances, but there are an awful lot of imposters, quacks, failures, and just plain incompetents running around in that field, and they exert far too much influence. They have become the modern priestcraft. They have supplanted the religious infallibility of previous centuries. One hundred and fifty years ago, phrenologists enjoyed as much status as today's psychiatrists; yet today, phrenology is dead. I don't know how much longer psychotherapy is going to last.' ''

    He snapped the volume shut and put it down. His right arm and hand were ever occupied with the ugly M-16.

    She thought,
Will I be alive when the sun comes up?

    ''Dear Sara. You came up to my cabin. Why?"

    "No," she said, fighting to bypass his terrifyingly stoic manner. "You're going to answer some questions for me, Lucas-about that girl at your cabin, for one thing."

    He seemed to defer. "She killed somebody. Remember Kristen, Sara? Kristen killed somebody, too."

    "Is the girl at the cabin dead, Lucas?" She kept using his name, searching for any breach point. She wanted to rise from the chair and dared not.

    "Kristen is dead," he clarified. "She was alive for a while, and then she was dead again. It's not my fault."

    She remembered her mini-lecture to Burt.
If you accuse him, he'll come on as the outraged innocent or vigorously protest that he's been framed. You and your silly mouth, Sara.
But there was really no reason to be seared of Lucas, for her to be scared of Lucas, unless she became part of the hideous pattern he seemed locked into repeating. Cory and Kristen, Kristen and Cory, a new daughter and a new…

    "Tell me what happened, Lucas. Who is coming here? Cory? Kristen? Burt? Who?''

    He had been watching her with an odd expression, waiting for her to challenge him with some accusational shuttlecock he could swat down. The attack he expected did not come. Sara wanted to help. He could confide in her. That was what had brought him to this place.

    "When I left, Sara, it was all clear. No problems. Everything had worked out crystalline, as Gustavo de la Luces would say. Just crystalline. He's a guy I used to work with."

    "Burt mentioned him to me."

    "Yeah." The muzzle of the gun was not pointed at her. His voice had tuned down to a quiet, hoarse whisper. "You know about Whip Hand, right? You wouldn't have gone all the way up to Point Pitt with Burt if you hadn't figured that part out. And Burt wouldn't go unless he had a goddamned good reason. He's that kind of guy, a problem solver, very direct. I liked him."

    
Psychopath? You're describing most of the businessmen on Broker's Row.
Burt had said that.

    "I wasn't as good at it as I thought. Revenge, I mean. I did the first one okay; pretty seamless. The second one was sloppy; I got frightened. The third one was nearly a complete wash. I thought I was up to it. It was for Kristen, you know. But I guess I wasn't."

    A knot of scrap pine began sizzling in the fireplace. "You're a problem solver too, Lucas," she said. Her heart was banging about inside her ribs like an enraged ape trying to fight its way out of a cage.

    "Then that crazy religious nut chanced along, and I said to myself,
perfect. Perfect.
I could stop with clean hands. Except for…"

    "The girl at the cabin." She was gambling, and she knew it. "You were avenging Kristen, and all of a sudden you got Kristen back. And that meant you'd get your old life back. And that might lead all the way back to Cory, and Cory wasn't good for you, so-''

    "You're not so smart, Sara," he snapped. "You think you know every goddamned thing. Well, you don't." The M-16 swung back up, and Sara felt as though she had attracted the unwanted attention of a cobra. "You don't at all. You just don't understand. Kristen was…" He stopped, sighed, then refocused on her with something like anger. "You made me forget things at that hospital. You took away elements that I needed to remember. You convinced me, with your psychiatric horseshit, that my little girl Kristen was perfect and I was mourning her loss so bad I wanted to kill myself. You took Kristen out of my head and laundered her and stuck her back in."

    He had seemed so broken, so consumed with guilt. Sara had wanted to help him up out of the black well of depression. The man's wife had overdosed on pills and left him a note reading DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT. Then his teenage daughter had gotten killed at the Whip Hand show. This was all true, a matter of record. And Lucas had pulled that stunt on the courthouse steps with the plastic gun, as if in deadly presagement of what was to follow a year later. Gabriel Stannard had been scarred, marked by his future murderer. Lucas had been driven by love for his daughter.

    Hadn't he?

    
Cory had committed suicide. Remember,
Burt had said,
he was seeing other women after she died.

    What other women? Where were they now?

    
Pow!
The pine knot exploded in the fireplace, scattering embers.

    "Kristen had to be watched constantly. Or she'd tell. Eventually, she'd tell. She was not the little angel you reinvented her as, Sara. You messed with my head. You changed my reality. And look what has happened."

    "Lucas." She tried to stay calm, level, reasoned. "Lucas, what did Cory's suicide note really mean?"

    He thought about this, like a man who sees the inevitable barreling toward him and realizes he'll have to tell because time is leaking away. No force could stop it.

    "I wrote the note," he said.

    Lucas had written DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT in a flawless mimic of Cory's hand. She was blamed. What was all her fault?

    "We don't have a whole lot of time, you and I, Sara," he said after checking the windows again. "He's coming here. There'll be cops and noise and madness."

    "Lucas-listen to me. What did you have to do with Cory's death?" The idea that Lucas had killed his wife rose like a ghost seeking trouble. "I'll take care of you. Nothing'll happen to you if you just-"

    "I didn't kill Cory," he overrode, working up anger. "Killing Cory was Kristen's idea."

    
He knew about the nightmare glitter in Kristen's eyes. It was the same queer golden light he'd seen in her eyes as she watched him hold the knifepoint to Cory's temple and feed her the red pills, one at a time…

    "Kristen never really came back, not really, not back up from the grave," he said. "I would be crazy if I believed that. The girl's name was Cass. She was everything Kristen could not be. More, really." Then, almost as a whimsical afterthought, he added, "She was much better in bed than Kristen. She wanted to take care of me. She didn't care if I killed people…"

    Sara's stomach became an elevator car that dropped into freefall for twenty floors, then got hung up in its own cables and bounced to a gut-imploding halt. Mere feet from the fire, she began shivering. She thought of Lucas' mind, literally evolving to a malignant third level while the technicians at Olive Grove watched, secure in the knowledge that they were curing him. And the truth had backed up so far in his brain that the pressure was seeking any vent. It was pouring out of him now and reminded her of her pathetic assessment of her own love life. Once it had been Lucas who was going to help save her. Now she watched the fragile jackstraw structure of her planned future begin to drop parts and buckle.

    "It was rage, at first, I was so angry with Cory. Then I was angry at Kristen. I…"

    Sara's imagination sketched in a picture in nightmare chiaroscuro, of Lucas attacking his thirteen-year-old daughter following their murder of his wife, then-

    "I was going to stop, but I wanted to… and I thought she would stop me, and instead she wanted it, she liked it, she begged me for it…"

    - then becoming trapped by Kristen, who had clearly been the product of her parents' union, the sum of both their minds and personalities, a combination of potentials for disaster and tragedy patiently waiting for the right catalyst-

    "And I got Kristen back, just like in the dream; in the dream I was able to change things if I put my mind to it, and I changed what happened at that concert and got Kristen back again. I did it in the dream a million times, then I did it in real life. And it worked. But I…''

    - to cause an explosion.

    "Sara, I didn't know what to do next. It got all foggy. So here I am. Help me."

    He sagged into the plush chair across from her, the M-16 across his knees now, perhaps her biggest victory so far in this exchange. Sara had to remind herself how to inhale.

    "Maybe we program flaws into our lives," he said. "Maybe it's just another pattern, another cycle moving through predetermined motions with nothing to stop it. Once it starts, it has to play itself out. And now he's coming here. Don't ask me how I know. I know."

    ''Lucas, if you're talking about Burt, that was probably him on the phone a moment ago. He was going to get a Ranger to take him up to your cabin to check on you again the day after we both went up. I thought the girl there might be lying."

    "Then Burt is probably dead now." Lucas said this with a lack of inflection that was chilling. It was just another cog turning in the clockwork pattern.

    She couldn't let it faze or stop her. "Then the police, Lucas. I spoke with them in San Francisco. They've probably guessed you'd come here."

    "They don't matter. The firepower's mostly for them."

    "Then who-" Sara caught herself. "You mean Gabriel Stannard? But how would he know to come here?" She had not thought of this before, and now, inexplicably, it scared her. "Why come here, especially if he knows you're after him?"

    "He has to. He's a self-made badass. He has to prove himself, walk through the fire now, or his fans will vanish. He has to take me on and win. He wants to kill me for the same reason I wanted to waste the rest of Whip Hand… and with that kind of motive, I'm sure he knows just as much as, if not more than, the police do. And that's another reason for coming here, Sara. In ruse I don't survive. I'll need you to tell everyone what happened. You're the only person I can really trust, you know."

    "He's coming here?" Disbelieving, Sara was out of her chair without thinking. This madness had to be cut out, and now.