Endgame (14 page)

He waited till they turned to listen to him, sheltered beneath their hoods and huddling against the cold and damp.

“What we need to do,” he said, “is circle the island in opposite directions around the cliffs and then meet back here in the centre. It should take ten minutes at most. We'll be able to see everything there is to see that way. Remember that we'll never be so far apart we can't hear if the other team calls out. You might have to yell loud, but just do it. If we hear you, we'll come running.”

The others listened, eyes wide, blinking away the rain.

“And don't try anything brave,” Spike continued. “If you see Edwards or Harvey or anybody you don't know, just note where they are and come back and get us. Once we determine where they are and whether they're armed, then we'll decide what to do. Okay?”

Heads nodded.

“Sandra, you go with Pete. Verna, you come with me.”

Spike watched as Pete and Sandra disappeared around a grove of trees. He turned to Verna.

“It's just you and me, kiddo,” he said.

“Cozy,” Verna said, heading in the opposite direction from Sandra and Pete.

As they moved along, Verna slipped on a rock and stopped to tie her bootlaces tighter. Spike went on ahead, pushing aside the branches of low-hanging trees. Verna noticed he was walking oddly. She couldn't remember having seen that before.

“You have a limp,” she said, catching up to him.

He shrugged. “It acts up when it's cold and rainy, like now,” he said. “I had a bout of polio as a kid. Not a severe case, as it turned out, but it left my right leg a little weak.”

“Lucky it didn't leave much lasting damage,” she said.

“Not to me, no. But my brother died of it. From what they can tell, I passed it on to him.”

“That's so sad,” Verna said. She hesitated. “My little brother died, too. Little Tyler.”

They were making their way with difficulty through a patch of dense brush. Verna walked in front, while Spike followed behind.

“How did he die?”

“Motorcycle accident,” Verna said. “At least it looked like an accident. I suspect otherwise.”

“Tough luck,” Spike said.

“He was troubled, my brother. I think he resented the kind of upbringing we had as kids, though we both went our separate ways by the time we were in our late teens. We didn't have a happy childhood and I think he couldn't face a lifetime of more of the same.”

“Parents, huh?” Spike said.

“Yeah,” was all Verna said in reply.

Spike's mother had given him no hint that she favoured his brother over him, but Spike felt the withdrawal of her affection after his brother's death. He hadn't been too young to make the connection. He grew up believing he'd killed his brother. His father had been an emotionally repressed blue-collar worker who never spent a great deal of time with his family. As a result, young Elyot managed to find ways to distract himself while he was growing up. Drugs, minor break-and-enters for which he never got fingered, and once a fruit-stand holdup that netted him a total of fifty-two dollars. The cops had come sniffing around his door, but ultimately he realized they had nothing to pin it on him, so he lay low till they went away. He never tried it again, knowing they were just waiting till next time. That was when he decided there wasn't going to be a next time.

At seventeen, he dropped out of school for good, but he'd already started a band and soon got a few gigs at local punk clubs. He met Max and Pete and Kent a few years later and joined their group, abandoning his own as too amateurish. The Ladykillers already had a repertoire, but they had just lost their singer, who got married and let his wife browbeat him into dropping out. Spike fit the bill. It was a match spawned in purgatory, as he liked to say when they finally broke into the industry full-time.

Spike's reminiscences were interrupted by something rustling in the brush off to the right. He held up his hand to shush Verna, but she was already aware of it. Her eyes turned on him, big and round with fear.

He pushed a branch aside and let out a yell as a large black shape leapt past him and tore off down the path with a growl. He was startled only for a moment before he burst out laughing.

“Fucking dog!” he yelled, his rain-streaked hair hanging down in strands. “I thought the fucker was going to kill me.”

Verna watched him with a mildly amused look on her face, but said nothing. She cocked her ear to listen for sounds from Sandra and Pete, but all she heard was the rain coming down all around.

O
n the far side of the island, Sandra stood on the cliffs looking in the direction of the mainland. It couldn't be seen for the fog.

“You'd never know it was out there now, if you hadn't seen it with your own eyes,” she said.

Pete stood off to one side. He hadn't said a word the entire walk. She looked over at him. He kept his head turned aside.

“I didn't mean to make fun of you about your OCD earlier.”

She waited, but there was no reply.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing to talk about,” he said, and continued with their hike.

I
n the parlour, Max had just finished pouring the last of the wine into Crispin's glass. The critic held it up to his nose and sniffed. The recorder turned silently on the table beside him.

“I truly believe my sense of smell is that much stronger to compensate for my lack of sight,” he said, with an air of satisfaction.

“Yeah?” Max said.

Crispin nodded. “If I told you I thought Sid Vicious was an unbelievably stupid twat, what would you say?”

“I'm not sure. Back then, I might have taken a swing at you, blind or not.”

“Apart from killing his girlfriend, he once used soiled water from a toilet to shoot himself up with heroin.”

Max guffawed. “Yeah — that sounds like Sid, all right. He did a lot of fucking stupid things. No more sense in him than … I don't know what.”

“But you admired him?”

Max nodded. “Sure. We all did. It was like the Pistols gave us a licence to do whatever we wanted to do, you know?”

“Was that a good thing?” Crispin asked.

Max stared at him with incomprehension. “Of course! I never knew it was all right to sound terrible until I heard the Pistols, you know? They were just fucking awful and I ran home and played their record for Pete and my friends and I said, ‘We can do that.' And we did.”

“Your first recording was quite memorable,” Crispin said. “It actually sounded like the Pistols.”

“We were trying to sound like the Pistols, of course. Everybody did back then, but I liked groups like the Ruts and Stiff Little Fingers. Here on the west coast, we had the Germs. Stupid fucking Darby Crash with his passion for cutting himself with broken beer bottles. He couldn't do himself in fast enough once Sid was gone. It was like a fad for a while. Lots of people wanted to die.” He nodded to himself before continuing. “I always thought the Clash was overrated, though. But you couldn't really imitate the Pistols. It was just impossible.”

Crispin nodded. “How do you see music today?”

Max sneered. “Corporate bullshit. It's all marketing.”

“Some would say that's all punk ever was in North America. A facade with a built-in marketing campaign and fashion to match. Rip a T-shirt and add a straight pin. And voila! You've got a punk movement. What happened to all that righteous indignation and anger?”

Max shrugged. “It went away, I suppose. You can't be angry forever. It was too destructive to last. But those of us who were there will always be changed by it. Punk wasn't just the music. It was a lifestyle. We lived it!”

Crispin sipped his wine. “How do you want to be remembered?” he asked. “What do you want people to say about you when you're gone?”

“I want them to understand that I'm not really nasty or vicious. I'm not a bad-ass. That was just the press making me out that way.” He leaned over and kissed Sami Lee on the cheek. “I love my girl, Sami Lee. I always treat her right.”

“It's true,” Sami Lee said. She smiled grimly and took a drag of her cigarette.

“I like people around me to be happy — as long as they don't piss me off, of course.”

Max smiled broadly before remembering Crispin was blind. He sighed and turned to look out the window.

T
he trek took Spike and Verna to the far side of the tiny island in less than ten minutes. They stopped to listen, but there was no sign of Sandra and Pete.

Verna looked worriedly at Spike.

“You don't think …?” she began.

“If they found Edwards and there was trouble, we would have heard something from them.”

Verna looked meaningfully at him. “What if it's not Edwards?”

“Not a chance, “Spike said scornfully. “Pete's a bit odd, but he's not a killer.”

“What if it's Sandra, then? She's a pretty hard-done-by lady. She definitely shows signs of addiction to something. I think she's pretty hardcore.”

Spike lifted his head and howled into the rain. “Ha! Max is ‘hardcore,' not Sandra.”

“All right, but you know what I mean.”

Spike stopped to consider this. “Yeah — I know. But I think somehow you're wrong. Tell you the truth, if anyone here is capable of murder, it's me.”

Verna looked at him with a stricken expression. “That's a terrible thing to say at this moment.”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Don't take me too seriously. Let's just keep on going.”

As he stepped forward, the rock edge crumbled and he suddenly found himself sliding down the cliff. His hand grabbed a leathery cedar root. It was the only thing that saved him from falling over the edge.

Verna stared in horror.

“Don't just stand there. Help me!” he yelled.

Verna stood frozen to the spot, her eyes panicked. “Why did you say that?” she cried. “Why did you say you were a murderer?”

“Don't be fucking daft! I was only joking.”

“How do I know?”

“Because I would have raped or killed you by now if I was the killer, you stupid bitch. Now help me up.”

Verna grasped a branch behind her. Slowly, she reached a hand down to Spike. As he grabbed it, he yanked on her arm, pulling her toward the edge.

“I should kill you for that, you fucking twat!”

She stared in horror, trying to keep her grip on the slippery bark.

“But I don't want to die, so pull. Now!”

Verna pulled, keeping hold of the tree. For a moment, she wasn't sure if she could pull him up. Somehow she found the strength. With considerable effort, Spike was able to grab hold of a rock and haul himself up a few inches at a time.

He stood and brushed his hands off. A long cut bled down his arm. He turned to look at Verna.

“Next time, don't fucking hesitate!”

“You're fucking welcome,” Verna said sulkily. “And next time you call me a bitch, I will let you fall.”