Popcorn (12 page)

“Brooke did it, Wayne, because being an in-control woman does not mean denying one’s sensuality. Isn’t that what you said, Brooke? I read that.”

Brooke nodded.

“She didn’t do it for men, Wayne, no matter what you and your bar-room pals might think,” Scout scolded. “She did it for herself because she is proud of her body and proud to be beautiful and there is nothing wrong or dirty in celebrating that. In fact, it’s an assertive thing to do, a feminist thing to do.”

Scout finished her little speech and turned, smiling, to Brooke, clearly hoping to have won her approval.

“That’s right, um…Scout, it’s all those things.”

Wayne got up and helped himself to another drink. “Well, I guess that makes me feel a whole lot better about jerking off in the john over it, Brooke. I must confess, I never realized I was doing such a fine and empowering thing.”

Scout looked as though she wanted to die with embarrassment. But before she could apologize to Brooke, Wayne pressed on. “I want to ask Brooke something now, Scout, and I don’t want you getting mad at me. OK?”

“Well, it depends on what you ask her, Wayne.”

“What I want to ask is how’d those girls in
Playboy
magazine get their hair the way they do? It always looks so damn perfect.”

Brooke managed to steady her voice. “Well…you know, I guess it’s just a question of styling really. They use a lot of mousse and they back-light it and sometimes they put in extensions…”

“Brooke, I do not mean that kind of hair.”

Scout’s pale skin blushed a deep red. She could not believe what her boyfriend was asking — and them guests in someone else’s house and all.

“Wayne!” She punched his ribs.

“Well I want to know!” Wayne protested. “Ain’t never going to get a better chance to find out. I mean we tried shaving yours, didn’t we, sugar, and you just ended up like some kind of damn Mohican with a rash!”

Mortified, Scout turned to Brooke. “I am truly sorry, Brooke I—”

Wayne was not going to drop it. This was clearly a subject that had always bothered him. “But in
Playboy
magazine those girls just have a little tuft, like that was all that ever grew. It don’t look shaved or nothing. These are adult women, not little girls, but all they got’s a tiny little tuft. How’d they do that?”

Strangely, the turn the conversation had taken was no less embarrassing for the terrifying circumstances under which it was being conducted.

Scout stared at the carpet, clearly wishing that she could crawl under it and hide. Brooke simply did not know where to look. She tried to stare straight at Wayne to show she wasn’t scared, but unfortunately she was and so she didn’t have the nerve. She couldn’t look at Bruce — she had nothing to say to him, even with her eyes. In the end she leant back on the huge couch and looked at the ceiling. Between the two of them, Scout and Brooke had the room covered from top to bottom.

“I said, how’d they do it Brooke?” Wayne repeated, his voice hardening.

“Well, Wayne one has a stylist.”

This was one of the funniest things Wayne had ever heard. “A stylist! A pussy hair stylist! Now that would be one hell of an occupation! Yes sir, I guess I could get to like that kind of work!”

“Wayne that is enough!” Scout was mortified.

But Wayne did not care. In his opinion he was mining a rich comic seam. “Oh, yes, sir! I’d work weekends and all the overtime the boss’d give me. I’d be saying, “Can I shampoo that for you madam? And how about I massage in a little conditioner?” I’d work hard and get me my own salon…There’d be a whole row of women sitting reading magazines with little hair driers on their—”

“I am not
listening
to this any more!” Scout grabbed two cushions, held them to her ears and began to scream. “Aaaaaaahhhh!”

“Oh come on, honey,” Wayne pleaded through Scout’s shouting and his tears of laughter. “You cannot deny that the notion of a snatch stylist is hill-fuckin’—larious. I mean, would they talk to their clients while they worked? Say, “How was your vacation, ma’m?” and…”

But the more Wayne talked the more Scout screamed, adding drumming feet to her efforts to block out his comic monologue. The mad cacophony was enough to jerk Bruce out of the lethargy of terror. He strode across the room and plucked an internal phone from its bracket on the wall.

“What you doing, boss?” Wayne enquired, still smiling at his own wit.

“I’m calling my security guard. He’s in the lodge at the gate. If you leave now, he won’t hurt you but if you harm us, he’ll kill you.”

“
He’ll
kill
me
? Well ho, fuckin’ ho.”

Wayne levelled his gun at Bruce. For a moment Bruce believed his hour had come.

“Bang!” said Wayne, who was still in a merry mood. “You give that guard a call, Bruce. Yes sir. If it makes you feel better, you give that of boy a call.”

Bruce punched the button on the intercom and awaited a response. Scout took the opportunity to apologize to Brooke. She was still mortified over Wayne’s comments.

“Brooke, I am so sorry that Wayne has gotten to prying into your personal stuff. He does not understand that a woman likes to keep her special private places special and private.”

Bruce punched the button on the wall again. He was getting no reply. Wayne looked up from the gun with which he was still playing.

“He ain’t answering you, Mr Delamitri. Maybe he can’t hear you…Here, let’s see if we can’t get him a little closer to the phone.”

Wayne and Scout were sitting together on the couch. The holdall he had been carrying when he entered was on the floor between his feet. Wayne reached his hand down into the bag.

If Bruce had been shooting the scene, he would probably have started on a two shot of Wayne and Scout, then taken a close-up on Wayne’s hand and panned down with it as it disappeared into the bag. Perhaps he would then have covered himself in the edit by picking up a reaction shot from Scout, who knew what was in the bag; then back to Wayne’s hand as it emerged from the bag pulling a severed head by the hair.

But Bruce was not shooting the scene. He was in it and his heart nearly stopped. He had to clutch at the wall to keep from fainting.

Brooke opened her mouth to scream but scarcely a sound came, only a rasping gasp, dry and painful. She felt as if in a dream, paralysed by a complete and immovable fear.

Wayne raised the head and held it next to his own.

It would have made another lovely two shot. The grotesque, blood-drained, death-head and the handsome, grinning young face beside it.

“Surprise!” Wayne said, and he laughed.

There was a sheepish grin on Scout’s face too. Half pleased with the major effect her boyfriend was having, half apologetic and embarrassed, aware that they had done a very bad thing.

Wayne got up, still holding the head by the hair, and carried it across the room to where Bruce was standing. Bruce gasped and recoiled, backing himself against the wall, almost as if trying to force himself through it.

“Huh huh huh.” Bruce tried to speak but it was as much as he could do to draw breath. He still held the intercom phone in his hand, although so lifeless was his grip it was surprising that the phone had not fallen. Wayne took it from Bruce’s numbed grasp and held it up to the ear of the severed head.

“Hallo! Hallo!” Wayne shouted. “Oh Mr Security Guard!…He don’t hear so good, does he, Bruce?”

Wayne let the phone drop and held the head up so that its face was in front of his own, so close that their noses were almost touching.

“Hey! You hear me?” Wayne shouted into the dead face at the top of his voice. “The guy who pays your salary wants to talk to you, you fuckin’ jerk!”

The head swung about on its hair. Wayne turned its face away from his in disgust.

“How much did you pay this guy, Mr Delamitri? Was he expensive? Because if he was you are being ripped off, Bruce my friend. He wasn’t worth shit as a guard. He just sat there in his hut with his big dog and we crept up behind him and killed him.”

Scout looked across at Brooke. “We didn’t kill the dog.”

The little caravan-park store in the redwood forest turned blue then red then blue again then red.

There was no particular call for the police car to be so garishly illuminated as it pulled up outside the shop. It was scarcely dawn yet and there had been no other traffic on the gravel road leading through the woods from the Interstate. Cops, however, will be cops. The few guests slumbering in the darkened trailers were lucky they hadn’t turned on the siren.

Astonishingly, it was the storekeeper himself who had raised the alarm. Wayne had shot him only once and that had been in the shoulder. The force of the impact had spun the victim back through the open door and into the parlour behind, and Wayne could not be bothered climbing over the counter to finish the job.

The storekeeper was lucky. Such is the terrible damage done by modern weapons that even a shoulder wound can be deadly. The man’s flesh, however, was old and weak and put up little resistance to the bullet as it passed through his body. In fact, the projectile had caused nearly as little damage on its exit as it had on its entry. Nevertheless, there had been considerable loss of blood, and the old man, who lived alone, had lain semi-conscious on the floor in front of the television for several hours before summoning the strength to crawl to the phone. The telerecord of the Oscars ceremony had been playing throughout, and the old man’s troubled dreams and hallucinations had been further disturbed by talk of legs of fire.

While waiting for the arrival of the ambulance (which did deploy its siren and woke everybody up), the police questioned the storekeeper. They soon realized that he was another victim of the celebrated Mall Murderers, who were clearly no longer restricting their activities to malls.

“A young man and a scrawny kid of a girl,” one of the officers said into his radio. “Same description as at that motel this morning…All they took was some Jack Daniels, some cigarettes and some pretzels…oh yeah, and one of those maps of the movie stars’ homes…I don’t know why. Maybe they wanted to go visit Bruce Delamitri and congratulate him on his Oscar.”

SEVENTEEN

W
ayne was still swinging the severed head about in disgust. He was clearly moved by the tawdry service Bruce was getting from his employees. He saw it as symptomatic of a national malaise, and held the head up as evidence of declining standards in general.

“I mean, shit, man! That’s what’s wrong with this fuckin’ country. People just don’t do the damn jobs they’re paid for. No wonder we can’t get ahead of the fuckin’ Japs. Wouldn’t catch no fuckin’ Jap screwing up on his duty like that, man. No way! This motherfucker deserved what he got, Bruce. I did you a fuckin’ favour.”

On the table stood a lava lamp in the shape of a rocket. In a gesture which amply summed up the contempt he felt for the dead security guard, Wayne impaled the head on the lamp.

Bruce gulped down his rising nausea and Brooke began quietly to weep. They stared, transfixed, as the great misshapen tumours and globules of red lava slowly rose upwards through the electric-green liquid in the lamp and disappeared into the severed neck, waited a moment and then slowly re-emerged from the head and dripped down again.

“Please,” Bruce muttered.

“What’s that, Bruce?”

“Please,” he repeated. “I don’t know who you are but—”

“Oh, we’re just no-count white trash, Bruce,” Wayne said, crossing over to rejoin Scout on the couch. “We ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. The only memorable thing I ever did in my whole life was kill people.”

But it was plain to see that Wayne rated himself rather highly. He was puffed up with pride like a psychotic peacock. He gripped Scout’s thigh proudly, as if to reassure her that he was only being self-effacing out of politeness.

Scout was proud too. “We’re the Mall Murderers,” she said. “I’m Scout and this is Wayne.”

Bruce and Brooke said nothing. Scout was a little disappointed. She had hoped her announcement would have more impact. Fearing that they hadn’t understood her properly, she repeated the main point. “We’re the Mall Murderers.”

Scout need not have worried. They had heard her the first time.

They should have guessed, of course, Bruce particularly. Two insane murderers? A man and a woman? Big fans of his work? People whose own activities had been consistently linked with his own for the previous month and now
in his house
? It had to be them. But why? Their connection was entirely an invention of the media. In reality, Bruce had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall Murderers. This was small comfort, though, because murdering people with whom they had nothing to do was the Mall Murderers’ stock in trade.

“Are you going to kill us?” Bruce asked.

“Now what kind of question is that? Me and Scout here never know who we’re going to kill till we done it.”

“It just happens,” Scout added, swinging her legs like a little girl talking about some game — although little girls don’t tend to have guns lying on their laps, except sometimes in Bruce’s movies and now, of course, in his lounge.

Silence returned.

Conversation was getting no easier. Again Scout felt it incumbent on her to try and oil the social wheels.

“This is so great, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, us all here together, just sitting talking.”

Bruce was scarcely listening. His mind was racing. If these were the Mall Murderers, then he and Brooke could be dead literally at any moment. He had to do something: every second left alive with these two psychos was borrowed time. He looked at his big desk, which was positioned across the room, behind the couch on which Wayne and Scout were sitting.

In one of Bruce’s movies there would have been a close-up on the top right-hand drawer and a music sting:
that drawer matters
.

Scout’s voice rattled on, scarcely penetrating the edge of Bruce’s thoughts.

“Because Bruce here is Wayne’s hero, and I’ve always admired girls like you, Brooke. So beautiful and all. Except I can’t deny I think it’s a shame about all this cosmetic surgery you ladies get done, because these days you don’t know who’s really beautiful and who’s just a nasty old rich bitch.”

Had Bruce moved? If anyone had been looking they might have thought he had. Before, he had been standing by the wall intercom. Now, he seemed to be a little closer to the desk.

Wayne was talking now. “Hell, it don’t matter none about cosmetic surgery, does it, Scout?” he said. “I mean, if you look beautiful, you are beautiful, don’t matter how it happens.”

“I just think it was kind of nice when a girl was what she was and that was it,” Scout protested.

Bruce was definitely moving now, if incredibly slowly. He was making his way around the room towards that desk, that drawer. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Wayne and Scout were still concentrating on each other, their voices just babble inside Bruce’s head. Brooke was staring at the floor. Only one pair of eyes seemed to be fixed on Bruce, the eyes of the security guard, popping out of his severed head. It was almost as if the head was willing Bruce on. Like some creature in an insane Frankenstein experiment, it seemed to sense a man who might avenge its bloody murder. For a moment Bruce caught those eyes and they stared at each other, sharing two extreme close-ups. For that moment Bruce half imagined those eyes alert in a living head, a head kept functioning by the great bloody globs of life-giving lava that journeyed up its neck and down again.

Bruce made a supreme effort to pull himself together. His terror was making him light-headed. The voices of Wayne and Scout, the bright eyes in the dead face and the near-certainty that death was just a heartbeat away were all crashing about his head and preventing him from thinking. Bruce was not a weak man: his glib exterior concealed a steel core. Still only in his mid-thirties, he was currently the most successful movie director in the USA. This was not something that could be achieved without considerable strength of character. None the less, Bruce’s current situation was on the verge of defeating him.

“It’s a movie,” a voice inside him whispered. “Just be in a movie.”

Bruce told himself he’d seen it all a hundred times before. He was in control. He was always in control. “It’s just another movie.”

He tore his gaze away from the dead head and viewed the room in a wide shot. Nobody was looking at him. He was in deep background. Infinity focus.

“How about Brooke here? Do you reckon she’s real?” Wayne was saying. He leant back into the cushions of the couch, relaxed, and clearly feeling at home. Scout cast a critical eye over the woman sitting opposite.

Brooke shrank before her gaze. An observer might have thought it strange how absurd a really sexy evening dress can look when the person wearing it is cowed and scared. One has to carry glamorous, sexy clothes off with confidence, otherwise it’s possible just to look like a sad, desperate tart.

“Real? Get out of here!” Scout exclaimed. “Why, Brooke here’ll have been cut up and stretched back and sucked out and pumped up and I don’t know what. Ain’t that right, Brooke?…I said, ain’t that right, Brooke?”

The star of Bruce’s movie was nearly at the desk now, nearly at that special drawer. All he needed was a few more moments of inattention from his tormentors.

Bruce did not realize it but he had a co-star in his drama. It might not have appeared that Brooke was aware of his tortured journey across the room, but she was. While staring at the floor, she had caught fleeting shots of Bruce’s feet moving across the back of frame. She knew that Bruce had some kind of plan and that Wayne and Scout must remain diverted. She knew that it was up to her, that she must enter the conversation and enter it arrestingly. She raised her head and stared Scout in the eye.

“It’s none of your fucking business.”

Scout and Wayne were certainly surprised. Brooke had shown little spirit up to this point, but now she was coming out punching. Her voice was hard and tough; it commanded the room. Bruce seized the opportunity and advanced a whole step.

Wayne glared at Brooke. “Now that is where you are wrong, Miss High and Mighty fuckin’ bald snatch Daniels. It is our business on account of the fact that you belong to us. You hear? You be -fuckin’—long to me ‘n’ my baby. Now, answer my baby’s question. Unless you think you’re too good to talk to her. In which case, you can talk to this.”

Wayne raised his machine-pistol to his shoulder and pointed it at Brooke. Her POV was the gaping end of the barrel with Wayne’s grinning face behind it, chin resting against the stock.

But beyond Wayne’s head, in deep background, Bruce was still edging through the rear of frame.

Brooke knew she must keep Wayne’s attention. Bravely she met his stare, fixing on to his eyes as they hovered above the black-hole snout of the gun.

Slowly he closed one eye in a cheerfully grotesque wink. He was taking aim.

Brooke attempted not to flinch, which was not an easy task. “All right, pervert, if you must know” — it was terrifying to risk annoying him in this way, but she knew that above all she must keep the focus on herself until Bruce got to that desk — “I’ve had the wrinkles round my eyes and lips dealt with, some cellulite removed from my thighs, I have had breast implants and my navel has been remodelled.”

As she spoke Bruce opened the drawer. Wayne was never going to be more distracted than he was at that moment. It was Bruce’s best chance, and he took it.

He watched his own hand in close-up, pulling open the drawer. He watched the hand disappear inside.

The drawer was empty.

As Bruce frantically felt to the very back, there should have been a musical sting. Something harsh, like a scream, or, seeing as it was Bruce’s movie, perhaps something ironic, like a sit com ‘wah wah waaaah’ but discordant and sinister. There was no sting, however, because Bruce had stopped playing his desperate little movie game. His defeat was too real, too complete.

“Oh, Bruu-uuce.” It was Wayne’s voice, nasty and sarcastic. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Wayne had not even bothered to turn round to face Bruce. All Bruce could see was the back of Wayne’s head above the cushions and his hand protruding over the arm of the couch. From one finger of Wayne’s hand hung a small pistol.

“You see, Bruce, I can smell guns,” Wayne said, still without bothering to turn round. “I smelt this one a while ago. I went over to fix me a drink and I thought, mm-mm, what’s that smell? I like it. I do believe it’s a gun. And guess what? It was! Can you believe that?”

Bruce did not answer. Not for the first time that night, he was incapable of speech.

“Also, I must confess that it is not uncommon for a man to keep his piece in the top drawer of his desk. For an Oscar-winning film-maker, Bruce, you are not very original.”

Bruce shrank a little inside. For a moment there he’d been a fighter, he’d had a plan and a chance. Now he was a fool, casually outwitted and out-manoeuvred by the dregs of a small town truck stop.

It was six a.m. and Bruce’s appointment with nemesis was well under way. His old life was already over. Even if he survived his ordeal, nothing would ever be the same again.

Outside in Los Angeles, of course, and America-wide, like him or loathe him Bruce remained the lion of the hour. His Oscar triumph was still a top story on the morning news. Sadly, not
the
top story. It would have been so under happier circumstances, but the massacre at the 7-11 store was necessarily number one on all the channels. Even in California, fourteen dead while doing a bit of shopping is big news, particularly if surviving witnesses are prepared to swear that after they had committed the massacre the perpetrators actually coupled, like two wild animals on heat, against the Slurpy Pup dispenser.

“Sex and death in America today,” said the reporters, as the ambulances squealed off into the dawn. “It could come straight out of a Bruce Delamitri picture.” An observation which coincidentally segued very nicely into the pre-edited Oscars report.

“I stand here on legs of fire,” said Bruce.

“Why’d the guy have to make such a vacuous speech?” the news editors complained. “My God, if he’d said something about violence and censorship, would we have had
him
this morning!”