The Kill Riff (2 page)

    As in battle, some hazards come with the territory. A simple release clause on tickets for festival-style concerts could solve potential problems. Remittance of purchase price could constitute an agreement to waive one's right to police protection during a show. Every fan for themself. The core truth was this: As a solution, all such measures could do was cover asses, not heal fractures, not bring back the dead. Sometimes concerts erupted. Sometimes not. Reasonable predictions could be assigned to a particular band's appeal.

    Whip Hand was an extremely popular heavy metal group.

    Concert security is a bad joke. They're big, and they're bad, but they're also outnumbered. They are highly visible in yellow bodybuilding jerseys with broad black horizontal stripes bordered by studs. They want deeply to bull it out from behind the wooden partition, but once they see the charge, they break for the stage level. This is misinterpreted as free license to jump the stage, become one with the performers. The tidal wave backswells, for thrust, then surges forward. The center of the barricade bows inward with an unheard groan; the sides collapse and are stomped down. On his knees at the lip of the stage, one bouncer reaches into the front rank of rock'n'roll commandos, grabs a face, and bangs it into the metal superstructure of the prefab stage. Blood spatters his jersey. The victim goes down and is seen no more. Like army ants, the crowd turns its brief but lethal attention to the bouncer, who is overwhelmed. His backstage pass is snatched as twenty arms pull him from the stage. His tattered shirt flies into the air. Maybe it was the blood that was the catalyst.

    Over one hundred strong for the Civic Auditorium show, the sheriffs are up in the aisles, totally impotent. Bashing with batons toward the center of the arena floor will only reap them a full-scale riot. They are already at the limit of their competence trying to restrain the concertgoers seated at the periphery of the open floor from joining in the melee. Commotion is always a good excuse for working off aggravation against the minions of law enforcement. They represent authority and retribution and are untouchable-except in moments like this. One deputy turns his back to the stage, and a swinging fist crushes his rimless glasses into his face, mashing his nose flat. Blood spurts. Two more badges lay into the assailant with truncheons, and mace mist fills the air. One kid gets his eyes pasted shut from the whack of a baton. The blood dribbling from his nostrils makes him look as though he has a real mustache for the first time in his life.

    Whip Hand was a seasoned combat team. They had a preplanned escape contingency for just such a situation as this. By the time the bouncer had been yanked off the stage and devoured by the crowd, the music had stopped and the band was gone, vanished into the labyrinthine convolutions of the Civic Auditorium's tunnel maze. In an underground garage, they piled into a Datsun station wagon with reflectorized, sun-screened windows. A radio cue dispatched two decoy limousines, diverting the gullible. Back at their hotel, the band could play the game of defeating their own security by sneaking through their chosen sex partners and other privileged hangers-on. There was security, after all, and there was SECURITY.

    The audience had gotten rowdy; no problem. Party animals, all. A little healthy teenage catharsis. Three days later the band would be in a new state, on a new leg of the tour.

    The heel of someone's hand smacked into Kristen's brow, scattering sparks across her vision. She was rudely shoved from behind and stumbled sideways between the two people in front of her. She went down on one knee, in a clumsy mimic of the genuflecting rock star. Her hand found the support of the barricade, now caved in at a forty-five-degree angle to the stage. Abrupt, numbing pain shot through her; people were walking on her legs. Heels dug into her calves. The panic roar of the crowd had drowned out the music. She could not even hear herself scream. Heavy weight bulldogged in on her from behind, and she felt the plywood crack beneath her stomach. She collected splinters in her chest as she slid down, clawing for purchase as the wooden partition collapsed.

    Viet Cong regulars would scramble over the barbed wire of American encampments by using the corpses of their dead buddies hung up in the wire as miniature bridges. The barbed wire had been manufactured in Philadelphia; the dog soldiers were constantly admonished not to waste it. All it took to defeat this feeble shield was one dead Cong. It seemed like such a mnumental wste, in both directions.

    Kristen's spine stretched, then cracked apart like the slatting of an orange crate as a motorcycle boot stomped into the small of her back. Her breath whooshed out as though she were deflating.

    
Gas from a balloon,
she thought.
My life hissing out.

    Then came the waterfall of arms and legs and weighty bodies, the crunch point of herd chaos.

    
Maybe if I yelled fire-

    

    

    "Your mom's always hollering 'fire,' " he had said to Kristen following the divorce. He shrugged.

    "The girl who cried wolf," Kristen had said. "The original. I think she just feels deprived of her flaming youth-y'know, the sowing of wild oats, all that great crap she thought she was supposed to have done before twenty-five? You guys just… I dunno… used each other up. Time to move on." She had shrugged, groping for clarity. During the entire acrimonious split-up, everyone had done a great deal of very important shrugging.

    "We outgrew each other in different directions." He had stuffed his hands into his topcoat pockets. "Let's see if we can scare up some lunch."

    Kristen paced him, linking arms. She wore bright red woolen mittens. "Don't want to talk about it, huh?" Her words had puffed out into the December air in chilly white clouds.

    "Daughters are supposed to look like assholes when they learn from their mistakes in life. Not daddies. Daddies should know better."

    "Christ, don't be so sensitive." Then she had pounced on the straight line: "You're my favorite asshole, Dad."

    He had made a face at her choice of words. Limousines whispered past them in an endless, taxpayer-funded procession. There were more limousines in this tiny city than at the Academy Awards.

    Kristen kept wearing her mischievous grin, working to distract his mind and counter his glum mood. She could be frighteningly wise and manipulative-traits of her mother's-but she lacked Cory's meanness of spirit.

    He forced a wan smile. "Lunch, huh." He was staring at the Capitol dome in the hazy distance.

    "Yep. We can venture forth into the great primordial stone swamp."

    "Interesting return address."

    She puckered up her face. "Better than writing Washington, D.C., on your letters. Like you live in a city that's gay or something."

    "Whoa." He was mocking her now. "You're not supposed to be conversant in that stuff, yet."

    "Next you'll tell me I'm too young for a gigolo." Teasing each other, they strolled on, blending with the cold. Eventually they scared up some seafood. Nine weeks later, Cory, Kristen's mother, died of a barbiturate overdose. The whole time she was going down, down, she had lain in a hotel room bed, staring at her reflection in the desk mirror. She had left a note that concluded DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.

    

    

    Shriek of feedback. A kid with a magenta mohawk and a torn green leather coat achieves the stage and manages to grab an unmanned mike stand. He catches a shock from the coaxial connector and springs back. The stand tips over and THUNKS on the stage. Amplified feedback loud enough to shatter teeth reverberates from the back wall of the arena.

    Bloodied now, Kristen attempts to turn her head to stare up through the assaulting chaos of bodies. Her double string of crystal beads, her dad's most recent Cfiristmas gift, is cinched tight, cutting off her wind, strangling her. Another stomping foot crunches into the hollow of her neck, at the place where her ear and neck blend delicately together. The force pushes her through the remnants of the barricade. She sees sparks and tastes floor dirt. There is no sound beyond a medium-pitch roar-perhaps her own rushing, oxygen-starved blood, still pumping.

    A final thought:
Is this what dying feels li-

    

    

    Kristen had left him a note, too.

    
DADDY-OFF TO SEE "WHIP HAND" (OBSCENE, NO?) WITH MARTA AND SUKI. PROMISE TO BE BACK BY NEXT THURSDAY (HA HA). LOVE YOU. K.

    His life, summed up by two scraps of paper.

    His mind almost craved the pain of playing it all back again. It was important not to forget a single detail. Seeing Kristen on the brink of her death, over and over, was better than never seeing her at all. The dream never changed. Things were shaded differently sometimes, but she always died. Twelve other concertgoers had died with her; the goddamned disaster had even made the cover of Time. He wondered whether a less notorious group than Whip Hand would have rated a cover spread. The band's lead singer, the iron-pumping blond with the Grecian profile, had made the Wall Street Journal a year previously, when Lloyds of London decided to cover him for $ 1.5 million in paternity suit insurance.

    The hospital-sterile sheets were dumbed up with sleep sweat; the man groped them in the wide, retarded motions of deep yet troubled slumber. His breath began to hitch. He was almost gasping.

    What he needed was the ability to change the dream, to alter the configuration of the past.

    The rock god strips away his golden vest like a carapace. The new vantage point is distant, higher, providing a godlike overview of the arena. At this distance the vest resembles a sheath of a thousand gold doubloons, polished, metallic. From here, Kristen cannot be seen. He can see the rockshow, but not his daughter.

    He sees his feet, realizes he is standing in a spotlighting nest or on a girder high above the broad crescent of stage. Too far away to grab the singer, or save his daughter, or prevent the whole sequence from happening one more time.

    
I'm packed,
he thinks.

    He feels weight in his hands. Looks down, resenting the necessity to tear his vision from the imminent tableau below. He would miss the horror of Kristen's death. He saw in his grasp an abbreviated, foul-looking machine gun, a nasty, ventilated thing reminiscent of a Russian AK-47, with a curved banana clip.

    And he thinks,
Thirty slugs should take the bastard down all right.

    He sockets the weapon into the hollow of his shoulder. His index finger brushes the trigger. Squeeze, don't snap. Be ready for the gun's tendency to kick toward the sky.

    
Write a jerk-off wet-dream child-molesting love ditty about this, you overpaid baboon…

    He cut loose.

    
(Don't fritter away your ammo. When you see the lead goon drop, chop the reinforcements. Fire selectively to generate panic and confusion. Make sure you've maximized disorder by the time you have to reload-you may need the extra two seconds.)

    He was holding a longer, lighter weapon now. A rifle with a powerful Leupold stretch target scope. Better. His marksmanship medals were no joke.

    Light flooded in, spoiling his aim, startling him, making him wince.

    Blood dribbled from the rock god's head. Spatters of it despoiled his gray three-piece suit. His palms were skinned from his abrupt tble down the rough-cast stone of the courthouse steps. He is surrounded by bodyguards. Just like Reagan. Guns materialize from nowhere.

    The gentle gush of unconscious orgasm warmed the sleeping man's belly.

    He is standing on the courthouse steps below the rock god and his throng. He drops the pistol he has brandished. It is plastic. It cracks apart on the stone. He smiles a bitter smile of loss. Then they swarm over hiry.

    

    

    Lucas Ellington huffed mightily and woke up.

    "Do you want the candle?"

    "Yes," he said. The candle was a bit of mumbo-jumbo he had requested. It helped him focus his thoughts.

    "The same dream again?"

    "I did it again, Sara. More explicit. Jumbled details. Scary, like a roller coaster. Almost a helplessness-as though I had no say, no control."

    He stared at the wavering flame of the strawberry-scented votive candle. Near the desk, Sara fired up one of her filtered Salem 100s. He could smell it. The leather of the Stressless recliner crunched as he shifted around, eyes on the candle flame, riffling mental indexes to recapture the salient emotional high points of last night's hellish internal videotape replay.

    "I'm afraid that while I was wielding all that phallic firepower in the dream, I came all over myself." He noted this unselfconsciously. Sara understood.

    He heard her get out of her chair while he talked. Now she was behind him somewhere, near the office door. He heard her hose swish together as she moved. She was adorned with some light, spicy scent that was easy to pick out in the dark.
She had a unique insight into his clockwork,
he thought.
Or, at least, she was convinced of that.

    
Clink
. Her coffee mug on the glass desktop. The dark, the candle, seemed to open up all of his senses.

    "You ready for tomorrow?"

    "Ready for tomorrow…" He sounded almost wistful. "Yes. It's time I got back in the world. That was what we used to say. The place where the bad stuff was going down was not the world. And I think I can successfully leave the bad stuff here." It was his speech from yesterday and the day before.