The Kill Riff (36 page)

    

    

    CASS WAS CURLED UP NEXT to the fireplace, very still, while Lucas paced around the cabin to vent pent-up energy.

    His first thoughts had been of Cory, and how fine his life would be if she had been more like Cass, more human. Everything would have turned out all right instead of the way it had. Mindful of his wrecked knee, his gauzed hands, Cass had pulled him into the warm nest of pads and sleeping bags on the cabin floor. In the firelight it had been so easy to overlay Kristen's face on hers; Kristen had once had the same sorts of bruises that Cass had now.

    She feels heat at her temples, a surging at her groin. Her eyes are captured. The green spikes of color in them flare and become prominent, as they do whenever she is excited or happy…

    Cass' eyes were light green with dark rings bordering the iris. It was easy to make the substitution, and the expression on her face had been identical to Kristen's in the nightmare as she returned the cobra-seduction gaze of Gabriel Stannard. He thought of power surging back and forth, from the Arena floor to vibrate the catwalks, from the amps to the stage and back again, from eye to eye, setting up echoes that bounced back, growing stronger, reverberating, swelling in potency until nothing could stop them. The same force that fed amperage through thrumming cables to Whip Hand's storm-trooper P.A. system was alive in Stannard's hooded gaze. It was enough power to twist time, to change reality, to jump-arc from the past to the present, to now.

    Cass' legs rise and enclose him; he feels her hands on his buttocks, and she is pulling him into her faster and faster, her voice becoming breathless, a whisper, her eyes tilting shut as her own control deteriorates and she begins to gasp. He looks at her face and sees-

    Kristen, bruised, beneath him, teeth bared, fucking energetically. He thought of Cory, controlling him, directing him, telling him what to do through orgasm after orgasm. She is never completely fulfilled, never satisfied. Climax, for her, is like accrued interest in a savings account. The only reason for having it is to pyramid it into more.

    Cass, who reminds him of Kristen, who inevitably takes him back to Cory. Cass is thrusting hard with her pelvis now, working at it, distilling away her massive reserve of pain, helping him to help her. He feels as if he is outside himself, standing across the room observing two strangers engaged in this farcical positioning. His detachment gives him an unsuspected sexual endurance. Locally he feels friction and little else, but Cass comes a second time, tiny, gemlike grunts escaping her. She relaxes, opening her eyes again, clumsily bucking and rolling him over so she may pounce and straddle him, hips moving slowly, rotating liquidly, her rich auburn hair untrussed and falling like wing curtains to obscure her face.

    He recalled that the position had been much easier on his ravaged hands. She was a considerate person even in bed, Cass was. He wondered if she had a motive. So he asked her, "What are you thinking?"

    "I'm th- Ahh!" Her body tightened up, rising, then came down, slow, slow, slow, relaxing. "I'm thinking that I'm about to fall right off the edge of my third climax and want this to be a tranqu… phnmm… tranquil one."

    More silence and velvet motion; the muscular flower enclosing him.

    Then: "Mmm, I guess I was right about you, Lucas my dear."

    What had she meant by saying that?

    She suspects something.

    In his mind's eye he saw Kristen, fifteen, glowing, the bruises fading now. Kristen lifts the fat vial of oblong red capsules into the light and smiles speculatively. He feels a surge of love for his little girl. She wants to make him happy. She perceives his pain and wants to help.

    The one power he thought beyond his reach was the power to reach into the nightmare concert and grab Kristen back. Yet now the nightmare events had congregated to compose a reality. He'd seen Kristen in the milling crowd at 'Gasm's fatal Arena gig. He'd perforated the motherfuckers who had caused her death. And now he had her back-in a manner of speaking, of course. She was here, beneath him, helping him, as before.

    He had loved her enough to kill for her. He knew she hadn't been dead, not really dead…

    "It was a lie," he murmured. "The way the music was a lie."

    Either she does not hear him or disregards his talk as the nonsensical jabber of coitus. Her tempo speeds up and turns feverish. There is a delicious itch burrowing into the head of his penis. The soles of his feet start to tingle. His stomach teeters on the brink of a rollercoaster drop.

    He had seen her startlingly colored eyes in that moment. He had looked deep into them, into her mind, into her soul.

    Her eyes are glittering.

    "I love you," he whispered, just barely disturbing the air with his breath.

    She jerks, making a breathy
whooo
sound, and tightens all around him, her tempo hitching. He feels his cock and balls spasm and all the pictures in his brain flow together like warm oil paint, running.

    Kristen had not been as good in bed.

    She flowed to his side and hugged him with her arms and legs. Wetness brushed his thigh. She wrapped him up tightly because he had been shaking all over, in shock.

    "Oh, baby… no, no, it's okay…"

    By the time he stopped shaking she was drowsing, slipping into that never-never land that beckons you after really good sex, the soft, warm cloud that lets you come down slow. When he freed himself from her, her hands would not let him go. He stood before the dying lire, the air movement making his damp crotch and legs chill. The fire needed stirring up and refueling.

    She had rolled onto her stomach then, her round butt poking up saucily, flowing into her legs, which lapered into the magnificent calves he had admired. She had crooked herself onto her elbows and swept the hair from her eyes.

    Her eyes are glittering. It's encore time.

    "Lucas?"

    She had been saying his name when he crushed her skull with the stubby split of firewood. He'd hit her twice, and she had not moved or drawn breath since then. She was curled up next to the fireplace, very still, where she had died.

    Kristen was dead. Cass was dead. So now they really were the same.

    They'd gone off to join Cory. He stood before the renewed fire, into which he had tossed the chunk of split birch. Cass' blood sizzled as it evaporated. Heat sheeted the front of his body. He knew about that nightmare glitter in Kristen's eyes. He had learned to recognize it. Even though he had not been at the Whip Hand concert, he knew the glitter. 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, with a swallow of water every tenth pill.

    
Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy…

    Kristen had gotten that glitter from her mother. She would have matured into the same kind of creature. If Cass was anything like Kristen, the same chain of events would be set in motion once again, and it would lead to his destruction. Lucas understood why he had a naked female corpse in front of his cabin fireplace.

    Reality was slipping in and out of his grasp. The dream and the here and now; the past and the present; the old Kristen who was the new Cory; the new Kristen who was the old Kristen, it would hit critical mass and blow his circuits soon if he didn't get help.

    Sara had helped him the first time.

    He had to find her. Pretend he was being chased by a demon. Sara had made everything stabilize for him; Sara could explain what was taking place inside of him. Without Sara, he never would have gotten his little girl back. For that he was grateful… and now he did not want to be afraid.

    He dressed hurriedly, yanking on his pants, groping around in the darkness for his boots. His frightened mind could find comfort in order, in the dissolution of problems, and now his mind considered the problems at hand.

    The body of Cass' monster boyfriend, Reese, was still outside in the rain. Bodies had to be dealt with. All the Whip Hand incrimmata needed to go up in smoke or into the sea, and soon. The remaining ordnance waited to be piled into the Bronco. He turned his back on the corpse in the living room and concentrated on cleaning up. His fingers were steady as they broke the boxes of 5.56 ammo and loaded the clips for the M-16. He mixed in fifty Teflon-tipped rounds. Developed for police use, then officially rejected as too dangerous, Teflon loads could punch through a stack of four Kevlar vests as easily as ripping through a cotton shirt, and the SWAT squads of Los Angeles disliked such abrupt vulnerability. The range and penetration the Teflon coating gave the comparatively small-caliber bullets were awesome. Lucas tucked the loaded clips into their canvas pouches on a garrison belt. Good to be armed, just in case…

    The shearing wind made the rain outside needlelike, and it stung his face. Cass' body was shrouded by his sleeping bag, and he was stopped by the sight of it on his way out to load the Bronco.

    He thought he had helped her, too, in return. Now she would never have to worry about the White Picket Fence screwing up her life.

    

    

    THE RANGER'S NAME WAS LUBBOCK, Trace W.

    He barely scraped five-five in his Smokey Bear cap and shitkicker heels. Thanks to his mom's mom, he was one-quarter Paiute Indian, but that blood did nothing to push along his suntan. It was still too chilly to go shirtless along the Diablo and Santa Lucia ranges, so Lubbock had resorted to a sunlamp to get his coveted ruddy-outdoorsman's cast, with mediocre results. Now he looked like any other displaced Staten Island Jew with a sunburn. This abraded both his purely western sensibilities and his ranger persona.

    Trace Lubbock wore tailored, starched, dun-colored uniform blouses with a tight fit and knife-sharp collar blades. He squinted on purpose to make his face craggy and weathered. To assure tenderfeet that he was indeed a seasoned mountain badass, he spoke in a low, dry growl through clenched teeth. If it worked for Clint Eastwood, it'd work for Ranger Lubbock. Usually, though, grinding his jaws gave him muscle-spasm headaches. The pain settled in between his shoulderblades and defoliated his cool in a mohawk-straight furrow up and over the crown of his head, with a silver dollar of pain dead bang between his eyes.

    The seed of another such headache was sprouting right now, and he resisted the urge to knock it down with a slug of coffee. Norma had warned him off caffeine. Everything Norma warned him off had been regurgitations of the TV commercials that divided up her daily soap opera intake. He felt manfully entitled to his four morning cups of joe even when headaches were the price. From what he'd experienced, caffeine withdrawal was worse. When he was late getting to the ranger station below Los Gatos, he lacked time to brew at home and had to drink the turbid crud shat by the station's wheezing Mr. Coffee. It hadn't been cleaned since its purchase in 1970, and the stuff it produced reminded Lubbock of the silt that had caked his feet when he had made the mistake of wading into the Salton Sea, farther south. That one-time goof had come before Norma and before rangerhood. He had reached a detente between the coffee, the headaches, and the four pint bottles of Pepsi-Cola he put down every day (number one came at lunchtime). Hell-tomorrow would bring the first paycheck to reflect his recent salary hike, and Norma's VCR would be paid off, and didn't that translate as progress in the long run? Life wasn't so bad. Just dull.

    Lubbock was also a harmlessly superstitious man. He knew that if he took the trouble to get more coffee, make sure it was the right temperature, measure in his cream and sugar powders with assayer pickiness, by the time that precisely prepared mugful was ready to drink… that fella from Los Angeles was going to stroll through the door and make him strand that coffee on the radio desk, to grow cold. Besides, he did not wish to give (he impression that all he did at the station was dump coffee down his chute. The only call that had been logged this morning had come in from this Kroeger fella.

    Trace Lubbock,
Super-Ranger
, sat without his coffee, looking tough and professional. Waiting.

    The radio in front of him spat ranger drive! and fuzzy crosstalk. The bad weather and overcast conditions were juggling the airwaves. When he clumped to the station's freezing bathroom to relieve himself, he dared the phone to try ringing. Norma had told him that the caffeine in all his coffee and Pepsis was a diuretic. Whatever a diuretic was. It sounded like just another cute name for the Inca Squat Dance-ain't that the shits? Lubbock firmly believed that a man pissed out what a man poured in; you drank a pint, and a pint of a different color emerged, and that was all. Norma was so foggy sometimes.

    Superstitions always had some basis in fact, he thought, and sure enough, as soon as he was laid bare with his cannon in his hand, he heard the front door rattle as it was slammed shut. He took his time buttoning up, having learned at age thirteen not to try pissing through a zipper because you can shake, wiggle, squirm, and dance-but the last three drops always hit your pants! He checked the mirror and made sure his Ranger Face was on before saying how to the L.A. fella. Kroeger -same name as the supermarket to which Trace once hauled wagonloads of deposit bottles during his boyhood in Roswell, New Mexico. Kroeger and his weird phone call about a matter of life and death and all that IV stuff. This was going to be weird.

    Kroeger had needed Trace to pinpoint the location of a cabin owned by Lucas Ellington. When Trace considered the map reference, he whistled through his teeth. The location was prime-a couple of acres that cost more than five of the ticky-tacky double wide he kept Norma in. The mobile home was cheap, and Trace was still feeling each payment hard. Norma had selected a trailer corral where every other double-wide tin fire-trap enclosed a story like their own. Christ-you could always hear your neighbors humping in the next trailer. It wasn't like a home at all. Checking out the sort of retreat Lucas Ellington's money had bought reminded Trace that not everybody relaxed by watching the tube inside an anonymous foil box. One day, he'd win his own modest Xanadu like the buddy of the fella Kroeger had.