She closed the door, relieved at the definite sound of the latch clicking shut. This, too, was new—she generally bathed with the door open, so Stannard could wander in and out as he pleased, which pleased her even more. She twisted the hot taps in the tiled Roman tub full on and let steam mist the mirrors so she wouldn’t have to consider the ravaged state of her body.
Nude, she was angular and graceful, with an unmistakable thoroughbred hauteur. Her long, contoured legs had helped make her internationally famous. Her dark eyes, her flood of dark hair, made warm promises to the world at large. Now her hipbones seemed to jut out; her belly seemed sunken instead of flat. Her breasts hung, looking out of proportion to the anorexic state of her body. Her hair had lost luster, her eyes humanity. Her fine, slim feet looked bony and old, roped with blue veins.
She lowered herself into the simmering suds and felt her skin drink up the bath oil. Time for repairs to commence.
Sertha closed her eyes. Long black lashes—her own, not cosmetic fakes—drifted down to blot out the world. First, she thought, the drink. It was a mess of juices and protein powder and blenderized calf’s liver and other disgusting gook her doctor had invented for her. Then a lot of steam and some time on the Uva-Sun table; some passive electronic exercise followed by a light workout in Stannard’s impressive weight room. Laps in the pool. Then she could insinuate herself with the kitchen staff, to construct her own special salads.
Horus seemed to have twice the number of muscle cables in his arms as a normal human being. She thought of the delicate interplay of those tendons and ligatures, all working in concert to squeeze the fatigue out of her body. It was pleasant, not frightening, as her halting consideration of Stannard’s recent personality shift had been. She did not desire to have sex with Horus, though Stannard understood he had no right to protest if she ever did. To be sure, it would be an adventure, but she had long ago opted to spare herself the hassle. When dear Gabriel did not get his way, or disliked another person’s decision, he was capable of acting like the most monumentally spoiled brat in the COSMOS.
Perhaps it was because he was a child, she thought —an overly pampered one, used to getting his way. He hated arguing fidelity with her, because it was a rule for grownups. The concept of faithfulness to one woman was, for him, a chore above and beyond the call of his profession. Part of the baggage of his chosen public persona was the parade of women—most of them girls, really—convinced that their lives would gain new meaning, and their hanger-on careers in the lightning-strike field of rock ‘n’ roll cemented, if only they spread their legs for Gabriel Stannard and partook of the power he represented. He handled this pressure ably—that is, he paid it next to no attention. Most couplings with his fans were restricted to sordid one-nighters in hotels while on tour. He told Sertha of needing such women only as steam valves for the pressure of the road, as a sexual analgesic. Horus was always there to hand last night’s bimbette cab fare and usher her out of the Presence Magical.
But the first time Sertha had accompanied him on the concert circuit, she had seen the cheated look in his eyes a hundred times. She resented being the villainess who had locked this jaunty child out of his candy store. Later, he had admitted to her that too much candy was never good for a kid, and she smiled. He smiled back. For a moment it was all genuine. He was capable of a mature attitude, but generally only for brief bursts. He was one of those men who always wanted whatever someone in authority told him he could not have. Sooner or later he would begin to resent the lack of new flesh, and Sertha would catch the flak.
She knew the extent to which it was all part of his job. Calculated. Even the Beatles admitted to forming a band, at first, to “meet birds.”
When Sertha had been introduced, she had barely known he was a musician, although his wardrobe had tipped it instantly. He was fascinated by the concept that someone could not know who he was on sight. Naturally, she was not from this country. She was not blinded by his light. And he came after her with the ardor of a stable boy setting sights on a princess.
Sertha wondered if the great passions of history had ever sat down to round-table the terms of their “relationship.” He was not only childlike as well as childish, but like a narcotic—a golden, delicious drug, so pleasant to take and oh so difficult to resist. His charm could knock down her defenses like two double shots of vodka and sneak up on her in exactly the same way. Whenever she mustered and rehearsed the complaints that needed airing between them, he used his uncanny power to wipe them from her brain with a mystic pass, a perfect smile, a flash of heat from those ice-blue eyes, and the fine music his body could make against hers.
And she had let him get away with it, times beyond measure. That was how good he was. But when she had looked in the bathroom mirror—actually looked, without lying to herself—she was forced to acknowledge that her vitality was somehow being leached away…and the most obvious suspect loomed large, with his ability to send blood rushing to her groin and fog to mist her brain, blotting out her little dissatisfactions. He was tapping her battery to keep the embers of his hate banked. He was stealing her heat and replacing it with none of his own. It was not the empathic transfer of energy she resented, it was the lack of compensation. Up until the events the press had labeled the Whip Hand Murders, Sertha had always gotten something back from her best lover.
She could hear his voice in the next room as she simmered in the king-bed-sized tub. His words were unclear, but his tone told her he was busy sandwiching new layers onto his budding scheme of vengeance. She thought of what all that energy could do if it was channeled in her direction, applied toward keeping and pleasing her.
She regretted recognizing the progression so easily. She had seen it before. Sex had become unimportant to Gabriel because he had discovered a new karmic vitamin. But the thing fueling him now was tainted, poisonous, ultimately fatal. That was the part he had not yet tasted. Basking in the healing heat of the tub, Sertha asked herself how much of the responsibility for saving him was hers.
She stepped out of the tub and belted herself into a lush black terry robe, to hold in the warmth pulsing from her. Her damp hair hung untoweled. When she cracked the door, steam wisped out around her. Stannard was still talking.
When she thought she might redirect his concentration so that he could become as hung up on her as she was on him, it gave her strength. “Love,” she said. “I was nose-deep in the tub when I suddenly thought of two places. The Bahamas. And Europe. Suddenly I began plotting, and a lot of possibilities jumped up. The Paine villa is empty right now; they’re friends of mine, and we could move right in.…”
Sertha became aware that she was addressing an empty room. The big bed was cold, and the videotape deck was running. The tape chilled her down immediately.
It was Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up, playing again.
The perverted parlance of America’s so-called news programs had always confused her. No news report needed more than five minutes to impart its information, yet on television there was no such thing as a five-minute timeslot. In Southern California the malady of news overload was acute. The four o’clock hour bled into the five o’clock hour, which segued into the six o’clock hour, which was updated at eleven and repeated at one-thirty in the morning. Almost none of it was essential information. It was cluttered with sports scores, the cult of local personality, and time-wasting “human interest” features about people you would cross the street to avoid in real life. And that was the key—none of this represented life as Sertha knew it.
The entertainment industry programs stole their format from the news shows but banked on sensationalism to an even more extreme degree. They were the National Enquirers of the airwaves—bright, glossy, fast forward, and empty of caloric value. They were hosted by blown-dry, vapid nonentities, all acting hopefuls who craved advancement via the art of the million-buck smile. One of the worst of these minicircuses of disinformation and thinly veiled advertising come-ons was Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up.
<
br /> Buzz words were lifeblood to such programs, and the Whip Hand Murders buzzed loudly indeed.
The phone had rung until even Stannard’s attorneys had advised him that some sort of statement, some minimal public exposure, might be a good idea. Don’t make the public think you’re hiding, they told him. That perked up the hunter-killer in him, and a Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up van was soon dispatched to the Stannard estate, bearing an anchorperson with a fierce smile, fabulous legs, and the dead hiss of deep space between her ears. Her name was Mardi Grassley, and the first question she asked Gabriel Stannard was, “Do you feel that rock music has caused the deaths of your fellow former band members?”
Stannard’s uncoached response was deleted by unanimous decision in the editing booth.
Take two.
“That’s a simplistic charge.” His annoyed sigh spiked VU meters in the van. The background noise could be sweetened later. Everything could.
“It avoids the issue,” he said. “It’s like making you responsible for the guy who watches Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up just to see your legs so he can whack off. And believe me, your producers make sure viewers can see lots of your legs, Mardi, during those phony reaction shots you guys pretape to stick into the interviews later.”
A fascinating social insight, but too complex for Mardi’s viewership. And you couldn’t say “whacking off” in prime time.
The musical segment of the program was called Rock Wrap. Stannard had seen himself on it numerous times in the past. It had previewed the new video of “Maneater.” Perhaps someone at the studio had done some elementary addition after seeing it, and that was why Mardi Grassley’s crew was all over his front lawn now. Stannard found himself constitutionally incapable of hiding from their cameras.
He had seen Mardi Grassley’s legs before and could see them now. They were wondrous fine. A strategic advantage. It was easy to imagine her in a leather teddy, assuming positions you’d never hear discussed on Donahue.
The most ironic aspect of the entire interview was that Mardi Grassley wanted to ride Stannard’s boybone in the worst way. Maybe it was real lust, maybe just the latent physical promise she used to get a hook into interviewees, but either way Stannard felt the air grow dense with palpable sex vibes. Even this TV clone wanted him.
They let the tape grind, so he rattled on for a while about rock music and social responsibility. Blaming rock for sending misfits into berserk sprees, he said, was a criticism that people outside the entertainment industry had been leveling for years. He compared it to the buck passing that went on in education. Kids were stupid. Parents blamed schools. Schools blamed parents. So much finger pointing went on that the kids never got any help… but they sure as hell thought they knew who was responsible for fucking them up. Round and round. It all avoided the issue. Placing blame was no solution. And if there was a single person responsible for the Whip Hand Murders, what kind of upbringing did he have that permitted music to trigger him into homicide? Was the fact that Jessica Savitch was once held hostage by a crazed fan of her news show her fault—or her producer’s, for the way in which she was presented?
Stannard put forth these points with effortless eloquence. He was doing what he was good at—controlling audiences.
None of it was used, and Grassley and company finally settled for splicing in a lot of reaction shots of Stannard. She theorized, he nodded. Close-ups of Stannard meant a guaranteed viewership for Rock Wrap. It was not necessary for him to actually say anything.
What he told them became passionate, inflamed, potent, and utterly unusable. What they invented to fill the gaps was vapid, promotional, and by rote, like weather dialogue enhanced by steroids. Mind Chee-tos, thought Stannard. They looked like food, but when you crunched them you got nothing but orange scum on your teeth.
Mardi Grassley had played him. In person, she had been dripping for him; on tape, she had spun and bitten, with a challenge uncomfortably like the one Stannard had tossed down at the close of the “Maneater” video. Now Stannard had to shit or git… because everybody was looking at him now, and as usual, the watchers hungered.
Sertha saw it replay as she came out of the bathroom, realizing Stannard had lit off, taking his .44 Magnum with him. Steam uncoiled from her bare skin in the cooler air.
If Mardi Grassley’s expression had been any more portentous, her face would have ruptured. She wound up in her most unctuous Rona Barrett mode. “So, the question remains: Is Gabriel Stannard, the macho bad boy of heavy metal, for real? Can he just stand idly by while his old comrades drop like targets in a shooting gallery, or is there enough fiber beneath the tough, strutting, and oh-so-safe stage persona to compel him into direct action? We expect no less from Gabriel Stannard than for him to burst forth with six-guns blazing. This reporter isn’t so sure anymore. Tell us, Gabriel: Are there any bullets left in your gun?
“This is Mardi Grassley, for Rock Wrap.”
Her piranha smile dissolved into a freeze frame of Stannard’s face above the caption WHIP HAND KILLER’S NEXT VICTIM?
Fade out. Commercial. Next segment. Hollywood Weekend Wrap-Up was incisive, penetrating, pushing the limits of hard-line investigative journalism.
“This cannot be healthy,” Sertha said to the empty room.
The videotape ran varicolored static.
Sertha was not used to being unseen, unnoticed, or worse, ignored. The concern surprised her with its mundanity: Why could things not continue as they had before? This phase of her life had been amputated midway. Her mind naturally recoiled from the thought, the way the eyes recoil from a sudden bright light.
She might have to leave this place. Already she felt the tug; now she had to choose whether to acknowledge it.
She could not be more uninvolved. Stannard had locked her out.
She wondered how many of her things were here and how long they might take to pack, were she ever to think seriously of leaving.
“You guys look like a coupla dicks wearing shirts,” Stannard smirked as he strode into the poolhouse.
Both men in the room, chocolate and vanilla, speared him with acid glances. To retort would be to rise to unwanted bait.
Cannibal Rex’s serpent eyes flickered up to spray Stannard with caustic blood, then declined. You’re spared, they said, this time. He finished working his gums with the lees of coke dusting his pinky finger—the pinky on his left hand, the hand on which he could still count to five. His bone earring jittered to and fro as he polished off the dope. His punctured Special Forces beret was discarded atop the long folding table next to all the hardware. Even though it was nearly night, he slid his radiation-proof wraparound shades back on. The only light inside the poolhouse, a dim forty-watter in a billiard shade, hung right over the table and the goodies arranged on it by Horus.
There was one other light source in the room. From the corner the “Maneater” video spun out on one of Stannard’s army of 24-inch color TVs. Over and over again, Stannard and Cannibal Rex laid waste to the schoolroom set on the Chaplin stage. Each play of the video faded out on Stannard’s face, filling the maw of the camera, repeating, C’mon, bad man—take me down if you can. The image on screen was replicated in the lenses of Cannibal Rex’s shades; two hot points of cool fire in the dark.
Horus was draped loosely in his workout silks, a cacao-colored man in funeral black. He did look rather like an enormous black phallus wearing a shirt. All he would give Stannard by way of retort was, “You just wish you had a cock this perfect. But then, I know that you were circumcised as a tadpole, so it’s difficult for me to believe you know anything about real dicks.”
Cannibal snorted. Whether it was from the blow in his snoot or the gibe, no one could tell. His eyes were masked.
Stannard cracked a huge smile the moment he saw the gear on the table. Eagerly, he said, “What we got?”
Horus worked his way from one end of the table to the other, lifting and demonstrating.
“Okay. Exhibit A. We got your American 180—al
so called the Buck Rogers gun. Laser-sighted .22 caliber; empties a 177-round clip in five seconds. Lightweight. Recoilless. Police departments and government agencies use ’em. It’s got a hit rate fifty percent higher than any other rifle ever tested. The laser concentrates the bullets onto the target. It’s a battery-powered helium-neon job.” He activated it, and a dot of red light the size of a pencil eraser skittered across Cannibal Rex’s forehead. “At fifty feet the sighting dot is no bigger than a quarter; at six hundred feet it’s three inches wide. The slugs can penetrate wood, concrete, car doors. Depending on how fast you reload, this thing can fire over 2000 rounds per minute.”
Stannard nodded, a well-fed look in his eyes. Cannibal Rex belched and reached over to crack a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“This is a standard Auto Mag,” said Horus as he picked up a large pistol. “I’ve had it blued to cut the reflection of the matte finish. Kicks just like Dirty Harry’s revolver, except this is an auto pistol. They couldn’t manufacture these until recently; the fire rate of an automatic caused parts of the gun to melt.”
Stannard held a clip to the light. It was loaded with eight big 240-grain lead slugs. “Man, firing six of these mothers numbs my hand and nearly breaks my wrist. I think I’d rather stick to my revolver.”
Horus shrugged. “The handgrip is too fat for you. The reload rate’s too slow, even using speed loaders —great fun for the target range; not such fun when the target is you. Even urban police departments are beginning to admit that the revolver is a dinosaur. The bad guys watch Miami Vice and tote submachine guns. FBI stats say the average shootout consists of twenty-three rounds fired from seven feet in poor light. The six shots and awkward reload of your Magnum under firefight conditions aren’t optimum. You told me you wanted the maximum advantage.”
“Yeah, right.” He dropped the clip back onto the stack. “What about the shotgun?”
Horus tapped it. “Italian SPAS autoloading gun.” It was an awesome weapon, with a fat slide, rectangular vents, a pistol grip, and a fixed stock.
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