Static!

by Michael R Collings

  For another five minutes, there was silence on the porch again. Finally, though, Payne finished, the words exploding in a rush.

  “We watched the Bogart thing. I’d never seen it. Have you, Nick? It’s great. A great period piece, full of mood and atmosphere and those tremendous close-up shots of…of…Bergman. Great. Great. We watched it and then talked about it. Then she had to go home. The DVD player had been acting up toward the end—it’s never done that before, you know, never. Not too bad, just lines across the screen during the Bergman close-ups, a few breaks, like the tracking was off. Whenever I stood up to fix it, it would clear. And then the sound started to buzz. It gave me a headache…it probably gave Cathy one too, because she looked a little pale when she left. We said good-night and my headache lightened up. I watched her car until the tail light disappeared around the corner and then I went inside and fixed myself a strong drink and tried to sleep. I remembered Cathy on the beach, saw it again so clearly that I could almost smell the salt in the ocean spray and then the headache came back, blindingly, until I couldn’t see anything except the static from the DVD player after the disc finished playing. And I had nightmares all night.”

  He stopped.

  In spite of the cool breeze, he was sweating. Nick could see his forehead glistening and dark patches spreading at his armpits. Nick didn’t feel at all warm, though. He felt cold, chilled. Someone is walking over your grave, his grandmother would have said.

  Payne laughed, although the action seemed to suggest as much relief as humor.

  “So now I guess I had better get the damned thing fixed. I can’t have it sputtering like that every time I try to watch it. I have to leave LA for a couple of days tomorrow, so could I ask you a favor?”

  “Sure.” Nick wasn’t sure but felt that he had to say so.

  “If I give you the address of the repairman my aunt used to call, would you go by and give him a note from me and the spare key, and have him come by tomorrow or the next day. I called him this afternoon and he said that was the arrangement he had always had with my aunt. He worked on her stuff for a couple of years, even sold her a lot of it by phone but never once saw her. When he came out here, the house would be empty and quiet. All of the rooms would be closed up except the one he was supposed to work in. She always knew which one. He said he thought she was sitting in the next one, listening with a glass to the thin walls to see if he touched anything other than what he was supposed to. He said he never did, it was too scary to hang around and she paid him too well for him to take any chances at screwing up the arrangements. Anyway, he said it would be fine, that he could come by late tomorrow or the next day.”

  Again, Nick sensed an explosion behind Payne’s words, but he shrugged and said “Sure.”

  Payne reached into a back pocket and pulled out an envelope and handed it to Nick. One end felt heavy—as it touched his fingertips, Nick recognized the weight and shape of a house key.

  Payne stood and stretched and yawned. “Long day tomorrow.” His voice was languid now, as if all of the energy had drained out. “I’ve got to fly home to meet with some more lawyers. Nothing to worry about, they said. Besides, it’ll give me a chance to answer all the non-questions I keep getting in letters and phone calls from the folks back there. You know, what’s the place like, what was she like. Anyway, it’ll be fun to be home for a while.”

  They talked a few minutes more—trying to say goodbye but somehow the conversation kept going of its own volition for ten or fifteen minutes more. By sundown, Payne was walking across his lawn toward his darkened porch. He must have pushed the glider seat as he passed, because Nick thought he heard that odd squeak just before Payne’s front door opened and a thin streak of light spilled out into the night.

  Nick sat for a while, picking unconsciously at the cheese and crackers and trying to sort out his thoughts. It had been a strange conversation, more one-sided than anything, and frustratingly irresolute. Just when it seemed as if Payne were about to break open and say something, he would shift directions, then explode in a flurry of words that said nothing but intimated something deeper, almost a fear.

  Nick finally gave up and went inside, leaving the envelope with the note and key perched on the tray in the kitchen, next to the empty cracker box and a rapidly drying-out remnant of cheese. It could all wait until morning.

  He decided to read since it was too early for sleep and he didn’t want to watch TV. He went to his one good bookshelf; the others in the place were brick-and-board makeshift things that held his books without straining his budget too much, but this one was an antique, over a hundred years old and build of solid oak that was darkened by age and use to a burnished, dusky glow. This was where he kept his small collection of special favorites, mostly hardcover and mostly, like the bookshelf itself, more expensive than he could really afford. It was an eclectic collection, including a couple of nineteenth-century editions of Milton and Swift that he picked up for fifteen or twenty bucks apiece at library sales, an autographed The Stand that a friend gave him when Nick finished his Master’s, things like that. When he was restless, he liked to let his hands hover over the shelves like the pointer on a Ouija board and decide for themselves which one to pullout. His unbreakable rule was that he had to trust his subconscious. Whatever it picked, he read. It always worked.

  But that night he broke the rule. He let his hand drop until he touched the heavy gilt binding of an 1890s leather-bound volume that had been his grandmother’s favorite: Wuthering Heights. Normally he would have enjoyed re-reading it, but not that night. The book felt wrong. He needed something lighter. He settled for his old dog-eared paperback of Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and sat at his desk to read.

  It must have been two hours later. He was most of the way through the novel, about to where the Lady Amalthea enters the clock to become transformed again into the unicorn. A noise filtered through his open window, coming from the direction of Payne’s porch. It was a slight sound but enough to draw Nick’s attention. He looked up.

  A dark figure stepped off the porch. He couldn’t see it clearly but it seemed to be wearing a long, dark coat. Maybe black. The figure turned along the sidewalk and headed toward the stoplight three blocks away, where there was an all-night quick-shop and a couple of gas stations. He watched the figure intently.

  It wasn’t Payne. It couldn’t be Payne. Nick was sure of that. Payne was taller and much thinner, even if he were wearing a coat. And who would wear a thick coat on a warm summer night in LA.

  Nick thumbed the light switch, casting his study into darkness. In a few seconds, he could make out shapes outside, the lurching mass of a hibiscus by the corner, the ghostly thin column supporting the street light whose bulb had burned out weeks before and had never been replaced by the city. He noted the silence, too, the absolute silence that happened only rarely in Tamarind Valley. No birds, no insects, not even the distant hum-roar of cars on the main boulevards. He shivered.

  The figure had gone past the far border of The Greer’s yard now, a dark shape hunching along in front of the still-darkened, still-empty house where Mr. Harrison had died. Nick’s eyes smarted from the strain of peering so intently through the darkness. But he couldn’t stop. There was...something wrong, something about the shape that bothered him.

  He stood and leaned over the desk, his hand sliding on a stack of papers and knocking them out of order. Something wrong. Something.

  With a chill, Nick realized what it was. He swallowed and slumped back into his chair, sitting for a long while in the darkness.

  Whoever that was, he (or she…or it?) limped.

  Just like The Greer had on those rare nights when he had seen her figure, swathed in black like this one, limping down the street.

  But of course it couldn’t be her.

  She was dead.

  Besides, Nick decided after a moment’s reflection, running the image through his mind and measuring height, weight, probable body type against the distance and the d
arkness, besides, this person was taller, not as bulky, not as awkward as The Greer seemed to have been.

  But it wasn’t Payne, either; he was still sure of that. There was nothing of Payne’s easy grace in the movements, nothing of the natural athleticism that came through even though Payne didn’t seem interested in athletics themselves.

  Nick glanced out the window toward Payne’s. There were no lights visible. Not even a blue ripple along the hedges from one of the television screens. By the time Nick looked back to where the sidewalk intersected with the night, half a block away, the figure was gone. Even craning his neck to see as far as possible, he could not spot the dark form against the vague lights further down the street. It had disappeared.

  Nick shivered and tried to finish his reading. But Beagle’s story didn’t have the old magic anymore. He didn’t finish the book that night, and he didn’t sleep well either.

  By the next morning, he was half convinced that he had dreamed the whole episode. There was no mysterious figure, no sinister outline in the darkness, just unpleasant dreams and wild imaginings. At ten o’clock, he had even gone so far as to start across the lawn to Payne’s to share a laugh over his mind’s attempts to dredge up an “ectoplasmic apparition.” Halfway across, he stopped.

  “Damn,” he muttered. Payne had probably already left. He had said he would be taking off early. Nick went on anyway and rang the bell and waited. He stepped back from the door and ran his fingers through his hair, feeling for all the world as if someone were spying on him and that he should look his best, just in case.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “There’s no one home.”

  He turned to scan the quiet street.

  The sidewalks were deserted. Even the windows of the houses up and down Greensward seemed dark and withdrawn. There was no one on the street or on the lawns, not even any faces gleaming from cracks around the jambs of closed doors. Payne’s place was locked and still, too. Nick’s ringing the bell raised no more than a memory of an echo.

  He walked around to the side. Payne’s car was gone. Nick shrugged and started across the lawn.

  By the time Nick got back to his own place, he had almost forgotten why he went over to Payne’s in the first place. He let himself in through the back door and wandered into the kitchen. The tray from last night was waiting, along with Payne’s note and spare key. Nick tucked them both into his shirt pocket, making a mental note to deliver both that afternoon.

  For a change, he actually remembered to do it. He had a habit of forgetting obligations and commitments unless they were particularly enjoyable. But the rustling of the envelope every time he bent or turned that morning was enough of a reminder.

  About eleven o’clock he jumped into his car. He had a number of other errands to run and had decided to treat himself to lunch somewhere. It turned out that the repair shop was only three or four miles away, well out of the residential part of Tamarind Valley but not quite into the business district either. Nick checked the address on the envelope, found the street with no trouble, and cruised along until he found the right number.

  It was a neat little place, hardly what Nick would have expected of a major audio-video outlet. Tasco’s Audio-Video Outlet appeared to be a single room, more of a catalogue store than a showroom, that shared the ground floor of an old house that had been spruced up with a new front and a coat of paint. The place next door was a thrift shop that, judging from the display in the front window, specialized in unusable junk.

  Nick maneuvered his car into a parking spot that was inches too small for comfort, got out, stretched, and headed toward Tasco’s front door.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ric was a born loser.

  Everyone said so.

  Old lady. Old man. Guidance counselors at school. Ball-busting skirts that teased but wouldn’t put out.

  Everyone said so—except Ric.

  He knew that he was goin’ places. This crummy job was just a stop-over, a chance to bag some small change until the big money started rolling in.

  He had lots going. Maybe a drug deal over in the eastside. Maybe not. Ric could afford to wait, to choose just the right thing.

  Until then, Old Man Tasco was an easy touch and the job was a snap.

  He was stacking boxes along the back wall when the bell rang up front. Someone had walked in. Big shit surprise.

  He didn’t straighten up, not yet. He was wearing one of those sleeveless T-shirts designed to show off the upper arm—and he had plenty to show off. Whoever was behind him would see the muscles in his back and legs as he knelt to pick up a couple of boxes. Where the shirt rode high and his worn jeans low, a sliver of skin showed.

  Sometimes chicks came in—he liked to give them a real show. Just last week one of them, maybe twenty, twenty-five, slipped around the counter and patted him on the ass and whispered “Nice” in his ear before he turned around. He copped a five-buck tip for carrying her stereo out to her car and could probably have gotten more if he’d been in the mood to ask her for a number. She wasn’t his type, though. Hang-dog ugly bitch.

  Anyway, Ric figured that it never hurt to put on the show. He reached up, stretching, knowing how that would make the muscles shift beneath his shirt and jeans. His movement was fluid, graceful as a panther. Strong.

  “Hey,” someone called as Ric lifted the last box and set it on the top of a stack. “Can I get some help here?”

  “Shit,” Ric murmured to himself. A guy.

  He turned around suddenly, acting as if he had been startled by the sound. He didn’t smile. He took in what he could see of the man in a single glance and decided that there were other games he could play with this one.

  “Yeah, man,” he said, injecting a street-wise tone into his voice as he studied the guy more closely.

  Older, maybe twenty-five. Pale, skinny. Shabby. Nerdy.

  There was something else, something indefinable that Ric felt more than saw.

  “Is Mr., uh, just a minute,” the guy stuttered. He pulled an envelope from his shirt pocket and glanced at it, holding the paper up to catch the light that filtered through the dusty showcase window along the front of the store. “Is Mr. Tasco in?”

  “Gone to lunch,” Ric said. Let’s play this one tough. He moved to the counter along the wall and sauntered behind it to stand next to a stack of reference books and a small cash register. “What can I do for ya?” It came out more as a challenge than a question.

  “I’m here...about a repair job. I’m Nick Wheeler.”

  Ric nodded noncommittally, hooking his thumbs in the loops of his jeans and leaning back against the wall.

  The guy continued. “I have a letter for him from Mr. Gunnison.”

  “Who?”

  “Payne Gunnison. On Greensward Lane.”

  Pansy address Ric thought, sneering inwardly but keeping his face carefully immobile while the guy talked on.

  “I live next door to him,” Wheeler said. “He called yesterday about some repairs. Payne Gunnison,” he added unnecessarily.

  The name sounded familiar. Ric flipped open a thin book and ran his finger along a page, his mouth moving slightly as he read the entries. His finger was long but calloused, rough and dark. He looked up and smiled. It was a startling and not entirely pleasant smile—he had been told so often enough. The guy on the other side of the counter seemed to withdraw, almost flinch back like he’d been hit.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ric said, carefully pulling the guy back into the conversation. Don’t let him get away yet, play him along, there more fun to be had. “Payne Gunnison. He lives where old lady...I mean, where Miss Greer lived.”

  By the time he finished the sentence, Ric was almost polite, had stepped nearer the counter. He was close enough now to see the rough texture of the guy’s shirt, close enough for the splintered wood along the counter to nudge into his waist when Ric leaned forward and smiled again. This time the smile invited rather than repelled.

  Ric could see the flutter of a s
hiver in the guy’s cheeks. No one else would have seen it, but Ric did.

  The smile broadened.

  “That’s the one,” the Wheeler guy said. “Anyway, I have a note about what needs to be done and a key for Mr. Tasco.”

  Ric glanced toward the open street door and then back to Wheeler. There was a thin line of sweat along the guy’s upper lip. The guy’s eyes flickered to the door and back, half a beat behind Ric’s.

  “Here, I’ll take care of it,” Ric offered, reaching out for the thin envelope Wheeler still held suspended above the scarred counter. “I’ll need you to sign a work order and receipt, though. Let me fill one out.”

  He pulled a pad from beneath a counter and started to write.

  “Name.”

  “Nick, uh, better make that Payne Gunnison.”

  “Address.”

  “Don’t you have...?” Wheeler began.

  “It’s in the files. I could look it up, it’d take time.” He waited.

  The guy mumbled out the address. Ric finished the form by filling in the date.

  “What’s wrong with the stuff?” he asked, looked straight at Wheeler. Even after the guy started to speak, Ric kept staring straight into the guy’s eyes. It always unnerved them; Ric could tell. There were enough queers like this one hanging around. They cruised him as much as the chicks did. He shifted his weight behind the counter, thrusting his hips forward a fraction of an inch.

  “Uh, the sound breaks up,” Wheeler said. “The picture, too, sometimes. I think. That is, that’s what Mr. Gunnison says.”

  Not much help there, Ric figured, for a minute concentrating on his job. The whatchamacallit rubs against the doohickey and makes this funny sound. Made as much sense as what this Wheeler guy had said. Most of the guys who came into Tasco’s didn’t know crap about sound.

  The shits.

  Wheeler seemed to think for a moment, then added, “And the machine shocked me once.”