"Up to you."
"You're an enormous help."
"Sorry, Poopsie. I thought you knew. If you want somebody to tell you what to do, join the army. Get a respectable job. Last I heard, free will was what made the world go 'round."
". . . and 'round and 'round and 'round, without anybody and for sure that they're doing the right thing. So, great. I'll make something up. I'll trust my goddam intuition."
"Good idea."
And Billy got a good idea. It came in a massive intuitive flash, translated from thought to word to deed so quickly that he didn't even have time to consider it.
"Okay," he said. "I want everyone in New York City to know thirty seconds of peace—"
"NOOOOO!" Christopher screamed, but it was already too late. The Power welled up and out of Billy in a wave so far beyond anything he'd experienced that he felt like he was going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, whipped suddenly over the brink and sent madly dashing toward the thunderous rocks below . . .
. . . and then the pain hit, an unbelievable agony that shrieked and every nerve in his body and then focused on his chakras, the centers of energy that ran from his crotch to the center of his forehead. It was white-hot pain, blinding and intolerable, a thousand times worse than the cross-current zap from his Argentine guitar and no less reluctant to allow him reprieve . . .
. . . and then darkness, complete and blissfully oblivious.
While, in the city that surrounded him, his dream began to come true . . .
Peace, draping like a heavenly veil over all of Manhattan, sucking the hate and the driving passion from over eight million people in the space of a second.
For more than eighty percent, it came to them in their dreams. Nightmare was vanquished. As was Freudian doubt and guilt. As was all of the irrelevant nattering that occupied so much unambitious dreamscape.
But for the waking, the shift was another thing entirely.
Cab drivers, perennial cranks at the wheel, went suddenly calm: no need to honk or scream obscenities. Their passengers, too, were suddenly stripped of their anger at straying spouses, troublesome partners, mutinous underlings, intimidating bosses, that asshole in the LeSabre that refused to go more than thirty mph. All-night, deli waitresses found themselves without a complaint by or against them. Janitors found themselves at one with their brooms. The pimps and patrolmen of Times Square found themselves smiling at each other, for no other reason than that it felt good to do.
A professional hit man named Vic Scampetti watched his mark leave the Gramercy Park Hotel at the moment the peace settled into him. His Smith & Wesson Model 3000 shotgun was pumped up and ready. The gimp—an overextended dealer to the stars who'd stepped on a couple of the wrong toes—was in his sights.
. . . and then a ripple ran through the universe, muddying his vision, putting a pinprick of pain in the middle of his forehead. It was over in a second. What replaced it was an incredible sense of well-being. He looked at the twelve-gauge in his huge dark hands. He looked at the kid he was supposed to blow away. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror.
Then he set down the shotgun on the seat beside him.
It didn't seem right, all of a sudden. Killing just didn't seem like the right thing to do, that's all. He didn't agonize over it. He launched into no chorus of mea culpa, mea culpa. He very simply decided that he would not off the kid. Dino would just have to understand.
Vic started up the Eldorado and pulled slowly away from the curb. He felt better than he could remember feeling in all of his thirty-seven years. Ahead of him, the kid had crossed over to the north side of Gramercy Park, heading west in a loose, shuffling dance step. Vic grinned and turned right at the corner, pulled up alongside the kid, and leaned partway out the window. "How ya doin'?" he called out. The kid began to smile . . .
. . . and then the headache slammed into him with full crushing power, an avalanche of pain that turned his vision lava-red. His foot slammed reflexively down on the brakes, making the world lurch around him. Beside him, the kid had staggered back against the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the park, clutching his temples and whining. Vic was suddenly flooded with hate and an even more seering confusion, thinking what the fuck am I doing, I'm s'posed to kill this guy, I must be goin' crazy as he picked up the Smith & Wesson and braced it against his shoulder, aiming.
The kid saw what was coming. He started to scream. His open mouth made a perfect target. Vic aimed for the bull's-eye and squeezed off a shot. There was no need for a second. His tires squealed as he pulled away.
And pain settled over Manhattan like a Portuguese Man o' War.
The peace had lasted for thirty seconds, precisely.
The first thing Billy saw, when he awakened, was red. Then the details of his room began to swim into view, limp and rubbery. The headache was steady and torturous now, as he'd always imagined a migraine would be. He moaned, and the sound was like a needle in the brain.
Then Christopher was leaning over, with an expression that he'd never seen the angel wear before. Not the anger and concern, both represented in equal batches: it was the fear that was a stranger there. He had never seen Christopher afraid before.
"Don't talk," Christopher said. The words thudded dully against Billy's eardrums. "You just lay there and go to sleep. You stupid little putz."
Billy tried to cast a questioning gaze. It hurt too much to move his face.
"Dammit, you've got to listen when I talk to you." The voice was soft and deadly, completely bereft of humor. "You could have fried yourself out just now. Did you know that? You could have just scrambled your brains for good. Then you'd be of no use to yourself, to me, or to anybody else. You got that?"
Billy thought about nodding, then raised his arm up weakly with an okie-dokie sign.
"Good." Christopher smiled, but it didn't fool anyone. "Now get some sleep. You're gonna need a lot of it to get over this thing. But you'll be alright, okay? I promise you'll be alright."
It hurt too much to smile. When Billy tried, it turned into a grimace. The lights went out, and Christopher vanished. He was alone in the dark with his pain and an all-consuming, soul-numbing fatigue. He tried to think about what had happened. It didn't work. Sleep welled up like a great dark ocean and quietly washed him away.
In his dream, there were chittering things in the room that tittered and called him by name. . .
TWENTY
SOCIAL CALLS
Tuesday morning. 8:45. Billy was sitting on the edge of his bed, massaging his temples, watching the sun attempt to claw its way through the sky's impenetrable layer of clouds. The sun was losing. Billy wasn't surprised.
He shifted his gaze to the wall, and the front-page shot of Jennifer Mason. It was an older picture, from her prepunked-out days. He could imagine the reporter at the door of the familial abode, saying excuse me, ma'am, but do you have any pictures of your late daughter for the final press edition?
Her hair was long, but her face was the same: a perfect-toothed smile, bright eyes beaming out from their impeccably made up settings. Her face was warm and wonderful, even in grainy black and white. She looked great.
One hell of a lot better than she looks now, he thought, and then put a lid on it. There was no point in endless recriminations, inevitable though they were. They did no good; and besides, his head hurt too badly. He didn't need any more pain.
Still, he couldn't stop staring at her photograph.
As the air in the room began to tingle.
"It's not fair," he said, "that this should have happened. You were too young, too beautiful, too cool. It doesn't make sense. It isn't fair.
"I wish that we could have you back again . . ."
. . . and then she was there, less than a foot from where he sat, leaning over him and smiling, arms folded across her belly.
"Oh, you can have me back," she said, stepping closer. "You can have anything you want. The question is
She held out her arms to him, prepared to embrace hi
m.
". . . how much of me do you want?"
As her belly opened up in a great wet smile, and her insides tumbled toward him . . .
. . . and then Billy awoke with a start, eyes snapping open like a vampire in a Hammer horror film. There was a scream on his lips that died in the transition; it fell back into his throat, became a painful lump that was hard to swallow around.
"Jesus," he croaked.
And then the downstairs buzzer rang.
Bubba awoke, from his place at the foot of the bed. He and Billy stared at each other in blank-eyed confusion. "Damned if I know," Billy said conversationally. His head clanged as he said it. The words you could have fried yourself out just now replayed in his mind, bringing the memory of the cause of his pain back with it.
The buzzer went off again. It felt like vigorously-applied steel wool on the inside of his skull. He dragged his gaze over to the clock on his desk. 8:45.
Then he looked up at the picture of Jennifer Mason.
Wishing nothing whatsoever.
"Alright, already," Billy muttered as a last buzzing barrage assailed him. He struggled to his feet, teetered there a moment, then moved painfully to the window and peered down at his guests.
Detectives Hamilton and Rizzo stared unhappily back at him.
Let this be another bad dream, he thought, blinking a few times just in case. They didn't disappear.
His keys were in his pocket. He hadn't managed to undress before losing consciousness. He was not about to walk three flights of steps: down would be bad enough, but back up was inconceivable.
He was also not about to yell. So he fished out the keys, dangled them outside the window, pointed at them with his other hand, and then let them drop to the pavement below.
Thereby buying himself a minute of throbbing shuteye before the interrogation began.
Eight-fifty found Larry Roth firmly planted behind his desk at the saintly offices of Front Line Media. He was fresh from the steaming shower and sheets of Brenda Porcaro's apartment, where eight weeks of seductive pre-production work had come to slam-bang fruition. Brenda was the receptionist for Front Line, and had clearly been hired on the basis of her scenic, rather than secretarial, attributes: the theory had been advanced, by none other than Larry himself, that she would fail the pencil test not because her breasts sagged, but because the pencil would be too damned happy to ever want to fall.
Larry smiled and leaned back in his chair, despite the monster headache that both he and Brenda had awakened with this morning. A large cup of light coffee, an egg on a roll, two extra-strength Tylenol, and a day's worth of flimflammery were laid out before him. He popped the painkillers and washed them down, thought once more and, fondly of Brenda in motion, then steeled himself for the business to come.
First on the list was to read and answer the previous day's pressing mail: largely inquiries from the Better Business Bureau, the Postal Inspector, and the Attorney General's office. Front Line Media had a vast array of scams and swindles, all of which fell short of actual mail fraud. But not by much.
Today's allegations included several probes into the "Erotic Art and Literature Society," which bought up remaindered books of truly awful art (featuring naked women) for a dollar apiece and sold them through their bogus publication, Better Lifestyles, for only $14.95 (plus $3.00 shipping and handling).
There were a lot of pissed-off art enthusiasts out there wishing to confer with "Felix Cunningham," Larry's alias on this particular project. He was in charge of "Customer Relations," which essentially made him Front Line's first-string flak catcher and shit shoveler. He had an alias for every scam they pulled. It gave the illusion of a vast media empire, protected him from possible retaliation from dissatisfied customers, and helped him distance himself from the fact that he was instrumental in bilking thousands of people out of millions of dollars annually.
After all, he was a comedian, not a shyster. This was just something to keep him alive in the days between now and the Big Break. There were those who did not approve, Billy among them; but it cost him very little, in either sleep or self-esteem.
It's a living, he mused, then bit into his sandwich. Contemplating the vagaries of business ethics was difficult with the rich flavors of butter, salt, egg, roll, and Brenda Porcaro alive in his mouth. He plowed through the sandwich, and made sizable headway with the coffee before the first letter of rage made its way before his eyes.
And that, of course, was when the phone began to ring.
"C'mon. Answer the phone," Billy hissed. "Please . . ."
It was obvious to Dennis Hamilton that Billy was pretty fucking upset. For starters, they'd brought him some of the worst news he could possibly have heard. On top of that, his headache appeared to be monumentally worse than the ones the two detectives had been complaining about since roughly five-thirty this morning.
Crowning it all was the fact that Frank was being a king-size prick.
As if to illustrate this, Rizzo said, "I love an air-tight alibi."
Billy whirled, still holding the endlessly-ringing phone to his ear. His free hand jabbed an outstretched finger in Rizzo's direction. "You know what I like about you, man?" he snapped. "Nothing! Not a single goddam thing!"
"Watch it, kid." Rizzo was pretty close to the wire himself. "You're starting to annoy me."
"SO FUCKING WHAT!" The phone rang another time, senselessly, before Billy slammed it down. "You think you don't annoy me with your glib patronization? You think I want you in my face? Think again!"
Hamilton stood, getting ready to intervene. He'd been kneeling beside good ol' Bubba again, skritching away; but Bubba had tensed and recoiled at the roar of his master's voice, gone into fight position. If Bubba expected trouble, then Hamilton thought it wise to be ready as well.
"I mean," Billy continued, "why would I kill someone who wanted to give me a record contract? It doesn't make any sense! She's one of the last people I'd want to kill, if I wanted to kill anyone at all! Why would I do it? Huh?"
"You tell us," Rizzo said. His temper was on a tooth-skin tether.
"I can't tell you, because I didn't have anything to do with it!" Billy bellowed. Hamilton saw the next Rizzo retort coming from a mile away, saw that nothing more than spleen-venting was going to come from either side. and so he let himself drift back to the reason for their visit: the body they'd found in the Greenwich Street ditch, with that horrible fucking face carved across her.
But that wasn't the worst.
The worst was that she had been chewed: that she'd fallen or been thrown into the construction site culvert and lay there unnoticed for a good four hours, which was plenty of time to become part of the food chain. The rats must have found her fairly quickly, working on her arms and her legs and her face.
But not the torso. Oh, no. Not the goddam leering jack-o'-lantern grin, which was left clear as day to greet them this morning. The little bastards had gnawed her extremities to the bone in half a dozen places, but they'd left the psycho killer's carving intact, as if . . .
. . . as if they were framing it.
Dennis Hamilton shuddered involuntarily. His head throbbed in much the same way. He lit yet another cigarette, his fourteenth of the day, in a day just under nine hours old. Then he tuned back into the cheerful debate, still in progress.
"Listen, Rowe," Rizzo was saying. "I don't know what to think. All I know is that we're sitting on two bodies in the last four days, and that they've got only three things in common: they were all attractive young women, they all were carved up like Halloween pumpkins, and your name kept coming' up. Now, don't you think that's a little strange?"
"Of course I do! What, do you think I'm crazy?"
"The thought had crossed my mind."
"Frank. Stop." Hamilton was massaging his own head now; Bubba was still on combat alert. "This isn't going anywhere."
"Why don't you make fun of my apartment?" Billy yelled. "It was good for a laugh last time! Why don't you kick my dog? That
might be fun!"
"That's enough out of you, too, Mr. Rowe," Hamilton snapped. It didn't need to be loud to cut. "My head is killing me, and I don't think I can take any more of this. Okay?"
Billy and Rizzo both glared at him for a minute; then, seeming to realize they had something in common, they both turned away in embarrassed resentment. It gave Hamilton another minute of blissful silence in which to try and make his skull stop clanging.
"You're gonna have to come down to the station with us," Rizzo said at last.
"Why?" Billy wanted to know, but both of their volumes were down.
"We want to have a composite drawing done," Hamilton cut in, hoping to keep it that way, "of the killer's face."
"What I saw of it," Billy added.
"That's right. And we want to keep trying your girlfriend: not because we think you did it, but because it would be nice to establish positively that you didn't. You understand."
"I guess." Billy didn't look happy, but he did look resigned; and he was evidently burned out on the hollering, as well.
Hamilton tried to match the kid with the bristling bundle of loose nerve endings he and Rizzo had questioned on Friday. Not an easy task. It went beyond the shave and snappier dress, beyond the trendy hair. It went beyond the almost-frightening metamorphosis of his shithole apartment, which was now neat as a pin.
No, Dennis Hamilton thought. It runs deeper than that. There's something new going on inside that boy. Something intense.
Something scary.
Rizzo was aware of it, too. It was obvious that he didn't know what to do about this new Billy Rowe, and it was weirding him out. Big chunks of Rizzo's reasons for disliking Billy had been defused when they walked in the door; but the dislike had persisted—intensified, even—to the point where rational discussion was impossible. That was not Rizzolike. It did not bode well for the joy factor of the next several hours, much less the investigation as a whole.
The Cleanup Page 14