“Shit!” Klondike beefed. “Asshole pimp six feet under in his muthafuggin’ pimpmobile!”
“Watch your language,” said Riff. “And keep your voice down!” Slick mud was beginning to join them in the hole, in force. He scooped out the bilge with his hands.
“What kinda car is it?”
“Who cares, thought Riff. Dumb question; dumb goon. “Just dig, before we drown.” He wanted to find out if they were near a car window they could break, to cut excavation time. They’d been putzing around on the roof for nearly half an hour. Riff realized they were on top when he found the insulated rectangle of the sunroof. The car was gigantic—maybe a full-stretch limousine. He traced the outline of the sunroof with a finger while Klondike continued to bail sludge from an awkward squat.
“Crowbar!” Riff said over his shoulder. Soon the horizon would turn pink-gray with predawn light, and he mentally damned the end of daylight savings time again.
Klondike poked his head out of the hole, did a quick three-sixty, and returned with the crowbar. His own private mudslide was right behind him. Things were getting gooey.
“All clear topside,” he said.
Not sure which side the sunroof opened from, Riff had a moment of indecision, and that was when he heard the grinding noise. It was a low whirring basso against the lighter sound of the pattering rain.
The sunroof was opening. Yellow cabin light sprayed upward from the widening hatchway.
Things happened too fast for Riff to keep track. He fell backward onto his rump in surprise, thinking, It’s one of Bunny’s goddamn tricks, goddamn Bunny it’s—
It seemed a funny thing to hear a big lug like Klondike screaming. His voice spiked Riff’s ears, cracking high with terror.
“Riff! It’s got my leg I can’t Riff help HELP ME—!”
And in the sickly glow of the limousine’s interior lights, Riff saw what had ahold of Klondike’s leg.
The suit sleeve was crushed black velvet; the cuffs, ruffled lace. The kind of overblown getup a showoff like Desmond would demand to be buried in. The ebony claw dragging Klondike backward was threaded with luminescent white mold. The brown jelly of rot glistened in the light, and the dagger fingernails that were Desmond’s coke-snorting tools—now jagged and cracked—gathered, seating themselves in Klondike’s left calf.
Klondike hollered.
Riff was backed into the humid mound of turned earth. He might have yelled, but his throat seemed stuffed up with grave dirt, and his tongue hugged the roof of his mouth in fear.
There was nothing for Klondike to grab as an anchor, and the relentless tow of the slime-clotted hand pulled him, wriggling, to block the light from within the buried car. Another arm slid through the crack of space and snaked around Klondike’s waist in a hideous bear-hug, from below. Dense black mud was dripping down into the car as Klondike thrashed to no gain against the dead, locked embrace.
Riff could still see, too well.
The pressure increased. Gray knuckle bones popped through wet splits in the decayed meat, and Klondike screamed one last time.
The sound of his back breaking apart was the splintering of dry bamboo, the crunching of ice between the teeth. It cut off the screaming. Then Klondike, all of him, began to fold into the hole in a way Riff had never seen a human body bend before.
Riff’s own body thawed enough to move, and one hand grasped the spade. He took a single step closer.
Klondike’s body hung upward in a ludicrous bow-shape, feet and arms in the night air. Something else in his body suddenly gave way with a sharp, breaking-carrot noise, and he sagged a few inches further down into the sunroof.
Riff, trembling, raised the spade, blade down. Klondike was as dead as a side of beef. Riff was not watching him so much as the moldering hands that pulled him down. There, on the middle finger of one, was the diamond.
When he lifted the spade to strike, the dark, oily mud greasing the roof of the car skimmed his feet from beneath him, and he sprawled headlong on top of what was left of Klondike.
Now Riff screamed, because the groping claw had locked around the lapel of his topcoat three inches from his nose, pulling him inexorably downward along with his inert partner. Klondike’s stale animal odor stung Riff’s nostrils for a fast instant before being washed away by the eye-steaming stench of putrefaction. Riffs guts boiled and heaved. He was sinking into the impossibly small sunroof.
He flailed; got his heel against the lip of the hole. Like a hungry spider, the graveyard hand was making for his Adam’s apple, and he fought to slow it down. When his fingers sank into the oleaginous dead flesh, he killed the onrushing spasm of revulsion by jerking backward hard enough to dislocate his shoulder.
He had a grip on the ring when he did it.
The thick, drenched tweed of the coat separated with a heavy purr drowned out by the rain. Riff plunged backward and wedged into the rapidly dissolving dirt mound, shuddering uncontrollably, teeth clacking, completely apeshit with panic.
In the sickly yellow glow, he saw that the maggoty flesh of the ring finger had stripped away like a rotten banana peel, exposing a still-clutching skeleton finger. The sound it made against the red enamel was like a fork tine raked against a porcelain sink.
Brown gunk was leaking from between his own fingers, and he opened his fist to reveal a diamond almost as big as a golf ball, nestled in clumps of buttery skin that was warm only because it had been inside Riff’s closed hand.
Riff’s body would not move; he was frozen from the bowels down, his back married to the pit wall. If he looked away, all he would see were dancing, round-edged rectangles of yellow light.
Klondike’s chin was still perched on the edge of the sunroof. The now-ringless hand in lace and black velvet circled his body and tugged. Klondike’s upper row of teeth caught on the rubber insulation strip. Another tug, and his forehead bonked against the hatch. Then the rest of him slid into the hole all at once and was gone.
Riff was whimpering now, still cemented to the spot, transfixed by the waiting yellow hole. He could just see the upper curve of one of the phony electric braziers on either end of the front windows. Yellow squares overlapped in his pupils; in his mind he saw a million times over the rotting hand emerging again, grasping, pulling up a shoulder, revealing a head and torso ...
“Here!” he yelled, his bones finally grinding into motion. “Here, God damn it! Keep it! Bunny wanted it, not me! Take it back—!” He flung the diamond without aiming. It bounced on the roof with a thunk, and wandered toward the sunroof like a crystal BB in a Brobdinagian puzzle maze.
It decided at last to drop in, and vanished, noiselessly.
Riff’s treacherous body now insisted that he run, that he set an Olympic record for running in the rain.
The sun roof began to whirr slowly shut, paring away the light. Riff’s heartbeat punched away at his throat. The last of the ooze in his hand was rinsed away.
Then he piled out of the hole and hauled his poor white ass toward the freeway at maximum speed. In forty-five minutes the rain changed to a five-alarm downpour, and Riff stood in his own private puddle, facing the singularly unamused gaze of Bunny.
“Turn him out,” said Bunny, flatly, and two of his boys winnowed down to his waterlogged skivvies.
“I told you I don’t have the ring,” said Riff, still shivering. “But you’re not going to believe that any more than you’ll believe that Klondike—”
“Pulled a doublecross, bashed you with a shovel, tied you up with your own coat and took the diamond?” finished Bunny. His eyes bugged, watery and yellow with sickle-cell. “Shit. Any one ’o them things, maybe—but Klondike didn’t have enough battery power to invent all four. You’re jerking me around, Riff my friend. Maybe you didn’t even make it out to the grave, huh?”
Riff swallowed. Bunny was getting ready to do something nasty.
“I’m not lying,” he said carefully. “Klondike is still at the gravesite.”
Anticipating Bunny�
�s next accusation, one of the hulks flanking the doorway to the office stepped forward. “I know what you’re thinking, boss,” he said in a voice as deep and growly as a diesel truck engine. “That boy Desmond is as dead as one of them barbecued chickens in the market. Me and Tango was a hundred percent sure.” He back-stepped to his place at the door, and Riff thought of a cuckoo clock.
“You took a hundred percent of my green,” said Bunny. “You better be goddamn sure.” He said gah-dam.
“Can I have my pants back?” said Riff. Regrettably, it drew Bunny’s pique away from his bulldogs and refocused it on himself.
“Give him his duds,” said Bunny. “He’s going out there with us.” He rose to his buggywhip-skinny six-two and wired an expensive pair of rose-tinted shades around his face. “And if you’re snowjobbin’ me, boy—”
“I know,” Riff nodded as he fought his way back into his sodden clothing. “I’ll have a hard time peddling Veteran’s Day poppies wearing a cast up to my eyebrows.”
“You got it.”
They made the drive in funereal silence, and nobody cared about the dawn and the dirty floormop hue it turned the horizon. LA’s surface streets were flooding by now, and the homeowners in the Hollywood Hills would be cursing the mudslides, and it was obvious that visitor business at Forest Lawn would be just ... Well, thought Riff—they were assured of no disturbances, anyway.
The gorilla named Tango broke out three umbrellas in basic black, and nobody moved to share one with Riff, who led them down to Plot #60 from an access road charmingly called Magnolia View Terrace. It proved a lot easier than sneaking up from the freeway. The heavily saturated turf around Desmond’s final resting place made their shoes squish. Bunny’s Gucci loafers were goners, Riff thought with not a little satisfaction.
Forest Lawn was discreet concerning such peccadilloes as vandalism. No matter what happened to Desmond’s grave, the news would never make the Times, and the wad of bills Tango had slapped into the gatekeeper’s palm guaranteed privacy for proper mourning.
One of those characteristic Astroturf tarps had been pegged over the hole. Desmond’s garish monument stone spired toward outer space like a granite ICBM.
“So what?” Bunny said loudly as a jolt of thunder shook the ground.
“They covered it up!” said Riff.
All three men turned to look at him. “I can see that, null and void,” Bunny snapped. “Get on with it!” The pimp stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his black overcoat, Tango’s buddy holding an umbrella over him like a dutiful Egyptian slave. Riff never could dredge up the guy’s name—the two were as interchangeable as knife maniac movies—so he pointed at Tango. “Help him,” Bunny said, and Tango eyed the tarp doubtfully before stepping sidewise down into the pit. Bunny thought he could hear a noise through the downpour, a kind of electric fly-buzzing. Maybe construction equipment was working somewhere nearby.
Riff held up the corner of the tarp for Tango. There was a very dim yellow glow emanating from beneath it, and water had pooled in its middle, causing it to sag.
As Tango ducked under the tarp, Riff planted his foot dead bang into the bigger man’s ass, driving him inside. The tarp flopped wetly back into place. Tango’s partner saw it happen, and automatically broke his revolver from its armpit holster, bringing it to bear on the bridge of Riff’s nose.
But by then, Tango had started screaming.
He shot up against the tarp from beneath, hurling water all over the trio just as Bunny pointed to Riff and shouted, “Blow him away!” Then he took a miscalculated step that dumped him onto his butt in the mud.
Riff grabbed the big magnum barrel just as it went off in his face. There was a backward tug as the slug whizzed cleanly through the sleeve of his overcoat. The pistolero’s second shot headed off into the stratosphere as the slimed incline of the pit came apart like warm gelatin under his heels. He slid indecorously down into Riff’s embrace. As he flailed for balance, Riff wrested the gun away and gave him a no-nonsense bash in the face with it that flattened his nose to cartilaginous pulp and rolled his eyeballs up into dreamtown.
It had taken maybe two seconds, total. Riff quickly climbed to the rim of the grave. He knew how, by now. The gunman’s semiconscious body oozed slowly downward until his legs were beneath the tarp edge. Then he was pulled the rest of the way inside.
Topside, Bunny was still on his back, trying to scramble his own petite shooting iron past the silver buttons on his double-breasted overcoat. He looked up, glaring hotly, and saw a dripping, mud-caked bog monster pointing an equally mud-caked revolver in his direction. His hands stopped moving and his eyes became very white.
From behind Riff, there came a sound like a green tree branch being twisted in half, followed by nothing except the patter of the new rain. One of the tent pegs popped loose and the tarp sagged into the hole.
Bunny’s face was a livid crimson-black with rage. The knowledge that he had been outdrawn, however, did not stop him from trying to preserve his image by saying, “I’ll kill your ass for this, you know,” in his quiet, bad-pimp’s hiss.
“What it is, Bunny,” said Riff, gesturing with the gun, “is you need to climb down into this hole.”
“Tango—!” Bunny screeched, trying to crawl backward.
Riff frowned and shot Bunny once, in the left leg just below the kneecap. Blood mingled with the mud and gore spoiling his seven-hundred-dollar suit. “This isn’t a movie, Bunny; just get in the hole.”
Hiding his pain behind clenched teeth, Bunny began to drag himself toward the pit. When he backed down into it, on top of the tarp, his hands going wrist-deep in the muck, he looked up at Riff and in his best snake-charming voice said, “Why?” mostly to buy a couple of seconds more. It was extra seconds that always counted in rescue time.
“Because I gotta change my life, Bunny,” he said, looming over him with the gun.
Buy more seconds. “I’ll let you,” said Bunny, gasping now. “Anything you want, man. Partners. We’ll—”
Riff was about to tell Bunny not to bullshit a bullshitter when the ruglike tarp heaved mightily up, splitting in the middle. The first thing that came out was yellow light. The second thing that came out was a black velvet-clad arm that captured Bunny’s wounded leg in its trash compactor grip very nicely. Bunny slid three more feet with a loud cry of pain.
One thing about those limos, Riff thought as he turned away and walked back up the slope. He’d noticed it during the ride out in Bunny’s own chariot. They sure had a lot of room inside.
Bunny’s pocket pistol fired four, five times behind him and then stopped.
Riff pawed around under the limousine’s bumper for the magnetic case containing the spare keys, and when he got behind the wheel he involuntarily glanced at the car’s sunroof. The two cars were probably a lot alike.
He did not stick around to hear the tiny whirring noise coming from Plot #60. Nor did he ever see the ridiculously fat diamond left at the edge of the grave, as payment. A Forest Lawn worker, finding it later in the day and assuming it to be a cheap crystal because of its large size, took it to his Pasadena apartment and hung it in the kitchen window, where it threw the setting sun’s rainbow colors against his breakfast nook for the next fifteen years.
PINEWOOD by Tanith Lee
Born in north London in September, 1947, Tanith Lee had her first book, The Dragon Hoard, published fifteen years ago. Since that time she has become one of the field’s most popular authors, with some thirty books of fantasy and science fiction for adults and another ten or so for young readers—this in addition to short stories, radio plays, and two scripts for Blake’s Seven. Lee’s most recent books include a science fiction novel, Days of Grass; a DAW Books reissue of two of her Macmillan novels, Dark Castle, White Horse; a fourth novel in her Flat Earth series, Delirium’s Mistress; and a collection of stories, Night’s Daughter. Just finished, a major historical novel set during the French Revolution is awaiting a publisher. It shouldn’t have to w
ait long.
Clear morning light slanted across her face and woke her. She turned on her side and murmured:
“David. David, darling, I think it must be awfully late—”
Receiving no answer, she opened her eyes. The other side of the bed was empty, and the little clock on his side table showed half past ten. Of course, he had woken when the alarm went off, as she never did, and left her to sleep. The clock’s little round face, like cracked eggshell, ticked with a menacing reproach. She had always been certain it disliked her, in a humorous rather than a sinister manner, because she never responded to its insistent morning screams, and when David was away on business, forgot to wind it up.
Beyond the bright window the pines rubbed their black needles against the autumn wind. She shivered as she sat up in the bed. The gothic trees disturbed her, a stupid notion for a woman of thirty-seven she told herself.
Dear David. She brushed her teeth with swift meticulous strokes. He alone had never minded about her sluggish waking.
She examined her eyes and her throat in the harsh light, bravely. Not so bad. Not so bad, Pamela, for the elderly lady you are. She smiled as she ran the bath, thinking of her anxious questionings, her painful jokes: “I’m too old for you, darling, really. People will ask you at parties why you brought your mother—” in reality she was three years David’s senior—and the batch of youthful snaps: “Oh, but I look so young in these—” He was good to her, sensing the nervous, helpless steps she took toward that essentially, prematurely female precipice of age—the little line, the gray hair. He told her all the things she wanted to hear from him, all the good things, and never seemed to find her tiresome. He had always had a perfect patience and kindness toward her. And she had always known that she had been unusually lucky with this man. She might so easily have loved a fool or a boor and found out too late, as had Jane, or her sister Angela, a man with no ability to imagine how things might be for the female principle in his life—a lack of comprehension amounting to xenophobia.
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