Before you knew it, the flame blazed into an inferno. With a crackle, it jumped over Pacific Coast Highway and started devouring everything in its way. Up the street, fire fighters started to knock at every door in the neighborhood, urging residents to leave.
Michael leapt down the stairs, two at a time. His body pulsating with heat, he pushed the door open and ran into the studio, knocking over a few art pieces that stood in his way, only to discover that his fear came true. He was too late.
Ash wasn’t there, and neither was Bull.
Thinking he knew where they might have headed, Michael hurried back out, not before noticing that her cellphone had been left behind, in pieces. To his horror, it seemed to have been purposely crushed, perhaps by the weight of the bronze piece. It now stood amidst the fragments, twisting around itself as if to direct a victorious glare at him.
Chapter 18
Rescued by fire. That was what Michael considered himself to be. The cops had been dispatched to various evacuation missions around town, which allowed him to escape interrogation. They had not caught up to him, not yet. But sooner or later, they would. How long would it be before his luck ran out? Would he have enough time to find his sweetheart? Enough time to save her?
When probed about his previous model, Bull had told Ash, “One day, I’m going to show her to you.” That was a remarkably strange answer—unless, of course, it was not about Lace herself. Rather, it was about the outdoor sculpture he had made of her. That cut at the base of her throat could only be interpreted one way: she was slain by him.
Did he want Ash to see it? And once she did, would he let her go? Or else, would he make sure she never breathes a word of it, never points it out to anyone?
Sirens had been shrieking in the distance, but once Michael arrived at the beach, they faded away. The horn of the pale moon pierced open the clouds, and in the tear between them, a star here, a star there gave a pearly blue glimmer.
The Taurus constellation rose across the celestial sphere, as if to crown the dark cliff right there, opposite him. From time to time, a red glow flickered around its outline, which made it seem to melt in waves of hot air. But when the glow died out, there was the ledge, as solid as always, its top bathed in silvery moonlight.
An eerie silence deepened all around—until suddenly, from above, a small stone shot down at him. And soon after, two or three bigger ones came cascading down over the rocks, to the sound of rapping and rolling.
Startled, Michael raised his eyes. Opposite him, a dark figure came to a stand at the top of the ledge.
“Long time no see!” reverberated his voice. “Come up, my boy!”
The gravel gave a crunching noise underfoot as Michael sped forward. To his relief, Ash was nowhere in sight, at least for now. “I’m not your boy, never was!”
Bull snorted a laugh. “Really, you weren’t?”
“Stop it, stop playing these pointless games with me!”
“Give me a straight answer, then!”
“To what question?”
“Ha!” said Bull. His eye was ferocious. It seemed to burn into him, burn with a twitch. “What other question is there, but this: When did you see me last?”
“The night of the murder.”
“Ah! At last, you remember!”
“It came back to me.”
By now, Michael reached the place when the old man’s body had been found, at the bottom of the bluff. It was marked by a broken wooden stake.
“You know too much, my boy.”
“What I know is not enough.”
The outdoor sculpture had to be close by. It had been made of the biggest, most conspicuous pieces of stone, which incidentally made it hard to find. Michael tried to decipher the dim shapes, to no avail. A passing cloud had stolen the moonlight away, and drowned white into blackness.
Bull huffed. “Why did you come here?”
“To see your art—”
“Most of it is still inside my mind,” said Bull, in a boasting tone. “It’s invisible.”
“Your hand isn’t!”
“What does that mean?”
“Bull, anyone can recognize your chisel work. Every mark, every cut is a signature. Together, they tell me who you are. Show me your hand!”
Taking a step back, Bull bellowed, “Don’t you come near me!”
“Why not?” asked Michael. “We have this thing between us, this friendship, such as it is—”
“Such as it has been.”
“So, for the sake of good old times, show me your hand!”
With a kick here and a kick there, Bull went on knocking rocks over the edge. “I’ll show you,” he said, raising the pitch of his voice, “what you really want to see! By hurting her, I’m going to hurt you where you hurt most.”
“No! Stop it—”
“I haven’t even started.”
With that, Bull pulled a figure towards him and forced her toward the edge, clutching her elbows from behind in his hands. “Here she is, see?”
Ash tried to resist him, tried to wriggle side to side to release her elbows from his hold, but to no avail. She remained in his grip, up there on the ledge, and other than to cast a burning look at him over her shoulder, there was nothing she could do to save herself.
“Why put her between us?” said Michael, in a desperate attempt to appeal to reason. “Let her go! Come at me—”
It was then that a sigh came out of her, so feeble you had to strain to hear it. “No, Michael. Go away while you can, or he’ll kill us both.”
Michael cried, “Why, what is it, Bull? You scared of a woman?”
“I’m scared of her eyes,” said Bull, his voice suddenly croaking. “There’s a strange fire in her.”
“You can’t put out fire by blowing on ash—”
“Can’t I?” Bull slapped the back of her head. “I can sense what’s in her mind. It’s revenge.”
Coming out of her faintness, Ash stirred. She craned her neck backward to glance at Bull.
“Don’t look at me,” he said, and just to show her he meant it, shook her even more ferociously than before.
“I’m in your hands,” she said, in a barely audible voice. “What can my eyes do to you?”
“I can’t stand seeing myself in them.”
At that, she laughed. It was an incredible thing to do when your life was in danger, so Michael rubbed his eyes. The smile left on her lips was no optical illusion. It was still there, painful, grim, but still triumphant all the same.
Bull tightened his grip on her and—with a groan of desperation—shook her again and again. Suddenly, a flame flared out just behind him. On impulse, he took his hands off, stepped back and gave a scream. And as if responding to it, sirens started wailing out from the distance.
“Go!” He thrust her out off the cliff, then backed away from the flame. “As far as you can, away from me!”
She flew in the air. To Michael, time seemed to slow down, which allowed him to watch her coming down as if in slow motion, her arms flailing, her eyes widening, her mouth starting to gape open as if to let out a cry.
He stumbled forward, arms outstretched, sure he would come short of reaching her in time. Catching her would be a miracle. His heart burned for it. But his mind stayed cool, as it was tormented by doubts. He had to cast them aside, find his balance, and raise his arms to her.
And just as he planted his foot at the base of the ten feet cliff, he was met not only with a barrage of stones cascading down all around him but also with the full weight of her body.
The two of them tumbled down, then rolled over once or twice, with Michael tightening his arms around her, showering her with small kisses, his heart pounding.
Her breath was feverish. Now in his embrace, she raised her eyes to Bull as if to put her spell on him. “Your time is coming. It’s coming soon, Bull.”
In return, Bull yelled, “Away, woman!” And, hands pressed to his temples, he rushed off down the trail.
Michael l
owered her onto a nearby bench. She laughed and wept like a lunatic, and then murmured something which at first he was not sure he heard right.
“Go after him,” she whispered.
Gently, slowly, Michael passed his lips over her fevered brow, then turned around to follow Bull.
“Wait!” Michael called. “Tell me why!”
“Why what?” echoed a voice.
It was, as near as one could tell, Bull’s voice, yet you could barely see him there. It was only by the rustles that you could guess at his movements as he climbed over the knee of a rock, turned himself over with a thud.
Michael entered the shadow too. His eyes started to accept the darkness, and now he could see the silhouette of a huge outdoor sculpture, its wings spread. And directly underneath it, snuggled tightly inside a nook, was Bull.
As if fascinated with his own creation, he stroked the chisel marks all around him. “Leave me alone,” he said, dejectedly. “Alone, with my Lace.”
Michael bent down to pick a half-broken wooden stake from the ground.
“I’ll go, Bull—but not before you tell me.” He hurled the stake up and caught it mid-flight. “Why did you kill her?”
Chapter 19
Having limped around the knee of his outdoor sculpture, Bull crawled into a nook under its stone belly. His hair reeked of smoke, and the left shoulder of his leather jacket was blackened, scorched a few minutes ago by flying embers. Curling into a ball, he seemed even smaller than he usually was.
He sighed. In place of answering the earlier question posed to him, what had made him kill Lace, he said, “How persistent you are, my boy! I didn’t want to show you my newest piece, but in the end, you found it out on your own.”
“It’s gorgeous,” said Michael, slyly. Already guessing at the answer, he asked, “Who was the model for it?”
“You know very well who she was.”
“Let me hear you say it.”
“Lace.” Bull had been fuming at him just a short while ago, but now, having uttered her name, the breath went out of him. “Did you know her?”
“No,” said Michael. “Did you?”
“I knew her for several months, long before my uncle made any mention of Lace, long before he gave me that hundred-dollar bill of hush money, hoping she’d go away, stop claiming he’s her father, stop bothering him.”
“Did she accept it?”
“Of course she did! But as I’ve told him, that wouldn’t have silenced her.”
“How would you know?”
With the full force of frustration, Bull kicked at the stone belly, perhaps to deter any further inquiries. “I knew Lace better than you think. Better than anyone.”
Michael pressed on. “In what way?”
“I’ve been paying for her time. I had her.”
“She wasn’t yours to have.”
“You understand what I mean, my boy. How could I resist her? To me, nothing in the world is more provocative than beauty.”
“I suppose she refused you, Bull?”
“She did, which made me distraught. No, more than that. Enraged. Obsessed. Raving mad. I hated, hated, hated that she treated me as if I weren’t a man, simply because I’m short. I couldn't think of anything else but her for days, weeks, months on end. Finally, I figured out how to deal with Lace.”
Michael had thought that getting a confession from Bull would prove more difficult. To his surprise, it was quite easy, up to now. “So,” he said, “What did you do?”
Bull shifted uncomfortably in the nook, slipped off the stone knee, turned over. Was he about to hold something back, or to stop talking altogether?
At last he said, “I called her back for a last modeling session. When she came, Lace seemed agitated. I offered her a drink, telling her that ‘It would take of the edge.’”
“And?”
“And, it did.” Bull gurgled a terrible laugh. “One little swig out of what I put in that bottle, and she was knocked out real good. There she was, lying prostate on that stage, ready for me. Ready for the taking.”
For a moment, he crept out of the shadow, perhaps to check the impact of his confession. “Lace was not the only one to lose her senses. I lost mine, too.”
Trying to contain a growing sense of revulsion, Michael asked, “Did you?”
Bull slipped back, grumbling, “Yes, I didn’t know what came over me when I tore that white dress off of her. I wasn’t myself. Or maybe I was, in a new way, more powerful than ever.”
“Powerful enough to resist temptation, I hope?”
“You must be kidding, my boy. All the lights were shining brightly on her flesh, the flesh for which I’ve hungered so long. It blinded me. Truly, Lace made me do it. It was all her fault. There was no way, I tell you, no way I could hold myself back, after all this time. No way I could resist her. ”
Bull paused, perhaps expecting an interruption, but when none came, he went on, unhindered. “When at last I finished with Lace, when I got off of her and saw how badly damaged she was, damaged to the point of disgusting me, I thought she was dead. I hoped so. She was better off dead than alive.”
At that, Michael shuddered.
Bull ignored him. “I thought she’d never wake up. And even if she did, she wouldn’t remember who’d done it to her. Boy, was I wrong!”
At this point, Michael had to control his fury. He could take no more of how Lace was raped. Instead, he wanted to hear about her murder. Bull, he sensed, was getting close to describing it.
Michael turned his back to him and took out his cellphone. He should have done it earlier, but this was the first break, the first opportunity he could find. As discretely as he could, he clicked a button on it to start recording the next part of their conversation. Was he discreet enough?
“Now.” He turned back to Bull. “Tell me about the murder.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” said Bull, quite firmly this time. Somehow, he must have noted that he was being recorded. “All I can tell you is this: Lace shouldn’t have written that letter to my uncle. It left the murderer no choice. He had to kill her.”
Picking a broken wooden stake from the ground, Michael fastened his grip on it. “What are you saying, exactly? You didn’t kill her?”
“I’m saying, I’ve told you more than I should.”
“I’ve talked with two boys, who saw a man that night, a short man—just like you—who attacked Lace. They wrestled him to the ground. Did you see them, that night?”
Stubbornly, Bull kept his silence. He seemed nervous. His eyeballs rolled in their sockets, and tortuous veins pulsed on his throat.
Michael said, “One of them left a bite mark on the attacker’s hand. The scar should be unmistakable, with one tooth mark missing.”
“Let me guess: whoever carries this scar is the murderer,” said Bull. “Relax, my boy! Sooner or later, you’ll find your man.”
Michael demanded, “Show me your hand!”
Bull laughed in his face. “A story is something I can change at will. Not so physical scars. What, you think I’m going to show them to you, so you can point them out to the cops?”
Michael took a deep breath, after which he decided to try getting a confession out of him by some other means. Flattery, perhaps.
“For the first time,” he said, “you’ve created something different, something other than your own hand, your own figure. To me, this is an angel come to life. So pure, so beautiful.”
In the light that bled through the clouds, the wings of the outdoor sculpture cast a shadow over Bull. Clearly intoxicated by the praise, he softened his voice. “I was inspired.”
“Unlike everything else you’ve created, this piece isn’t twisted. You’ve created something balanced, at long last.”
“Don’t let her fool you,” said Bull, this time soberly. “Her balance is merely a deception.”
A gust of hot wind blew over a few sparks. He took off his leather jacket. From its inner pocke
t, a tool fell out, clanging against the surface of the bluff.
At first, Michael thought it was a chisel, but no: it was the same flat blade knife Bull had used for painting in oils. Was this the knife with which he had slit his model’s throat?
Michael felt blood gushing in his veins. Flattery was not the right way to deal with such a monster. Revenge was.
He gripped the stake with such anger that in a flash, the wood grain felt as if it were embedded in his skin, as if it had always been this way.
“Remember what you told me once?” he asked. “You said, ‘When you’re on the horns—on the horns of a dilemma, that is—find the bull’s-eye. Find it, and drive a stake through it.’”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Bull gave a defiant chuckle. But his eyes betrayed a sudden glint of terror.
“Bull, I can hurt you where you hurt most—”
“You’ll never destroy me, my boy!”
“I will destroy your art.”
“You wouldn’t dare—”
“Wouldn’t I?”
For a moment, neither one of them uttered a word.
Meanwhile, a shadow flickered next to the stone head, which loomed directly over Bull. Michael thought he saw someone—Ash—standing to its side, trying to dislodge it.
Michael locked eyes with her and in that moment, both of them knew what he would have to take over. He would be the one to avenge not only what had happened to her but also what had happened to the slain model.
“Bull, can you imagine Lace, the way I found her that night,” Michael asked, “her eyes open underwater, coming after you?”
Meanwhile, with a subtle gesture of his hand, he hinted to Ash to move over, find a safe spot, somewhere behind the stone shoulder.
She did. He was ready.
Slowly, Michael raised the old man’s stake and calculated his aim. The next few seconds were going to become forever chiseled into his memory.
A deafening shriek flew out of Bull’s throat.
“No! Not my art—”
Virtually Lace Page 12