After a day of surprises, Clay was not the least surprised to find The Knickerbocker looming in the windshield. Savy snuck them in through a back entrance and they rode the service elevator to the 10th Floor. There, they passed along a corridor of open doorways, where old people sat watching TV or playing chess or muttering at ghosts Clay could not hear. “I’m not supposed to have a skeleton key,” Savy whispered. “But I need painkillers sometimes to help with Mo’s withdrawal, so Spider miscounts the inventory a little.”
At the very end of the mothball-reeking passage was a padlocked door, which Savy swiftly violated, stepping into a long, narrow closet filled with shelves and shelves of pills, medical kits, defibillators, creams, laxatives, thermometers, and plenty of things that Clay didn’t want to know about. In the back, among the old wheelchairs and blood-pressure machines, was a large oxygen tank on a handcart. Savy turned a valve and the tank produced a sudden gaseous whine. “Help me with this beast.”
“Where are we taking it?”
“To dive on the reef, Cousteau. Come on, put your back into it.”
Clay got the tank angled and the wheels moving. “You’re high, aren’t you?”
“Not high, man. Poisoned.”
They mouse-squeaked the tank down another hall and arrived at Room 1034, which was empty except for a few Spartan arrangements—a double bed with a bare mattress, an old scratched bureau, and a small window with a view of the fire escape and the Capitol Records Building. “The woman who lived here,” Savy explained, “died of an embolism four months ago. No surviving family. Guess who got to clean the room out? It breaks my heart every time. You wouldn’t believe the things people leave behind. The stories that get forgotten.”
They positioned the tank on the side of the bed, and Savy tore one of the new pillows from its plastic, and flopped onto the mattress. “Don’t worry,” she said, patting the bed beside her, “it’s new too.”
Clay wrenched off his charred Docs, never wanting to put them on again. Part of him still doubted they’d escaped Karney’s house of horrors; none of the old people had turned from their book reading and idle staring when the frizzy-haired girl and half-naked dirtball passed their doorways. What if it was because they hadn’t seen anything? What if he and Savy were ghosts now, as bodiless and lost as Rocco and Deidre? Marilyn and DiMaggio?
“Can’t be dead,” Clay decided, flopping down, “hurts too much.”
“What?”
Clay shrugged, feeling like a beached fish, his skin tingling with something like sunburn. “I was thinking how maybe we died in that blaze and our souls are wandering free of our bodies.”
“Please. If I had to be anchored to a place, it wouldn’t be here.” Savy loosened a tube on the side of the tank and clapped the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth; she gave the valve a hard turn and began breathing with the full expanse of her lungs. The tank responded with its gaseous hiss; and each inhalation seemed to restore a year or two of life back into her. Savy was tired, grimy, spent, but in short time she was also looking like herself again. “Pure oxygen,” she gasped. “Like we’d have gotten at Cedars or any ER. Suck it.”
A few breaths and the rotting organ of Clay’s brain began to ripen afresh. The choked traffic on the freeways of his veins and arteries loosened and his blood circulated freely. Clay breathed and breathed and breathed until his head spun and his body floated four inches off the mattress. Then he simply smiled and Savy grinned back.
For an hour, they stared at the ceiling, counting cracks in the plaster and passing the mask back and forth like some geriatric joint—all the while hearing speeding sirens and whirling chopper rotors racing for the Hills. “What was it?” Savy asked inevitably. “The thing that Rocco called The Hailmaker and Davis called The Man?”
“Oh, him,” Clay said, and though he tried to lather his words in gravitas, they still emerged happy and high. “I met him once before. He the devil.”
Savy paused, pulling a leaf from her hair. “As in the red-winged beastie whispering on your shoulder? The proprietor of Hell? The fiend with a thousand faces?”
“As in, the Queen Bitch. I guess he/she has a hoof-hold in the music industry?”
“Not surprising. Although”—and now Savy’s voice dropped and she sounded as serious as she had all day—“do you really think Rocket Throne existed because of some deal Rocco made with that thing?”
Clay admitted he didn’t know. Who but Boyle could say? And would he ever say? Clearly the idea troubled Savy. They were quiet a moment before she asked Clay if he believed in God.
“I guess. In the abstract.” Clay sucked hard on the mask. “You can’t have the yin without the yang, right?”
“Where was God today?”
“Well. We’re alive. Maybe He, or She, was in that platinum record that broke the window, or the canyon bushes that broke our fall. She—or He—is certainly in this oxygen mask right now. Hoo-ahh!”
Savy frowned and sat up. “That’s a cop out, Clay. Where was God in that video we watched? Rocco had rejected the Hailmaker, preached hope and redemption, but no angel came down with a thunderbolt. And say what you want, but our escape today? Pure dumb luck. I’m always looking for God around this place, and all I see is sagging flesh that’s almost out of time.” A spasm of coughs hit her and Savy took possession of the mask again. “I’m so sick of people saying God’s in the little things. ’cause, guess what? His adversary is in the big things. The other night a kid Mickey’s age got shot, two blocks from my apartment. Where was God? Where the hell was He when your mother fell?”
“Hey, easy.”
Savy laid back down. “Sorry.”
“What’s your point anyway?”
“I don’t know. Just that it seems like evil is a given in this world, while good is something you have to look for under rocks. I guess what I’m saying is we need to stick together. Look out for each other.”
Savy handed the mask back and curled herself in a ball, facing away from Clay. In time, she fell into a deep, oxygenated sleep, snoring gently on the pillow beside him.
Watching her respiration, Clay thought about their future. How great it was to have any kind of future after tasting death. And yet, how naïve they had been. So focused on the seductive pull of fame, they had never thought to question who was pulling on the other end.
But was anything worth suffering a fate like Davis Karney’s?
Rocco Boyle: Had his neck broken by someone who wanted to steal his life. Davis Karney: Lost his mind and lit himself on fire, thinking others were there to do the same.
Clay Harper?
Lying in the room of a dead woman, beside a living, breathing woman, Clay contemplated if going to college and working some soul-sapping day job was really so bad.
Not if it meant coming home to lie next to Savy Marquez every night. Even if they never played another big show, wasn’t a safe, anonymous life—with jam sessions and occasional coffeehouse gigs, doing covers of “One Headlight” at the county fair while children danced off-time in front of the stage—still a life worth living?
Of course it was.
People did it all the time.
Eventually the sirens ran their course, and the city grew intensely quiet. Clay fell into an uneasy sleep where dreams and reality meshed inseparably. One moment he was standing at the window, staring down on the street below the hotel, the next he was caught again in the death trap of the mansion, watching Kiss Kiss’s sizzling mouth move at the bottom of the stairs. Come here, she whispered to him. Closer. Please. I need you.
His eyes snapped open and Savannah was in his arms. She was kissing him and half her clothes were gone. The scent of kerosene and woodsmoke hung between them. Their movements were rough, desperate. Maybe it was what they’d endured, escaping death together. Maybe it was something that had been happening all along. Or maybe it was only lust, magnetic forces drawn spontaneously together. But Savy’s sudden proximity filled his senses, the warmth of her, her smoky hair, the
contour of her body, flesh and bone grinding into him. And her breath, hot CPR in his mouth. Kissing him. Slow, hard.
Clay’s hands rose to cup her breasts through her bra.
This wasn’t happening.
This was happening.
Savy fought with his jeans until they dipped below his knees. She slipped out of her bra and, in the fading light of the window, her breasts were neither big nor small, but proportional to her body, one slightly larger than the other, malleable to his touch, her brown nipples long as he rubbed them, building a slow friction between his fingers.
She explored with her tongue—neck, chest, kissing the hairs on his stomach. Her grip was firm as she pumped him up and down, as she yanked his boxers away and lowered herself between his knees and brought his cock to her lips.
Her tongue flicked rapidly at his tip as she took him into her mouth. Clay’s groin tightened, threatened immediate release, and he fumbled for her, gripping her damp underarms, hating to make her stop. She gave him a pointed look and the bed groaned as she lay back. And her eyes slipped shut as he drew her panties down her legs and free, the cotton soft and weightless in his fingers.
Naked. They were naked against each other, their skin rubbing, feverishly hot. Even her arms were bare, sans bracelets, the little hairs on her forearm rising to meet his own. And Clay’s mind raced—not happening, is happening!—as he witnessed the thatch of hair between her legs, as he licked a hot trail from her belly to that thatch. “Do it,” she cooed, her hands scrambling.
And Clay lost himself. The folded flesh was wet and parted slowly for his finger. His movements were mechanical at first, but he found his rhythm. Savy purred from the back of her throat, as if she was an instrument he was playing with his mouth and hands, the way she’d played him with her mouth and hands. She rocked against his motion, grabbed him by the back of the hair, guided him lower, filling his nostrils with her scent. Clay kissed the inside of her thighs, licked the button of flesh over her opening, and Savy squirmed and Savy cried out. “Like that. Oh! Faster. Faster!”
His fingers made tiny lapping sounds each time he slipped in and out of her. Her writhing body was beautiful, hands clutching the bare mattress, spine arching,. And most enticing, the music of her throat, moaning as the feeling took possession of her, the feeling he had created in her. So good, so hot!
Then Savy was rolling to her stomach.
Clay massaged her thighs, pressed his fingers against the firm muscles of her ass. There was no blue tigress on either buttock; she’d never been wildcatted by a tattoo machine or fondled by a drunken drummer. But Clay was beyond jealousy anyway, beyond fire and smoke, beyond anything but living, fiercely, carnally, in the moment. To go from near death to sex with the girl of his dreams made firework explosions all over his nerve endings; it lit up his spirit—essence? soul? whatever it is we really are at our core—like a giant cowboy on the Vegas Strip.
He fumbled at first, inexperienced as he was. Though it wasn’t rocket science; it wasn’t even riding a bike; and Man had been figuring it out since his earliest days in the primordial muck. Savy helped him, guided him. He entered her slow. Melted into her, inch by inch. And she gasped, her mouth going slack as he thrust deep. And the bed frame groaned with their movements. And if there were voyeurs in the Capitol Records Building—and if this wasn’t just a very amazing dream—he and Savy were giving them quite a show. With luck, they would end up on the internet. “Oh, God, Sav,” he panted.
“Don’t come yet. Don’t you dare.”
But that feeling of build-and-release was on him. Too good. Too quick. He grit his teeth. Think of something else. Anything!
His mind conjured fat women. It contemplated maggots in curdled milk. And it found the devil’s long white fingers, fondling him under the door. Only not his ankle this time. No, now those terrible fingers were tickling at his balls. And Clay gasped deep in horror. His thrusts slowed. His libido waned. He withdrew himself to the foreskin and got back under control.
Then, with a backward thrust of her hips, Savy took him inside again, consumed him entirely. He plunged, hard and slow, her tight ass slapping his stomach, the headboard knocking, the both of them thrashing and gasping.
So good, so good. It couldn’t really be happening. Except nothing had ever felt like it was happening more. Clay never wanted to wake.
But when he could no longer restrain himself, he groaned and his thrusting intensified and Savy urged him on. He clung to her hips as the sensation rose. As his groin tightened and his climax surged up from the vas deferens depths. And he floated there a moment, at the pinnacle, all his senses wide open, hanging over a massive rollercoaster drop, over the whole fucking world.
And they’d thrown caution to the wind, or at least Clay had, because in the next instant he was coming inside her, into that velvety warmth. He bucked and rode the spasms, writhed against the jettisons of semen, and Sav, Savy, Saaaavy! buried her mouth into the pillow to mute her wanton scream.
So good. So hot. So fleeting.
Because even at the height of his pleasure, even as this lustful eruption delivered rapture in its purest form, even then, Clay understood that nothing this good could possibly last.
When he woke, day was gone from the window and the oxygen tank was gone from the room. Savy too. In a daze, Clay regarded the tattered jeans he was wearing. No evidence they’d ever been off. Though his boxers felt cool and sticky, forcing the conclusion that something—flesh-and-blood girl or vivid wet dream—had excited him enough to ejaculate.
No evidence that Savy had ever been in the room with him either. The pile of silver and black-beaded and onyx tiger-eyed bracelets that had been on the nightstand was gone. Only a black Gaslight Anthem hoodie that he’d never seen her wear remained, hung from the bedpost.
Showering in the adjoining bathroom, Clay threw his smoky clothes back on (minus the creamed underwear), along with the hoodie, which was two sizes too small, but better than wandering around shirtless in public. He descended to street level, discovering an empty space where his Jeep should have been—and an empty pocket where his keys should have been.
He called Savy twice, leaving voicemails.
In The Knickerbocker lobby, Spider was manning the desk. His eyebrows drew up at the sight of Clay and his exposed belly under the hoodie. “You see Sav?” Clay asked.
The drummer shook his head. “She took the day off to get ready for the gig. Were we supposed to meet here?”
“I thought so.”
After a trek down to a thrift store on Sunset for a pair of Sketchers and a shirt that fit (property of the department of redundancy department property, it said), Clay lingered in the hotel lobby until Spider finished his shift. By then, they had summoned Fiasco Joe, who arrived with BadVan and a black Rickenbacker 330, courtesy of Dooley’s Den, for Clay.
“Hey!” Spider said, scrolling through his phone. “You guys hear about Davis Karney?”
“Something about a fire?” Clay delivered this as casually as he could.
“His entire mansion burned to the ground. Possible arson.”
“Shit. He’s dead?” Fiasco said.
rip rocco and deidre, the message at their grave had read. your murderer will get theirs.
“No,” Spider told them, to Clay’s surprise. “His girlfriend is, but they found Karney in the rubble and rushed him to Cedars. He’s in critical condition.”
“Oh, fuck!” Clay shouted. And every eye in the lobby was on him.
Clay had been making excuses for Savy ever since. She hadn’t stolen his Jeep, but “borrowed it” to check in on her brothers. She was going home to grab a guitar cord she’d forgotten. She was going to meet them at the Echoplex in time for sound check. Definitely by sound check.
Except sound check was over and done and the opening band, Dude Incredible, had taken the stage. Spider called The Knickerbocker, Dooley’s Den, friends of Savy’s that Clay had never met, and eventually succeeded in getting Mo on the line. Mo,
who confessed to having no idea where she was; she hadn’t come home at all last night. “Okay, what the fuck is going on?” Fiasco demanded.
Clay could only shrug. “She should’ve been here by now.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” Fiasco leaned in, close enough for Clay to sniff the Pink’s nacho-cheese chili dog he’d eaten on the way over. “Why are you covering for her?”
Clay opened his mouth, ready to play the ongoing fool, the detained mob witness (dunno, my memory ain’t so good), but at that moment the backstage door burst open and they spun to find Cameron Moreno and the other Physical Jerks entering the club. “They came early,” Spider realized. “To see us.”
Fiasco’s shoulders slumped. “And they’re going to realize pretty quick that we’re one hot guitarist short of an eye-fuck.”
But they’d hardly completed the go-around of fist-bumps and bro-hugs before the door flew open again and Savy sauntered in with her guitar. Fiasco ran to her, meaning to curse her off, but Savy elbowed him aside. She beelined for Clay, grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him into the backstage bathroom—slamming the door on Fiasco’s incredulous pursuit.
“Where were you?” Clay said. “I was worried sick.”
“I needed time to think.” Savy shut her eyes. “Now I need a second to focus. So help me, okay?” She was shivering like she’d come in from some terrible storm. Her hair still held the intense tang of smoke. She opened her eyes and looked directly at him.
“Are we never going to tell anyone?” she said.
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