“Is it on?” Savy called, still catching her breath.
“Yeah,” Clay shouted. And to his amazement, she opened the door again, separated the magnetic security strips, and tripped the alarm. The hundred-decibel bank-robber bells shrieked from every direction. Even Savy, who was expecting it, jumped madly as she slammed the door again.
Karney was off the deck in a flash, sprinting away on bone-thin legs, plowing straight through the rose bushes, indifferent to the havoc the tooth-like thorns had on his flesh. He gained the wall, leapt up to grab the top of it, and was gone a moment later. He doesn’t move like someone half-dead, Clay observed, and a moment later his eyes were drawn to the Generator’s loft, its window and skylight winking rapidly as Boyle flipped the lights on, off, on, off.
Clay hit the nearest lights himself and observed his guitar player’s ashen face; and he wanted to hold her, to comfort her and be comforted. “Let’s go back to being nobodies,” he told her.
“What?” she screamed back, and Clay heard that the full force of her lungs was restored—because at that moment, the alarm bells died. His father was hovering in half-buttoned pajamas at the panel, his fingers still stuffed in his ears. Behind him, Essie appeared in her ghostly nightgown, looking younger and more vibrant than ever.
“What the hell”—Peter’s eyes appraised their sweaty faces and disheveled clothes—“are you into now?”
“There was an intruder in the yard,” Clay told him. “The alarms weren’t set.”
“I armed them before bed. How did they get unset?”
“I haven’t even been in the house, so don’t look at me.” Clay lifted his hand and presented Essie, whose jaw clenched tellingly.
No matter, Peter didn’t even consider it. “Don’t start that again. In fact, why don’t you—”
“It was me,” Savy cut in. “Our band was meeting us here after the gig and I was afraid we’d trip the alarm hauling our gear in. Totally rude of me—I even forgot to ask Clay’s permission. I’m sorry. There were a couple of knuckleheads hanging out front and I should’ve known better.”
“Ahh. Do all your band-lings have our code, Clay?”
“She’s covering for him,” Essie said, no longer playing the worried step-mom. “There wasn’t anyone here. What are you up to?”
“No, I saw them too,” Peter told her. “I ran to the window as soon as the alarm went off. There was a… a shadow running through the roses.”
A shadow was one way of putting it. Still, Clay felt an incomparable sense of relief that his old man had seen something and admitted it. “He jumped the north wall. There could be others. We need to call security, have them check.”
To this, Clay would have expected Peter to answer in the negative, if for no other reason than it was his son’s idea. But: “Yeah,” his father said. “I think that’s a good idea.”
And behind him, Essie—transformed so quickly from savior to malefactor—gave Clay a wicked little sneer.
The armed response circled the property twice on foot and promised to patrol the cul-de-sac through the night. There was nothing else to be done, no way to convince Peter to toss Essie from the house; even suggesting as much would have gotten Clay evicted himself. Fortunately, Peter was a notoriously light sleeper who, once disturbed, could not return to sleep. An hour before dawn, he decided to head into the office. “You’re obsessed with that job, Petey,” Essie told him—and how could Peter not hear the hollow performance?—her concern as fake as her psychic abilities. “It’s going to kill you one day.”
She was smart enough to leave at the same time as the old man, however, and Clay and Savy departed minutes later, leaving the property abandoned but for the restless soul in the Generator. Clay drove the predawn streets, finding a street sweeper here, a jogger there, and as they drew closer to Savy’s neighborhood, hoodlums parting company or a prostitute walking home.
“I think we have to come to a grim reality,” Clay said stiffly. “The only way we can resist them is to put the band on hiatus. With Karney and the Demons out of commission, the Hailmaker will need to find the next big thing quickly, right? If we refuse to play, he’ll move on to some pop star.”
To this, Savy said nothing, didn’t even blink her eyes, and Clay feared she was either in shock or, worse, disagreeing with him. Finally, her chin rose and fell. “The price of fame is just too high.”
“I’ll look out for you, Sav. Monetarily speaking. I’ll get a real job, sell this Jeep, whatever it takes. Okay?”
Savy stared out the window. “I’m sorry I didn’t come clean about Bass.”
“You knew I’d be an asshole about it, and I didn’t disappoint.”
“I couldn’t stand him when we were in a band together. Now, things are different.”
“Lucky guy.”
“I doubt that.” Savy chewed her nails. “According to Mo, I’ve taken after our mother, not knowing how to treat the people who love me. I’m sorry if I’ve been that way with you.”
“You haven’t,” Clay told her.
They landed a parking spot in front of Savy’s building. The street was empty and the sky was going a particularly lustrous shade of orange. Birds sang sweetly in the trees. As they crossed the building’s interior court, Savy tucked her arm inside Clay’s and they walked like that, leaning into each other, to her apartment.
Her key had hardly slipped into the lock before the door flew back, and they found Mickey, looking sleep-deprived and miserable. “We were waiting up,” he explained.
Clay entered behind Savy and immediately caught the ire of her abuela’s bloodshot gaze. “Donde está Guillermo?” the woman demanded, in her bathrobe, rigid and alert on the couch. And though the rest was lost in translation, the clipped speech and admonishing tone was clear enough for a house pet to comprehend.
“We stuck him in a Lyft at eleven o’clock,” Savy replied, alarmed. “I tipped the driver extra to bring him straight home.”
“You let him go on his own?” Mickey said, and there was a parental anger in him. “You didn’t check his eyes?”
“It was dark in the club…” Savy replied, but her voice wavered. The facts were clear: Savy had been so caught up with her show, her handsome Fishman, with limo rides and record contracts and malevolent seduction, that Mo had slipped through her fingers.
Shit, Clay thought. I forgot all about him! The bathroom stall at the Viper. The sound of Mo’s voice, highly sedated. A memory so alive in his mind he could reach out and touch the stickered partition that had divided them. He might have helped Mo, talked him out of whatever he was doing—if it hadn’t been for a dead girl’s insistent hand.
“I’ll find him,” Savy promised, and like that, she was gone again, leaving Clay to face the four-eyed firing squad of her brother and grandmother.
“We will,” he echoed, and fled in Savy’s wake, their boots echoing through the court with its trash-filled swimming pool and slumbering homeless. He didn’t know where the rusted Marquez Datsun was until its engine squealed, turning over on the quiet street. “Savannah!” he called, but she was already tearing away.
Clay darted for the Jeep and got its wheels spinning in record time. Signs, parked cars, and palm trunks whipped by as he gathered speed. Several blocks down, Savy caught a red at the first major intersection; she slowed, but didn’t stop, hanging a left on Van Nuys Boulevard. As Clay reached the light, it turned green and he cut the wheel at top speed, closing the distance.
He tried her cell, but Savy either didn’t have her phone or was paying no attention to the rings. So they sped along in tandem, the dead streets beginning to come to life, early commuters honking as Savy blew another light, ripping through at seventy. If this kept up, a cop was bound to pull her over. Which wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe then Clay could convince her to let him drive. He didn’t care if she’d done it before and lived to tell the tale; he didn’t care if daylight was breaking—he couldn’t let her tour dealer’s dens and meth basements on her own. Who knew
what would be waiting? Thieves? Rapists? Davis Karney? Suddenly, Clay was certain there was a larger plot at work here, that Priest or the Hailmaker or whoever the fuck was after them at the moment, wanted to separate him from his guitar player. If he could only talk to her before she got one of them T-boned, she would see it as clearly as he did.
They were on the 101 South, racing along at eighty-plus miles an hour, Clay fearful her Datsun wouldn’t hold together at such speed, when he finally lost her. There was a caravan of delivery trucks taking up three lanes and by the time Clay weaved in and out of their diesel crawl, Savy’s taillights were out of sight.
He held out hope as far as Alvarado Street, with the downtown skyline hovering in his windshield, before he accepted she was gone.
He ended up on Mulholland Drive, on a turnout overlooking Studio City and the sprawling urban Valley that lay between him and the house he and Rocco Boyle called home. He checked his phone compulsively, but how many times could it disappoint him? His acoustic lay in the Jeep’s cargo space and Clay sat up on his hood, strumming, hoping the sounds he pulled from the strings would quell a little of the fear in his heart.
The sun lifted into another perfect California sky, but his guitar spoke only in minor chords—of rainy heartache and a thunderous mad desire to love someone who didn’t want to be loved. They rang down the hillside until they were silent. Rang down the hillside and were silent. “I lived a lie before I met you,” Clay sang, “I was blind, and I was numb too. But then my walls went crashing, when I saw your soul in passing. When everything I feel is not enough, I can’t seem to touch you close enough….”
Slowly the progressions got under his fingers, the jigsaw of separate parts coalesced into a coherent structure, and before long, there it was. The song he’d been trying to articulate for weeks, capturing what he felt for Savannah Marquez, was born on the morning airwaves. “There’s No End to This Wanting,” he called it, and his gut told him it was decent. Dare he say good? Undoubtedly the best song he’d written without Rocco Boyle looking over his shoulder. Too bad I won’t ever play it in front of people, he lamented.
As it turned out, though, Clay was wrong. He would play the song again, and in front of quite a lot of people. That night, in fact, he would be introducing it to the world.
24
HORROR BUSINESS
Songwriting had calmed him, distracted him, but it was only ointment to the sunburn, and soon Clay’s paranoia was itching him again. Savy hadn’t returned his calls, so Clay resorted to dialing the guys. Fiasco didn’t bother picking up, and Spider, half-asleep, seemed to take the panicked edge in Clay’s voice as additional evidence of his crack-up. “We’re meeting today at the hotel. You’ll see her there.” And Clay tried to verbalize his desperation—that Savy had gone looking for Mo in the seediest parts of town, had gone in alone—while skipping the bit about an extra-crispy rock star crawling from his pool. “Sucks,” Spider told him. “But this happens every few months with Mo. I love the guy, but he’s a hopeless junkhead.”
Clay drove aimlessly, down into canyons and through one Los Angeles neighborhood after another. He saw Savy standing at bus stops, Savy pumping gas, Mo jumping hurdles on a high-school track. Around mid-morning, he hit a Jack in the Box, but wasn’t able to swallow any of the grease. He needed someone to talk to, someone who’d listen to this whole spooky, perverted tale without judgment. And there was only one candidate that came to mind.
His next appointment with Dr. Alexander was scheduled for late that afternoon, but Clay phoned his office at the stroke of nine. He expected the answering service, but to his surprise Payton himself picked up. “Clay? Everything well?”
“Um, definitely not. There’s some stuff I haven’t been telling you. I think I’m ready to though. Could I come in earlier… like, asap?”
Payton was as casually astute as ever. “Sounds like you should. Come by at ten.”
Clay thanked him and was sitting in his waiting room twenty minutes early. The room was small and library-quiet and Clay felt as safe here as he did anywhere. Here, he wasn’t a budding musician, or a jilted lover, or someone hunted and haunted; here, he was just another client, with his choice of seats and a decent selection of magazines.
Tossing his feet on the coffee table, Clay skimmed two articles in Rolling Stone, and contemplated how much he could tell Payton before Payton called the men with butterfly nets. Ten o’clock had come and gone before he noticed the computer tablet at the far end of the coffee table. Open to the LA Times. He had never seen a tablet in Payton’s waiting room, but it was possible the day’s first appointment had forgotten it.
Hoping to find something on Karney’s disappearance (hadn’t anyone else seen a burned mummy in a hospital gown?), Clay changed seats for a better look. The tablet was open to a story titled missing girl found dead after week-long search. Clay saw the picture accompanying the article and his breath caught. His blood turned to sand in his veins.
It was her. The girl. The groupie. His succubus.
There was no flesh missing from her face, but Clay knew those eyes and that dental-perfect smile. She looked younger in the photo, her hair girlishly braided, and she was wearing a school uniform. Clay held the paper close…
Los Angeles—The five-day search for a missing Carlsbad teen has ended in tragedy. The body of Annie Strafford, 18, was found near a jogging path in Griffith Park this morning. Her family first reported her missing last Saturday after she failed to return home from a party. A suspect, 18-year-old Curtis Johnson of Oceanside, is already in custody.
Under questioning from Carlsbad detectives, Johnson confessed to bringing Strafford to his family’s home and eventually tying her to a bed and cutting her face. He has been charged with kidnapping and aggravated assault. Johnson and Strafford were both seniors at the prestigious Midvale Prep in Solana Beach and had been dating for over a year.
“[Johnson] was the nicest guy,” said Dana Gordon, a friend of Strafford’s and Johnson’s. “Annie liked him. But they didn’t always get along.”
Their relationship came to a head at an October 27th Halloween party they attended in Carlsbad. The two were seen dancing around midnight and disappeared soon after. According to Johnson, he brought Strafford to his home, since his parents were on vacation in Europe.
Clay scrolled hard, almost knocking the tablet off the table.
Johnson admitted that he and Strafford were both intoxicated. When Strafford refused to have intercourse with him, Johnson became violent. “The suspect confessed to dragging her to his bed and tying her arms to the posts,” Sgt. Rich Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Carlsbad police department, said on Wednesday. “He drew a knife and held it to her throat.” But Strafford wouldn’t stop kicking her legs and fighting back. “The victim still had her Halloween costume on,” Hernandez said. “This included a masquerade mask. [Johnson] was enraged by her struggling and he used the knife to carve around the mask.”
A short time later, Johnson fled the house. “In the morning he sobered and returned home,” Hernandez added. “Allegedly to bring [Strafford] to a hospital.”
But Strafford was not where he had left her. “Her bindings had been slashed,” Eric Brand, a lawyer retained by the Johnson family, said. “She was alive when he left, but wasn’t there when he returned. Mr. Johnson panicked, thinking she had wandered into the hills behind his home, and he began to look for her.”
The Strafford family have spent the last five days maintaining hope that Annie had escaped and was simply hiding out, in shock or too afraid of Johnson to contact authorities. Now they fear that Johnson hasn’t been as forthcoming as he let on. “Obviously there’s more going on than he claims,” Steven Strafford, the victim’s father, said in a press conference this morning. “Whether [Johnson] ended my daughter’s life that first night or came back to do it later, there’s little doubt he was responsible. What else could have happened?”
Annie Strafford was discovered by joggers at 6am on November 1
st. In addition to the wound on her face, her throat had been cut. LAPD investigators have yet to locate a murder weapon, and Brand has stated that his client is not responsible for the murder.
Clay stopped there. His stomach was in a knots and he decided that the moment those knots loosened he would vomit. Projectile vomit. There was a lot that bothered him about the article. Annie’s sexual virtue juxtaposed against the seductive vixen he’d encountered; Johnson’s insistence that he hadn’t killed her and Annie’s inexplicable escape from the ropes. He thought of the knife she’d pulled so quickly on Essie and was convinced it was the same one Johnson had used to disfigure Annie—as well as the one that had freed her from her bindings. The blade had been her defiler and her liberator.
Staring at the frozen image of Annie Strafford, Clay felt a deep sorrow for her. He imagined her strapped to that bed. A sound—late, late at night— across the house. Annie calling out, thankful, relieved. Until a dark figure arrived to stand over her.
The tablet clapped the table as Clay dropped it. He gained his feet, not knowing whether to run toward Payton’s office or out to his Jeep, only that he needed to get moving. And now.
As it was, Payton solved the dilemma for him. The office door drew open, and his familiar voice beckoned him inside.
Clay waited, expecting his nine o’clock to emerge, likely avoiding eye contact. But no one appeared and Payton called out again.
Entering, Clay saw the therapist at his desk, bare feet up, staring dreamily into his aquarium. “I thought you had someone in here.”
“They left before you arrived,” Payton told him.
“I’ve been out there for half an hour.”
FAREWELL GHOST Page 27