Grave of Angels

by Michael Prescott

  “Jeez, what’s your deal, lady? Seriously, what do you care?”

  “Just tell me how many.”

  Chelsea heaved a sigh. “Six, I guess. Maybe seven. Shit, maybe eight. I don’t exactly keep count. It’s not like I pay for ’em.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “They’re always on the house.”

  “Because the bartenders all love you so much.”

  “No.” Her face turned serious, and abruptly she looked younger, vulnerable. “Because I’m good for business, is all. They don’t love me.”

  Wednesday’s child is full of woe…

  Kate almost softened, until she thought of the girl whose stomach had been pumped in the ER. “A friend of yours nearly croaked two and a half hours ago, but I guess a little thing like that doesn’t stop the party express from rolling on.”

  “You think I don’t give a shit, right?”

  “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

  Chelsea hesitated, then chose defiance. “Nah. No reason.”

  Kate sighed. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  She led Chelsea to the sink. She wetted two paper towels and blotted up the spatter on Chelsea’s blouse.

  “I just saw your parents,” she said.

  “To tell them about Shauna?”

  So that was the girl’s name. “Exactly.”

  “I’ll bet they didn’t care.”

  You’d win that bet, Kate thought.

  “As long as the money keeps coming in,” Chelsea went on, “they’re not gonna lose any sleep. They don’t care about anybody, not even each other.”

  “They still live together, most of the time. They must feel something for each other.”

  “My dad feels something. He feels he’d be broke and homeless without my mom to sponge off of. He’s quite the bounder, my dad.”

  “Bounder?” Kate was amused.

  “I did a PR tour in the UK. They talk pretty cool over there.”

  “If all your dad wants is money, he could be bought off.”

  “That’s not all he wants.” Her eyes flashed. “The green-eyed temptress,” the tabloids called her. She’d recently signed a mascara endorsement. “There’s the other part, too.”

  “What other part?”

  “Being famous. Being a celebrity.” She spat out the word like poison. “That’s what they all want, right? That’s what everybody wants.”

  “Is it what you want?” Kate asked gently.

  “Oh, abso-fuckin’-lutely.” The twisted grin returned, mocking itself. “I’m living the fantasy.”

  She ran a hand through her ash-blonde hair, dyed two shades darker with sweat. Her bony frame trembled. She was a small girl, achingly thin, her natural curves erased by obsessive dieting. A starved waif.

  Kate moistened another towel and wiped the girl’s mouth. “If you talked to your mom, maybe you could convince her to get your dad out of the picture.”

  “I can’t talk to her.” The green-eyed temptress hawked up something shiny and sent it spinning down the drain with a jet of water from the tap. “For me to talk to her, she’d have to listen to me. Okay? She doesn’t listen. Nobody fucking listens.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Go play Dr. Phil with somebody else. I don’t need your pity.”

  “Then try not to be so pitiful,” Kate said sharply, losing patience.

  “Fuck you. Seriously. You need a hobby? Try shagging Grange.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “It’ll be like fucking a gorilla. Just use protection, ’kay? You don’t want that guy’s spawn growing in you. Shit, you’d be incubating the missing link, unless you got yourself scraped—”

  Kate slapped her.

  A light slap, delivered with the palm of her hand, sweeping right to left across Chelsea Brewer’s startled face.

  There was a moment of astonished silence. Then Chelsea reddened.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Stop swearing.”

  “You fucking hit me.”

  “I said stop swearing. Or I’ll do it again.”

  Chelsea opened her mouth, shut it. Regarded her with an abused animal’s wariness. “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Grange puts his life on the line for you. Don’t badmouth him.”

  “I didn’t know it was such a sensitive area.”

  “You need to learn some manners.”

  “Christ, you sound like my mom.”

  “Do I?”

  “Not really. She doesn’t care if I talk trash. I could fire you for hitting me.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Nah, I’ll let it slide this time.” Chelsea rubbed her cheek. “That hurt like hell.”

  “Good. So why aren’t you at the hospital with Shauna?”

  The girl blinked at the change of subject. “Because…because I don’t want to be.”

  “Why not?”

  “I figure I’ll get there soon enough.” She looked down, her voice lowered. “That’ll be me someday, in the ER. If I make it that far. Maybe I’ll just drop on the spot, game over.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe it’s, like, predestined or something. Predestination—that’s a religious thing, right?”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t believe in much of anything.” Chelsea leaned against the sink, the fall of her hair brushing her reflection in the mirror. “You do, I guess. All that Catholic stuff.”

  “Yes. All that Catholic stuff.”

  “The churches are pretty cool. When I was in Paris, I saw Notre Dame. That’s Catholic, right?”

  “Sure is.”

  “So what was it like—living in a convent or whatever?”

  “I lived in a duplex with seven other sisters. I spent most of my time on the street.”

  “Like a social worker?”

  “In a way.” If social workers performed last rites on gangbangers when they were shot down in the street. “Counseling homeless people, drug users, runaways.”

  “Turning them on to Jesus?” Chelsea asked skeptically.

  “Trying to, sometimes. Or just steering them in the direction of a halfway house.”

  “So how does a nun slash social worker end up running interference for celebrities?”

  Kate smiled. “By the grace of God, of course.”

  “Yeah? They say the devil’s in the details.”

  That was clever. Chelsea was smart, smarter than the roles she played. Smarter than the role she played in real life, every night, in dives like this.

  “There wasn’t any master plan,” Kate said. “It just worked out that way.”

  “So you buy into the whole program? God, heaven, angels, all that sh—that stuff?”

  “Sometimes I doubt,” she said carefully.

  “What do you do then?”

  “Pray.”

  “You could be wasting your time praying to something that’s not real.”

  “I could. It’s still better than sticking my head in a toilet every night.”

  “Hey”—that insouciant grin again—“don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  “I have tried it.”

  The girl tilted her head. “Yeah?”

  “We can talk about it sometime. Some of the choices I made.”

  “You mean, I can learn from your mistakes?”

  “Somebody ought to.”

  Chelsea considered it, twisting a blonde tress around two fingers. “I don’t know. You’re not turning me into any Jesus freak.”

  Kate smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  She thought she was done here, then remembered the man who’d been watching Chelsea. The spot where he’d been sitting was not only out of Grange’s sight line, but angled away from Chelsea as well. Possibly, he’d been afraid the girl would see him. She brought up the photo on her phone.

  “Do you know this man?”

  Chelsea glanced at the im
age, then looked harder, her face losing its color. “Where’d you take this?”

  “It’s not important. You do know him.”

  “I’ve seen him.” Her voice was suddenly throaty. “A long time ago. Back then, he had hair.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “His name is Swann. With two n’s. I don’t know his first name.”

  “When was this?”

  “When I was with my dad—you know, when I left home.”

  At age eleven Chelsea had vanished from her mother’s house and hitched her way to Colorado Springs, where her father had been living in a trailer. She spent six months there while her parents wrangled listlessly over custody, neither of them too keen on the idea. A court sent Chelsea back to Mama, and soon afterward her acting career took off.

  “What was Swann doing with your father?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It’s not like we ever talked about it. But I can guess. My dad never got into any, you know, legitimate business.”

  “How often did this man come by?”

  “Three or four times. Always at night. I never really met him. My dad would push me out of the trailer before he showed up. I was supposed to go over to the neighbors’. But usually I’d hang around, wait for Swann to show. Sometimes I’d look in through a window…”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “They were planning something, I think. I don’t know what.”

  “I’m surprised you remember Swann after all this time.”

  “He’s not somebody you forget. He scared me. Has he hooked up with my dad again?”

  “It’s nothing for you to worry about. You’re cleaned up now. Get back on the dance floor. Only, cool it with the Cuba libres, okay?”

  Chelsea stayed where she was. “Why’d you slap me, really?”

  “I told you.”

  “I trash-talked Grange. That’s what you told me. But I don’t think so. Something else I said—it got to you.”

  “Nothing gets to me,” Kate said, but she didn’t meet the girl’s eyes.

  SKIP Slater, founder and chief executive officer of Celebrity Whack-A-Mole, had come home early with the blonde from the escort service. Now she was dozing on his pillow, and he was restless. He threw on a robe and padded down the hall to the computer room.

  Time to look in on the action. There was always action, 24/7, on CWAM.

  He’d dreamed up the idea as a sophomore at Tulane, during a late-night drunken bull session in which it was collectively agreed that the Internet had rendered good taste obsolete. A competition ensued to name the crassest possible web ventures. Skip’s contribution: a site where people could bet on which celebrity would be next to drop dead.

  Luckily, he had the skills necessary to translate inspiration into reality. The enterprise had started small, a sideline he’d pursued while earning a degree in computer science. In the four years since his graduation, the site had taken off. It had been profiled disapprovingly in People, disparaged on Access Hollywood, panned by Page Six. Some of the bluenoses worried that the game cheapened human life, to which Skip replied that the payoffs on his leading contestants were anything but cheap. Other naysayers predicted that some nutball would try to rub out a celeb and score a big prize. Skip pointed to a clause in the users’ agreement stating that no money would be paid to anyone convicted of a crime in connection with the deceased.

  Truth was, the negative reviews didn’t matter. Any PR was good PR. Skip knew that, and the two-faced media vultures knew it, too.

  The setup was simple. CWAM tracked nearly a thousand international celebrities. To play, a client predicted which one would kick off next. It was like a horse race, with the various celebrities standing in for the nags on the track. The difference was that the stars, unlike the horses, weren’t actually trying to cross the finish line.

  Odds were adjusted continually in accord with the betting action. If a star’s demise was publicly anticipated, the bets on that person would rise and the odds would drop until the payout was low. On the other hand, sudden, unexpected fatalities could generate a handsome payoff. A lucky wagerer could strike it rich by backing a long shot. While everyone was betting on a B movie Methuselah to be the next DOA, some twentysomething sitcom star could sneak under the wire. Unpredictability made the game fun.

  Skip entered the glorified crawl space optimistically dubbed a second bedroom by the Realtor who’d sold him this town house. The entire condo took up only eight hundred square feet. Night and day he heard the clack-clack-clack of footsteps from his upstairs neighbor who wore spiked heels; what made it worse, his neighbor was a guy.

  Still, he had a West Hollywood address. It beat living in some shit hole in the Valley.

  He squeezed behind his laptop, logged on to the site, and checked the latest updates. Slow day. No deaths. No payouts. Some betting action on a geezer who’d showed up on the news, looking frail while he received his star on the Walk of Fame. He looked about ready to pop. But you could never tell. He might hang on for another two decades. No one knew who was next in line.

  The escort girl came shuffling into the room. What was her name? Elke or Ellie? She padded around, poking at his potted plants, all of which were artificial because he was incapable of maintaining any life-form other than himself.

  “Wow,” Elke or Ellie said, “you’ve got a ton of books.”

  “I like to read.”

  “Who’s Hermann Hesse?”

  “A deep thinker.” He saw her reach for the book. “Don’t touch that.”

  “I was gonna look at it.”

  “Don’t. It’s a first edition. Hey, you like TV? Watch TV.” He gestured in the direction of his high-def plasma Toshiba.

  She found the remote and started flipping through the two hundred channels on his satellite system. That shut her up.

  An IM alert chimed. BlitzCraig, his sysop in Sandpoint, Idaho, had a question.

  U C the #s on Chelsea Brewer?

  Skip frowned. Chelsea Brewer. Though not at the top of the list, she was one of their more interesting commodities. Despite her youth, the little popwreck could conceivably go horizontal at any time. She had convictions for hit-and-run, driving with a suspended license, and something called gross vehicular mischief, which involved driving her Porsche onto the Venice Beach promenade in pursuit of a paparazzo. She was, as the tabloids liked to say, “trashtacular.” She lived the lifestyle of the rich and scabrous.

  He called up her screen and checked the numbers. There were currently 246 wagers that Chelsea would be the next celebrity to wear a body bag. The betting pool was $22,395. It was one way to measure the value of a life.

  He scanned the columns of figures and saw what was worrying BlitzCraig. The average bet was fifty dollars. The largest was ten thousand, and it had been placed fifteen minutes ago by a player with the screen name Loki.

  Loki. Norse trickster god. Figure of darkness and treachery.

  Ten Gs was a shitload of money to plunk down on any celeb, especially one as young as Chelsea Brewer, even if she was a suicidal nutjob.

  Skip felt an icicle prick of fear. I C it, he IM’d BlitzCraig. Expln?

  IDK. News story?

  That was what Skip was thinking. It was his nightmare, the doomsday scenario.

  He IM’d his news monitors. CWAM retained three staff members whose only job was to monitor news updates and the nattering of the blogarazzi. Two of them were on duty at any given time. He could never remember which two.

  While waiting for a response, he did some quick math. The odds on Chelsea were currently two hundred to one. If Loki won his wager, he would cash out two million dollars and bust the house.

  “Shit,” he muttered. The payout on this pop tart would sink him.

  “Everything okay?” Elke or Ellie asked from her perch in front of the TV.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “There’s nothing good on the tube.”

  “Play a video, then.”

  His two news mon
itors responded to his query. No reports on Chelsea Brewer. Nothing on Google News. Nothing on TMZ. Nothing on Drudge. Nothing anywhere. Which only meant that whatever Loki knew hadn’t gone public yet.

  Loki could be anybody. A paramedic, a nurse in an ER, some lucky asshole who happened to be at the scene of an accident.

  Or a paparazzo. That was Skip’s biggest fear. Fucking paps roamed the streets day and night like dog packs. They would be in the lead position to catch a breaking tragedy. If CWAM had been around when Princess Di took a header into that underpass, a fast-thinking pap could have laid down a heavy bet and bankrupted him.

  Skip’s financial situation was a delicate balancing act not unlike a house of cards. Now the cards might be about to come tumbling down.

  What if he didn’t pay? It wasn’t like Loki could sue him. CWAM was incorporated outside US jurisdiction. He could brazen it out, refuse to honor the transaction. The strategy was problematic. For one thing, Loki might come after him with something more potent than a lawsuit. A sawed-off shotgun, say. Reneging on a seven-figure obligation was the kind of thing that got a person’s kneecaps shot off, or worse. Moreover, once word got out that CWAM welshed on a bet, site traffic would collapse. No more eyeballs. No more mind share. No more anything.

  He figured he could scrounge together the cash if he liquidated his portfolio and drained CWAM’s cash reserves, but after the payout, CWAM would be flat busted. There would be no money to pay his tech guys or even to cover his server fees. Without outside financing, he wouldn’t be able to keep the site going. And nobody with investment capital would come within five hundred yards of him once CWAM foundered.

  Before now, he’d never wanted investors. He’d hoped to keep the operation in-house. All the startup money had been his own, courtesy of an inheritance from Grandma. His parents had begged him to do the sensible thing and invest the seventy-five thousand in a nice mutual fund, but he’d gone for the big score. His gamble had paid off. He wasn’t super-rich, but he was comfortable, the site was growing, and lately he’d contemplated branching out into more mainstream web enterprises. It only took one successful site to set the table for a big-time IPO, and he had some ideas…

  Correction. He’d had. Past tense. Now he had bubkes. He was screwed, blued, and tattooed—if Chelsea Brewer was the next celebrity to die.