The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Horus' security force was stationed discreetly at the stage doors. They were joined into one mind by anten-naed headsets. They wore bulky, zippered windbreakers and packed slim attache cases that concealed all manner of brutal retaliatory capabilities. Sertha assumed these guards-three men and two women, not counting

  Horus-were the source of Stannard's newfound ease. She was only partially correct.

  Horus stood in the shadows like a dream idol from Stannard's subconscious, arms folded, face impassive, his golden earrings winking brightly. Sertha looked from him to Cannibal Rex and back, thinking of dark and light chess pieces of equal value.

  Stannard knew his image was a lie. The macho posturing, the badder-than-thou stance, were mostly the product of his TV and comic-book fantasies. He,had pumped up his body (artificially, so chided Horus), he'd become proficient in the use of weapons. His persona scared people enough to make him interesting and intimidated dealmakers enough to insure him a hefty income. But it was all on the order of the man who fanatically amasses a vast library without ever stopping to read the books. The collection implies knowledge, wisdom, worldliness. And if people thought you were knowledgeable, and worldly wise, you really didn't have to be because they deferred to you automatically. It reminded Stannard of the way clerks behaved in the face of presumed wealth.

  The headache was making the hard comma of scar tissue bisecting his right eyebrow pulse. He wiped sweat from his face and felt the tough little bump there. His mark.

  The stage was so hot that sweat generated all along his forearm, where it was in contact with Sertha's thigh. He released her. She was bearing up well in skintight white jeans and an oversized, sleeveless designer T-shirt with hand-painted balloons all over the front. Endless fashion shoots had inured her to the heat of klieg lights. Her face was perfect, like an antiperspirant ad.

  Rock'n'roll was Stannard's life. And rock'n'roll insisted he do something besides dent his buns, waiting for an axe to drop and split his head. If his life were headed toward some kind of personal apocalypse, then rock'n'roll and the persona that he had lived for so long demanded that he be the one to initiate the final onslaught.

  There was an idea there. Part of his brain, the part that recognized hope, came to full attention.

  Rolling over for an oncoming Fury like this Lucas Ellington guy was no answer. Depending on the real world to save his ass was no answer. Stannard had to take everything up he feared in two fists and choke it until somebody won.

  He looked at Cannibal Rex, frozen in position, guitar jutting. What if he was to suddenly attack the camera filming the video footage? Just swing his guitar and smash dead on into that fucker? It'd cost a fortune. Everybody'd get supremely pissed. Violence-wham!

  What if that violence could be interpolated into the video? The video could end as the guitar smashes the camera and blacks out the frame. Chop the music off; no fades, no lead-outs, just click and gone. Play it straight for half the running time, then the band goes berserk. Have cameras whirling around to catch the action as it happens. See the props and backdrops suddenly exposed, camera crews panicking, stagehands dropping their styrofoam coffee cups. Bash-a camera in the middle distance bites the dust. And the song grinds on, losing an instrument at a time as more band members fly into the fray, gleefully wiping out everything.

  Stannard abruptly realized how the video should end. The camera-the final, surviving camera-pushes in on his face. Dark, manic, threatening. Cannibal Rex lurks to the rear. Stannard grabs Cannibal's guitar and mouths the final line of the song.

  "C'mon, bad man-take me down if you can."

  Then the camera gets knocked cold.

  It was a modification of the song's final line, which spoke of bad girls, not bad men. But Stannard had the clout to get away with this one-time editorial change.

  Hell, Circus magazine would devote a column to speculating on the secret hidden meaning. To the Bible humpers, "bad man" could only be the Big Red Guy, and that meant even more press.

  A grin cracked across his bored expression. Yeah, this could stir up a lot of rock'n'roll trouble. He loved it. The specter of Lucas Ellington had stolen his sleep, made him iffy in the sack, put hipi on the instant defensive. The solution was to call him out, on his own terms, and win. No cops. No headlines. To Stannard, the answer was to live his own myth at last and send out a message that only Lucas Ellington would understand instantly.

  fc'mon, bad man-take me down if you can

  The Sweetouchnee tea hit him like pure crank, kicking his metabolism into overdrive.

  "Hey, Logan! Get your massively artistic ass over here! I've got an idea that'll save this dead meat!"

  Logan McCabe squared off his baseball cap and ambled over. Standing in the wrecked schoolroom set, Cannibal Rex smiled as if he knew telepathically what was about to happen.

  15

  SARA WINDSOR DID NOT WANT to redden her eyes, so she rubbed them with the backs of her knuckles, gently, easily. Her day's workload had implanted weariness into her bones, but her brain was starkly awake, defying the fatigue. Her lower lip had developed a small chapped patch; her tongue refused to leave it be. She would worry it until it dissolved away and things were normal again.

  Apt personality exterrialization, she thought. Her brain was chasing after Lucas Ellington. It did not want to take a break or defer work until tomorrow.

  Her favorite chair was a broad, low-slung, handcrafted recliner with wide, flat arms. When she had selected it at Furniture Barn, she'd known those wide arms would be perpetually piled with her take-home work. Everything, even the chair, related to her job. She was either terribly efficient… or the work had invaded every aspect of her life, even her love life, or her choice-of furniture, or her favorite television programs.

  Perched on the chair arms were two ungainly stacks of file folders, their machine-cut manila edges spiraled out of true by a random bump. Closer to the edge were several freebie notepads, the kind you pick up at xerography shops as a customer perk. They were covered with vagrant scribbles: Laundry Thurs. or else! Or else she'd have not a stitch of underwear pleasant to the nose. Call Mom. For the fourth time that month. The more she spoke to her parents, the less they talked about. She had begun to wish they did not speak at all, so that their relationship might turn around and improve. PHONE BILL-by 27th. Which bill the goddamned "diversified" phone companies, a system once the best in the world, were preparing to double, or triple, or tack on a surcharge, or some other surprise. Sheffield: Mamie-Ghost & Mrs. Muir. Work. Again.

  Daniel Sheffield preferred hearing cassettes of Bernard Herrmann movie sound track music during analysis. It helped him concentrate. Lucas had been into music, too, but his method of focusing his thoughts when talking to Sara had been to stare at a candle flame until he achieved an almost meditative calm.

  Enough stalling, she thought. Let's do it.

  Several pens maintained precarious positions on the backward-slanted arms of the chair, listing against their pocket clips to keep from rolling off into oblivion. The purple one refused to write, she knew; it had given up two days ago. At the very brink of the left arm, just shy of the edge, she parked her steaming mug of black Laichee tea. The dripping metal tea ball was fished out and left to cool on a folded paper towel, its duty done. She balanced a yellow legal pad against the bare knee that poked from her bathrobe, flipped to a clean sheet, and began to write.

  GUNTHER LUBIN-roadie for J. Knox-knocked cold V2 hour prior to Knox killing-found I hr. after.

  The San Francisco police still suspected Gunther Lubin of some culpability in Jackson Knox's murder, but they knew they had nothing concrete on him. Doctors had examined Lubin and decided that he had most likely been in dreamland at the moment Knox died. They'd probably kept a leash on Lubin and grilled the poor bastard mercilessly following the murder of Brion Hardin in Denver. If they had been able to add one plus one.

  CRYSTAL DiPRIMO-(sp?)-Brion Hardin's groupie? Girlfriend? Daughter?-Asleep during Hardin murde
r and/or under from dope. No alibi. Time factor?

  It had taken the staff of the Denver Hilton nearly twenty hours to trip over Brion Hardin's stiff, cold corpse in room 704. When they did, Crystal DiPrimo was still snoring in the keyboardist's room, sleeping off a load of Quaaludes and red wine. The police had awakened her, and she had not been polite. Even drugged, she might have been capable of knifing her paramour… if she could have overpowered a man nearly a foot taller and ninety pounds heavier; if she could have wielded a heavy blade like a trained marine; if Hardin had been already incapacitated. That last was mostly fantasy, since the only thing found polluting Hardin's metabolism was a couple of bottles of dark Heineken. The Hilton desk clerks recalled exactly zero about a man named Calvin Westbrook, the renter of the murder room. The rock and roll magazines and tabloids had not been charitable about the killings. All possible angles on intergroup hostilities had been enthusiastically milked. Lurid color shots of Jackson Knox's mangled body were run alongside newspaper photos of the Room 704 bloodbath, and it was immediately rumored that Hardin had threatened to quit Electroshock in midtour in order to form a new band with Knox, a band that would violate a number of contracts and rouse the ire of a lot of record company execs. It was further rumored that certain members of Electroshock did not appreciate certain other members sleeping with certain of the group's concubines and whores.

  Speculation flooded in and engulfed the event. Media waves would evenly fill any gap the killer-or killers-had left behind.

  One sobering trivium had floated to the surface in a Nude Thymes editorial. Clapper Boyette, resident cynic, writing in his popular Slings and Arrows column, had spelled it out.

  First Knox, then Hardin. Assess this. Knox was just beginning to blossom as a soloist-BFD-and Hardin's band was creeping up on the make-or-break third-album stage. No great loss either way, but a tragedy considering that more Whip Hand fallout still lives in a band called 'Gasm. It's a tragedy that 'Gasm wasn't wiped out instead, removing a metalhead buboe from the butt of rock and roll. Too bad. Oh, well. We can hope, can't we?

  The hot tea stung Sara's raw lip. She licked it absently.

  KNOX-land mine.

  HARDIN-military knife.

  She underscored military. The coroner in Denver had specified a "long, broad blade" and put forth an educated guess that the murder weapon had been a marine corps Bowie knife. That much had made the papers.

  That afternoon, in a Dos Piedras hunting and fishing shop, Sara had found such a knife. Seeing it, she could not believe such things actually existed. The thing the shop's proprietor had dragged out of the display case looked like an enormous parody of a knife. She'd joked about it resembling a prop from a mad slasher movie. Doubtless anxious to assist this attractive lady and keep her in his store for a few moments more, the counter man had trotted out several catalogs and reference books from his stock room for her edification. In a glossy, oversized tome titled Military Hardware of the US from WWII to Indochina, Sara had gotten her first look at an antipersonnel mine.

  LUCAS. Underlined three, now four times on the pad.

  He was capable of utilizing such lethal-looking stuff, she was certain. That led naturally to that trusty cop show standard, motive.

  The question marks were beginning to clog up the page. Superficially, Lucas' motive could be a member-specific vendetta against the former components of a now defunct band called Whip Hand. Cause: the death of Lucas' only daughter, Kristen, during a crowd riot at a Whip Hand concert.

  Lucas had confronted the band's lead man, Gabriel Stannard, on the steps of the Beverly Hills courthouse with a purgative gesture that could be interpreted as an act of aggression, the promise of future retribution, or a threat. Low-wattage terrorism against someone protected by vast wealth.

  But Lucas had been cured and was not capable of becoming a methodical hit man. Not now.

  He had not been committed to the mental hospital. He'd come voluntarily. That man, Sara thought, could not be behind these hideous and calculated terminations.

  Both Lucases had been cured. Hadn't he?

  There was the Lucas whose wife, Cory, had left him, whose little girl had been stomped into the concrete at a Whip Hand show, a man full of remorse and suicidal tendencies. The urge to end his life had never radiated too strongly, but Sara had recognized the signs, the seeds, the little things that could resonate with deadly certainty and start a chain reaction in the mind. That sort of mental critical mass had sent much stronger men jumping off the top floors of skyscrapers. She had noted it, accounted for it, and treated it. She did her job.

  Then there was the other Lucas.

  The strength of the black tea was making her back teeth ache. She shifted the pad to her opposite knee, and her free foot tingled with pins and needles.

  Cory Ellington had been found dead in a hotel room of a Seconal overdose. Lucas' complicity had never been suggested, but it had been intimated. Everybody knew that Vietnam vets were dangerous, homicidal, on hair triggers. It was a popular delusion on the order of catching herpes from toilet seats-untrue, yet holding the potency of mythology. Things did not have to be true to scare people. And wasn't the stunt with the plastic gun the sort of thing an unhinged vet would pull? The newspapers would certainly see it that way.

  There was Lucas the grief-burdened widower and pain-wracked father. And there was Lucas the problem solver, the team component who interfaced so well with the group at Kroeger Concepts.

  Nobody would care that Lucas' undistinguished military tour had in no way unbalanced him mentally. You never heard about the vets who had returned physically intact and totally blase about their service, the guys to whom the military had been just a job, a duty to dispose. The image of the berserk Nam psychopath was ever so much more media fun. Likewise, these same nobodies would give not a sterling goddamn that Cory had ridden the suicide train, because the image of the wife killer was even more fun. Lucas was a victim of the Lizzie Borden syndrome. Lizzie had been acquitted, but that didn't change the rhyme about the axe and the forty whacks. Lucas was a victim of the same sort of prejudice. Please deposit Nobel Prizes for deductive logic on the pedestal by the door.

  Sara listened to the breeze kicking up outside and played devil's advocate. If Lucas was guilty, if he in fact had done it… well now, that really screwed up the TV viewing schedule for the evening, didn't it?

  In both murders the weapons had been military in origin. Sara had no idea how difficult it might be to deprive someone of the burden of life, but if Lucas was constitutionally able to blow one man apart and gut a second like a dinner trout, it would surely have been within his ability to force-feed Cory five dozen reds and forge a suicide note or make her write one under duress. DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT. The note blamed Lucas; the logic was crystalline. If you accuse yourself before others can, then they hesitate to point the finger. What if the rough message of that note had been directed not by Cory at Lucas, but the other way around?

  There was a second message to ponder: KILL SATANIST ROCK. All the photos of Room 704 had included that admonition, which dripped redly down the wall scant feet from where all two hundred-plus pounds of Brion Hardin had faded into rigor mortis.

  Lucas was a stolid atheist; always had been. He enjoyed rock, and not just 1960s nostalgia, either. He'd introduced Sara to Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream and a defunct group called U.K. and the resurgent Slade and even, god help her, a kicky little number called "Golden Shower of Hits" by the Circle Jerks. Scragging the demons of rock'n'roll in the name of Jesus was totally out of character, a contradiction of all the facets of Lucas that she understood.

  Think you understand, her mind nagged.

  The legal pad was filled with accusations and dirty brainstorming. The thought of exonerating Lucas made Sara's heartbeat quicken in hope, but one word hung like a sty in her mind's eye to upset any neat deduction of innocence. The.word sizzled in danger red and SOS yellow, and the word was diversion-f
rom the medical Latin divergere, to extend in different directions from a common point.

  The art of diversion was a hallmark of military strategy, second nature to an experienced campaigner. Lucas qualified. Didn't he?

  His suicidal tendencies had certainly seemed bonafide enough to fool a psychiatrist. What if they had been mapped out to do just that, on purpose, to divert her from other things?

  What if the attraction she felt for Lucas Ellington had been programmed the same way, for the same purpose?

  More question marks on the yellow legal page.

  It dawned on Sara that Lucas could very well have planned his entire "recovery," leading everyone at Olive Grove along so they would unhesitatingly put the stamp of approval on his cured mind. No, this man could not be capable of such a vendetta. We fixed him up. He was broke, but now he's all better.

  What if Lucas was out there settling his score, evening up, reachieving some balance? What could her role be? Perhaps he planned to recover all he'd lost, and that meant getting himself a replacement for Cory. And if he actually had murdered Cory…

  Sara's eyes defocused suddenly in mild shock at the logic chain she'd just linked together. Bad as the idea of a surrogate Cory was, what if Lucas found himself a surrogate Kristen?

  What if you strolled up to an epileptic and blinked a red light in his face until he tipped over?

  Anger flared then, and she threw the legal pad across the room. The pages rattled, the wings of a chaotic yellow bird flailing in ungainly flight, and it crash-landed in a wad near the front door. She felt like crying. She felt like punching out the reading lamp, which hung over her shoulder like a peeking judge of her thoughts.

  Why hadn't Lucas called her?

  Two days. Two absolute meatgrinder days at Olive Grove, during which Lucas' slick disappearing act had nibbled, then gnawed, at her concentration. The Lucas she knew would have phoned. Lucas always comes back, Burt Kroeger had told her. The emotional weight she had assigned to Lucas' calling had become frightening.