The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  She petrified, a cat on freeze mode.

  Two people had just emerged from the treeline far below her and were valiantly fighting their way up the inhospitable incline. They were about a hundred yards distant, mere specks. But it was obvious they were bound for her position as though homed in via radar.

  She turned and bounded back toward the cabin. Going up was more of a challenge, but she did not fall, and her legs greedily welcomed the work. In the rare times she noticed her legs thrumming with strength, she would reflect that maybe the eight years of dance classes inflicted on her by her parents had been worth it. Her legs hit stride and propelled her upward with gazelle sureness.

  She could lay for them inside the cabin.

  Twenty minutes later the two visitors knocked on the cabin door. It was a city knock, no different from that of a group selling highschool band candy or proselytizing for the Seventh Day Adventists.

  Cass opened the door fully prepared for a confrontation with Lucas' fabled ex-wife.

  She met eyes with a tall woman whose conservative brown hair was windblown. Her tan boots were newly scuffed from the climb. She had removed her dark glasses to unveil direct, authoritarian eyes, also brown, which she narrowed in the sunlight.

  "We're here to see Lucas,'' she said as though it explained everything. Then, less sure: "Lucas Ellington."

  Ellington. Nice name. Cass had not known it. Yes, this had to be Sara, and the bulldog type with the fluffy gray hair, standing a respectful distance behind and to the left, that had to be her attorney, as Lucas had forewarned. Any residual fear drained away. She had this ex-spouse's number. No problem. She folded her arms and squared her body. She'd actually been rehearsing the routine in her head.

  "Too late," she told them sweetly. "Lucas is long gone." If the legal bloodhound knew his business, il wouldn't be any use to try and convince them that this was not Lucas' cabin. "He expected you guys to show up a week ago.'' Just a hint of derision there. Perfect.

  Bulldog stepped forward to flank Sara. "Do you suppose you could tell us where he is. Miss-?''

  Cass' eyes did not leave Sara's, where a war was brewing. "Nope."

  A slow breath escaped Sara, laden with the psychic smell of grinding teeth. "I don't believe her. Listen, whoever you might be… if Lucas is hiding, or if you're just covering for him… you might be in danger. He-''

  "Sounds horrible." Cass smiled, dripping contempt.

  "He is being sought statewide right now for possible connections in three murders," Sara overrode, despising the lie but infuriated by this girl's snide manner. Splendid, her professional imp poked her. You've just changed from a potential equal in this argument to Old Bitch. She had been put instantly on the defensive by a girl half her age. Almost half, since she was almost forty. Didn't she have any chops left? Her jaw muscles concretized. "I don't know how long you've known Lucas, honey, but I'm willing to bet it hasn't been more than two weeks, and you obviously don't have any idea of who or what you're involved with! If Lucas is here, he'll see me. I'm his doctor…"

  Now she was looking past Cass and into a depressingly vacant cabin. There was a locked door set into one wall. A hiding place?

  "You listen to me now, Mom," Cass shot back. "I really don't care if you're Doctor Jekyll and that's Mister Hyde behind you. Get some legal realities straight. I am the caretaker of this place. Lucas is gone; don't ask me where. That's none of my business and none of yours. You are trespassing. If you want the tour, bring a cop with a warrant. I know how that works, so don't jive me. I would tell you all I know is that Lucas packed up and left days ago, but you're not prepared to buy that. So we have nothing to talk about, do we? Goodbye."

  She began to shut the door in Sara's face when Sara interposed her boot, blocking it. Cass' green, dark-ringed eyes flared.

  "You trying for forcible entry, doctor?"

  Burt interceded. He approached with his hands open in entreaty, a gesture unchanged almost since caveman days, like the handshake, originally intended to prove the absence of hidden weapons. "Er-look, young lady. We're not here to cause trouble or make you angry. Seriously. I don't know what you've been told, now, but Lucas is a good friend of mine, and he might be in trouble I don't think he even knows about. Perhaps you care about that? I'm certainly not here to trap him, or compromise him. I'm here to exonerate him." His salesman voice clicked in; he made his eyes as warm as he could. More primal signals. That was how you sold products. "I just need to talk to him. I guarantee you that if he knew Sara-Ms. Windsor-and I were standing here right now, he would see us. So I believe you; I don't think he's here, either." Christ, he thought-what on earth had this girl been told?

  Cass held the door fast, and Sara withdrew her foot. She looked from one to the other and settled on Burt. "You should have come to the door first. Your lady friend is less civilized. I'm not a hard-ass, but I've already told you: Lucas is gone. He did not say where. That is all I know." She shrugged.

  "Fine," said Burt, still succoring. "Is he coming back?"

  "In a month, maybe." That fib was harmless enough.

  "Can I leave word for him here? That's all I really want-to get in touch as soon as I can."

  "Sure. You can leave word, but like I say, he may not see it for four weeks or more. Four weeks equals a month."

  Sara stopped smoldering. "Did Lucas do that to you? Black your eye?"

  "No. I had an accident. I'm recuperating up here, and baby-sitting the cabin, and that's all." Then she pointedly turned back to Burt. "I think your lady friend wants to ask if I'm Lucas' significant other. No. Lucas is a touch too old for me." Unspoken was He's more in your range, Mom. Cass watched her barb sink and seat.

  "Any idea of what's in the locked room?" said Burt, pushing his luck.

  "Not the foggiest."

  He craned his neck but could not see the video gear Lucas had borrowed from Kroeger Concepts. "Then that's all I can ask without force," he said, conceding defeat and hating it, for it offended his problem-solving mind. "Let's go, Sara."

  She spun on him. "You mean we just walk off, Burt, just like that, after the drive, after… everything? Just pull out because she wants to play some stupid game?" Her eyes were wet with fury.

  "Hanging around here gains us nothing. Lucas would have poked his head up by now."

  "Lucas!" Sara shouted at the cabin, at the woods. It was immediately apparent how futile it was. "Lucas, goddamnit!"

  "You've got quite a backbone, young lady," Burt said to Cass. "I sure as hell hope you don't come to regret it. Because if you're spinning me 'round, you will."

  He took Sara's hand to avert her, and they crunched away down the footpath. She looked back. He did not.

  "You're welcome," Cass said, knowing they could not hear. Then, in a whisper, she added, "I win."

  She watched from the door until the pair could no longer be seen. Lucas would be very pleased. Maybe he would tell her what their tale of three murders was really about. Probably this Sara woman, playing soap opera, trying to scare her. She might have tried saying they were from Internal Revenue; that scares the shit out of most people. For all the results they walked away with, she might have said she was a Russian counterspy or a Roman demigoddess fallen on hard times.

  Cass reveled in her handling of the situation… but now her stomach lurched sourly, and her knees wanted to unhinge. Her hands trembled. Battle fatigue. The thought of the fat sandwiches packed into the bindle became less than appetizing. It was just adrenaline backwash. She recognized the nausea. She replaced it with anger. She would not let this spoil her plans for the beach.

  Murder. Sara had used the magic word, and it hung around to hamper her.

  They might come back. If they did, things might escalate. They might bring up the Rangers to roust her. Would her backbone give out at a crucial point, making her faint or puke while they ransacked Lucas' place looking for god knew what? She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, drawing slow, deep oral breaths. Gradually things sw
am back into normal focus, and the iron returned to her blood. If the interlopers were to hang back a day, then try again, Lucas would have returned and the matter would be out of her hands. She would help him any way she could.

  Just who was Lucas, though, out in the real world? Did it matter, as far as her relationship with him was concerned? She wiped her brow; found it sweaty. Nervousness, leaking out through her pores.

  Then she heard footsteps outside, or thought she did. She stopped in midbreath. A shadow disturbed the light in the front window. She pushed out of the chair. Maybe the pair had thought of some new angle to throw in her face.

  When she pulled open the door, she was pissed off.

  Then she found herself staring up, up into Reese's crooked smile. Lucas' long-handled axe, from the chopping stump outside, depended loosely from Reese's right hand.

  "Hi, puss," he said.

  ***

  "Just who the hell are we?" Burt said.

  They had traded the fantasmagoric milieu of the woods for the push-button urban familiarity of bucket seats and tinted windshields, and now they were headed north. "Be realistic, Sara. We can't demand anybody do anything. Even if we had any kind of authority, we'd still need guys with badges to deal with that girl. Is that what you want? I thought the idea was to avoid guys with guns."

  Their descent down the mountain had made Sara's coat a hot purgatory to wear, and she had stowed it in the backseat. She nursed a keen whomper of a headache, and the Excedrin tin in her bag was cunningly empty.

  "Overreaction from acute frustration and paranoid delusions." She sighed. "Hysteria and headaches are textbook responses. Goddamnit, Burt, where is he? Off making my reasoned Sherlockian deductions come true? Boy, that would change all our lives really fast. And if not-where is he? He's not in the cabin, and that means he lied to you on the phone the other day. That snotty little bitch might have been telling the truth. For all you and I know, Lucas hadn't even been to the damned cabin in the first place!" She constricted her face in pain. "Christ, I'm making my headache even worse. The sun is scouring out my eyeballs." Her sunglasses were not much of a buffer.

  "What if Lucas had just stepped out to get groceries or something?" Burt's eyes stayed on the highway. He was back in the realm of questions and answers, relentlessly sorting data and seeking possibilities.

  "Big joke on us." She spoke softly, to deny the thin claws of pain a tighter hold on her belfry. "Ha. Ha." The girl had been so spunky, so self-assured. Sara detested being shot down by someone who had been a squalling baby while she was busting hump to survive her sophomore year at university. "But she saw Lucas, Burt-he might have been up there as recently as a week ago. Why should she bother to construct an elaborate lie when the truth works even better?"

  "Just what I was thinking."

  The Rolling Stones rolled through "Ventilator Blues" on the sound system of Burt's Eldorado. He'd twiddled up and down the FM dial until he found a station he could stand. Heavy metal was not to his taste; Mick and the boys, just barely. He thought about killing the music in deference to Sara's headache but never got around to it. For the next four miles it was the only sound in the car.

  "So we're back to square one. Where is he?"

  "We're not leaving for real, are we, Burt?"

  His mental gears had been grinding. "I thought that if you were amenable, we could enter the dreaded metroplex and shack up in one of its finer motor lodges. Tomorrow, we'll check again. Just in case Lucas went to the 7-11. He's got to be driving something. It'll be parked somewhere if he is. We can quietly spy. He's probably using a Jeep, or something similar, if he drives right up to the cabin's front door."

  "If we were just looking for his car, we could have avoided that hysterical scene up there."

  Burt thought it best to ignore her embarrassment. It had gone badly, yes. But that was the past, and they were planning for tomorrow. "We didn't know that until we went and checked, now did we? Now we know better than to go knocking."

  "Unless something is parked there."

  "Now you're catching on." Burt was not one of those half-wit drivers who stare at their passengers while carrying on a conversation. His attention was on the driving. When he did sneak a glance to check her condition, he said, "Look in the glovebox. There might be something ancient and painkilling stuffed away in there." It was about time for him to choke down one of his awful blood pressure pills as well.

  "There's another problem." She rummaged and held up a rock-hard pack of chewing gum. "I can't do overnighters and mountaineering indefinitely."

  "Not the outdoors type? You weren't bad on that hill, you know."

  "That's not what I mean. I'm shirking my duties at the hospital. I've already cashed in most of my sick time for the fiscal year. What if Lucas takes four weeks to come back, like that girl said?"

  "I'll stay. I can get away with it. I'm president of my own company. You can drive this car back to L.A. After all, Lucas might show up at Olive Grove, or at Kroeger Concepts, if he really isn't up here. I'll rent myself a Jeep and tool back to the cabin-maybe to charm the harpy therein into balming me with all the hot poop there is to know." He paused, pleased with his own turn of phrase. "Sounds good, anyway."

  "I wonder what Lucas told her. You notice that she seemed to be fully briefed? Ready for us?"

  "Yeah. I thought about that, too, and it might be another reason Lucas might show up sooner than she says. But he didn't rent her along with his camping gear. Who is she, where did she come from?"

  "If Lucas was out there avenging Kristen, killing the guys in Whip Hand, and he somehow acquired a substitute daughter, a surrogate Kristen… would he stop his vendetta?" She was speaking with her eyes shut.

  "What about that combination-brain stuff? What if he's-I don't know, programmed. And can't stop." Burt was thinking of the death junkies he'd known in the service, the guys who thrived on night patrol, the machines who collected VC ears and balls and didn't want to go home.

  "I was just thinking that if he got a surrogate Kristen, it would nullify the motive for the vendetta, wouldn't it?" It also might mean that a surrogate Cory would be next, and his brain would rebel at that thought. Cory was death for him.

  On the radio a few seconds of burp-gun deejay patter bled over into the opening of Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio." For a moment Burt wished he was back at Kroeger Concepts, chiding Gustavo de la Luces good-naturedly about the silly tune and busting his brain on stratagems that were, in Gustavo's words, "do-able, get-able, and cashworthy." Lucas had once joked, long, long ago, that those three words sounded like a Beverly Hills law firm.

  "Something else," Sara said. "What if that girl has slept with him, Burt? She might be the Cory substitute, not Kristen. Those bruises we saw might be Lucas' fault." Her voice trailed away. "I… I just don't know…''

  "Yet," he said, hoping to deter her from further self-excoriation. "But if he's all the way back to Cory, and that girl's not dead, maybe it means he didn't help kill Cory after all. Remember, he was seeing other women after she died."

  "Yes. Yes." Maybe she was a bigger victim than Lucas. Maybe it was all innocent and hubbed on a third explanation no one had thought of because there wasn't enough information. Yet. "Oh, God, Burt-where the hell is he?"

  "Best we can do for now is-"

  "Wait, shh!" Her hand flew to the radio knob.

  The deejay was reporting that there were no new developments in the 'Gasm concert tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. Three members of the band were dead. Two were in critical condition. Their assailant, a middle-aged man who had opened up on the band with an automatic weapon during their Community Center show, was in the custody of the Pima County Sheriff's Department. His name was being withheld, but he was described as a "religious fanatic."

  Sara blanched. Burt suddenly wanted a drink, very badly.

  As far as the deejay was concerned, the attacker was "… one of those ass-backwards backward-maskers. They condemn us, gentle listeners, yet they kill and we don
't. Let's just hope that lynching hasn't gone out of style in woolly old Tucson, you hear what I'm sayin'? Here's 'Toledo Breakdown.' "

  The song was one of 'Gasm's few slow numbers, like "Agent Orange Blues." The inevitable ballad, as Chic Garris would have put it. Song style #3.

  The Eldorado slowed to a stop on the shoulder. Burt was staring at Sara. "Now what?"

  Her trusty words had failed her, and she felt useless and dumb. The jock had referred to the assassinations as the "latest Whip Hand murders."

  18

  THE AXE SWUNG DOWN IN a sharp silver arc toward Cass' head as she slammed the cabin door.

  She had reacted to the sight of Reese instantaneously, trying to engage the heavy sliding bolt on the door. In a single, horrible moment of elongated time, she saw Reese's thick wrist flick. The cording defining his arms jumped into hard relief, and the axe pivoted upward with frightening speed. She knew how heavy it was; she'd levered it from the chopping stump the day before, and its mass caused the blade to thump to the ground, wrenching her still-mending left hand.

  She threw all her weight into the door. No good. The blade thudded in and blocked. Its crescent, dirty and pitted, was inches from her nose.

  A savage kick snapped the door inward, freeing the axe and sending Cass sprawling on her ass to the cabin floor. She looked up at Reese, framed in the light filling the doorway, as his foot drifted back down to its starting position.

  "Jackpot time." His lips barely moved when they formed words. His voice was a nightmarish memory, whisper-soft, sandpaper-hoarse, a deep and purring register that issued from somewhere black and demoniac inside of him. The axe, which had moved in a blur, now hung idly in his grip, at ease. He gave the cabin interior a bored once over with eyes the color of anodized aluminum. "Nice place."

  Cass hoisted onto her elbows but did not try to stand, not yet. Reese's pupils were pinpricks. His habit was to pop Dexamyls like black M&Ms until the steady beat of the speed pounded like rock'n'roll in his bloodstream and made his chest and arm muscles twitch and tic at random. Reese preferred crank to sugar in his coffee.