The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Two sets of sheriff's eyes bugged as the stone wall of grace Methodist grew in their windshield to monster. Darkness descended inside the car, leaving only the ryes, dull white with fear. The end was right on top of them.

  The driver of the number-two car chickened and mushed the brake down hard enough to spring a tendon In Ins ankle. No fucking way he was Steve McQueen. He has a goddamned family and a wife and Sears payments to live for.

  Smoke blurted from the wheel wells, and the cruiser slid to a halt, its nose kissing the stone steps leading to the cemetery gate with a hollow bump. Both cops inside could hear the Charger's engine racheting, growing distant. They listened to the hiss of their own radio and the clicking noise of their flashbar lights. Tinka-tinka-tinka-tink. The woop-woop siren had malfunctioned, cutting itself off about the time they rounded the corner. In the mirrors they could see their fellow officer's car belching up steam clouds into the moist air, leaking its vital fluids all over the pavement. Crashed autos only blew up in the movies.

  ***

  The two sheriffs looked at each other. Simultaneously, both said, "Son of a bitch."

  "This damned street's as empty as a collection plate," said K. C. Dew to his deputy, Chris Carpenter.

  Carpenter curbed their cruiser at 7764 North Claremont. The vacant slot they filled had been provided by the departure of Joshua Knopf, private investigator.

  K. C. disliked city cops trespassing on his preserve and resented the suggestion that he and Carpenter were to do nothing more here than await the arrival of some bigshot from the L.A.P.D.'s collection of SWAT lunatics who wanted to land his goddamned helicopter right in Vista View Park. His men had been ordered out on roadblock duty. Everybody complied. It wasn't the shitwork that K. C. bristled at so much. It was the suggestion that psycho killers were some kind of urban specialty.

  Out here in the sticks, he knew, there were crazies, too. But they were quiet crazies-the senile, the juvenile. Rarely did you pull a one-hundred-proof whacko. Out here, they didn't dress like the village idiot or drop clues like they had holes in both pockets. Out here, a quiet madness waited, and to K. C. that threat was more frightening than the more concrete disposal problem presented by a loon in a tower with a rifle.

  He remembered Mrs. Kalish. Her husband, Jack, had gone to Southeast Asia and come back in a KIA bag. She had hung herself in 1972, leaving an incoherent note about the coming UFO invasion. The Vietcong were aliens. She had been thirty years old.

  He remembered Buddy Simonsen. That one still hurt. After a decade and a half of tipping hats and picking up checks for coffee and danish and pie, Buddy simply forgot who and where he was and hadn't remembered since.

  A silent street, a quiet house like this one, could be signs of serious trouble. They might have to deal with a dead body today. K. C. was convinced there was something wrong with a community like Olive Grove/Dos Piedras, so friendly and countrified, where the dead could go unnoticed for so long. Chris Carpenter had been a deputy for nine months, the same amount of time it took to make a baby. Like a baby, Chris had done a lot of hard growing in nine months. He'd dealt with his first dead body his second day on the force. He'd blanched but not puked. He'd dealt with it. It had been an easy one, thank god. Mrs. Keeley had been found in her bathroom, dead for ten days until a neighbor noticed the smell. She had been ninety-one, also a widow, who still took evening constitutionals and cooked her own food. Her homemade preserves were locally famous. Old people often died in the bathroom, K. C. knew.

  K. C. and Joel Carpenter-Chris' old man-had cone to high school together. They still took fishing trips twice a year. K. C. fought regularly not to be over-protective, over-proud, of Chris.

  "So what are we supposed to do?" Chris said. Rain lussed down all around them and speckled the windshield.

  K. C. rubbed his florid face. "I guess we stroll up to the front door and knock in the name of the law." His casual ness did not appear forced. He kept his thoughts to himself. He had spent a good slice of his sheriff's career amortizing the horrendous discoveries he often made at times like this; the starved, forgotten dead people he'd tripped over, the domestic scenes out of Peyton Place by way of de Sade's Justine. His duty was keeping the peace.

  He opened the door and hefted one massy leg out. The wing lights popped on, red and white, and the door buzzed with a cheap smoke-alarm sound.

  Chris turned up his coat collar and grabbed his plastic-bagged hat. Claremont's single streetlamp tossed down a long thin shadow from his football-toned frame. As the rain ebbed and then descended with renewed vigor, they could hear frogs chittering in the distance. The street was oiled and gleaming. Their Wellington boots made soft sounds on the pavement.

  "Car's in the driveway," Chris said. "Datsun. It's hers." They took no notice of Burt Kroeger's Eldorado, parked curbside two cars up.

  "Anybody asks, you and I are investigating an anonymous call regarding a suspicious disturbance." K. C. knew he was circumventing the desires of the police in Los Angeles by poking around. But he'd damn himself for sitting and waiting.

  Both men were three paces from the car when a single gunshot ripped through the fabric of the rainy night, to silence the frogs. The cruiser's right mouse-ear blinker disintegrated in a spray of red plastic chunks, and the bullet zinged off the roof.

  K. C. hit the deck with amazing speed. "Chris!"

  Carpenter dived headfirst over the hood of the car and rolled. Hearts racing, they huddled up behind the far side of the front fender, sneaking glances at the house through the cruiser's windows. Chris jacked open the door to grab the radio.

  There was an absolute lack of practical cover. Past a recently laid strip of sidewalk, lawns sloped up to houses. It was wide open, punctuated only by standing lamps at the sidewalk level and flagstone or concrete walks winding up to each residence. Decorative foliage was mostly tucked against the houses.

  It was no popgun that had taken out their blinker. K. C. wondered if the shooter had a good scope, or excellent aim, or both. It had definitely been a warning shot.

  "Everybody's enroute," Chris said, hugging the street with the riot gun he'd retrieved. "Can't contact half our units. They don't respond. B-two, B-five, B-eight."

  "Jesus." Sykes and Fowler, Preston alone, Dalton and Schlacter. They were all on roadblock duty or patrol. What the hell was happening?

  Chris sat gauging range. Impossible to hit anything with a pistol at this distance. The shotgun in his grip seemed a bit futile. Scattershot would get a lot of attention but accomplish little. When he dropped to one knee beside K. C. and met his eyes, both men heard sirens gradually pushing back the stillness of the night.

  "Don't do nothing," K. C. said. "No shooting, not yet. It ain't our job to get killed for these guys. Not yet."

  31

  REASON AND SANITY HAD TO prevail. It was Sara's duty to manipulate the tools of mind and logic to win. But her phobic side told her that Lucas might pivot on a whim, a misspoken phrase, or even a neutral silence, and cut her to pieces, using the inequities only he could perceive as justification. He had been honed away to nerve endings, awaiting stimuli. His response would be ruthless and final. Lucas was a problem solver.

  Problem: People jaywalk. Solution: Kill people for jaywalking. Next case.

  He was at the front windows again, M-16 slung across one forearm, the.45 hanging butt-down and ready. All the ammo hanging off him clinked comically when he moved. Sara did not laugh.

  She was dry now. The thought of what Lucas' mean weaponry could do to her chipped away her courage. She had seen what kind of damage mushrooming slugs and hydrostatic pressure could do to a human body in several emergency wards. Spence, her first husband, had kept a hunting rifle in the bedroom closet. She had never seen him fire it. It had been an expensive gun… but she had never seen him fire it. If she got a chance to grab any of Lucas' guns, she was sure she could operate them, although the M-16, a new sight to her, looked a bit intimidating. That weapon, and the reasons for its presen
ce in her living room-her living room, with the fireplace and the books and her comfortable furniture and the reproduction of "Girl's Portrait"-was not as easy to deal with as a mechanical intimidation. It was awesome; it was like the end.

  He did not need the guns for her. She could be killed with any of the hundreds of blunt instruments and cutting edges scattered innocently around her own house. Bare hands could dispatch her… although from observing Lucas, it was now clear to her that he had seriously hurt his hands. It was a tiny advantage, not reassuring. It would be imbecilic to try to bash or stab Lucas while he had the guns, and Sara was not confident that she would exploit an opportunity if one presented itself. She wanted reason and sanity to prevail. She wanted everybody to live happily ever after.

  She had become lost in a maze. Each time she turned, she smacked into a wall or dead end.

  "Lucas." She spoke softly, head down. "Gabriel Stannard will never be able to evade the police long enough to come here. They've probably corraled him into protective custody by now. Even if he wanted some kind of crazy… showdown… with you, the police would never permit it."

  He looked back at her with something like pity for the stupid. His gaze held the party line: He's coming.

  "Sara. Dear. I think you're very wrong." The timbre of his voice had changed. Moments ago he had been Inhering, scared, confused. He had needed her help. As soon as he had moved to the window and begun the rigid business of surveillance, his fear had dropped away like a chrysalis. The way he avoided line-of-sight contact with the windows, the stiff efficiency with which he moved, saddened her deep inside. Lucas-her Lucas-was receding.

  "I think Stannard's fuzzy little rock-and-roll brain will make it imperative for him to seize any opportunity to kill me," he went on. Even the tiny hesitancies had evaporated from his voice. "He knows how mucked up the law enforcement and judicial systems are because he's a victim of them, just like me. Eye-for-eye justice is something his limited intellect-can encompass without causing a headache. His persona demands he pick up the gauntlet. He really has no choice. I've turned his manufactured image against him, forcing him to live up to it. His wild-man reputation will compel him to face me, even while the timid good citizen inside him will persist that the safest course is to hole up behind a lot of guards and whistle in the police. To preserve the myth of what he is, he has to come. The cult of personality says so. Rules of promotion and publicity say so. I'm an expert in that field. For him to cringe now is bad advertising." He turned from the window to offer up another of his odd, scary smiles. "I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid."

  She tried anger. It was all she had left. "I want my goddamned robe, Lucas, and I want it now. No more of this screwing around. If you think you're crazy, then shoot me. But I think-''

  Her heart shoved its way past her voice when Lucas released the bolt on the M-16 with a metallic snap that rang in the high corners of the room, cutting her off like a splice in a movie. Her body tensed, anticipating a bullet. The shot would seem very loud.

  Then she heard what Lucas was hearing. The hiss of tires on damp blacktop. Two car doors closing. Lucas was back at the front window, parting the curtains, with the muzzle of the M-16. They heard sirens, shrieking tires growing closer. The sirens were no longer dismissible, faraway noises.

  "Looks like showtime," he said.

  Bracketing the front door was an arrangement of oblong, delicate windows that latched at the top, bottom, and middle and swung inward when unhooked. Sara had filled the little frames with thick stained glass. Lucas opened the middle one on the right-hand side of the door, flicked a microswitch on the side of the Nitefinder scope, and sighted. There was no light in the foyer. He was invisible.

  She had expected more noise.

  She thought of bolting for the kitchen. He could easily see her in the periphery of his vision, but now his concentration was focused outside. The kitchen door could not be locked or barricaded. The bathroom was a trap with a minuscule window. She could flee out the back door, but how far would she get, panicked, her bare white ass an easy target in the dark? She could flee upstairs, but how long until Lucas got fed up and started shooting through the ceiling?

  Her thoughts of escape steamed away into pipe-dream mist at the sound of the gunshot. All gone. It sounded like a bark, a loud cough, a plug blown out of a hole by explosive decompression. It stiffened her body and slammed her eyelids shut. The sound was irresistible in the way it forced her to flinch. She wondered if what she had just heard was someone getting their skull ventilated. Time and physics suddenly failed to work. Otherwise, why couldn't she move her damned arms and legs?

  "Sit down, Sara."

  She did, floating back into her seat with the loose joints and feather weightlessness of a defective puppet, merely aware of just how vulnerable and fragile her body was and wanting above all to keep that body intact and alive, even if it was the aging and malfunctioning thing the sometimes saw in her mirror.

  Another voice pleaded inside her, and she hoped it was the real reason she had not simply cut and run like a madwoman. The voice insisted that Lucas was her problem, that she was responsible. It demanded she engineer some solution while her puppet-flimsy body was shirking its duties.

  All this galloped through her mind in two seconds or less. Time really was screwed sideways.

  "Don't worry, Sara." He was talking to her but not looking at her. "Let it happen."

  ***

  The wild lights of police flashbars illuminated Claremont Street. Tires crooned on the street outside. Somewhere a guttural motor revved and rumbled, distantly.

  The all-over chill she felt might have been blowing through the tiny window by the front door. But that was crazy, too.

  Bang! Another brown and brittle boneyard fence divided itself around the prow of the Charger, and the tilting confusion of tombstones and plot markers jounced in the front windshield like the waiting maze of a particularly hairy pinball machine. Stannard corrected course, arms bulging as he cranked the doughnut steering wheel, holding the car to his chosen path by muscle and will. The tow-bar-style front bumper began picking off marble slabs, five or six, and chalky debris scattered across the hood with a hailstorm noise and was lost. They were regaining speed in spite of the crappy ground. The left headlight went dead with a crunch as it met the crossarm of a crucifix-shaped gravestone and turned it to chalk dust. Horus' hands jumped up to shield his face, but he was otherwise nonchalant.

  Stannard downshifted and dug out, vaulting the Charger through the far fence of the cemetery. After a few bouncing seconds of wiping out foliage in both directions, he fixed on the twin track of mud ruts he had described to Horus as a goat path. It was slick and messy, but the car fit, and it provided an adequate way to sneak up on Claremont Street from behind… a totally unanticipatable direction.

  He was thankful for the hairy police chase, for the concentration needed to ramrod the Charger through the muck ahead, for all the obstacles cluttering the complicated road that led to Dr. Sara Windsor. His mind was occupied and kept at bay from the real question of just what the fuck he thought he was doing. Horus would not nail him with that one; neither would Cannibal Rex, for different reasons. Horus wanted to do what was needed, to be there for Stannard if the situation got overwhelming, beyond his capacity to cope. Cannibal wanted to hang out, in hopes of some serious mayhem. For Stannard, thinking too hard about what he intended to do tonight could abort everything. He knew this, and so programmed his mind to be other places, thinking other things.

  He already knew he did not want the climax of this whole movie bursting out with him offstage.

  He was aware that for perhaps the first time, he had to play the part of Gabriel Stannard, to become the Stannard of the sleeve copy and rock articles and promo hype, and to do it without the safety nets that were usually in place for the monied and noteworthy. Money and power had a way of insulating you, of pampering you into a warm stupor of self-security and surface passions. All the insulation in Beve
rly Hills, however, could not save him from the things Lucas Ellington was capable of doing to his mind.

  The cops doubtlessly thought he was some kind of luzzy-minded jukebox hero, as stupid as the airheaded teenagers who plonked down their drug money to buy his albums. That made Stannard bristle. No way his moment was going to be usurped by some overweight Maalox junkie who probably kept a framed picture of Jack Webb on his bathroom wall, no fucking way, dudes.

  In the flash department, the cops were losers. Without their hardware they were nothing. While he, Gabriel Stannard, was…

  Was. He was.

  Nobody manhandled a microphone better. Nobody gave a more outrageous interview. Nobody could have succeeded in running the wild gauntlet he was now completing, besting it to invade the stage and perform the way he wanted.

  Tented open on the Danish leather sofa in his bedroom next to the TV and tape trolley was a screenplay entitled Shakedown. Sertha had also read it. The plot involved the efforts of a group of high-tech thieves to rip off the gate receipts of a Woodstock-style rock festival. Lots of violence, chases, gunfire, and gadgets. A production floor of $30 million, they estimated, if Gabriel Stannard could be convinced to play the part of the main rock 'n' roller-the inside man who choreographs the heist, the prime target in the ensuing pursuit. He eats it during a climactic shoot-out on the Golden Gate Bridge, Stannard recalled. A meaty role, fair portions of good dialogue, and a spectacular death scene.