The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Now it was Sara who wanted to backtrack into the past, to change it around. Tears blurred her aim.

  Pieces of the front door and frame exploded inward as the police kicked it down and piled into the foyer. Somebody shouted no, somebody shouted stop just as her finger applied pressure to the trigger. The safety was off. Her father had taught her how to shoot.

  She wiped her face with her free sleeve and resumed bracing the gun with both hands. There was no way she could explain anything to these strangers. One overzealous cop raised his weapon to sight on her and was ordered to back off.

  Sara turned, sighted, and fired. To her the motions were like swimming or riding a bicycle, unforgettable.

  Three feet away the cassette deck sprang off the glass shelf, tried to spin, and crashed against the wall, scattering broken chunks of metal and plastic. The shelf held. Gabriel Stannard's voice was severed in an instant, and the component's blue digital meters faded out like dying eyes.

  34

  LIKE AN INSULT FROM HEAVEN, the rain got heavier and wetter and more miserable. The sniper spat his toothpick out onto the dark ground. Cheated of his moment, he felt fatigued and impotent, as though the plug had been pulled on his stamina.

  Through his crimson-illuminated reticle, he had seen his target come crashing through the front window, obviously shot, obviously unmoving, no threat and nothing to deal with. The sniper's work had been done for him, usurped by some amateur. He wanted nothing to do with the cleanup phase; it was not his mess.

  In Arizona, Lucas had isolated a similar target in his own sights and had the moment stolen from him as well. His response had been a sense of relief, of freedom. In Dos Piedras, the killer himself became the new bullseye, framed by a new scope, a better shooter, and the moment had again been purloined. The sniper felt no sense of burden lifted. He was pissed off that he had mushed out here in the rain for nothing.

  He had seen every cop movie it was possible to rent on videotape. They never got it right; they were always out to lunch when it came to the challenge of portraying police procedure the way it really was. Good and bad guys meet; both draw their awesome high-tech shooting irons simultaneously, both are such expert shots that they blow their guns out of each other's hands. Or die in the moment of discharge. Or, sometimes, a SWAT sharpshooter was brought in to terminate the danger with the skill of a surgeon excising a malignancy. Irresistible force meets even more irresistible force. King Kong versus Godzilla. The good force was supposed to prevail. It wasn't over unless good triumphed. If good got its ass kicked, then there was usually a sequel to set things right. Now that the sniper thought about it, he liked those predictable cinema finishes better than this.

  That was the way the world was supposed to work. You eliminated the misfit, and society could go chugging happily onward.

  He saw the media trucks and jeeps begin to hamper traffic down at the point. Video bar lights clicked on, and harsh shadows capered on the wet pavement.

  As it turned out, not landing the chopper in the open field had been an excellent decision.

  Keeping snipers clear of the press was the golden rule of SWAT operations. There was a phenomenon called "post-shoot trauma." To protect the integrity of the team, each team member's exposure to media attention had to be minimized. The news bloodsuckers would not care that he had done no shooting and in fact felt bad about that. They would only be interested in getting the guy with the long rifle case on camera.

  To get himself clear of Dos Piedras tonight, the sniper realized, he would have to proceed as though he had actually shot someone. The evasive escape tactics would be the same. That put him back into a context in which he could function. He sleeved the AR-I and twisted his ballcap around so the wide bill would keep the increased rain off his glasses. It might be possible to walk back to Vista View Park from here without being seen at all.

  He turned his back on the scene and walked away, across the field, feeling a little better already.

  35

  "I DON'T KNOW WHY IT took so long to call," Sertha said. ''Call it failure of nerve. People who are upset can waste so much time."

  "Don't apologize; it's natural." The voice on the other end of the line was deep, succoring, almost the tone of an analyst. It was comforting to her, and knowledgeable, and so much more grown-up than Gabriel Stannard's.

  The voice was all the encouragement she needed to pry herself loose. It was for her own good. If she felt no more than a tug at the thought of leaving, then she knew a tug was not strong enough to hold her. She saw her reflection in the glass-topped table that held the base unit for the telephone. She looked regal. Every hair was in place. The illusion was perfect.

  "There were reporters swarming all over the house," she said. "We needed a private army to fight our way to the front gates. The hospital is even worse. I have no idea what they want."

  "I saw the news, read the papers. They're like all carrion eaters."

  "I've been alone here, and have had a lot of time to think. I thought about what Gabriel needs, and what I need. We never really connected, I think. I know that sounds like a cruel thing to say when I've spent so long with him, but it is true more and more. We never intertwined. Sometimes we ran parallel to each other; it looked like we were in sync. But I see him now in the hospital, and he looks at me as though I've come to sell him a magazine subscription. He's angry and frightened, and treats me dismissively. There is nothing I can do to help him except to be there for him… and he does not want me there. I do not think it is a front, false bravery. He truly does not want me there."

  "You remind him of what happened to him-of what he was, as opposed to what he has become. You're not at fault. But you're going to be the one who pays if you permit this to continue."

  "I know." At first the sanctuary of Stannard's estate had been a warm blanket against a cold, insectile world. Here she could be anonymous, and cleave to another human being, and build, because there was time. Lately the hounds were at the gates, and her privacy had become the victim of Stannard's newsworthiness. The sole advantage to staying was that she had the house all to herself. Stannard would inevitably be returned, and what would happen then was something from which her body urged her to flee, now.

  If she remained, she would be finished. Emptied. She was sensitive to the one-way flux of energy from her to Stannard. Perhaps it had taken the extreme of his gruesome hunting sortie for her to recognize it, but she was smart enough to disengage before she was drained to a husk. Physically, she had become irrelevant to his existence, and later in the hospital his touch put her in mind of leeches, of ticks trying to thieve lifeblood as unobtrusively as they could. So she had choked off the conduit, pulling away to save herself… and she saw that he hated her, if only on the level of instinct, for not being more self-sacrificing.

  Her looks were on the mend. First, the sclera of her eyes cleared, returning to veinless white. The flush of blood mellowed her lips and shaded her flesh. Her cracked and ravaged cuticles repaired themselves; the long nails were on their way back. She could walk out to the pool without feeling as though she had been used as a sandbag during a flood. On the worst of her days, she still had the power to turn heads, but only within the last few weeks had she stored enough surplus beauty to enable her to radiate. It was an effect that could only be gauged by the reactions of strangers; in a way, her own kind of feeding. To get this, she had to reenter the world. It was not too late, but what Robert had just told her was true: if she tarried here, paying the bill that would accrue would make her evaporate.

  Two phone calls to New York City was all it had taken. The Objet d'Art perfume account, which had given up on securing Sertha Valich, proved more than eager to grant an eleventh-hour reprieve. "Actually," Joanna Traxson, the firm's head, had confided, "this is more like eleven fifty-nine and forty-five seconds, Sertha love, but for you…"

  The second call had been to Robert, because beyond the work Sertha needed a friend, and there was no time to make new ones whe
n her personal battery was critically low. She did not want to step off a plane at JFK and be alone. She had been with Stannard, and alone, for too long.

  Now that it was done, Stannard was like a blown dynamo, circuits fused by one glorious overload. It was the way his eyes roamed over her and saw nothing that hurt the most.

  Her luggage, all matched top-grain hides, was ranked and filed in the front hallway. The limousine would wait just as long as she wanted. This call might have been more expediently made from the mobile phone tucked into the vehicle, but Sertha purposefully wanted a more positive sense of disconnection. This was the final call she would ever make from this house, making up her next bed totally before jumping into it.

  "Horus is coming back here today," she said. "He can handle this place with much more panache than I." It was time to divert Robert. "And it will be so nice to see you again. Since the new times are nothing to talk about, we'll talk about old times… and dinner, at least the first one, will have to be on your Gold Card."

  "Platinum Card," he corrected proudly. "Ever see one? They issue merchants a booklet of special instructions on how to treat anyone who hands over a Platinum Card. It's quite outrageous. Yes, by all means, take advantage."

  It was his tone she needed more than his words. He had assured her that he was still there for her, and beyond that it was all cute upper-crust banter, a social whirl she could dance in her sleep. What they had once shared had stayed with her, not growing cold and dead, but glowing with a minuscule core of heat that had been the cause for many pleasant reflections through several years. Now that she fanned the memory, she was just as pleased to see it respond, and warm. Realizing that people just did not fade out when you were done with them was new to her, and frightening. But now she was also willing-and that will sustained her.

  "It's settled, then." He sounded glad. "I'll send my car to collect you when you arrive at JFK."

  She cut directly to the goodbyes, but with an honest smile on her face. Before the tears could fill her eyes again and meddle with her thoughts, before unsaid, words and regret could foul her logic and make her tarry one more day in a string of added days, and kill her that much more, she hung up the phone, closed the ornate double doors of the manse behind her, and walked out into the light, into the next chapter of her life.

  36

  IT WAS WEDNESDAY, AND IT was raining.

  The TV set in Sara Windsor's Olive Grove office broadcast dazzling rainbow snow and the steady, soothing hiss of off-the-air static. The rain had returned, after two days unbroken by sunlight. She needed no special permission to be here this late at night, with her thoughts zeroed in on the flickering flame of the votive candle on her desk.

  Staying home was too much of an ordeal.

  The police had taken their time, enjoying themselves in their analysis of her living room. They excitedly compared bullet hole evaluations, and strung their trajectory wires, and dusted for prints, and their calm methodology nearly drove her into a screaming fit. Her home had been raped, in a way, and now the cops were getting their jollies by feeling it up instead of giving her healing time.

  Holing up in an anonymous hotel room somewhere would be inspirational enough to make her use her Colt Diamondback revolver on herself. No, thanks. Faceless rooms reminded her of too many assignations with faceless men who drove expensive, faceless cars.

  The most tempting possibility was to sell the house and move on. Her ex-hubby, Spence, had done it; career-obsessed Dr. Christopher Rosenberg had done it; and, in the most extreme fashion possible, Lucas had done it-and in so doing, had betrayed her.

  The same ambulance had removed both Lucas and Stannard from the premises; how was that for a black little irony. By the time the stretchers were slotted into the waiting van, the two paramedics were besmirched to the elbows in thick, gelid blood. Two types.

  Lucas' throat wound, though messy and serious, was not automatically fatal. The carotid artery is nearly as big around as a Magic Marker, and there had been enormous loss of blood complicated by secondary hemorrhage from the posterior branches of the artery. Quick incisions were made so that ligatures could be tied around the external carotid. Lucas was pronounced dead on arrival with the ligatures still professionally in place.

  Lucas should not have died, and did. Stannard, who had absorbed more bullets than a being of meat and bone and blood had any right to, had survived.

  She had seen it in Lucas' eyes, at the window. With his blood on her hands, she saw that the Lucas Ellington she knew had died long before Stannard had fired his surprise shot.

  The deal makers in New York and Hollywood had sleuthed out her home number, but not the office number at Olive Grove. For the time being, she found sanctuary from the battering-ram siege of book and movie offers. "Based on a true story"-now there was a magical phrase. People would swallow anything prefaced with it. What difference did it make, when they were incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality in the first place?

  Across the room, on the TV, reality had signed off until the farm report, at five A.M.

  The thing Gabriel Stannard had been packing in his crotch, the police had informed her, was a High Standard hammerless two-shot derringer. Then followed the jokes about concealed weapons, ho, ho, phallic symbols, yuk, yuk. Lucas had been dispatched-as they say in Victorian detective stories-by a tiny, ridiculous-looking thing that would be decorative adorning a Mississippi riverboat gambler's vest pocket.

  Claremont Street was just as aversive. Men and women in official cars picked apart the dead end, the "goat path," the Grace Methodist cemetery, and the spot in the street where a man had died. There was plenty of paper for Sara to read if she wished. One preliminary report described the way in which a guitarist named Cannibal Rex-real name, Martin Killough Beecher-had been killed.

  It had happened while Sara was hugging the floor in her towel. Just as Lucas' M-16 chopped apart Stannard and the living room wall, Cannibal Rex opened fire with his Auto Mag. The gunfire in the house had touched him off like a bomb, and the heavyweight slugs began to punch spectacular holes in the flanks of the foremost police cars as a general firefight erupted. The Charger began to come apart a chunk at a time as the cops brought their own firepower to bear. When Cannibal ducked down to change clips, a stifl-fingered blow from one of Horus' schooled, lethal hands had caused his brain to burst. Horus had not been held in custody very long.

  The rounds from Lucas' gun had also perforated a switchplate for the ceiling light fixture, a china vase sitting on the mantel, and a framed photograph of Sara with her parents at graduation. The center geisha in the Takamatsuzuka reproduction, the one in the orange kimono, had a bullet hole in her exposed left hand.

  A lot of the paper Sara saw concerned the cabin up at Point Pitt and the dead people discovered there.

  Burt Kroeger's wife, Diana, had insisted on cremation, followed by a scattering of ashes in the Pacific Ocean. Sara supposed that meeting Diana was inevitable. She had no idea what to say to her.

  In one pocket of Lucas' garrison belt, investigators had discovered a string of crystal beads, the kind that caught the light and divided it up into rainbow hues. No one could figure out their significance.

  In Tucson, Arizona, the machines monitoring the life functions of Jackal Reichmann went steady and shrill. Eldon Quantrill lost his entertainment value and went to trial for triple homicide.

  In San Francisco, Ralph "Sandjock" Trope, manager of the Rockhound nightspot, bagged himself another headline by positively identifying a photograph of Lucas Ellington as the mystery roadie with the diamond eyepatch he'd spoken with on the day guitarist Jackson Knox died. Ralph could not actually match the roadie's face with Lucas', but he could read the papers and knew a promotional opportunity when he saw one.

  Since no positive proof against Lucas Ellington had been unearthed in the Denver murder of keyboardist Brion Hardin, he was blamed anyway. He had become convenient.

  The news media gained a full nelson on the l
egend of Lucas Ellington, the rockstar assassin. The police earnestly plugged their forthright protection of innocent bystanders in Dos Piedras. It would be irrelevant to point out that the two men who died were the only ones who would have died under any circumstances.

  Now, sitting in her darkened office, toying with desk knickknacks and staring at televisual snow, Sara realized that Lucas had forced her to do nothing. It had been his plan. Her only part had been to play yet another surrogate Kristen in the presence of Stannard, to complete

  Lucas' reenactment of his nightmare.

  She had not thought herself a killer, yet she had picked up the pistol and certainly would have shot Stannard in the head had the police not bashed through her door at that moment. She was not a killer, yet hadn't she killed Lucas by failing him, by not seeing the gun in Stannard's pants? She had surely spent aeons watching the singer draw and fire.

  The ways in which normal people were compelled to kill was a mainstay of her field of study. The yellow legal pad was on the desk in the pool of dim light, mostly doodles.

  Would Lucas have killed her?

  Would she have killed?

  And if so, what was the difference between them?

  Lucas represented what could almost be termed another evolutionary step-Psychopathic Man, possessing the mechanisms to cope with what living has become, to survive in this world. That capacity was present in everyone. The difference was that the mechanisms finally turned on him and consumed him. But those mechanisms could not be scoured out of the human psyche; they were part of our genetic makeup. And despite the nasty implications of being surrounded by a sidewalk full of latent killers, Sara thought, we'd better be thankful for those mechanisms. Someday, they might mean our survival.