Pay me in flesh, p.3
Pay Me in Flesh, page 3
“How ’bout we ride some more?” he said.
“No thanks.”
“There’s another Benjamin in it for you. Two Bens for half an hour.”
“Where to?”
“We’ll head up to the hills. We’ll look at the lights, the stars. Then we’ll close our little deal.”
“Half an hour?”
He nodded.
“Cool, daddy,” I said. Half an hour was about all I could last. I wasn’t thrilled about leaving my haunts. But up in the hills would work. There were lots of places to kill up there, and less traffic than on the busier streets below.
At least he drove fast. We tore down Santa Monica, running yellow lights, and took Cahuenga to the freeway.
“Where we going?” I said.
“My dime,” he said. “I’ve got a spot.”
“You mean I’m not your first?”
“Funny.”
He got off at Barham. Then we headed up into the hills, on the narrow roads above Universal Studios. I hadn’t been here in a while.
“So how’d you get into this line of work?” Smiler said.
“Let’s not,” I said.
“I want to know. Another fifty if you talk.”
“You’re pretty loose with the money.”
“Curious about human nature.”
Boy, was he in for a surprise. “You a writer or an actor?” I said.
“How’d you know?” Smiler said.
“If you guess writer or actor in this town, you’re going to be right nine times out of ten.”
He laughed. “You got that right, pretty lady. But it seems a little untoward to call me just an actor.”
“You just said untoward.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Maybe you really did go to Stanford,” I said.
“I said I did.”
“Just checking.”
“You sound pretty smart yourself. What are you doing walking the streets?”
“We can all use a little extra money.”
He turned up one of those little winding streets off Laurel Canyon. “You’ve done this before,” I said.
“That a problem?”
“Not for me.”
“Let me tell you why I do this,” Smiler said. “You look like a nice lady, so maybe you need to know. I’m a cop.”
“I thought you said you were an actor.”
“Writer, actually. You know, all cops and lawyers in L.A. want to write screenplays.”
“Sure.”
“And what I like to do,” he said, “is talk to the girls. Get to know them so I can write about them. Pay for their time. I’m trying to figure out what it is inside that makes them do what they do. What you do. Because I know it’s not just for the money. You have to have something inside you that is dark and unsettled.”
“You do talk like a Stanford man.”
He laughed again. We were going up the backbone of the hills on a long stretch of road without streetlights. It was a clear night and I could see Hollywood sparkling below.
I wished then I had someone to share this with, someone I wasn’t going to eat. I wondered if I’d ever be able to share a moment like this with anybody again. The answer was obvious. Not in this lifetime, which might never end.
The cop pulled over to the side and killed the engine. The sound of crickets fill the void. A cool breeze blew through the open windows. The smell of sage was delicate on the wind, soft as a promise.
“You know what I like about you?” he said.
“My sunny personality?”
“Fact that you’re thoughtful. That’s really going to make it hard for me to kill you.”
I didn’t flinch. I sort of half expected this. You do this often enough, you’re bound to pick up a sex killer. It’s part of the risk. Except it holds no fear for me. “And you know what I like about you?” I said. “The fact that you’re a thoughtful guy. Only I am not going to feel much of anything, one way or the other, about killing you.”
His smile went the way of the dodo, replaced by a wolfman look. The one he intended to scare me with. His hand went into his rear pocket and came out with a switchblade knife. He flicked it open in front of my face.
“You’re gonna to do exactly what I tell you,” he said. “And if you do, I might just let you go.”
“You don’t have any intention of letting me go, which is a bit of a coincidence, because I don’t have any intention of letting you go, either.”
His nostrils flared, like tulips opening up. “You see what I have in my hand? Do you know that I am going to shove this in your neck, you don’t do what I say?”
“Get serious. You’re not going to bloody up the car. If you’re a cop, you’ve heard of DNA.”
He snorted. “Car’s hot,” he said. “I’m gonna do you, then burn it, with you in it.”
“You’ve thought this through. I think you’ve done this before.”
“Shut up! Take your clothes off. Now!”
“Why would I do that if you’re going to kill me?”
“I can kill you slow, and I will.”
“Listen, blondie, you can’t kill me at all. Say, what’s your hat size?”
Now he got cockeyed. He put the blade point on my neck. “I’m dead serious.”
“You’re half right,” I said.
“Look in my eyes! You know what I can do.”
“You look in my eyes and tell me why your hand is shaking.”
Then he started with the names, the standard epithets sex killers have for their female vics. I yawned. And that’s what pushed him over.
He plunged the knife into my throat.
I yawned again.
For a moment he looked perplexed, like a napper suddenly awakened from a dream.
Then he screamed. He started fumbling around. He left the knife sticking out of my throat. He tried to turn and open his door. I removed the knife and jammed it into his side. He screamed again.
Emily and I went to work. I gave the sharp end a push up into his nose and through the cartilage. His eyes bulged. In one second he was paralyzed.
Another shove and it was lights out for him.
But my work was just beginning.
It’s not easy to get at a brain. There’s a myth floating around that zombies somehow get superhuman jaws and teeth, and can bite through a skull.
Yeah, right.
I get at the brain the way the ancient Egyptians did, by clever use of Emily through the nasal cavity.
Once you get the right traction on a brain you can get most of it. It’s a little like fibrous Jell-O, so you have to have the right touch, which I’ve developed.
Necessity is the mother of deadly skill sets. You don’t get quite all of the brain this way (you’d need a cranial saw and good scooping spoon for that), but it’s quite enough, thank you.
When I finished I checked the trunk. Sure enough, he had a full gas can there. It didn’t take me but two minutes to douse him and the car and set it on fire.
It was dark in the hills, the wind was a whisper. The lights of the city were flickering with life, as if hope were alive.
But it wasn’t for me. And it sure wasn’t for the cop I ate.
CHAPTER 4
But now Traci Ann, apparently another form of walking dead, was being accused of the very crime I committed.
Which raised a whole lot of troubling questions. Slight conflict of interest maybe? Ya think?
But most important, why Traci Ann? What evidence was there that she had been the one? None, there couldn’t be. But I was the only one who knew it.
I told Etta I had to talk to Traci Ann as soon as she came around.
“She only comes out at night,” Etta said. She trembled slightly, and I thought for a moment she might faint.
“Can you hang in there for a little while?” I said.
“I think so.”
“I’ll come back before twilight. I want to be here if the cops come back.”
I made sure Etta lay down to rest, then I hopped in my bug and drove.
It’s one way to think in L.A. We drive. We are a city of cars, though sometimes those cars don’t move. But I find now that getting behind the wheel, with the wind blowing my hair, gives me a sense that I’m alive, even though I’m dead.
I decided to do double duty. As I thought, I pointed the car toward Glendale. Seeing Etta’s distress over her daughter reminded me I hadn’t seen my own mother in a week. She’s a worrier. She thinks I’m not getting enough to eat.
I’ve not sought to set that record straight anytime soon.
As I headed toward the 101 freeway, passing over Sunset Boulevard, I kept trying to put together a picture of why Traci Ann would be a suspect in the cop killing. I’d gotten the first news feed earlier that morning. It was all over the place. The cop’s name was Tom Hennigan. He was indeed a detective, specializing in undercover work.
But the news clips said nothing about his being a sex killer. That little item they missed. Or else someone was hiding the information.
Was Traci Ann being implicated a matter of misidentification by an eyewitness? Maybe somebody saw me getting in the Charger and mistook me for Traci Ann.
But that was unlikely because we looked so different. She wasn’t nearly as tall as I was.
Could it be she was being set up by someone?
That didn’t make sense, either. Traci Ann was a streetwalker who lived with her mother. There was no reason—at least none that sprang to mind—for anyone to go to such lengths for a frame. She could easily have been picked up and killed in quiet.
Then another thought hit me. Hennigan himself. Maybe he was supposed to pick up Traci Ann and kill her. Maybe he was working for someone. Or maybe he had a connection with her already, and that’s why she was a suspect.
Only he picked me up instead. Could he have made a mistake?
These questions couldn’t begin to be answered until I got a chance to talk to Traci Ann. Then at least—
Come to me!
I almost lost control of the wheel. It was the Voice.
I could never tell when it was going to hit, and it seemed to love to pick out times when I needed to think. It strikes deep inside my brain. It varies in strength. And I have to fight it back or it gets stronger.
For some reason, it was strong now.
Come to me!
“Get bent!” I said out loud.
I’d started hearing the Voice the moment I was reupped. And I know enough about real zombie-ism to know that this is the whole raison d’être. It’s so someone can control the zombie, bend them to their will.
The Voice tried to do that to me from the start, but I fought it. I continue to fight it. And when I find out where it’s coming from, I’m going to seriously kick whoever it is right back.
Come! Come!
My head was starting to ache. The Voice sounded angry.
Come!
“No!”
Come, Miss––
“I will not!”
––Uganda.
Uganda? What the—
Come—
“That’s it! You’re getting the treatment.”
No!
“Yes!”
I started humming the theme to Hawaii Five-O. Loudly Nothing gets rid of bad thoughts (or songs you can’t stop thinking about) faster than the Hawaii Five-O theme.
“Bop-bop-bop-bop bah-bahhhh, bop-bop-bop-bop bahhhh—”
Stop!
“Bop-bop-bop-bop ba-BAHHH, bop-bop-bop-bop BAHHH . . .”
No response.
“Bop-buh dawdle lawdle lawdle ee-dah . . .”
Nothing. But I kept on humming out loud for a few miles just in case.
No rest for the wicked, as they say.
No rest indeed, because the next thing that hit me was a flock of birds. Black birds to be exact. The kind Stephen King or Alfred Hitchcock would use.
They came out of the sun and swarmed down around my bug. Not dive bombing me, but making their presence known.
Just as I got to the Glendale Freeway, my arms started jerking the wheel. They cut me into the slow lane. I almost took a motorcyclist out.
This was new. Voice, birds, and a battle for my extremities.
Now I was mad. I reached into the pit of my head and screamed at my brain to make my arms obey me.
It felt like I was arm wrestling with an invisible Stallone.
A big black bird, the biggest I’ve ever seen, cruised right alongside my bug. I was doing about sixty. How could a bird go that fast? I gave it a quick glance and saw it was looking right at me, with big, albino eyes.
Eyes. Eyes like I hadn’t seen since the time I was a girl in the trailer park—
WOOONKKK!
A big old Pepsi truck almost clipped me. Or me it, because my arms were wanting to take me to the left.
I fought back. My arms did what they were told. My foot relaxed.
The birds disappeared. They didn’t fly away. They literally disappeared.
Breathing fast, I felt myself back in control.
The Voice. The birds. The eyes. My own body.
It was all as obvious as a B actress at the Emmys. Someone, or something, was issuing me a warning. We’re watching you, and we are in control.
My head and heart pounded all the way to Glendale.
My mother is Calista Caine. I can best describe her as an ex-hippie who had me rather late in life, leaving what I would describe as a double generation gap. It’s like I’m her granddaughter, even though she’s only thirty-five years older than me.
I can’t relate to her stories of Haight-Ashbury and the Merry Pranksters and the Summer of Love. At least she wasn’t at Woodstock. Thank God she wasn’t, or I’d have another set of nostalgic stories to sit through.
My memories of life as a girl are all lemon swirls and thick gray smoke, my mother being into the color yellow and the plant marijuana. For most of my childhood I saw that her greatest pleasure in life came not from her daughter bringing home an A from school. Or when I learned to ride a bike for myself—thanks to a neighboring father, not her. No, For Calista Caine in those formative days she was into getting leisurely baked and watching re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show.
That was one reason Mom shuttled me off to the local Sunday School when I was eight. It gave her half a Sunday off so she could toss hippie lettuce. It gave me a chance to play with toy arks and start asking questions about a character with whom I’ve developed a very strained relationship, the Lord God Jehovah.
But in those early, hopeful days I would put on biblical epics for my mother, to show her what I’d learned and to get her to pay attention to me. One Sunday night as she reclined on our beat-up sofa, eyes glazed with half lit euphoria, I regaled her with the taking down of the walls of Jericho. Complete with songs. Yes, I was a nascent Andrew Lloyd Webber, a regular little Hammerstein.
“And they marched, marched, marched!” I sang as I high-stepped around in a circle. I kept checking Mom to see if she was listening. Sometimes her eyes would be open, sometimes closed. I thought she fell asleep once, so I sang louder, “And blew their trumpets loud! Oh, yes! They blew their trumpets loud!”
“Not now, honey,” she said.
“Watch out! Watch out! The walls are tumbling down!” I myself fell down in an attempt to symbolize the destruction of the ancient city. As I did, I hit a chair that fell on our dismal little coffee table, which jostled the bong that rested there, which spilled cannabis water on the floor, which caused my mother to scream and, in a very unmellow fashion, grab me by the hair and toss me outside our trailer.
After which she locked the door.
An hour or so later she opened it and I was still crying and she tried to tell me everything was all right. But she smelled like sweet smoke and I knew she wasn’t right in the head. I didn’t want to have a mom like that, but that was the parental card I was dealt. My father, a biker named Harry Clovis, had hit the road shortly after my birth and died a most unglorious death in Mexico. I eventually realized how much that desertion had messed up my mother, and grew a little more charitable toward her as the years went on.
But only a little.
She now runs a bead shop in Glendale, just off Colorado Street in the eastern part of town. I try to stop in unannounced, to catch her doing that thing she does.
Which she was doing.
“Mom, are you getting wasted again?”
She looked up at me from behind the counter. Her long white hair was held in place by a paisley bandana. She was a symphony of beads and tie-dye and Mary Jane.
“Mallory!” Smoke billowed from her nose. She tried to hide the pipe.
“I see it, Mother.” Plus, her eyes were as red as sunrise over Santa Monica.
“I have a medical condition!” Mom said.
“Chronic for the chronic?”
“Well, yes.”
“Uh-huh. What is it this month?”
“Honey, that’s not fair.”
“I don’t want you to overcook your brain, Mom.”
“Why don’t you try some? You won’t be so uptight.”
Yes, Mother still says uptight and sometimes groovy. It’s best to change the subject.
“How’s business?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“That’s very Baba Ram Dass of you, but how is your bottom line? You almost missed your rent last month.”
Mom said, “I get by. What about you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t try to fool your old mother.” She stood up quickly and I realized anew that she still refused to wear a bra. The pronounced jiggle and sway that might have been all the rage at an LSD soaked love-in in 1969 was now a couple of polar bears trying to get out of a tent.
She came around from behind the counter and gave me one of her patented we-are-the-world hugs. God love her, she’s still a true believer in the oneness of all creation. She has no idea her daughter is undead. That would, as they once said, blow her mind.
“Now let me tell you,” Mom said, “that you can have more clients if you’ll only use more visualization.”
“Mom—”
“How do you think I pay my own rent? I see it coming in, and every time, there’s a new or old customer walking through that door.”
