Bullets of Rain (32 page)

    

    

    Her extremities were beginning to announce pain. More pain, new pain; every time she opened her eyes it was to a revised catalog of hurts and wounds. She deduced she was still nude, still sitting on the sofa. Price had been right about psychologically unmanning her.

    "Look in the mirror and tell me what you see." Price's voice again, lectoring.

    Her captors were bulked out in sweaters and coats, holding forth from the only secure shelter for miles. It was almost logical… but for the body count and mayhem damage, let alone the sadistic craziness capering around in Price's head. At the height of the storm she would have opened her door to any of them. In fact, she had, to most of them, at least once already.

    Price, she'd never invited inside.

    "I know you are contused and hurt and angry and lost." Price was reading the note from the bottle found on the beach. "And it pains me, yadda-yadda, et cetera, and so on… the things I flee! I should do, versus the things I know I must do." Sound of the page riffling. "Well, it's a little purple, but it sounds like it was from the heart."

    "Just stop it." Michelle, speaking from somewhere else in the room. "This isn't funny anymore."

    "Come on. Look in the mirror. Tell me what you see."

    It was a trick, a joke, a dodge using one of the framed photos of Lorelle from the hallway.

    Until the image of Lorelle blinked when the naked woman on the couch blinked, and felt her pain at the same time.
Your ballroom days are over, baby.

    "So, now who's delusional?"

    Supremely satisfied with himself, Price rose to stretch and take a turn around the room. En route he pulled the cigarette out of Dina's mouth, took a lordly puff, and stuck it back where he found it. "Man, I wish I could've been a fly on the wall when those navy yahoos showed up. That must've been choice. Bet you acted like a serial killer with a cellarful of half-eaten schoolkids."

    "They assumed we were, you know, gay," said Suzanne. "You could see the expression on that Suthrin guy's face, like, yikes- dykes!"

    "And all you really had up your bum at that moment was ole Bryan, the Bry-Guy. Shit, Lorelle, why didn't you just tell the story the way it was, as in: This nutcase drove through my garage door and tried to tenderize me with a ballbat?"

    It was an excellent question, but forcing words out still felt to Lorelle as though a barbell was resting on her chest, bowing her ribs.

    "Okay, I'll admit I dropped little Suze on you like a bomb," Price said. "And telling Luther to call you 'Art' and act like you were a guy was a bit of a stretch, but I also told him he would win a whole bunch of pretty guns when we were through. But the navy guys, they were a wild card. At least they brought us a sturdy vehicle."

    Now she realized just how Price had evacked his coterie of intimates.

    "So who needs the reality check here, Lorelle, I mean, really?"

    The more important question was, what would have changed?

    Probably nothing. Price still would have come, on time and on target. She would still be sitting here, a prisoner in her own house, doped on the sofa with cold air stinging her bare butt.

    And tears coursing down her face. Luther had helped her, but he had been in on the lie. In the end all he wanted was a kiss as he died. So many people had been hurt. Price was a maker, one of those sinister malefactors who pulled you into his orbit and stirred the ingredients out of perversity, what the older writers once called a usurer. Lorelle hated people who seemed to have everything figured out. It made it that much tougher on everybody else in the world.

    "You used everybody," she managed to say, almost choking.

    '
Xxcuse-moi
," said Price. "I'm not the one who told the navy guys Suzanne was my wife. And you just caught that fly and ran with it, didn't you? I'm the guy who wound her up and sent her out. Oh, please, 'Art,' give a cute woman a safe harbor from all this madness… Darling, I'm the only guy you can trust."

    Suzanne did a sort of clumsy curtsy, smiling at Price. Lorelle thought of Suzanne pretending to be more disabled than she had been, feigning drugged sleep, popping black capsules and doing educated inventory on the contents of the gun safe while she and Luther tried to keep the savages from the battlements.

    "Oh, get over yourself, Suzanne," Dina said from the bar, snubbing her smoke and instantly firing up a new one. She had to cup her hand to keep the drafts from snuffing the flame.

    
It was Price's idea,
Suzanne had said, between acts.
Fucking with you. I said no, but… you can't say no to him.

    Echoes of their lovemaking scuffed her memory. Lorelle had become her own husband, then cheated on herself.

    "What did you do to her?" she said.

    "Our Suzanne?" Price wrapped an arm around her and she rubbed against him like a cat. Her black eye, her split lip were still real. "I gave her what she wanted. I do that for practically everybody, haven't you noticed?'' He kissed the bruised orbit of her eye, the edge of her mouth, demarcated in dried blood. "Suzanne wants to be an actress, more than anything, right, sweetie?"

    She purred and squeezed his groin.

    "Please, spare us," Dina said, blowing smoke with disgust.

    "You see before you the classic actress-model dynamic in play here," said Price. "I could have picked Dina to throw at you, but that was dicier. I saved her for backup. When you didn't come on to her in the upstairs bedroom, back at the party, I knew I was dealing with-you should pardon the expression-a man of substance. Nobody else could have said no to Dina when she turns on the waterworks." Price scrunched his pitted face into an alarming parody of grief. "Sniff, sniff… am I pretty? ''

    "Shut up, Price." Dina was annoyed by the instant replay.

    "So you're all like a traveling mime troupe," said Lorelle. "If I give you spare change, will you go away?"

    Price lit up. "That's funny! Humor in the midst of travail. Honey, you're truly a special person. I mean that sincerely. Yep, we're all just mimes, walking against the wind. Tonight, especially."

    "I want you to get out of my house," said Lorelle.

    "Hey, action bulletin: You're not in charge anymore. You think you have the balls to force me, why, then point that mirror at your crotch. Besides, I haven't told you the best part yet." He was clearly reveling in his own schemata.

    All the prep, her planning and hoarding, had come to nothing. Threat had strolled right into her fortress and put a gun to her head, if only figuratively. Real security was a social illusion, a nonverbal contract. If Luther's story was to be believed, he had watched a spectral assassin try to pluck a guy buried in more personal security than Lorelle had ever imagined. Everything was just a matter of deception, the spin of the story told. Lorelle had been living her own lie until Price had come along to puncture it, like some obscene civil servant. People buried their pain in lies when they could not handle the truth. But people wanted to buy into fantasy; Lorelle had anted up when she'd first let Suzanne into the house, and believed her story.

    "You saw all those people at the house," said Price. "Full up with their own hipness. So edge they could cut a turd into single servings like a Tootsie Roll, fresh from the sphincter."

    "Gross," said Suzanne, scowling.

    "Everybody wants to project the image of what they want to be. Nobody is happy being what they are. Except for you, the hermit up the beach. You were so fresh and pure, compared to all the other basket cases, that I couldn't stop thinking about you. I had to rattle your cage, this neat bubble you've sealed yourself into. Because messing with the entry-level humans at the party was totally predictable; bound to get dull. Look at you now. This is all pretty thrilling, right? Sex, drugs, adventure, risk. What was all your target practice for, if you never wondered what you'd do in a crisis? I'm your fucking angel, lady. You're my masterpiece. Are you excited?"

    "Have to use the bathroom," Lorelle said.

    "I think I have to throw up," Dina added, by way of critique on Price's speechifying.

    "How's the can?" Price asked Suzanne.

    "Clean. I scoped it out before you got here."

    "Yeah, but a lot's happened since then, and I want to make sure a stray firearm didn't find its way under the washcloths." Price folded his arms.

    "I bagged all the bullets in a pillowcase," said Suzanne. "Guns, too. The gun safe is empty."

    "Good girl. What about Luther's piece?"

    "Got it. Accounted for."

    "Suze? Were the guns in the safe loaded?"

    "Not anymore," she returned. "I cleaned them out, clips and chambers. Luther's, too." Daddy had apparently taught little Suzanne quite a lot about firearms.

    Price looked at Lorelle. "All loaded? Anybody that didn't know you better might think that was a touch paranoid."

    Lorelle's eyes tried to see into the dark corners of the room. They hadn't mentioned the shotgun.

    "What about weapons at Spilsbury's?" said Michelle.

    Price shook his head. "Just crap they used to make spears and shit out of. Curtain rods and bamboo poles and shit."

    The Benelli riot gun had to have a round or two left, but where was it hiding? It had hit the floor and skidded away in the dark when Luther died. She tried to calculate possible trajectories and realized she was most likely sitting right on top of it. If they hadn't found it, it had to be under the middle sofa of the three-group.

    The house heaved again, holding itself down against the storm and the force of the moving masses of air trying to tear it free of the earth. Price whistled in awe.

    "So tell me about Malcolm, dear. How did that go down?"

    Lorelle just returned Price's glare, dully. How was she supposed to casually check beneath the sofa for the shotgun?

    "You know-Malcolm. Shaved his head, wearing a little skull he liberated? I can drag his carcass back in here if you need reminding."

    "He was on the road home."

    "Managed to mess up your Jeep, too, from the story his little tribal brothers told. They dragged him in out of the storm, played spy-spy on you while you were stalking around downstairs at that house that isn't there, much, anymore."

    A thick, deadly pain was sliding around the occipital cup of Lorelle's skull like quick-dry cement, petrifying her neck muscles. It was as though Art's imagined rattlesnake had slithered up into her head to coil around her brain, suffocating it with constriction, holding its venom in reserve for later.

    "I didn't know it was Malcolm," said Lorelle. "I didn't know Malcolm."

    "Sure you did," said Price. "You were standing in his hair in my bathroom. You need to know a little more about some of the people you've helped to kill." He moved closer and hunkered down. "Now, Malcolm made a lot of noise about writing the great American punk chronicle, but never managed to produce any copy. In other words, a total amateur, one of those, you know"-Price affected the
duhh
manner of a chimp fathoming a calculator, tapping his temple-"those I've got this swell idea guys, the guys that never seem to get the swell idea out of their creative little heads? What Malcolm actually was, was the world's longest-running temp worker. His whole life was made of leftovers, so he invented this fantasy about being a brilliant writer the world just wasn't cool enough to understand, which is a lot more romantic and interesting, and probably got him laid once in a while. But he wasn't up to it. Never was. Total amateur."

    Malcolm's story was another unfinished book, like the novel Lorelle had begun decanting from her own head, the fragment that still resided in a box in the back room, never to be completed.

    "Tobias was his war chief, in the New World Order on this here beach. When Malcolm went into your house, but didn't come out, I think Tobias nominated himself as tribal leader, and after a bit of squabbling and a few head wounds, he probably took charge. Quite different from loitering at Starbucks with a laptop, hoping someone will ask what you're doing. Proactive, as they say. Tobias-I think he wore the fake leopard skin-was an account yuppie for a firm called Bryanstone Partners. They'll have to call for a temp, come Monday. Too bad Malcolm's not available. There was another one, too, called Ricou, I think. He was in a band called Pinch, which will most likely be needing a new drummer after tonight."

    "I didn't have anything to do with the others. I didn't even see them." She still perceived things through a turbid fog, and her head ached with the slightest nudge. It was exactly like the epic hangovers she had felt, during the time when she drank to anesthetize memory.

    "Where is the dog?" She felt low, having not thought of Blitz, who might be dead by now. Another victim of Price's "truths."

    "Still in the garage," said Price. "We opened that door a crack and it filled up with snarly doggy, all snapping and fangs, so we figured on keeping that one shut and going for Door Number Two. That dog was literally foaming at the mouth."

    "Don't hurt him."

    Price looked offended. "That would be low, to hurt an animal, man. Unless it tried to bite you. Which, I suppose, explains Malcolm."

    "He tried to get in." The surging pain was melding with the amoebic light plus whatever drugs Price had put into her, all oozing toward a critical mass that felt like thumbs pressed hard against her eyeballs. It was tough to force whole sentences out.

    "All they had to do was knock, right? See, they were no longer civilized. We are, and we walked right in. Door was open for us, in fact. There's a lesson there, somewhere." Price shrugged. "No matter. Before Malcolm and his crew came your way, they decided to storm the cabana," said Price. "Just burst in and started raping and pillaging. Very Visigoth, all hard-ons and bloodlust. So you got this fuck-chamber full of inked-and-pierced ne'er-do-wells, all lolling through their idea of Extreme Sex… and they screamed and ran away into the storm like kindergartners, the ones that weren't tied or cuffed, anyway. God, I wish I could have seen their faces."