High Life (27 page)

“But you were earning good money. And no one’s ever going to catch you for that boy. I mean, can’t you just think yourself out of this? You could clean up.”

“Don’t be an idiot. There’s nothing to go back to.”

“Are you angry about the other day?”

“Like I said, nothing’s any better or any worse than anything else. But, yeah, it was kind of a shitty thing to happen. Where is your friend, anyway? Shame he’s not here, we could do it all over again.”

“Jesus, Rex …”

“No, man, I mean it. I like being degraded further than I can manage myself. It’s an added bonus to a dull afternoon.”

“Why did you set me up?”

“You’re pissed off with me?”

“You could have warned me. I’m in a vulnerable place right now.”

“He had a fucking gun. What did you want me to do, die for you?”

“You could have dropped a hint.”

Rex started laughing when I said this. It started out sarcastic but it ended up sounding sad. He shook his head slowly, then took a wrap out of his pocket and tapped some smack into a spoon. We were in the same room, but he was a million miles away. At that moment I knew I could spend the rest of my life trying to reconnect and I’d never do it. The guy was gone.

“Rex, I need you to hold onto something for me. I can’t risk Ryan tossing my place and finding it. Can you do that for me?”

“I could be persuaded.”

“You want money?”

“Like I told you, man, we don’t take love here no more.”

“Okay, I’ll pay. Do you want to know what it is?”

“Just give me the money and leave it.”

“I’m sorry about what happened with that kid. And with Ryan. But it wasn’t my fault, you know?”

“Who said it was?”

“You’re acting like it.”

Rex shrugged and started cooking up. I dropped the tape and all the cash I had on me next to him on the couch.

“It’s important that it stays safe, Rex.”

He was too busy with his lighter and spoon to answer.

“Rex?”

“I said I’d look after it. Now can you please fuck off?”

* * *

Back in Laurel Canyon, Willow Glen looked good. It looked like the home of a young star on the rise, maybe someone who’d just moved from a video soap to his first feature role as support. An optimistic place full of light and excitement and youth.

I had a shower and a Coke, then sat up close to the TV and watched a tape of an old Escape commercial, the one with a couple dreamtiming on a boat and a small jetty. Drifting images of happiness and ease. I wanted to be the guy with his thick dark hair and his confidence and his solid unthreatened existence. I wanted to be the girl with her unassailable beauty, her excitement and laughter, that flash of white bikini between her legs.

I had the ad back to back for half an hour. Ten minutes into it I got up and stuck my photos around the edge of the screen. It made an interesting juxtaposition. Dead bodies and a perfect way to live. I jerked off and spurted over everything.

Bella called while the tape was still playing. I watched my come drip on the floor while we spoke. She told me she loved me. She told me the payoff to Ryan went fine. She told me he was coming out to Malibu the next day with a present for us both.

When I put down the phone I felt cold. The present was another tape, apparently, not of us, but of some other people doing wrong. Bella said it was the best thing that could happen because it would give us something incriminating to use against him. I knew that he wasn’t that stupid and that he’d have his own dangerous reasons for this continued contact with her. Same as I knew Bella had begun to play a game of her own with him. It dawned on me that evening that I had lost the ability to influence events in my own life.

I walked around the house for a while. Then I lit a cigarette, turned on the pool lights, and went outside to look at the patterns on the surface of the water. A breeze made the fronds of the palms in the garden rustle.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The toilets at Sub were unisex stalls—black laminate walls with swirls of glitter embedded in them. Lorn and I shared one and did a reasonable amount of the coke I’d brought with me—I’d cut it with a little white smack, but I didn’t think she needed to know that. Then we kissed and I fingered her, but it didn’t mean anything and we went out into the main bar area, got drinks, and hung out.

Lorn knew a lot of the people there and after half a vodka and lime she wandered off to mix with the famous. It was a big place—bars, dance floor, a raised dining layout—and pretty soon I lost sight of her.

I stayed where I was and watched another race at play. They glowed, they possessed a vitality the rest of the world was denied. Their eyes shone, their hair was good, they moved easily in perfectly fitting clothes. And when they talked it wasn’t about the weather or how the car needed fixing, but about things that were monumental—six weeks shooting in the Andes, a crowd shot that involved two thousand extras, the manipulation of astronomical amounts of money—lives lived every minute of every day at high speed.

There was a hierarchy, it was unmistakable. Whenever a particularly big name entered, the whole place paused and turned toward the doors. But even the lowest of the ranks there, those on the periphery of the film industry, had lives so much better than the millions who scrabbled in the city outside, it was impossible to believe they shared the same planet.

Sub was better than the reception at the Bradbury building, better than being on the Warner lot. This was where people who had their faces on billboards came to be with others like themselves.

I didn’t see Lorn again that night and I didn’t make an effort to meet anyone. It was enough to be there, to feel their otherness around me. I left quite early, afraid too much exposure might overwhelm me.

One last drink at the bar. The barman looked at me for a moment then asked hadn’t he seen me on
28 FPS?
His question almost short-circuited my head, and as I left through the metal-flake entrance hall, pretty well ripped on booze and blow, past the crowd that had gathered celebrity-spotting in the warm night air, my blood fizzed with the knowledge that I had taken the first steps toward belonging.

* * *

The morning, though, was different. I woke feeling uneasy and hungover. The euphoria that had wrapped me at the club was gone. Instead, my guts were knotted with a gnawing anxiety at the prospect of Ryan’s Malibu visit.

I hauled myself out of bed and fell into the pool. I floated facedown. But it wasn’t enough to blot him out, so I blew air and sank to the bottom. And lay like a corpse, looking up through ten feet of water at a warped and distant sun. I wanted to stay down there, insulated from all the dangers of the planet, the whole fucking hassle of living—but after a while water pressure and lack of air made me feel nauseous, so I got out.

On the ground floor at Malibu.

“I know a guy in the security business. He passes things on from time to time.”

We were sitting in front of a TV—me, Ryan, and Bella. Outside it had started to rain. People on the slopes were probably freaking at the unseasonable wetness and worrying about mud slides, but in that room the rain just drew things closer around us—the heavy stone walls, the furnishings, Bella’s protective isolation.

Ryan’s latest cassette was in the machine and ready to run. He held the remote and talked to Bella like I wasn’t there. It was obvious he was fixating, that he thought he had a chance with her. I’d watched him take things in when he’d turned up half an hour earlier—the house, her BMW, the pool, the acreage of the grounds. His eyes had catalogued possessions, and the desire I saw exploding in him confirmed my fear that allowing him up to Malibu wasn’t the smartest move Bella could have made. But then, she didn’t know him as well as I did.

“When I saw that stunt with the guy in the motel I knew you’d be into what I’ve got here.”

He looked at me and kept his face straight.

“What was your name again?”

“Jack.”

“Jackie, yeah, that’s right. Well, this is a few steps further down the road so to speak, but I have a feeling you’re a man who appreciates extremes. And I expect that goes double for Beauty here.”

He smirked at Bella and started the tape.

“This came out of a security camera. The girl’s some Hispanic who cleaned the joint after hours.”

On screen two men in ski masks walked into view carrying shotguns and shoulder satchels. They looked tense, wired for signs of danger. Glass-fronted display cases bordered the space around them, evidently the showroom of a small jewelry store. From our point of view, looking down from a corner of the ceiling, it was possible to see the lower corner of a door open. The feet of a woman walking backwards came through it. She was dragging a vacuum. One of the men lunged half out of shot and wrestled a pretty Mexican girl into view. She looked about twenty and had great hair that shone even on videotape.

They hit her a few times and pointed their guns at her. She had blood on her mouth and the crotch of her jeans went dark as she pissed herself. One of them used wide adhesive tape to gag her and bind her hands behind her back, the other one pushed up her T-shirt and rubbed her tits. Even in the terror of the situation the way they swung looked sexy. When he’d finished having his feel he hit her so hard on the side of her head that her legs buckled and she slid to the floor. She just sat there looking vacant, like her brain was off somewhere else, desperately rerouting in an effort to restore function.

The guys started on the business of the day and Ryan fast-forwarded through five minutes of display case smashing and jewelry theft.

“All this is just straight robbery bullshit, but things start to happen just about … here.”

The figures on the screen stumbled back to normal speed. Their bags were full and the showroom was trashed, bits of glass and wood everywhere. The girl had curled up on the floor, trying to be invisible. But she couldn’t quite manage it and as the men started to head out of shot one of them paused and said something to the other. He checked his watch then dropped his bag and together they began stripping her. She tried to struggle but after a few kicks in the stomach she stopped and they draped her facedown over the remains of a display case. Both men got their cocks out and the taller of the two started giving it to her in the cunt from behind. The other guy stood in front of her face wanking and rubbing the end of his hard-on across her eyes and over the tape that covered her mouth. He had a hunting knife in his free hand.

The men moved faster. The guy in the saddle fucked so hard the display case rocked and the one with the knife looked like he was trying to pull his dick out of his body. A few seconds later he spurted over the girl’s face, did up his pants, and stood with his knife under her chin, looking at his buddy like he was waiting for a sign. It came soon enough, a rapid nodding of the head, and probably a lot of shouting too, but there was no sound on the tape so I couldn’t hear it. The guy with the knife cut the girl’s throat. Blood came out of her neck in a wave and made a wide path across the floor. She shuddered violently like she was having a fit, dragging her tits across broken bits of glass that still stuck from the sides of the display case. The guy fucking her slammed in a few final times then threw his head back. From what I could see through the hole in his mask it looked like he was howling.

After the men left, the girl’s body flopped about weakly once or twice, like a fish dying.

“Ever seen anything like that before, Jackie?”

He knew I had. He knew I’d stood with him and watched a girl get taken apart with a jackhammer.

“How about you, Beauty?”

“Of course not.”

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Too primitive, no distance, no control.”

“Jackie?”

I didn’t answer. Ryan chuckled.

Bella got up and killed the TV. Ryan tracked her, his eyes pushing into the creases of her body.

“Maybe it was too much for you, Beauty. Maybe injecting people is okay, but killing them crosses the line.”

Bella stood in front of him, all of her body behind her cunt, like she had a hard-on.

“You’d be surprised at the lines I’ve crossed.”

Then she lifted her skirt and let him eat her. When she’d faked an orgasm she had me fuck her on the floor while Ryan watched and wanked himself. I felt his come splat across the cheeks of my ass.

Later, after we’d cleaned up, she called the limo and we went over to some vegetarian place in Rustic Canyon for food. The restaurant had only recently opened and the air stank of money. It was too early for the dinner crowd, but there were still plenty of sleek-looking industry types in professionally selected clothes and five-figure watches winding up working lunches. They used a lot of hand movement when they talked. Cell phones went off every thirty seconds.

Ryan took it all in with the same hungry look he’d had on his face when he walked into Bella’s house. Watching him sitting there, talking to her like a normal human being, was unsettling. I knew that he was simply not going to let things go at fifty grand now. An expensive restaurant, the house at Malibu, sex with Bella—these were all tastes of a world that would possess him as much as it did me. I couldn’t understand Bella. She was too smart to misread him, to pigeonhole him as some petty criminal of limited threat, but that’s what she appeared to be doing.

I ordered grilled fish. It was the closest thing they had to meat.

Me and Ryan, alone in the men’s room. Our dicks out at a glass urinal that had fish swimming behind it. Mr. Frightening and me. I was glad that my clothes were so much better than his. I looked like I belonged, Ryan looked like he got lost on his way to a beer joint. It gave me an illusion of security.

But it didn’t last.

“I’m getting closer, Jackie.”

“To what?”

“Hand-job first, then today. Next step’s gotta be some deep mattress action, whaddya say?”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Oh, Jackie, don’t tell me you’re upset. I thought it’d turn you on. Maybe if I’d killed her and taken a video you’d find it more exciting.”

“Fuck off.”

“I saw that hard-on in your pants. I bet if you’d been in that jewelry store you’d have stuck your dick in her neck.”

“You’re disgusting, Ryan.”

We’d stopped pissing but our dicks were still out. Ryan reached across and took hold of mine. He squeezed and looked into my eyes.

“I can pull it off or I can stroke it. It’s up to you. I like it up here with the money. It’d be smart for you to make things easy for me. You know I can send you straight back to selling your ass any time I want.”

I pulled my dick out of his hand and zipped up, but he didn’t stop.

“You and me are partners, don’t forget it. You think I’m going to stand around with nothing, while you suck up everything she puts in front of you? I’m entitled, boy. I spent my life cleaning up other people’s shit and I’m fucked if I’m going to miss out on this.”

He stepped away from the urinal, fists clenched, dick still hanging out of his pants. His breathing was ragged and he was sweating. I knew whatever Bella gave me, whatever life she made possible for me, was never going to be safe as long as he was around.

“Take a pill and put your dick away.”

“I got a lever on her, Jackie, and I’m gonna use it till it’s all used up. You can come along for the ride, or you can go back to the gutter. It’s up to you.”

“You’re underestimating her if you think she’s going to keep paying out for that tape.”

“See, now that’s the kind of approach that’s gonna keep us tight, you giving me useful advice. I like that about you, Jackie—you learn fast. But don’t you worry, that tape was only a foot in the door. Shit don’t happen in isolation. All I gotta do is look around a little more and something else’ll turn up, you can bet on it.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and shook me. I thought maybe he was going to kiss me, but right then a guy came in and Ryan just zipped up and walked out. I stood in front of the mirror for a little while, looking at the lines on my face, listening to the sound of piss going down the drain.