High Life (29 page)
“Couldn’t happen. She doesn’t do the operations by herself. Her father helps her, and he is a surgeon.”
“Was. Doesn’t mean anything. The operation was done before Karen was killed. You said so yourself.”
“What about the spunk? Bit difficult for Bella to come up with that.”
“The come don’t necessarily mean anything. Could be someone wanked into the body after it was dumped. Could be a million explanations. By itself it don’t rule her out.”
“But it could mean someone else was involved.”
“I just bet you got a suggestion.”
“Her father.”
“I don’t like that suggestion.”
“What do you mean, you don’t like it? The guy’s a junkie.”
“It’s been fifty years since you could hang a murder rap on someone just because they like to unwind with something stronger than booze. Don’t get simple on me, Jackie.”
“He’s got a major sex thing going on with Bella. I’m telling you, he could easily have killed Karen in a fit of jealousy over it. He cuts open dogs when he gets pissed off. I’ve seen him do it, exactly the same as Karen was.”
“I got Bella doing the operation illegally—which, by the way, I wasn’t sure of until you told me, ’cause Joey never actually saw who did the cutting. I got similar tattoos and I got a tape of them having some girlie fun. I got nothing between Karen and this guy Powell except what you say. And forgive me, Jackie, but you got what we call in the business a vested interest.”
“But if he’s involved in the kidney thing too, it could just as easily be him.”
“It wasn’t him in that motel room stopping some guy’s heart.”
Ryan shoved himself away from the rail and headed for his car.
“Come on, I want to give you this present. Things have been working out pretty good since you and me hooked up. I want to show my appreciation.”
I didn’t move right away. I watched some gulls circling over a patch of water and thought about Lorn. All I wanted at that moment was to be with her in a big bed, in a room filled with sun, the world shut outside and the smooth whispering of our skin against each other drowning out the shit Ryan kept forcing me to listen to.
“You don’t want to miss out on this, Jackie, believe me.”
But I also knew I couldn’t turn down what he was offering.
The sun, the water, and the blue air all turned to dust on the way to Santa Monica. I followed Ryan’s Plymouth south down PCH and prayed for it to get totaled by a truck.
* * *
Euclid Street. Memories of Karen on a slab. It seemed like a long time ago, but then a lot of things had happened.
The sun was low in the sky as we arrived and the haggard palms made long diagonal shadows across the concrete of the road. We went in the same way as before, down the side ramp. The front office was shut anyhow. Ryan was acting like a guy playing Santa Claus.
The body room hadn’t changed—same fluoro light, same coolant hissing in the same pipes, same TV babble from the attendant’s room. A place out of time, a place where the temperature and the cool motionless air never changed, no matter how many days went by outside.
Ryan whistled and the Japanese guy shambled out to meet us. He looked pleased to see Ryan.
“You got her ready? My friend here’s kinda anxious to start.”
“Sure. She all ready out back. One sweet honey. Say twenny-five, look real nice. Big tits, but she got a lot of hair on her pussy. I have to shave her first, but you western guys maybe different. Anyhow, still plenty fresh. Rigor all gone. Mouth nice and clean so you can kiss her too if you want.”
Ryan handed over a thick fold of cash, the Japanese guy gave him a key and went back to his TV, unwrapping a candy bar.
“Outside again, Jackie, too much traffic in here. They start coming in from rush hour soon.”
He led me out of the body room and around the back of the building to a square concrete construction that looked like it had been tacked onto the main block as an afterthought.
“This is where they used to keep the blacks in the old days. The only time it’s used now is when Kung-fu needs a few bucks. Praise the Lord for more liberal times, eh?”
He used the key on a recessed steel door that was rusting at the corners and pushed his way inside. The place was windowless and the lights were already on. Not fluoros but a line of clear low-watt bulbs that hung from the ceiling on dusty flex and threw an ochre pall down the center of the room. One wall had the same fridge doors as the main building, but there were a lot less of them. The other three walls were marked with trails of powdered plaster that spilled from blisters in peeling green paint. There was a pile of junk in one corner—old paint cans, a tarpaulin, a few pieces of what was probably refrigerator machinery. It looked like they used the place to store shit they couldn’t be bothered to throw away. Today, though, it was going to serve a different purpose. Ryan locked the door behind us.
On a gurney something lay heavy and still and covered with a sheet.
“She’s all yours, Jackie. Whaddya think?”
He pulled the material away with a flourish, like a stage magician. Big tits and a lot of cunt hair. I couldn’t argue, she was good-looking all right, even dead. Along with Karen and the jackhammer girl, this was the third corpse I’d seen. Maybe it was the familiarity, maybe it was because of the photos Ryan had given me, but the sight of her didn’t make me feel like puking or any of the other things you see on TV. Instead it was like when I’d watched Ryan stroking Karen’s pussy—I wanted to touch her, to see what her flesh felt like, to run my hands over her belly and the tops of her thighs. I knew she’d be smoother than any other woman I’d ever been with. My cock felt like it was carved from stone.
“Look at that fucking beard. Let’s see what’s in the middle of it.”
Ryan pulled the woman’s legs apart. One of them swung off the edge of the gurney and made tight rubbery arcs in the air for a few moments. The motion made her pelvis grind.
“Whoa, look at that. She wants it, Jackie. The bitch is dead and she still wants fucking.”
In the center of the dense black hair I could see a pale tear-drop of meat, about the color of skin on a side of beef. I wondered if she’d be slick inside. A smell came off her, but it wasn’t fish. It was more like the fragrance cheap soap leaves behind.
Ryan used his thumbs to pull her open, she looked dry. I spat on my middle finger and pushed it into her. She was tight, but what struck me more was the cold, synthetic feel of her, like she was some injection-molded dummy that had never been alive. She had ridges along her cunt tunnel.
“I bought her just for you, Jackie.”
“You expect me to fuck her?”
“It’s what you want. Might even do her myself after you’ve loosened her up.”
I pulled my finger out of her hole. Before I could wipe it, Ryan grabbed my hand and stuck it under my nose.
“Smell that? Know what it is? That’s the smell of what’s inside you, boy. All the stuff you want to do but don’t. Not because you think it’s bad or wrong or evil, but because you think you might get caught.”
“You don’t know what’s inside me.”
“Oh, you’re wrong there. I spent too many years looking at people. I’ve seen the things they want and there’s nothing that sets you apart from them. Everyone’s the same, only difference is some are less frightened of getting caught than others. I know you want to do it so stop shitting around. Your pants look like they’re gonna rip.”
Ryan was right. I wanted to fuck the woman. I wanted to be on top of that body, pumping away, filling her dead hole with come. And I was going to do it. Right then there was nothing that could have stopped me. Maybe Ryan had set it up to seed another blackmail scam, maybe someone was getting ready to kick in the door and bust me—I didn’t care. In that dingy light my desire to make real what I’d seen in photos was overwhelming.
I moved up to her head and looked at her face—white like the rest of her. Her eyebrows and lashes stood out so starkly they could have been painted on. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was slightly open and I could see the glint of teeth. I kissed her. Her lips gave against mine, but they didn’t spring back, they stayed wherever I pushed them. I forced her mouth open with my tongue and searched for hers, but it had fallen down the back of her throat and I couldn’t reach it. Her teeth were sharp and hard, like small rocks or pieces of bone. I knocked them with my own and her head felt dull, as though all the spaces in it had been filled with cement.
I took my face away and held her breasts, they moved sluggishly under my hands, cold bags of flesh. It was weird knowing I could squeeze them as hard as I wanted and no one would complain—she wouldn’t shout and Ryan certainly wouldn’t move to stop me. But I didn’t do it, I couldn’t spare the time, I had to get my dick inside her.
The gurney was too narrow and too high to be any good as a fuck station so Ryan and I lifted her down. We got the tarp off the junk pile and spread it out first, though, to stop the dust and bits of grit that covered the floor from sticking to her back. When we had her ready I took off all my clothes—I wanted maximum contact. Ryan ran his hand over my ass then sat on the gurney and took a nitro pill.
I got on her. She felt solid and round, like something I’d fall off if I wasn’t careful. My weight on her chest made her sigh, a hollow gust of air that smelled like garbage. Her cunt lips had stuck together again when we moved her and I had to cover my dick with spit before I could get the first couple of inches inside. After that it wasn’t too difficult, except that her pelvis was at the wrong angle and I had to put my arms under her knees and pull them up to her chest.
The impact of my body made her head loll in quarter circles, back and forth with each stroke. With her mouth open it almost looked like she was enjoying herself, but the only sound she made was an occasional gurgle, like she had something trapped deep in her throat. Her cunt was neutral, it didn’t accept or reject my thrusts, it was just there, to be used or forgotten. It felt mostly like a tube of cartilage.
I held onto her as tight as I could and concentrated on sensation, on the feel of her cold thighs against the sides of my chest, her belly and breasts under me, the stale hairspray smell of her hair, the taste of her neck, slightly soapy where it met her shoulders, my dick enclosed in dead tissue. I wanted to drive myself into her and never forget what I found there.
Some time in, Ryan got down off the gurney and started wanking himself over her face. He came pretty quickly and I had a close-up of thick spunk disappearing down her throat. When it was my turn I must have gotten a little too energetic and disturbed something inside her because foamy white liquid started boiling over her chin while I was spurting. I thought maybe she was going to cough herself alive like a drowned person, but it was just some gassy reaction to the shaking I’d given her, and after it was over she was just as dead as before.
I put my clothes back on and stood looking down at her, not really knowing what to do next.
“She liked that, Jackie. Look at her, she’s smiling. Fucking slut. You take her legs.”
We heaved her back onto the gurney and Ryan wheeled it over to a large white sink at the far end of the room. A length of hose was connected to the cold-water tap. He uncoiled it and handed it to me. I didn’t have a clue what he was doing and by this time I didn’t care, I was feeling a little spaced by the whole episode.
“I’ve had enough, Ryan.”
“We gotta wash her out first. Stick that end in her cunt.”
He turned the tap on then came around and took over from me, jetted water into her until it started coming out again in fast swirls that spilled off the gurney and onto the floor. It reminded me of the first time I’d gigged with Rex up in the hills—the masked woman strapped into a harness, blasting douche water out of her ass.
Ryan pulled the hose out and turned it off.
“Okay, get on the gurney and lift her up.”
“Huh?”
“Lift her so she’s standing up. We gotta get the rest of the water out of her.”
“Fucksake. Let’s just go.”
“It’s part of the deal.”
“Christ …”
Doing what he wanted looked like the fastest way out of there so I climbed up and got my hands under her arms. As I lifted, Ryan yanked her legs sideways off the gurney. I almost dropped her and he had to step in and put his arms around her waist. Her legs splayed on the wet floor, but we managed to get her pretty much vertical and water ran out of her gash. Ryan held her open with his fingers so it could happen faster.
“Look, Jackie, she’s doing wee wees.”
When she was empty Ryan turned the tap back on and hosed out her face. It sounded like she was gargling as her throat filled up. We bent her over the gurney to drain her, only there was some kind of blockage and Ryan had to sit on her back to force the liquid out. Bits of food came with it.
Ryan and I split outside the morgue. The episode with the corpse had left me relaxed and kind of floaty and I didn’t want to head back to Malibu straight away. I thought about paying Rex a visit and confronting him about the tape, but there wasn’t much point. It wouldn’t erase what Ryan had already seen. So I drove down to the water instead and parked on Ocean Avenue, near where Karen had been found.
The sun was touching the horizon, bleeding orange light across the water, turning the palms into black cutouts that would have looked good in tourist photos. The place hadn’t changed, the tramps were still lurching alcoholicly from one pointless activity to another, the cardboard shelters still cowered against bushes in the quieter areas.
I phoned Bella to tell her I was heading back and to give her some bullshit about why I’d been gone so long. She was home from her Brentwood clinic, but just about to leave—Powell had a donor lined up. She didn’t have time to speak and told me she’d see me tomorrow. We blew kisses and hung up.
I sat in the Mustang and thought things over. I’d hoped Bella had suspended contact with Powell after he’d taken me to watch the kidney operation, but it seemed now that wasn’t the case. Obviously the lure of a donor was strong enough for her to forgive him, at least temporarily. But why should that be? Providing one more kidney for the less fortunate of Los Angeles couldn’t be reason enough to set aside the anger I’d seen displayed at Apricot Lane. I was missing something. And with Ryan trying to tie her into Karen’s murder, that wasn’t a good thing. Knowing in advance what he might possibly uncover was the only way I’d have a chance to protect her.
I was starting to feel drained from fucking the dead girl. I wanted to go home to Willow Glen and sleep. Instead, I pointed the Mustang up Wilshire, scored half a gram in West L.A., and sat in a Taco Bell for a while killing time and pumping up my blood-sugar levels with cola. When I figured Bella had had long enough to make it to Apricot Lane, I headed there myself. On the way I tuned into a radio show that was running through the various pairings around town.
Kate Moss and Johnny Depp had been seen on Hollywood Boulevard looking happy and relaxed. Lisa Rinna wanted her long-time fiancé to marry her or walk. Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow were still beautifully blond together and almost certainly to wed. Cindy Crawford and her barman boyfriend had just bought a house. Sylvester Stallone and Jennifer Flavin, Arnold and Maria, Pamela and Tommy … On and on, beautiful people doing beautiful things with each other. It depressed me that I wasn’t one of them. Even though I was clocking up screen time on
28 FPS,
I had a long way to go before anyone would be interested in who I was seeing.
I parked on San Ysidro so Bella and Powell wouldn’t hear my engine, put the top up, and did some coke. Then I got a tire iron out of the trunk and walked carefully along Apricot Lane. This far up the canyon they didn’t have street lights and I was glad about the darkness. Down at the dead-end I climbed the fence and managed to work the garage door up high enough to roll under. Inside—the black Jag and Bella’s 850ci.
The steel door to the basement was a bitch to open, especially because I had to worry about noise, but I got it done eventually and made it into the corridor on the other side. It wasn’t hard to remember where the observation booth was—it was the only door that didn’t have a lock. I turned out the lights and stepped quietly into the small space.
Same bright light through the one-way glass. A body on the table, skinny, male, and white. Powell sat at one end, behind the head, doing his anesthetic thing. And Bella worked away in the middle.
This time, though, things had a different feel. Bella moved as swiftly and as carefully as before, but as the operation progressed the sensuality I’d seen hinted at during my first visit to the clinic grew into something more overt. Her hips ground against the edge of the operating table as she cut into the body, forcing her cunt hard against the chrome steel framework, and even though it was difficult to tell because of her gown, I was pretty sure she was pressing her thighs together most of the time. Once or twice she threw her head back and I thought I heard her moan.
Powell looked like he was wanking. I couldn’t see properly because of the angle of the table, but when he wasn’t involved with his gas cylinders his hand dropped between his legs. Unlike Bella, however, it wasn’t the open abdomen of the donor that interested him—his masturbation was fueled by his daughter’s own excitement.
An hour later Bella lifted a kidney out into the world. She let it lie for a while on the man’s chest while she did something inside his guts, then she picked it up and rubbed off the shreds of membrane that clung to it. I waited for her to put it in a container and store it in the fridge like before. But that wasn’t exactly what happened.
She stepped away from the table, pulled her mask down, and examined the organ closely, not like she was looking for anything in particular, but like she wanted to absorb as much of it as she could through her eyes. The surface of it shone under the lights and I could see a delicate network of dark blood vessels embedded in the pale tissue. It moved in her hand like a small slippery sack, something that might fly from her grasp if she squeezed it too hard.
She hiked up her gown and turned to rest her ass against the edge of the operating table, she was naked underneath and her cunt hair looked like coal against the halogen burnout of her skin. For a minute she played lazily with the kidney, running it over herself in slow strokes—across her belly, up the insides of her thighs, leaving a trail of rosy smears. Then she got serious, reached between her legs, held the lips of her cunt apart, and began rubbing it against her exposed meat. Her knees trembled and I heard clearly a sound in her throat.
Powell had rolled his stool out from the end of the table so he could see better and was pounding away at his long white cock. But the scene in the operating room wasn’t a shared experience. Bella was occupied only with herself, with the sight and feel of the pink organ sliding between her labia and over her clit. As she pressed harder, red juice ran between her knuckles and dripped from her wrist.
After a while she started to shudder too much to stay standing. She lay down on the floor with her knees hard up against her chest. I could see straight into her cunt. The blood and the small rolls of tissue that were beginning to break off the kidney made it look like a wound. Her moans became continuous and her hand started to blur.
At the end of it all she shrieked and jammed the thing inside herself. Powell lurched upright and spurted seed across the floor, then collapsed back on to his stool and sat looking at her as though he wanted to get up and hold her, but knew she would not allow it. Bella lay where she was, breathing deeply with her eyes closed, stroking the outside of her pussy and the short curve of kidney that protruded from it. Nothing happened for maybe thirty seconds then Powell checked a couple of gauges and said something. Bella stirred, looked around like she wasn’t sure where she was, then pushed herself to her feet and stood braced against the edge of the table, head drooping over the donor’s open abdomen. The kidney fell out of her and landed heavily on the floor. She stared at it until Powell spoke again, then shook herself, put on a fresh pair of gloves, and started stitching up the man on the table.
I got out of the observation room, out of the clinic, and walked back to the Mustang. I didn’t notice what the night was like around me, I was too busy assimilating.
The story Bella had spun me about helping the homeless with medical care and low-income people on kidney waiting lists hadn’t really been so bad as far as murder linkage was concerned, even if the operations were illegal. But now it was obvious I’d been bullshitted. Cutting “donors” open to use their kidneys to wank with kind of fucked the philanthropic cover story she’d used to sucker my acceptance of her extracurricular medical activities—the organs wouldn’t be much use to anyone after being stuffed up her cunt. Add the fact that she wasn’t qualified to perform that kind of surgery and you had a level of suspicion that was up there with Powell’s doggie antics. Not such a great development when Mister Frightening was doing all he could to upscale his Malibu contact.
I didn’t feel like hanging around Willow Glen or Malibu by myself, so I figured I’d make the trip to Rex’s that I’d put off before. My anger toward him over giving the tape to Ryan had burned itself out, but I still felt a little face-to-face was called for. I turned the key and L.A. went by outside my car windows—lush trees under a night sky that glowed with reflected light, as though the molecules of air over the city had absorbed so much of its scrabbling desire they phosphoresced with it now of their own accord.
Rex answered his door out of it. As soon as I saw his pinned eyes and his drooping face I knew I shouldn’t have bothered, there was nothing I could hope to gain. I couldn’t say anything that would make him my friend again or that would persuade him to reduce his drug use and save himself from what he obviously intended to be a terminal degeneration.
I wanted to make him feel bad for hurting me with the videotape, but there was no way the notion of remorse was going to penetrate the cloud of smack and disaffection that wrapped his head. Still, I was there, it would have been a wasted journey if I didn’t at least try.
He gave me a dead look for a couple of seconds at the door then went into the lounge and sprawled on what was left of the sofa.
“I guess you were gonna show up sometime. Get your whining over with and get out.”
“You don’t think I’m entitled?”
“You should have paid me more.”
“Giving Ryan that tape could have fucked everything for me.”
“I didn’t give it to him, I sold it.”
“Yeah, I figured, but why?”
“I needed money.”
“Did you watch it first?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I would have given you money. Jesus, man, we were friends.”
“Because I can’t stand the way you look at me. You think I’m fucking up, but I’m not. What I’m doing is the only sane response to life in this city. You’re so fixated with your TV bullshit you’re incapable of seeing it.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds but I knew he wasn’t seeing me.
“I ought to kick the shit out of you.”
“I wouldn’t feel it. But if you want something else to make you feel important you could leave some money on your way out. I’d feel what that’d buy.”
I stood there for a while trying to decide on a course of action. In the end I gave up, there was no way to get satisfaction. In that kind of situation words and violence are equally ineffective.
Before I left I tossed a wad of bank notes into his lap. I don’t know why. Maybe I did it just because I could. Maybe I thought it would shame him. I don’t know.