High Life (33 page)
Lorn had a friend in Hawaii who sent her ice sometimes—totally cool that morning, as my fucked-up sleep the night before had left me less than chirpy. We smoked it in a glass pipe that looked like something out of a chemistry set. An amphetamine variant that lasts and lasts. Enhanced brain speed, pumped up physical performance, improved concentration. An excellent drug that hadn’t spread well because it was too cheap for dealers to make anything like they would on crack. They say you start to hear voices if you do too much, but then they’ll say anything.
James moaned that we were rushing when we got in front of the camera so we had to balance things out a little with a lude or two. By lunchtime we were faking normality pretty well—on an open-air bus that took tourists around various Hollywood death spots. We asked the driver questions and generally fucked around in the style demanded of presenters on that type of show.
At the end of the day Lorn wanted me to go with her to some Korean bathhouse she’d discovered. The thought of floating around naked and pretending nothing existed but her body and the heat and the water was enticing, but I couldn’t do it. Things at Malibu were approaching critical mass and I couldn’t risk being away too long. Also, I felt kind of responsible for Powell and I knew if I didn’t give him his shot no one else would.
Driving back I thought about Rex. Right then, sitting stoned in a dark room with the TV on twenty-four hours a day seemed like a reasonable response to the nineties when you compared it with the anxiety generated by most other ways of living. Of course, you’d have to be careful which shows you picked to watch. Documentaries, nature programs, shows about poor people—they’d be okay, you wouldn’t be confronted by any great difference between your lifestyle and theirs. But you’d have to stop yourself thinking about what great lives the producers had, and the directors, cameramen, presenters … And you’d have to be majorly careful not to flip onto anything from Spelling or Starr.
I called him on my mobile but it sounded like he’d been disconnected. Not much of a surprise, considering.
Back at Malibu I got Powell’s dose together and went straight to the basement. He had a strip of duct tape across his mouth now, but apart from that nobody seemed to have done much for him. Parts of his suit jacket were dark with sweat and there was a pool of piss over by one wall, as far away as he’d been able to squirt it from where he was cuffed. I thought about giving him some water, but I didn’t want to take the tape off, so I just fixed him and went upstairs.
They were waiting for me, sitting at a round walnut table in a room that had a view of forest going vague in the twilight. It looked like they’d been there some time.
“Jackie, we were just talking about you. You were right all along. DNA makes Powell our man.”
“You got the results?”
“A half hour ago, he matches the spunk. Me and Beauty here been deciding on an appropriate course of action.”
“Arrest him, of course.”
“That’s not our favorite option.”
“What are you talking about? You have to.”
Bella cut in.
“Jack, things are complicated. For all of us. I admit, having him arrested was my first thought too, but it’s not something we can do. He’s too closely connected to me.”
“But you didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
“Of course I didn’t. But certain of my interests would not be looked on favorably by the police. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”
“What she means, Jackie, is she’d end up getting busted as well. Karen’s death is linked to the kidney operations too tight for them not to come out, and they aren’t something anybody’s going to turn a blind eye to. Plus, you can never really figure which way an investigation’s going to go. Even if it starts off everyone’s for Powell on the murder, things could get twisted around. Maybe Beauty being rich pisses some cop off, maybe a piece of evidence gets interpreted different from how I see it. Who knows? What’s for sure is if we go with the law, all of us’ll get fucked one way or another. Beauty’ll do time for her operations alone, and the best you can hope for is withholding evidence—and they won’t have much trouble upscaling that to accessory after the fact. Not to mention that with Bella gone you could hardly expect to maintain your current lifestyle.”
“Not to mention that any investigation would turn up your blackmailing.”
“Good, Jackie, you got a handle on things—we’re all in it together.”
Bella put her hand on mine and spoke gently.
“It sounds ghastly, but there really is only one thing we can do.”
She paused and shook back her hair as though she was trying to be very brave. “We have to kill him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. There’s no other way.”
“You honestly want to kill him?”
“You’ve seen what he does to dogs. I’m sure Ryan can describe what he did to Karen if you want. He’s unstable. What do you think he’s going to do if we don’t deal with him? He won’t have a choice, he’ll have to kill us all.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go to jail.”
“I’m sure Ryan has the necessary expertise to avoid anything like that.”
“He’s going to do it?”
Ryan put his elbows on the table and leaned toward me. “Sure I am, Jackie. For another million bucks, who wouldn’t? Besides, I got my own reasons.”
“You’re getting another million dollars?”
“Beauty’s promised it for services shortly to be rendered, and I don’t have a problem trusting her. But what we really need to discuss, Jackie boy, is your part in the action. See, I’m gonna need a little help.”
“No fucking way.”
Ryan put a surprised expression on his face. “Why, Jackie, don’t be churlish.”
“You don’t need me. You could do it better by yourself.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I do need you. See, I don’t want you walking away from this thinking you’re all uninvolved, and maybe a few years down the line getting an uncontrollable urge to talk. Nope, I’ll feel a whole lot more comfortable with you nice and tied in. And it ain’t only that. You’re sucking up rewards left, right, and center—a house here, a car there, your own little TV show—and I’m fucked if I’m gonna carry the load for your life as well as my own. It’s time to make a contribution, boy.”
“No.”
“You don’t have to pull the trigger, just be there to help, hold him down if he gets feisty, that kinda thing. It ain’t exactly difficult.”
“Ted, perhaps you’d give us a minute alone.”
When I heard Bella use his first name I knew I was fucked. Ryan left the room and she moved closer to me.
“You have to think this through, Jack. We can’t have Powell running around now that we’ve gone this far. Sooner or later he’d destroy me. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Of course it does.”
“And you do agree he has to be punished for what he did to Karen?”
“Well, yeah, but murder … Look, you cut kidneys out and wank with them, and Ryan thinks killing is one of the perks of his job. But I’m just a guy. I’ve never done this kind of thing. You can’t ask me to waste someone, for Christsake.”
“But I am, Jack. Like Ryan said, you need to make a contribution. Just go along with him. He only wants you to watch.”
“But being there will be just as bad if we’re caught.”
“Jack, I’m asking for some evidence of your love. I’ve given you a lot, but that can’t continue if it doesn’t work both ways.”
“What about Ryan? He’ll never go away after this.”
“He’ll go away and things will be better for us than they’ve ever been.”
“I don’t think he will. I think he’ll stay forever, fucking you and taking your money.”
“He’ll go away.”
The second time she said it I started to believe her. There was something in her voice that would have been frightening if it had been directed at me.
So … Bail on watching someone get whacked and say goodbye to my piece of paradise, or tough it out and get even more—that was the message. Not really a choice. So I said yes. I guess I’d been moving toward something like it ever since Karen’s death—from selling my ass, to wanking over pictures of dead people, to doing it with a dead chick in the morgue. Taking a ride with Ryan wasn’t really such a leap. Not when you considered what was at stake.
Ryan came back into the room and the rest of the evening went into fast-forward. I felt ill and cold.
We set off in the Jaguar around eleven. Ryan and I wore plastic spray jackets and over-trousers he’d bought earlier in the sporting section of a department store. We had the hoods over our heads. Powell sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat, hands cuffed behind his back, a few extra strips of tape on his mouth. Ryan drove, I was in the back. The black glass shielded us from the eyes of the world, which was just as well because two guys dressed for a monsoon on a mild Californian night and another one with his mouth taped shut might have attracted attention.
Ryan wanted it to look like a queer trick gone wrong, and he wanted a place where cooperation with the authorities wouldn’t be overly forthcoming. So we made for the drag. I could see the side of Powell’s head, he looked drained of self-will and immensely tired. Twenty-four hours chained to a pipe and much less heroin than he’d ordinarily take couldn’t have done him much good, but it was more than that. He knew what was going to happen and he knew there wasn’t anything he could do about it. I turned my head away and counted palm trees.
We cruised. Past the whores and on into faggot territory. We did it a couple of times so that if anyone remembered the car it’d look like a john out for trade. I knew each pass along the street was bringing us closer to going active and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to piss. I pressed my thighs together and held my knees. My hands sweated inside the dishwashing gloves Ryan and I had accessorized our plastic ensembles with. I’d expected surgical latex, but that ripped too easily. Apparently. The knowledge Ryan had was chilling, but his obvious experience gave me a bizarre kind of reassurance. I guessed if anyone could get away with murder, he could.
We turned off the drag about the middle of where the boys hung out and worked our way into the warren of vagrant hostels and warehouses that made up the southern flank of the area. Most of the streetlights didn’t work and there wasn’t anyone walking around. Ryan guided the car off the road, into the loading bay of some abandoned Mexican food company. Plenty of shadow, no windows overlooking.
Ignition off, park-brake set. Time to deal. Time to deal and hope to fuck I could maintain afterwards.
Ryan twisted in his seat like he was about to engage Powell in conversation, but he wasn’t wearing his conversation face. In fact, the fat white circle in the center of his tightly drawn hood looked like something made from putty.
“Guess you can figure the result of your blood test.”
Powell maked a high-pitched noise through his nose.
“What’s that, pops? You didn’t do it? It wasn’t you who cut open my little girl and jerked into the hole? Gee, could I have made a mistake?”
Ryan screwed up his face like he was thinking, then shook his head.
“Nope. No mistake, you fuck. You cut her guts out and you got off while you did it. Now it’s my turn to get unglued.”
Ryan took a knife out of the door pocket, something that looked like it was designed to skin animals—a short wide blade, sharp on both sides. Powell started shaking his head around and making more noise, it sounded very loud in the car. My fear and his combined into a hideous tension that gave me a hard-on. It surprised me a little, but I put it down to stress.
Ryan pushed the sides of Powell’s jacket apart, unbuttoned his shirt, and unzipped the top of his trousers, exposing him from his throat to the start of his pubic hair. White skin like Bella’s, but not as tight.
“The man who sold me this knife said it was sharp enough to do an operation with. Let’s if he was telling the truth.”
Powell tossed in his seat. He wasn’t very strong because he was on the edge of withdrawal again, but it made things awkward for Ryan. This was where I came in. I reached over and wrapped my arms around his upper chest and held him still.
When the point of the knife got close to his sternum I heard him fart, not just air, but a long wet stuttering noise like he was letting go of everything in his colon. The air in the Jag funked up pretty bad, but we kept the windows closed all the same.
“Oh, deary me. Eat something that didn’t agree? Maybe I can find it for you.”
Ryan stroked the edge of his knife down in a single straight line—not deep, only about a quarter inch. There were a few small folds of skin around Powell’s navel and he had to go back over them. For a couple of seconds the wound was just this weird track with white edges and a fine red center, more like a split than a cut. Then blood started running out of it. Powell really shifted then and I had to hang on tight. To get the best position I leaned forward with my chest against the back of the seat. This put my head next to his, my chin almost on his shoulder. The squealing he made hurt my ear. I could see blood collecting between his legs. I felt bad about what we were doing and all I wanted was for it to be over. But my hard-on didn’t go away.