High Life (40 page)
Bella reeled in her fish the very next day. She wanted me to meet her at Apricot Lane, early evening. Lorn would be with her.
I showered and changed my clothes, then sat staring out of the window at a square of wall and a door exactly like mine on the other side of the pool, figuring on not doing much else until it was time to head into the hills. I hadn’t eaten anything all day except a couple of doughnuts and I felt hollow and thin. But I guessed that was the right way to feel, considering what I was about to have a hand in.
I was two cigarettes into a pack when my Century City agent rang and told me to get over to his office immediately. He wouldn’t say any more on the phone and I pretty much floored it all the way.
When I got out of the elevator all the staff were lined up to greet me. The agent himself fountained a bottle of champagne in my face and put an arm around my shoulders. Everyone started clapping. I’d scored the men’s grooming gig. Locked in and irrevocable. I was going to be the guy on TV and billboards and magazine pages all across the country. High, high profile. Exposure to three hundred million people. They might not know my name for a while, but walking down the street would certainly be a different experience soon.
The gig would wipe out my entire previous existence. It would put what I had with
28 FPS
in the shade. I had a two-year contract to be the face of a product. I was an L.A. success story. I was what other people dreamed about.
I hung around for a while, signing papers and going through a schedule of upcoming photo and video shoots, soaking up the attention from these people who suddenly loved me. Then I got back in the car and drove into the hills.
I didn’t need Bella for wealth or visibility anymore. The grooming campaign was going to put my face in front of more people than most TV stars, and the money from it would set me up for life. At a stroke, she’d become obsolete.
But that didn’t mean I could avoid the evening’s entertainment up at Apricot Lane. Bella would find out about my windfall sooner or later and if I messed up her kidney fix she’d strike back for sure. Maybe she’d use some kind of financial leverage on the ad company, or maybe she’d go straight for the throat and send the gloves from Powell’s murder to the police. Either way the result would be the same—I’d lose everything.
* * *
Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Drive, San Ysidro Drive—streets through a town I belonged to at last. The houses and cars I passed on the way were no longer the impossible possessions of people better than me, but things that would be mine as a matter of course. I estimated prices, I planned purchases. I thought realistically for the first time about position, setting, design, about the convenience of the flats versus the seclusion of higher up. I considered whether I should go for a Mustang again or whether I should try a Corvette, or maybe something European. It was a hard decision to make.
The sky was shaded at the edges by the time I drove through the open gates of the clinic and into the garage. Bella’s 850ci was already there. She climbed out of it impatiently like I’d kept her waiting and opened the passenger door. Lorn sprawled unconscious across the leather upholstery. The only thing keeping her off the floor was her seat belt. She looked pale and vulnerable and for a second I wondered if it was really me who was about to participate in this visceral rape, or whether some other desperate, driving, fame-obsessed soul had taken possession of me. Then I got her under the arms and dragged her downstairs. It took a while because she had a tendency to flop about.
Bright light, sharp instruments on a tray. Lorn lay naked and uncovered on the table, a needle in the crook of her right arm fed anesthetic into her system from a drip-bag on a frame. Her face was so white it was hard to tell where her bleached hair started.
Bella was naked too under her gown. The opening at the back was only loosely tied and I could see the crack of her ass and sometimes a rear shot of her cunt as she bent over Lorn making her final preparations. She wore rubber gloves and a cap, but no mask.
“Things will be different after tonight, Jack.”
“She won’t like you so much, that’s for sure.”
“I never intended it to be long-term.”
“Just as a punishment to me.”
“I wanted to set some boundaries.”
“And now that I know them, what? You want me back?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
I shuffled about and avoided the question.
“Do you want me to turn her on her side?”
“No, I’m going to enter through the abdomen.”
“Why?”
“Pass me a scalpel.”
Bella was locked in. She didn’t look at me. Her attention was focused on the smooth white belly in front of her. She ran her hands over Lorn’s breasts, then on down to the outside of her hips, as though trying to commit the body on the table to some tactile portion of memory. I gave her the sharpest looking thing I could find on the tray of instruments, then moved to stand behind and a little to one side of her.
The scalpel blade caught light from the overhead cluster. I felt myself holding my breath. Bella leaned forward and kissed Lorn for a long time. She stroked the side of her face and it looked like she was whispering something. Then she straightened and stood absolutely still, and for a moment it was as though everything in the world was copying her. Even the air in the room seemed to stop moving.
But things didn’t stay that way. Bella reached out with her scalpel. And even while her hand was traveling through the air it was obvious to me that something was wrong. She was going for a point immediately below Lorn’s sternum, a point that looked way too high up the body to be anywhere near the kidneys. I took a step forward then hesitated. I mean, I wasn’t a doctor and this could easily have been a bona fide technique. But then Bella made her incision. She held the scalpel like a pencil and drew it firmly down in a straight line to the top of Lorn’s pubic hair—it was too much of a cut, and far too similar to what Karen had ended up with in the park.
I jerked her away from the table and spun her around. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Bella’s hand flicked out and the scalpel sliced the air in front of my face.
“Back off. You had your fun with her, now I’m having mine.”
“You said just her kidney.”
“I changed my mind. Wait upstairs if you don’t want to watch.”
Bella looked disgusted and turned back to the table. Blood ran from Lorn’s wound, out over both sides of her stomach in bright red sheets. Her cunt hair was soaked with it and small rills were already spilling from the table and spattering against the floor. The cut was deep but her abdomen held together. Bella wasn’t all the way through yet. She got ready for another stroke. I grabbed for her arm but she was fast and managed to bring her blade across the back of my hand before I could get a decent grip. It hurt like fuck and I jumped back, expecting her to try for more damage. But she didn’t come after me, she just stood there like an animal defending a carcass, her face stretched and ugly.
“Don’t be stupid, Jack. You’ve got a lot to lose.”
She stared hard at me, then, like she figured the gash on my hand had sufficiently impressed upon me the idea that I shouldn’t interfere, she prepared to start work again. But all I was impressed with was the obvious fact that nothing short of force was going to stop her opening Lorn up all the way and scooping out her guts.
So, walk away and let her get on with her killing? Or do a little of my own? It wasn’t a difficult choice to make. Any affection I’d felt for Bella had been choked out of existence the night Ryan and I killed Powell. And now, with my new ad contract, there was absolutely no reason to stay linked to her. On the other hand, I still kind of liked Lorn.
And there were two other reasons that made removing Bella an attractive proposition. One, it would get rid of that nagging glove problem—the only physical evidence connecting me to Powell’s murder. And two, I could fuck her while I was doing it.
This last was the clincher, and before she started cutting again I moved up close and hit her full force on the side of the head. She went down hard and slumped around one of the legs of the operating table, unconscious. I moved quickly about the room, collecting a few things and stripping off my clothes. I took Bella’s gown off too and tied her hands in front of her with a roll of bandage. Then I flipped her on to her stomach and waited for her to come around. She didn’t take much more than a minute, which was good because I was worried about leaving Lorn too long without attention.
Bella made a few painful sounds before she opened her eyes, after that her noises got angry and I figured it was time to start. She was still groggy so it wasn’t much trouble to pull her ass up, get her knees under her, and slide my cock in from behind. I wrapped a length of yellow-brown surgical tubing around her neck while she was like that, then just stayed that way, my cock hard as a pipe inside her, the tubing in place but not tight enough to do anything. Until she got a little more active and tried to speak. Then I went to work.
I held the tubing like the reins of a horse and cut off her air. It surprised me how deep the rubber squeezed into her neck, it looked almost like a cartoon. She tried to move forward and started shaking her head. Her movements were jerky. I pulled back harder and pumped my dick into her. She’d been silent since I tightened up, but now she started to make grunty choking noises which I figured were some kind of breathing reflex. Her cunt went a bit loose too, which I hadn’t expected, and she lifted her tied hands off the floor to claw at her neck. I loosened my grip suddenly so she overbalanced and fell face-first against the floor. There was blood on the tiles when I hauled her up again.
I felt the tension in her body, the locked muscles, the bones which seemed suddenly to protrude where before they had been so smoothly padded. She tried repeatedly to get her fingers under the tubing and pull it away from her neck, but her weight made it difficult and she went through this weird cycle of snatching her hands up to her throat, then jamming them back down again before gravity could kick in and do its thing with her face and the floor.
It was hard to keep my eyes open. I wanted to close them and absorb the raft of sensation pouring from the woman beneath me—the straining of her back, the taste of sweat between her shoulder blades, the smell of the gas she farted out as she struggled to free herself. Her cunt vibrated loosely around my cock, like whatever usually held it tight and in place had let go and it was now just a drifting, unconnected tunnel of gut. I felt a withdrawal of the life inside her, as though some emergency survival instinct was sucking it toward the center of her body, away from the edges, trying to save it.
She pissed against me. It felt hot and thick and it made my head swim because it meant I was actually doing it—I actually had my dick inside a body that was racing toward death.
Sometimes when she moved around I could see her face. It wasn’t a good color. Her tongue was so swollen it looked like the front half of a shoe.
She lurched around more and more desperately, kicking her legs out and trying to get to her feet. After one particularly violent effort she sagged for a moment and started to pump shit. It blasted out of her ass in a liquid brown fountain that went on so long I had to pull my cock out and watch. My stomach dripped with it, it made a pool around our knees.
And because I didn’t have my weight against her anymore she was able to get her feet under her and jerk upright. The movement took me by surprise and I lost my hold on the tubing. For a second I thought I was in trouble, but then she slipped on the shit and fell heavily on her elbow. Something snapped, but she didn’t scream. She was too busy trying to suck air past her tongue.
I jumped on her and we rolled around until I trapped her arms between our two bodies and got her on her back. It was awkward pushing inside her this way because I was using my hands to strangle her now and I had to keep tight against her so she couldn’t free her arms. But with one of them broken and her being pretty badly fucked up already, she couldn’t fight hard enough to stop me.
Face-to-face made everything so much more immediate. I wanted our mouths to be together so I could share her last breaths, taste her spit, be as intimately involved in her experience of dying as possible. Her tongue made it difficult, though, and she kept moving her head around. The best I could do was put my forehead against hers and catch what smell of her I could over the shit.
She made weak humping motions with her hips, trying to throw me off, but her strength was gone. I fucked her as hard as I could, expecting a gradual relaxing of her body as the life drained from it. But when it happened, it happened quickly, like a switch had been thrown, and the change was exquisite. I felt it around my cock, through my belly and arms, a profound stillness that was suddenly there, reaching out to me with a promise of endless tranquillity.
I took my hands off her neck and looked closely at her open eyes, at the way her tits shuddered with each of my thrusts. And when some of the air trapped in her lungs worked its way out of her nose and made a hissing noise like a blow-up toy deflating, I started to spurt. It went on forever, and after it was over, after I’d pumped myself so dry it felt like I’d never be able to come again, I lay on top of her, listening to the thudding in my chest and the silence in hers.