Sex and Violence in Hollywood (21 page)

Carter flinched at Adam’s anger. “Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

Adam did not respond, kept his eyes on the road.

Slumped in the backseat, Rain took a drag on her cigarette, blew a smoke ring. Poked her cigarette through the quavering circle a few times, smirking.

Carter stared intensely at Adam for a moment. “What did you mean about the convertible standing out?” He looked through the windshield, the side window, back at Adam. “We’re not going to Denny’s for breakfast, are we?”

Adam shook his head slowly, and explained.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be shitting me!” Carter shouted. “I can’t believe you—I mean, I-I-I—what the hell did you come get me for?”

“You said you wanted to help,” Adam said.

“I said I’d help you kill your dad! I was very specific! I didn’t say a damned thing about any coma patients!”

Rain leaned forward between them, looked at Carter. “This is just as much your problem as ours. You were there.”

“I didn’t get out of the car!”

“You think the cops’ll care about that?” Adam said.

Rain said, “You were there, Carter. You think if Monty wakes up and starts talking, he’s gonna fuckin’ forget about you?”

Carter rocked himself, fidgeted. Bit his lower lip, ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t—you shouldn’t have—I gotta get out.” He reached for the door’s handle.

Adam hit the console’s master-lock button and saved Carter from an ugly death.

“He’s in ICU at LAC/USC Medical Center,” Rain said. “I don’t know if they’ve got a cop guarding him. If so, this is gonna be a fuckin’ pain in the ass.”

Carter looked at her with wide, incredulous eyes. “You don’t know how you’re gonna do this yet?”

“I just found out a little while ago, so give me a fuckin’ break,” Rain said.

“Do you have any idea how you’re gonna kill this guy once you get to him?”

Rain shrugged. “Pull his plugs.”

“Plugs? Which plugs? You ever been within a mile of a life support system? Do you even know what one looks like?” He turned to Adam. “C’mon, tell me you’re not seriously gonna do this. You know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna go in there and unplug the television. He might not even be allowed visitors, you think of that? The guy’s a pile of hamburger with tubes, he’s not lonely.”

“We won’t know until we get there,” Adam said.

“But they’ll see you, Adam! You go in there, finish him off, come back out, people will see you. If you even get that far. They’ll be able to identify you.”

Rain said, “Right now, we don’t have much fuckin’ choice.”

Carter glared at her. “Hey. Elizabeth Bathory. I’m not talking to you.”

“I hate to admit it,” Adam said, “but she’s right.”

“Who’s Elizabeth Bathory?” Rain asked.

“C’mon, Adam, you don’t really think he’s gonna sit up in bed all of a sudden and hold a press conference, do you? He’s not gonna come out of that coma!”

“I said, who the fuck is Elizabeth Bathory?” Rain said impatiently.

“We don’t know that,” Adam said. “We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen.” He swallowed, but had no saliva in his mouth.

“Goddamnit, who is Elizabeth fucking Bathory? And what’s this fuckin’ we shit? I’m gonna warm this seat, you’re on your own, Mr. Douglas.” She flopped back, took another puff on her cigarette.

Adam looked at her in the rearview and his eyes narrowed. “Elizabeth Bathory was a sixteenth century Hungarian countess who murdered over six hundred young girls in her lifetime. She believed their blood kept her young. She tortured each of them, drained their blood, then drank it, cooked with it, and bathed in it. But next to you. Rain, she’s Shirley fucking Temple!”

“Fuck you, Big Brother. And you too, Carter.”

Carter shouted, “Goddamnit, Rain, will you shut the hell up!” He turned to Adam again. “People will see you, they’ll see this car, you’ll be—”

“We won’t be in this car,” Adam said.

“What?”

Adam turned right, down a narrow side street. Took another right and stopped the car beneath a tall rectangular sign: SUREFIRE AUTO BODY—Miracles Overnight.

“I picked it out of the Yellow Pages,” Adam said. “They’re fast, they’ll do it right away, and my dad won’t know anything about it.”

Adam talked to a tall, skinny guy in his twenties, tattoos up and down his arms. Told him he had called earlier about the damage done to his car by a drive-by shooter. The guy asked no questions. Gave Adam a 1989 Honda Civic as a leaner and said the Lexus would be ready tomorrow morning.

“That was amazingly easy,” Carter said as Adam drove them away from the body shop in the Civic.

“What do you mean?” Adam asked.

“The guy didn’t ask you about the damage.”

“I explained it already.”

“Yeah, but still...isn’t that the law? Don’t they have to report that kind of thing to the police?”

Adam shook his head. “That’s doctors, Brainman. Doctors have to report gunshot wounds to the police.” Adam merged into the traffic on the Hollywood Freeway, said, “ICU might be a problem. When my grandma had a stroke, they only let in family members, except kids. To get in, you talked to a nurse on a telephone, told her who you were, who you wanted to see, and she’d buzz you in. The double doors were always locked.”

“They do that in all hospitals?” Carter said. “Maybe not at this hospital.”

“If they do, we need to be ready for it.”

Carter looked at Adam in horror, pressing himself back against the door. “We?”

“Yes. We. Us. You and me.”

Carter’s mouth opened into a large O and he shook his head rapidly. “Oh, no-ho-ho way! I’m not going in there with you. I mean, I’ll help with, like, the creative end, I’ll be an idea man, I’ll give you moral support, immoral support, whatever. But I am not going into that hospital.”

“I need you, Carter.” Carter almost spoke again, but Adam held up a hand. “Just listen for a second, if they keep those doors locked, I’ll need you to call the nurse on the phone to get me in.”

Carter stared at him with a blank expression for a moment. “You can’t use a phone?”

“You know me, Carter! I’m no good at that kind of thing. I can’t lie, I can’t fake anything. I get all nervous and my voice—”

“You end up sounding like a twelve year old boy whose voice is changing, yeah, I’ve seen your act.”

“So I need you to do the phone for me. If it’s there.”

Carter looked out the side window for a while. Chewed on a fingernail. “Okay, so if the phone is there, I make the call, and that’s it, right? After that, I can just leave.”

“Leave? Couldn’t you at least...wait for me?”

“Hey. Dr. Kevorkian. I don’t think you’re understanding me. I want nothing to do with this. In fact, once I get out of this Japanese death box of yours, I may not get back in. I may take a bus home. Just to distance myself from you. You hear that? I would rather ride a city bus than be connected to this, wrap your brain around that.”

Adam eased the car down an off-ramp to the surface streets. “You’re the one who needs to do some brain-wrapping, Carter. You are connected to this. Monty could identify both of us!”

“How? I didn’t give him my last name.”

Adam’s laughter was brittle, dark. “Yeah, that’s the funny part. I didn’t tell him mine, either.”

Carter turned slowly to the backseat.

Indifferent, Rain lit a second cigarette, took her time on the first puff, and said, “Yeah, I told him who you are, who your daddies are. He was pretty fuckin’ impressed. ’Specially with you, Big Brother. Monty’s a big fan of Daddy’s movies.”

“I’m overwhelmed by a great lack of surprise,” Adam said, looking in the rearview. Behind him. Rain stared at the ceiling as she smoked. “I bet you like them, too, don’t you, Rain?”

“Fuck, yeah. Bomber was the shit. I liked Explosion, too.”

Adam nodded. “Yeah, no surprise there, either. What do I keep telling you, Carter? We need a really good plague, like in Egypt in the Bible. But this one would only kill people who like my dad’s movies.”

“Fuck you, Mr. Douglas!” Rain shouted. “You’re such a fuckin’ snob. All you movie people are alike. You all think you’re so fuckin’ important. Everybody in this cocksuckin’ town’s an executive or an artist. Even my fuckin’ mother. Makeup artist, she says. Ha!” She took a hit off the cigarette, blew smoke in an explosion of breath.

Adam said, “That’s not what I mea—”

“Even actors are fuckin’ artists,” she went on, emphatically pounding the seat with a fist. “Stupidest motherfuckin’ thing I ever heard. Memorize some lines, get in front of a camera, pretend to be somebody else for a while, say ‘fuck’ a few times, maybe show your ass, and you’re an artist! Doesn’t sound like art to me. You’re all a buncha fuckin’ overpaid snobs. You don’t know dick about real life. Or anything real. All you know is the fuckin’ movies, the center of your universe. But movies aren’t real. So what do all you fuckin’ artists have to feel so fuckin’ important about, huh?”

“Hey, I’m no artist,” Carter said quickly as Adam said, “Rain, that’s not what I was talking about. I meant—”

She leaned between them. “You ever been abandoned in a big city you didn’t know? When you were a kid, I mean?”

Adam and Carter shook their heads.

“It’s about midnight,” she went on, nearly whispering. “You’re all alone, it’s fuckin’ rainin’ hard as bullets. And you know Mom’s not comin’ back, not tonight. You’re all alone in a big strange city, and you don’t know a single person.” Her head turned right to left as she looked at them both. “How fuckin’ important you think movies would be then, huh?”

When they did not reply, Rain sat back slowly, took a final puff and stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray in the back of Carter’s seat.

For a moment, Adam’s mind left the unbearable problem weighing down on him. He was impressed by what Rain had said, and to his surprise, felt guilty for making her feel the need to say it. He doubted she would ever believe that he felt the same way.

Carter asked, “Did, uh...did that happen to you?”

“When I was ten,” she said.

Adam had to remind himself that Rain was still the Antichrist because, for a moment, he felt a dull ache of sympathy in his chest for her. The rearview showed her staring out the side window, smoking her cigarette.

Was it possible Gwen had done such a thing? Abandoned her little girl in a big city in the middle of the night? What could keep her from meeting her daughter and taking her home? Why would she leave the child alone on the street in the first place? Adam wondered how much his dad knew about his wife’s past. Not that it would matter to him, of course.

He did not want to believe it, not coming from Rain. But it sounded so true. Could Rain be such a good actress? Could Gwen?

Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center was an enormous, pale, blocky building, and looked exactly like a hospital. Driving into and up the hospital’s multilevel parking garage, Adam’s nausea reminded him where he was going, what he was about to do. His legs, which had been calm for a few minutes, began to shake again.

What was he thinking? How could he be so stupid as to fall for anything Rain said? If he felt any pity or compassion for her, it was only because she wanted him to. Maybe she was softening him up for something.

Adam parked the Honda on the third level, pocketed the keys and turned to Carter. Cleared his throat and gulped before speaking. “You ready?”

Carter looked as afraid as Adam felt. “Oh, yeah. I’m ready. Sure. This won’t bother me a bit. Can’t you see how cool I am?”

Adam wanted to shout at Rain, scream at her. Instead, he said, “Try not to hotwire the car and drive to Tijuana with a street gang while we’re gone, okay?”

Adam and Carter got out of the car and headed toward the stairs that led down to the front of the hospital. Their footsteps echoed softly.

“How are you gonna do it?” Carter whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t—we’re here, Adam! This is the hospital!”

“I suppose I could just use...his pillow.” Walking was already becoming difficult, and they were not even inside yet. His legs wobbled and jerked beneath him. He clutched the rail as he went down the stairs.

“You mean...over his face?”

Adam nodded.

“But what if they’re breathing for him?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

With the stairs behind them, they stopped and faced each other.

Carter snapped his fingers a few times. “Shit, what do they call that thing, that machine that breathes for you?”

“A respirator?”

“Yeah. What if they’ve got him hooked up to one of those?”

“And? What?”

“Well, I dunno, could you still do it with a pillow? If he’s got some machine breathing for him?”

Two men in suits approached them, talking loudly, laughing. Adam and Carter started walking again. Fast, heads down. Adam swerved a couple times, stumbled. His palms were wet and beads of perspiration dribbled down his back and sides.

The voices of the suits faded behind them. Ahead, the hospital’s main entrance. Automatic sliding glass doors opened and closed, an alien mouth that ate people up and spit them out.