High Life (34 page)
Ryan made another cut, following the same line, deeper now, beyond skin and fat into the first layers of abdominal muscle. Powell arced himself out of the seat and Ryan shouted at me to keep him down. I did what I could but it was difficult, blood kept splashing up and getting in my eyes and I had to let go with one hand to wipe it off. Ryan waited for Powell to slump back, then started cutting again. He paid a great deal of attention to what he was doing.
When the belly finally opened, it happened in a kind of visceral explosion. The edges pulled apart like they were spring-loaded and guts and shit flew everywhere. Powell screamed and jerked in my arms and I came so hard it felt like someone had turned a hose on in my pants. If I had had the time I might have felt ashamed, but Ryan was busy pulling organs out of Powell and I had to work at keeping him upright.
“Greasy old fuck.” Ryan flicked a gob of something off his glove and sat back breathing heavy and looking exhausted. “Should have made it last longer. Whaddya think, I went too fast? Shit, I wish Karen could see this.”
Powell felt way too heavy to hold onto now so I let go of him. His head fell forward, but otherwise he didn’t move.
“You know, Jackie, you see those cops on TV sniveling about how bad they feel when they shoot someone—just shows what bullshit it is. I felt good every time I ever did it. Especially now. How about you? You feel good? Won’t be something you forget in a hurry, I bet.”
I looked around the interior of the car. There was an awful lot of blood. It ran down the insides of the windows and dripped off the dash, the nice English carpet was swimming in it. No, it wasn’t something I was likely to forget.
“You look pale, Jackie.”
“I feel pale.”
“Just keep telling yourself the fucker killed your wife, you’ll be fine. Take the tape off him and let’s get the fuck outta here.”
Ryan climbed out of the car and started stripping off his plastic wear. I pulled Powell’s head back and peeled away his gag. He made a raspy breathing noise like it was a big relief and opened his eyes. I jumped and was about to yell for Ryan but he whispered something. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a drain.
“In the freezer …”
Then he vomited a bucketful of blood into his own open guts and died properly.
Out of the car, between its glossy black finish and the greasy concrete where trucks backed up to get loaded. I removed my wet-weather gear and wiped my face with handfuls of tissue. Ryan bundled all the blood-covered stuff into a suitcase and told me he’d dump it someplace away from the scene.
We walked casually back to the drag, then up to Hollywood Boulevard, and took separate cabs to the junction of Sunset and PCH where Ryan had his Plymouth parked.
On the drive to Malibu there wasn’t much other traffic and I stared at the line in the middle of the road and thought about how Karen, who started all of it off, didn’t have a thing to do with it anymore. The reality of the bloodletting had shocked me into some kind of motivational clarity and I could see now that revenge for her death had never really been an issue. She was just a name for the game. For a while I wondered how a person I lived with for two years could have become so ultimately insignificant. Then I remembered something from back in the Jaguar.
“How come you said ‘my little girl’?”
“Huh?”
“Before you started cutting Powell, you called Karen your little girl.”
“I said this, I said that. What the fuck?”
“You never called her anything like that before.”
“Like I said, what the fuck?”
“Some things don’t add up.”
“Ain’t that just like life?”
“I can’t figure you killing someone, taking that kind of a risk, over just a hooker you used to know. It isn’t you. And the way you did it … Powell could have been made to lay out a good few bucks, but as soon as you got proof, you whacked him. Seems like you moved so fast you didn’t even think about money. It would have been more your style to suck him for what he was worth first.”
“Maybe I was thinking about Bella. Maybe I’m more human than you think.”
“Jesus, give me a break. You might like fucking her, but you wouldn’t kill someone just to help her out.”
“How about the million bucks?”
“You could have got that easily enough blackmailing her again about her operations. Shit, even Powell could probably have raised it to stop himself getting killed.”
Ryan didn’t say anything, just looked through the windshield and made a show of concentrating on the road.
“And you basically tortured him to death. Why not just shoot him in the head? It would have been a whole lot safer than sitting there all that time. You got too much out of it for a straight execution. It meant something more.”
“All right, Jack! Enough.”
“I helped you do it, I’ve got a right to know.”
Ryan glanced angrily at me, then his face changed and he sighed.
“No one has rights, Jackie. Not when it comes down to it. Food, shelter, love, life … You ain’t got a right to any of it. All you can do is grab as much as you can and hope you get hold of a decent chunk before you check out. But I guess it’s over now, and you and me shared a few things, so I’ll tell you. One thing though, Beauty don’t get to hear about it. Ever.”
“Absolutely.”
Ryan shifted his ass onto one cheek and took out a wallet. He flipped it open and thumbed out a beat-up photograph—a girl in her early teens, coltish and pretty, blond hair cut short even then, shorts and a tank top, smooth-limbed against the fence of a tract house, the kind they have in the shittier parts of the valley. Unmistakably Karen.
“I don’t understand.”
“She was my kid.”
Ryan’s voice was flat, like he was frightened that if he allowed emotion to creep in it would overwhelm him.
“I had her with a whore I was fucking when I joined the force. We split up before she was born, but I stayed in touch. With Karen, not with the bitch. I didn’t have much else and I figured it was the right thing to do. It worked for a while, we had some good times together, but she got wild when she started growing tits and told me to stop coming around. I tried to keep it going, but I guess she was pissed off with me not being there and all. When she was fifteen she ran away from home. I didn’t see her for five years after that. Then I was working Monica one night and I came across her selling her ass. I didn’t hassle her, shit, all I wanted was some contact—you have a kid, that kinda feeling never goes away. But she didn’t feel the same. She told me if I wanted to spend time with her I’d have to buy her. She only said it to get back at me, I know, but it pissed me off so much I did it—paid to fuck my own kid. It bothered me at first, but she was a great fuck and what was I gonna do? You hit fifty without family, the world’s a cold place. We did it regular for a long time, but about four months before she was killed she got sick of it and told me to fuck off. The next time I saw her she was in the morgue.”
Ryan put his photo away and cleared his throat.
“That’s why I killed Powell. And that’s why I did it the way I did. After the DNA there was no reason to wait. Million-dollar joke on Beauty, huh? I woulda done it for free.”
“You were never going to arrest anyone, were you? Whether it was me or Bella or whoever.”
“Karen deserved more than the system. Who was gonna give a fuck about her? Shit, a dead whore comes in, they have to hold a lottery to see who gets the file ’cause no one wants it. Everyone’s too busy trying to solve cases that can do them some good. And even if some cop has his ass in gear enough to get it to court, it could be the killer only gets ten years, out in less. If it’s some crackhead or junkie they plead diminished responsibility. If it’s someone with money they plea bargain. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wanted to make sure the punishment fit the crime.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had a momentary urge to laugh at the ridiculousness of Karen being Ryan’s daughter, but I didn’t, because at the same time it seemed so disgustingly sad.
Ryan took a heart pill and I lit a cigarette. Our headlights cut a hole in the night. On our left the ocean gathered itself like a beast waiting to spring. I suggested tossing the suitcase into it. Ryan said to stop worrying, he’d deal with it later.
At Malibu we spent the rest of the night in an extended fuck session—I guess Bella thought we deserved some kind of reward. I would rather have swallowed something and slept for a long time, but I felt shaky after the murder and got paranoid that maybe they’d start plotting against me if I left them alone together. When the humping eventually stopped I curled up and thought about what Powell had whispered back in the car of blood.
In the freezer.
What did it mean? Could have been he was just so far gone with pain and fear it didn’t mean anything. On the other hand, if a dying man tells you something it’s pretty hard not to figure it might be important, one way or another.
Ryan moved out the following day, took his cash and his Bentley, and had me follow him in the Plymouth to a bungalow he’d rented in Westwood. It was a nice house in a nice area, not flashy, but easily middle-class—the kind of place where nobody was going to bother asking where your money came from as long as you looked okay. I took a cab back to Malibu and collected my clothes and the Mustang. Ryan had instructed me to disappear before the cops came calling to tell Bella they’d found her father—a lover hanging around the place would not look good, he said.
Bella stood with her hand on the car door as I was about to leave.
“You were very brave, Jack.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t know what it means to me to be free of him.”
“There’s still Ryan. He’ll be back as soon as this blows over.”
“Our future doesn’t include him.”
“I hope not.”
We kissed, then I started the car. Before I pulled away, Bella stroked the side of my face.
“Being apart will be awful. I’ll think of you every minute.”
“Me too.”
Eight weeks is what Ryan figured to be a safe time. It only took the police four to determine that Powell had been murdered by assailants unknown, probably while trying to buy sex, and to dump the case with a million other unsolveds, but Ryan wasn’t taking any chances.
The time dragged by in an agony of potential catastrophe. First I packed shit that I was going to get busted, then I packed shit that being away from Bella for so long would spell the end of our relationship and its associated benefits. While I was working, things weren’t too bad, but downtime quickly became unbearable, and in an effort to find some alleviation of my anxiety I began to invite Lorn to Willow Glen. The only thing that made it less stupid now than the time she suggested it herself was that I figured Bella wouldn’t risk visiting me during the separation period.
Lorn ended up staying about four nights out of seven and seemed to enjoy the continuity of our time together. I think she wanted to upscale whatever it was we had between us, to move to a place where we’d feel it necessary to start revealing ourselves to each other. I, of course, had no intention of playing that game. Sometimes, though, when I was holding her before sleep, I caught myself wishing that she could have been the one providing houses and cars and TV time. Then I’d have had everything.
On the nights I was alone, and sometimes in the day too when I wasn’t working, I drove aimlessly through L.A.—I figured if I kept moving my fears wouldn’t be able to take hold of me. But it didn’t work, and on one occasion things got so bad I had to stop at a pay phone and call Bella for reassurance. It helped because she told me she loved me and how good things were going to be when we got back together. She even said she’d started watching
28 FPS
she missed me so much. I watched it too, but it was depressing. I timed how long my face appeared on the screen each half-hour show. Usually it wasn’t longer than four minutes.
Lorn and I only went out together once during this time—to a club Dan Ackroyd owned. While we were there I had her take Polaroid photos of me standing at the bar with movie people in the background.
At home that night I shut myself in the toilet and stared at the pictures, looking for whatever it was that made this golden breed so much better than me. But it was a secret I couldn’t learn. So I shuffled the prints up with the ones Ryan had given me and flicked through them—me a few feet away from Woody Harrelson, the dead chick with the crowbar up her ass, my face emerging from shadow behind Oliver Stone and some director from New Zealand in close conversation, an angle on the dead couple fucking, bags over their heads. Flash cards that reflected something about me. But what? Probably everything there was to know, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Toward the end of the eight weeks, with Bella reentry looming, I stopped asking Lorn over. Unfortunately that didn’t end her visits. She started turning up uninvited, and to drive the message home I had to make it obvious my enthusiasm for our increased contact was not what it had been. I didn’t want to sever things completely, but neither did I want the level of danger her presence in my house represented vis-à-vis Bella. It was a fine line to tread and I guess I pretty much failed at it. The last time she was around she left well before dawn, not in floods of tears or anything, but I could tell by the expression on her face that things hadn’t panned out the way she’d hoped. It made me feel bad for a while, but what could I do? Even if I’d loved her it couldn’t have been any different.