"Hang on," said Michelle. She press-ganged a partygoer from just outside the kitchen arch, a tall woman in a pencil skirt and vintage forties lingerie, whose face read as male, pancaked in too much makeup, as though in preparation for a silent-movie shoot. "Chantelle, darling, go ask Kyle and Elpidia if they've got a twenty on Tobias, and see if you can spot him yourself. He might have pulled a costume change on us."
While Michelle was occupied with Chantelle, Shinya moved very close to Art and took both of his hands in hers, furtively glancing back to ensure her hostess would not overhear.
"You've got the right idea," she said in a low voice, to Art. Whispering was impossible here. "Get out. Before you get hurt." Then she quickly kissed his gathered hands, and retreated.
"Okay, doll," Michelle said to Shinya as she returned. "Our girl Chantelle is on it, and if she doesn't turn him up, you and I will do a search of the closets and storage areas."
Shinya nodded, her obsidian gaze welling with tears she regarded with surprise, as though she had no idea why she was running off at the eyes.
Art collected his slickers, his bomber jacket, and the coat he had loaned Suzanne from the peg near the door. Michelle stopped him before he could get rainproofed.
"You have to promise me you'll come back, or I'll come looking for you," she said, turning his head with one hand and kissing his cheek. "Don't panic. I'm not attracted to you in that way, at least not yet. More of a kindred spirit thing. We have a lot in common. You and me together could overlord this entire party."
"What would Price say?"
"Price won't mind. Promise me."
Art didn't want another semantic battle. He wanted to get out into the storm, which was at least something he thought he could deal with. He settled for: "I'll see you again.''
Michelle vanished back into her party, and Art made it through the door. The storm on the outside had grown ten times worse than the one on the inside. Or was it the other way around? He could not decide.
***
The dash clock in the Jeep read 7 P.M. Price's house, and the menagerie it contained, seemed to collapse time; Art might have sworn he'd only been there an hour or so. Among the vehicles parked outside, the wind was threatening to tear the ragtop off a Caddy convertible and the newer, smaller cars were visibly rocking with each gust. A yacht-size black Buick Riviera held its ground, determined as a squatting cockroach.
Foliage had taken wing from the hills and debris scooted across the road like tumbleweeds, in the narrow brilliance of the high beams and the Jeep's bonus rack of halogen floods in shock-mounted titanium. Sheets of water unfolded themselves across the driving surface as Art engaged the four-wheel drive and managed a steady thirty-per, leery of booby traps, alert for a washout. He wanted to hole up in his sanctuary, fix a hamburger, and empty his head of the cacophony of the party. He had not partaken of any of the edibles at Price's; he now admitted to himself it was because he backhandedly feared the food was drugged. Half the people he'd encountered had seemed dangerously high. Paradoxically, a part of him wanted to go home and plug down Dixie Double Hexes until he lapsed into sleep, but he promised himself he'd be good tonight.
He wanted to know the hidden linkages that would bring the whole story into light. Price was adept at talking around the truth, and Michelle was his creature, so anything they revealed indicated a concurrent action list of facts in partial shadow. They seemed to be ringmastering the whole circus; they knew why Suzanne's personality had fishtailed on him, but Art was not permitted to know because he was an outsider.
Forget it,
he told himself.
Cut your losses, don't try to figure it out, and just drive. Leave it behind and it becomes the past. It's not like you had any make on Suzanne's personality-whatever it was, for real.
He thought of his own isolation, his self-imposed exile from the vertiginous soap opera represented in microcosm by Price's party. For every upside to dealing with people, there was a downside; for every benefit, an emotional bill to be paid. Somehow Price had seized the more jagged emotions of each of his guests and propelled them to the fore; he unburied fears and needs and denuded them, right on the surface, where they were unshielded enough to strike sparks against all the other fears and needs distilled from every other partygoer. Price could be a sadistic child in a room full of windup robots, setting them all in motion, heedless of how they collided or fell over. What remained hidden to Art was the benefit derived by Price himself, a guy who acted like he always had an angle hardwired to an agenda… unless it was to simply humiliate and embarrass everyone enough to give him some kind of future leverage.
Michelle seemed to know what was going on, too, but her only reaction, apparently, was bemusement at the demolition derby. She was luminescently attractive; another kind of armor. Art could not deny that his glands surged whenever she touched him or made eye contact, and she was pointedly aware of this, and the best defense he could muster was a passing-fair stone face. If you permitted yourself to be seduced by the song of the Sirens, you crashed your longboat on the reef-that was the entire purpose of the transfixing tune. Venus flytraps looked like flowers. Mosquitoes anesthetized their puncture points so you didn't know your blood had been sucked until they were gone. Legend said cobras mesmerized their prey. After the seduction, Art wondered, what sort of feeding took place?
Suzanne remained an enigma. Art felt the need to see her one more time, to talk with the version of her that had engaged him from a safe distance, before the roller-coaster free-for-all that had transpired in the bedroom. Pulling against this was the voice in his head that advised him to just let it go. It was what it was, and the story had ended.
The End. Next page.
Dina disturbed him. He felt a conflicting desire to reach out to her, to engage her seeming manic depression, because past her perimeter of Bouncing Betty mines and razor wire there was a human being in considerable pain. He felt like a kid who had been warned not to touch something hot. The burn might teach him something he desperately needed to learn and know, the shape of which might only be clear after he'd taken the risk. Or it might merely scald and scar him, proving that reaching out was foolish.
All of them, the hosts and partygoers, were from a world Art had forsaken and did not miss. He could bail and leave them to their damnation and self-destruction. He owed the world nothing, and the world did not care about his grief. It wasn't living, but it was a life.
What happened next, happened fast.
First impression: A zebra sprang across the Jeep's path just as something shattered the right front windscreen.
It was too late to brake, but Art stomped the pedal in pure reflex, his entire body contracting as though electroshocked. The Jeep brodied off the rainswept road, tires hydroplaning, then vaulted a wet dune as though kicked in the ass. Sandgrass divided like hair ripped by a comb. The Jeep was airborne for a quarter of a second. It crunched down hard on its right front fender and tipped over, mostly because the front wheels were turned. It made a heavy woodblock impression as it settled into the sand on its passenger side.
Art's brain lurched like an egg in a dropped jar of vinegar as the world took a forty-five-degree tilt and his harness pushed the air out of his lungs. Touchdown punched him in the face, and his extremities blunted into remote, as though his hands and feet were sending signals from far away. His head banged the padded underside of the roll bar as all the loose junk inside the cab pelted him.
The engine revved wildly, a keening noise that strained upward; the sound of a prehistoric beast in pain. He tried to force his arm to stretch, to cut the ignition, and his right shoulder hollered. The headlamps carved a triangular spray of featureless sand and slanted needles of rain. The motor chugged and expired, leaving the hiss of falling water and the echoes of the last five seconds inside Art's swimming cognizance. Cold air pierced the cab. His legs seemed nailed into a pretzel configuration and the rest of him was strung aloft by the bondage of the driving harness like a parachutist hung up in an apple tree. Gravity insisted he go down. He undogged the latches and collapsed into a cramped astronaut crouch, feeling the door handle bruise his back, the gearshift jabbing his balls. Sharp things poked into his kidneys and he was able to draw two deep, raw breaths of air before he thought:
A zebra?!
Maybe just someone in a patterned coat. Faux fur.
The Jeep gave a creak and cubes of shattered safety glass blizzarded down from the driver's-side window like crushed ice. Cold air lashed through the exposed cabin, bringing hostile raindrops. It was incentive enough. He wanted to lapse into unconsciousness, a blissful reprieve. Instead he keyed his own uncooperative, broken-robot body toward the task of climbing out of the upended Jeep, using his elbows for leverage.
Maybe just his imagination. Faux monster.
When he was upright, he pounded the glove box with his list, one, two, three times, before the goddamned door popped and jettisoned its contents-manuals, maps, old Life Savers, brown paper towels, flashlight. The rain slicker was still constricting his movements like a spiderweb. He hoped there wasn't any glass in his eyes.
Somebody was shouting in the distance. To Art it was all unintelligible rigmarole, like the voodoo bullshit assigned to black natives in serial thrillers, back when no one gave a damn about political correctitude. Art tried clumsily to dismount the Jeep and fell on his ass in the sand. Even as he contracted into a squat, the wind kept up its mission to knock him over again.
Flickering light was visible inside the Spilsbury house. Art realized he had gone off the road thirty yards shy of the driveway. Oddly, he felt very warm even though the wind and rain were frigid and unrelenting.
What to do first?
Somewhere inside the disorder of the Jeep was one of his guns- a Heckler G Koch USP compact, he remembered. A hammerless dock knockoff packing a ten-round, nine-millimeter mag. Normally it was stashed inside a fake Day Runner in the glove box. You could purchase these things out of any firearms periodical, and they usually featured a concealed, lockable back flap that concealed storage snugs "sized to your weapon" plus room for an extra clip. Why had he stashed a gun in the Jeep? Or had he misremembered this as well, which was why there was no gun to be found, and no attendant security to be had from tucking it against the small of his back (an "SOB carry," in gun argot).
The plastic flashlight was inadequate as a weapon. He blinked it several times in the direction from which he thought he had heard voices. No response, incomprehensible or otherwise.
Art flopped his hood into place and began to plod. It was time at last to check out the Spilsbury house, close up.
Art knew exactly nothing about his nearest so-called neighbors, the Spilsburys. Were there more than one? Wet sand sucked at his boots. There were small ponds everywhere, even this far from the beach. More than once, the storm tried to bowl him over.
The highway side of the two-story house was dark, but as Art rounded to the south he saw light flickering downstairs, dully orange and wavering. Firelight. If the wooden structure was burning, the interior would eat itself flagrantly until the doors and windows imploded and the blaze introduced itself to the abundance of rain. That would leave a gutted shell, unless the struts and supporting walls collapsed; then the pitched roof would cave in like a circus tent with the central pole removed. Bye-bye, vacation retreat.
One of the table-size board-ups securing the oceanside bow windows had been liberated. Thin curtains had blown themselves to rags on the edges of broken glass. Apparently someone had pried off the plywood and hurled it through the window as a battering ram. Possibly more than one person, since the ledges were up past Art's head height. He imagined invaders standing on one another's shoulders, breaching the battlements with Viet Cong stealth. Smoke was steadily feeding from the top of the window frame and disintegrating like cotton candy on the wind.
Before he could locate some way to climb, he saw the front door was wide open. He eased toward the entrance and at the threshold clicked on his light. The beam cut the yellowish smoke.
The Spilsbury living room had been tarted out in New England nautical chic: rockers, furniture with fake antique veneer, carved wooden gewgaws. Model sailing ships on the mantel. A metal-gridded, porthole-style window that had been framed by a ship's wheel. The wheel was gone, but Art was close enough to see the pattern of dust and sun-fade it had left behind. It had been smashed, along with one of the rockers and some of the sea-chest tables, for firewood. An ungainly pile burned fitfully in the red-brick fireplace. The more porous woods had kindled faster, and the pile had spilled across the hearth, where it had already set a woven rug to smoldering.
Cold air lashed Art from behind and he thought he felt the house sway gently. The fire horripilated and rearranged itself, spitting glowering embers onto the floor, which was mostly waxed hardwood. There was probably an extinguisher in the kitchen.
The layout was traditional, even classic. Art moved past the main stairwell and saw the expected risers in velvet-finish white against polished wood treads, the banisters and newel post both lathed into overdetail. Brass rods secured a carpet runner. Dominating the dining room was a large, scalloped brown table and high-backed chairs with cockleshelled, cabriole legs. A poster from the Burt Lancaster movie The Crimson Pirate hung framed on the north wall. A buffet cabinet had toppled, to dog-pile the liquor bottles within; several had ruptured, and the air was redolent with the sharp tang of alcohol. He saw a phone and delicately lifted the receiver, noticing it was a Bakelite oldie with a rotary dial. No tone. He jiggled the cradle the way people do in Forties films when they can't get an operator. It never worked then and it didn't work now.