Carrion Comfort (82 page)

“You think you could coexist with Willi?” asked Harod.

Kepler turned into a parking area near the Hollywood Bowl. A gray limousine with blackened glass sat waiting. “When you’ve lain down with snakes as long as I have, Tony,” he said, “it doesn’t especially matter what variety of poison the new one carries as long as it doesn’t bite its bedfellows.”

“What about Sutter?”

Kepler turned off the Mercedes’ ignition. “I just came from a long conversation with the Reverend. While he places much sentimental value in his long relationship with his friend Christian, he also is willing to render into Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Willi can be assured that Jimmy Wayne Sutter will bear no grudges if Mr. Barent’s portfolio changes hands.”

“You know something, Kepler?” said Tony Harod. “You couldn’t frame a simple declarative sentence if your fucking life depended on it.”

Kepler smiled and opened the door. Over the noise of the warning buzzer he said, “Are you with us or not, Harod?”

“If being with you is keeping my head down and staying out of this shit, I’m with you,” said Harod.

“Simple declarative sentence,” snapped Kepler. “
Your friend
Willi needs to know where you stand. With us or not?”

Harod glanced out at the bright expanse of parking lot. He looked back at Kepler and his voice was tired. “I’m with you,” he said.

It was almost eleven
P.M.
when Harod decided that he wanted two hot dogs with mustard and onion. He set down the script revisions he’d been working on and walked to the west wing where Maria Chen’s light still shone under the door. He rapped twice. “I’m going to Pinks. Want to come?”

Her voice was muffled, as if she were calling from the bathroom. “No thank you.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Thank you anyway.”

Harod pulled on his leather flight jacket and got the Ferrari out of the garage. He enjoyed the drive, shifting hard through the gears, shaving the yellow lights, and blowing off two low riders that made the mistake of challenging him for three blocks on the Boulevard.

Pinks was crowded. Pinks was always crowded. Harod ate his two hot dogs at the counter and took a third one out to the parking lot. Two teenage boys were standing between a dark van and his car, one of them actually leaning against the Ferrari as he talked to two girls. Harod walked up to him and thrust his face within inches of the other’s. “Move it off or kiss it good-bye, kid,” he said.

The boy was six inches taller than Harod, but he jerked away from the side of the sports car as if it were a hot stove. The four of them moved away slowly, glancing back at Harod, waiting to get the proper distance away before shouting snide remarks. Harod studied the two girls. The shorter one looked like an upscale Chicano, black hair and brown skin, the whole package wrapped in expensive shorts and a halter top that looked like it was under too much stress. Harod imagined how surprised the two beach boys would be if that particular piece of chocolate came over to join him in the Ferrari and decided to take some of the stress off the elastic.
To hell with it
, thought Harod.
I’m too tired
.

He finished off the third dog sitting behind the wheel, washed it down with the last of his Tab, and had switched on the ignition when a soft voice said, “Mr. Harod.”

The van door had opened four feet from him. A black chick was sitting sideways in the passenger seat. There was something familiar about her and Harod had given her an automatic smile before he registered where he had seen her before. She was holding something in her lap, bracing it.

Harod kicked the clutch in and was reaching for the gear shift when there was a soft noise like the silencers made in his spy movies and a wasp stung him high on the left shoulder. “Shit!” cried Harod, raised his right hand to brush the insect away, had time to realize that it was not a wasp, and then the interior of the car lurched sideways and the console and passenger seat came up sharply to strike him in the face.

Harod never totally lost consciousness, but the effect was the same. It was as if someone had banished him to the storm cellar of his own body. Sights and sounds came through— vaguely—but it was like watching a distant UHF station on a cheap black and white TV while a radio in another room provided garbled sound. Then someone put a hood over his face. It made little difference. From time to time he would become aware that he was rolling slightly, as if he was on the deck of a small boat, but the tactile sensations were fleeting and false and far too much trouble to sort out.

People were carrying him. He thought they did. Perhaps those were his own hands on his arms and legs. No, his own hands were behind him somewhere, welded together by a band of skin and cartilage that seemed to have grown from nowhere.

For an indefinite period of time Harod was nowhere— neither conscious nor unconscious— floating somewhere inside himself in a pleasant primordial soup of false sensations and confused memories. He was distantly aware of two voices, one of them his own, but the conversation— if that is what it was— bored him and he soon returned to the inner darkness the way a skin diver allows his weights and a gentle current to carry him deeper into purple depths.

Tony Harod knew that something was definitely wrong, but he just did not give a damn.

The light woke him. The light and the pain in his wrists. The light, the pain in his wrists, and a pain that made him think of Ridley Scott’s
Alien
where the thing comes busting out of that poor sonofabitch’s chest. Who was that actor? John Hurt. Why the hell was the light in his eyes and why did his wrists hurt and what had he been drinking to turn his skull inside out like this?

Harod sat up . . . tried to sit up. He tried again and shouted with the pain. The shout seemed to clear some last film between himself and the world and he lay there and paid attention to things that had not seemed important before.

He was handcuffed. Lying in a bed, handcuffed. His right arm was on the pillow next to him, the manacle around the right wrist connected to the heavy white metal of the headboard. His left arm was down at his side, but the handcuffs there were connected to something solid below the side of the mattress. Harod tried to lift his left arm; metal rattled on metal.

The side of the bed then. Or a pipe. Or something. He wasn’t ready to move his head yet to check. Maybe later.

Who the hell was I with last night?
Harod knew a few female friends who were heavily into bondage, light S & M, but he had never allowed himself to be on the receiving end.
Too much to drink? Vita finally got me in her chamber of pleasures?
He opened his eyes again and held them open against the pain of light striking his optic nerves.

A white room. White bed— sheets, brass painted white— white walls, small mirror in the opposite wall with white painted frame, a door. A white door with a white knob. Single, naked light bulb— about ten million watts, Harod judged from the glare— hanging from a white cord. Harod was wearing a white hospital gown. He could feel the slit up the back and that he was naked underneath.

OK, not Vita. Her plea sure chamber ran to velvet and stone. Who did he know that had a hospital hang-up? No one.

Harod rattled the cuffs and felt the raw skin where he had already chafed his wrists. He leaned left and looked down. White floor. Left wrist cuffed to white metal bed frame. No need to move again for a while unless he had the urge to throw up all over the nice white floor. Let’s think about this.

Harod went away for a little while. When he realized where he was sometime later— the light the same, the white room the same, the headache a little better— he thought about mental hospitals. Had someone committed him when he wasn’t looking?

They don’t handcuff people in mental hospitals.
Do they?

A stab of fear struck through him hard enough to set him struggling and kicking, rattling metal against metal until he fell back panting. Barent. Kepler. Sutter. Those lowlife sons of bitches had put him away somewhere safe where he could spend the rest of his life staring at white walls and peeing in his sheets.

No, that group would just kill him and have done with it.

Then Harod remembered Pinks, the kids, the van, the black chick. She’d been the one. What had Colben said about her in Philadelphia? They thought Willi had been Using her and that sheriff. But the sheriff was dead . . . Harod had still been there when Kepler and Haines arranged to have the body discovered in a Baltimore bus station so there would be no connection with the Philadelphia fiasco.

Who was Using her now? Willi? Possibly. Perhaps he hadn’t been satisfied with the message relayed through Kepler. But why all this?

Harod decided to quit thinking for a while. It hurt too much. He would wait for a visitor. If the black chick came in and Willi or whoever didn’t have a
very
tight grip on her, someone would be in for a surprise.

Harod was feeling the definite need to urinate and had tried some serious shouting when the door finally opened.

It was a man. He was wearing a green surgical outfit and a black balaclava with mirrored sunglasses in the place of eyes. Harod thought of Kepler’s sunglasses, then about the serial killer in Willi and his
Walpurgis Night
movies. He almost urinated then and there.

It was not Willi. Harod could tell that at once. Nor was he the right size or apparent age for Tom Reynolds, Willi’s queer cat’s-paw with the strangler’s fingers. It didn’t matter. Willi had had time to recruit legions of new nobodies.

Harod
tried
to go for the man. He did try. But at the last second the old revulsion washed over him— stronger than the earlier nausea and headache— and he pulled away before his will touched the other’s mind. It would have been easier and less intimate for Harod to have licked another man’s anus or taken another man’s penis in his mouth. The idea alone made him shudder and break out in a cold sweat.

“Who are you? Where am I?” Harod’s words were almost unintelligible, falling from a tongue carved from cheap wood.

The man walked to the bedside and looked down at Harod. Then he reached under his surgical blouse and pulled out an automatic pistol. He aimed it at Harod’s forehead, “Tony,” he said in a soft accent, “I’m going to count to five and fire. If you’re going to do something, you had better do it now.”

Harod pulled at the cuffs hard enough to move the bed. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

Harod’s mind leaped, but thirty years of self-conditioning prevented him from completing the contact.

“. . . four . . .”

Harod closed his eyes. “. . . five.” The hammer fell and went
click
.

When Harod opened his eyes the man was standing by the door and the gun was out of sight. “Do you need anything?” came the soft, accented syllables.

“Bedpan,” whispered Harod.

The balaclava nodded. “The nurse will bring it.”

Harod waited until the door was closed and then squeezed his eyes shut in concentration.
The nurse
, he thought.
Dear God, let it be the old-fashioned tits on top, slit between the legs kind of nurse
.

He waited.

The nurse was the black woman. The one from Philadelphia. The one who had shot him and brought him here.

He remembered her name. Natalie. He owed her a lot.

She wore no balaclava but appeared to have white patches on her temples, wires in her hair. She carried a bedpan and set it in place professionally. Stood back to wait.

Harod brushed over her mind lightly as he relieved himself. No one was Using her. He could not believe that they had been so stupid— whoever
they
were. Maybe it was just this stupid black bitch and an accomplice. Colben had said something about the two of them being after Melanie Fuller. Obviously they did not know what
he
could do.

Harod waited until she had retrieved the bedpan and walked to the door. He had to make sure the door was unlocked. It would be just Willi’s kind of joke to have them both locked in— to give Harod someone to Use and no way to Use her. What the hell were those little wires in her hair? Harod saw them in hospital movies, but on
patients
, not nurses. Some sort of sensors.

She opened the door.

He hit her so fast and so hard that she dropped the bedpan, spilling urine down the front of her white skirt.
Tough titty
, thought Harod and took her out through the door, seeing through her eyes.
Get the keys
, he ordered.
Kill that other cocksucker any way you can, get the keys, and get me out of here
.

There were six feet of corridor and another door. This one was locked. He threw Natalie against it until he felt her shoulder twist, had her claw at the wood. It did not budge.
Fuck this
. He brought her back into the room. Nothing that could be used as a weapon. She walked over to the bed, tugged at the cuffs. If she could dismantle the bed for him, tear the frame apart. But there was no way to do that quickly while Harod was cuffed to frame and headboard both. He looked at himself through her eyes and saw black stubble on his white cheeks, eyes wide and staring, curling hair matted.

The mirror. Harod looked at it and knew that it had to be one of those one-way things. He’d have Natalie break it with her bare hands if need be. If there was no way out through it, he’d have her use shards of glass for a weapon when the fucker in the balaclava came in. If the mirror wouldn’t break, he’d assume it was one-way and just have her bash her pretty little face against it until it was just bones sticking out of black mush. Give whoever was on the other side a good show. Then, when they came in, she could tear their throats out with her nails and remaining teeth, get the gun, get the keys . . .

The door opened and the man in the balaclava came in. Natalie whirled, crouched to leap. Her snarl was something seen in a zoo when feeding time was long delayed.

The man in the balaclava shot her in the hip with the dart gun in his hand. She leaped, claws extended. The man caught her and lowered her to the floor. He knelt beside her for a minute, taking her pulse, lifting an eyelid to check her pupil. Then he got up and walked over to Harod’s bed. His voice was shaking. “You son of a bitch,” he said. He turned and walked out of the room.