If you can trust the information, if you don’t file it away with tales of Batboy and Anna Nicole Smith’s being a man, you might consider the fact that in the early 1970’s a serial killer did thirteen people in order to prevent the San Andreas fault from finally giving way. He was sure God had to have a certain number of sacrifices, and that if he didn’t provide them, nature would.
Novel idea. Lousy execution. You haven’t heard of him. They didn’t make any movies about it. Manson did it earlier with a great counterculture paranoia angle. The Black Dahlia revival was sexier with a film noir feel. Maybe he was just too Northern Californian, too mellow, no flair. He did it over four months, no Denny’s shooting gallery, no sorority house finale. But maybe it worked, there weren’t any big earthquakes that year.
When he first saw her, really saw her all the way, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody did anything on Hollywood Boulevard anymore. Premieres didn’t count, limo to carpet to theater door in full evening wear in the blazing afternoon sun to be in time for the evening news on the other coast. You couldn’t see the street for the cameras and the crowds and the headache-inducing reflections off your date’s sequined dress. You wore your shades, you smiled, you snored, you went home. The street didn’t matter, it could have been all false fronts and mockups beyond the ropes and bleachers and you’d never know the difference.
Here the street showed, every faux stone star, every In-n-Out cup, every urine-stained wall. The theoretically (but never actually) hyper-cool sunglasses at night thing would have been suicidal, given the number of anxious predator types in the doorways. Yeah, so they looked a little less scary when they let tourists pose with them for pictures, but he knew you didn’t really want to fuck with them. Street punks by accident or design, out here because there wasn’t any in there or because out here was more dramatic. It was the right place for them to be, certainly. Living on Hollywood Boulevard had a certain panache even twenty years after “Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway.” But it wasn’t the right place for him.
She fit right in, though. Sitting in front of just one more boarded up storefront. Beyond-skinny Kate Moss arms, with the obligatory black tattooed thorn armband, wrapped around bony knees in purple tights. Red-red no color found in nature hair butchered in a cut that looked expensive and was probably her tweaked girlfriend with some nail scissors. The embroidered leather jacket over her lap looked expensive too, but that was required, probably costumes was set up on Gower someplace. No jacket? Just a walkthrough, you want screen time you need to smell like cow and sweat like one, too.
She was perfect. He’d seen her in dreams often, in chance quick cuts sometimes, a glimpse behind the Hari Krishnas on Third Street or a three-quarter through the glossy windshield of a Jaguar. But now she was here, right here, in the rail-thin and dead pale flesh. Still, she looked so fragile, vulnerable, head tucked down, chin resting on the run in her tights, shoulders rounded and slumped. Too much Melanie, not enough Scarlett. Until she lifted her head and her sharp chin and sharper cheekbones made her look dangerously angular, a dagger of a girl. And her eyes held it. The spark, the flame. No color in this light, really, just dark, wide, and *there*. Presence. Magic.
She watched him watching her and he knew very well what she saw. He knew black was the uniform down here but his closet would only let him go so far. The pants weren’t, they were trousers, slightly flared, $750 masquerading as thrift shop. The shirt was so roughly woven that it looked like burlap, but it had too much shine, too much drape to be anything but silk.. And his jacket, hell his three-quarter length black leather had a grey on black paisley cloth lining. Black Hushpuppies on his feet, in on Beverly, on Rodeo. Even Melrose. Not here. No chains, no symbols, nothing like the little palm trees all over her heavy, creased black leather.
It didn’t matter, though. She unfolded herself and pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t try for graceful, no graceful way to get your butt off a cement curb. When she walked to him he tried to tell himself he wasn’t surprised. This was the one, he’d known it all along, she was it. She didn’t come too close, not making a come-on or at least not an obvious one. Her chin pointed dead at him.
“Club not what you expected?” Her voice was high and a little nasal. She’d have to work on it if she was going to be with him.
“When I saw how many Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts they were letting inside I decided to take a pass.” He looked her up and down, glance number six, speculative and superior. “Maybe it’s not a complete loss, though. Maybe I could buy you something to drink? Or eat?”
She shook her head. Her voice stayed flat, the mockery, the wit wasn’t there yet. But it was in there, he knew damned well it was. “I like to stay hungry.” She stayed silent, he did too. He’d made the move, you couldn’t let them see you want it. Finally she gave in. She waved her arm at the wall of the Hollywood Hills, twinkling with lights, looming over them like some Spielbu sidebar box of rg alien ship. “About the only thing I could use right now would be a view from the top of this wall. Can you drive me up there?”
He let her see a smile, no teeth, just the lips. “I can drive you up there and serve you drinks from the edge of the precipice. Anybody you need to say goodbye to?”
She just shook her head and pulled on her jacket. She entwined his arm with hers, arranging his hand on her sleeve to suit her before they moved off. The jacket was so thick it was like clutching couch upolstery, but somehow the delicate supporting bone under that heavy, pungent suppleness was erotic. He wasn’t very sensitive to sexual stimuli, normally. He got it up and kept it up when it was sucked on by some flavor-of-the-month talent. Or he got hard at the thought of the good he was doing his career with a given fuck.
And he had his fantasies. But somehow (and he’d known she would) this girl was all three, the ultimate exotic toy, the perfect foil for his emerging notoriety...and of course the other. He could see her like that, street punk, nobody would miss her.
He shook that thought away, though, as he handed her into his Lexus. She grinned a little for the first time at his opening the door for her. It wasn’t a warm grin, she was laughing at him. But that was fine, just fine. In this town you only got so far before you had to find the right girl. Or the right boy if the boy was named Keanu. But you had to find someone, an asset, to succeed with you, to wear white perfectly as she hosted your parties, to have huge fights with in semi-public places, to spend on, to cheat on, to dump. Or be dumped by. Didn’t make much difference. You needed that kind of buzz eventually, and now was the time. And this was the place. And this was the girl.
She liked his place in the Hills, he could tell. It wasn’t a top-notch address, he’d have to move soon, but the view...you could see the Baldwin Hills on the wrong end of the valley almost close enough to touch. Downtown was fairyland. Century City was Oz. And Hollywood was a lighted carpet, made to be walked on. She stood by the window and sipped at the drink he’d mixed, a martini since she hadn’t known what to ask for, and she looked long, motionless, five fingertips touched to the glass like it was a soapbubble and might break if she pressed too hard. She didn’t move much, she barely breathed. She was there, out there, above it and down in it. If he’d had to film her he’d do it from the side, to catch that expression, as if she wasn’t really home but might be any instant. He’d have to light it carefully, hard to shoot against glass without flares, harder still to catch both her and the knife-sharp glittering landscape outside. Still, you could....
She broke his reverie. “Would you mind a lot if I took a shower? When I’m on pavement dirty is fine, but this place is so clean, I feel like The Red Death or something.”
He nodded and pointed her at the bathroom. He hid the smile until she passed him, her hair smelling like clove cigarettes and Aveda gel. Once she’d had a chance to get good and wet he took off his shirt, just his shirt, and went in to join her.
She wasn’t singing or even humming as she washed herself. The all-marble bathroom wasn’t steamed up at all, the air system was too good for that. Her clothes were in a heap, he noticed some rather conventional white underwear in addition to the purple tights. He’d buy her silk stuff, very classy, and crotchless nylon lace trash for playing games, and everything in between. He walked to the shower area, a sunken room of its own set off with a marble bench, no curtain or door at all, it was too large to need one. She was facing him dead-on but her eyes were closed as she rinsed her hair. Blood streamed down her slim neck, her sloping shoulders, over her very small breasts and down, into the shaved cleft between her legs. Her arms were at her sides, streaked red in long paths like rivers. The floor of the shower area looked like a colorized Psycho, although without the artful spiral swirls.
For a moment he really, honestly forgot to breathe, like a cliche from some really tired treatment. He thought for a second that he’d lived his fantasy already, and then that this was a dream, and then that she’d chosen to suicide in his expensive marble shower. It only was a second before he saw that her hair dye was sluicing from her hair in waves as she passed her head underneath the hot stream, before he realized that the color was wrong and the texture wrong, too orange, not thick enough, not even dilute would it look like that. Still, by then, figuring out the truth didn’t make much of a difference. He was rock hard against his trousers and reaching in the drawer for the $300 barber shears by the time she opened her eyes. He really did just have to find out what it would look like, live-action.
Even if shower scenes were overdone.
The next time he found her he was well on his way up. His calls were being returned before lunch by the people he’d asked for. He’d stopped going to the standard list of fashionable eateries with the standard famous faces and begun dining at places that were too exclusive to be fashionable, with dining partners most people would never recognize at all. The Hollywood house was gone, and so was Little Miss Palm Tree’s opened corpse, up into the Angeles National Forest along with the hundreds of other Angelenos who were supposed to stay missing. Luckily for him the next midnight interment committee didn’t turn her back up again. She stayed gone. He stayed hot and got hotter.
Unfortunately hotter required more. More taste, more style, more entertaining. He needed art and decided to be quirky and acquire at least some of it himself, give himself something to start stories at dinner parties. In a gallery at Bergamot in Santa Monica he saw a painting in black watercolor of a dark, masculine angel, not at all usual, too intense and realistic and romantic to be a hit. But it caught his eye and he ducked into the gallery out of the rain.
The place was nearly empty, just the bored young too-pretty-for-this-job sales associate and a woman busy sorting through a stack of canvases at the rear of the gallery. He saw another angel, the only color other than black the red hair, empress-like this time. There were also what seemed to be a number of views of the City with angels hovering over them, City Hall, the Mormon Temple. There were other scenes he didn’t recognize, a flood of some sort through chapparal-covered hills, this one, too, guarded by angels, just watching, not reaching out to the little people swept away by the raging torrent.
Then his eye was caught by movement and the woman at the canvases turned very slowly, gracefully. He quickly saw it wasn’t grace, it was caution. She was quite old, tall and still strong-looking but frail enough to favor her joints as she straightened. Her hair was long and white and her face imperious, one of those old lady’s faces that doesn’t get slack but stretched tighter over her bones. No facelifts, though. The skin on her neck looked so soft and fragile that he was sure he could bruise it with the slightest touch. Her purple clothing, all loose and flowing and layered, was a perfect combination of artist elan and old lady eccentricity. He wanted to look at the paintings but he couldn’t. He could only think of her, how perfect she would be. He argued with himself, but even as he ran through the objections he shot them down. She was very old and very odd, but it would proclaim him above conventional judgements and mores. Her art could be a success and that would reflect well on him. She clearly knew this City, had painted it dozens if not hundreds of times. He could make a movie of her life...
She accepted his invitation to coffee across the courtyard firmly and calmly. Her voice was steel and her thoughts more so. Sometimes he could see the younger woman, burdened with an over-arrogant nose and a too-dramatic body, now softened into this bundle of bright cottons and tissue paper skin over now-fragile bone. He paid her for several of her paintings right there in the cafe. He was worried that she might think him odd for asking her to come home with him, but she smiled a smile he guessed she’d smiled a million times in the past, just as she had in his dreams, and she came with him like a young girl with a lover. She was stronger than the street punk, and more fierce. She very nearly took his eye out before he could get her tied to the brushed-steel Italian bedframe. And she clung to life, and her eyes to his face, a very very long time.
Eventually he stopped being surprised at where he found her or what happened when he did. A bored, rich blond Bev Hills shopper, tan just starting to shade to leather, with a laugh like breaking glass that chilled him to the bone. A death-fixated gamine goth slut with a latex skirt and a t-shirt reading “Born to Die” who proved to be neither willing to embrace the darkness nor female. A hard-eyed East L.A. teen in baggy clothes with breasts like Greek sculpture who gave him her knife like an obedient child when he told her to and cried for mercy to her mother and to Mary when he used it on her. Even a big, forceful screamwriter who concealed her porn under pseudonyms and her pierced nipples under her power suits. This last shocked even him, as he found himself wallowing in her lushness, combining her two writing careers in one last scenario. At the end she didn’t beg for mercy, she begged for the knife. It shocked him. For a moment. But that, too was perfect, just perfect.
He’d thought, at first, that he really was supposed to make each one his consort in Eden. His mate. His fit partner. Talented, unique. Each one of them had been unique. Each one of them could have had her talents tamed and polished, targeted, marketed. And stolen, of course. It would only be fair, with what he could give her, that she would give to him. He’d pictured the wedding, the collaboration, the soft-focus vaseline-lens happy ending.
But deep down he knew that kind of film just wasn’t box office anymore.
They were all different. All different but all perfect, all her, the woman he saw in his dreams of castles made of cast cement and temples made of glass and steel, of wilderness bounded by city and city menaced by wild animals. She drew him to her over and over, and he found her, over and over. Suddenly, too, he found himself no longer making calls but taking them, unable to feast on the surfeit of riches, having to farm out ideas to cronies to help them succeed or enemies to help them fail. The City opened to him and poured her blessings on him, power, acclaim, parking spaces. He was blessed among men. And he found that while a friend is who you call when you need help moving, and a best friend is who you call when you need help moving a body, true power is being able to get someone else to make the trip to Angeles Crest. Even without having any friends at all.
He was known as eccentric for his prowlings around town. He was spotted in the oddest places, the yuppie-family-mart of Third Street Promenade, wandering Hollywood Memorial, eating in average restaurants. They made up stories about it, of course, that he kept his ideas fresh that way, that he was lonely for normal people, that he was tired of success. It all added to the fame. It was all wrong. And he found himself down on Melrose one sunny Sunday afternoon. Looking. Looking for her.
It didn’t take any time at all, this time. She was standing in front of Retail Slut with her back to him, slight, long flowing brown hair, short and swirly kinderwhore dress. He knew her by the posture, her head up proudly, back arched, arms almost behind her. The arrogance in that pose, the self-assured nature, the little girl garb. He was just about to approach her, make himself known to her yet again when she turned. And it was her. But it wasn’t kinderwhore, just kinder. Her face was dewy soft, eyes very very bright. Her hands and arms were babyfat and peachfuzz, all downy and new. He saw that she wasn’t slight, instead she was tall for her age, Mommy maybe a retired-model trophy-wife and Daddy a European exile to give her that bone structure, that faintly royal air. The poise was perfect, but the innocence was still there complete and whole in a town that stripped innocence faster than sharks will a piece of tuna. His age estimate kept revising downwards as she looked at him openly. Not twelve, not even ten. A very tall, very graceful nine. Her, at nine. But still, her.
He’d done it so often, it hardly took thought, there wouldn’t be anyone around to notice, there never was, she’d come with him, she’d be...perfect. He was all ready with the line, the oldest one in the book, she’d be perfect for a movie. She was nine, what did she know, it would work on her. But instead she walked right up to him. Right up to him. Very, very close.
“Sir, I’m sorry to bother you, but my Mother was supposed to meet me here when she found a parking space, and that was a really long time ago, I’m not sure what to do now...” She trailed off. Her voice was as sweet as he’d expected, her again, but played this time through the clear high tones of a bell. Faint accent, barely noticable. If she’d gotten a chance to grow up, it would have been a killer selling point in her inevitable film career.
He turned and walked away and didn’t look back.
He was lying on his back and staring at the black draperies over his head late that night when the tremor hit. His new house was in the Santa Monicas with a view of the ocean as spectacular as the old place had of the valley. The canyon, the narrow, twisty road, the expensive, unique houses cantilevered clinging to the chapparal hillsides, all screamed money, power in a way that Brentwood and Bev Hills just never did to him. So did the drive he had to make to be anywhere like civilization. Only the powerful could afford to be so isolated in a City where nothing mattered more than access. He wasn’t accessible. It was perfect.
The faint shaking barely disturbed him, his breathing stayed deep and even. He registered the fact of an earthquake like the CalTech seismograph, already calculating. If the epicenter is here, on some new fault, its a four. It’s probably a Northridge, though, that makes it a 4.3. If it’s the San Andreas it could be a 5.9. If San Francisco just fell down, make it an 8. He was just calculating what it would be if Portland had erupted in a cinematic spectacular of lava and rock when the Erte bronze of the bound nude woman fell from the pedestal to the right of his bed and broke his collarbone. Apparently his designer hadn’t thought things through.
He considered it, as he drove himself despite the grindingly banal pain down the canyon to the hospital. He considered it as they gave him the Percocet he demanded and fitted him with the really ugly cast he’d have to wear. He considered what it meant. Everything so good, for so long. He’d chase her and find her and chase her again, a Grecian Urn or a Rolling Stones song, just perfect. And this time he left her, he let his...his conscience? Christ, did he still have one of those? Get the better of him, and he ended up here. Even the most luxurious hospital is still a damned hospital. And only skiing, helicopter and small jet crash injuries add to your prestige. Anything else is just awkward, nobody knows what to say, how to act, when the powerful are powerless to escape injury. It upsets the normal scheme of things.
When he finally got downstairs to the underground parking lot, one of his many abused and interchangeable assistants trailing him to drive him home, he found that he’d been keyed. Fucking keyed for Christsakes. Not robbed, not carjacked, not even burglarized, nothing that dramatic. Keyed. The burgundy door of the Lexus sported a new stripe of primer all the way along. The asshole had certainly been meticulous about it. He didn’t even bother to snarl, he didn’t think he could after that last Percocet he took in the elevator. He just got in on the passenger side (thinking that “passenger” is synonymous in L.A. with “being taken for a ride”) and laid his head against the window and went to sleep.
Of course, he knew. He’d been attuned enough, astute enough, to stay on top for so long. No idiot plot here. No “I don’t understand it, my watch was working a minute ago!” No. He’d had her. The City. He’d owned her. He’d taken her and made her his and buried her drained shell in her own mountains so many times. He’d fucked her up the ass and down the throat and in new holes that he’d made for himself. Over and over again. She’d never been able to escape him, his power drew her to him and made her weak. And with her weak, he was strong. But when he’d let her go she’d gotten that power back, and now she was paying him back. Every twist of every blade, every time he’d asked her politely to scream louder for him, to lift her head and look at her own blood, to die, die underneath him, his voice velvety and a smile on his face even when his mouth was bloody from biting off pieces of her, every one, she’d make him pay for now. She’d have revenge.
And of course, he was proven right. The damned environmentalists went nuts over the deal to bring more jobs to the City by draining some godforsaken piece of swamp that no one ever even saw except to drive through on their way to the airport. Eventually it failed and he had to make the failure look like someone else’s fault, but it still tarnished his armor. His next three blockbusters tanked, the one following that had a great opening weekend and the legs of a worm. Since the “talent” skimmed the cream right off the fucking top of the gross they were screwed, even with video. Always ready, the vultures descended to dissect the corpse. Los Angeles magazine ran a very nice piece on his diligent efforts to make great product and his love for this big town of ours. But Buzz reamed him a new one with an expose on every little pissant office drone he’d ever screamed into tears, capping it off with a sidebar on the problems surrounding his upcoming films, making each one sound more inane than “The Last Boy Scout” and more crippled than “Waterworld.” But it was the comparison to “Cutthroat Island” that made his stomach clench.
When he got mugged at the Beverly Center, a mall which on any given day actually has more security personnel than aspiring actors (often the two are one and the same), he knew he was in trouble. He’d been trying to prowl again, hunt her again, bring her down. But he wasn’t capable of stalking that prey. She was too damned strong and too damned angry and he was weak, now. There never had been any mercy shown in this place for weakness of any sort, and there was a little girl walking the City right now who was proof of just how weak he’d become. Sitting on the tile by the food court, holding his crotch where the well-groomed and stylish mugger had kicked him, he marveled at it. He’d destroyed careers and lives and barely thought about it. He wasn’t stupid. He knew damned well that when Daddy got told he was a cocksucking loser and had better try working for PBS in Minnesota, Daddy took it out on little Johnny or little Susie one way or the other. He’d always understood that killing her, killing his women, no matter how vicious it was, no matter how valuable they were, couldn’t compete. He did greater damage to more people every damned day, and he didn’t need a better reason than a bad lunch or a lousy rewrite.
But he hadn’t been able to take her, that one motherfucking time. He’d blinked and now he was sitting here, needing to piss but not even able to get up, with some security guard/actor named Thaddeus bending over him solicitously while somewhere a blond, teenaged mugger charged a Nintendo 64 on his gold card.
He managed, eventually, to hobble out of the ice-cold climate controlled environment and into the brown, stifling late fall heat. He’d actually resorted to being chauffeured. At least his damned driver was waiting.
When he was out of town in Teluride during the few days following the big verdict in the Trial of the Century (which came just four years after the other Trial of the Century) and only heard about the (rather second-rate) rioting through the hysterical reports of his friends, he began to think maybe, just maybe, he’d dodged the bullet. Maybe. He pictured building a palace in exile here. He still had the power, he could make people come to him. Fuck the drive from the canyons. Screw the crosstown meetings. Abandon closing deals over food he couldn’t pronounce or enjoy. There were so many reasons to leave. He’d known he had something before he’d gone to try his luck there all those years ago. He still had that something now. There were other cities. Other women. There were telephones. There were computers. There were fax machines. There were airplanes.
When the fax machine spit forth the news early the next day that the asshole at Disney had finally lost his grip and was looking for a new studio to ruin, he sent email to his new assistant to have the plane ready to fly. They were on their way back in two hours. Back to L.A.
He had to admit as they flew in, the place looked terrific. Noon, Santa Anas apparently blowing because it was clear, clear all the way from San Jacinto to Catalina. It looked like a matte painting, too detailed and precisely drawn to be real. No fog, and none of that shit that the locals tried to call haze to avoid saying the word smog. Just razor sharpness. It was lovely. It would be his again, he could feel it. It pulled him in like a good story line, it always did. And he drew it in, too. He just needed to feel that power, like in the beginning. He’d have her back. She was a vengeful bitch. But he could make her forget.
His Lexus was waiting for him at baggage claim. He’d given up the driver when he’d gotten his prostate back, he really just had to be behind the wheel. The coast drive was lovely as always, the house was lovely as always, the view even better than usual. He tracked down the nearly invisible housekeeper and got rid of her, sent her back to wherever it is housekeepers go. Two vodka martinis on the deck later he was feeling civilized, the perfect center of a perfect world. The sea was ruffled and scalloped by the wind, a small trace of haze just starting to blow down from the north, from the direction of Point Dume. He watched it come, rolling over the sea and the land. And then he noticed the color, the deep, intense auburn color of that haze. And just as he saw it, the tang of burning aromatics bit, just fainly, at his nose and mouth.
Fire. A Santa Ana, a strong one, late fall, and a fire. North of here, obviously. Most likely, no problem. Still, he was too much an Angeleno to ignore the facts. They ticked in, one after the other, running through his mind: the canyons running right along the path of the winds, like a big wind tunnel; the winds getting funneled from the godforsaken Valley to the coast sometimes 50, 60 miles an hour. Fire in that takes no time to travel, no time at all, really. He was on his feet and heading for the strongbox with all his papers and the really, really valuable stuff before he could even think about it.
As he reached the car he grabbed the Thomas Guide. He knew the roads, but still, he didn’t want to miss anything. He never let himself miss anything. Yep, he was right. Out to Saddle Peak Road and either down to the sea on Tuna Canyon or up to Mulholland on Stunt Road. Stunt curved north, Tuna stayed south...He looked at the plume of smoke, now quite dense, and decided.
He was a master at guiding the too-large car on these tiny roads. He made Tuna Canyon in no time flat and with adrenaline making his body sing turned right to the water and safety. The radio was reporting fire straight down Las Virgenes and Malibu canyon, north. They thought it might reach Las Flores. He grinned to himself, a rarity, not really worth it with nobody around to impress.
Quick thinking. Dancing with this City, playing with her. I’ll win and I’ll do it my way. She’ll take it, all of it, and like it too...
When he first saw the pall off to the south he grinned even wider. He liked games, she was putting up quite a fight. But when he reached the ocean she’d know who her master was, goddammit. It was only when the radio reported that a blaze had started in Topanga Canyon, too, that his mouth went dry. He clenched the padded leather wheel and stopped thinking at all.
He’d already realized he’d have to change tactics by the time the news came that the fire had jumped to Tuna Canyon near the sea. Smoke had changed to ash and then to flakes, like black snow. The initially pleasant smoky tang had become a stench. Breathing was getting to be a little painful. He pulled a U and headed up the way he’d come. Backtracking, he really hated backtracking, but he’d do what he had to. He’d make it. Hell, he’d scripted enough cliffhangers to know how they turn out.
But Mulholland was a vision of hell, as if the old bastard who stole Northern California’s water had brought his own personal torment back to his namesake road. There was no way to turn to the right, the way he’d intended to go looked like an old-style disaster movie inferno. He had to try Mulholland left, or a side road, and hope that Las Virgenes had burned itself out and was nothing but cinders and smoke now.
When it came down to driving into a cloud of black and red, the fire roaring deafeningly barely a block or two distant, or cutting off on the side road, he chose the latter. Cold Canyon. He really didn’t find it all that amusing. Nor when he was chased down a hillside by the flames onto another dirt road did he appreciate the gate that blocked him at Cold Canyon Fire Road. Not that he could have gone any further. It had raced around in front of him too, up the hillside, embracing him from all sides. For the first time he looked, really looked at the flame, the effect. It looked like suns through the night of the smoke, suns or new born stars. He couldn’t really breathe much at all, the state of the art filtration in his climate control system had finally crapped out. It wasn’t controlling the climate, either. The Lexus was supposed to have the most insulated cab of any luxury car. But it was heating up, getting very hot indeed in here. And then it was painful, searing. Every nerve in his body etched, acid. He had to use the wipers to get the black stuff off the windshield so he could keep watching. For a moment he thought about getting out, either trying a run or just letting himself be consumed. But finally he realized he couldn’t. He was too damned chicken.
The small patches of orange became a river of red and the river began dancing, almost hypnotically, through the veils of acrid, choking smoke. The flames were so close now he could see pattern, shape, flames like hair, like arms, like a lovely woman, impervious to the flames, mischievous. She knocked on his window but he wouldn’t roll it down. He didn’t think he could lift his arms now anyway, which was bad, because one of them was on the metal seatbelt buckle and he thought maybe he could smell it cooking. Besides that, though, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t roll it down, or that he couldn’t talk. She’d always been with him, after all, close as a lover. Now was no exception.
Even his thoughts came stuttering, like a croak. “You’ve had your revenge now, you bitch...brought me down for what I did to you....”
She grinned widely, her eyes very dark, very bright, utterly innocent. Leather jacket, imperious nose, androgynous face, lovely breasts. Her laugh was like glass shattering and her eagerness and pride were overpowering. Everything, all, they all had their revenge.
“Revenge? The hand of Goddess smiting down the evildoer with fire and brimstone? How Cecil B. DeMille. Not my style. Divine retribution is quaint but passe.” She tilted her head. He let his own fall back and realized he’d thought he wasn’t hurting any more because pain was all there was, nothing didn’t hurt. “I got something from you, every time you murdered. I got a taste of it, your power, her pain, the destruction. Things break here. Buildings, minds, people. Things burn here, houses, relationships, desires. You snapped, and I liked that, and you broke things and I liked that. I liked it all.” She reached out one flame hand to caress his hair and make it more like hers.
Her face looked pouty now but it was a pouty like Helen of Troy, it could send men to their deaths. “But then you left me. You didn’t want to play anymore. You’d been so good and I couldn’t just drop you flat. So I had to find another way to get what I wanted. Another way to be with you.”
She bent and kissed him and he tried to scream, he really did, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t like dying in the movies. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t fun. And right up until when he stopped being able to see it wasn’t pretty. But he could still hear her, hear it in the roaring flames and in the groaning of the car and in the crisping of his flesh. Her voice was a roar. Her voice was a sigh. “I do think this worked out well though, in so many ways, love. So many ways...”
His charred corpse and twisted luxury car were found the very same day by Laguna Beach firefighters drafted to help save the luxury homes in the area. By evening the road would have been open but for the investigation, causing no end of aggravation during the drive-time commute.
Three days later a stoner planting pot seeds came upon the corpse of Lily Calavera, an East L.A. teenager who had gone missing after a fight with her mother five months before. Evidence at the site and witnesses led to the man who dumped the body, and he in turn told everything he knew about the killer, to an astonished public. More victims were uncovered. More evidence, including videotapes, was discovered at the murderer’s home. Miraculously, the fire had parted right there, sparing the house entirely. The story became huge. The time was right. The book was written in a week and a half, the first draft of the screenplay in four. Fights broke out over casting. It was the biggest story of the century in Los Angeles.
For about eight months.
