Hip Cities and Lost Souls
Chapter 20
Police saw horses blocked off the entrance in
a pathetic tribute to the man, the peeling paint of the front door and broken
windows part of the black man's life. Murders had happened here before, some
even as far back when it had been a Spanish estate. But the cops generally did
little more than cart out the bodies, investigating details with a shrug or a
nod. The victims more mystery than the crime, servant, prostitute, drug dealer
or addict. But the black man's death didn't sit well here or downtown. He wasn't
scum. And Bobo felt a mingling of emotions as he dipped under the crime-scene
ribbon and climbed up the stairs, the interior maintaining some of its original
awe, its drooping Spanish design taking on the aspect of funeral home.
Damn it! The man had saved his life. And in
return he'd what? Killed him, dragging the shadow up from the street into his
sanctuary.
Don't get me mixed up in your drug
bullshit, the man had told him. He hadn't even gotten high in Nam, when the
mortars sent everyone to one retreat or another, booze or dope, dope or booze,
with occasional boys and women in between.
Clean. Like the proverbial whistle. Straight
and cool, a stumbling, bumbling giant among men who had nearly died in the
trenches, believing not so much in war or political issues, but in Duty.
I gotta do my part, Mr. Bo, he'd said,
both about Nam and this place. He couldn't go home to Detroit. Not with the
memories there. But this place, this hole in the earth had come close enough,
filtering through it the same human filth as his father's place. Only the
weather's better here, was the joke.
In Nam, the black man had put his arm around
one tiny scared white boy's shoulder, saying: It's not as bad as back home.--
a remark his own tribe condemned him for, mocking him from their dens of
heroin.
What you taking up with that white boy for?
they'd asked. He don't give two shits about no nigger.
But the man had cared for Bobo. The man was
brother, father, lover, friend, everything and nothing at the same time.
Nothing in the sense that war left nothing for anybody. It was how Bobo had
survived it, and grown with it, and discovered later the path of the buddhists.
Through him. By him. For him.
Dead.
Here in L.A., he took up others the way he had
Bobo, like a black guardian angel looking for souls to save, running this dump
of a hotel with pennies he could squeeze out of its owner, taking in lost
children as if the war still went on, as if the grandson of an ex-slave had to
live up to every detail printed on the bottom of Miss Liberty's base. Over
time, even the cops had come to respect him, and his single-handed effort at
trying to keep fools alive.
Dead.
And it was Bobo's fault.
The man hadn't wanted to take in the drugs,
saying it was everything he opposed in the world.
Do it for me, Jake, Bobo had pleaded. A
personal favor. I'll have them out of your hair in twenty four hours.
Who could have known the power of Buckingham,
and how easily evil could rage through a city destroying in minutes and hours
what men struggled for years to build.
But Jake knew. Nothing for nothing, the
man'd said about war. And this was war!
"There's a cop inside," Dan said,
dragging at Bobo's arm, halting him just inside the vestibule where the inner
glass doors looked in on the lobby. A blue uniform showed on the couch. The
sound of snoring snuck under the door to them.
"So?"
"So we can't just walk in and expect him
not to wake up. Isn't there some other way inside? One a little less
obvious?"
"Perhaps," Bobo said and turned and
stopped immediately. Two cop cars had pulled up to the curb, the stone faces of
their occupants staring up at the lobby. "Down!"
Dan and Bobo leaped into the shadow, caught in
the limbo between the doors.
"Isn't this lovely," Dan said.
"Just the place I wanted to be."
"Get a grip on yourself," Bobo
hissed. "They're probably looking for old sleepy-head."
"But they have to come through here to
get a hold of him," Dan said.
"Not necessarily," Bobo said, reaching
up, his hand in a fist. He banged sharply on the glass.
"What the fuck are you....?" Dan
protested. But Bobo covered the man's mouth. Inside the hotel, the sleeping cop
grunted awake with a series of coughs and curses-- his walkie-talkie hissing with
static and angry voices, voices from outside asking him if he's awake.
He answered gruffly, and apparently satisfied,
the cars outside moved on.
"See," Bobo said with a grin.
"I see we're still not in the
hotel," Dan snarled. "And I wouldn't be shocked if those cops came
back."
"All right, all right, come with
me," Bobo said, slipping out the front door to the stairs and street,
noting how bad the place looked, how much more the front sagged, caulking
crumbling around the windows, wood splintering under the stairs, as if with the
death of Jake the place died, too. But the silence was the worst part. It had
never been silent before, always filled with the giggle and the groan of whores
and junkies, locked in their mutual dance of pain, the girls asking Bobo if he
wanted a date.
It was ceremony. They thought they knew him as
well as they did each other, and knew his preference, his love or lust for a
single black man. Father, brother, lover, friend. But Bobo always gave them
their due, pretending to admire them all, pretending not to know which was
prettier or which would suit him best.
He's coming to see Uncle Jake again,
they whispered behind his back, as if Bobo was a little rich kid coming home to
father at intervals to beg from him cash. And maybe they weren't far from the
truth. Maybe Bobo had gotten a bit too confused with life on the street, aching
for a bit of the old spirit, a regeneration at important times to retain some
of his humanity.
Where would that come from now, he wondered?
And who would mother these poor street fools when they crawled half-dead up the
stairs.
No one.
There would never be another Uncle Jake.
They crawled back under the ribbon, glancing
either way for sign of the cops. One of the patrol cars had stopped up at the corner,
waiting for something. Maybe just to circle around again to check on their boy
inside.
"Exactly where are we going?" Dan
asked when they had walked down the block to the Boulevard, the bright lights
blinding them both after the dark street.
"Around the block," Bobo said.
The other cop car appeared around the corner
and slowed as it came around the corner, its two occupants eyeing Bobo and Dan.
Then sped up after a moment.
"Like sharks," he said. "They
keep circling. What are they looking for?"
"Jake's killer," Bobo said.
"Don't be a fool. They don't care about
anyone in that place."
He turned up the next block, darkness
smothering them again. Small insignificant shops huddled on either side. Most
of them vacant. Most of them waiting for the new Renaissance that would never
come. The new groove. The latest Fad. Yet after Manson everything seemed flat,
as if nothing could ever follow that, as if the movement had collapsed under
the weight of sudden reality.
The narrow alley mouth opened between two of
these shops, an inconspicuous gap that few would guess from its appearance was
another entrance into the Selma, barely wide enough to fit their shoulders as
they moved. Someone had stacked trash cans in it, and as they squeezed by, rats
scurried out from the shadows, squealing their protest.
The other end was different-- a small court
inserted into the v-shaped belly of the building. A small cabin, which the
Selma owner called "a cottage" rested in its middle. It had once been
a tea-house for movie stars and other elites. Now, its walls shook as they
walked, caving inward with winter rain and neglect, spray painted with biker
slogans and primitive line-drawings of naked women, all of it matching the
scrawl across the inner walls of the main building. Loose bits of machinery
sparkled on the ground, chrome pipes and other parts from bike repair. Beer
bottles and cigarette butts filled the space inbetween.
But one of the bikers remained seated upon the
back of his chrome steel like Don Quixote, blond hair shimmering silver in the
after glow of the boulevard lights a block away.
"Billy?" Dan moaned.
"I knew you'd come here," the man
said slowly lifting the shotgun. "Everyone said you and the nigger were
close."
"D-Did you kill him?" Bobo asked, a
quiver in his voice.
"Na," the biker said. "He was
always straight with me. It's you I want."
"Don't, Billy," Dan said, stepping
between the shotgun and Bobo. "He's mine. I've got an investment in
him."
"Bullshit!" Billy said. "Get
out of the way or I'll kill you, too. It's the only way any of us can
survive."
"But it's not Bobo that's killing people,
it's Buckingham!" Dan protested.
"They're the same person."
"Are they? Would Bobo kill his own
friend? We've all been had, friend. Buckingham's been feeding shit into the
rumor mill to keep us at each other's throats."
"Okay," the biker said, obviously
not convinced. "If he's not Buckingham, who is?"
"I don't know," Dan moaned.
"But he seems to want us all out of the way so he can have L.A. to
himself."
Billy frowned, a light coming into his eyes.
"Himself?" he said and suddenly laughed. "Himself?"
The laughter died with an explosion and flash,
a gap of blood and flesh opening wide in his chest. Billy's shocked face looked
down, his free hand touching the wound as if disbelieving it.
"Down!" Dan shouted, twisting
around, his small caliber pistol barking, sending several bullets into the
darkness out of which they'd just come.
Bobo rolled-- out of reaction-- seeking the
protection of the bike's wheels. Another shot sparked from the alley way. Wood
splintered from the corner of the cottage. Billy moaned, his form slowly
slumping forward till it fell from the bike.
Bobo crawled forward, rolling the man onto his
back, crying for a medic in the back of his head. Death crept up toward's
Billy's face, coloring the flesh grey.
"We're all doomed, man," Billy
sputtered, blood boiling out of the corners of his mouth. The head fell
sideways onto the gravel.
Dan scrambled up from the corner of the
building. "Come on," he said, tugging at Bobo's sleeve. "We've
got to scoot before the cops come..."
Bobo shook his head. "We've got to look
in the hotel."
"After this? The cops had to have heard
the shooting."
"I need to look, Dan," Bobo said,
staring straight into the eyes of his former partner.
Dan sighed, waving his gun in mock
nonchalance. "Why not? We'll only get fried if they catch us."
***********
They came in through the kitchen-- the subtler
Spanish design marred from a dozen coats of paint and scrawling graffiti. The
kitchen hadn't been used as a kitchen in decades, except for the
three-times-a-day kettle for Jake's tea, part of the black man's fascination
with things British. He equated it with class.
"Which way now?" Dan asked nervously
glancing around the room at the various doors leading into the maze of halls.
Bobo pointed, staggering up several short
steps and into a dim-lighted hall. It emptied into the lobby where the cop had
been asleep.
"Where did he go?" Dan asked,
swinging his pistol around the room, a layer of dust covering what might have
been the set for a 1930s movie, complete with potted palms and spittoons.
The front desk, however, had been sealed in
metal. The residents called it "the cage", wire mesh and a coin cup
providing total contact between management and cliental. The three padlocks on
its door had been wedged loose, its interior rifled. Even the heavy steel safe
had been gutted.
"Well?" Dan asked, standing a few
feet back with his pistol roving over the stuffed chairs and front door.
"Nothing," Bobo said. "Not even
in the safe. But Jake wouldn't have put the drug in there."
"Where then?"
"I suppose we could look in his
room."
"Lead on, Sherlock," Dan said.
"But be quick. This place gives me the creeps."
Stairs rose to the left of the cage, branching
at the top into a long rail and several dark halls. Most of the second floor
stank of smoke from a fire a few years earlier. Underneath the rising stair, an
unmarked door led to Jake's room. Bobo pushed in on it carefully. The air
smelled stale from lack of ventilation. No windows to let out the scent of
death.
Bobo closed the door behind them and flicked
on the overhead light. The unreasonable neatness struck him immediately, like a
slice out of military life, and nearly as simple: a dresser, chair, bunk and
bedside table defining the black man's total possessions.
Only the ivory buddha stood out, sitting atop
the dresser with bloated cheeks. Gook stuff, other troopers called it.
Other men collected souvenirs, Jake had brought back a religion.
"I don't see where he could have hidden
anything here?" Dan mumbled, pushing up the brim of his hat with the
barrel of his pistol.
"Which is why I think he would have
hidden it here," Bobo said, slowly surveying the room, looking for cracks
in the walls or floor. "He'd want to keep it where he could lay his hands
on it quickly."
He even knocked on the wall, but it all
sounded hollow. Then, turning again, his gaze again caught on the buddha.
"Of course!" he said and went to the
dresser. It lacked a drawer near the top, yet space had been left between it
and the first drawer. More than enough room for the dope if Jake packed it
carefully.
Bobo moved the Buddha and felt along the rim
of the dressed top until he found what he wanted and pressed. The top sprung
open like the top to a trunk. Inside, he found the shopping bags in which he
had transported the dope, torn handles and all. But they were empty.
The door to the room slammed open, blue
uniforms flowing through it with shotguns and pistols aimed at his head. Dan
moved, but was swept up in the wave of police and shoved hard against the wall.
"Move motherfucker," one of the cops
said, "and I'll blow your brains out!"
"Me?" Dan said innocently, letting
the pistol tumble from his fingers to the floor. "Wouldn't think of
it."
They grabbed Bobo, too, shoving him beside Dan
to pat him down. They cuffed them both and sat them on the cot.
Demetre entered, straightening his tie. He
paused and looked down into the open dresser top, nodding his approval.
"Clever," he said and glanced at Dan and Bobo. A deep crease settled
between his eyes, tightening the pale white scar down one cheek.
"Leave us," he said to the others.
They stared at him for a moment, then shuffled out.
Dan squirmed.
"Don't move!" Demetre barked,
sounding like a Marine Drill Sergeant. "You move again I'll break your
arms."
"My wrists hurt," Dan complained.
"Your boys put the cuffs on too tight."
"You're lucky that's all they did,"
Demetre snapped. "Now which one of you killed Billy?"
"Neither of us," Bobo said.
"Someone shot him while we were talking to him."
"How convenient," Demetre said,
looking again at the dresser. "Is that where you hid the drugs?"
"I didn't hide them. Jake did."
"Liar!" Demetre barked. "Jake
didn't handle drugs."
"It was a personal favor to me."
"For you?"
"We were close," Bobo said.
"Bullshit! Jake didn't have killers for
friends."
"I'm no killer. Those bones are buried
back in Nam."
"What's this for?" Demetre asked,
retrieving Dan's pistol with two fingers. "It's hardly a keychain
ornament."
"Protection."
"From whom?"
Bobo stayed silent.
"Answer me, asshole!"
"Buckingham," Bobo muttered.
The black cop laughed. "That hardly seems
possible since you are Buckingham."
Dan looked over sharply at Bobo, his mouth
tightening and an odd, knowing light came into his eyes.
"I'm not Buckingham," Bobo said,
sweat forming on his skin near where the cuffs chaffed.
A thoughtful humm escaped the back of the
black cop's throat. "All right, tell me how you came to bring the drugs
here."
"Someone was following me. I begged Jake
to hold onto them for me until I could lose the tail. I never figured on anyone
killing him."
"Which batch is this?"
"The Albuquerque shipment. We think
Buckingham snatched it."
"And?"
Again silence.
"Listen, friend," Demetre said,
taking two long strides across the room, his forefinger pressed up under Bobo's
wobbling chins. "I've got enough to up you two away for the rest of your
lives. Either you spill everything, or I'll have you hauled downtown."
"How about a deal?"
"You're in no position to make a
deal."
Bobo shrugged. "Then take us
downtown."
Demetre stared, finger clicking the top of his
pen repeatedly. He grumbled and moved to the side of the dresser where Bobo had
put the Buddha down on the chair. His long black fingers touched the pale
surface.
"Where do you know Jake from?" he
asked.
"Nam."
Demetre turned, his gaze narrowing.
"Where in Nam?"
"Around Danang," Bobo said.
"Though we did some R&R in Saigon."
"And?"
"And we saved each other's lives a time
or two. Its hard to keep track, but I think I owed him more than he did
me."
"Some way to pay him back," the
black cop said softly, staring off into space. He could have been talking to
himself.
"I know," Bobo mumbled.
"What kind of deal did you have in
mind?"
Bobo looked up into the cop's dark eyes which
studied him like an enemy. "You let us go, I'll give you Buckingham."
"That's one poor fucking deal," the
cop barked. "You can tell me anything you like."
"And you could track us down just as
easily."
"Granted. But how are you going to give
him to me when you don't even know who he is?"
"Mike's set up a meeting."
"Bobo, shut up!" Dan barked.
"No," Bobo said. "Buckingham
wants us dead. If the cops can stop him, that's fine with me."
"Don't argue, talk," Demetre said.
"Not until we have a deal."
"All right we have a deal. Where and
when?"
"Tonight at midnight. Griffith's
park."
"That's a big park. Can you be more
specific?"
"Near the nature museum."
"Not the bird sanctuary? The
Museum?"
"That's right."
"And what exactly is Mike using for
bait?"
"Part of it is dope."
"But the Albuquerque shipment was in
there?" the cop said, indicating the dresser.
"We had another shipment I picked up
earlier."
"What else does Buckingham expect from
the meeting?"
"Us," Bobo said. Me, Dan, Mike.
Buckingham wants all of us."
"Wants you dead if I know him,"
Demetre said.
"I know. Mike knows that, too. But it's
better than waiting for him to pick the time and place."
***********
"Griffiths Park! What a trip!" Dan
said laughing as they danced down the street. "Boy is he going to be
peeved at you when he finds out you lied."
"He already knows," Bobo said, his
puffy face stiff with concentration.
"What do you mean he knows?"
"He read me, Dan. He might even have
known where the meeting was before he asked me."
"Then why did he let us go?"
"Because he knows I owe Jake for this.
He's giving me my shot."
"You're crazy."
"You explain it then."
"I can't. Nor do I know what to do next."
"That part's easy," Bobo said.
"We go find the other stash."
"Then you have it, you son of a
bitch!"
"Yeah," Bobo said with a sigh.
"I have it."
Dan stopped and grabbed Bobo by the arm.
"No more games, Bo," he said.
"No more games."
Too late for games now. Too late for anything
but paying back his debt to Jake, and even that might not come out the way he
expected. This Buckingham was a tricky son of a bitch.
***********
He let the cab go, watching its yellow trunk
shrink in the shadow of dawn, East Los Angeles stretching its heavy arms around
his shoulders like a shroud. Rain. He felt rain, a misty, frustrating,
end-of-winter rain that would do little to break the heat or humidity. Yet he
liked the feel of it on his face.
"Well?" Dan asked, looking nervously
around, as out of place here as he had been in Phoenix. Too much Wall Street to
ever get along in Chicano town. "Where's this girlfriend of yours?"
"Not a girlfriend, Dan, just a
friend."
Though wife might have fit better. Or the
hippie "old lady." It felt odd to have either.
"I don't care what you call her,"
Dan said impatiently. "Let's just get it over with. I don't like this part
of town."
"That way," Bobo said, pointing
towards the string of houses that lined
both sides of the street, stucco rat-traps stinking of rice, beans and hot
peppers. He stopped in front of one, concrete stairs rising up towards a
splintered porch. Several of the lower windows had been boarded over or pinned
shut with burlap. He climbed, fishing in his pockets for the keys. The stucco
had long smoothed down into streaks of grey dust. He'd asked the landlord to
paint but had been laughed at.
You want to paint, mister, you paint.
Or perhaps paint wouldn't have cured the
building ills. The steps sagged with rot as he climbed to the porch, and the
beams of the porch itself crumbled under his step, threatening to fall through.
He avoided the front door and moved towards another set of stairs at the far
right, a narrow, steep climb along the side of the house-- something added
later therefore in better shape. The door on top had many more locks than those
below, installed by Bobo for added security. He fitted the proper key to each,
snapping them back, half expecting them not to turn. The romance had been
precarious lately as his attention focused more on business than her.
Once I get things settled, baby, he'd
told her. Then we can settle down.
But the door fell in on foul air. Gun smoke
and Blood. Vietnam right here in his own little hide-a-way. "My God!"
he moaned.
"What is it?" Dan asked, pulling up
short on the stairs behind him, wood creaking under his heals.
"Can't you smell it?"
Dan sniffed. "No, not really."
Gunpowder and blood! Not very fresh,
but there, taking its time to settle in the sealed apartment.
He reached in and flicked on the light to
wreckage and ruin-- the kitchen a shambles of spilled drawers and emptied
cabinets, broken dishes and empty silverware laying in the center of the floor.
It had the feel of rage like a trapped animal
tearing at the bars of its cage.
"What the hell...?" Dan mumbled as
Bobo stepped inside.
"Stay here," Bobo told him and moved
through the hallway to the rest of the apartment, finding more the same in the
other rooms. He found the bodies in the bedroom. His woman and another man shot
to death in the act of love-making.
"What is it?" Dan asked when Bobo
stumbled back to the kitchen bearing an unbroken bottle of whisky from the
ruin.
"Disaster," he said, twisting off
the seal from the bottle and taking a long, hard pull. He handed the bottle to
Dan.
The scene had Buckingham's touch written all
over it-- and he would be waiting with more of the same at Echo Lake.
***********
Dan pulled the car to the curb. He hated
driving a dead woman's car, and couldn't shade the image of the eternal embrace
from his head. It felt like an early warning for the gas chamber.
No officer, we didn't kill them. We just
took their car.
Sure, sure, Dan thought, but expedience was
expedience and they needed transportation.
"I don't see the van," Dan said,
staring up at the hill and house, bass notes flowing down through the ground
like an earthquake.
"Are you sure they said here?"
"Yes, I'm sure. I might be crazy, but I'm
not deaf. They said they had to dump the stuff from the apartment. I'm not sure
whether they figured on staying or not."
"Where else could they go?"
Dan shrugged. "God knows. But the racket
coming out of this place, I don't think Mike would hang around."
"I suppose we should check just the
same," Bobo said, yanking back the door handle with a thud. "Mike
might have left word for us."
Dan nodded and exited his side, gravel
grinding under his heals. The stairs rose like chunks of cliff, unevenly
spaced, and they climbed it with difficulty, Dan wheezing half way up.
"You all right?" Bobo asked, pausing
beside him, his bruised eyes still reflecting the apartment's death scene.
"Are you?"
Bobo shrugged, but the earlier anger had
converted into something sad and lost, the child coming to the surface after a
trip through hell. And how could Dan blame him? Bobo had lost an old lover and
a new in the space of breath.
The continued up, the music growing more
unbearable as they climbed. Dan didn't bother to knock, but pushed the door in.
Sprawled naked limbs blocking its passage on the inside. He had to shove it
hard to get them to move, and even then they merely rolled to one side, their
stoned faces grinning up with invitations to join in.
"They're out of control, man," Dan
shouted to Bobo, who nodded, staring down at the orgy circle with clear
disgust.
Dan stepped over and around the wreathing
bodies. Bobo pointed towards the urn-sized candy bowls in the corners of the
room, each full of pills. Dan ran his fingers through them as if they were
precious stones.
"Is this the Denver stuff?" Dan
asked, his throat pained from shouting.
Bobo lifted a pill and squinted at it, then
nodded. "It's got the company logo on the downers."
"How the hell did it get here?"
"Maybe we should ask Dale," Bobo
said, a fire in his eyes. He stepped towards the inner curtain and tore it
aside. Less sex here, Dan thought, the crowd of swaying bodies chanting the
lyrics to the playing songs. Dale's deep voice screaming above them all.
"Just feel it, people! And you will see
the door!"
The big man's twisted and turned as if in
convulsions, naked except for dayglo paint, most of which colored his genitals.
He danced and shouted and banged on the tops of the speakers.
"Ahhhhh! Yiiiiip! Yeahhhhh!"
He might have been imitating a paper-back
indian or some National Geographic interpretation of a savage. The women swayed
at his feet, their hands waving up at him.
"Fuck me!" each of them yelled.
"Fuck me!"
"Jesus Christ!" Bobo said-- just
barely loud enough for Dan to hear. "Who the hell does he think he
is?"
A cult leader, Dan thought-- the latest fad in
a generation of fad followers, all of whom had stepped over the line-- Leary
and others had started it with the idea of being free. He had seen their kind
back east. But the west had always taken things too far. Like the acid tests.
And Manson. He closed his eyes and tried to make it go away. It wouldn't. No
more than Bobo's lover's death scene would.
And Dale's expression said they had come at a
bad time, some intricate moment in the transition of worlds when leader and
followers needed no interference from the outside. They were strangers. Dangers
to the quest. And Dale glared at them through the haze.
"What do you want?" he asked as
someone cut the music. The sudden lack of sound hurt Dan's ears. The
participants stopped in place, staring at them, like puppets frozen on their
strings.
Dale's sharp gaze eyed them with the clarity
of a straight-- the drunken, staggering stupor of the McCadden apartment gone,
replaced by something darker and more calculating. Dan might even have called
it evil had he been religious.
"We're looking for Mike," he said,
his own voice suddenly weak in the vacuum.
"He's not here," Dale said coldly.
"If you doubt me, look around."
No Mike, Marie or Lance. Only Sarah. A naked
hypnotized Sarah staring without recognition up at Dan, spittle at the corners
of her mouth, a vapid look in her eyes.
Poor Lance, Dan thought. If Mike and him had
come this way he'd have seen her this way.
"Look, Man," Bobo said, shuffling
his feet from side to side as if something stuck to the heals. "It's
important we find him. He said he would be coming here."
Dale's gaze shifted toward Bobo, the nostrils
flaring in and out as he breathed. He studied Bobo's features with a slow
disgust, seeming to evaluate the man behind them.
"He might have been here," Dale said
finally. "I seemed to recall seeing his face sometime tonight. Something
about dumping furniture in my garage."
The tightness eased in Dan's chest, escaping
with a short laugh. "Thank God," he said. "Did they say where
they were going."
"I don't remember," Dale said.
"And I wouldn't have listened in either case. They are not taking our
journey and it is the only one I care about."
The King of Love turned his attention away
from them as the music started again, the dance of waving arms and fingers
rising up around his legs like flickering human flames. He had dismissed them.
He no longer knew or cared for their existence either.
Bobo tugged on Dan's sleeve, motioning him
towards the door. "Time to go," he shouted in his ear.
Dan didn't move. He owed Lance and leaving
Sarah with these people struck him as wrong. He could feel the rising
electricity in the air, the throb of something ugly beginning here.
"I don't want to leave the girl,"
Dan growled an inch from Bobo's ear.
"You mean you want to take her?"
"She's Lance's old lady."
"Then let Lance rescue her," Bobo
said. "We mess with her now, there's no telling what these people'll
do."
The exchange did not go unnoticed-- Dale's
dark gaze turning towards Dan like a tank turret, the mouth forming the words
telling them to go.
"Dan, come on," Bobo said, yanking
his coat sleeve. "We'll get Lance and come back."
"It may be too late then," Dan said,
stepping towards the girl, drawing up Dale's heavy brows.
Again the music ceased.
"I just want to talk to Sarah," Dan
said, daring another step forward despite the infuriated eyes. This time the
puppets stirred around him, their eyes as hard as his, waiting on some signal
from him...
"Speak to her quickly," Dale said
tersely. "Then leave."
"You're crazy, Dan," Bobo whispered,
but took the next step with Dan, protecting Dan's rear, his hand deep in his
pocket. He had dug up pistols from the East L.A. apartment. Dan's weighted
heavily in his belt. But both pistols and the shotguns in the car would not
free Sarah if she didn't want to come.
"Sarah?" Dan said, leaning towards
her naked form. She quivered, cringing away from him, her face crinkled with
lines of horror. What did she see? A frankenstein? Certainly no savior.
"Do you want to come with us to find Lance?"
Her eyes widened as the horror deepened and
spread. "NO!" she shouted and clutched Dale's leg.
"But Lance will be worried about
you," Dan said, moving closer, feeling the mood of the room grow more
tense like the string of a bow waiting to launch itself upon him.
Enemy! Outsider! Infidel!
Those were the terms their kind used for
people like Dan and those were the words silently screaming in Sarah's eyes.
"Go away," she moaned. "Leave me alone."
"Come on, Dan," Bobo hissed
through clenched teeth. "These people aren't happy campers any more."
Dale waited, his hands gripping the chair arms
as if to tear them loose. Dan sighed and rose from his crouch. He took a long
step back, Dale and his kingdom shrinking back into the frame of a single room.
No messiah. No New Testament. Just another insane man in a world of insanity.
He coughed. The incense made it hard to breathe. He could see Lance's aching
eyes in his head.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," he
said and pivoted away from the woman, the man and the scene, slamming his fist
into the door frame as he moved through the black curtain, the pain helping to
cure the ache in his head-- the music rising behind him like a laughing voice.