Rex also felt closed out, but not from any supposed mystery (though he would have agreed with Kate: the musicians he loved called it soul), rather just from the piece he wanted. The keys he’d stolen when he’d blown off the job out here at the airport had got him into the main building all right, but John had apparently changed the lock on the door to his private office, the suspicious bastard. The room, Rex remembered, had big steel-framed industrial windows that looked out on the loading ramps and runways but didn’t open. This cheapshit door would be easy to force, of course, or just to punch a hole in, but he couldn’t do that. His idea was to remove one of the rifles in the gun case, unnoticed, then return it the same way before anyone knew it was missing, no prints on it but John’s. Kill two birds, as they say, revenge the tune in Rex’s head even more than murder. He’d left Nevada sleeping fitfully, told her he was feeling edgy, had to go for a jog, back soon. She’d mentioned earlier that John was out of town for a couple of days, this was the moment. Would the sonuvabitch then, the evidence all against him, really take the rap in a town he owned? Nah, but it might at least cause the arrogant cocksucker a little discomfort, and cost him a night or two of sleep wondering who the fuck it was who could walk freely around inside his pants like that. So how was he going to get in to the goddamned place? Well, try turning the handle, numbnuts: wide open. Hah. It had been a while since Rex had worked out here, and he’d only been in John’s office a couple of times, but the big windows let in enough light from the parking and loading areas outside for him to make his way easily across to the big glass case that housed some of John’s famous gun collection. These keys worked. Smooth as silk. He had the glass doors open and his gloved hand on the piece of hardware he wanted when he realized there was someone else in the room. Sitting in the padded swivel chair behind John’s desk. Might be John of course. But probably wasn’t. Ice tinked softly against glass like chopsticks on a deadened cymbaclass="underline" a lonely drinker. In the dark. Not John’s style. Rex was playing all this in his head with his hand on the rifle, just above the stock. He took the rifle down out of the case, turned, and aimed it at the figure behind the desk. “Turn on the light, mister,” he said. If it was John, of course, he was dead. The rifle probably wasn’t even loaded. “And don’t try anything funny.” He heard the ice again as the guy took a drink, set the glass down with a sigh, then reached forward and turned the little switch on the desk lamp. It was John’s sideman, the one Nevada described as a babyfucking psycho. Dressed in what looked like designer jungle fatigues. Was he waiting here for John? “Planning to kill someone?” the guy asked, his voice slurring slightly, and took up his drink again. “I heard someone prowling around,” Rex said, taking in the scene. “Thought I’d better arm myself just in case. So, what’s your story?” “Short on other options in this greasy little pit stop, my friend, I’m getting pleasantly fried, how about yourself?” Rex lowered the rifle, sat back against a butt-high filing cabinet, lit up. “I recognize you now. The hotshot in the sports jet. John’s buddy.” “His partner. Help yourself.” He gestured vaguely toward the bottle, staring at Rex’s gloved hands, seemingly amused. There was a picture of John’s wife and kids on the desk, an ashtray, the bottle, the brass lamp. And something else: handcuffs and a horse crop. “Don’t drink on the job. But you should let people know when you’re going to hang out here, General. Surprising nervous types like me can get you messed up.” “Work here, do you?” “Part-time.” “No shit.” Rex had the feeling he was not fooling this sneering wiseass with his jive and began to wonder if he’d have to waste him. Somehow he didn’t think so. It was like he was too cool to give a shit about anything, murder included. About that, he now said, as though tuning in to Rex’s head: “Ever kill anybody?” “No.” “Thought about it, though, I bet.” “Maybe.” “Sure you have. Natural as sex. We’d all kill if we could get away with it. Always somebody we’d like to have out of the way. Who’s in your way?” “Fat dudes. Like you.” The guy smiled, peered up at him over his whiskey glass, his face spookily half-lit by by the green-shaded desk lamp, his smirk luminous, his eyes, though gleaming, set in deep shadows. “How about John?” Rex was taken aback, took a quick drag on his butt. This cat was truly weird. Outside. “What about him?” “Well, he’s certainly rich. Big man, John. What do you think? Would you like to kill him?” Rex knew his hesitation had given him away, so he said: “Yeah, I think I’ll go look for him now, get it over with. Hang around here much longer and I’ll take out the wrong dumb motherfucker.” He pushed off from the filing cabinet, strolled to the door, rifle in hand, flicked his cigarette out into the corridor, then turned back. “If you need anything, pops, look for me down at the night watchman’s crib by the main hangar.” “Sure. You bet. So long, killer.”
Big rich John, pit-stopping Bruce’s lifelong pal and partner, was at that moment, give or take a time zone or two, stretched out under a lean handsome woman on a slowly rotating circular bed in her own bachelor digs, very fanciful and high-tech, up the coast from L.A. where they’d met earlier that day, though not for the first time. The woman collected Victorian children’s book art, it was all over her walls like a giant composite comicstrip, imaginative and sensuous and richly hued, color gradations as fine as hairs and all now in vibrant flowing motion, as though stirred by a fairy wind. Everything was in motion: the lights, the furniture, the undulating music which seemed somehow more visible than audible. In short, John was stoned, enjoying a magic carpet moment with a powerful young sorceress, wild and beautiful. Life was. He said that. Wild and beautiful. She, pegged to him, riding him like the golden knight on her wall, both hands at the pommel, kneading balls, clit, and thighs, digging in their pubic hair as though searching for buried treasure, agreed. He felt very peaceful, letting the bouncing cheeks of her solid little ass slap his cupped hands like juggled fruit, feeling a world away from ejaculation, yet racing along at cliff’s edge at the same time, ready to tip at any moment, but that moment still his to choose. And meanwhile, everything, everything was as though organically fused and doing a delicious full-spectrum color dance for his fiberless optic-wired head alone. This shit lasted forever, he knew, but he was in good company and prepared to squander a few of his life’s hours, his long life’s hours, it was like a time between times. He had just bought a national trucking firm to go with his air cargo operations, his money was on the right horse in the convulsive communications and entertainment industry, thanks in part to his fiery rider, and he was headed back home to his own annual Pioneers Day barbecue to announce plans to build a racetrack on a rundown farm he’d picked up at auction. For some reason, her sexual energy maybe, this woman reminded him of Marie-Claire, though of course not so mad — in fact, this woman was not mad at all, she knew exactly what she was doing, even spaced out on acid she did. John did not share Bruce’s regressive appetite for shy little girls, the fantasy fuck of eternal playboys who cannot grow up; John was turned on only by smart mature strong-willed women with lives, power, talents, wealth of their own. And if they lacked any of that he provided it for them, as best he could. Not for their sake. For his. It made the sex better. What about your wife? What? The woman had stopped bouncing for a moment and had settled back into his broad hands, doing a slow twist around his cock. Does she ever do this? Sure, everybody does. He couldn’t remember when last, though. Couldn’t even remember if he saw her the last time he was home. Must have. This feels very fucking good, he said. It’ll get better, sweet prince, she laughed. He saw now why he thought of Marie-Claire: her teeth. When the woman smiled, she displayed Marie-Claire’s pebbly little rows of white babyteeth. But whereas Marie-Claire’s smile suggested a catastrophic vulnerability, this woman’s was more sensuously calculating, witchy in a way, not unlike the mirrored smile of Snow White’s stepmother, probably on the wall behind her though seeming to hover in the air just over her shoulder. He told her so and she grinned again, her eyes gleaming, her auburn hair coiling around her perspiring face wild as the wild Medea’s now sliding into view, and told him about a pornographic cartoon she’d seen about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all the time wriggling her hips round and round. The whole cottage got into it, humping away, shooting jism out its chimneys, and with all those dwarfs involved, of course, that girl got it every which way up every hole she had, gave me a lot of funny ideas. Not about dwarfs and princes, I hope. She laughed and, tightening up, twisted harder. I remember the first fuckfilm I ever saw, he said, fingering her circling anus. She gasped as he worked his finger in and grabbed at his nipples as though to brace herself. Saw it on a big screen. Friend of mine in town set it up, his father owned the moviehouse, the Palace, the old Palace Theater. The Palace, she repeated, her eyes squeezed shut. He thought his were, too, but he saw everything, and more besides. Home Movies, the film was called, I think. A smalltown couple with two kids, a girl and boy, have the neighbors in to look at their holiday movies. The neighbors sit around with their knees together, oohing and ahing politely, but what they’re seeing of course are all sex scenes, mostly incest in all the ways you could imagine with a few naked campers and gullible hitchhikers thrown in. The woman on top of him, still clawing at the flesh around his nipples, was pumping back and forth vigorously now, her eyes closed, biting her bottom lip with her row of little teeth. As he went on describing the movie, not really wanting to, but as though spellbound by his own voice, which seemed to be booming out of the quadraphonic speakers in the corners, he found himself at some point telling her instead about the last time he’d been up at the cabin with Bruce, together balling three women at once, two of them a mother and daughter. Nevada had apparently set it up, or some of it (the third woman might have been a scheduling mistake), but she wasn’t there. At one point when they were all in a sweaty tangle, Bruce had cast a poignantly sorrowful look at John over the ass of the woman on his face, then lifted one hand off her quivering butt and given John a brief high five, John slapping back, thinking nothing of it at the time, but worried about it since. What the hell was Bruce trying to say? Beats me, the woman groaned. But what about the neighbors? The family raped them, he gasped, and they had an orgy or something, but the strange thing was seeing that film in the Palace. The cliff, he realized, was crumbling at his feet. Or thereabouts. It was like a fucking cathedral, that moviehouse, a golden-domed two-decker with a lot of ornate detail, red plush seats, a lobby like a hotel’s, we’d all gone there with our parents to see the classics, the original Snow White, for example, it was like a part of history, something bigger than all of us, and suddenly, there we were—whoof! God! Great! Awesome! the woman rocking away on him whimpered, her head thrown back now (his view was of her slender white throat, arched chin, dilating nostrils, which seemed to be merging with the dancing overhead lights and swirling ceiling), her raspberry-tipped chest wet and heaving, her sleek belly rippling like the sails on Sinbad’s ship, listing beside the bed. He was asea on Sinbad’s sea, storm-tossed yet satin-pillowed, spume-blowing nigh at hand. But wha-whatever happened to—gasp! — that fantastic theater? The Palace? It was in the way, he wheezed. I tore it down. The woman jerked forward, her burnished hair whipping the air, her vagina convulsing. Oh Jesus! she laughed. Whoo! You fucking bastard! I think I’m coming! Pink labial folds had burgeoned around the mouth of the rabbit hole Alice was falling down, the wet red sides of the hole itself throbbing in constrictive waves like the vagina that clasped his cock, and Daphne sprouting laurel leaves while Apollo grabbed at her vanishing ass — there they came! pop! pop! pop! — was like the onset of some stupendous mythical orgasm. He felt like he was coming and not coming at the same time, and then, as she cried out, or the music did, or he did, the cry all around them like a lightning flash, there was a great quaking as though the Big One had hit, and in his balls at least, it had. John, shuddering blissfully as his loins turned explosively inside out, was intensely happy. Not as in ever after, but the genuine article. Right now. Life, goddamn it, if you lived it, really fucking lived it, was very very good.