Chapter 3
Rain drummed on the bedroom skylights. Robert Anthony Allison woke up and, as always, rolled right out of bed. Shauna, as always, slept on. He went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, knowing nothing would wake his wife.
How many men, he wondered as he shrugged into his favourite silk robe, how many men had fantasies about sleeping with Shauna Dawn McGuire? Five million? Twenty? He’d done his best to encourage those fantasies: three movies in two years, each a blend of violence, romance and sex that nobody else could bring off. Shauna was a big part of the blend — some of his competitors said he’d still be directing drive-in horror movies without her — but who else could live with a sex goddess and still keep the objectivity a director needed to exploit her properly? Not her last two husbands.
He padded back into the bedroom, studying Shauna’s face. The fantasies couldn’t include her merely human traits: her catatonic style of sleeping, her allergies, her humourless and self-absorbed lovemaking. As a husband he might resent those traits; as a director, his personal feelings never interfered with artistic concerns.
A narrow flight of stairs led directly from their bedroom suite to the kitchen. Allison plugged in the coffee maker and watched the rain slash down. He looked west and north, down the hill to the willows along Escondido Creek, up the far slope to the ridge almost a mile away. It was all his own land. He knew every one of those scattered oaks, right up to the ridge where the land fell away almost vertically into the next valley. He knew the course of the creek, from the pool a mile upstream (on the eastern boundary of his land) to the canyon three miles southwest (just outside his land) where the creek met the Carmel River. At the age of thirty-two, he was landed gentry, just like the rich pricks up and down the Carmel Valley. But unlike them, he had earned his land, over ten square miles of it; the pricks had inherited it from grandfathers who’d paid next to nothing for it.
Allison picked irritably at the peeling skin on his nose. Sunburn: he had pale and vulnerable skin, and the ultraviolet seemed to get past even broad-brimmed hats, but he was not about to run around like a clown, his nose painted white with sunblock ointment. At least the heavy overcast today would block some of the UV. He envied Shauna; she just turned a deeper and deeper brown.
Breakfast was two cups of coffee, black, strong and unsweetened. Then fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the cold tile floor of the kitchen before he went back upstairs to his dressing room.
Allison had thought carefully about the clothes for today’s interview: khaki trousers and safari shirt, dark-green ascot, glossy Wellingtons. A light-brown leather jacket with a broad sheepskin collar. He studied the effect in the mirror of his nineteenth-century wardrobe: outdoorsy, macho, semi-military. His close-cropped black beard and gold-rimmed glasses might make him look a little too bohemian, even left-wing; the beard might have to go soon. His hair was getting shorter with every styling — not yet a soldier’s white sidewall haircut, but close enough. The hole in his left ear lobe had closed up nicely. He put on a flat-brimmed Stetson, almost like a drill sergeant’s.
Not a bad effect, he decided. It helped to be over six feet, with big shoulders and no belly. Even the sunburned nose helped a little, made him look less… studied. Sometimes your production values could be too good.
“Who are we today — Ernest Hemingway or Smoky the Bear?”
Shauna stood in the doorway to the bedroom, wrapped in an old terry-cloth bathrobe. Allison framed her between his hands, the great director visualizing a shot.
“Kid, you got funk. Real funk. The robe is a genuine objet trouve, but I think I see pink plastic curlers in your hair, plus fuzzy pink slippers on your tootsies. Then in the background we see in deep focus the five-piece dinette set, genuine Formica and wood-grain vinyl trim, a K-Mart special this week only, plus a seventeen-inch TV set playing afternoon soaps.”
“Wow. What are you popping?”
“Caffeine, real Colombian brown. But I don’t drink it, I just snort it.”
Shauna leaned against the doorframe and stretched in a big yawn. Not bad; remember that. It would look better in a black lace nightie, real Rita Hayworth, or even nothing at all. She doesn’t know the killer is lurking in the closet with the butcher knife, but the audience does.
“Where you going?”
“Fort Ord. Lunch with our old buddy General Miles. Two or three drinks, burger and fries, then I ask to borrow the Sixteenth Airmobile Cavalry for a couple of months.”
“Gee, thanks for not inviting me.”
“Kid, you don’t get invited — you get deployed. You’re my force de frappe. I don’t waste you in these little skirmishes.” He put his arms around her.
“God, you say the sweetest things to me, I mean, really, God.”
They lurched companionably downstairs to the kitchen, arms around each other. Shauna poured herself a cup of coffee, took the mandatory sip-before-first-smoke-of-the-day, and lighted a Marlboro. She slid into a chair at the kitchen table, next to the window.
“Know what I miss? I really miss the hills being green.” She waved her cigarette at the hillside across the creek: it was a dull beige, with here and there a green bush or weed.
“Wait’ll next year, kid.”
“Do you think it’ll be okay again by next year?”
“Kid… No. It won’t be okay. It’ll be worse. A whole lot worse.”
“Hey, Bob Tony. It’s such a beautiful morning, don’t spoil it.”
He looked around the high-ceilinged kitchen, at the gleaming copper pots, the used-brick fireplace, the microwave, the doorway to the sauna and hot tubs.
“Okay, it’s a bad setting for a prophet of doom,” he said. “But I’m getting an intuition. Like this next project could be the last for a long time, because already there’s no cable and soon there won’t be any more movie theatres.”
“Okay,” she shrugged. “This is the way the world ends. So what?”
“The oracle is working on it. — Listen, I’m late, I’m due for lunch in half an hour. What are you doing today?”
“Thought I’d go into Carmel, do some shopping.”
“Mmmh. Okay. I’ll be back around three or four. Talk to Lupe about dinner before you go.” He kissed her with husbandly absent-mindedness and left.
The house was part of a compound on the crest of a narrow ridge. On the north stood a barn and stables; on the east, a garage, sheds and two-story guest house; on the south, a big greenhouse and the low, flat-roofed servants’ quarters. The area within the compound was partly garden and partly swimming pool.
Allison sprinted through the dead garden, past the swimming pool, and into the garage. Hipolito Vasquez, the gardener and handyman, was changing the spark plugs in the Chevy van. Next to the van were Allison’s red Mercedes 450 SL convertible and Shauna’s silver Jaguar XJ sedan.
“Buenos dias, Don Roberto.”
“Buenos dias, Hipolito. Y como estan los ojos, hombre?”
Hipolito grinned under his salt-and-pepper moustache. “Mucho mejor, gracias a Dios.” He had made the mistake, a few days ago, of working outside without sunglasses. The UV had given him a mild dose of snow blindness. A lot of people got it these days, but usually only once: two or three days of agony were enough to teach caution to anyone.
Allison got into the Mercedes; Hipolito opened the garage door, and the convertible backed out into the rain. Allison let it glide down the long, curving blacktop drive to the gravel road along the creek.
He didn’t like the road because it gave others access to his land. Farther up the creek was a ranch run by some weird religious sect called the Brotherhood, and farther still a handful of cabins that had been taken over recently by four or five families. Both groups left Allison and each other alone, but it was still an annoyance to see their jeeps and vans going past.