The party had been going strong for some time when Candace arrived, and Rick was flying high on coke and champagne. He hugged her around the shoulders but didn’t kiss her, and half carried her over to where many of the guests were crowded around a projection television.
Ladies and gentlemen here she is — our leading lady, the versatile Miss Candi Thorne.
All eyes flicked from the screen to Candace, long enough for recognition. Then the cheers and applause burst out across the room. Rick had been amusing his guests with some of her films. Just now they were watching the one with the donkey.
Candace didn’t really remember how she managed to escape and find her way home.
She decided not to leave a note, and she was prying the blade out of Rick’s old razor when the idea began to form. The razor was crudded with dried lather and bits of Rick’s whiskers, and she wanted to get it clean before she used it on her wrists. A scene from another of her films, Voodoo Vixens, arose through the confusion of her thoughts. She set the razor aside carefully.
Candace made herself a cup of coffee and let the idea build in her head. She was dry-eyed now and quite calm — the hysterical energy that had driven her to suicide now directed her disordered thoughts toward another course of action.
She still had all of her mementos of Rick, and throughout the night she went over them, one by one, coolly and meticulously. She scraped all the bits of beard and skin from his razor, collected hair and dandruff from his brush and comb, pared away his toothbrush bristles for the minute residues of blood and plaque. She found a discarded handkerchief, stained from a coke-induced nosebleed, and from the mattress liner came residues of their former lovemaking. Old clothes yielded bits of hair, stains of body oils and perspiration. Candace searched the house relentlessly, finding fragments of his nails, his hair, anything at all that retained physical residues of Rick’s person.
The next day Candace called in sick. She spent the day browsing through Los Angeles’ numerous occult bookshops, made a few purchases, and called up one or two of the contacts she’d made filming Voodoo Vixens. It all seemed straightforward enough. Even those who rationalized it all admitted that it was a matter of belief. And children have the purest belief in magic.
Candace ground up all her bits and scrapings of Richards Justin. It came to quite a pile and reminded her of a bag of Mexican heroin.
Candace returned to work and waited for her chance. When no one was watching, she dumped her powdered residue into the plastic muck destined to become Colt Savage dolls. Then she said a prayer of sorts.
Beneath the Christmas tree, Joshua plays with his new Colt Savage doll. Pow! An electron cannon knocks Colt out of the sky, crashes him to the rocks below!
Jason pits Colt Savage against his model dinosaurs. Yahhh! The dinosaur stomps him!
David is racing Colt Savage in his car, Red Lightning. Ker-blam! Colt drives off the cliff at a hundred miles an hour!
Billy is still too young to play with his Colt Savage doll, but he likes to chew on it.
Mark decides to see if Colt Savage and Black Blaze can withstand the attack of his atomic bomb firecrackers.
Jessica is mad at her brother. She sees his Colt Savage doll and stomps on it as hard as she can.
Tyrone is bawling. He pulled the arms off his Colt Savage doll, and he can’t make them go back on.
Richards Justin collapsed on set, and only heavy sedation finally stilled his screams. It quickly became apparent that his seizures were permanent, and he remains under sedation in a psychiatric institution. Doctors have attributed his psychotic break to longterm drug abuse.
Nothing excites the public more than a fallen hero. Richards Justin: The Untold Story, by Candace Thornton, rose quickly on the best-seller charts. Reportedly she was recently paid well over a million for the film rights to her book.
SHRAPNEL
It looked like the wreckage of a hundred stained glass windows, strewn across a desolate tangle of wasteland in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope.
The hood of the ’78 Marquis buckled in protest as Harmon shifted his not inconsiderable weight. He smeared sweat from his face with a sweatier arm and squinted against the piercing sunlight. Even from his vantage point atop the rusting Mercury, it was impossible to achieve any sense of direction amidst these thousands of wrecked cars.
At some point this had been farmland, although such was difficult to envision now. Whatever crops had once grown here had long ago leeched the red clay of scant nutrients. Fallow acres had lapsed into wild pasture where enough soil remained; elsewhere erosion scourged the slopes with red gashes, and a scrub-growth of pine, sumac, honeysuckle and briar grudgingly reclaimed the dead land. Grey knobs of limestone and outcroppings could almost be mistaken for the shapeless hulls of someone’s tragedy.
Harmon wished for a beer — a tall, dripping can of cold, cold beer. Six of them. He promised himself a stop at the first convenience store on the highway, once he finished his business here. But first he needed a fender.
“Left front fender. 1970 or ’71 Montego.”
“I think it will interchange with a ’70-’71 Torino,” Harmon had offered — too tired to explain that the fender was actually needed for a 197 °Cyclone Spoiler, but that this was Mercury’s muscle car version of the Montego, which shared sheet metal with Ford’s Torino, and anyway the woman who ran Pearson’s Auto Yard probably knew all that sort of stuff already She had just a dusting of freckles, and wheat-colored hair that would have looked striking in almost anything other than the regulation dyke haircut she had chosen. The name embroidered across the pocket of her freshly washed but forever grease-stained workshirt read Shiloh. Shiloh had just finished off a pair of redneck truckers in quest of certain axle parts incomprehensible to Harmon, and she was more than capable of dealing with him.
“Most of the older Fords are off along the gully along the woods there.” Shiloh had pointed. “If they haven’t been hauled to the crusher. There’s a row of fenders and quarter panels just beyond that. You wait a minute and Dillon or somebody’ll be here to look for you.”
The thundering air conditioner in the window of the cramped office might have been able to hold the room temperature at 80 if the door weren’t constantly being opened. Harmon felt dizzy, and he further felt that fresh air, however searing, was a better bet than waiting on an office stool for Dillon or somebody.
“You watch out for the dogs,” Shiloh had warned him. “If one of them comes after you, you just jump on top of something where they can’t get at you until Dillon or somebody comes along.”
Hardly comforting, but Harmon knew his way around junkyards. This was an acquaintance that had begun when Harmon had decided to keep the 1965 Mustang of his college days in running order. It had become part hobby, part rebellion against the lookalike econoboxes or the Volvos and BMWs that his fellow young suburban professionals drove each day from their energy-efficient homes in Brookwood or Brookcrest or Crestwood or whatever. Harmon happened to be an up-and-coming lawyer in his own right, thank you, and just now his pet project was restoring a vintage muscle car whose string of former owners had not been overly concerned with trees, ditches, and other obstacles, moving or stationary.
It was a better way to spend Saturday morning than on the tennis court or golf course. Besides, and he wiped his face again, it was good exercise. Harmon, over the past four years and at his wife’s insistence, had enrolled in three different exercise programs and had managed to attend a total of two classes altogether. He kept telling himself to get in shape, once his schedule permitted.