Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) Read online

  And made money like there was no tomorrow.

  The paper-trail always led here, no matter how he did it. With checks attached. And he was able to retain his treasured privacy. Which, he reflected, was probably linked to this hobby of his somehow. Way back when.

  But he certainly wasn’t ashamed of it.

  He liked gore. He liked to hear the screams.

  So what.

  He was . . . different.

  So what.

  Outside the New York traffic snarled, bleating up at him through the light spring rain.

  The TV screen flickered.

  The word Offed appeared and disappeared again.

  There were no titles.

  He was aware of the sweat beading on his upper lip, of the tremor purring through his body. It was always the same.

  He leaned forward.

  Surprisingly, the print was wonderful.

  35mm, he thought. Film originally. Not video. And no grain. Good and clear.

  And they got down to it too. No preliminaries. Just a medium shot of a motel room, Anywhere USA but not too terribly shabby, bed and mirrored bureau and a bathroom off left—and a girl being led through a door, her back to the Tricky Dick Nixon masks, teeshirts and jeans, one massive belly outdoing the next for gutspill.

  The girl looked stoned, drugged-sort-of drifting over to the bed, head lolling, with one man on each arm practically holding her upright while the third disappeared out of frame, presumably to check the camera.

  She was blonde and slim, dressed conservatively, wearing a navy blue skirt and a trim white blouse, looking like a stewardess or something, with good hips and very good legs—and for now that was all he could see. Her back was still to him.

  He was already wishing for a close-up.

  Howard didn’t know why but he had the feeling the girl was going to be a looker.

  They led her to the far side of the bed and sat her down. She slumped to the pillow immediately, buried her head in it while one of the bruisers reached around in front of her and unbuttoned her blouse, laughing—the soundtrack muddy, garbled, not nearly as good as the picture—saying something to his buddy while he tugged the blouse out of her skirtwaist and then lifted it off first one arm and then the other.

  She wore a sheer white silk bra and her breasts were modest and pointed. Just the way he liked them.

  Tricky Dick One turned her over on her belly so Dickie Two could get at the zipper in the back of her skirt. The girl was wearing heels. He took them off slowly, one by one, and then unzipped the skirt, lifted her a little from the waist and pulled it off her. He patted her behind and laughed. Then drew her slip down over her legs.

  Her panties were cut high, to the hip.

  For the first time the girl resisted slightly, waving at him as though shooing away an annoying pet, a cat or a dog bothering her on the bed.

  “Nooo,” she mumbled.

  “Yeees,” he laughed.

  And turned her over.

  As he did, her face came fully into frame for the very first time.

  And Howard froze.

  He knew her!

  He was ninety-nine percent sure he did! It had been just a glimpse God knows, she was turned away again, but now that he looked at her even the body looked familiar. The legs, the breasts, the willowy arms, the short blond hair.

  It had been a hell of a long time and he couldn’t even remember her first name at first, Ella or Etta—no, Greta—of course! He’d dated her back in college for a few months and finally dumped her after all kinds of messy shit between them and he remembered that at the time she had wanted to be . . .

  (. . . my God . . .)

  . . . she’d wanted to be . . .

  . . . an actress.

  Jesus! My God, he remembered her now. Remembered her perfectly. They’d seen a revival of Night of the Living Dead together. Greta liked this stuff too. It was one thing they had in common. Spent God knows how many nights curled up on his Boston sofa watching exactly this sort of slasher, body-count stuff—simulated, of course.

  And now they were . . .

  Jesus Christ!

  And now they were going to do her!

  Right in front of him!

  Or were they?

  He supposed it depended entirely on whether the film actually delivered what the ad had promised him.

  Bored with the same-old-same-old?

  Care to experience the real thing?

  Try our video! We guarantee—

  OFFED delivers! You’ll never

  need another violence fix again

  in your life, Bunky. We swear it!

  On our mothers’ graves!

  $39.95

  What if it did?

  He pushed rewind. Reran the scene. Reran it again. The girl’s head, turning.

  It sure as hell looked like Greta.

  He suddenly, desperately, needed a drink.

  He pushed pause. The image froze and flickered, shot with horizontal lines.

  He walked to the bar and poured himself a scotch. Downed it and poured himself another.

  He thought about her.

  She’d liked her sex hard, no doubt about that. Though Jesus, never this hard. He used to kid her that she wore bite-marks the way some women wore jewelry.

  And she was kinky. He’d even taped a few things on his own now-primitive camcorder with her, nothing too heavy, and she’d stolen the tapes eventually.

  Too bad.

  The woman had been damned attractive and an absolute slugger in bed but there was an edge to her he’d never really cared for. Something rough-cut and slightly lower-class in the Jersey accent, in her off-the-rack taste in clothing.

  He doubted she’d ever make it in the movies.

  And he knew from day one that it wasn’t going to last between them.

  Of course he hadn’t told her that. Not with her crawling all over his dick the way she was, willing to try anything for him—including whips and chains and clips and knives and leather, the whole magilla. No way was he going to tell her that until he had to.

  Until something more interesting came along.

  And then one day it had come along.

  Funny. He couldn’t remember her name either.

  In had been ugly, though, he remembered that. The end of the thing with Greta. She’d screamed and whined and pleaded. Showed up drunk a couple of times, pounding on his door. Begging.

  But the cancer was already finishing his father by then and he knew it was impossible, that he was going to have a lot of money soon and he knew she wasn’t up to it. Not with that accent, those tastes.

  So it was bye-bye Greta.

  Maybe for real now.

  Jesus.

  He finished the scotch, poured himself another glass just for sipping purposes and returned to his chair.

  His nerves were steadier. The scotch expanding inside him. He reached for the remote and pressed play.

  The film whirred into motion.

  And the knives were out.

  Knife, actually. One guy with a long, serrated kitchen knife and the other pulling a pair of metal garden clippers out of his back pocket, the kind you used to trim back branches, holding them up for the camera.

  Which now lurched forward a pace or two. Evidently there was no zoom lens and Tricky Dick Three was carrying it nearer to the bed on its tripod.

  It was still no closeup, but better.

  The woman who still looked ninety-nine percent like Greta moaned but did nothing to resist as the guy with the knife snipped away the shoulder-straps to her bra and then sawed through the center. Her breasts shuddered free. The nipples were pale pink, large, blending away into the paler breast flesh. Just like Greta’s.

  The man cut through the waistband of her panties and pulled them out from under her.

  Like Greta, a real blonde.

  Howard gulped his scotch. The goddamn movie just wasn’t made for sipping.

  The whole idea that this was Greta he was watching�
�that it even could be Greta—scared the bloody shit out of him. There was something about it so fucking ironic and infinitely more perverse than he’d ever dreamed—maybe even more than he’d ever wanted to dream—that you had to wonder. All these gruesome images. All these years collecting this stuff. All these years searching, looking for . . . what?

  Death, obviously.

  It had to be. The experience of violent death in which he was both observer and yes, participant. Participant in that he’d bought and paid for this particular tape, he’d sort of even financed the thing in a way. Allowed it to be. He and others like him.

  Okay, he’d done it a thousand times.

  But now it was someone he knew, someone he’d screwed every which way to Sunday who was going to get seriously hurt here, and you had to wonder.

  It was just possible he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

  He was about to find out. In spades.

  Because Dickie Number Three was lurching forward with the camera again, coming closer, as Dickie Number Two put the clippers back in the pocket of his greasy jeans and grabbed her by both her arms—unfortunately standing in front of her, the asshole—pulled them up over her head and held the wrists pinned to the bed.

  Her struggles were feeble, the drug still working.

  Until Dickie Number One leaned over with the sharp serrated knife and carved an X on her left breast, the center of the X the center of her nipple, blood pooling up and oozing down her side as she screamed and struggled in earnest, adrenalin kicking in and beating hell out of the sedative so that Dickie Three had come out from behind the camera to grab her legs and hold them while Dickie One carved the right side of her the same as he’d done the left.

  And then it was all three of them.

  Dickie Two working on her fingers and toes with the clippers, snipping at the joints, joints popping off all over the bed, Dickie One finding imaginative gourmet ways to carve living flesh with a serrated knife and Dickie Three generally relegated to holding down whatever part of her they were busy on at the moment.

  While Howard stared open-mouthed and trembling. Twitching. Scotch forgotten. Bolted to his chair.

  For twenty-five minutes of this.

  Until the coup de grace.

  At which point he stood up.

  Shouting. The scotch dribbling down to the wall-to-wall carpet.

  “Fuck! You motherfucking cocksucking assholes!”

  They’d decided to shoot the end of it right up close.

  Finally, thought Howard, a close-up.

  He giggled. Excitement and terror and scotch all kicking in at once. An extremist cocktail.

  Oh, my God, Greta, I’m going to watch you die.

  On the screen Dickie Three ran gut-bobbing back to the camera and hauled it forward until it stood just three feet from the now-blurry blood-drenched sheets and the glistening red body on the bed that still breathed in and out and tried to move, just barely.

  He focused the camera.

  And Howard realized two things simultaneously.

  One, it was not Greta.

  And two, it was not murder.

  And he could have killed the whole bunch of them right then and there for a moment, tracked them down and hacked them to fucking bits, for putting him through this.

  Not Greta. And not death.

  Oh, the girl was a look-alike all right, very similar, but they had left her face pretty much alone all this time except for slashes across the cheeks and shit, the nose was wrong, the eyes were slightly wrong, the cheekbones a bit too prominent—and now that he thought about it, now that the spell was broken, he realized he’d been stupid ever to have thought it could be Greta in the first place, because Greta was the same age as he was or maybe slightly less and this girl was hardly out of her twenties, the age she was then, the age she remained in his imagination.

  He felt like a total fucking idiot.

  Damned if he didn’t know a latex appliance when he saw one.

  They were good. Very good. Worthy of Tom Savini. Probably expensive too. Maybe even state of the art. But a motionless closeup camera is a goddamn merciless thing and you could see where the living flesh stopped and FX began as clearly as though they’d signposted them.

  So that when the knife slit her open and the hand slipped into what was supposed to be Greta’s chest and pulled out what was supposed to be Greta’s beating heart but was not Greta’s heart nor anybody’s nor even Greta, Howard was already on his feet.

  Cursing. Mad. Dispirited and disappointed as hell.

  And ripped off again.

  A week later he thought, well, it was still one hell of a movie, marked it, and added it to his collection.

  A month later he saw her.

  Really saw her.

  She was walking down Central Park South half a block from his apartment just as he was leaving and she looked right at him without the slightest sign of recognition and he damn near walked into a uniformed doorman hailing a taxi—because the Greta he remembered, the almost-Greta in the film, had been an attractive woman, sure, but this Greta, this older, graceful Greta of the perfect legs and silk Armani jacket was absolutely stunning.

  What in the hell had happened to her?

  He could barely get her name out.

  “Greta?”

  “My God. Howard.”

  And her smile was all he needed to ask her out to dinner.

  Miraculously, she accepted.

  Over duck with truffle sauce at Cafe Luxemborg on the Upper West Side he told her nothing about the very strange movie experience he had recently had and everything about investing—the kick of winning big when his choices were successful, playing down his utter fury at the occasional inevitable defeat. He told her stories. About riding high on Apple and Nintendo and dumping Exxon at exactly the right moment.

  And what was she doing?

  Well, films had not worked out for her. He’d guessed as much, naturally. She’d hung around L.A. for a couple of years and then moved into real estate. She had a few other interests, she said, on the side. And she was doing pretty well from the look of it.

  And no, she wasn’t married.

  And no, she wasn’t engaged.

  There wasn’t even a boyfriend. At least none that she was telling him about.

  And he couldn’t help but wonder if she still got into the same kind of rough stuff in the bedroom as she did in the old days. The thought of it made his mouth water a whole lot more than the duck did, and the duck was the best there was.

  And it looked like maybe he was going to find out.

  He could tell she still found him attractive. Her body language, the way she looked at him and listened, everything told him she did.

  Well, he was still attractive. Why not?

  And she . . . utterly beautiful. Success, he supposed, had made her beautiful. The rough city edge to the voice was completely gone. What was left was a deep, resonant purr that made him think of wild warm nights on Caribbean shores, of jungle terraces, of heat and sweat and strange, exotic passions.

  In the limo they drove south from the restaurant toward her midtown hotel. The theatres all along Broadway and Eighth Avenue were letting out and traffic was heavy. They talked over splits of champagne. Of old mutual acquaintances barely recalled. Halfway there and stalled in traffic she leaned over and brushed his lips with hers. She smelled lightly of Aliage or something similiar. Her lips were soft, more generous than he remembered.

  “You’ll come up?”

  “Of course. Absolutely.”

  He was impressed. The hotel was one of the best in town and her room was nothing less than the penthouse.

  She opened the door and they stepped inside into darkness and she turned to face him, came into his arms, and her mouth was hot and sweet, broke free and locked the door behind him and turned on the lights, the huge bright living room springing into focus, took off her jacket and stood there in front of him smiling, and he thought how strange it was, that he shoul
d be here about to make love to a woman who only a month ago he’d thought was going to die—and die horribly—all across his video screen.

  Life was very odd.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, stepping toward him again.

  “Believe me. So am I.”

  “It took a while, you know.”

  He was about to ask her what did when they stepped out of the bedroom, out of the darkness there.

  Three heavy men in jeans and teeshirts. Beer guts hard, straining their belts.

  Even a month later and without the masks they were all too familiar.

  And a whole lot uglier than he imagined.

  One moved behind him to the door. The others flanked her.

  “I told you I had a few sidelines,” she said. “Other interests. And I definitely recalled your other interests. I remembered them vividly in fact. I knew you’d be answering the ad sooner or later. Being you, how could you resist it?”

  She laughed. “You’ve become a very private person over the years, you know that, Howard? But then, the rich are always insulated—protected—aren’t they? I ought to know. It took me ten years to become . . . protected enough for this. An address was all I needed for you, but no one had one anymore. Who’d have thought you’d be here in New York playing the stock market? You could barely count your change when I knew you.”

  She sighed and caressed his cheek. Her hand was warm.

  “In the long run this was really much cheaper than hiring a private detective. And a lot more fun, too. We just ran the ad and waited. We even made a little money. Didn’t we, gentlemen.”

  They smiled. It was not a nice thing to see.

  The door to the bedroom opened. The girl who stood there in her white silk camisole was familiar too. The last time he’d seen her she was covered with blood. Now, of course, she was smiling.

  “My sister. Doreen, meet Howard. Did you notice the family resemblance, Howard? Didn’t you find it striking?”

  “What do you . . . ?”

  “What do I want? I want to make a movie, of course. Just like we did in the old days. You see I remember how you treated me too. Come here.”

  She stepped past her sister into the bedroom. The two men followed her. The third prodded Howard in the back with a thick horny knuckle. He had no choice but to follow.