John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  "Jeff - you know where Mitch probably is?" Careful,

  Prentice told himself, leaning back in the desk chair of Jeff's office. You don't want to come off sounding like that cop that came over here. That'll turn Jeff against you in a hot second.

  Jeff was sitting pensively on the edge of the desk. Afternoon sunlight came in dusty stacks through the cantilevered blinds. "Do I know where Mitch probably is? If I knew where the fuck Mitch was we wouldn't be having this fucking discussion," Jeff said.

  Prentice thought: I'm helping him, I really am. This whole paranoid thing is just making a wreck of our lives. Both of us feeding on it emotionally - me because of Amy, Jeff because he feels bad about not taking care of Mitch.

  The dreams Prentice had been having about Amy were enough to convince him he had some kind of morbid entanglement with her memory. Best all that were jettisoned. .

  "Mitch is probably deliberately letting you stew, man," Prentice said. Everything he said was an attempt to convince himself as much as Jeff - an escape from culpability. From the sense of something precious inside him rotting away because he was trying to play along with Arthwright. "I mean, think about it - Mitch is into rock'n'roll. Wants to be a head-bangin' rockstar. Chances are he's hanging out with that crowd on Sunset Boulevard, down by the Whisky, the other clubs down there. I mean - he probably was at Denver's, and then that didn't come to anything, and he split for town."

  But what about Amy? Prentice asked himself. Her connection to Denver. Her death.

  He squashed the thought. Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and . . .

  "Maybe you're right," Jeff said grudgingly. "But

  that headbangin' crowd is big, man. How am I supposed to find him in it - if that's where he is.

  "A private eye. Go on foot and ask people in the lines outside the clubs. Maybe even see Mitch there. I mean, if you . . ." He broke off. He was about to say, If you tangle with the Denvers in court you could lose a lot of money - and and make an enemy of Arthwright. But if he said that, Mitch might realize that Arthwright had put him up to this.

  Prentice writhed inside. Wrongwrongwrongwrong. The word like a bell pealing in his mind. Wrong.

  Jeff hugged himself wearily. "I'm fucking tired of thinking about this. I'll decide what to do tomorrow."

  The desk phone rang. Jeff answered it in a monotone. "Yeah. Hello . . . Yeah, he's right here."

  He passed the phone over to Prentice and left the room.

  Prentice put the phone to his ear. "Tom Prentice here."

  "Hi, 'Tom Prentice here.' It's Lissa."

  Prentice's gut did another flip-flop. There was anticipation in it, and fear. "Hi. I'm glad you called."

  "Listen - Zack wanted me to invite you to a party he's giving for some of his friends. He's giving it at their place, but he's setting it all up, I guess. Oh and I'm supposed to ask you - it was all very cryptic - how it's going 'with Jeff'? Whatever that's about."

  "Uh. Fine." Could Jeff be listening on the extension? No, why would he? "It's taken care of."

  "Good - I guess. I'm not in on that loop. Anyway - taking me to a party's a nice cheap date, don't you think?"

  "I'd love to take you on the expensive kind." But he was glad he didn't have to, yet. He was veering

  dangerously close to flat broke. God, he might have to write that video. ''For that matter, I'd take a trip to Baghdad with you in an F-16."

  "Good. I like an explosive date. But, in the meantime, Arthwright's party at the Denvers' is on Saturday -"

  "It's where?" Unable to hide his startlement.

  "At the Denvers'. You're supposed to not bring you know-who. Can you pick me up?" She gave him the time and her address and they exchanged a few more vague innuendoes and he hung up.

  Telling himself, This way I can clear up the question of Mitch being out there . . .

  Then asking himself, What are you so scared of?

  West Hollywood

  "First time I saw a Wetbones body, I didn't want to believe it used to be people. If I believed that, shit, I'd have to puke," Blume said. "Eventually, I did have to puke." He was six inches taller than Garner, but slumped in his chair almost to the same height; he had bushy hair receding with clown-like frontal baldness. A tired, cynical face built around a long, thin nose; the nondescript clothes that private detectives wear. He took another long pull on his beer. "You sure you don't want a beer or something?" he asked Garner. "I don't like to drink alone."

  Garner was tempted. He ached for a drink, sometimes, to put out the smoldering anguish of fear for Constance. But he wasn't going to throw away all those years of sobriety for anything so sickly as a mere temptation.

  Garner shook his head. "Naw. I'll have a Seven-Up

  though, if that helps." They sat in a corner booth under a buzzing Felix The Cat clock. Garner wished they'd sat nearer the door. The tavern stank of old beer and a piss-choked bathroom.

  "How many of these bodies have you seen?" Garner asked.

  "If you can even call 'em bodies . . . Two."

  Blume heaved himself abruptly out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back moments later with a double tequila in one hand and a fizzing glass of soda in the other. He sat down, passing Garner the glass. "They didn't have Seven-Up. Sprite."

  "Great. Fine. You were saying . . ."

  Blume knocked back the double tequila in one swallow. Blew out his cheeks. Then shook his head sadly. "If there hadn't been a skull, you wouldn'ta been able to tell it was human. Too much of a mess. Just a lot of . . . wet bones. Broken up wet bones. Wet with blood and . . . gunk. Piss and phlegm I guess. Even shit from the busted intestines. Busted bones and guts in the middle of a puddle of blood. No clothes around. It didn't look like it was dug up, neither. Too fresh. Not like somebody'd messed with a grave. You could just see these bones were new. And in one there was this busted skull, and the eye - well, one of the eyes was intact. But no lids . . ."

  Garner swallowed. His mouth was very dry. He took a long drink of the Sprite. His tissues seemed to soak it up like desert sand sucking a raindrop. "Seems to me it could still be . . . a hoax. Stolen bones from some medical school or . . . Were there organs?"

  "Yeah. Some. What wasn't mushed into . . . gunk."

  "And skin?"

  "I didn't see it. But there was a lot of stuff I couldn't

  quite make out what it was and I didn't wanna look that close."

  It's a big city. it wouldn't be her.

  "But - why do you bring this up . . .?"

  'They were all young girls, I heard, these bonepiles . . ." He shrugged. "I don't wanna be insensitive or nothin' but . . ."

  "Any identification of the . . .?" He waited, heart thudding so hard in his chest he thought that Blume must be able to hear it.

  "Nope. That's part of why this thing hasn't really broken into the papers much because they're not connected to specific missing girls and the cops are taking the same tack that you did - that they're stolen bones . . . I.D.ing them's hard. There are so many missing kids in the L.A. area it's unbelievable."

  "Yeah. I know." Garner fingered his soda glass. Stared at the slowly, slowly melting ice. "But you drive around in this town for a day or two - especially when you're from out of town - and you find the statistics about missing kids very believable indeed, Blume . . ."

  "You got any kind of fingerprints on your little girl?"

  "Yes. I left them at your office with your boss when I first came in. And I've given the police a stat of them. They should be in the police computer."

  "As far as I know they haven't got any fingerprint I.D. on these Wetbones things yet. Hey, don't give me that look, it's a long shot - but we should push the cops into crosschecking it just to eliminate that longshot, when they've got some fingerprints on those bodies . . . If you can call 'em bodies . . ."

  "You already said that," Garner pointed out, through grating teeth.

  Suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. The smell of the men's room, the s
tale beer, the reek of booze off Blume himself. He wanted to shout at Blume that he was killing himself with alcohol, an addictive drug that's sold on television to children, sold in advance through hundreds of thousands of beer and wine commercials, but then his automatic guard against self righteousness came into play, and he said nothing, except, "I need some air. Just keep looking for her, all right? I'll call you."

  Garner lurched out of the booth, staggered outside, as so many drunks did, coming out of Blume's favourite low-cost boozery.

  For a few moments Garner was staggering like a drunk but - he was horribly, terribly sober.

  Santa Monica

  She was beginning to see pictures in her head that seemed to come from nowhere at all. She knew where they were from, though - not from Ephram, not from God or the Devil. They were from her, the part of her that she couldn't stop from feeling.

  Constance was sitting under a lemon tree in the backyard of the little condo that Ephram had rented, sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a white bikini that Ephram had picked for her, and sunglasses she wore as often as he'd let her. Ephram had pushed some buttons in her head and she felt no pain.

  Ephram was in the house scribbling in that little book of his. It was the only time he left her alone and she was trying to enjoy it - though she knew he was still watching her in some way, and she mustn't even think fleetingly of climbing over that white wooden

  fence and running. So instead she was sitting there quietly, seeing herself transfixed by steel poles.

  It was sharp, mental image, like a slide projection: Constance with three shiny steel rods, each an inch thick, thrust laterally through her breasts; another transfixing her neck; another through her temples, passing, presumably, through her brain. Constance smiling happily through it all, talking, chattering, saying nothing.

  And then it would vanish, this picture, only to be replaced by another: Constance walking through a party, talking to people like she was the hostess, only she had a noose around her neck, already tightened, her face swollen and black, as if she'd already been choked to death, or - no, she wasn't quite dead, she was perpetually on the verge of choking to death, but never did, not quite, she just walked around chatting, shaking hands, hugging people, smiling as she said, "Excuse the rope," in a strangled voice. No one seemed to mind.

  And then she saw herself in a steel globe that was just a little bit too small for her body but big enough so that she could wriggle around looking for the escape hole that she knew must be there but she couldn't find She kept trying but still couldn't find it, and the globe was tightening, was getting smaller . . .

  "Constance?"

  She'd felt him coming before he'd spoken. "Yes?"

  "We're going to go out tonight, we're meeting someone at a motel . . ."

  She nodded. She tried to feel nothing. She was getting pretty good at it . . .

  Lately, Ephram had got into this prostitute thing. First that girl they picked up at the disco, then call-girls chosen from classified ads in the Los Angeles Swingles Guide. Constance could see the logic, that the girls he picked weren't with pimps or madams, they were working alone, and they usually didn't tell anyone where they were going. Or so he assumed. But maybe he was wrong about that. Constance had pointed out that they'd know it was risky going out with all these strange men, maybe some would tell their boyfriends or whomever, have them waiting outside . . .

  But no, Ephram said, they were complacent and too-confident, these girls, and besides he mentally frisked them for traces of accomplices. "These are girls," he said, "one can snip off at the stem - and no one will notice them missing in a tree already heavy with rotten fruit, ha ha."

  None of the girls were surprised to see Constance with Ephram; with the trick. They were used to threesomes and foursomes.

  Sitting with Ephram in a thickly padded blue vinyl booth in a dark corner of the Howard Johnson's cocktail bar, Constance felt a squeezing pleasure of anticipation and excitement. For a moment she thought that Ephram was prompting the sensations, but then she realized that, instead, those feelings were her own, were coming up out of her unbidden. And that meant, she thought with a surge of joy and relief, she was becoming what Ephram wanted her to be. There would be less punishment now - and she could be another person, a new person, so that the Constance she had been need no longer be responsible for the things she'd done; need not exist at all. The old Constance could die . . . on the vine. Like rotten fruit.

  The latest girl was a little overweight, and Constance could see some anxiety in her eyes as she approached the booth, wobbling a little on her high pumps, carrying an overnight bag that would have her working lingerie in it. The girl was nervous the old man would reject her because she was overweight, and she'd lose the great wad of money he'd promised her. She had lots and lots of fake blond curls tumbling over her bulgingly exposed cleavage; she had a deep-dark tan and capped teeth and a tighter than-skintight short black dress. And a big butt.

  Ephram beamed at her. "My dear! You must be Naomi! Sit down and I'll get you a drink . . ."

  There were drinks and there was small talk and an envelope passed between Ephram and the hefty prostitute. Constance felt her pussy getting wet looking at the girl, imagining what Wetbones would do with all that flesh.

  This was just getting better and better, Constance thought: now I'm responding. Getting excited thinking about it. That ought to please Ephram.

  She could feel Ephram's glow of approval like a space heater in a cold room.

  The girl made a few dumb, sexy remarks about Constance, stuff she probably just felt obligated to say. But Constance liked hearing it. She was beginning to enjoy female attention. It was something she'd never have thought herself capable of six months ago the very notion would have made her burst out, "Gross!", but compared to most of the recent innovations in her appetites, it was minor.

  After a couple of Margaritas, Naomi was animatedly talking about herself, on and on. Constance wondered if Ephram was already priming the girl's pleasure

  centres. "Oh anyway," Naomi was saying, "I met this guy you know? Who's, like, a movie producer? And he's, like, really into me? And he wants me to, um, audition for his next movie and I'm all, Oh listen I wasn't born yesterday but he's all, No really, I'll get you an appointment right now let's call up my secretary right? And, like, I knew it would happen eventually because I've always had this higher destiny. That's what the girl who does my charts says, You have a higher destiny."

  Ephram smiled at that. "I'm quite sure you do, indeed, Naomi. Ha ha."

  Naomi chattered on, "And, like, I always knew I'd be something special anyway, even without seeing it proved on my charts? You know? Because, um, like, I've always had this talent for acting stuff out - I always do it with my clients, they love it, I get in all these kind off like, characters the clients want and certain outfits - I have all these costumes - and I can just be like, these people, like I'll be Elvira - you know, Elvira from, like, on TV? And I'll pretend to be Elvira with a blackwig and a black dress and they ask me, Come on, you really are Elvira and you do this on the side right? And I say no, but I've always had this talent . . ."

  Finally Ephram got a glazed look in his eyes that meant the girl was going to die soon. He paid the bill and took Naomi by her plump, silver-ringed hand and, still chattering, she followed Constance and Ephram out and across the parking lot and up to the second tier of the motel and into number 77 and Ephram put on the Adult channel. The girl didn't mind that at all, it just started her talking about how she'd acted in an adult video and knew some of those girls and how the director always said she was the one with real talent . . . she'd always had this talent, this knowledge of her special destiny . . .

  Ephram toyed with her in the room for awhile, jolting the girl with pleasure, little jolts, which she attributed to Constance's touch. After a while Naomi stopped chattering, and they slipped into an unreal subworld, smoky with a pink fog that seemed to thicken out of nowhere, clouding the room with a frag
rance that was both floral and epidermal; an insulated retreat where Naomi's black lace crotchless lingerie was the requisite uniform of simply existing here, and where the only window was the TV screen with its writhing pixel-patterned flesh and sodden connections and false sighs and cheap hip-hop soundtrack; and where the only constant beyond the probing of slick membranes and swollen clitoral nodes and Naomi's great bouncing and swirling breasts, was the dumpy little man masturbating in the corner; the little man was simply there, ever there in the background, as the two girls played on the bed - the prostitute, normally exactingly conscious of the ticking away of her mental taxicab meter - coasted with only a murmur of wonder down into a nautilus-shell retreat from the currents of time.

  And the little man in the background was the source of nourishment and renewal, a ridiculous and divine fixture of this self-contained universe . . .

  So it went until Ephram himself broke the spell by declaring that he wanted to do something special outside.

  "Outside?" The girl seemed puzzled. She'd forgotten that Outside existed. Now the recollection of the outside world came back, because Ephram permitted it to. She nodded - and then frowned. She had mixed feelings about the proposition. She was intrigued, for financial reasons, because here was an excuse to ask a lot more money, but also dismayed because of the risk. "We

  could get busted for that. Now if it was off in the country somewhere . . . I did this video once, I was so good in it too, we were like naked cowgirls you know? And uh -"

  As Naomi chattered, Constance, knowing Ephram's mind, was dressing the girl, smiling and nodding and tugging her dress onto her - grunting with the labour of it. At the same time Constance focused on the waves of pleasure Ephram sent through her, taking refuge in them. She needed refuge because at the mention of outside, the place for the Engorgement Ritual, her earlier mellowness began to slip away and she felt herself drying up inside, the familiar hollowness growing in her, the feeling that came when she was being used a little too much . . . being used up in the effort to insulate her from the monstrousness of her complicity . . .