DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (56 page)

Karl knew what Cam could do to him. Despite the fact his business was going down the hole from the stalker fooling with his client base and his credit and his tax returns, it was nothing compared to what strings Cam could pull if he put his mind to it. Hollywood wasn't big enough for both of them if Cam went against him.

Karl walked away from Cam and the foyer in which they had been talking. He went into the living room and collapsed on one of the soft leather sofas. He ran a hand over his eyes. The headache was no better. He caught himself grinding down his teeth against the battering pain.

Cam followed and stood over him, a bear of a man, but he wasn't threatening Karl physically. He was, if anything, a dumbfounded bear, lost and crazy to know what cave to hide in.

Karl looked up at him. Saw his face, how seamed it was, how gray. "Okay, Cam. Get me the keys, draw me a map. I'll leave in the morning."

Cam reached out and clapped him hard on the back. It made Karl's brain rattle in his skull. The headache shifted right to the crown and sat there, thumping with his blood.

"Now you're talking," Cam said. He left the room and Karl heard him rummaging in another room. Going through drawers, it sounded like. Looking for keys.

"Montana," Karl said below his breath. "Hell." He leaned forward and put his head into his hands and closed his eyes. Maybe this was for the best. He could get some perspective. He could get out from under the pressure of being followed and nearly killed every few days. He hadn't realized how wearing the past weeks had been. The prospect of just running away, disappearing, was so appealing that it surprised him. He could easily go away at this point, leave town, and never come back.

Except he knew that was a lie. This was where his life was. Anywhere else he would be worthless. Only in Hollywood did he have a place he belonged. So he would come back.

"I found the keys," he heard Cam call from the other room. "We're in high cotton."

Karl drew the ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. "Ever seen this before?"

"No, why?"

"Take a closer look. Maybe you'll recognize it."

Cam rolled the pen around between his fingers, scrutinizing it.

"Never saw it before. You gonna tell me why you're asking?"

Karl took it back and slipped it into his pocket. "No, it doesn't matter."

"You're leaving? Right away?" Cam handed him the keys to the cabin.

Karl came to his feet. "Yeah, right away."

46

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

James Baldwin, "Letter from a Region in My Mind,"

New Yorker magazine

It was two days before The Body realized his prey was gone. The new BMW was missing from Karl's driveway. His new temporary office—in a building two streets away from the burned out shell of his old office—stayed closed. His house was empty.

Getting through the scenes on the set was torture. Concentration had flown the coop. Cam gave him hell, Robyn had a heart-to-heart talk with him—again. Olivia grew exasperated in their scenes together and once stalked off the set in a fury, screaming that she "hated working with goddamn pretty boys."

He would never forgive her for that.

His hands shook. He perspired and had to have his face mopped every ten minutes. He blew his lines. He missed his marks. His voice croaked and his movements were stiff. One day Cam threw half a tuna salad sandwich at him.

The Body tried to pry out of Robyn Karl's whereabouts. If anyone knew, wouldn't she? She was surprised he was missing. Her face crumpled like a crushed soda can when she learned he had not been seen in days. Hurt she hadn't been told he was leaving. Or worried something horrible had happened to him? She was no help.

The Body broke into Karl's new office and searched it. There was a new computer, but there weren't any clues in the files. He did find the employee records, all newly and neatly filled out, in a file cabinet. He had Karl's secretary's address and phone number.

On the night of the fourth day of Karl's disappearance, The Body called Lois.

"I need to get in touch with Karl LaRosa. Could you help me out?"

"I'm sorry, you need to call the office next week."

"I can't wait until next week. This is an emergency."

There was a pause. "Who is this and what is the nature of the emergency?"

The Body hung up. He should have known it wouldn't be that easy. Women were all bitches. You couldn't pry anything out of them with a crowbar big as a high-rise.

It was raining, nearly eight PM. If he hurried over to her house he'd catch her still up. She would be coerced into giving up the information whether she wanted to or not.

He threw on a thin jacket to protect his shirt from the rain and ran to the car. She didn't live that far away.

~ * ~

She knew his face the moment she opened the door to him. Rain dripped from his fine blond hair into his eyes. He wiped it away and gave her a boyish grin. "Hi," he said, "nasty night, isn't it?"

"Uh . . . can I help you?"

"Could I come inside out of the rain? I have a message from Karl for you."

She unhooked the safety chain and allowed him entrance. She lived in a small, pastel-pink house set back from the street in a white gravel lawn. Her furnishings were modest, bargain basement stuff, but she wore a beautiful silk dressing gown, oriental, blue with red scaly dragons imprinted over the material.

He followed her to a tiny living area where an ivory nubby linen sofa faced a white, unused fireplace. She offered to get him a towel to dry himself off. He waited, standing on the pale blue and peach Indian throw rug.

He didn't know what he was going to do until she returned with the towel in her hand. He stepped forward as if to retrieve the towel, but instead caught her in an embrace, her arms pinned to her sides. She dropped the towel and gasped.

He looked down into her face. She was not a pretty woman. She was too thin, her chin too pointed, her nose and lips too tiny for her wide, flat face. But her eyes were exceptionally bright, black as a squirrel's, flaring with life. She said, "What are you doing?"

"Where's Karl? Tell me and I won't hurt you."

"Why would you want to hurt me?"

Now she was breathing hard, fear sliding into her eyes like a shaft of light breaking over a dark horizon.

He brought his arms quickly up and his hands circled her throat. He pressed both his thumbs into the cartilage of her windpipe, but not hard. "I don't want to hurt you," he said. "I want to know where Karl went. Tell me."

She tried to shake loose and he pressed his thumbs deeper. She tried to cough. His fingers tightened deeper into her flesh. Her hands were around his wrists, but he ignored them. She was not a big woman, not strong, not even as much of a challenge as Marilyn had been. With more pressure he could choke her. With a quick twist of her neck, he could break it.

"Okay, okay," she whispered. Her voice, cut off the way it was, sounded like a low, harsh wind blowing over a plateau.

Now her eyes watered. They glittered in the light from a lamp on the mantel over the dead fireplace.

He relaxed his hold on her larynx, but did not remove his hands. "Where?"

"He went to a cabin, Cambridge Hill's cabin."

"Where's that?"

"Somewhere in Montana."

"Where in Montana?" He was losing patience and his fingers tightened again.

"I don't know!"

He pressed so hard her eyes began to pop and she fought him, hammering at his upper arms with her fists. He relaxed his grip once more. She took in ragged breaths.

"Where in Montana? I won't ask again."

"Outside of Billings."

He grinned down at her. "You think I'm handsome?"

She blinked.

"Most women think I look like a young Robert Redford."

She tried to nod. She licked her lips.

"I could have played Louis in Interview With a Vampire. Don't you think so?" He bent down and nuzzled her ear. She arched her head away from him and he could feel her body trembling against his chest.

Just as he was pulling away from her neck where he had planted a kiss, he bore down with his thumbs hard and at the same time lifted her off her feet. She kicked and pummeled him. Her eyes were wild with fright, the wall eyes of a horse trapped in a burning stall. Her nails clawed his face and he just laughed.

Laughed and laughed.

~ * ~

Karl took along a laptop computer, his cellular phone, and the gun. He could still hardly believe he was packing a gun. He had bought it early in his troubled time with the stalker; he went into a gun shop and picked it out. He didn't like it at all, in fact treated it the way he might a poisonous snake he kept as a pet, handling it with great care. It made him feel safer, however, and that was the purpose of guns in the hands of law-abiding people.

He found books in Cam's little cabin, dog-eared paperback thrillers in a cardboard box set against the wall in the bedroom. There was no television or radio. There were no neighbors. Down the dirt and gravel road that led to the cabin tucked back into the woods was a small fishing pond and further on a rugged path led into forested hunting ground. The dirt road connected to a two-lane highway that wove into Billings, twenty-six miles distant.

Karl had stocked up on perishables, but overbought on canned goods. Cam's cupboards in the small open kitchen that joined the living area were full of every kind of canned food imaginable. He found tuna and salmon, beans, vegetables, yams, pickles, canned ham—enough to feed one person well into the millennium.

Karl had never taken a vacation. He hadn't left L.A. in years. His work was so demanding and he was so dedicated that he had forgotten the last time he took time off for himself. The cabin reminded him of the reasons he was a workaholic. It was boring to spend time doing nothing.

The first day there he missed being plugged in. The silence was pressing and made him slightly paranoid. Without the sounds of a city—the traffic roar, the ocean down at Malibu, the lights, the crowds—he found that his hearing overcompensated. He jumped at creaks in the wooden plank floor as he walked over it. He flinched when a breeze blew a fir limb against a window. He turned to find the source when the wind sung teakettle songs down the chimney.

Then there were wild animal sounds from the forest surrounding the cabin that he could not identify. Howls and cries, snorts and rumblings that put his nerves right along the razor's edge.

He thought he'd go crazy if he had to stay isolated too long. Cam had promised the script was almost finished. Five, six more scenes, he'd said, and we wrap.

It might take a week, two weeks. Longer than that and Karl thought he'd be climbing the log walls and scratching himself like a monkey. Reading the old paperbacks kept him entertained for a couple of days. He hadn't read a novel in . . . how long? Since college, he guessed. He had forgotten how many hours he could squander, lost in the pages of a novel.

Yet even reading began to lose its attraction after a while. It seemed to him Cam could have varied his reading habits a bit. Hell, where were the Playboy magazines and the copies of Variety? Even a National Geographic would have been appreciated.

It was cold during the nights at the cabin so that Karl had to build a fire in the fireplace for warmth and use two blankets on the bed. He chopped wood, amused at how bad he was at it, once nearly burying the ax in his own foot. He spent almost an hour imagining how he'd drive himself to a doctor from this ends-of-the-earth place if he really did manage to hurt himself.

He stacked the chopped wood neatly in cords on the front porch—panting, aching—and wondered why anyone romanticized the early years of the last century. It must have been a bitch to work this hard every single day.

He cooked, but nothing too complicated, swept the floors, washed his clothes in the tub and hung them from a clothesline he found in back of the house. He might have taken his laundry into Billings to be done for him, but too many Hollywood types took time off to visit in the town; someone would recognize him, word could get back where he was. He didn't want to have to answer questions or explain his presence here. All he wanted was to endure the hours until Cam called to let him know the film was completed.

~ * ~

Middle of the night, dreaming of swimming in the surf at Malibu with Marilyn. Every time he dove into the waves and came up, she waved at him from where she waded in the shallows. He was laughing, happy to know that her death was a lie. "Watch this," he yelled and dove again into a big white-crested breaker. When he came up, flinging his head to clear his hair from his eyes, he couldn't see Marilyn anywhere. He turned in a circle, treading water, but she was gone.

A hand wrapped around his ankle, jerking him into the deep. The water was green as new summer shoots of grass. Seaweed swirled before his eyes, tangled around his head. He tried to bend over to see if Marilyn had his foot and was playing a game. It was not Marilyn. It was a severed arm, latched onto his ankle, dragging him down . . .

He woke soaking with sweat, the covers heaped over his head. He threw back the blankets and that's when he heard someone at the door in the front of the cabin.

He wasn't ready for this. He hadn't expected it.

He fumbled for the nightstand, got the drawer open and his hand on the gun. It was a 9mm Beretta, black, mean, and loaded with hollow-point cartridges. He flipped off the safety and pulled back the slide, chambering a round. The sound was like sheets of tin slapping against Karl's eardrums, loud and frightening.

Now he was sweating in earnest. It was dripping down his forehead and his neck. His palms were damp and he was afraid his finger would twitch on the Beretta's trigger, setting off an explosion.

There was no point in calling out and asking who was there. He knew who it was and why he was here. It didn't matter how the intruder had found out where Karl had gone. At this point all that mattered was living through the next half hour.