Lovely Death Read online

  “You could always blow your fucking brains out.”

  Nick jerked around in his seat, heart racing. But he found nothing, just another hallucination of a very unstable mind. Yet, something hung there in the air. It was a parting stench, faded but unmistakably terrible. It was like rotting garbage. Or extreme halitosis. Leonard Harrow’s breath hung in the air, as did his words.

  Nick thought of the gun. He slowly turned again to face the steering wheel. He let his gaze flicker to the glove box, where the large-caliber pistol slept. With a trembling hand and tears in his eyes he reached for the latch.

  Interlude: Happy Together

  The party was a bust.

  The place looked like a political fundraiser, not a gathering of creative talent. The agency had picked the most ultra-modern hotel, with the blankest, most ultra-modern décor possible. The place looked like the sterile, blocky hospital wing that Nick imagined would be found on a spaceship like the Death Star. And the fake Hollywood hotshots surrounding him, with all their botox and prosthetic chins, seemed to be just as plasticky as any Storm Trooper.

  At least the catering company had really stepped it up with those crab cakes. Nick had spent the last thirty minutes hovering in the corner, chatting up the modestly cute server with the winning hors d’oeuvres platter. He was into his third glass of scotch and trying to figure out his escape route. Donnie had deserted him in this room full of slippery handshakes and shiny smiles. And he had taken Sandra with him. His beautiful friend (and the leading lady of his soon to be famous indie film) cast Nick a reassuring smile before being ushered off to meet more studio bigshots.

  “You have to come, Nick,” Donnie had said two days earlier. “As your agent, I insist. Especially if this thing goes through with Tantamount Studios, which we both know it will. Let me be the first to tell you, kid, who you know in this city is what keeps you out of the gutter with the rest of the wannabes. You don’t wanna go back to living in the back seat of that shit heap car, do you?”

  “No way,” Nick agreed. “After shacking up in a dirty shit heap motel, I could never go back to living in my own car.”

  Donnie had patted him on the shoulder and smiled a wolf’s smile. “Gratitude doesn’t really suit you well, does it, kid?”

  Nick made no reply as he had sat in the plush office of his agent’s chic building.

  “No matter,” Donnie said. “You keep your axe and your grindstone, kid. We’ll see what tune you’re singing once you’re driving around in a fucking Bentley. Just show up to the agency gala, alright? I’ve already gotten a confirmation from Sandra. Let my secretary know if you need some cab money.”

  And so Nick had found himself surrounded by the other half, those heavyweight investors and self-proclaimed appreciators of storytelling. He did not mingle. Nor did he network. Not because he was a class warrior, but because he’d never been good in crowds, especially ones dominated by a cultural class of staggering wealth which he could hardly comprehend. Donnie had introduced him to a few bobbing heads before disappearing with Sandra to rub elbows with other clients and businessmen. Somewhere in the mix, Nick had spied George Clooney high-fiving some nameless money man while holding a blonde woman’s waist and laughing. The place gave him the nervous sweats.

  Nick had entertained just hanging by the open bar and getting shit-faced, but fortunately thought better of it. He may have been uncomfortable, hell, he may have even hated his agent, but Nick was no idiot. He was about to break into the big-time. That was the whole point of reaching for his manic dreams by driving cross-country with a shitty video camera and an even shittier car. Wasn’t it? It was, he decided. But still, he needed to get away. He needed to get out of that place and find some air that wasn’t so overly purified.

  Across the street Nick found exactly what he was looking for. He tugged off his already loosened tie and opened the door of an upper scale dive bar. Its trendy geographic location in L.A. prevented it from being an actual dive bar, but like so many things in that city, it did a convincing job of pretending.

  As opposed to the futuristic Emergency Room motif of the party across the street, this bar, Dos Diablos, was dominated by a splash of rockabilly nostalgia. Original posters of Gary Cooper films lined the dark, wood-paneled walls, along with countless photos of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Waylon Jennings was warbling through the neon rainbow of the corner jukebox, and Nick instantly felt himself relax a little.

  The place was busy, but not too busy. There were a few open seats at the bar and Nick took one at the very end. The bartender was a cute redhead with long, toned legs that stemmed up out of black stilettos and into an equally black leather skirt. She had an attitude, but not of the “go fuck yourself” variety. It was one of intelligent tolerance. She raised her eyebrows to acknowledge his existence while pouring a round of shots for one of the tables and simultaneously laughing at one of her customer’s jokes. Nick liked her immediately. There was no television, thankfully, so Nick examined the simple but attractive design of the mahogany back bar and the cascading arrangement of liquors while he waited. He also admired the shape of the bartender’s ass in her skirt. There was a male bartender too, but he seemed to be mainly working the other end of the line.

  “What’ll it be, handsome?” she finally asked, making friendly with him. Her forest green eyes darted across the bar while she addressed him, but not in a manner that suggested she wasn’t listening. She was absolutely listening to him. She was a pro, aware of a dozen needed services in varying degree, but in possession of a keen, Zen-like balance that allowed her to give every patron a personalized, unrushed drinking experience.

  “Wait,” she said, doing a brief impression of Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent. “Don’t tell me. Vodka on the rocks. No, that suit screams success, so how about a Manhattan? Or maybe an Old Fashioned?”

  Nick showed her his lopsided grin and shook his head.

  “No? Oh wait, I’ve got it. Duh. Shirley Temple, with an extra cherry.”

  Nick chuckled. “I’ll have a beer. Please.”

  “Damn. That was my next guess. What color can I get you?”

  Again, Nick grinned at the young woman’s peculiar choice of phrasing.

  “I’m partial to the reds, actually,” he said with a smile. “Anything amber is fine by me.”

  At this, the crimson-haired girl gave a surprised laugh. She narrowed her eyes at him and shook a finger. “You’re trouble, aren’t you, lovely man?”

  “Me?” Nick said. “No, I’m harmless.”

  “Good to meet you, harmless. I’m Laura.”

  Nick spent the next two hours sitting at the glossily shellacked bar, flirting with Laura until her shift ended. He told her all about the shit show across the street, about his sleazy agent, and the little movie that might, just maybe, lift him out of destitution one day soon. The clientele did a gradual shift change, but the bar stayed full well into the late hours. Eventually, Laura was relieved by her partner Peter an hour before closing.

  Laura sat down next to Nick and they continued drinking together. As it turned out, she was a writer. She wrote literary fiction, a creative anomaly in a city that worshipped screenplays and cared very little for screenless storytelling.

  “People here aren’t illiterate, you know,” Laura defended, shaking her whiskey glass at him.

  “That’s true,” Nick replied. “There are plenty of people here who are interested in literature. It’s a fertile field to strip mine for ideas and bastardize into the next big blockbuster.” He wasn’t being cruel, but alcohol brought the truth out of him. “You ought to be in New York. This place is a wasteland.”

  “Then what are you doing here, smart guy?”

  “According to my family, escaping reality. And it looks like I got lucky.”

  Laura snorted. “No shit, pal. You have any idea how many people would kill to have a finished indie film being bought by a studio like Tantamount?”

  “Yeah, it’s a pretty good feeling.
Still…” Nick paused to wave his hand in the general direction of the monstrous gala taking place across the street. “All this, those kind of people, it’s just not for me.”

  “Sounds like someone’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

  “Nah, it’s not like that. I don’t hate them. They just make me uncomfortable. Fuck it, though. If this thing sells maybe we can get the hell out of this place for a while.”

  “We? You have a mouse in your pocket?”

  Nick shook his head. He hadn’t realized just how openly he’d been thinking aloud. He’d been thinking of Sandra and how quickly she had disappeared into the crowd with Donnie.

  “Nah.”

  “You have a girlfriend, Nick? If so, I’m going to feel like I’ve been led a bit astray.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Nick said.

  “Is that the sound of a broken heart I hear?”

  Nick bit his lip and took a swig of his beer. “No. If I’m not mistaken, that’s The Turtles.”

  Laura cocked her head, then realized he was talking about the jukebox. From the corner, the unmistakable opening chords of Happy Together strummed out through the speakers.

  “I appreciate a man who knows his music,” she said. “So, aren’t you going to ask a pretty girl to dance?”

  “I don’t dance,” Nick said, regarding her with a steady gaze. She wasn’t just a pretty girl. With her curly crimson hair down, she was lovely. Her cheekbones were high and she had a short, pointed nose that wasn’t overly pronounced. Up close, he could see a dusting of faint freckles just below her emerald eyes.

  Laura shook her head and placed her hand over his on the bar. “Voltaire said ‘Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.’”

  Nick laughed. “Yeah, well, according to the Tao of Carlin ‘Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.’”

  “Logical though that may be, it makes no sense in this context. Get your ass up and dance with me because I know you can hear that music. Come on, lovely man.” And she had dragged him out of his seat. He did not clearly recall dancing—had probably repressed the memory to the furthest depths of his subconscious—but he did recall what happened after. The two of them had left the bar. Instead of his shitty motel they had opted to go to her place, a mid-sized apartment a few miles away which she shared with a roommate.

  Nick and Laura fucked like animals. It was so obnoxiously loud that her roommate knocked on the bedroom door to complain not just once, but twice.

  In the morning, Nick woke up thinking of Sandra. He should have stayed to make sure she got home alright, should never have left her to wander the evening away with Donnie. He was married, sure, but he was still a creep. But a smirk tugged at Nick’s lips. He knew that if Donnie tried anything funny she would probably kick his ass. Sandra was a tough one when she wanted to be. That was a fact that shone through in Grindstone, as she single-handedly took an axe to The South Side Skinner and did it with such believable grit that it was about to make her a star.

  Nick imagined Sandy socking her grabby agent in the jaw and the image brought a small smile to his face. He wished it had been her bed he was waking up in, not Laura’s. There was something there between the two of them. He was sure of it. Back when they’d still been filming the movie in an abandoned warehouse, she had told him she needed a little more time. But it had been four months since then. Two of those she had been single, since her and her asshole, punk-rocking ex-boyfriend had split the sheets.

  Sandra was the one for him, Nick knew. He had made up his mind right then and there, while Laura’s head rested on his shoulder and he stared at the poster of a drunken Dean Martin toasting her bedroom from the wall. Outside, car horns began to give the occasional honk in traffic, and the sound of it made Nick aware of the half-cooked hangover brewing in his stomach.

  Nick kissed Laura softly on the forehead and crept out of bed. He grabbed his boots and Levis, and without waking her to say goodbye, he left.

  Despite the slight headache and the gurgle of his gut, Nick stepped out into the morning light feeling pretty damn good about himself. He decided that later he would give Sandra a call, maybe even stop by her apartment up north. After all, once he got something in his head, Nick wasn’t much on wasting time. He never had been.

  And as Laura Scranton would quickly find out, Nick Aragon wasn’t much on returning phone calls either.

  Eight

  Muted daylight found Nick siting in the front seat of his car, cradling the pistol. It was loaded and the weight of ten .45 caliber rounds amounted to a solid five and a half pounds of cold, deadly steel and polymer in his lap. The gun was a killer. And so was he, now twice over.

  He pressed the button to eject the magazine. It was full, telling Nick that the girl in his trunk had not died by gunshot, as minimally reassuring as that was. He shoved the magazine back into the body, feeling the mechanical finality of the click telling him it was in place.

  What was wrong with him? Had the stress and guilt of Laura’s killing caused him to snap, to break from reality and attack that poor girl? Jesus Christ, had he become a rabid dog, some sort of Jekyll and Hyde monster that was capable of blacking out and killing a person? Nick’s chest rose and fell as his breaths came in short bursts. Had he turned into a psychopath, a man with multiple personalities starting down the path of becoming an unwitting serial killer?

  There was no one he could call. Not a single sane person could possibly believe his story. That included Sandra. If something so disturbingly gruesome had happened to someone else, Nick knew he would think the same of them. His innocence was unbelievable in the face of so much damning evidence. He was done for. A newly famous horror film director—arguably the most promising upstart in decades—whose life had turned into a grim downward spiral just as terrible as anything his imagination had ever conceived on screen.

  Nick grabbed madly for the handle and pressed the door open. He leaned out and threw up in the road. It was mostly a dry heave, with a squirt of bitter coffee. The world around him quavered, reality darkening at the periphery. The next thing Nick knew he was on his hands and knees beside the car, palms down in the roadside gravel. He spied the fallen gun and reclaimed it, used the weight of its butt to press down on the ground and lift himself. With one hand on the car, he stood up again, wheezing.

  Save for the searing burn of guilt, Nick’s mind was blank. All logical reasoning had ceased. There was no point in it. The situation had spun out of control. And when Nick eyed the tall green grass lining the highway ditch beside him, he knew it would be the place he would die. The gun hung heavy in his hand, but he did not drop it. He swallowed, bile biting his tongue, and took a step forward. When he rounded the car, his knee collided with the chrome bumper and pain arced through his leg.

  “Fuck!”

  Nick braced himself on the warm blue steel of the trunk, subsequently picturing his awful cargo and wincing. The tears were coming thickly now and he did not bother to wipe them. The throb in his knee subsided enough for him to become aware of something else: an impossible warmth coming from his pocket. It was a feeling he recognized. Nick pressed away from the car and dug in his pocket. What he produced was the bullet, the one with the inscription, which he clearly recalled having discarded on the floorboard of the Cougar.

  The thing radiated heat in his palm, in short erratic bursts, like an arrhythmic heart. For an instant Nick had the idea that he might use this bullet to kill himself. As that thought flashed through his mind the bullet’s radiant pulse doubled in speed. The thing seemed to be reading his thoughts; it seemed to be alive. It was excited even.

  It urged him to do what needed to be done, promised to him with its silent warmth that there was a very clear path of escape from all this burgeoning horror. He could free himself. With its magical help, he could find rest at last. His dreams would no longer be troubled. His heart would cease to be an iron weight in his chest. The guilt and fe
ar that had come to rule his life would melt away in a single moment of fiery cleansing. The bullet reflected harsh sunlight from its brass but Nick did not want to look away. He was transfixed on the thing. It had spoken to his soul.

  At last he looked from the bullet to the gun, back to the bullet again. And he knew what he had to do.

  Nick depressed the release button and the magazine fell into his hand. Using his thumb he ejected the top round, releasing some of the pressure on the spring. And then something happened that nearly caused his heart to stop.

  There was a resounding thud and the Cougar rocked violently on its leaf springs.

  Nick dropped both the magazine and the inscribed bullet to the dirt. The gun, he clutched over his chest in surprise, fully expecting to see the hallucinated form of Leonard Harrow sitting in the back seat again. But the car was empty.

  The first noise was followed by another metallic thud. This time, however, Nick watched as an eight inch dent erupted alongside the rear quarter panel of the car, just above the wheel well. He stared for a moment, red-eyed and confused, and did nothing. Until the screams started. What he heard was the sharp, piercing howl of a girl calling for help.

  The screaming, Nick realized, was coming from inside the trunk.

  ***

  Nick breathed slowly, goggling at the trunk of his car in disbelief. Surely this was no hallucination. He’d seen the vehicle rock on its suspension, and witnessed a crease forced into the steel body from the inside. The screams, they faded into weeping. And as the girl spoke, begging for help, he recognized her velvety voice.

  It was Layla. She was alive.

  Nick stood there a moment longer, just processing things. He blinked a few times, shook his head, and tried to gather his wits. He cast a look behind him at the barren stretch of interstate highway. At that early hour the minimally travelled stretch of freeway was empty.