Wayne read his thoughts. ‘Take it, man. You don’t have to kill Brooke. You could kill me, or Scout here – ‘cepting, of course, if you did vengeance would be not be a long time acomin’.’
‘I don’t want to kill anyone, Wayne. I just wanted to know what it’s like.’
Wayne put the gun back in his belt and thought for a moment. This was a tough one. He’d never really thought about it before. It was like asking what’s it like to eat or to make love, it was just stuff you did.
‘You might as well ask what it’s like to make a movie, Bruce. It depends. On the circumstances, on the victim. I can tell you what it ain’t like. It ain’t like you show it. For one thing, there ain’t no music playing.’
‘No. I imagine not.’
Despite the terror of the situation Bruce felt slightly annoyed at this. People were always pointing out to him that in real life nobody died to a sexy backing track. Like they were saying something really original and astute. It was one of the Moral Majority’s favourite points. They always took particular exception to the rock soundtracks Bruce assembled to accompany the mayhem he depicted. They said it was manipulative. Well of course it was. Bruce put fuck music behind his love scenes too and nobody minded that.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Wayne. ‘It ain’t witty.’
Witty? It seemed a strange word for a truckstop hick like Wayne to use.
‘Like in Ordinary Americans, when the two guys put the little shortorder cook’s hand in the foodprocessor. You remember that scene?’
Of course Bruce remembered it. It had been a triumph of dark, brittle humour. ‘Filmmaking for a new generation’, he seemed to remember somebody saying, and if they hadn’t they should have done.
‘Now that was witty,’ Wayne said. ‘They put the guy’s hand in the blender and it whizzes up blood and stuff all over their suits, and one of the tough guys says, “Shit, this suit is Italian,” which was so funny because, like, the poor little cook’s screaming on account of he’s only got a spurting stump on the end of his arm and this guy is worrying about his suit!’
Wayne howled. ‘NeoGothic’, they’d called it, ‘postmodernist pulp noir’. Wayne just thought it was cool.
‘But that was only the start, right? It got better, because we knew that the boss man had told the two heavies to go to some real swank hotel to waste this black dude and they know that there is no way they are going to get into no swank hotel with all blood and pieces of bone and skin on their suits. But if they don’t make the hit, the boss will burn them. So they have to go to the dry cleaners and strip off to their underwear and the dry cleaner guy is this little faggot in tight shorts and he says, “That’s OK fellas, I’m used to shifting stubborn stains from delicate fibres. I have satin sheets,” which is a very funny line in itself, but it’s even funnier because we know that one of the killer guys just hates faggots, he hates them like a fuckin’ religion, so he just digs out this huge Magnum from his underpants and wastes the faggot dry cleaner guy completely, like half his head comes off. But then the other killer guy is real annoyed and says, “Shit, man, how we gonna clean our suits now?” So they have to try to figure out how to work the machine and when they get to the swanky hotel to kill the black dude their suits is all tiny like kids’ suits, because they shrunk. Now that was one classy scene, Bruce. Like I say, witty.’
Bruce did not reply. Normally when people enthusiastically repeated his work back to him, as they often did, he would say, ‘Thank you, that’s very kind,’ at the earliest opportunity to try and shut them up. But this time he said nothing. There was an awful fascination in just how well this terrible man knew his work.
‘I don’t know how many times Wayne watched that movie,’ said Scout.
‘A shit load of times, let me tell you,’ Wayne added. ‘It said on the poster that the New York Times reckoned it was ironic and subversive. I just thought it was classic the way everybody got wasted. It was so witty.’
Bruce was getting nowhere. He had been attempting to get to know his persecutor, to get inside his head. All he got was his own imagination quoted back at him.
For a moment Bruce remembered something from before. Mirrors. Something about mirrors. Then that thought, too, was interrupted.
Buzzzzz… Buzzzzz.
They all jumped, even Wayne. After all it was only seven a.m.
Buzzzzz. The entryphone intercom on the wall was not going to shut up.
‘Now who’s that coming calling, Bruce?’ Wayne took up his gun. ‘It’s Oscars morning. Everybody knows you’re liable to have a head sorer than a hog’s ass on a country farm. You ain’t pushed no alarm button or nothing, have you, Bruce? Because if you have, I’ll kill you inside’a one single breath.’
‘No, Christ, no!’ Bruce said quickly. ‘I think it’s my wife, my ex. We have a settlement to discuss. Christ, she’s an hour and a half early.’
Scout squealed with excitement. First Brooke Daniels, now Farrah Delamitri. It was like being in her very own edition of Entertainment Tonight. ‘Farrah Delamitri! My God, I’d love to meet her. Didn’t I read somewhere you wished she was dead?’
‘It’s a figure of speech,’ Bruce replied ‘I was quoted out of context.’
The buzzer sounded again, more insistently this time.
Bruce turned to Wayne. ‘So I leave it, right?’
There was very little love lost between Bruce and his nearly exwife, and on occasion he had wished many horrid things upon her, but inviting her in to visit with the Mall Murderers went beyond any desire for revenge he might have had. Unfortunately the decision wasn’t up to him.
‘You’ve made an appointment, you keep it,’ Wayne said. ‘I guess she can see your big old Italian Lamborfuckin’homosexual parked out in the drive. She knows you’re here and I don’t want her getting suspicious about nothing.’
Again the buzzer.
‘Look, surely we don’t need to bring anybody else into this. I mean…’
Wayne was trying to be patient. ‘Ain’t going to drag nobody into nothing, Bruce. You just have her come on up here, do your business like you would anyhow, and then she can go.’
With great reluctance Bruce crossed again to the wall intercom and picked it up. There was a harsh New York voice on the other end.
‘For Christ’s sake, Karl,’ said Bruce, ‘have you any idea what the time is?’ He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Wayne. ‘It’s not my wife, it’s my agent, a guy called Karl Brezner. He says he has to see me right now. It’s urgent.’
‘Now if me ‘n’ Scout wasn’t here, Bruce, and it was just you and Brooke here, would you let him up?’
‘I…’ Bruce knew he had hesitated too long to lie. ‘I guess I would, if he said it was urgent.’
‘Tell him you’re sending someone down,’ said Wayne.
Wayne put all the bigger guns behind the sofa cushions where Scout was sitting. He put one handgun in his pocket and Scout kept one ready under a cushion on her lap. ‘I’m going to go down to the gate and let Karl in so we can visit with him for a while. Now he don’t have to see no guns or nothing but Scout and me are going to be ready, and anybody who tries to mess around with us is going to get very dead, d’ya hear? So you all just sit tight till I get back. Like I say, this guy don’t need to see nothing suspicious.’
He was about to leave when Scout stopped him. ‘ Wayne, honey, what about the head?’
He laughed. Turning back, he plucked the head from its stand on the lava lamp and dropped it into a wastepaper basket.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Did you see that movie Ordinary Americans?’ the detective, whose name was Crawford, enquired through a cloud of blueberrymuffin crumbs.