Slippin' into Darkness

11:15 A.M.-6:05 P.M.

First, Shutterbug ripped toilet-paper streamers from the trees in front of his house, cursing the A-Squad as he worked. Then he went inside and unplugged the telephones. One in the kitchen. One in his bedroom. One in the basement. Then he sat down and thought things over. He thought about what Ozzy-what Steve Austin – had said to him. Austin, still stuck on April Destino after all these years. The quiet bastard had always been a loner in high school, and now Shutterbug knew why. The guy was a nut, worshipping the memory of a dead whore like that.

Obviously, Austin hadn’t known the real April, the pitiful woman with lines on her face and a body that was going to seed after years of dope and booze and various less pleasant forms of abuse. That particular piece of meat wasn’t exactly a candidate for pedestal treatment.

She lived in a trailer park, for christsakes. Shutterbug wasn’t the only one who knew that April. She got around. A couple of his business associates over in the City had their own April Destino stories. She had done her share of hardcore before her body started to go. Shutterbug had actually seen the stuff without putting two and two together-

April wore wigs in the movies, and he hadn’t recognized her until they got reacquainted.

The big reunion occurred at a wild wrap party over in Marin. A Friday the 13th rip-off with a guy in a hockey mask who wielded a hard twelve-incher instead of a machete. Big house and bigger egos. Too much coke and too many bores, and he had stepped onto the deck for some air, big redwood deck with plenty of ferns and Tarzan shrubbery.

And there was April Destino. Red leather pants. Sequined halter top barely containing breasts that were fuller, heavier than when she was a teenager. Bare feet and painted toenails, a gold ring on one little toe.

Running into April scared him, sure, but things turned out okay. She made a joke of it-laughed and thanked him for giving her a start in the business. And then it was his turn to laugh and thank her for the very same thing. They did some coke together. They left the party together. He almost proposed that they go looking for a pool table, that’s how raunched-out he was that night.

Restraint won out and they ended up at her trailer. It was mounted on a cement foundation and sported aluminum siding and all, but it was still a trailer. April gave him a naughty smile and whispered that he was going to pay. And he laughed and said that if he was going to pay, they were going to get it on film and it was going to be good. She assented to that particular proposal. All very mysterious about it, grabbing her coat and a few things from her bedroom, stuffing everything into a small backpack.

And then they were at his place. That was when he still had the prison set in the basement. Many moons ago. She got off on it-or pretended to-stripped off her leather pants, white snake legs shedding blood-red skin, white ass pumping. She laughed and said that the fumes from the photo chemicals he stored in the basement were giving her high a nice edge.

With April it was all business, and it was just his luck that her business was pleasure. She gave him a good look and let him get the focus right. She hadn’t shaved her legs in maybe four days, but he still got hot peeping at those crisp blond hairs. Then she took off the sequined halter-there wasn’t much of it-and slipped into the old blue-and-white cheerleading sweater that she’d brought in her backpack.

She stepped out of the jail and strode across the basement floor, the little gold ring on her toe clicking with every other step. Her fingers snapped for cash. He didn’t have any, so he wrote her a check on the camera shop account and marked it “refund.” April thought that was really funny. She laughed and laughed, her naked shoulders shaking so violently that he imagined he heard her bones rattling.

Then she got serious. Put on the horny jailbird act. Really went to town. So horny and stuck in a cell with no men around at all, that’s how horny she was. She was a high school princess and used to getting what she wanted, after all.

And suddenly the eight ball was in her hands, and a pair of eyes the color of prison bars locked on Shutterbug’s lens.

Yeah. That was the real April Destino, the girl a blind nutcase like Steve Austin had never seen. Shutterbug drew the living room drapes, lay down on the overstuffed couch, remembering that night with April. He connected a few dots. Coke at the party, more coke at April’s. Drinks at his place.

Sure. He had been wrecked when April visited his house. That explained her weird message in his yearbook. No wonder he hadn’t remembered it. April must have found the book and scribbled the inscription on the night they’d done April, Part II. Simple. And he had discovered it years later, believing it to be some supernatural message from a dead woman.

Mystery solved. Dead was dead.

And if dead was dead, if April was truly gone, he sure as hell hadn’t seen a ghost last night. Unless ghosts were made of too much beer and too much coke.

Too much of a good thing was indeed too much of a good thing. It was that simple. Like the spiked punch April had guzzled at Todd Gould’s party back in 1976. But now it seemed funny. Seeing things. Getting scared. Imagining nightmares under the bed, in the closet, or on a lonely road.

Shutterbug’s mind continued to drift. His memory replayed the phone call he’d taken at the shop, the car parked in Joe Hamner’s driveway. Puzzling mysteries, not as easy to explain away as a ghost story. He searched for connections, and his thoughts turned to April Destino, and to Steve Austin.

He lay there, hoping that everything would come to an end, and knowing somehow that he had plenty of time to think before that was going to happen.

Derwin MacAskill wanted to lie down, but he too damn busy mowing lawns.

Six lawns mowed in one hot April afternoon. Shit. Sweat on his back and itchy grass sticking to him like stink on shit. Damn. If April was this hot, there no telling what kind of misery May and June would bring. He didn’t even want to think about July, let alone motherfuckin’ August.

So he mowed lawns. Smelled gasoline. Scooped and bagged countless dog turds. Listened to James Brown get real funky on the Walkman with the duct-taped cassette door. Good old seventies Superfly kind of riff called “The Payback.”

Get down Soul Brother Number One. James was indeed one crazy mother. Did his time cool and clean after runnin’ up against the Man. A real-life wildman.

Oh, there were others out there like James. Derwin knew that, and he also knew that most wildmen weren’t even famous. He should know. He ran with three of them. Crazy rat-soup eatin’ motherfuckers, always doing weird shit. Like last night at the drive-in.

And then that other shit at the cemetery. He didn’t even want to think about that insanity. Except for the sight of old Marvis Hanks screaming like some nutty bitch when that downed caretaker grabbed his legs, that shit wasn’t funny at all.

That shit was plain weird. Someone digging up a dead body, taking it who knows where. Doing who knows what with it.

Weird.

James Brown screeched, and so did Derwin. Clapped his hands, spun, caught the lawn mower on the return.

A mystery man bustin’ up some caretaker who caught him in the act, right there in the cemetery. Bashin’ in the old honky’s head with a shovel or something, just bashin’ and bashin’…

Derwin knew that was wildman kind of shit.

Especially fine wildman kind of shit.

The cop who robbed graves and busted up caretakers had a slow, fairly uninteresting afternoon. Tires slashed down on Bergwall. A fist fight at a grocery store on Springs Road-shoplifter versus checkout girl, and the checkout girl was a bruiser with an undefeated record of eight and oh. And don’t forget the piece de resistance, a hit-and-run driver taking out three front yards on Rollingwood. Uprooted trees of various description and value, bashed mailboxes. Two victims-a ceramic troll and a cast-iron jockey.

Steve felt more empathy for the troll and the jockey than for the people he interviewed in conjunction with each call.

At least, that was what he told himself.

Griz Cody wished that the whole world were dark, because his hangover had him closed down good.

First off, he called in sick. No hassle there. But then his wife started bitching, and she was a pro. She made a special trip out to the garage just to check out his truck. She said that he better do something about it if he was going to stay home, cheesin’ off his job, because he wasn’t going to use her car. Not this time.

He didn’t mind her bitching. Not really. It meant he could spend the day in the garage. Nice and quiet out there. Cool cement and the greasy smell of tools. There was even a six-pack waiting in the old fridge.

He made the trip, had a couple brews. But he couldn’t shake his surly mood.

Damn truck. A big scratch zigzagged across the blue hood. Shutterbug’s projector did that. Busted headlight to go along with the scratch. Front left. The drive-in gate did that when he bashed through it.

But it wasn’t the truck that pissed Griz off. And it wasn’t his wife harping at him. The memory of last night ate at his guts. The damn movie ran through his brain, an ugly, unvarnished record of his impotence. A cold picture of him pinching that damn cheerleader while the other guys laughed looped through his thoughts like a snake crawling over one of those figure eight things.

A Moses strip, that’s what those things were called. And like that was part of the problem. On top of everything else, everybody thought that he was stupid. An egghead like Shutterbug probably thought that he didn’t even know what a Moses strip was.

Shit. All this stuff ruining his day. A hangover. The scratch on his truck, and the busted headlight. The guys laughing at him and his limp little dick. The Moses strip.

Him having an ugly wife-that was the Destino bitch’s fault, too. Once word got out about his limp dick and the pinching and everything, all the babes had avoided him like he was a fag or something. It was all that bitch’s fault. Him having an ugly wife and everything else. Every little bit of it.

Todd Gould woke up feeling just fine. He ate a big breakfast and went to work at his father’s furniture store. He thought about selling furniture.

For a few hours, Amy thought about doors, and how much trouble they could be. She decided that locksmithing would have made for a rewarding career path, and she wondered why her high school counselor had never suggested such an option. Add one more to the list of male-dominated professions requiring attention.

Finally, she couldn’t stand to look at the door anymore. The scored grain spoke of the wood’s age, and she began to think that she might be trapped in Steve Austin’s basement for a very long time, indeed.

So she stared at April’s corpse instead. The oddest scenario formed in her head, and she knew it was a result of reading too many Barbara Michaels novels. She imagined herself as an archaeologist trapped beneath a pyramid by a sudden cave-in, pushing forward in the face of danger, undaunted, discovering the burial vault of a forgotten Egyptian princess.

And then everything came together for her imagined alter ego in a sudden epiphany, the kind that only occurred in fiction. The beauty of the dead princess, captured for the ages on the carved wooden sarcophagus-a quiet beauty that was a twin to her own. This impression crossing with her memory of the strange, silent attentions of her Egyptian lover, his cold interest in her work, his fascination with the forgotten mysteries that only he recognized in a pair of beautiful eyes that gleamed like the Nile at sunset…

A dozen film-clips flickered in Amy’s memory Little bits of old mummy movies. Kharis the mummy-he of the gamey leg, severed tongue, and digit-less right paw-dragging his reincarnated love into a quicksand bog. And she could almost see herself, the beautiful archaeologist, lifting the sarcophagus lid that wore her own face, confronting the decayed corpse.

Knowing that in a thousand years she would be its twin.

Just as she would soon be April Destino’s twin in death.

Amy shook the image away, fighting to control her imagination. The task was impossible. She saw Steve Austin hauling April Destino out of the grave.

And she was left with one irrefutable impression-Austin, charged with the same unquenchable desire that had spanned the centuries in a dozen-plus works of fiction, was much more dangerous than a walking band-aid with a compulsive attitude.

Bat Bautista didn’t waste his time thinking about dead Egyptians.

He didn’t think much about April Destino, either.

He spent his day at a dusty state prison thirty miles north of town, just praying that some idiot con would give him some lip. He wanted nothing more than to bash some face while imagining that he was beating on Griz Cody, or Derwin MacAskill, or Todd Gould, or that smarmy asshole Shutterbug.

Those guys were so damn stupid. You could rattle their cages without even trying. Bat had to smile at the memory-Shutterbug screeching like goddamn Stepin Fetchit while Todd and Derwin and Griz tried to figure out who stole April Destino’s corpse.

Like you had to be a detective to figure it out.

Bat figured that he should have been a detective. He was the smartest guy he knew. If he had managed to pass the damn police tests, if he’d done better in the interviews…hell, he’d be chief of police by now if he’d only had a little luck.

Shit. The cops wouldn’t have him. Him-the guy who could solve the whole damn mystery.

Clue number one: a hole in the ground where April’s body should be. Clue number two: busted beer bottles beneath the granite cross that bore her name. There was only one guy in the world who had the hots for April Destino and played graveyard baseball. Just add clue number one to clue number two, end of story. Ozzy Austin balances the equation.

Good old Ozzy Austin. The Six Million Dollar Robot. Many moons had passed since Bat last crossed swords with that weird asshole. They had played baseball together as kids-little league. Pony, high school-but even then he had thought Austin was screwy. Norman Bates on the mound. Hecklers always got to Austin. They knew how to push his buttons. Calling him a robot was one way to do it-the guy was a robot, throwing that same damn fastball over and over. Austin was just lucky that most guys couldn’t hit it, but that didn’t change the fact that he pitched like some damn Iron Mike.

The truth fuckin’ hurt, and that was that. Hecklers never got to Bat Bautista. He just kept cool, maybe pictured himself bashing their heads with a claw hammer, and things were fine and dandy.

Bat twirled his nightstick, clattered it against the bars, imagined waving it in Austin’s face. He wondered if it was still easy to get under Ozzy Austin’s skin. He could almost see Austin squirming. He could almost smell his sweat. He whistled low and smooth as the idea took hold. He wondered how much money Ozzy Austin had, and how much peace and quiet he was going to let good old Ozzy buy with it.

Bat wondered about other stuff, too. He was one hell of a detective. He noticed things other people missed. Like last night, in the movie. He’d spotted the two shadowy figures hiding behind the old furniture in the basement, watching the A-Squad and April. He figured Shutterbug had never noticed them before because maybe the film had to be projected really big to see them. And Todd and those other morons hadn’t noticed last night because they were too busy watching themselves with April.

No one had noticed them the night the A-Squad did April, of course. But Bat had noticed last night. There they were, on Candid Camera. In 1976, Shutterbug’s primitive movie lights had cut the shadows for a second or maybe two…just long enough for Bat to spot the two of them up there on the big screen, peeking from behind that old furniture, in 1994.

Amy Peyton and Doug Douglas. Just a quick glimpse, but he’d caught it.

He wondered what he’d do about the two of them, and Shutterbug. He’d have to do something about them. He’d have to get hold of that film. For keeps. After he took care of The Six Million Dollar Robot, of course.

He wondered about the whole mess while he sipped a beer after work.

He wondered about it while he drove home.

He was still wondering when he pulled into his driveway.

And spotted Ozzy Austin standing on his front lawn.