The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 30

Buddy didn't want to go to the lake, he wanted to go home. He had been shot at twice now in two days, and quite frankly, it was nothing like the paintball tournaments he'd had in the hills above Malibu, where, dressed in brand-new cammies, face guard, and shooting gloves, he had crawled around giggling, armed with his top-of-the-line C02-operated paintball "Devastator" rifle. He had done mortal combat with a hand-picked gang of stone-eyed killers from the William Morris Talent Agency. During those tournaments, Buddy had been dismayed to learn that he was surprisingly easy to hit. He was usually the first to get knocked out of the game. Geeks from the studio mailroom outlived him. Even so, he always enjoyed the contests. This was much different. The sound of bullets impacting deep into the side of the Blazer, or pinging off the rocks where he was cowering, was like nothing he'd ever before experienced. He visualized a bullet heading right at his surgically enhanced profile.

He'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery. He'd added surgical implants to his cheek and chin bones. He'd liposuctioned the fat from under his chin and stitched his forehead up under his scalp to eliminate the onset of forehead wrinkles. Buddy and Dr. Eugene Haliburton had spent at least ten fascinating hours adjusting his look on the virtual reality computer in the doctor's office, turning the image of the new square-jawed Buddy from full face to profile to three-quarters. They added a little mass here, nipped some there. He watched the screen in awe as the little stylus erased wrinkles and added a chin dimple. All of this facial artwork took place before Buddy nervously submitted to surgery. The idea that his expensive cosmetic redo would end up being splattered all over the Texas landscape by a whining piece of lead fired by some religious zealot with a fourth-grade education appalled him.

After Buddy and Cris changed the bullet-punctured tire, they drove along the east shore of the lake looking for the discarded metal boat. Buddy wished he had the inner strength to persevere, but the fact was, he desperately wanted to split. He played out a few excuses, looking for a usable exit line. "Shithe might say, 4 7 forgot I have a damn music and effects run at the studio on Friday for 'Starfighters.' It's a fucking command performance. Fd do anything to not have to go, but…" Or perhaps, "I gotta loop Barbra Streisand on Friday. Babs goes tits up if I don't stand there and feed her every single line. If it wasn't for that, you know I'd…" Or some fucking thing, anything that would get him out of here with his outlaw rep intact. But every time he was on the verge of reciting one of these excuses, he would get the mild taste of chocolate in his mouth… which he had now come to dread, because it was immediately followed by such loneliness and self-disgust that he knew he had no choice but to stay.

His mind would then shift gears. They had killed his son. He had never been there for Mike. Never even tried to find out who Mike was. With his son's death, he could make up for it all by trying to catch the bastards who killed him. The problem was that Buddy couldn't escape the fact that he was so scared he could barely function. He wished he had some inner strength to fall back on. There was nothing for him in the arcane tradition of the Jewish faith. Buddy needed a hipper religious gig.

He had tried Scientology; Tom Cruise and John Travolta had gotten him enrolled. Scientology had been a fun excursion for a while. He loved their snappy military-style uniforms with the cool ornamental braid. He wore the uniform of an Operating Thetan. He had his tailored at the studio wardrobe department, so it fit him perfectly, no sags or wrinkles. He looked like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. He also read the basic dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology from cover to cover. He had Scientology E-meter tracks made, which drew mental pictures of his state of being, graphing such notable psychic landscapes as his interior pain or perceived threat to his survival. He had tried, for almost six months, to obtain the level of Operating Thetan Three (OT-3), which was the State of Beingness, and would give him full control over Matter, Energy, Space, Time, and Form of Life. He had sat with his counselor and told her that he felt he was on the verge of going "clear," which in Scientology indicated a pure spirit. He had smiled blissfully and bragged about his spiritual purification to the actors at the celebrity center, but in reality, he attained none of the inner peace that he sensed the others derived from the religion. Worse still, he was paying through the nose for the experience.

After another three months of bluffing, he dropped out. The night that he quit, Heidi told him that life wasn't about control over energy or time or the form of life. It was just about getting laid, so she sent Michelle Fortner over to prove her point. Michelle gave him an incredible weekend of tube cleaning, but spiritually, Buddy was still bankrupt. Now he felt so alone and confused that he was on the verge of jumping out of the Blazer and running. But some invisible force wouldn't let him.

"Pull up," Cris said suddenly.

Stacy stopped and they all got out. Buddy followed Cris down to the water, where the aluminum boat Kincaid had been in was floating near the shore. Inside the boat, on the floorboards, were two orange canisters. While Cris and Buddy pulled the boat up onto the beach, Stacy took some latex gloves out of her purse and pulled them on as she walked to the water's edge.

"What is it?" Buddy said, his eyes on the orange painted canisters.

"They're waterproof bio-units. Good to three hundred feet," she said. "They're used for marine research." With gloved hands, she picked them up. Inside the canisters the black Styrofoam packing was still in place; the indentations where several vials had been pressed were still visible.

Then she carried one of the canisters back to the Blazer and examined it in the headlights.

"What do you think?" Buddy asked. He had trailed her there, hating this discovery; afraid it might lead to something and afraid it might not.

"I was just wondering if we should send this to Wendell. Maybe there were ink markings labeling the vials. We could get an ink transfer off these with chemicals."

"What for? We know what was in there."

"We think we know," she said. "But we can't be sure." She closed up the container and moved back to the boat to retrieve the second canister. When she got there, she saw that Cris was inside the boat, sitting on the center seat, studying a wet slip of paper in his hand.

"What's that?" she asked.

He handed the slip to her. On it she read: