Seeing Red, page 4
Kiondike's spade was the first to thump against something solid and hollow. "Bingo," the larger man muttered.
Riff hesitated, then tossed back another gout of dirt anyway. Klondike smelled like a wet bearskin, and his permanent facial shadow of black beard stubble served to camouflage his face in the darkness. Riff did not necessarily enjoy working with someone as coarse as Klondike, but all his life he had made a virtue of never questioning orders.
"Wait" he said, and the big man froze like a pointer. Riff tapped the surface beneath their feet with his spade. "Sounds funny."
"Time," said Riff.
Klondike peeled back the cuff of his glove and read his luminous watch face. "0345 hours," he said. The fingertips of his gloves were stylishly sawn off, and Klondike promptly used the moment of dead time to pick his nose. "Ain't got us much time," he whispered. "Funk-hole's turning to mud."
"I know that," Riff said, hunkering down in the bottom of their excavation and resisting the urge to add you imbecile. He plucked a surgical penlight from a coat pocket and cupped his palm around the beam, leaning close. "Look at this."
The dime-sized dot of light revealed a silver dent—left by Riff's spade—in a smooth surface of brilliant, fire-engine red enamel. Klondike ran his fingers over it, and stared dumbly at his hand while the tiny scar in the otherwise flawless surface refilled with water.
"Bloody hell!" snapped Riff. "Bunny didn't tell us that the guy was buried in his goddamn car!"
Suddenly the drumming of rain on the exposed metal surface seemed to become incriminatingly loud.
Riff's ties to Bunny Beaudine ran back to the middle 1970s, and a half-witted punchline Bunny had formented about finding employment for needy military vets. A decade before, Bunny had been just another seedy Sunset Boulevard pimp, chauffeuring his anemic, scabby stable of trotters around in a creaking, third-hand Cadillac whose paint job was eighty percent primer. Then Bunny discovered cocaine, and his future turned to tinsel. Coke required bodyguards, and Bunny learned to be bad.
Riff suspected that Bunny got a kick out of two things: hiring white dudes to accomplish his dirty work, and vigorously dipping into his inventory for personal gratification, both the ladies and the face Drano.
His usual checklist of dumb jobs included low-power dope deliveries, playing cabbie for the girls—Bunny now captained a fleet of Mercedes, from the cabin of his own Corsair limo—and the odd bit of mop-up. It was a living.
Bunny's strongarm boys packed Magnums and broke bones with the frequency Riff broke wind after a plate of lasagna. Once he'd taken that first job for Bunny (a cash pass deliberately miscounted, as a test for Riff's honesty), Riff understood that there were no handshakes, no clean leavetakings. Since he had no other prospects—1976 was a lousy Job year for vets—it was just as well.
Until this current assignment came along. Riff remembered how it had gone down in Bunny's Brentwood "office."
Bunny had been laughing, flashing his ten-thousand-dollar teeth. "Poor old Desmond," he cackled. "Pour soul."
Riff had gotten a phone call and had shown up precisely on the half hour. "What became of Desmond?" Desmond was one of Bunny's competitors. They cursed each other in private and slapped each other's shoulders, trading power handshakes, whenever anyone else was watching.
Two of Bunny's boys bellowed deep basso laughter from across the room.
"Why, poor old Desmond somehow got his ass blowed off," said Bunn) "Terrible thing. You can't even live in the city anymore . . ."
The watchdogs stopped guffawing at a wave of Bunny's hand. His pinkie ring glittered and his broad-planed African face went dead serious. Riff stood, arms folded, waiting for the show to end so business could become relevant.
"What it is," Bunny said to Riff, "is this. You remember Desmond, Riff, my man?"
"I saw him a few times."
"You remember all those rings and slave bracelets and shit he used to wear all over his hands?"
"Yeah," said Riff. "Mandarin fingernails, too."
"Thems was for tooting. But you recall, right?" Bunny was nodding up and down. So far so good. "One of them rings was a cut-down from that diamond they called the Orb in the papers—stolen from that bitch in Manhattan last year."
"The one married to the toilet-paper tycoon." Riff knew the ring. It was cut down, alright, but was still of vulgar size, and worth at least a hundred grand.
"You got it. Well, here's a little piece of trivia that nobody knows. Poor old Desmond was buried wearing that ring."
Riff was already beginning to get the picture. As with all pimps up from gutter level, Desmond had insisted on burial as lavish as his lifestyle, and in a boneyard as obscene as the diamond he'd hired stolen. Riff looked back at the bodyguards. "Why didn't you just have your goons steal the ring after they blew the back of his head off?" he said, smiling.
Bunny kept his happy face on. "Why, there ain't nobody in the world would finger me; that was a accident, man," he said, his voice singsong and full of bogus innocence. "Besides, we take the ring then, that means Desmond's boys be hunting it, and I don't want to end this life in the trunk of some Mexican's Chevy being drug out of the ocean by the police." He pronounced it po-lice. He shrugged. "But now—now, as far as Desmond's people are concerned, that rock is a permanent resident of Forest Lawn, by the freeway. Ain't nobody gonna miss it."
The goons chuckled on cue. Riff drew Klondike as an accomplice mostly because the hulking halfwit was the wrong color to make it in the world as a bodyguard for Bunny, but the bonus Bunny pushed in Riff's direction erased any objections. The only hitch was that no amount of cash could get Riff clear of Bunny now.
That was how Riff's adventure in the rain had begun.
"Shit!" Klondike beefed. "Asshole pimp six feet under in his muthafuggin' pimpmobile!"
"Watch your language," said Riff. "And keep your voice down!" Slick mud was beginning to join them in the hole, in force. He scooped out the bilge with his hands.
"What kinda car is it?"
Who cares, thought Riff. Dumb question; dumb goon. "Just dig, before we drown." He wanted to find out if they were near a car window they could break, to cut excavation time. They'd been putzing around on the roof for nearly half an hour. Riff realized they were on top when he found the insulated rectangle of the sunroof. The car was gigantic—maybe a full-stretch limousine. He traced the outline of the sunroof with a finger while Klondike continued to bail sludge in an awkward squat.
"Crowbar!" Riff said over his shoulder. Soon the horizon would turn pink-gray with predawn light, and he mentally damned daylight savings time again.
Klondike poked his head out of the hole, did a quick three-sixty, and returned with the crowbar. His own private mudslide was right behind him. Things were getting gooey.
"All clear topside," he said.
Not sure which side the sunroof opened from, Riff had a moment of indecision, and that was when he heard the grinding noise. It was a low whirring basso against the lighter sound of the pattering rain.
The sunroof was opening. Yellow cabin light sprayed upward from the widening hatchway.
Things began happening too fast for Riff to keep track.
He fell backward onto his rump in surprise, thinking, It's one of Bunny's goddamn tricks, goddamn Bunny, it's—
It seemed a funny thing to hear a big lug like Klondike screaming. His voice spiked Riff's ears, cracking high with terror.
"Riff! It's got my leg and I can't . . . Riff, help, HELP ME!"
And in the sickly glow of the limousine's interior lights, Riff saw what had hold of Klondike's leg.
The suit sleeve was crushed black velvet; the cuffs, ruffled lace. The kind of overblown getup a showoff like Desmond would demand to be buried in. The ebony claw dragging Klondike backwards was threaded with luminescent white mold. The brown jelly of rot glistened in the light, and the dagger fingernails that were Desmond's coke-snorting tools, now jagged and cracked, gathered to seat themselves in KIondike's left calf.
Klondike hollered.
Riff was backed into the humid mound of turned earth. He might have yelled, but his throat seemed stuffed up with grave dirt, and his tongue hugged the roof of his mouth in fear.
There was nothing for Klondike to grab as an anchor, and the relentless tow of the slime-clotted hand pulled him, wriggling, to block the light from within the buried car. Another arm slid through the crack of space and snaked around Klondike's waist in a hideous bear-hug, from below. Dense black mud was dripping down into the car as Klondike thrashed to no gain against the dead, locked embrace.
Riff could still see, too well.
The pressure increased. Gray knuckle bones popped through wet splits in the decayed meat, and Klondike screamed one last time.
The sound of his back breaking apart was the splintering of dry bamboo, the crunching of ice between the teeth. It cut off the screaming. Then Klondike, all of him, began to fold into the hole in a way Riff had never seen a human body bend before.
Riff's own body thawed enough to move, and one hand grasped the spade. He took a single step closer.
Klondike's body hung upward in a ludicrous bow-shape, feet and arms in the night air. Something else in his body suddenly gave way with a sharp, breaking carrot noise, and he sagged a few inches further down into the sunroof.
Riff, trembling, raised the spade, blade down. Klondike was dead as a side of beef. Riff was not watching him so much as the moldering hands that pulled him down. There, on the middle finger of one, was the diamond.
When he lifted the spade to strike, the oily, dark mud greasing the roof of the car skimmed his feet from beneath him, and he sprawled headlong on top of what was left of Klondike.
Now Riff screamed, because the groping claw had locked around the lapel of his topcoat three inches from his nose, pulling him inexorably downward along with his inert partner. Klondike's stale, animal odor stung Riff's nostrils for a fast instant before being washed away by the eye-steaming stench of putrefaction. Riffs guts boiled and heaved. He was sinking into the impossibly small sunroof.
He flailed; got his heel against the lip of the hole. Like a hungry spider, the graveyard hand was making for his Adam's apple, and he fought to slow it down. When his fingers sank into the oleaginous dead flesh, he killed the onrushing spasm of revulsion by jerking backward hard enough to dislocate his shoulder.
He had a grip on the ring when he did it.
The thick, drenched tweed of the coat separated with a heavy purr drowned out by the rain. Riff plunged backward and wedged into the rapidly dissolving dirt mound, shuddering uncontrollably, teeth clacking, completely apeshit with panic.
In the sickly yellow glow, he saw that the maggoty flesh of the ring finger had stripped away like a rotten banana peel, exposing a still-clutching skeleton finger. The sound it made against the red enamel was like a fork tine raked against a porcelain sink.
Brown gunk was leaking from between his own fingers, and he opened his fist to reveal a diamond almost as big as a golf ball, nestled in clumps of buttery skin that was warm only because it had been inside Riff's closed hand.
Riff's body would not move; he was frozen from the bowels down, his back married to the pit wall. If he looked away, all he would see were dancing, round-edged rectangles of yellow light.
Klondike's chin was still perched on the edge of the sunroof. The now-ringless hand in lace and black velvet circled his body and tugged.
Klondike's upper row of teeth caught on the rubber insulation strip. Another tug, and his forehead bonked against the hatch. Then the rest of him slid into the hole all at once and he was gone.
Riff was whimpering now, still cemented to the spot, transfixed by the waiting yellow hole. He could just see the upper curve of one of the phony electric braziers on either end of the front windows. Yellow squares overlapped in his pupils; in his mind he saw a million times over the rotting hand emerging again, grasping, pulling up a shoulder, revealing a head and torso
"Here!" he yelled, his bones finally grinding into motion. "Here, goddamnit! Keep it! Bunny wanted it, not me! Take it back!" He flung the diamond without aiming. It bounced on the roof with a thunk, and wandered toward the sunroof like a crystal beebee in a Brobdingnagian puzzle maze.
It decided at last to drop in, and vanished noiselessly.
Riff's treacherous body now insisted that he run, that he set an Olympic record for running in the rain.
The sunroof began to whirr slowly shut, paring away the light. Riff's heartbeat punched away at his throat. The last of the ooze in his hand was rinsed away.
Then he piled out of the hole and hauled his poor white ass toward the freeway at maximum speed. In forty-five minutes the rain changed to a five-alarm downpour, and Riff stood in his own private puddle, facing the singularly unamused gaze of Bunny.
"Turn him out," said Bunny flatly, and two of his boys winnowed Riff down to his waterlogged skivvies.
"I told you I don't have the ring," said Riff, still shivering. "But you're not going to believe that any more than you'll believe that Klondike—"
"Pulled a doublecross, bashed you with a shovel, tied you up with your own coat, and took the diamond?" finished Bunny. His eyes bugged, watery and yellow with sickle-cell. "Shit. Any one o' them things, maybe—but Klondike didn't have enough battery power to invent all four. You're jerking me around, Riff, my friend. Maybe you didn't even make it out to the grave, huh?"
Riff swallowed. Bunny was getting ready to do something nasty.
"I'm not lying," he said carefully. "Klondike is still at the gravesite."
Anticipating Bunny's next accusation, one of the hulks flanking the doorway to the office stepped forward. "I know what you're thinking, boss," he said in a voice as deep and growly as a diesel truck engine. "That boy Desmond is as dead as one of them barbecued chickens in the market. Me and Tango was a hundred percent sure." He back-stepped to his place at the door, and Riff thought of a cuckoo clock.
"You took a hundred percent of my green," said Bunny. "You better be goddamn sure." He said gah-dam.
"Can I have my pants back?" said Riff. Regrettably, it drew Bunny's pique away from his bulldogs and refocused it on himself.
"Give him his duds," said Bunny. "He's going out there with us." He rose to his buggywhip-skinny six-two and wired an expensive pair of rose-tinted shades around his face. "And if you're snowjobbin' me boy—"
"I know." Riff nodded as he fought his way back into his sodden clothing. "I'll have a hard time peddling Veteran's Day poppies wearing a cast up to my eyebrows."
"You got it."
They made the drive in funereal silence, and nobody cared about the dawn and the dirty floor-mop hue it turned the horizon. LA's surface streets were flooding by now, and the homeowners in the Hollywood Hills would be cursing the mudslides, and it was obvious that visitor business at Forest Lawn would be just . . . Well, thought Riff, they were assured of no disturbances, anyway.
The gorilla named Tango broke out three umbrellas in basic black, and nobody moved to share one with Riff, who led them down to Plot #60 from an access road charmingly called Magnolia View Terrace. It proved a lot easier than sneaking up from the freeway. The heavily saturated turf around Desmond's final resting place made their shoes squish. Bunny's Gucci loafers were goners, Riff thought with not a little satisfaction.
Forest Lawn was discreet concerning such peccadilloes as vandalism. No matter what happened to Desmond's grave, the news would never make the Times, and the wad of bills Tango had slapped into the gatekeeper's palm guaranteed privacy for proper mourning.
One of those characteristic Astroturf tarps had been pegged over the hole. Desmond's garish monument stone spired toward outer space like a granite ICBM.
"So what?" Bunny said loudly as a jolt of thunder shook the ground.
"They covered it up!" said Riff.
All three men turned to look at him. "I can see that, null and void," Bunny snapped. "Get on with it!" The pimp stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his black overcoat, Tango's buddy holding an umbrella over him like a dutiful Egyptian slave. Riff never could dredge up the guy's name—the two were as interchangeable as knife-maniac movies—so he pointed at Tango. "Help him," Bunny said, and Tango eyed the tarp doubtfully before stepping sidewise down into the pit. Bunny thought he could hear a noise through the downpour, a kind of electric fly-buzzing. Maybe construction equipment was working somewhere nearby.
Riff held up the corner of the tarp for Tango. There was a very dim yellow glow emanating from beneath it, and water had pooled in its middle, causing it to sag.
As Tango ducked under the tarp, Riff planted his foot dead bang into the bigger man's ass, driving him inside. The tarp flopped wetly back into place. Tango's partner saw it happen, and automatically broke his police revolver from its armpit holster, bringing it to bear on the bridge of Riff's nose.
But by then, Tango had started screaming.
He shot up against the tarp from beneath, hurling water all over the trio just as Bunny shouted, "Blow him away!" meaning Riff, and took a miscalculated backward step that dumped him onto his butt in the mud.
Riff grabbed the big Magnum barrel just as it went off in his face. There was a gentle backward tug as the slug whizzed cleanly through the sleeve of his overcoat. The pistolero's second shot headed off into the stratosphere as the slimed incline of the pit came apart like warm gelatin under his heels. He slid indecorously down into Riff's embrace. As he flailed for balance Riff wrested away the gun and gave him a no-nonsense bash in the face with it that flattened his nose to pulpsteak and rolled his eyeballs up into dreamtown.
It had taken maybe two seconds, total. Riff quickly climbed to the rim of the grave. He knew how, by now. The gunman's semiconscious body oozed slowly downward until his legs were beneath the tarp edge. Then he was pulled the rest of the way inside.
Topside, Bunny was still on his back, trying to scramble his own petite shooting iron past the silver buttons on his double-breasted overcoat. He looked up, glaring hotly, and saw a dripping, mud-caked bog monster pointing an equally mud-caked revolver in his direction. His hands stopped moving and his eyes became very white.
