'Was Mitch got Eury fucking with that old dude. Out the ranch. You know where that place is?'
'The ranch? No. I thought maybe he went out there but then I thought, How'd he get out there? There's no bus out there. So I thought maybe he'd come here…'
'You on probation?'
'Yeah,' Lonny lied.
'Who you got for a P.O.? Bentley?'
'No.' He didn't want to talk about his Parole Officer. Because he didn't have one. 'You think she's at that guy's place?'
'Yeah. Denver. She be goin out there yesterday night. I don't know where the fuck it is… Mitch, he know.'
'Maybe. But he was in the hospital. Only he ain't there now, I heard. He cruised on it.'
The Ranch. Eurydice, now. And Mitch.
Where was it? Where was the fucking place?
West Hollywood
Ephram had to bribe some guy fifty bucks at the door to get Constance in because she was underage but once inside it didn't seem to matter how old she was. A lot of the girls here, and most of the young gay boys, seemed like teenagers.
She'd never been in a disco, if that's what it was. That's what Ephram called it. It was just a long white room with coloured track-lighting and four wall-video screens. Just now the screens showed Janet Jackson – no, Janet's video was just finished, now it was Taylor Dayne. There was a long, curvy, transparent-plastic bar – by some trick of the light it looked as if the people at the far end of the bar were leaning on nothing, on thin air – and there were a lot of tables crammed together, and a small dance floor at the far end. Mirrors on two sides of the dance floor made the room seem to extend onward like another car in a train. On the third side of the dance floor was one of the video screens so that a slightly larger-than-lifesize, two-dimensional Taylor Dayne was dancing with the half- dozen gay boys and hetero girls who rollicked on the dance floor.
Constance was occupying herself with all the details – even the splatter of colours mixed into the black floor tiles – in order to keep from feeling the panic, the fear that came like a swarm of mosquitos, the bad feelings that Ephram punished her for. In order to keep from thinking about Daddy. In order to keep from thinking about the men they'd murdered, her and Ephram.
Most of her mind, she knew, was locked away inside her, a mewling cat in a carrier-box. You had to ignore its muted yowling to get where you were going.
She wanted to go to the bathroom but she was afraid – no, not afraid don't think that… She wanted to go to the bathroom but Ephram would mentally follow her in, and it embarrassed her.
I have to follow you in. Otherwise you might wander off, out bathroom windows or back doors.
Escape? She laughed and sipped her Coca-Cola.
'We won't be taking any young men along with us, tonight, actually,' Ephram remarked. 'It happens that young ladies come here who work as rather expensive whores. They pick up the moneyed men at the bar here. We'll let one seem to pick us up. There are things I want to try… Best with a woman… A very young one preferably… Thank heaven for little girls, ha ha.'
Constance nodded. (Don't think, don't think, don't think).
She sipped her Coca Cola. After a while, the video screen showed the band Poison, with their cockatoo hair and day-glo costumes and the cheap mystery of dry-ice clouds.
She had a thought and instantly hid it away.
From the Journal of Ephram Pixie 'for July the 22 199':
It's not enough, anymore. My use of proxie neural pathways to experience pleasures is not entirely protecting me from being used up myself. I have a sense that there is some aspect of the negative astrology, some variant of the hidden constellations that is hidden to me as well as to ordinary men. Something veiled. Could someone be veiling it from me, setting me up for a fall? Who? Denver? The Akishra?
Could it be they've lured me to L. A…?
No. I am Ephram Pixie, master of my destiny as no man else is.
Still, I am feeling enervated. Or at least rather ragged in my enjoyments, sagging in my appetites. Perhaps it is at last time to attempt Wetbones again. If I do, it will attract the Akishra. And that could be fatal.
Or will it – in particular? This is Los Angeles. They feed so widely and so well here. It could well be that the Spirit brought me here so to give me a smokescreen, a place of concealment, where the Akishra will not notice me in the general background of suffering and decadence. So very many emissions here.
It could be that I have lost faith, that I should be trusting the guidance of the Spirit more. It could be that the Spirit plans to exalt me, at last, in this place and that is why I have been guided here. He does seem to be guiding me back to the Engorgement Ritual. But oh! That Ritual is so very taxing. But oh again! How very rewarding it is, once the labour is done, ha ha.
There could be another reason the Spirit is prompting me to Wetbones. It might well be the ideal way to stop any search for Constance in its tracks. When she was twelve her father had her fingerprints registered; there was a police drive on for it, a way to help locate children if they turn up missing, and to identify their bodies if they turn up dead… I saw it in her mind as a hope, back when I allowed her hope. She doesn't need all her fingers to be of use to me. Not really.
I have made my decision.
Wetbones.
Downtoum Los Angeles
Garner had known what the police would say. The verbal shrug he would get. There were literally tens of thousands of missing teenagers in Los Angeles. Most of them were homeless addicts and prostitutes, living in cars and under freeways. Giving his report was just a way to get Constance's name on the LAPD computer.
Now he drove the van West, onto the freeway, glad he wasn't going East; traffic Southeast-bound, on the other side of the freeway divide, was thick as coagulated blood.
He'd spent five hundred bucks on a deposit for a detective agency, a cheap gumshoe who was just another warm body to go about asking have you seen this girl have you seen this girl have you seen this girl, anyplace she'd be likely to turn up.
Of course, he could be wrong about where Constance would likely turn up. And he could be wrong about it even being in this city. And even if it was in this city, the town was so fucking big.
But he'd learned to trust his intuition; he thought that maybe – along with the patterns of incidents and coincidences that made up the flow of life – pulses of intuition were God's Morse Code.
Or maybe he was kidding himself.
He had to stay busy. Had to. So he started on Hollywood Boulevard, showing a display cardboard taped with several pictures of Constance to anyone who'd talk to him. He wandered tirelessly but fruitlessly through Hollywood and the Fairfax and downtown L.A.. He talked especially to prostitutes, trying to get a handle on the local trade in chickens. Who was dealing in young flesh? Where were they?
It could be that the son of a bitch who had her would market her in those shadowy and seamy venues.
He walked the streets for two days, sleeping at night in his van to save money for bribes, before he began to hear the recurrent note. The rumours kept cropping up: The More Man. A rich movie industry sleaze who sometimes scattered largesse on compliant teenagers.
And then he began hearing about the murders. The kids on the street would try to sound knowledgeable about the murders. But all they really knew, apart from the condition of the corpses, was what to call them: Wetbones.
Culver City Los Angels
Prentice was trying not to think A universal skill, a widely applied survival technique: Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and just do what you have to do.
'Jeff – you know where Mitch probably is?' Careful,
Prentice told himself, leaning back in the desk chair of Jeff's office. You don't want to come off sounding like that cop that came over here. That'll turn Jeff against you in a hot second.
Jeff was sitting pensively on the edge of the desk. Afternoon sunlight came in dusty stacks through the cantilevered blinds. 'Do I know where Mitch probably is? If I knew where the fuck Mitch was we wouldn't be having
