Popcorn

‘What I want to ask is how’d those girls in Playboy magazine get their hair the way they do? It always looks so damn perfect.’

Brooke managed to steady her voice. ‘Well… you know, I guess it’s just a question of styling really. They use a lot of mousse and they backlight it and sometimes they put in extensions…’

‘Brooke, I do not mean that kind of hair.’

Scout’s pale skin blushed a deep red. She could not believe what her boyfriend was asking – and them guests in someone else’s house and all.

‘ Wayne!’ She punched his ribs.

‘Well I want to know!’ Wayne protested. ‘Ain’t never going to get a better chance to find out. I mean we tried shaving yours, didn’t we, sugar, and you just ended up like some kind of damn Mohican with a rash!’

Mortified, Scout turned to Brooke. ‘I am truly sorry, Brooke I-’

Wayne was not going to drop it. This was clearly a subject that had always bothered him. ‘But in Playboy magazine those girls just have a little tuft, like that was all that ever grew. It don’t look shaved or nothing. These are adult women, not little girls, but all they got’s a tiny little tuft. How’d they do that?’

Strangely, the turn the conversation had taken was no less embarrassing for the terrifying circumstances under which it was being conducted.

Scout stared at the carpet, clearly wishing that she could crawl under it and hide. Brooke simply did not know where to look. She tried to stare straight at Wayne to show she wasn’t scared, but unfortunately she was and so she didn’t have the nerve. She couldn’t look at Bruce – she had nothing to say to him, even with her eyes. In the end she leant back on the huge couch and looked at the ceiling. Between the two of them, Scout and Brooke had the room covered from top to bottom.

‘I said, how’d they do it Brooke?’ Wayne repeated, his voice hardening.

‘Well, Wayne one has a stylist.’

This was one of the funniest things Wayne had ever heard. ‘A stylist! A pussy hair stylist! Now that would be one hell of an occupation! Yes sir, I guess I could get to like that kind of work!’

‘ Wayne that is enough!’ Scout was mortified.

But Wayne did not care. In his opinion he was mining a rich comic seam. ‘Oh, yes, sir! I’d work weekends and all the overtime the boss’d give me. I’d be saying, “Can I shampoo that for you madam? And how about I massage in a little conditioner?” I’d work hard and get me my own salon… There’d be a whole row of women sitting reading magazines with little hair driers on their-’

‘I am not listening to this any more!’ Scout grabbed two cushions, held them to her ears and began to scream. ‘Aaaaaaahhhh!’

‘Oh come on, honey,’ Wayne pleaded through Scout’s shouting and his tears of laughter. ‘You cannot deny that the notion of a snatch stylist is hillfuckin’larious. I mean, would they talk to their clients while they worked? Say, “How was your vacation, ma’m?” and…’

But the more Wayne talked the more Scout screamed, adding drumming feet to her efforts to block out his comic monologue. The mad cacophony was enough to jerk Bruce out of the lethargy of terror. He strode across the room and plucked an internal phone from its bracket on the wall.

‘What you doing, boss?’ Wayne enquired, still smiling at his own wit.

‘I’m calling my security guard. He’s in the lodge at the gate. If you leave now, he won’t hurt you but if you harm us, he’ll kill you.’

‘He’ll kill me? Well ho, fuckin’ ho.’

Wayne levelled his gun at Bruce. For a moment Bruce believed his hour had come.

‘Bang!’ said Wayne, who was still in a merry mood. ‘You give that guard a call, Bruce. Yes sir. If it makes you feel better, you give that of boy a call.’

Bruce punched the button on the intercom and awaited a response. Scout took the opportunity to apologize to Brooke. She was still mortified over Wayne ’s comments.

‘Brooke, I am so sorry that Wayne has gotten to prying into your personal stuff. He does not understand that a woman likes to keep her special private places special and private.’

Bruce punched the button on the wall again. He was getting no reply. Wayne looked up from the gun with which he was still playing.

‘He ain’t answering you, Mr Delamitri. Maybe he can’t hear you… Here, let’s see if we can’t get him a little closer to the phone.’

Wayne and Scout were sitting together on the couch. The holdall he had been carrying when he entered was on the floor between his feet. Wayne reached his hand down into the bag.

If Bruce had been shooting the scene, he would probably have started on a two shot of Wayne and Scout, then taken a closeup on Wayne ’s hand and panned down with it as it disappeared into the bag. Perhaps he would then have covered himself in the edit by picking up a reaction shot from Scout, who knew what was in the bag; then back to Wayne ’s hand as it emerged from the bag pulling a severed head by the hair.

But Bruce was not shooting the scene. He was in it and his heart nearly stopped. He had to clutch at the wall to keep from fainting.

Brooke opened her mouth to scream but scarcely a sound came, only a rasping gasp, dry and painful. She felt as if in a dream, paralysed by a complete and immovable fear.

Wayne raised the head and held it next to his own.

It would have made another lovely two shot. The grotesque, blooddrained, deathhead and the handsome, grinning young face beside it.

‘Surprise!’ Wayne said, and he laughed.

There was a sheepish grin on Scout’s face too. Half pleased with the major effect her boyfriend was having, half apologetic and embarrassed, aware that they had done a very bad thing.

Wayne got up, still holding the head by the hair, and carried it across the room to where Bruce was standing. Bruce gasped and recoiled, backing himself against the wall, almost as if trying to force himself through it.

‘Huh huh huh.’ Bruce tried to speak but it was as much as he could do to draw breath. He still held the intercom phone in his hand, although so lifeless was his grip it was surprising that the phone had not fallen. Wayne took it from Bruce’s numbed grasp and held it up to the ear of the severed head.

‘Hallo! Hallo!’ Wayne shouted. ‘Oh Mr Security Guard!… He don’t hear so good, does he, Bruce?’

Wayne let the phone drop and held the head up so that its face was in front of his own, so close that their noses were almost touching.

‘Hey! You hear me?’ Wayne shouted into the dead face at the top of his voice. ‘The guy who pays your salary wants to talk to you, you fuckin’ jerk!’

The head swung about on its hair. Wayne turned its face away from his in disgust.

‘How much did you pay this guy, Mr Delamitri? Was he expensive? Because if he was you are being ripped off, Bruce my friend. He wasn’t worth shit as a guard. He just sat there in his hut with his big dog and we crept up behind him and killed him.’

Scout looked across at Brooke. ‘We didn’t kill the dog.’

*

The little caravanpark store in the redwood forest turned blue then red then blue again then red.

There was no particular call for the police car to be so garishly illuminated as it pulled up outside the shop. It was scarcely dawn yet and there had been no other traffic on the gravel road leading through the woods from the Interstate. Cops, however, will be cops. The few guests slumbering in the darkened trailers were lucky they hadn’t turned on the siren.

Astonishingly, it was the storekeeper himself who had raised the alarm. Wayne had shot him only once and that had been in the shoulder. The force of the impact had spun the victim back through the open door and into the parlour behind, and Wayne could not be bothered climbing over the counter to finish the job.

The storekeeper was lucky. Such is the terrible damage done by modern weapons that even a shoulder wound can be deadly. The man’s flesh, however, was old and weak and put up little resistance to the bullet as it passed through his body. In fact, the projectile had caused nearly as little damage on its exit as it had on its entry.