Nevertheless, there had been considerable loss of blood, and the old man, who lived alone, had lain semiconscious on the floor in front of the television for several hours before summoning the strength to crawl to the phone. The telerecord of the Oscars ceremony had been playing throughout, and the old man’s troubled dreams and hallucinations had been further disturbed by talk of legs of fire.
While waiting for the arrival of the ambulance (which did deploy its siren and woke everybody up), the police questioned the storekeeper. They soon realized that he was another victim of the celebrated Mall Murderers, who were clearly no longer restricting their activities to malls.
‘A young man and a scrawny kid of a girl,’ one of the officers said into his radio. ‘Same description as at that motel this morning… All they took was some Jack Daniels, some cigarettes and some pretzels… oh yeah, and one of those maps of the movie stars’ homes… I don’t know why. Maybe they wanted to go visit Bruce Delamitri and congratulate him on his Oscar.’
Chapter Seventeen
Wayne was still swinging the severed head about in disgust. He was clearly moved by the tawdry service Bruce was getting from his employees. He saw it as symptomatic of a national malaise, and held the head up as evidence of declining standards in general.
‘I mean, shit, man! That’s what’s wrong with this fuckin’ country. People just don’t do the damn jobs they’re paid for. No wonder we can’t get ahead of the fuckin’ Japs. Wouldn’t catch no fuckin’ Jap screwing up on his duty like that, man. No way! This motherfucker deserved what he got, Bruce. I did you a fuckin’ favour.’
On the table stood a lava lamp in the shape of a rocket. In a gesture which amply summed up the contempt he felt for the dead security guard, Wayne impaled the head on the lamp.
Bruce gulped down his rising nausea and Brooke began quietly to weep. They stared, transfixed, as the great misshapen tumours and globules of red lava slowly rose upwards through the electricgreen liquid in the lamp and disappeared into the severed neck, waited a moment and then slowly reemerged from the head and dripped down again.
‘Please,’ Bruce muttered.
‘What’s that, Bruce?’
‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know who you are but-’
‘Oh, we’re just nocount white trash, Bruce,’ Wayne said, crossing over to rejoin Scout on the couch. ‘We ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. The only memorable thing I ever did in my whole life was kill people.’
But it was plain to see that Wayne rated himself rather highly. He was puffed up with pride like a psychotic peacock. He gripped Scout’s thigh proudly, as if to reassure her that he was only being selfeffacing out of politeness.
Scout was proud too. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers,’ she said. ‘I’m Scout and this is Wayne.’
Bruce and Brooke said nothing. Scout was a little disappointed. She had hoped her announcement would have more impact. Fearing that they hadn’t understood her properly, she repeated the main point. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers.’
Scout need not have worried. They had heard her the first time.
They should have guessed, of course, Bruce particularly. Two insane murderers? A man and a woman? Big fans of his work? People whose own activities had been consistently linked with his own for the previous month and now
‘Are you going to kill us?’ Bruce asked.
‘Now what kind of question is that? Me and Scout here never know who we’re going to kill till we done it.’
‘It just happens,’ Scout added, swinging her legs like a little girl talking about some game – although little girls don’t tend to have guns lying on their laps, except sometimes in Bruce’s movies and now, of course, in his lounge.
Silence returned.
Conversation was getting no easier. Again Scout felt it incumbent on her to try and oil the social wheels.
‘This is so great, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, us all here together, just sitting talking.’
Bruce was scarcely listening. His mind was racing. If these were the Mall Murderers, then he and Brooke could be dead literally at any moment. He had to do something: every second left alive with these two psychos was borrowed time. He looked at his big desk, which was positioned across the room, behind the couch on which Wayne and Scout were sitting.
In one of Bruce’s movies there would have been a closeup on the top righthand drawer and a music sting:
Scout’s voice rattled on, scarcely penetrating the edge of Bruce’s thoughts.
‘Because Bruce here is Wayne ’s hero, and I’ve always admired girls like you, Brooke. So beautiful and all. Except I can’t deny I think it’s a shame about all this cosmetic surgery you ladies get done, because these days you don’t know who’s really beautiful and who’s just a nasty old rich bitch.’
Had Bruce moved? If anyone had been looking they might have thought he had. Before, he had been standing by the wall intercom. Now, he seemed to be a little closer to the desk.
Wayne was talking now. ‘Hell, it don’t matter none about cosmetic surgery, does it, Scout?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you look beautiful, you are beautiful, don’t matter how it happens.’
‘I just think it was kind of nice when a girl was what she was and that was it,’ Scout protested.
Bruce was definitely moving now, if incredibly slowly. He was making his way around the room towards that desk, that drawer. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Wayne and Scout were still concentrating on each other, their voices just babble inside Bruce’s head. Brooke was staring at the floor. Only one pair of eyes seemed to be fixed on Bruce, the eyes of the security guard, popping out of his severed head. It was almost as if the head was willing Bruce on. Like some creature in an insane Frankenstein experiment, it seemed to sense a man who might avenge its bloody murder. For a moment Bruce caught those eyes and they stared at each other, sharing two extreme closeups. For that moment Bruce half imagined those eyes alert in a living head, a head kept functioning by the great bloody globs of lifegiving lava that journeyed up its neck and down again.
Bruce made a supreme effort to pull himself together. His terror was making him lightheaded. The voices of Wayne and Scout, the bright eyes in the dead face and the nearcertainty that death was just a heartbeat away were all crashing about his head and preventing him from thinking. Bruce was not a weak man: his glib exterior concealed a steel core. Still only in his midthirties, he was currently the most successful movie director in the USA. This was not something that could be achieved without considerable strength of character. None the less, Bruce’s current situation was on the verge of defeating him.
‘It’s a movie,’ a voice inside him whispered. ‘Just be in a movie.’
Bruce told himself he’d seen it all a hundred times before. He was in control. He was always in control. ‘It’s just another movie.’
He tore his gaze away from the dead head and viewed the room in a wide shot. Nobody was looking at him. He was in deep background. Infinity focus.
‘How about Brooke here? Do you reckon she’s real?’ Wayne was saying. He leant back into the cushions of the couch, relaxed, and clearly feeling at home. Scout cast a critical eye over the woman sitting opposite.
Brooke shrank before her gaze. An observer might have thought it strange how absurd a really sexy evening dress can look when the person wearing it is cowed and scared. One has to carry glamorous, sexy clothes off with confidence, otherwise it’s possible just to look like a sad, desperate tart.
‘Real? Get out of here!’ Scout exclaimed. ‘Why, Brooke here’ll have been cut up and stretched back and sucked out and pumped up and I don’t know what. Ain’t that right, Brooke?… I said, ain’t that right, Brooke?’
The star of Bruce’s movie was nearly at the desk now, nearly at that special drawer. All he needed was a few more moments of inattention from his tormentors.
Bruce did not realize it but he had a costar in his drama. It might not have appeared that Brooke was aware of
