The window held.
Clay picked the record up and threw it again.
This time there was a crash, but only from the glass in the record frame. I made the windows extra thick, Clay imagined Karney telling them. You can’t do it. Accept it, huk-huk-huk!You’re dead already, fucker. “Fuck you!” Clay shouted back. “You’re dead too!”
Savy didn’t bother making sense of the outburst. She forced the record out of the frame and flung its platinum circle like a Frisbee. When that didn’t work, she used the record to hammer at the window with everything she had left. In other contexts it would have made a hilarious visual, but now it was another sign of the rope closing around their own throats. Her blood didn’t have the oxygen to maintain such a violent pace, but Savy willed herself. Desperate.
Above them something, the roof maybe, crashed inward with a concussive boom.
The room was filling with smoke. Savy screamed in frustration. They were going to die here. Never again would they hear another song, play another song. With an anguished moan, Clay grabbed for the record and together he and Savy rammed it into the glass with all their anger and hope and fleeting will to live.
And they broke a pane low on the window. A single triangular shard fell loose.
A moment passed. Then all the glass above it let go with a massive shattering crash. Clay pulled Savy away from the raining fragments, feeling one nick the back of his neck. He grabbed the discarded record frame and used it to clear the jagged pieces sticking from the window.
Smoke wafted in through the new opening from a fire below, sandwiching them. “Ughhh,” Savy coughed and retreated. Clay fought his way forward, shoved his head into the cold air outside, trying desperately to find the ground beneath them, if there was any ground beneath them. All he got for his efforts was a lung and eye full of black smoke and he gagged hard and fell away and might have passed out then and there if not for Savy digging her nails into his arm. With her puffed, mostly shut eyes, she looked exhausted and frightened. Their time was up and they both knew it. Clay used the last of his air to tell her what she already knew: “Have to.”
Savy nodded and forced herself back to the opening. Clay helped her perch on the sill, coughing, hacking, drowning in smoke and withering heat. She gave his hand a last sorrowful squeeze and, like that, was gone from the window.
Clay’s legs and arms shook from the lack of oxygen. A breeze blew outside and for a moment the smoke cleared. Clay didn’t bother finding the ground. If it had gone badly for Savy, if she’d broken her neck, Clay didn’t want his last earthly vision to be the corpse of the girl he loved tumbling into the depths of the canyon. He swung his legs over the window and one single thought floated there in his mind—Pleeeeease!—as he threw himself forward and free.
16
CASTLE OF GLASS
They didn’t know where Savy was. Only that she was late for the Echoplex gig—and Savy was never late. Clay had no explanation for Fiasco or Spider, didn’t know how to start if he tried. Well, you see, she and I watched Davis Karney commit an act of self-immolation. He rigged his whole house to go up. Seriously, we had to smash his windows and jump without knowing how far the fall was. It felt like we were dropping forever—and then the ground was just there, and our asses were tumbling down the side of a ravine, down, down until the scrub caught us. And I just wanted to lay there, stare right into the sun and feel life again. Because we were dead in that house, see, as dead as you’d ever want to be. But there were sirens going down in Hollywood and that got us moving, even if we were collapse-on-your-face tired. We helped each other along a coyote path back toward the burning house. Only, to get on the property where there was no fence, we had to scale the steepest part of the hill. A real bitch, but easier than escaping certain death—just about everything is, right? Well, we made it as far as my Jeep before the back half of the mansion collapsed into the canyon. I had us through the front gate and halfway down Rising Moon before we ran into the fire trucks. Had to swerve into a driveway to avoid a head-on. Seriously, who designed those streets? A bobsled team? Imagine surviving all that madness, only to get flattened by the rescue party. Lucky for us, no one in those trucks even looked our way. We were just part of the caravan of neighbors getting the fuck out of Dodge. So we made it down to Sunset and didn’t stop till we got here to The Knickerbocker—and honestly, fellas, I haven’t seen Savy since she left the hotel.
Not going to a hospital had been her idea. Sitting in Sunset traffic, slowed all the more by the sight of engines and ladder trucks racing in from all directions and the apocalyptic pillar of smoke roiling up from one of Hollywood’s trendiest hills, Clay’s adrenaline had plummeted and his head pounded like a kick drum. Beside him, Savy looked like she’d been shot out of a cannon, her face dirty and her clothing lacerated, her hair afoul with branches and creosote leaves. Filthy and bare-chested, Clay had suggested they make for Cedars-Sinai, come clean about where they’d been, but Savy killed the
