But it was the aquarium that broke Clay’s hypnosis. Those bright florescent bodies swirling on the surface, their eyes as stone white and empty as the mirror-eyes themselves.
Motherfucker, Clay thought. You killed those fish for fun. And what he said was, “Do you honestly think Farewell Ghost has the talent to conquer the world?”
“All that and more. You are the real deal, if I’ve ever heard it.”
Clay grinned and Payton grinned back. “Then one other question,” Clay replied, pleasantly, obsequiously. “What’s the best album title ever?”
“Album title?”
“Or the most badass song ever recorded? Is it Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”? Metallica’s “One”? Maybe something off Vulgar Display of Power?”
The fishtank gurgled. For the first time, the Hailmaker sat silently.
“Can you even tell me what your favorite song of mine is?”
Now the thing behind Payton’s face understood the game and the wide, child-eating grin broadened. Only this time the face he wore had had enough. The corners of the mouth were nearly touching earlobe when the Velcro riiiiip came violently, tearing the distressed flesh like cheap paper under the chin and along the jowls. Payton’s face became a ruined dollar-store mask. No blood or muscle or bone appeared in the wounds. Only… darkness. As if that was all the Queen Bitch really was. Total darkness. And a tuneless voice.
“Is this your way of telling me no, Clay Harper?”
“Yes,” Clay shot back, and where he found the balls to say so, as he stared into those torn features, he never knew. “I think we’re going to pursue other options.”
“There are none.”
“You can’t tell me every band is famous because they signed a deal with you.”
“No,” the Hailmaker consented. “Some have gotten very lucky. But for every band that breaks big without me, there are hundreds of thousands that never make it past their garage. Every bit as talented as you—and yet they never come close to their potential.”
“I thought you said I was special.”
“I misjudged you. You’re not hungry after all. But what if your father was to die suddenly? What if you discovered he had changed his will and left everything to big-titted Estelle? What if you were homeless, on your own? Maybe then you’d understand the pathetic struggles of the masses. The gutter hopelessness. Savannah’s reality.”
“What you don’t understand…” Clay tried, and his voice—the conviction he wanted to speak with—was beginning to return. He swallowed and gathered his strength. In a minute, he would either be dead or out of this nightmare and he didn’t want to be kept in suspense. “…is that music doesn’t summon the demons in people, it helps us cast them out. It gives us a way to express the hurt inside. Sometimes even overcome it. And those lost souls you’re talking about? I was one. So now I’m going to throw all the others a lifeline.” Clay stood and dared to look the devil in the eyes. “You promised to give a girl’s face back if she seduced me. When she failed, you cut her throat and threw her away. But no one’s above reproach—you said so yourself. Consider this yours, asshole.”
Clay spun and managed three steps before an invisible fist struck his back and his body crumpled to the floor. Invisible hands grabbed his collar and belt and he was flipped over like a fish in a pan to gaze at the furious figure standing above him. “We’ve signed your mother to a contract,” the darkness under the mask bellowed, and now it discarded the Payton impression entirely using its own androgynous voice, the one that had whispered his name as it caressed his ankle under a door years before. “She’s with me, Clay Harper. Suffering hoooorrribly.”
There was a pause in which Clay blocked out any image those words brought to mind. He shut his eyes and waited for the end.
Waited.
When nothing happened, he gathered himself to find Payton’s empty office.
The Hailmaker had gone.
25
THE GENTLE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES
The pillar of smoke was visible long before he reached Via Montana. It rose straight into the blue ether of sky, roiling, massive and black—another personal apocalypse for all of Los Angeles to witness. Clay gunned the engine the whole way up the street’s embankment. Even in his badly agitated state, it occurred to him that he needed to slow down, that if he didn’t exercise some restraint he was going to ram right through the gargoyle head on his own front gates.
Though as he rounded the bend that brought the cul-de-sac into view, Clay realized he couldn’t have reached those gates with a Sherman tank. Burbank P.D. had created a barricade of cruisers at the top; and the rest of Via Montana looked as if a spontaneous street fair had broken out. Cars lined both curbs, double-parked in some cases. People were hiking up to the barricade on foot like it was the apron of a stage. Clay had to park more than a block away and hoof it uphill, one of an anonymous many, catching tidbits from cops doing crowd control, from the chatter on the police and fire bands, from fans yelling to one another.
The fire department wasn’t attacking the flames directly; they were creating a fireline to prevent the blaze from spreading into the brittle-dry scrub around the property, and inevitably across the entire neighborhood. It wasn’t the main house that was on fire, but the guest place in back. “Isn’t that where Boyle hung himself?” someone asked. “Fuckin’ A right!” someone shouted back.
Clay lifted his chin, staring straight up into the smoke until the back of his head was resting between his shoulder blades. What he expected to see up there he couldn’t say. Boyle hovering in nebulous spirit-form? That had been the point of the Hailmaker setting fire to the Generator, hadn’t it? To eradicate Boyle’s anchor and send him reeling into oblivion. To deny Clay his strongest ally.
With the breeze carrying south, only the faintest whiff of burnt cedar descended on the
