Part 43 (1/2)

Hunter finds the gun and P.I. license and gets suspicious. Instead of killing him, he ties and gags him and throws him and his bike into the back of the van, and drives back to Georgia.

But Linda has come around a distant curve just in time to see the huge man tossing Ron's bike into the van. She's can't see the license number, but can tell from the peach color that it's from Georgia, and she can describe the van. She pedals like mad; it's at least an hour to the next small town.

Safe in his isolation, Hunter manacles Ron and tries to find out what's going on. He inspects the bicycle and finds the bug, which he triumphantly smashes in front of Ron.

In the process of wheedling and posturing and torturing, he reveals his True Ident.i.ty. He shows Ron the freezers full of food and cooks him up a nice chop.

While all this is going on, Linda is trying to make some cracker police officer take her seriously. She tries to reach Kellerman, but he has an unlisted number. The FBI puts her on hold.

Of course once the tension is stretched to the breaking point, the cops come boiling out of the woods. Hunter is so huge he absorbs about twenty bullets before he falls down dead.

Epilogue.

The coroner of Illsworth County, Georgia, has done hundreds of autopsies, but never one of such a huge person, and he's not looking forward to it. Mountains of messy fat to slice throughbefore you get to the organs. But he prepares the body and makes his first incision. Then he staggers back, dropping the scalpel.

Inside, there's no fat, and not a single organ he can identify. Some of them are s.h.i.+ny metal.

Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral.

His Civil War novel The Silent has been compared to Huckleberry Finn. He's won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and two Ditmar Awards, among others.

He's also been a buddy of mine for twenty-five years, which had absolutely nothing to do with the story you're about to read.

For Reds.h.i.+ft he presents an absolute treat: an alternate history concerning Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

Ting-a-Ling.

Jack Dann.

It was the same dream, the same ratcheting, shaking, steaming, choo-chooing dream of being back on the ghost train with his mother. She is imprisoned in a lead casket in the baggage car, and he knows that she is alive and suffocating. But he can't reach her, even as he runs from one car of the Silver Challenger Express to another. The cars are huge and hollow and endless, and he is exhausted; James Dean, forever the nine-year-old orphan, on his way again-and again and again- to bury his mother in Marion, Indiana.

Mercifully, the whistle of the train rings-a telephone jolting him awake.

”h.e.l.lo, Jimmy?” The voice hesitant, whispery, far away.

”Marilyn? ...”

”Well, who do you think it is, Pier Angeli?”

”You're a nasty b.i.t.c.h.”

”And you're still in love with her, you poor dumb f.u.c.k, aren't you.”

Fully awake now, he laughed mordantly. ”Yeah, I guess I am.”

”Jimmy? . . .”

”Yeah?”

”I'm sorry. I love you.”

”I love you, too. Are you in Connecticut with the Schwartzes or whatever the rack their name is?” Jimmy felt around for cigarettes and matches . . . without success. He slept on a mattress on the floor of the second-floor alcove. Shadows seemed to float around him in the darkness like clouds.

Marilyn giggled, as if swallowing laughter, and said, ”Anti-Semite. You mean the Greens, and I'm not staying with them anymore, except to visit and do business. I'm living in New York now-like you told me to, remember? I'm at the Waldorf Towers. Pretty flashy, huh? But that's not where I am this very minute.”

”Marilyn ...”

”I'm right here in L.A., and I've got news, and I want to see you.” She sounded out of breath, but that was just another one of her signatures.

”I got a race in the morning,” Jimmy said, feeling hampered by the length of the phone cordand the darkness as he felt through the litter around his mattress. ”It's in Salinas, near Monterey.

You want to come and watch?”

”Maybe I do ... maybe I don't.”

”s.h.i.+t, Marilyn. What time is it? I've got to get up at seven o'clock in the morning. And I've got to be awake enough so as not to crash into a G.o.dd.a.m.n wall. And-”

The phone was suddenly dead. Marilyn Monroe was gone.

Jimmy should have known better. But it was-he got up and flicked on the light switch-two o'clock in the morning. Not late for Jimmy when he wasn't racing; he'd often hang out with the ghoul Maila Nurmi and the ever-present Jack Simpson at Googie's or Schwab's on Sun set, which were the only places in L.A. open after midnight, or he'd drive ... or talk through the night to Marilyn, who would call whenever she felt the need.

The lights hurt Jimmy's eyes, and although he hadn't been drinking or doing any drugs, he felt hung over; and as he looked around his rented house, forgetting for the instant that he needed a cigarette, he remembered his dream . . . running through the clattering pa.s.senger cars of the Silver Challenger. ”Momma,” he whispered, then jerked his head to the side, as if embarra.s.sed.

But eventually the light burned away the dream. He found the cigarettes in his bed, the pack of Chesterfields crumpled, the matches tucked inside the cellophane wrapper; and he sat on the edge of the alcove, his legs dangling, and smoked in the bright yellowish light.

Below him was a large living room with its huge seven-foot-tall stone fireplace. He had bought a white bearskin rug for the hearth, and on the wall was an eagle, talons extended, wings outstretched, a bronzed predator caught in midnight. It belonged to Jimmy's landlord Nicco Romanos. He could almost touch his pride-and-joy James B. Lansing loudspeakers that just about reached the ceiling. Below . . . below him was the mess of his life: his bongos, scattered records and alb.u.m covers, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, cameras and camera equipment, crumpled paper and old newspapers and books ... a library on the floor. The walls were covered with bullfighting posters and a few of his own paintings, but pride of place was given to a bloodstained bullfighting cape that was cut into spokelike shadows by the bright wheel lamp that hung between the beams of the ceiling. Jimmy gazed at the cape and remembered when the Brooklyn-born matador Sidney Franklin had given it to him as a souvenir. That was in Tijuana. Rogers Brackett had introduced Jimmy to the matador, who was a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Brackett introduced him to everyone. All he ever wanted in return was Jimmy's c.o.c.k.

But Brackett knew everyone.

Jimmy could still feel the dark presence of his recurrent nightmare. It blew through him like hot, fetid air, the hurricane of a f.u.c.ked-up past. . . of memory. He had named it, thus making it tangible, absolutely real.

Black Mariah. Black Mariah. Black Mariah . . .

Suddenly frightened, feeling small and vulnerable as his thoughts swam like neon fish in deep, dark water, he huddled close to himself on the landing. He wanted to cry.

Momma . . .

He flicked his half-finished cigarette in a high arc across the room and wondered if it would start a fire. If it did, he would sit right where he was like a f.u.c.king Buddha and die withoutmoving a muscle.

If it didn't... he would race tomorrow.

The phone rang again. He picked up the receiver.

”Hi,” Marilyn said. ”You ready to go out with me?”