They had three days in the new apartment and Karen had promised they’d leave it as they’d found it, but already one of the crew had clunked one of the big sound consoles on a door frame, chipping the paint. Great; they’ll charge me hundreds to fix that. She sent one of the gophers, a teenager named Fred of all things, for some White-Out.
It took a couple hours for the crew to set up the lights and furniture they’d use, and to figure the camera angles so the punters couldn’t see how fake it looked when you stood right there gaping, as Fred would, once the models got there, once they started rolling video and fucking.
“No lights unless needed.” Karen didn’t want a huge bill. They had to cover everything, to the penny, then kick back a percentage of the gross income from the videos they’d made. Those big lamps sucked power like some of the girls involved sucked cocks. Karen was glad there would be no hetero sex on this shoot. Males needed so much coddling, so much mothering and babying and cajoling. Worse, they all had streaks in them leading to abuse, even rape. It didn’t always appear but when it did, a shoot could be violent, dangerous. She did not need that.
When the females, lesbian or just pretending, squabbled, it could get nasty, sure, but neutral corners or a slammed door usually took care of things. Ten minutes later they’d be back to enthusiastic writhing on camera.
“Hey Kare?” It was Bobby, her director, a young woman with short hair and muscular body who carried herself more like a longshoreman than a teamster. Union to the core, smart, and good at all the small jobs needing covered on a shoot, Bobby rarely bothered Karen unless necessary. She was not talkative, needy, or particularly friendly, but remained as reliable as sunset. “Kare, Fuzzy’s refusing to go to her spot.”
Karen followed Bobby’s swagger down the hallway, at the end of which she found an actor nick-named Fuzzy, due to her fluffy golden pubic hair, standing against the wall, arms crossed over her small breasts, sulking.
“She’s supposed to go do a tub scene.” Bobby gestured into the bathroom, all taupe tiles and gray floor stones. Fuzzy’s blonde skin and hair would stand out like a beacon if lighted properly, Karen thought.
Karen waived off Bobby, who went to take care of a dozen other things. She approached her actor gently. “What’s wrong, Fuzz?”
“No one believes me.”
Shocking, not believing the natural authority that comes from being an erotic film actor, Karen thought. She kept a straight face. “About what?”
“What I saw.”
So now I’m a cheap dentist, Karen told herself. “Okay, what did you see?”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Fuzz, you know me, give it a shot, huh? We’re on a tight schedule here.”
The girl, her immature pout comical without her knowing it, gazed soulfully into Karen’s face. Karen caught a tingle; that was the wallop that made Fuzzy’s videos so popular, she thought. Fuzzy took a wobbly breath, placed palms over nipples, and sighed. “It was a guy. A dead guy. He was all rotting and stuff. He was hanging from the shower nozzle. It looked like wire holding him up.”
Karen stepped into the bathroom. The tub was full of warm, sudsy water, just waiting for Fuzzy’s nubile nonsense performance. Several cameras were set up, their lines running out of the room to the central command console, where monitors allowed on-line editing.
“Come in here, Fuzzy.” Karen waved a hand.
“I can’t. It freaks me out.”
“There’s nothing here.”
“I know.”
“You know. What do you mean? You just said—“
“It disappeared. You know. Like ghosts do.”
“Know what’s gonna disappear, Fuzz? Your paycheck, if you don’t get your photogenic ass in here and give us a slam-bang performance.”
“But Kare.”
“You want to leave, some other girl will do it. There’s nothing in here.”
“Will you stay and watch?”
“No. I’ve got a million things to do.”
“How can I be relaxed enough?”
Karen had an idea. “Tell you what. I’ll let Fred come in.”
“He’ll just jack off.”
“Take it or leave it. He’s the only dangler.”
Fuzzy sighed again, bigger than before. “Oh, okay. If he touches me I’ll break his perv arm.”
“You can rip off his dick for all I care. I’ll tell him Hands Off, okay?”
When Fred got the assignment the first thing he did was not blush and scurry back to watch Fuzzy’s performance rubbing in the tub, it was to swallow his gum, stand a bit straighter, and ask, “What do I get paid?”
“You get to not be kicked off the shoot and you get to watch Fuzzy close up. And no touching her. At all. If that’s not good enough, take a hike, mike.”
“Name’s Fred.” He hesitated for half a second, then walked rapidly down the hall to escort Fuzzy into the bathroom like it was a date.
Karen rolled her eyes and got back to the list on her iPad.
Everything went fine until Fuzzy started shrieking.
#
Karen had to shove her way into the bathroom; it was already clogged with crew and other actors by the time she got there. She cleared people out from the doorway inward, as if unloading an over-packed state room from a Marx Brothers scene, and found Fuzzy curled in the sloshed half empty tub like a spider, knees up, legs tight, arms hugging herself, face averted.
From the shower head pipe, a body dangled. It looked discolored and Karen gagged when she realized the scent of decay was strong. Amazed and appalled, her heart pounded, her hands trembled, but she made herself reach out and poke it with a finger. It was solid.
She spun and vomited into the toilet.
That’s when a low voice, one of the regular crew, a young woman named Valeri who always smelled of floral perfume, quietly said something that made Karen shake with shock. “It’s Fred, isn’t it?” Valeri’s quiet voice affected Karen worse than a bucket of ice water splashed over her.
She stifled a few more gags. Got herself together. “Fuzzy? Honey, was Fred in here with you?” She glanced at the still-cringing Fuzzy.
Her big eyes made Fuzzy look like a Hentai Girl. “I. He.” She shook her head. “He came in with me.”
“What happened then?” Karen needed to understand what had happened because Fred, to whom she’d spoken moments ago, had gone, it seemed, from an overly eager teenager just out of high school, flustered and flattered to be given an assignment on an erotic video shoot, to a rotting corpse hanging from what had been, moments early, Karen had checked it, an inviting, clean, newly-installed bathtub full of suds.
Had a body somehow been concealed in the suds?
Who would have hidden it? Why? Who could have then hung it on the pipe?
Karen shook her head, negating such ridiculous thoughts. Facts, she thought.
“Fred came in with me and I started, you know. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, he was there.”
The glanced again at what was left of Fred and some gasped as the grotesque thing began to fade away. It was soon gone, as if it had never been there.
The cameras, Karen thought. She pushed her way through the oglers to check the command center, where Fuzzy’s masturbatory fantasy bath sequence would be on the server and visible through several cameras, at different angles.
#
“Okay, there’s Fred ushering Fuzzy into the bathroom like a prom date.” Karen tapped the upper right-hand of six screens. Her tone held contempt.
Tammy “Tams” Martin, the tech who’d been running this console, nodded. “He hovered around me once, on that mansion shoot, the one in the canyon. I let him watch until he started asking questions. Then I shoo’d him.” As she spoke, she advanced the video at one-quarter speed, as Karen had requested.
They saw Fred come in and take a seat on the closed toilet lid. He perched facing the tub, where Fuzzy went through a standard prep, stretching and bending and displaying for the cameras before lowering herself into the sudsy water to begin splashing and caressing her breasts and neck. She kept parting her lips and sighing, with sideward glances at the camera, as if flirting.
Fred sat rapt, taking it all in.
As she’d predicted, Karen saw how Fuzzy’s coloring, her bright hair and dark eyes, her luminous flesh, stood out against the pinkish gray background as if lighted from within. Each flirty glance offered a jolt of recognition that felt almost too personal, like an aunt crossing the line with a nephew.
“What do you know about Fuzzy?”
Tams looked at Karen. “Other than her megawatt charisma? No, not much. Heard she’s a student at Cal Tech or UCLA or something. No, it was USC, I remember one of the crew making a Trojan joke.”
“Condoms are for dicks.” Karen muttered this automatically as she leaned close to the monitors, watching as much of everything on video as possible.
“So, Fuzzy closes her eyes and starts, uh.”
“Messing with herself.” Tams laughed.
“Caressing, yes. So where’s Fred at that moment?”
Tams switched through all camera channels and angles. He was still sitting on the closed toilet seat, still watching avidly.
“Now advance it frame-by-frame. Fuzzy opens her eyes…”
Tams advanced two channels at the same rate. As toilet-perched Fred faded, a shape appeared in the tub, hanging from the shower nozzle pipe.
“It’s like a special effect.” Karen frowned. “He fades out and it appears at the exact same rate.”
Tams was tapping on a laptop and fiddling with console nobs. She tried contrast, brightness, and other things. Nothing new was revealed. “There’s no heat signature between fade-out Fred and hanging-chad Fred.”
They watched as, after being displayed for them a few minutes, the sickening Fred corpse thing faded away.
“I don’t get it.” Tam shook her head. “The fucker just vanishes.”
Karen glanced at Tams, eyebrows raised at her tech’s detachment. Then she realized that she’d adopted the same emotional distance.
“I can’t explain this, but I can guarantee you it wasn’t SFX. Not on this system, not that I can find evidence of.” Tams shrugged. “It’s baffling.”
“To say the least. We need to call the police.”
“Already did.” Amy, another tech, walked over from her console set-up. “They’ll be self-importantly bloating up the street any minute. I’m gonna take off, if you don’t mind, Kare.”
Karen did mind. “Stay put. No one leave.”
“Half the actors already split. I’m out of here.” Amy smiled, showing no hard feelings. “Allergic to cops, y’know?” She left the room and walked out of the apartment, and before Karen took roll call, most of the others had matriculated into the school of avoiding cops too.
#
The cops, all males, sprayed testosterone everywhere, strutting, bullying, and otherwise stinking things up so badly there was no way the apartment could be used to finish the shoot even if they’d be allowed, which Karen doubted.
Publicity stunt, most of the cops instantly decided. That, or murder.
Within five minutes of the cops arriving, Karen was heartily sick of answering questions about an all-girl lesbian “porno” shoot. No, you can’t have ‘extra copies’ and no, I don’t have any thumb drives. No, I don’t join in. No, I don’t want to see your dangly bits. No, no one’s looking for a cure.
On and on, the cops kept up their tasteless, macho, sexist bullshit. What, Karen wondered, scared them so much? Were all cops cowards cringing behind guns and badges? They did call their badges shields, she thought. Hm.
She kept correcting them, insisting it be called erotica, not porn. “It’s not about courtesans or prostitutes,” she said a thousand and seventeen times. Her distinction never penetrated once. The cops kept patronizing, acting affronted, pretending to be insulted in their manhood, copping staunchly prudish, falsely-shocked poses, condescending about Karen’s inability to get ‘real’ work in ‘movies’, and otherwise being representatives of the square, retro, regressive, disapproving, bigoted, prejudiced, nasty, suppressive establishment false-front misogynist control-women-at-all-costs false morality that dominated society.
How Karen hated it would not be possible to describe in words. That night, her nightmares gave her some tentative notion in images, but they evaporated on waking. It mattered little that she forgot her vivid nightmares because talking about such things would mark her, in the new sexist world, as suicidal. She wondered if Poe or Lovecraft were now considered suicide literature.
The shoot was shot. Shut down. A crime scene, the cops called it. They’d taped it off pending a sharp DA coming up with an idea what kind of charges could be filed, if any. With no body, no proof Fred had ever been there for real, they couldn’t prosecute any murder.
Several calls to Fred’s cell phone number had gone unanswered. Detectives were dispatched to locate and interview him ASAP.
The long weekend was not to be wasted by forensics and investigation; a new venue needed found, fast.
The cops flat out disbelieved both everyone’s account of Fred and what the various video feeds showed. “Hollywood magic,” they sneered at the vids.
They were determined to pin something on someone, to feather their caps.
Karen could hear the lawsuits stalking her. As producer and ostensible director, she would catch the brunt of any criminal or civil actions. She kept thinking about calling a lawyer, then stomping the impulse with outrage.
As she sat sipping a bourbon lunch in her house in the suburbs, she jumped when her phone buzzed against her leg. Digging it out of her jeans pocket, she checked to see who was calling. It was a number she did not know. Fearing it was the police, she hit Talk and said, “Yeah, hello?”
It proved to be a TV producer for a paranormal ghost-hunt documentary series, and he wanted to discuss what he’d been hearing. Of all his babble, one thing popped out at her: He was offering a new venue.
#
It was a house his production company owned and used for shoots, up in the canyons of course, a white elephant wanna-be mansion gone into receivership when some rapper or actor or musician blew it all on parties. It had good features, Karen noted, walking around with Gena Matinez, the TV producer’s assistant.
Big windows let a lot of light enter, it was on top of a hill so the light would shift but be available all day, and there was, naturally, a pool overlooking a ravine. Coyotes yapped in the near distance but Karen ignored them. The skill of handling dogs in a world of men came built-in.
“How much to rent it?” Karen was in no position to quibble but wanted to know how badly in the hole this detour would put her.
Gena, slightly older than Karen, slightly more artificial as a result in both looks and behavior, smiled too big. “Oh, it’s gratis. We own it free-and-clear so it doesn’t cost us anything. Makes us money when it’s being used.”
A shadow passed over Gena’s café-au-lait skin and both women glanced up, expecting to see a hawk or other bird. There was nothing.
Gena brightened again. “So you’d be doing us a favor, right?”
“Uh, sure. Right.” Karen was having none of this. Hidden costs were always worse than the price tag variety. “What do you want from us?”
Gena Martinez blinked. Her shiny silver bling flashed in the sun, causing shadows to dance on her flesh, accentuating the curves. “We’d want use of that tape showing the, uh. Haunting.”
Showing that sap Fred turn into hanging meat. “It’s not TV material.”
“Oh, we’d edit it for cable. Lots more leeway there.”
“This was a real human being. It’s like a snuff film.”
“It’s news. Interesting news, supernatural touches, the works.” She blinked. “We wouldn’t do anything exploitative, and of course the boy’s family would be compensated. It’s a genuine mystery. The unknown.”
Of course. Bribed. Also, people love gore. Karen nodded. “You can spin it that way. Fact is, we don’t have a clue what happened. The video is with the police at the moment, so I can’t offer it to you.”
Gena smiled big again. “We’ll take care of that. We’d want interviews with everyone who was there, too.”
“Clothes on?” Karen said this to provoke.
Gena took it in stride. “Dealer’s choice, I’d guess. Harry likes it either way. This is the biggest story to hit ghost hunting TV in ages.”
Karen wondered what the prior big thing had been. She was not about to ask. She tended to focus on bodies, not spirits, unless it was from a dry county in Kentucky. She needed a venue to finish her shoot on time. If there was no up front money, she could do it within budget, too. Win-win. “So we can finish our erotic shoot in exchange for interviews and the video of what happened to Fred, if you can get it, right?”
“That’s about it. We can have your lawyer get with ours and put it on a page for us to deface with our signatures, okay?” Gena shivered as another shadow passed over her. She seemed eager to leave. She kept wincing when the coyotes howled or yapped. One of Gena’s eyes seemed to keep measuring the distance between the sun’s disc and the horizon line. It had become a tic, like someone always glancing at a watch during a meeting.
“This isn’t a murder house or cult place, is it?” Karen knew such places proliferated all over California and, in fact, all over USA these days. Perhaps they always had. Still, she’d rather know if ghouls, ex-cultists, serial killer fans, or morbid tourism was apt to interrupt her naked actors as they frolicked for the cameras. “Not a draw for unwanted curiosity seekers?”
Gena’s eyes got big. “Uh, no. Never heard anything like that. It belonged to a lead singer from some no-hit band.”
“Big money for a no-hit.”
A big laugh. “Oh, yeah. Over-extended himself on kisses and promises. Happens more than you’d think. Probably overly in touch with his feminine side, hm?” Another laugh, more nervous this time, and another glance at the sun.
Karen ignored the weak joke, so imbued with sexism, and walked away from Gena, toward her own car. She wanted to get back to the city and gather her chickens so she could start a shoot tomorrow morning. If she didn’t act fast the actors might take other gigs, or disperse in boredom. The males might shoot their husbanded, saved-up wads with no camera to make it pay. Mustn’t allow that.
She pulled away as Gena scrambled to her own car, a big sedan. On the drive into the canyon and down to the flatland, Karen felt the big car on her rear bumper as if it were pushing her to hurry.
Karen thought about the flashy, nervous personal assistant. Was it TV did that to them? Maybe they were all twitchy in that end of the business.
“What are you freaked out about, Gena?”
She finally lost sight of the following car when she passed through a tunnel of shade in a patch of trees not yet cut down for yet another development. Shadows clotted so darkly she had to put on her headlights.
#
“Go ahead, let it fly.” Karen heard Tam giving directions to one of the male actors and smiled. Come on command; must be Kevin, she thought. He did that pretty consistently. She walked among her video screens, glancing at what was going on in various rooms, and felt pleased. On the sunny side of the house the pool and bright rooms offered day scenes, while on the shaded side, faux evening shots offered a more romantic effect. If graphic sex was romantic according to lighting; this made her smile more.
Her phone buzzed and she dug it from her slacks. She’d worn slacks and a button blouse under a blazer to be more professional, in case this change of venue prompted the actors and crew to shenanigans. So far, it had worked to maintain her authority, which kept them focused.
“Hello?” She heard the TV producer, Harry, and listened more closely. She frowned. What was he saying? He was talking too fast. “Uh, I’m sorry, must be a weak connection up here, you’re dropping out a little here and there. Could you say that again more slowly?”
He was telling her Gena Martinez was missing and not answering her phone, and asking if Karen knew anything.
“No, sorry, haven’t seen her since yesterday afternoon. We drove down together. Well, separate cars, but at the same time.”
He let loose a string of incoherent words, swearing about his frustration, and rang off, leaving Karen with an impression that producing TV was not the way to go as career move or healthy activity.
One of the actors walked by wiping sticky stuff from her face and laughing at a remark someone had made about Yellowstone and Old Face-Full, and Karen got back into boss mode. “Go wash with soap and water, get your makeup fixed, and get ready for your next scene.”
The girl scampered to a bathroom, her chuckle evaporated.
#
A scream brought all but a few in the house to a stop in their activities, then a shriek froze everyone in alarm.
Karen ran to the bathroom where the screaming was happening. The girl who’d taken the facial had gone in there not a moment before; had she slipped, fallen, and hurt herself? Had someone waited there to attack her?
The door was ajar so Karen barreled through, slamming it into the wall hard enough to crack a tile with the door knob. She saw the young woman pressed into the corner beyond the bidet, face averted and covered by one hand, the other hand gesturing wildly at the bathtub, the curtains to which were closed.
Karen and those crowding in behind her stopped muttering questions.
Her hand trembled but Karen reached for the bathtub curtain and pulled it back, slowly at first, then all at once. Brass rings rang on the rod.
Several people shouted and the girl cowering in the corner leaped the bidet, dodged the toilet, evaded a grab by the sink, and shouldered her way out of the room in a panic, followed by a few others.
Karen gaped. There from the shower head pipe dangled the battered, rotting remains of Gena Martinez. It echoed Fred except the tub was empty of water or suds. “Get cameras in here. Use your cell phones. Get this.”
As she commanded it be filmed, Karen watched the horrifying thing begin fading. She thought of layers of flesh being peeled away. She saw irregularly-shaped black holes in major bones where an acid or something had eaten. She understood a time passage shown in decay.
Some already had their cell phones raised, videoing the scene. A professional digital video camera arrived on Tam’s shoulder in time to catch a translucent image fading to nothing. Then it was an empty tub gaped at by shocked, stunned, and sickened people.
This time no one called the cops.
#
Karen took another deep breath. She’d shoo’d the others from the room. Now she and Tam looked for lenses. If a hologram had been projected, she’d find out how. She let Tam use her videographer’s expertise to figure out vectors. “If we saw it from there, they’d want it coming from… here.” Tam pointed to the ceiling, then climbed up onto the tub’s edge to examine things.
“Anything?” Karen’s fear had turned to anger. They’d been set up by Harry to sweeten his stupid ghost-hunting cable special. Her crew was being used as suckers for his con. This outraged her.
She and Tam found nothing. When they left the bathroom, most of the cast and crew had evaporated again. Stepping onto a deck, Karen heard the growl of their cars’ engines echoing in the canyon slot as they fled. She glanced at Tam, who shrugged. “Do you think we have enough raw video?”
Tam nodded. “No problem. I can edit together all we need. We’re sweet.”
“Good, because I wonder if any of them will work with me again.” Karen felt tired. She stood in the late afternoon sun, letting it warm her. Again she heard the snarling and yapping of the coyotes in the already-dark ravine beneath the house. “Sounds like a pack.”
“Always a pack, they’re not loners like some wolves can be.” Tam walked back into the house.
Karen followed. “I’ll help you pack out.” She found that three others had stayed, all males. That meant actors. Their sexism had kicked in; they couldn’t abandon ‘the ladies’ to unknown threat.
Karen put them all to physical labor of a type none were used to. When one balked about lifting one of the recording deck units, Tam snapped, “Put your freakishly big cock into it.”
They got things loaded into the van and Tam drove it with two of the three actors. Karen drove the other, a young man named James Tapper, a blonde surfer-looking type with a soft voice and clear gaze.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Karen asked him, driving down into the canyon behind Karen’s van.
He got shy. “I dunno.” It was as if he didn’t want to say in front of the boss.
Karen got that and told him not to worry. “Work’s over, you’ll all be paid-in-full, and we’re just talking.”
“Well, I guess I kinda have to. Seen one twice now, right?”
“Is that what we say?”
He blinked. As the car rounded a curve he braced himself on the dash. “Isn’t it? I mean, you say it too, didn’t you?”
“I saw something. I don’t know what it was.”
He thought that one over a bit. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”
Karen let him percolate a little more. “Did you see anything unusual today, or the other day? Anyone who didn’t belong, or someone doing something that struck you as odd?”
He gave it some thought, taking things more seriously as he responded to her sober, balanced tone. Finally, he shook his head. “No. Nothing seemed off.”
She had to agree. She’d noticed nothing strange and she’d been all over the venue during the shoot. Tam found no way of projecting a hologram, either. Neither could think of a way to fake it that wouldn’t leave obvious signs.
Had they seen ghosts, then?
#
They found Fred at his apartment on Fremont, dead on his bed, victim of an apparent drug overdose if the paraphernalia and drugs found on scene were any indication. A Medical Examiner’s report would tell the tale, but would take time.
Karen got the news along with everyone else in a bland, disinterested report on TV news. So far, word of the ghostly doings had not leaked to the media.
So how did this Howard guy, the TV producer, hear about it?
A few calls from Tam, who had better contacts from the bottom up in the audio-video world, dredged up the fact that Howard Dominquez Productions had been notorious for years because of paying young cops to be informants for its string of true-crime re-enactment shows. A few cops in each precinct kept ears to the ground and eyes open. If they heard anything HDP might be interested in, they’d report to him and often get a nice little bonus pay day.
Karen seethed to think one of the cops who’d strutted around bullying everyone and charging them with lying and publicity stunts and so on had been a scout for a bottom-feeder TV producer.
Worse yet, now she’d been suckered into working with HDP.
All that, and still no idea about poor Fred and Gena.
#
Along the route from the hill-top canyon house where Karen’s shoot and been finished, courtesy of HDP, Ltd. an alert, or bored, or sight-seeing cop happened to catch a glint of light from alongside the road. Down a steep slope they found Gena Martinez’s car, with her in it. She was battered and decayed.
They postulated she had gone off the road in the dark caused by the overhanging trees, which formed a tunnel that effectively blocked all but noon’s direct sunlight. It disoriented drivers to go from bright to dark so instantly.
Karen remembered turning on her headlights each time through that tree tunnel. She also recalled losing sight of Gena’s car as it trolled behind her into that same tunnel of tree-shadow.
A ripple of gooseflesh prickled Karen’s body head to toe. She’d likely lost sight of Gena’s car because it had veered off a curve and down a slope. Karen frowned, thinking she could have helped, had she known. Should’ve stopped, she told herself. She felt as if she’d let Gena die.
Gena appeared hanging in the tub in a battered, decaying state several days before she’d been found exactly as she’d manifested. A glimpse of the future? Karen gnashed her teeth. What was going on?
When she realized Fred had probably been lying dead at home on the day she saw him escort Fuzzy into the bathroom, on a day she’d seen him interact with Bobby as she’d directed Fuzzy, on a day she’d seen Fred fade from apparently alive to definitely dead, he, too, had not yet been found.
#
“Two people you claimed to see as ghosts, and have on video, turn out to have been dead on the days you claim to have shot those videos. What am I to make of that? What would anyone think?”
Karen stared at the detective, a squat man in a decent suit, shaved closely and smelling of Gio. She did not know what to say. She said nothing as she stood behind her desk, as if it protected her from his implications.
“Gotta think you knew they were both dead, then for what ever reason made those horror movie images of them. Maybe as a way obliquely to report them? Did you have something to do with how they died?”
Karen just shook her head, shocked anyone would think this way.
He persevered, his even, rational tone never wavering in its certainty. “Maybe it’s all drugs, huh? You peddling? We know the kid Fred OD’d. Maybe the Martinez woman had a skin-full when she she went off that road edge, huh?”
Karen sat down before her knees gave out. This somehow unlocked her voice. “No. I’m not. There were no drugs. Oh, maybe some of the males took viagra, but we shot all female at the first venue and—“ She shut her mouth. Her eyes felt dry so she blinked a few times which caused tears to run down her cheeks, which, she was sure, made her look weak, emotional, and most of all guilty.
“So you’re denying any connection to their deaths, in any way?”
Karen just stared at him, as if studying a bizarre aquarium fish.
He snapped shut his notebook.
She jumped.
He stood and nodded, being courtly, his polite exit mocking her obvious guilt.
She felt so obviously guilty.
She had done nothing.
She put her head down and wept.
#
She sat straight up in bed and startled herself by shouting, “White-Out.” Taking a shaky breath, Karen swung her feet to the cold floor and stood. She peed, then went to make some decaf tea. She watched dawn chase the shadows, wondering how she’d look in harsh direct morning light. That Rod Stewart song, “Maggie Mae”, mentioned how it showed her age. At thirty-seven, no partner, Karen sometimes worried about dying alone, no one to hold hands with as the final cold shadows gathered her in a grasp anything but comforting. She’d joke sometimes at parties, if she got tipsy, that she was worried Lesbian Bed Death would overtake her before she had someone to share her bed with.
She’d sent Fred to get White-Out to fix the chip on the apartment doorway.
He’d never come back.
Had he used petty cash to score some fentanyl-laced meth or some other stupidly lethal hit of a drug? Had he gone to his place and OD’d right then?
She obsessed about that chip on the doorway until her stomach growled her into making a couple eggs and an English muffin. She got showered and dressed, then drove to Tam’s studio, a strip-mall slot tucked behind a highway overpass. The edited sweet version of the shoot should be ready, and if so, Karen would turn it in and hope she was still employable.
On the drive to Tam’s a radio report told her about a huge chain-reaction crash in which a dozen people had been killed. It had happened in Nebraska during a white-out, the reporter said. It had been caused not by snow, but by Spring grass-fires. The smoke had been blown by fifty mile-per-hour winds across Route 80, blinding unsuspecting drivers. All it took was the first contact, metal on metal, flesh on plastic, bone on asphalt.
More white, more out, more whips of death manifesting, she thought. Light blocked by smoke, or trees, or by nothing anyone could see. A shadow on flesh, then death swooped. She shuddered, wanting to cry. Where would she manifest? How long would she linger before fading away to nothing?
#
She was still thinking about all this when a glare of sun whited out her vision for an instant and the shadow of an overpass blinked her into a confusion of spatial and temporal derangement. Swerving into the other lane, she discovered the last thing someone experiences when smashed to death by a collision is a shocked, surprised regret. No wait, I have more—
/// /// ///
