The Lioness(39)

Which was when the rifle went off.

At first, Felix thought that he had had the wind knocked out of him. He knew the feeling because it had happened before, playing pickup football as a boy. One minute he was running and then he was being tackled and then he couldn’t breathe. They were all on their sides in the Land Rover, and both of their captors were dead. But then he saw Carmen’s face—the horror and the fear, so much worse than it had been at any point this awful morning, when she had been so very, very brave—and he saw that she was staring at his chest. Reggie was, too, and he seemed just as alarmed as Carmen. And so Felix tried to gaze down, but his neck wasn’t quite right, and the combination of the fact that he couldn’t breathe and the looks on his wife and her publicist’s faces had him scared. Reggie pressed on his chest, and Felix wanted to say, No, please, no, don’t do that; that will only make it hurt more and make it harder to breathe, but when he tried to speak there was so much fluid in his throat and his mouth that it was impossible. It was running down his cheek and his chin.

Which was when it dawned on him. He’d been shot and was about to die too. Just like their captors. He hadn’t had the wind knocked out of him. He’d been shot at point-blank range by a fucking rifle. He was going to die, and just like his sister, it was going to be in a goddamn car. He felt a great wave of terror because this was it, this really was it. He thought of the Dylan Thomas poem that Patton had quoted just yesterday when they’d been having that pleasant lunch on the grass: he didn’t want to rage, he just wanted to cry. But even that was too much. A healthy poet could write about the dying of the light, but a dying writer, a human whose blood was running from his chest like a garden hose? There was no energy to rave, no resolve to rage. There was only soul-crushing fear.

There were so many things that he wanted to say, but he couldn’t, and already he was sinking, fading, the people around him growing foggy and far away, their words as distant and indecipherable as if they were trying to tell him something and he were underwater. But one idea ameliorated the horror and the despair a little bit. Made it bearable. And it was this: Carmen was proud of him. Surely, she was. She would think more highly of him because he had joined her and Reggie. In the end, he hadn’t been sniveling and mousy and pathetic. He had helped. That was, in fact, among his very last thoughts: I’ve been shot just like Charlie Patton’s old elephant, but unlike that creature, I will have left this world fighting. I died like…like…what was it they had called themselves at Katie and David’s wedding? When they were toasting? The lions of Hollywood. That was it. And that was me. A young, roaring, ferocious lion.

I have died like one of the lions of Hollywood.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


    Reggie Stout





Luke Barker’s suicide surprised even the most jaded West Hollywood detectives. The thirty-six-year-old stockbroker was found dead in his apartment on Christmas Day by the building superintendent and Reggie Stout, publicist for so many of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

—Movie Star Confidential, January 1961



Carmen was weeping, and so Reggie held her racking body close and murmured, “Shhhhhh,” over and over, the sound in his mind a bicycle tire losing its air after a puncture. He’d whispered just like that three times in the spring nineteen years ago, though back then he was comforting men who were dying, not a woman who’d suddenly been widowed. He was holding those soldiers’ hands or sitting beside them or, in one case, smothering an abdominal wound with sulfanilamide because that was what he found in the dead medic’s bag. He had supposed back then that whenever he returned home (if he returned home), he’d never see another person shot. He’d never again see the human body savaged by that sort of violence. He thought that was all behind him.

Apparently not.

“Shhhhhh,” he whispered again, rocking Carmen ever so slightly. She had a bad cut on her forehead, but foreheads didn’t bleed much. Still, she was going to have a black eye, that was apparent, and he worried that she might have a concussion—and, if she did, what he should do. And he himself was hobbled: if he were to self-diagnose, he would say that he had sprained his left knee and pulled his left hamstring. He had also done something, though he couldn’t say what, to his left shoulder. It hurt like hell, at least as much as his leg.

They were standing outside the toppled Land Rover, and as he had held Carmen, he had turned her, almost as if dancing, so she was facing away from the vehicle and could not see the three corpses inside it. The thing looked to him like a giant dead beetle. She was sobbing over Felix, but he also suspected this was a reaction to the fact that she had killed a man. They both had. They had, in fact, killed two men. And, yes, they were responsible for Felix’s death, as well.

“We can’t leave them in there,” she said, sniffling, pulling away from him, but still speaking mostly into his shirt.

“They’re better off in there,” he said.

“They’ll…they’ll cook!”

He was surprised she was so explicit. He shuddered to think what condition the bodies would be in by the time a ranger or bush plane spotted the vehicle. The decomposition in this heat inside a metal box? The insects? It wouldn’t be pretty. But, still, it seemed to him much better than being devoured by jackals or vultures like common carrion. Eventually, if he and Carmen survived this, they could have the bodies retrieved and whatever was left of Felix could be properly laid to rest, the ashes or the remains returned to California.