Bone Music

His mouth curls into a sneer. It’s a similar reaction to the one Thor the biker gave her when she refused to pull over on his command; only now she’s seeing it up close.

His baseball cap is on backward, giving her a full view of his bloodshot, rheumy eyes, his bulbous drinker’s nose. He’s stocky and about her age, but years of hard living make him look ten years older, and she’s not sure how much of his bulk is muscle or just beer fat.

His buddy is watching her, too, only his baseball cap is turned forward, hiding his face in shadow. He’s slouched forward on the bar, staring at her. Either he’s the more focused of the two or the more drunk.

She tries to imagine both men crying out in pain the way Jason did the night before when she broke his shoulder. It feels like a version of that old mental trick people recommend when you have to speak in front of a large group. Just imagine everyone in their underwear. But the trick backfires. It doesn’t make the men glowering at her now seem more human or less threatening. It doesn’t, in her mind’s eye, at least, dim the flames of their evident hostility toward her.

“You a cop?” Backward Cap asks.

“You a criminal?” she asks.

“Cops wear bras,” Forward Cap says, his voice just above a growl.

“The lady ones do at least,” his friend adds.

“I wouldn’t know,” Charlotte says.

She turns her attention to the television above the bar.

Both men fall silent, but she can feel their stares.

She’s here to attract a criminal, not create one. But for this to work, the line between incitement and entrapment will be thin. And right now she doesn’t see a lot of other options.

Marty had insisted on his ridiculous test on the way over, and it had been a total flop.

Right after she’d taken the pill, he asked her to start slowly walking toward the nose of the car, into the glare of the headlights so she couldn’t see what he was doing behind the wheel. Then he’d tried startling her with bleats of the horn to see if he could trigger the drug. When that didn’t work, he’d put his foot on the gas and accelerated toward her, slamming on the brakes at the last possible second. It had scared the crap out of her and almost caused Kayla to put a bullet in him. But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t re-create the raw, primal fear of being attacked by Jason in her own home. And neither, apparently, does sitting in this bar, surrounded by guys who look like they want to eat her alive.

When the bartender delivers her Diet Coke—which he’s poured, without ice, into a grimy-looking glass—she grips it gently, realizes she’s in no danger of breaking it, and takes a sip from it like an ordinary person.

The shitty presentation of her drink sends a message. Hit the road. Maybe the guy’s pissed because she asked to be treated the same as his male patrons. Or maybe he thinks she’s in real danger and doesn’t want to deal with the resulting mess if she sticks around.

She pulls out the money clip Marty lent her. The one Kayla gave her a hundred dollars in twenties for. She flashes the bills conspicuously. If her words, attitude, and outfit don’t end up making her a target for a bastard, maybe the money will. The bartender watches her as she pushes a twenty across the bar; then he picks it up, pockets it, and says, “I’ll start you a tab.”

She’s been only pretending to watch the television over the bar, but now the images on-screen capture her full attention. They also take her back to two different places at once, which makes her head spin. Her house, when she’d come across the story of the first murder—The first face, she corrects herself—online a few weeks ago, and Dylan’s office the day before. A lifetime ago.

Even though she’d played coy with him, the truth is she did keep to their agreement. She didn’t even know there’d been a second killing.

Now she does, thanks to an eleven o’clock newscast out of San Francisco.

It’s not a live shot. The helicopter footage of closed-down, traffic-snarled streets in Santa Monica has a subheading that says, LAST WEEK, and the streets are bathed in early-morning light. The chyron at the bottom of the screen says, NEW VIDEO RELEASED IN “MASK MAKER” KILLINGS.

“Can you turn that up please?” she hears herself ask.

The bartender appears in front of her.

“This isn’t a sports bar, girlie.”

“Does that look like sports to you, boyo?”

Forward and Backward Baseball Cap don’t whoop or whistle or make sarcastic sounds of encouragement over her retort. They glare at her instead. On any other night that’d be a bad sign. Tonight it’s a good one. The bartender, however, has followed her gaze. When he sees the footage of flaring police lights followed by a cheap black-and-white headshot of the Mask Maker’s first victim in happier days, Charlotte’s words shame him.

He grabs the remote, raises the volume until the voices of the newscasters are barely audible.

“. . . identified as Kelley Sumter, who’d recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting ambitions and had changed her name to Harley Grey. But aside from the gruesome early-morning discovery that shut down many Santa Monica streets late last week, the rest of twenty-four-year-old Sumter’s remains have not been found. Just her face. And now in this surveillance video, which we must warn you many will find disturbing, we see the man police believe to be Sumter’s killer, the Mask Maker. In it, he stages the horrifying scene that brought a city to a standstill just last week.”

The video’s grainy and black and white, but she recognizes the statue from a visit she’d made to LA with Luanne before she died. It stands at the spot where Wilshire Boulevard dead-ends into Palisades Park, a long, palm-tree-studded pedestrian thoroughfare that sits on a bluff high above Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica Bay.

If the image were clearer, she might be able to make out waves in the dark ocean behind the statue. As it is, the statue’s a shock of bright white amid a jungle of shadows.

The video’s star is a quick-moving figure who appears out of the right side of the frame like an apparition. Quick, stealthy, athletic, and based on what he does next, incredibly strong. He scales half the statue, slides his backpack to one side by dropping one strap from one shoulder; then he fastens something around the statue’s head like a mask. The newscast cuts away before Charlotte, or anyone else watching at home, can linger on the details of the surgically removed human face.

“While there are few identifying features on the video to help law enforcement, detectives are still hoping something about these images will lead to the capture of this killer . . .”

The newscast cuts to a police detective, identified as Manuel Ramirez, in front of a phalanx of microphones. He’s a wall of a man, with salt-and-pepper hair. Charlotte can’t tell if his eyes are sad or tired. “At this point, based on the video, we cannot assume the gender or ethnicity of the suspect. But what we can be sure of is that this person, even if not responsible for the murder itself, is most certainly an accessory. And we are doing everything we can to find them.”

Questions erupt from the reporters. But the newscaster’s narration takes over again.

Just as Charlotte fears, the report cuts to the cell phone footage that horrified her, and the rest of the country, when it hit the Internet. “So far no official statement on whether or not this killing has been linked by forensic evidence to a similar and equally gruesome discovery almost a month ago now at Griffith Observatory. That discovery involved the partial remains of twenty-six-year-old West Hollywood fitness instructor Sarah Pratt.”

It’s just as she remembered it. Jerky footage from someone walking toward the iconic observatory in bright morning sunlight. An entire group has just disembarked from a large tourist bus, which can be heard humming in the background beneath the excited chatter of its passengers.

The man doing the shooting is still getting his bearings, capturing mostly the backs of heads in front of him as he tries to pan up to the observatory’s domed roof. There’s a series of high-pitched cries off to his right. As if they’re unsure whether the cries are of warning or pleas for help, the crowd starts moving in that direction, and the cameraman goes with them. That’s when he captures the James Dean memorial—a bronze bust of the famous actor sitting on a white column of stone emblazoned with his name. The footage freezes at the first glimpse of the ill-fitting, grotesque mask of human skin that’s been stretched across the bronze face underneath. But the audio continues uninterrupted, screams spreading throughout the crowd. The combination of the gruesomely defaced statue and the escalating panic of the crowd terrifies Charlotte as much as it had the first time. It’s worse, maybe, than a gratuitous close-up of the ghostly face itself.