Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

“Hey, man, hurry up,” Bill said to me. “I’ll get the lights. You bag up the money and the receipts. We’ll drop it off at the bank and then tap the beer.”

But I was still back there a few scenes. The terror and grief of her face. And the humiliating moment when Spence had spoken our collective fantasy out loud. Something had changed in me in those moments. Good or bad, I couldn’t tell yet. “I got this sore throat.”

“Yeah,” Bill said, “it’s such a bad sore throat you can’t even swallow beer, huh?”

Spence laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like a bad one, all right. Can’t even swallow beer.”

I could tell Bill was looking at me. He was the only one of us who could really intimidate people. “So what the hell’s really goin’ on here, Jason?”

I sounded whiny, resentful. “I got a sore throat, Lord and Master. If that’s all right with you.”

“It’s when I said I’m gonna bang her, wasn’t it?” He laughed. “In your mind she’s still this scream queen, isn’t she? Some freaking virgin. She’s nobody now.”

“Then why do you want to screw her so bad?” I said.

“Because then I can say it, asshole. I can say I bopped Michele Danforth.” He looked at both me and Spence. “I’ll have actually accomplished something. Something real. Not just all these fantasies we have about going to Hollywood.”

“I shouldn’t have done it to her,” I said. “We shouldn’t have said anything to her at all. She had her own reasons for vanishing like that.”

“Yeah, because she was getting fat between movies and they probably didn’t want her anymore.” He laughed.

Hard to tell which rang in his voice the clearest — his cruelty or his craziness. Bill was climbing out on the ledge again. Sometimes he lived there for days.. Times like these, we’d get into shoving matches and near-fights.

Spence’s attitude had changed. You could see it in his dark eyes. He’d thought it was pretty funny and pretty cool, Bill screwing a scream queen. But now I could tell that he thought it was just as twisted as I did. Bill always got intense when he went after something. But this went beyond intensity. He actually looked sort of crazy when he talked about it.

“Maybe Jason’s right, Bill,” Spence said gently. “Maybe we should just leave her alone.”

The look of contempt was so perfectly conjured up, it was almost like a mask. So was the smirk that came a few seconds later. “The Wuss brothers. All these fantasies about what great talents you are. And all the big times you’re gonna have in Hollywood. And then when you get a chance to have a little fun, you chicken out and run away. We could all screw her, you know. All three of us. A gang-bang.”

“Yeah,” I said, “now there’s a great idea, Bill. We could kill her, too. You ever thought of that?”

“Now who’s crazy? All I was talking about was the three of us—”

I was as sick of myself just then as I was of Bill. I was already making plans to go call the community college again. See when I needed to enroll for the next semester. I knew that maybe I wouldn’t go through with it. But right then, with Bill’s mind lurching from a one-man seduction to a three-man rape... Prisons were filled with guys who’d had ideas like that. And then carried them out.

“I got to finish up here,” I said, working on the cash register again.

“Yeah, c’mon, Spence, let’s leave the Reverend here to pray for our souls. We’ll go get drunk.”

Spence and I had never been very good about standing up to Bill. So I knew what courage it took for Spence to say, “I guess not, Bill. I’m not feeling all that well myself.”

He called us all the usual names that denote a male who is less than masculine. Then he went over to a stand-up display of the new Julia Roberts movie and started picking up one at a time and firing them around the store. They made a lot of noise and every time one of them smashed into something — a wall, a line of tapes, even a window — both Spence and I felt a nervous spasm going through us. It was like when you’re little and you hear your folks having a violent argument and you’re afraid your dad’s going to kill your mom and you hide upstairs under the covers. That kind of tension and terror.

I came around the counter fast and shouted at him. Then I started running at him. But he beat me to the door.

He stood there. “Good night, ladies. Every time I see you from now on, I’m gonna punch your ugly faces in. You two pussies’ve got an enemy now. And a bad one.” He’d never sounded scarier or crazier.

And with that, he was gone.

It was misting by the time I got back to my room-and-a-bathroom above a vacuum cleaner-repair store. I had enjoyed the walk home.

The mist was dirty gold and swirling in the chilly night. And behind it in doorways and alleyways and dirty windows the eyes of old people and scared people and drug people and queer people and insane people stared out at me, eyes bright in dirty faces. This was an old part of town, the buildings small and fading, glimpses of ancient Pepsi-Cola and Camel cigarette and Black Jack gum signs on their sides every other block or so; TV repair shops that still had tiny screens inside of big consoles in the windows for nostalgia’s sake; and railroad tracks no longer used and stretching into some kind of Twilight Zone miles and miles of gleaming metal down the endless road. There was even a dusty used bookstore that had a few copies of pulps like The Shadow and Doc Savage and Dime Detective in the cracked window, and you could stand here sometimes and pretend it was 1938 and the world wasn’t so hostile and lonely even though there was a terrible war on the way. It was a form of being stoned, traveling back in time this way, and a perfect head trip to push away loneliness.

To get to my room you took this rotting wooden staircase up the side of the two-story stucco-peeling shop. I was halfway up them before I looked up and saw her sitting there. The scream queen. If the misting bothered her, she didn’t show it.

She smoked a cigarette and watched me. She looked pretty sitting there, not as pretty as when she’d been in the movies, but pretty nonetheless.

“How’d you find me?”

“Asked the guy at the 7-11 if he knew where you lived.”

“Oh, yeah. Dev. He lives about three down.” I smiled. “In our gated community.”

“Sorry I got so hysterical.”

I shrugged. “We’re video-store geeks. We can get pretty hysterical ourselves. You should’ve seen us at our first Trekkie convention in Spock ears and shit. If you had any pictures of us from back then, you could blackmail us.”

She smiled. “That’s assuming you had any money to make it worthwhile.”

I laughed. “I take it you know how much video-store geeks make.”

“L.A. I must’ve done three hundred signings in video stores.” The smile again. It was a good clean one. It erased a lot of years. “Most of you are harmless.”

“We could always go inside,” I said.

After I handed her a cheap beer, she said, “I didn’t come up here for sex.”

“I didn’t figure you did.”

She glanced around. “You could fix this up a little and it wouldn’t be so bad. And those Terminator posters are a little out of date.”

“Yeah. But they’re signed.”

“Arnold signed them?”

I grinned. “Nah, some dude at a comic-book convention I went to. He had some real small part in it.”

She had a sweet laugh. “Played a tree or a car or something like that?”

“Yeah, you know, along those lines.”

She’d taken off her brown velour jacket. Her white sweater showed off those scream-queen breasts real, real good. It was unsettling, sitting so near a girl whose videos had driven me to rapturous self-abuse so many times. Even with the added weight, she looked good in jeans. “I’ll make you a deal, Jason.”