Read Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) for Free Online Page B

imaginative gourmet ways to carve living flesh with a serrated knife and Dickie Three generally relegated to holding down whatever part of her they were busy on at the moment
.

    While Howard stared open-mouthed and trembling. Twitching. Scotch forgotten. Bolted to his chair.

    For twenty-five minutes of this.

    Until the coup de grace.

    At which point he stood up.

    Shouting. The scotch dribbling down to the wall-to-wall carpet.

    “Fuck! You motherfucking cocksucking
assholes!
”

    They’d decided to shoot the end of it right up close.

    Finally, thought Howard, a close-up.

    He giggled. Excitement and terror and scotch all kicking in at once. An extremist cocktail.

    Oh, my God, Greta, I’m going to watch you die
.

    On the screen Dickie Three ran gut-bobbing back to the camera and hauled it forward until it stood just three feet from the now-blurry blood-drenched sheets and the glistening red body on the bed that still breathed in and out and tried to move, just barely.

    He focused the camera.

    And Howard realized two things simultaneously.

    One, it was not Greta.

    And two, it was not murder.

    And he could have killed the whole bunch of them right then and there for a moment, tracked them down and hacked them to fucking bits, for putting him through this.

    Not Greta. And not death.

    Oh, the girl was a look-alike all right, very similar, but they had left her face pretty much alone all this time except for slashes across the cheeks and shit, the nose was wrong, the eyes were slightly wrong, the cheekbones a bit too prominent—and now that he thought about it, now that the spell was broken, he realized he’d been stupid ever to have thought it could be Greta in the first place, because Greta was the same age as he was or maybe slightly less and this girl was hardly out of her twenties, the age she was then, the age she remained in his imagination.

    He felt like a total fucking idiot.

    Damned if he didn’t know a latex appliance when he saw one.

    They were good. Very good. Worthy of Tom Savini. Probably expensive too. Maybe even state of the art. But a motionless closeup camera is a goddamn merciless thing and you could see where the living flesh stopped and FX began as clearly as though they’d signposted them.

    So that when the knife slit her open and the hand slippedinto what was supposed to be Greta’s chest and pulled out what was supposed to be Greta’s beating heart but was not Greta’s heart nor anybody’s nor even Greta, Howard was already on his feet.

    Cursing. Mad. Dispirited and disappointed as hell.

    And ripped off again.

    A week later he thought, well, it was still one hell of a movie, marked it, and added it to his collection.

    A month later he saw her.

    Really saw her.

    She was walking down Central Park South half a block from his apartment just as he was leaving and she looked right at him without the slightest sign of recognition and he damn near walked into a uniformed doorman hailing a taxi—because the Greta he remembered, the almost-Greta in the film, had been an attractive woman, sure, but this Greta, this older, graceful Greta of the perfect legs and silk Armani jacket was absolutely stunning.

    What in the hell had happened to her?

    He could barely get her name out.

    “Greta?”

    “My God. Howard.”

    And her smile was all he needed to ask her out to dinner.

    Miraculously, she accepted.

    Over duck with truffle sauce at Cafe Luxemborg on the Upper West Side he told her nothing about the very strange movie experience he had recently had and everything about investing—the kick of winning big when his choices were successful, playing down his utter fury at the occasional inevitable defeat. He told her stories. About riding high on Apple and Nintendo and dumping Exxon at exactly the right moment.

    And what was she doing?

    Well, films had not worked out for her. He’d guessed asmuch, naturally. She’d hung around L.A. for a couple of years and then moved into