Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,47

don't give a shit about what you want." I pause. "What I want to know is what happens if I go to the police? What if I lay out a scenario and I think it's a pretty goddamn plausible one about Rip Millar and what happened to Kelly Montrose and what if I go to the police and - "

"No, you won't do that," Trent says tiredly, turning away from me. "You won't do that, Clay."

"Why are you so sure about that?" I toss the cigarette, half smoked, onto the pier and grind it out with my shoe.

"That girl you beat up?" Trent says. "The actress. The one from Pasadena?"

I immediately start walking away from Trent.

"The one that your scumbag lawyer paid off? Two years ago?"

Trent keeps following me.

"She's willing to talk," Trent says, keeping up. "Did you know she was pregnant at the time of the assault? Did you know that she lost the baby?"

Amanda Flew's body is never found but a video of what appears to be her last hours is posted on the Net in a clip and you have to pretend you're not watching it in order to get through it. Amanda is in a motel room nude and incoherent and being shot up by men wearing ski masks. She has a seizure and two of the enormous men hold her down while her body thrashes on the newspapers taped to the floor, and then tools are removed from what looks like a beer cooler. The men take turns urinating on her and they keep slapping her face to keep her awake. And then the seizures become more intense and during one of them an eyeball is dislodged, bulging from its socket, and then a semierect cock is pushed in and out of her slack mouth, and then it's removed once blood starts running down her face, and it's at about this point in the roughly ten minutes of footage that you finally see it: when the drugs start wearing off and Amanda realizes what's going to happen to her and she stares into the camera lucidly for one long moment, her panicked expression becoming something else. And then the thing that makes me shut it off happens: you realize this isn't just about Amanda. I can't help thinking that it's happening because of me.

I avoid everything. Everything goes quiet once the video is posted and yet no one concedes that the video is real. There are actual arguments about its authenticity. People think these are outtakes from a horror movie Amanda shot the year before and not even the makers of the horror movie can stop this new narrative from taking shape. I order two bottles of gin from Gil Turner's and once they're delivered I make plans to leave for Vegas and reserve a suite at the Mandalay Bay but then cancel it even though I've already packed two bags, and the moon rises over the city and for the first time in what seems like years there are no cars on Elevado Street tonight, and in a warm bath I think about calling a girl who I know would come over but then I'm just lying in bed with the Bose headphones, drinking from the second bottle of gin, and then I'm dreaming about the dead boy again and now he's standing in the bedroom, moving softly toward the bed, whispering for me to come join him in his endless sleep, and in the dream the palm trees are taller and bending in the wind outside the sliding glass wall of 1508 and when I see the bruises on his face from where I struck the boy in the previous dream the phone starts ringing, waking me up, but not before the boy whispers Save me ...

What did Rip tell you?"

It's Julian and I'm just waking up and it's late afternoon, the sky dimming into dusk. "What?" I clear my throat, and ask it again. "What?"

"I know you saw him," he says. "I know he's looking for me. What did he want?"

I barely manage to sit up. "I think ... in terms of ... what's going on - "

Julian stops me automatically. "There's nothing that's going to connect him to that." The following silence confirms that we both know what he's referencing: Amanda.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "Where are you?"

"We're leaving tonight," Julian says, downplaying the urgency in his voice.

"Who's leaving?"

"Me and Rain," Julian says. "We're leaving tonight."

"Julian," I start and then