His ideal target was the early-retirement Silicon Valley exec who’d gotten his monster stock payout and thought that Hollywood was way more glamorous than Nerdville because you get to hang out with movie stars and maybe get a piece of movie star ass from time to time. What was a billion dollars for anyway, if you couldn’t do that?
Beauchamps would never touch a media light of any kind—movie, video, singer, not even one of the talking heads on E!—because the publicity would go on forever. Publicity, he thought, was his biggest enemy and he was careful not to attract any.
* * *
—
IN A SECOND BEDROOM, John Rogers Cole was working his way through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A morning insomniac, he found Jest usually helped him grab a couple more hours of sleep before he had to start the day.
Cole was a nondescript sort, which was the way he liked it. If you were nondescript, you didn’t have a cop looking in the driver’s-side window at a traffic stop and asking himself, “Say, don’t I know that face?”
Of middle height, he had fine brown hair, worn short, brown eyes, an ordinary nose and chin, and narrow shoulders. He usually wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. The shirt concealed a gym rat’s body: he had biceps like a drywaller and could run three miles in eighteen minutes. His current driver’s license and Visa card said his name was Douglas Moyers, but the gang all called him Cole.
His lack of facial drama didn’t help him with women, who always went for the square-jawed, blunt-nosed, big-shouldered guys like Beauchamps, but he did all right. In Cole’s experience, if you sat around in Starbucks long enough, drinking lattes and reading Jest, something would come along. He dug librarian types, black-rimmed glasses and an overbite.
* * *
—
ALSO SLEEPING ALONE, on a mattress on the floor of the home office, was Beauchamps’s half brother Clayton Deese, the cannibal. He’d been all over the internet since the FBI said he’d eaten some lady, and maybe a couple of guys, which Cox and Cole and even, to some extent, Beauchamps found disturbing.
Not only the eating part but the fact that cannibals tend to attract the eye, and Deese had a distinctive face and those tattoos. He’d always been clean-shaven, right up to the time he left New Orleans. He now wore a reddish beard that qualified him to hunt alligators down in the bayous, but there was something about his eyes that still attracted attention.
He looked like a mean motherfucker, and there was no way to cover it up. When a normal law-abiding citizen looked at Clayton Deese, his first thought was that Deese belonged in jail. Not that Deese ran into many normal citizens.
Deese dreamed in full-color porn; in between erotic dreams, he’d wake and his mind would snap to his problem, which was the same it had been in New Orleans. He had to get away. He was gone, but he hadn’t yet gotten away. He needed a bunch of money for that and he didn’t have it.
* * *
—
THEY WERE all sleeping soundly when, at sunrise, there was a sudden burst of dings from the living room. And then another burst, at a slightly different pitch. Beauchamps quit snoring and launched himself from the bed and went running out of the room, his REM sleep hard-on leading the way like a wobbly flashlight.
And then the shit hit the fan.
Like a fuckin’ machine gun, which is what Cox screamed it was.
When it had ripped open the dawn, she’d sat up in bed, her mouth dropped open, she’d shrieked, “Fuckin’ machine gun,” she’d grabbed a terry-cloth robe, and run after Beauchamps, pulling the robe on as she ran.
Deese bolted out of the home office, and Deese and Cox followed Beauchamps to a tinted-glass window in the family room that looked across the backyard to the house behind them. Men in dark uniforms were running through their yard and setting up behind palm trees, the deeply shaded lawns sparkling with muzzle flashes of dozens, and maybe hundreds, of fired cartridges, going both in and out of the house.
Beauchamps said, “Cops,” and then Cole ran in, fully dressed and carrying a book, and Beauchamps said, “They’re all over Nast’s place. They’ll get here, sooner or later. We gotta get outta here. Grab what you can, meet in the garage. One fuckin’ minute.” And they all ran back to their respective rooms.