Malibu Burns - Mark Richardson

Malibu Burns by Mark Richardson

Book excerpt

Malibu Makimura was drawing the final touches to a woman’s portrait when she felt the creeping sensation of someone else’s emotion. Her lower half twitched as the emotion hit her feet and slithered up her legs, just like how a snake feels vibrations on the surface of the earth. Only a snake’s sensory capabilities are more dependable than her psionic powers, which were annoyingly unpredictable.

Malibu focused on this feeling as it methodically slithered its way up her leg. The word sinister sprang to mind. Was that even an emotion? No, it probably wasn’t. Still, sinister was the word that best described what Malibu felt.

Malibu leaned back in her chair, spun the pencil between her fingers, and focused on trying to shake loose from the alien feeling. She shook her body, head to toe.

No dice—the emotion held firm.

In fact, it continued its upward climb. It no longer felt like a snake, but an octopus wrapping its tentacles around her limbs, her neck, suffocating her.

“Are you okay, dear?” asked the older woman whose portrait Malibu had been sketching. The pancake makeup on the woman’s face had been packed on extra thick, her cheeks colored red, her eyebrows shaved and painted on like big, wide, black rectangles. She looked pitiful and clownish.

“I’m fine,” said Malibu, which was suddenly true. The alien emotion, although still poisonous in nature, felt weirdly seductive as well, and almost as if Malibu was pulling the sensation toward her. She could sense the emotion slip through her skin and seep inside and spark to life something savage and angry that had been dormant.

Yes, hissed Malibu’s inner voice, a presence she was loath to acknowledge. It welcomed the feeling, found nourishment in its villainous nature.

“Can I take a peek?” the woman asked, meaning the portrait.

“Not yet. It’s not quite done.”

Malibu returned her focus to her work. She drew caricatures, although not the goofy, comical types you’d see drawn at tourist hot spots. Malibu’s drawings were surrealist abstracts, a blend of Picasso and Dali. She liked what she had done with this one. The eyes were particularly cool. One was placed high on the head, and the other down near the cheek. The contrast worked. Overall, she made a point to have the woman come across as interesting and not ridiculous; Malibu could be thoughtful that way. The portrait was more or less finished, but on a whim Malibu added one more feature—a knife. Working quickly, she drew it so it looked as if it had been recently plunged into the side of the woman’s head. Small traces of blood covered the part of the knife that touched the head. Perfect.

Malibu picked up the canvas and turned it to give the woman a look at what she’d drawn. The woman’s eyes narrowed and then widened. A horrified expression spread across her face.

“That’s me?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But it doesn’t look anything like me.” The woman’s thin lips narrowed into a line.

“It’s your essence.”

“My essence?” Her lips pursed, the makeup around them cracked.

“Think of it this way,” Malibu said, trying to add a professorial air to her voice. “We all exist in different realms simultaneously, parallel worlds. I focus on breaking down the doors that separate those realms of existence and capturing different elements of who you truly are. That’s what I draw, those different elements.”

It was a practiced speech, one designed to make the subject feel like a mystery was being unveiled. Years earlier, Malibu had read part of an essay on Charles Manson that discussed his obsession with the Beatles’ White Album, how he believed its songs had a hidden, deeper meaning, a meaning the Beatles themselves were unaware of. As if an unknown force was able to use the pop group to channel its message. Malibu obviously didn’t approve of the murderous path Manson and his family had followed, but she was drawn to the multi-world imagery. Mainly, though, she’d found the speech helped to pacify unhappy clients.

“I…I see,” the woman said. She leaned forward to get a closer look. A sense of understanding seemed to wash over her face. Her eyes brightened, sparkled, and the painted-on eyebrows were lifted higher on her forehead. “I love it!”

“I’m so happy.” The malevolent feeling wrapped its tentacles more tightly around Malibu’s body and squeezed. It felt hard to breathe.

“The knife is so…” The woman trailed off, smiled, as if happy to have been let in on a delicious secret. The woman dug into her enormous purse and pulled out five shekels. She placed the coins into Malibu’s hand, took the drawing, and hurried toward the exit.

Malibu worked at the Kit Kat Club, a women-only nightclub on Green Street, two blocks off Broadway, situated on the edge of North Beach. She had been employed there for three weeks; hired by the club’s owner, the multi-jowled, wig-wearing Hilda Martinez. Hilda had played a hunch and brought Malibu on board in the hopes her off-center artistic talent would appeal to the club’s refined clientele. Sadly, the experiment hadn’t paid off. There was scant customer demand for portraits. The well-heeled women who frequented the club for the most part didn’t want their portraits drawn; they wanted to cut loose. Malibu had caught murmurings within the ranks that Hilda was reconsidering her decision and Malibu’s days were likely numbered.

The base pay at the club was dismal, and the cocktail waitresses, bartenders, and other young women who worked there were all expected to survive on tips. To drum up business, most wore eye-catching getups: miniskirts, Daisy Duke shorts, fishnet stockings, cleavage-flashing tops, stiletto heels, and extra-fragrant perfume designed to climb up a customer’s nose, tickle the inside, and solicit an animalistic reaction.

Malibu didn’t consider herself a prude, and although she was nineteen and could have pulled off one of the risqué costumes, she had always been on the mousy side, and frankly didn’t feel comfortable advertising herself that way. When working, she opted to wear dresses that fell to just above the ankles and thin cardigan sweaters. Like her drawings, the outfits failed to generate any significant customer interest. Really, she was something of a bust.

On her first day working at the club, Malibu had gathered that the real action was found in the back rooms. What happened there was never discussed, but it was not hard to guess.

Malibu fiddled with the five shekels she gotten for her portrait, juggled them in the palm of her hand. A few feet away, a Persian girl in a belly dancer outfit sashayed toward a table where a sad-looking woman decked out in bling-bling jewelry sat alone. Malibu could hear the girl whisper in the woman's ear: Would you like a private party? The woman stifled a smile and nodded. Malibu watched as the belly dancer took the woman by the hand and walked them to a side door.

Perhaps it was inevitable Malibu would find herself slipping into a more racy outfit and going down that route as well. After all, a girl needs to survive and her options were limited. And since the tragedies with her parents, she was on her own. Now surely the backroom shenanigans paid much more than five measly shekels. Besides, she would do almost anything to avoid returning to the homeless encampment.

So…

The black-hearted alien emotion gave her neck a squeeze, as if protesting that it was being ignored. Malibu dropped the shekels into the side pocket of her sweater. She let her eyes roam around the room until they landed on a woman on the opposite side seated at a round table sipping a cocktail. She wore a leopard-spotted dress. In the filmy light, it was hard to gauge her age. Forties? More likely fifties, but she was put together in such a neat package, gave off such an air of authority, that her age seemed irrelevant. One of her legs was hooked over the other at the knee. The foot in the air wiggled. Her tortoise-shell glasses sat perched at the end of her nose. As Malibu’s eyes lingered, she felt the emotion become fiercer, overwhelming, and the voice inside her grew louder, as if the two entities fed off each other.

The woman turned her head and looked directly at Malibu. She pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, appearing to try and get a clearer look. Forcing the presence inside her down, Malibu blinked and diverted her eyes, as if it was deadly to look at the woman for too long, as if she’d snuck a peek at the sun and now her pupils burned.

Leaving her art stand, Malibu walked behind the bar where Hilda was hand-washing glasses.

“Do you know her story?” Malibu asked Hilda. “The one in the leopard-print blouse.”

Hilda’s wig that day was a bright purple. She wore an extra-large black kimono with red polka dots draped over her rotund figure. Hilda lifted her eyes and glanced at the woman. With a frown, she said, “That’s Luciana. She works for the Chairman. I suggest you steer clear.”

“The Chairman?” Malibu snuck another peek at Luciana, welcomed the burn, and wanted to feel it even more. As if listening to her plea, the dark emotion practically strangled her. She coughed.

“Steady,” Hilda said, and patted her on the back. “That’s right, the Chairman.” She didn’t elaborate. She’d finished washing the glasses and had started using a fresh towel to dry them.

The Chairman. It sounded cartoonish, a name you might give a crime boss featured in a comic book. Malibu didn’t know who the Chairman was and she frankly didn’t care. Her mind was fixed on Luciana. “So was she his moll or something?”

Hilda shrugged. “Doesn’t fit the profile. People say she’s a witch, that she can control the weather, crazy shit. Like I said, it’s best to stay clear.”

“Control the weather?”

Hilda shrugged again.

Malibu continued to look at Luciana, who now had her head tilted back and seemed to have let her mind drift elsewhere, maybe contemplating the meaning of the universe. The sinister emotion shifted again, and now it felt like a black cloud that hung all around her. In this form, it was slightly easier to breathe.

Hilda tried to slip around Malibu so she could reach a clump of dirty glasses on the opposite side, but the area behind the bar was tight and her body was so wide the two women were momentarily stuck at their midsections. Malibu sucked in her stomach, which allowed Hilda to squeeze through.

“A witch. That’s crazy. I bet she helps with gambling, drugs, extortion—that sort of thing,” Malibu offered.

Hilda frowned. She made a wheezing sound as she labored to catch her breath after the recent brief exertion. “You watch too many movies.”

Malibu couldn’t argue with that. She was a movie buff, always had been, as far back as she could remember. Malibu saw a man approach Luciana’s table. She’d never seen a man in the club before, and she half expected him to burst into flames. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a shiny bald head and a thick neck. His face had a grim, serious expression, his mouth locked in a frown. He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and white gloves. He was the spitting image of Max in Sunset Boulevard, a movie Malibu had watched dozens of times despite it being nearly one hundred years old.

Max, as Malibu thought of him, bent at the waist and whispered into Luciana’s ear. As he spoke, Malibu felt the black cloud that had been lingering around her evaporate. Luciana took another sip of her drink and placed the still half-full glass down on the table. She stood as Max dropped some shekels on the round cocktail table. Malibu watched as Max cupped Luciana by the elbow and led her out the exit.

Malibu left the club at exactly sunset—7:48 p.m.—slipping on a trench coat and walking outside. Fog had rolled in and coated the streets and buildings with dew. It was twilight, and the remaining sunlight slipped between the large wisps of fog, the light becoming splintered and scattered and as it reflected off the damp streets.

Malibu walked to Chinatown, onto Waverly Place, to the unmarked entrance of a Memory Station den. The place was a relic, one of the few dens that still existed, built at a time when such establishments were common. Before most people—those who could afford them, at least—had consoles installed in their homes. Malibu gripped a handrail as she walked down a steep and narrow stairwell, pushed open a door. A gusty wind blew down the stairs and followed her through the entrance.

A lonely looking man sat on the floor, shoulders slumped, head down, eyelids heavy. As the door slammed shut, he pulled his gaze up at Malibu. He wore wingtip shoes that looked like they were a million years old with holes on the bottoms and no shoelaces. With drowning eyes, he asked Malibu, “Can you spare a shekel? I want to see my daughter again. I want to see my wife.”

Malibu reached inside her trench coat and pulled a coin out of the pocket of her sweater. She walked to where the man sat and placed the dirty coin on his open palm. His hands looked rusty and covered with grease. He squeezed the coin tightly, his eyes bugged out of his head. He sprung to his feet with surprising vigor and hurried to a counter where an old Chinese woman sat leafing through a magazine. The woman’s hair was gray and thinning, coarse and wild, like a used Brillo pad.

“One hour, one hour, one hour,” the man said as he smacked the coin loudly down onto the counter.

The woman picked the shekel up off the counter with her thumb and forefinger, as if she were lifting something distasteful, lifting a turd. She nodded toward a hallway. “Room three.”

After the man brushed past her, Malibu went to the counter and said, “I’ll take an hour as well.” As she spoke, Malibu touched the old woman’s hand and got a glimmer of her thoughts. She had only seen the thoughts of one other person, her father. It was jarring to have it happen again, and with a stranger. What had triggered the insight, what had caused the thin fabric that kept their two realities apart to dissipate? Malibu could only guess. The woman’s mind was focused on the prosaic realities of life—rent, food, family. Before Malibu could get a fix on anything more substantial, the psychic vision stopped, like a wall being put in place.

“Room number nine,” the woman said as she pulled her hand away from Malibu’s touch.

The hallway was covered with a filthy, threadbare carpet. The door to room nine was open. Malibu entered and closed the door behind her. Inside the walls were yellow, the paint badly chipped. There was a recliner and above it a console, which looked like an old-style hair dryer, the kind you used to see in vintage black-and-white movies. The red power light was on. Malibu sat in the chair and pulled the console down over her head. She imagined she could feel it synch with her cortex, a marriage of mind and machine. Where in the brain were memories stored? It was a question Malibu had asked before, but never bothered to investigate.

Within seconds, she was thrust into a sleeplike state, eyes shut, eyeballs flicking left and right.

But she wasn’t asleep, and she could still maintain control of her conscious thoughts, enough to let her mind sort through a catalog of memories until she landed on the right one. It was a memory she had returned to again and again. She felt it marked a turning point in her life, at least with how she interacted with her father. With each review, what struck Malibu was how many new details were uncovered, how the scene came into sharper focus. When living through an event, it seemed she could only process so much. Images, like a movie, danced across her mind.

Santa Monica beach. October.

Despite it being the early weeks of fall, the rays of the sun hit like a hammer. Malibu watched her sixteen-year-old self as she splashed in the Pacific Ocean, just a few feet from the shore. At the edge of the water was her mother, a smile spread across her face. Malibu noticed that her mother’s toes were dug into the wet sand and her arms were slightly pinked, shoulders freckled. Her blonde hair fell from under a wide-brimmed hat, and in her oversized sunglasses and black two-piece bathing suit her mother sparkled like a movie star.

Farther up the beach, her father sat upright on a beach towel. Unlike her mother, he wore no hat or sunglasses or any protection from the sun. Even though he was sitting down, Malibu could see that he was trim, his stomach flat and as firm as a surfboard. He was reading a book and his face wore a serene expression. The same expression Malibu had seen in all the pictures taken of her father as far back as his days as a boy in Japan. His hair was long, falling down to his shoulders. Crow’s feet had formed around the edges of his eyes. He wore a leather necklace with a shark tooth dangling at the end. He looked more like a surfer than the physicist professor he was.

In The Blog

Best Noir Fiction