Black Leather Required Read online

  Lloyd took three staggering backward steps away from the demolition, his dropped pop bottle disintegrating on the hot-topped drive. He never saw the pumps blow up because the devilish reptile snatched him high and segmented him with six-inch teeth. One swallow and most of Lloyd was gone. The fireball born of the exploding service station–two bays, four pumps and one hellacious overhead–billowed skyward, shoving the animal forward on a warm, concussive cushion. Its tail sent a fire hydrant spinning across the residential street. As it recoiled from the heat blast, it stomped on a canary yellow Corvette T-top parked at the curb, reducing it to a mashed tinfoil joke. A plume of water spewed twenty feet into the afternoon air. It bent over in a fashion never depicted in children's books and drank from the flow with a mottled crimson tongue.

  Howie Raper, who had been larking on the crapper while Lloyd was stealing the Dr. Pepper from his own machine (Lloyd never paid and always used his key), lay buried from the waist down in a fall of shattered concrete, his left eye blinded by the flow of blood from his scalp. He was dying with his pants around his ankles. The vision flickered in his good eye long enough for him to witness the Rex's departure. It rampaged down the side street and into the twilight, away from the blaze, moving with huge, loping strides. Howie made one peculiar observation before he succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  Jesus God, a purple dinosaur. . .

  Here's Cal Worthington and his dog, Spot!

  Seward's subconscious was obstinate. For some reason it kept repeating the seance. It was like a ride in Disneyland where each diorama of pirates or ghosts or whatever had its own tape loop, so as you rode past them in your little car you got an entire canned spiel in sequence. But if the ride broke down and you got stuck in one place, you'd keep hearing the same snippet over and over and. . .

  "We call out to you now, Uncle Isaias, from our side of the veil. We are calling to you so that you may help us to contact the spirit of Murial MacKenna, dear, dear departed sister. Oh, Uncle Isaias, do you cleave with us this night? Can you heeeaaar me–?"

  When Seward thought of the robot playground that was Disneyland, he was able to fixate on the scam being perpetrated by the woman calling herself Madam Bathsheba Tyndall-Smythe. From behind draperies, an operative of Bathsheba's manned a video projector. Slanted beams bounced from mirror to mirror and recorded images manifested in the Madame's parlor as she held seance. It was taboo for her marks to leave the table. Breaking the circle of hands, she explained, would compel the visiting spirits to instantly depart. They sure as hell would, Seward thought. Worse, they might jump into fast-forward mode and embarrass the bereaved survivors.

  Madame Bathsheba employed a Nubian to prevent customers from dashing through the key curtain in their grief. Seward employed a get-around he'd learned from a college pal who had been an All Star linebacker. As he liked to say, he "executed the reveal." The Nubian had almost executed Seward, trapping him inside a particularly stressful bear hug. But the hoax had been exposed.

  The mirror gimmick was similar to an illusion Seward had seen in the late Unca Walt's Magic Kingdom. Actually, Unca Walt was supposedly freeze-dried in a cryonic fish tank somewhere, so he wasn't late, just postponed. Even after centuries of fakery, the best tricks were still done with mirrors. The glowering, turbaned sentry had turned out not to be a bona fide Nubian, either.

  When Seward managed to slit his eyes, light, and inexplicably, sound flooded his head in a torrent. Fluorescent tubing, miles long and too brilliant. Linens so sterile they whisked away your breath. A mummy. A whipcord dude in a Stetson, stroking an American eagle. Banjo music going a few hundred RPMs too speedy. Seward lost his mental grip and tumbled back down to where the séance was still repeating. A woman's voice, soft and lugubrious, said oh, I AM sorry mister (Seward didn't catch a name), but he's not out of it yet, poor man. Hm? It's major. Sorry.

  Mediums and necromancers of previous centuries had missed out on the advantages of video technology. Science, the so-called converse of the occult, had kept magic thriving by providing unscrupulous phonies with more efficient ways to bilk the gullible, almost as if some sort of gentleman's agreement existed between the fields of fraud and sorcery. The public was so eager to believe in the supernatural. They required very little prompting.

  Well, now they'd better believe, Seward thought. Even if it puts me out of a job.

  The good Dr. Falkenberg had taped up the damage done to Seward's ribs by the ersatz Nubian, and Seward got the usual admonishment on the physical hazards attendant to the profession of occult debunker. Falkenberg himself had begun to sound like a tape at Disneyland. Seward deposited the good faith check from Eloise MacKenna, sister of the dear, departed Muriel.

  Next had come Marybeth's front porch.

  He used his own set of keys to get in. The first thing she said to him had been: "Damn you, David Seward." It was her you-always-show-up-when-I'm-a-mess tone, which meant he could get his own drink while she polished off her after-work shower. He knew his way around her five-room place. He poured a neat scotch and smiled at the thought of Marybeth in her terrycloth bathrobe. Her TV was on, playing to an empty room. As he emerged from the kitchen he caught the tail end of a very weird bulletin indeed.

  Seward did not believe what he saw. It wasn't the first time.

  He had abandoned Marybeth in the shower and run half a block toward Fareholm Drive when he realized he would need a car. He hurried back, scooped up his keys, and forced his aging radials to kiss the pavement with black stripes. Marybeth was still rinsing.

  Just south of Sunset Boulevard the traffic had snarled on Fairfax. By then, he could see too well. He clambered onto the roof of his car to see better. He was so stunned by what he saw that he felt his body galvanized by an urban need long unexperienced: The need to have somebody in authority explain just what the hell was going on here.

  Incoming automobiles had already closed off escape to the rear, the way litter piles up in a drainage grate after a storm. Seward leapt ungracefully from hood to trunk across a chaos of gridlocked cars. So few people yelled at him he almost forgot he was in Los Angeles.

  Amid a clot of uniformed men on the sidewalk he spotted a major's gold oak leaves. He jostled closer through a riptide of gawking pedestrians and was three yards from enlightenment when the building wall folded down to bury them all.

  His knees hit the sidewalk and he banged his forehead against a payphone carrel. Then a falling brick skinned his skull and severed his tie-lines with the real world.

  . . . and his dog, Spot!

  This time, Seward's eyes opened and did not deny the hospital room or the car commercial gibbering from the TV set. In an adjacent bed was the mummy, plastered limbs hanging from wires and slings. One eye was unbandaged. It moved from the TV to check Seward's status, caught him awake at last, and widened.

  "Christ on a fudgsicle stick, boy, it's about time!" It was the major. It was partly the dogface brassiness of the voice, partly the eye, which Seward recognized because his job had always necessitated attention to minute detail. He remembered the major's eyes, watching the building come down to meet them.

  "You've been out colder than a nun's punky for two days!"

  This was verified by an RN who stopped by to make Seward swallow pink pills. He promised to marry her if she would bring more water. She was stocky, pretty, obviously fatigued.

  Seward watched the major's visible eye follow the nurse out, and wondered whether the soldier's body cast could accommodate an erection. Then the major's eye came back to him.

  "You need an update, am I right? Course I am." He let loose a chuckle that was more a cough. "Jeezus. You're gonna love this."

  As he spoke, another Cal Worthington commercial screamed at them from the TV, assaulting their senses.

  At the moment David Seward had been hastily introduced to various airborne portions of the law firm of Pratt, Bancroft, Keanau and Hudson in West Hollywood, Cal Worthington–southern California's emperor of automobiles–was busy do
wn in Long Beach taping new commercials on behalf of movie insomniacs and potential customers up and down the entire Pacific Coast. All night, every night, on nearly every station, the worst Z-movie dregs and awful sitcom reruns the affiliates could get away with were punctuated by an endless barrage of ads for Worthington Ford, Worthington Dodge, Worthington Suzuki. . .

  Time had marched. What once was Ralph Williams and his dog Storm was presently Cal and Spot. Cal's dumb gimmick was to feature a different Spot for each spot, so to speak. An eagle, a rhino, a shark at Sea World. Almost nobody remembered Storm the German shepherd anymore–except for old Firesign Theater fans–and as far as David Seward and millions of other co-Californians could recall, Cal had never stooped to using an actual dog. Something had been lost. Time had marched, and today Cal Worthington was Numero Uno.

  His specialty was gang-buying leftover commercial airtime in the midnight-to-six leg, when the excitement of local TV slowed down a bit. If your set was on, you couldn't miss him, and cable had opened up whole new vistas for Cal to conquer.

  The gangly car huckster had just hung a seven-foot boa constrictor around his neck when the Gorgosaurus rampaged in from frame left, flipping Hyundais and Daihatsus out of its path like cardboard boxes. Spot the boa panicked–maybe its reaction was racial–and slithered tight. Cal's eyes bugged. He took a header, clawing at the snake and hollering. The Gorgosaur flattened a Chevy Luv and spooned up its prey–cowboy hat, serpent, purple face and all. The audio track laid down the crunch of bones. Cal's final words were keep shooting. His cameraman, a UCLA film school grad, held bravely while his crew fled. Footage such as this could make him a star, he thought right up to the moment he died.

  The mummified major was lecturing.

  "Even small-fry artillery pulls their plugs, but what a friggin mess. Each one weighs how many tons? How much stinky, rotten goop all over the billboards and sidewalks if you blow them to hell? The sanitation crews threatened to strike right away. Yecch. You saw Fairfax Avenue."

  Seward remembered.

  He had watched a dreamy banzai wash along at strolling pace, its constituents nothing like the puppets of numberless Ray Harryhausen dino-operas, or flaccid iguanas in cosmetic jazz, or the honorable Godzilla. These monsters glistened and stank; bugs swarmed about them in clouds, riding the sour humidity of their advance. Thousands of beasts, walking north, massy and muscular, their shuffling strides emphasizing the sheer tonnage of living meat in locomotion, their metallic eyes afire with motility and hot, urgent life.

  They were contrary to civilization. Their gigantism made them destructive quite apart from malice. Awkwardly they tipped over trucks and swept down streetlamps with their thick, switching tails. They blundered into each other, then backed into storefronts, demolishing them. Utterly unnoticed in the commotion, the odd screaming pedestrian got mashed into paté.

  On the roof of his car, Seward had been transfixed by the shocking colors. The discordant clash of berserk pigmentation thoroughly contradicted the ho-hum deductions of decades of textbooks. The dinosaurs were vividly hued, bizarre, ultimately shocking.

  The great industrial clockwork that was Los Angeles failed to command respect from these former tenants. The temblors of their footsteps pulverized the concrete; their basic hungers redefined highly-evolved citizenry as junk food. The crowding turned violent when an Allosaurus was gored by a Styracosaur the size of a Patton tank. The shrieking carnivore rolled through the entrance to a supermarket, taking out girders like jackstraws and shattering tons of glass. Its insufficient claws pawing for the puncture in its belly, the Allosaur's every thrash took lives. Gawking shoppers were summarily dismembered or squashed. The Styracosaur rattled its fringe of horns, agitating the flies that had come for blood. The rhinoceros-like forward horn was obscenely red and jutting, an up-thrust wet tusk. The east wall of the building was shrugged off by the thirty-ton Brachiosaurus walking through it. Its swanlike neck paid out like a vast orange ruler incremented in crimson hashmarks. The cutlass teeth of the Allosaur glinted off the supermarket fluorescents as it continued to die. In the parking lot, several tall, ostrich-looking reptiles nibbled at the tops of palm trees nurtured in this modern-day photochemical atmosphere, found the taste of the flowers brackish, and sent the trees plummeting down. Overhead, demoniac black shapes rode the thermals on wings of skin. An immense American flag tore loose from its mooring atop an insurance building and came drifting down, an undulating leaf of clashing colors, falling, falling.

  In Seward's memory the descent of the football-field sized flag seemed the most terrible thing of all. The start flag for the apocalypse, perhaps. He saw billions of reptiles blacking out the concept of countries, casting entire continents into their shadow. This was no Army experiment gone haywire. This might be the end.

  After being awakened by the comedy of the late Mr. Cal Worthington, Seward digested what the Major told him about the coming of the dinosaurs . . . and how they began to disappear as fast as they materialized.

  "Tank crew zeroed in on a biggie," he said. "Poof–that dinosaur frizzed into static. They showed the tape on the news, slo-mo, instant replay and all that. You know when your cable service goes on the blink? Looked just like that. A monster the size of a construction crane just zapped into a cloud of blue-green vapor and swam away on the westerlies. And bam, bam, bam, there were dinosaurs appearing one second and disappearing a few minutes later, like they'd established some kinda beachhead but couldn't hold, you know? Well, militarily speaking, our problem shrank like a gonad in formaldehyde. For a second there it looked like this was going to be a disaster for property values, and now and again somebody got chewed up or squished."

  The major's drone blended with the TV, and Seward let the medication sweep him away for a bit. An ebony shape with hungry bronze eyes scudded past their eighth floor window. He fell into a natural sleep and dreamed again of Disneyland.

  Aguilar had had himself a revelation up there on the Stirrup, or so he kept broadly hinting to Case. He squinted toward the valley of the 'dines, ciggie dangling from his sunburnt lips, an intense expression plastered across his face a hair too obviously. Aguilar rolled his own; the stench was similar to smoldering balsa wood.

  "Nope. Just can't see him yet."

  Case decided to humor him. "Moses, with a new, improved tablet?" He frowned. "Brontosaurus, green mottles, black saddle, alternating red and green on the tail. Black tail tip. You talk to the Shack?"

  "What for?" Case dropped into his overblown imitation of Shack Cocoberra's chili pepper accent: "Chak, he say, pardone señor, we don't go no place today neether." Smoke and lees from the tepid tea in his thermos had congealed into an unlovely paste at the back of his palate. He coughed and spat uselessly. "I'm beginning to think he just wants to rack up overtime, is what I think."

  "Naw. Shack's honest, at least."

  "Overeducated, too." Case knew Shack's accent was mostly for atmosphere in the drive.

  "Besides, it ain't worth it." Aguilar had made the argument before; this would not be the last time. "Easier to finish out, contract a new drive, get the sign-on fee upfront. When the drives move quicker he gets a faster turnaround on the fees."

  "Yeah. Shack's honest." Mojos for authorized drives had to be licensed. In the beginning the licensing was akin to an emergency teaching credential, but the regs had been strengthened with the new administration. Taxes and prices always went up; wages chased but never caught them; with each preordained election came new rules. Always. These were the only facts of life with no ceiling. Thday, mojos were just part of the paperwork.

  "See Jack the Ripper?" Case said.

  "What?"

  "On the mountain top. Playing cards. Who told you to look for the green and black bronto?" Neither man could get his mouth around calling such a creature an Apatosaurus, which seemed just too-too.

  "I saw it in a vision." Aguilar had been chewing peyote again. Case realized he was smoking the fetid, crematory hand-rolleds to deaden the smell of t
he buttons on his breath. Still dope-conscious but curious, Case had tried it with him once. It had tasted like turd-flavored Sen-Sen.

  A Dimetrodon snapped to, displacing air with a pop. Case thought of a flashgun in reverse. The paper lantern struts of its spine rattled and the webwork of translucent hide refracted the setting sun into an instant rainbow before the two startled drovers.

  "Dammit," said Case. "I wish they wouldn't come in so goddamn close." The big dinosaur belched and tromped away on skinny, bent legs, defying gravity.

  "That's why we be here, amigo," Aguilar grinned. "Keep 'em off the expressways." Dinosaur gridlock was still an occasional problem.

  "What about the green and black one–the one your vision said you were supposed to look for?"

  "Just supposed to find him; that's it."

  "And all will be revealed unto us . . ."

  "Don't make fun." Aguilar's face went dead serious so fast it was hilarious. He could get religion at the most bone-tickling times.

  Case felt too centered to argue. "Whoa, me friend," he said. And it was good–the view, the time of day, a smoke and a partner and breathing space and a dash of peace of mind. Wasn't that what all the Suits cried the blues for lacking?

  In his lifetime Whitman Case had bailed out of a flaming bomber, survived seven serious auto accidents and three broken limbs, weathered eight muggings or robberies (two at gunpoint; another two during which he'd gotten the drop and walked away unrobbed), killed four men that he knew of in combat, missed catching a plane that subsequently crashed near Elkins Air Force Base due to pilot error, and nearly drowned once by getting his ankle tangled in a rope while white-water rafting down the Colorado. He had lowered his cholesterol and raised his fiber intake. He had lived through two surgeries–tonsils, and a detached cornea at forty-five. He had duly earned and spent several million American dollars, fathered no children, and manned three times, beyond which he had "seriously" cohabited with seven women, not counting Iris, who was as crazy as a dung beetle in a hubcap, and counting Pearl, whom he still thought of every single day. He had smoked maybe five zillion cigarettes and tipped back an oil freighter or so of coffee, black. He had lived drunk and sober, rational and pissed off beyond sanity, benevolently then selfishly, and did not believe in supernatural deities. Ever since he had first seen a dinosaur picture book as a child he had trusted in what the scientists had said.