"You like the Doors?"

The long-haired man has his legs up on the coffee table. Larry kneels at the edge of the glass, chasing down the last of a line with a well-worn $50 bill.

"Yeah, I like the Doors. Morrison's one of the best. Who doesn't like the Doors?"

His heart's rattling in his chest, the back of his throat stings like he's just done a fat line of Comet, but the snow's thick on the ground tonight, boys, and it's all free — somebody else brought the goods. This guy's been talking about politics, or the cops, or the Rosicrucians, or something — but Larry hasn't been paying much attention to that. Just listening to the pleasant sound of it, the dark honey sound of his voice, and enjoying the start of a good party. It's only just starting.

The party has contracted to a narrow point in time, just the two of them. Just a mirror and a 14-karat gold razor and a man's hand on the back of his neck.

"Morrison went both ways, did you know that?"

Good blow, good music — floating out of the stereo setup as unobtrusive and ever-present as cigarette smoke. Larry straightens up, blinking dopily.

"I heard Hendrix was AC/DC. Now he's dead."

All those guys are, and were. Larry's not that kind of musician, but he'll take it in the spirit it was given. The guy puts his hand on Larry's shoulder, affable in the way that goes great with fat checks and fine print. He's a bullshitter, like all the other bullshitters, and he wants something.

"You've got what those guys had, except you're alive and kicking. What are they paying you these days, Larry? You don't have to tell me right now, but I know it's not enough. Right now at Columbia they're telling you you've been discovered and they think you'll be so grateful for anything at all — you're like the girl with pimples who gets voted prom queen. So happy to be up on that stage, she doesn't know the joke's on her, or she doesn't care. Do you really think you're getting what you're worth?"

Nobody on the entire West Coast seems to know what Larry Underwood is worth. The man in the denim jacket can't keep his hands off him. That part is different. The cold pass of his hand between Larry's shoulder blades is like a breath of menthol — it makes Larry's balls hitch. The man's eyes are bright with dark affection. Nobody's ever looked at Larry like this, not ever, not once. Looking at him like he's more than the latest pretty thing — there's promises in the shape of his mouth, really dirty promises.

"No offense, but I've gotten this pep talk six different ways since I moved in here. It's not my idea of small talk. No offense."

"Guys like you never get what you're worth. I like you, Larry. I want you to get paid."

What label is this guy from again? Who does he represent? Is he scouting for a vocalist or making a play? He has the black-velvet voice of one of those gurus with a concrete bunker full of luxury cars — an electric voice, a voice designed to make you feel like you were the only person in the universe.

"I like me too," Larry says lamely. I like knowing my options. I like not getting the pants sued off me by an army of industry goons. "That doesn't mean anything to me."

"Whatever they're giving you, I'll double it. Just say the word. Come on over to my place. Be on my team."

He offers Larry a bump of something off the web of his hand, and Larry takes it. It isn't coke, but it's something — and it sparkles like champagne off the back of his throat.

Somebody has to notice the way he's leaning on this guy, the way he's practically in his lap. Larry's already sporting a semi in his jeans — the product of relentless anticipation and really great blow. The man's sparkling eyes are on him — and what was this guy's name again? Freemont, Freemantle.

Larry's still sniffling with pleasure and pressing the tip of his tongue to his hard palate when that big hand grabs him by the dick and squeezes — hard enough to hurt and to make his spine stiffen, hard enough to make Larry gasp and taste the cold glitter of stars on the back of his tongue. He can hear himself laughing, an industry sophisticate's flattered laugh, even as the heated vise of the other guy's grip makes his stomach turn over.

He's going to have to pay for this, Larry realizes in a dim kind of way — eventually.

*

Down in the basement playroom is the makings of a veritable Roman orgy. A trio of women are sprawled asleep on a bearskin rug, all of them topless — a guy's getting sucked off in one of those leather chairs that look like they should be used for nothing more athletic than smoking a pipe and reading the Sunday newspapers. There's a felt-top pool table, not currently being fucked on, and it must have come with the house because Larry hasn't played pool in years. There's a used prophylactic in one of the pockets. How conscientious. The man in the denim jacket presses him back onto the hard lacquered edge of the pool table — his impossibly crooked hand is pulling Larry's belt loose from its notches.

"You don't have to do that."

"Aw, don't sell yourself short. Of course I do."

"I don't do this at parties. In case you thought, you know, I do this at parties. I'm not—"

He kisses Larry on the mouth to shut him up, sweet and smothering — it tips him back on his heels like the heroine on the cover of a supermarket romance novel, off-balance. He's so turned-on that he might die like this, die of a heart attack right here with a hard-on in his pants.

The man in the denim jacket is strong enough to lift him without difficulty, and he does, hauling him into place on the green felt top. Larry resists the urge to wrap his legs around him like a groupie — it wouldn't work, it wouldn't be half as cute. The electric bounce of a good high is rattling around his skull.

He could get off just touching him, just being touched. The man's body is road-hard and alive with muscle, the hollows of his collarbone is faintly visible through the low throat of his tee-shirt — Larry gropes at him like a teenager, exhilarated and inexpert. His hands slide over Larry's body, his hot and callused hands — his sensitive mouth is dragging down past Larry's jaw, to the soft part of his throat. Telling him all the shit Larry wants to hear, the man is fumbling his jeans down, tugging the elastic of his shorts down and letting Larry's cock spring loose like a cartoon sight gag.

Larry fumbles for shirttails or a palmful of ass or anything, anything to get off on — the man's got a hand jammed between his legs, he sticks his fingers in his mouth, and shortly after he sticks them in Larry, smooth and easy. He works him apart like this is the most normal thing in the world, pressing into him. Fast operator.

Larry chokes on a sound and tries not to squirm. He could spread his legs and give it up, roll over and assume degrading positions with the confidence and poise only a cokehead possesses, but then this guy would know how cosmopolitan he isn't. He's never done this shit before. He always thought it was harder — swapping arcane signals in underground bars, trying not to get your head busted by cops. Poppers and Crisco. Elaborate, with more paraphernalia.

"I don't even know your name," he says, and he can't keep the excitement out of his voice.

"Doesn't matter this time. I like you, Larry. I like your sound." Exploring the inward bits of him while his eyes make their own crawling inroads down Larry's body — he can feel them on his throat, on the hollow of his shoulder, on the very top of his chest. "Don't you like me, man? Not even a little?"

Larry gropes at the small of his back, beneath his jacket hem where brass buttons snag — there's no soft indentation there, like a woman, only hard angularity. There's a queer banked heat rising from his muscles, like heated bricks. If Larry presses his face to the dirty collar of his coat, breathing road dust among the tin-backed buttons and mysterious stains, he doesn't have to think about this — it just happens. Stuff like this just happens to Larry Underwood, because he is hot shit.

The man jerks him off one-handed with long stripping strokes. He has black eyes, like a bird's eyes, and short sharp fingernails, and his hands are smoother than they have any right to be. Larry wants this part to be over. This guy is into some really bad shit. It was flattering, and now it's not. Now it's too-fast, too strange, too much.

Larry paws at the man's hard-on through his faded jeans, marveling at it but not with envy — the way you'd marvel at a desert sunset or a high cliff. It's not that he's with a man — half of California must be AC/DC these days, it's downright hip to get reamed now and then. It's this man who frightens him and excites him. The dark man, Larry thinks, but it's not his skin or his hair or his clothes, it's not the rawhide strip around his neck or the unseen bauble hanging on it — it's his voice. That voice, like a drawl. He could be from anywhere. Anywhere in America.

"Look at me, Larry. Are you thinking about my offer yet? Do you think I mean it?"

"I'm looking at you, all right," Larry says, suddenly flashing irritable. The hard corner of the man's hand is hurting his dick. "Don't tell me what to do. This is my house."

A little gentle friction would do it, a tiny shred of relief — Larry's never been good at being patient, he's never liked waiting. The guy twists his fingers, and Larry chokes.

"No, no. You're only happy when you're being told what to do. Look at me, Larry." Words spoken compellingly, with deep love.

Everything splits and fractures like a mirror shattering under a boot-heel, a thousand eyes are looking at them both, a thousand red and roving eyes — it's like something out of EC Comics, a sudden splintering of reality that leaves Larry Underwood breathless.

Something's wrong with the blow this guy gave him. It's laced, or it's cut with something, or it's just bad somehow in ways Larry doesn't have the vocabulary for but knows better than to fuck with. This guy is bad, bad, bad fucking news.

"Let me hear you," he says. Scream, or beg? The dark man's fingers pressing deep into Larry seeking secret places, the thumbnail pressing through the skin between his asshole and balls, finding some spot that arrests the process of what Larry already needs to do really fucking badly right in its tracks. Pure weird agony, skewered right on the edge of climax.

"Yeah," Larry says rawly, "yeah, okay, sure, just let me finish—"

Larry comes pitifully quick. The man in the denim jacket licks it off the heel of his hand with an obscene pink tongue, smiling with his eyes all the while. At least he's having a good time.

The heat of those eyes on him is too much to bear. Larry stares down, between his feet. The man in the denim jacket is wearing thrift-store cowboy boots, run down by long wear. Nobody in the industry would be caught dead in those boots, with splits in the leather and stitches missing. Not exactly luxury western wear. Larry is wearing tennis shoes, white ones.

A pair of white tennis shoes is sticking out from under the pool table — one off and one on. It's all he can do not to crane his head.

It figures somebody'd kick the bucket at one of Larry's parties — it was just a matter of time, it happens all over Malibu this time of year when the dope's flowing freely, all over California even, wherever industry people and their houseguests gather. People make mistakes and they go out of their lives with all the poise and dignity they came in with.

Larry doesn't need to see the dead man's gummy face to know who it is. He knows those raggedy-hemmed jeans and the pretense of authenticity carried with them, the tail-end of that dumb Navajo leather belt he'd dropped a cool half-grand on down on Rodeo Drive. He knows the smell of a too-enthusiastic night out. He doesn't need to see that part to believe it. All across America, people know Larry Underwood's voice, but how many of them recognize his face?

Larry is dead, dead as Dillinger, and nobody found him. Nobody cared to find him. His guests navigated around the obstacle as best they could, and went on watching his TV and sleeping in his bed and smoking his weed. Maybe nobody even switched on the lights until it was too late in the game, until the repo man came for the color TV and the pool table and the deluxe stereo. Decay has set in, and the mess is going to spoil the woodwork — there's a faint ring spreading out into the carpet like an aura. Wet rot, already.

"You didn't know him, did you? This was his house." The guy's voice is solicitous. The toe of one boot nudges the body, betraying an unsettling slackness in the flesh — an unmistakable rolling deadness.

"What the fuck is this?"

You fucked this one up, Larry, is the thought of the day.

"Hey, man, they won't miss you. Dead singers sell records like hotcakes. I'm going to give you some advice, Larry. You'll want to listen closely."

It would be impossible to listen to that voice and not lean in, in awful anticipation like the anticipation of a snakebite — and when Larry does the dead man's not under the pool table but right there between his legs, bearing down on him. All at once his nose and mouth are flooded with the smell of old butcher paper and nightclub bathrooms, sweet rot.

Larry knows that face from his nightmares, hell, he knows it from looking in the mirror the morning after a rough night — the strange slack features, the empty eyes, everything but the sagging cockeyed grin. Everything but the mouth — the mouth is a dead man's mouth, yes, but its long-toothed grin is animated by something that could only be called pleasure.

Larry opens his mouth to scream and the man in the denim jacket forces a raw red tongue into his mouth. His cock is still unfailingly hard, ready to pierce deep into Larry's guts — ready to pierce right through; the forcible presence of his body is multiplying and dividing like a kaleidoscope, splitting — too many hands and too many arms but no face, no eyes. Larry wants to scream, but his tongue has swollen in his mouth.

The struggle against him is almost involuntary, spasmodic and unavoidable as Flagg quakes with laughter. Equally unavoidable is the only clear thought in Larry's mind, the only barrier between himself and something worse: if he makes a sound, somebody's going to see them like this.The dead man in the denim jacket wants him to to scream. Larry makes a wet moan instead, and goes slack in his grip, slack like a corpse. The man lets Larry slip to the floor. He lets him land on his knees.

Larry's breath comes quickly, in wet little hitches — and the man in the jacket unzips his jeans. That impossible cock is hard and dripping in its master's hand, radiating dark unpleasant heat like cast iron on the fire. He's going to fuck my mouth, is Larry's only lucid thought, glinting as it flits past, doesn't he ever wait?

He squeezes Larry's jaw until it opens, splitting his lip in the process — Larry's fingernails pull gouges down his wrist, but there's no blood at all, not even red marks. When he opens his mouth to protest he is invaded.

Impossibly hard, impossibly thick — that cock slides in him like its own living thing, pressing in past hs tongue and then pressing deeper, practically past his tonsils. It makes involuntary tears spring to Larry's eyes. The man slides his thumb into Larry's mouth alongside his cock, tugging at his aching cheek— it tastes like a boost of amphetamine, cutting through the asphalt-chlorine taste that can only be come. In that moment Larry feels a deep sense of sympathy for every girl he's ever balled — every girl who's ever taken him into her mouth greedily. He can't stop himself from choking for air, gagging even, but it's like his mouth was made for this — not for singing shitty songs that top the charts or lying to women but for being fucked. Made for taking.

He's hard, horribly hard, even with his own jizz already drying against his belly. If he touches himself, he knows what'll happen — without being told, he knows. Larry won't do that. Nice boys don't, ha ha. It could be an hour down there, with his mouth abrading raw and his hands uselessly gripping at the carpet, at the pegged cuffs of this guy's jeans — pain where he never knew there could be pain, a smooth witchy hand pressing the back of his head down onto that cock, like Larry's whole face is nothing but a thing to be fucked. Nothing but a novelty item. He can taste the first slicks of come beading up like lead solder; they itch against his tongue and burn his throat. Flagg fucks into his mouth without relenting. There is nothing else in the universe but the two of them. There are no spectators but a thousand red eyes in the dark.

The same song is playing over and over again on the stereo, like a skipping record — and that awful pleasure is coiled up in his crotch like a too-tight spring, the blue-balls ache as palpable as a fist to the gut. Larry can feel himself coming unglued — slowly peeling loose from sanity. He's going to come again, like wringing out a damp rag — there shouldn't be anything left in him, no moisture at all, nothing but a crick in his neck and an unbearable spark of arousal that throbs like a bullet wound. His jaw aches, and nothing will stick in his thoughts except a thudding repetition of refusals.

This is not happening. None of this has happened.

He can't make a sound. Flagg has stolen his voice, there is no other sound but the awful wet sound of Larry sucking cock like his life depended on it. Make it good, or regret it — if he does so much as bite down he knows with terrible confidence what will happen. The press of an unseen knife-blade will be the least of it. Another cataclysmic split. More hands, more eyes. Teeth. Worse than that, Larry wants to do it, his heart's in it. He's wanted it all along. Swallowing down another man's cock like Linda Lovelace on speed. His want is only a conduit for something worse. His weakness. He's wanted this for how long, now—

Larry comes again, right in his jeans, and it's hardly what you could call a relief — he comes so hard he sees spots, and just when it seems he'll choke the dark man follows suit. Larry's mouth floods with come, slippery as eggwhite and bitter as poison, and there's nothing to do but swallow. His vision goes gray, but for the glint of a belt buckle in his peripheral vision, sparkling with star signs worked in brass. He'll suffocate like this, smothered in pure hate, he'll die like this.

*

Someone's lifting him by the shoulders, somebody else is trying to lift his head. The hair on the back of his head has adhered to something sticky and the motion jars it loose with a tug. Larry wakes up with a hangover like an electric drill and the taste of chlorine in his mouth, the inside of his cheek rubbed raw.

Larry cries out, but his voice is nothing but a neutered croak. Someone is pouring a glass of warm tap water in his mouth, but most of it is running down his chin.

He coughs a couple times and runs his tongue around his mouth, taking a long leisurely moment for it. There's no split lip, not even the healed seam of one. His jeans aren't down past his knees, there's no smell of rot, just the faint aroma of piss. The front of his jeans is stiff, but that could mean anything, anything at all.

They're alone. Thank God, they're alone.

"That must have been some party, Larry." Wayne Stukey blinks into focus, same judgmental prick as he ever was, and Larry wants to rasp fuck you but he doesn't. He doesn't recognize the girl with the water glass, though he can recognize her good intentions. He ought to thank her.

He's in the bathroom, not the basement. The sunlight is filtering in through the single-pane window and it strikes Larry's eyes with all the gentleness of an icepick. Larry presses a hand to his eyes. His throat has the approximate texture of fine sandpaper.

"Sure was."