Free Aaaiiieee by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

since Elvis! I’d rather pay to have him brought back from the dead than to kill him, you moron!”
    Bastinado had gone white, and lowered his sheepish gaze. “Sorry, Ricky…I wasn’t thinkin’.”
    “So what else is new?” Ricky waved impatiently at Jimmy to dismiss him. “Okay, Jimmy…go. Take the rest of the day off. But tomorrow, go look for that piece. Understand? That’s my biggest weapon against Springsteen this year.”
    “Yes, Ricky.” Jimmy turned and walked over the heads of the pacing giant cats again on his way out.
    *     *     *
    During the next few weeks, Ricky Concertina went back into the studio to continue work on his latest album, to be boldly titled Psychometrix. The public was aware Ricky was into esoteric subject matter, but he knew they’d never suspect the truth to his success.
    Meanwhile, Jimmy Tassone was having success in getting close to the object Ricky currently coveted. Jimmy had also begun organizing an effort to acquire the object Ricky desired above all others: some fibers from the Shroud of Turin that had been removed for carbon dating, if any had survived those tests. But Ricky wasn’t pressuring for this right now…he knew he couldn’t have everything immediately. Save that for the next album. Right now he was obsessed with the idea of acquiring a strange idol Kolosimo’s sources told him a cult had been worshiping somewhere right here in Southern California.
    Jimmy spoke with his inside man, Joey Cacciola, on the phone. Joey had infiltrated the cult—People of the Hand—and had to speak in a low voice. “They’re both pretty wacked, huh?” Joey said of their boss and his “spiritual mentor”, Kolosimo.
    “Ricky’s wacked. Kolosimo is brilliant. You think he believes any of this voodoo crap? Psychometrics? Psychosomatics is more like it. These drinks don’t give Ricky power, they only inspire him ‘cause he thinks they’re giving him power.”
    “I dunno, man. I seen a thing on Kolosimo in a book Ricky has. The police used him once to find a sex murderer. He held this dead chick’s panties and he could tell the cops where she was killed, where they could find the body and what the killer looked like, y’know?”
    “Stage magic,” Jimmy muttered, but he dropped the topic of doubt after that. They returned to the subject at hand.
    The object of the group’s worship was supposedly the mummified hand of a UFO alien, its craft having come down and exploded in a field in Mexico. The hand was recovered from the site by a farmer, but the story had it that the rest of the blackened rubble was simply carted away by him and dumped. Soon after, the old farmer died, presumably of radiation poisoning, but not before the leader of this cult found out about the hand and came to the farmer to purchase it.
    And then, somehow, Kolosimo had learned of the hand, and it wasn’t long before Ricky had become fixated on it.
    Well, tonight Jimmy was sure he’d be driving back to the house with good news and a present. Maybe this would save Springsteen from some misfortune, after all. God knew that Jimmy Tassone preferred the Boss’s music over the music of his own boss any day.
    *     *     *
    The others were sleeping in the house; the adjacent garage had been made into a temple, locked and very difficult to break into from outside. But Joey had a key, and he let Jimmy into the house to creep into the garage-shrine also.
    The walls had been painted black, and odd geometric patterns had been painted across the surfaces. Ricky would be drawn to these people, Jimmy thought.
     Joey called his attention to a table in the center of the room. A black cloth covered the table, and a smaller cloth shrouded the object atop it.
    “Here it is,” whispered Joey, drawing away the veil.
    Unconsciously, Jimmy kept several paces distant, as if what he expected to see in the big jar was one of those hand-like crab creatures from Aliens, which would fling itself out to seize his