Testosterone Book

James Robert Baker, the cult author of Tim & Pete killed himself in 1997, but he left something behind. It is not a book. It is a transcription of a collection of tapes sent by his longtime friend Dean Seagrave. Jim was expecting a bootleg of the Bad Religion show at the Palace. He got something else. Dean was having an extraordinary day. All his belongings just went up in smoke, and he's tooling around Los Angeles in a rental car with a handheld tape recorder. The police are on his trail for assaulting an old woman outside a grocery store, or so he was just told by the man in a wheelchair he attacked at Venice Beach. "He's an emotional serial killer," he says, explaining his frenzied quest for Pablo Ortega, his lover, who disappeared one night going out for cigarettes. Since then Dean has found out some pretty scary things about Pablo. Not just that he was attending Sexual Addicts Anonymous or cruising the beach a whole lot more than he originally said. No, what bothers Dean is the connection to a cult, all the disappearing animals, and the story about torture in Chile. Problem is, Dean might be crazy. Or everyone might be lying. But now Dean has a machete (because the chainsaw made too much noise), and he just found Pablo.