The Girl in the Cockpit

by Michael Avallone

  "You knew I was coming, you said."

  "Yeah. It was written all over your face in that pad of yours."

  "Dirty writing?"

  "Sex isn't dirty to me. It was your eyes. Your expression. You must be lousy at cards, Ed. I could tell you were wondering what I might be like in the sack. Don't apologize. I was flattered."

  "If you were flattered by that, you'd be breathing harder if you knew what I was thinking now." I reached over, took her drink and gave her the one she gave me. "Old Borgia custom. Don't be offended. Who could trust a doll that looks like you? Comes on like you? Which gets me down to the specific, Terry. Are you twenty-one going on thirty-nine or what? I know you haven't got a twin sister."

  She wasn't insulted by the drink-switching. Her answer to that was to tilt her head back and take a generous swallow. She moistened her red lips in pure appreciation of the brand and eyed me like a pixie who has just encountered someone who doesn't believe in pixies.

  "Say what you mean. Don't be obscure. Don't waste words like so many people your age do. We haven't got all the time in the world."

  There was no time to even probe or guess into what that might mean. I was almost afraid to ask. Her turnabout was altogether bizarre.

  "Okay. Fair enough. How come the violin strings in my place and the hot tonsils now? You were like a dear-me-poor-Dad-oh, Johnny-oh-Big-Sister and now, you're not even a page away from the centerfold of Playboy. What's with this Jekyll and Hyde act of yours?"

  Terry now stared across the floor at me quite solemnly. She didn't answer me right away so I poured some more oil on the troubled surfaces of her waters, on perhaps the - guilty shores of her mind.

  "If you're high on something or tripped out or just plain erratic, excuse me for living. I've got my night side, too, you know. I'm no plaster saint, either. But I won't drop dead if you're a monster."

  She shook her head slowly, her voice coming out nearly dead and from a far-off place. It was like she was speaking from Lost Horizon.

  "I put on that act for Johnny. At all times. He's too much of a kid yet, to understand. He's Italian, too, like Papa was. And that's about as old-fashioned as a man can come. You know what I mean, I think. I could see that in your style. You were good to him."

  She said all that with the zest of a woman announcing a train schedule. I took a nip at her Scotch. It was excellent, a fine brand.

  "I was, and I know what you mean. If your positions were reversed and you were the kid sister, he'd box your ears off if he ever saw a layout like this. I can imagine how John Junkyard reacted to your leaving the family nest and setting up housekeeping for yourself."

  "Right on, Ed." Her laugh was that tinkling kind that sounds like Chinese mobiles. In the exotic, aphrodisiacal atmosphere of that kind of room it was sex appeal with bells on. I hung onto myself.

  "Johnny's never been here. Ditto the old man. They sort of wrote me off their list when I moved out. And then when——" She shrugged and her half-naked body shimmered in the lights. "It was a nice funeral. Ugh. Can't stand funerals. A waste of money, a waste of time. And a lot of people standing around trying to stop the inevitable. Like they expected the dead to come back to life. It's not my bag, and never will be. Resurrection—Jee-zus!"

  "What is your bag, Terry? Your real one?" I put emphasis in the query.

  "I want to live well, do what I want, avoid fat and wrinkles and I'm never going to get married or have kids like Johnny. Imagine me with a chauvinist son like him? I'd go out of my mind! Why are you asking me, Ed? You asking as a cop or just someone interested in me?"

  "Guilty on both counts." I tried to find her eyes and look deep into them. It wasn't easy. The weird lighting of the room was too tricky. "You lost your father last week. He was killed. You don't seem as badly cut up about it as you should. Not the way Johnny is. Don't you care at all?"

  She had set her glass down on the rug, near her curved left haunch and somewhere that invisible Hi-Fi had changed records or tapes and we were getting, for a welcome change, a Bacharach medley. What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love had segued into Raindrops Falling on My Head. And Terry Ricco was sliding the pink, silken thing she was wearing away from her body, down off her shoulders. It slipped and rustled like a glorious flag of some kind and then fell soundlessly to the deep rug all around us. For a long moment, the lovely, sensual effect held because she put her two hands on her rounded knees, spread out her limber thighs, swung herself straight upwards in a sitting posture and gazed steadily across the room right into my own eyes.

  "I don't want to talk anymore. No more about dying or stupid brothers. Or old men with minds better off back in the old country. I'm curious, too. About you. What will you be like? Will you be any good at it at all? Are you tender, are you cruel? Do you swear and make funny noises when you're getting your rocks off? Or are you something special? A quiet tiger who knows how to scratch and claw and bring out the best in me? That's what I want to do right now, Baby Edward. Are you a shopper or a buyer? A giver or a taker? I'll warn you in advance, too. If you do find home plate, you'll never forget the sensation. Game, Ed?—or am I more than you think you can handle? Come on, now—tell it like it is."

  I've seen a lot of them naked, maybe some of the most beautiful women anyone would expect to meet, but there was something different about Terry Ricco. Physically, she was as perfect as a woman can be, of course. She had height and length, and rounded symmetry and long golden hair and flesh the color of new peaches—and the Vera Miles face was no handicap, either. But there was more to her than that. I don't know—it must have been the awesome fact that she was so terribly young, so many years and kicks removed from the kind of years and kicks I'd had. I've never been afraid of women when it came to this time of the relationship because usually I knew what I wanted and was hungry enough to reach for it, with my own special kind of bedroom ability. But Terry Ricco wasn't just a swell-looking dame who could make my toenails curl and maybe better. She was a young girl, making like Lolita, talking like an over-the-hill movie star who seeks out young studs, and reminding me very unfavorably of just how much older than she I was. She was no longer jail-bait, of course, but I had grown older.—And I was in love with somebody else. The time had passed when I needed to reaffirm my manhood. I knew what I could do, and, modesty to one side, I'm damn proud of that. It's enough.

  "You don't want to know who murdered your father, is that it?"

  "Not now, silly. Tomorrow we can talk about that."

  "And you haven't a single idea who might have done it?"

  "Ed, Ed . . . come on, now!" Her voice fell to a purr. Not a feline one but that particular sound that a woman can make only when she has the itch. She settled back down on her shapely thighs and her really lovely breasts barely moved with the motion. She had that wonderful distance between her navel and breastline which is the hallmark of all truly well-built women. It made her body long, lithe and contoured as if by a Michelangelo. The blond waterfall of her hair streamed as she shifted her slender, filled-out weight, and began to slide across the furry carpet toward me. I had not so much as loosened my foulard tie but this didn't seem to make much difference. Terry Ricco was intent on having a private party.

  She needed something to wake up her brains, to snap her out of the sexy trance she had slipped herself into. I threw her a fast curve, quick.

  "You shacking up with Frankie Conroy?"

  She came on, slowly, coiling toward me like a siren in a costume movie, as naked as she was. She shook her head and her goodies danced.

  "Bella Baldwin thinks you are. I think so, too."

  That accomplished something. She stopped making like the Serpent in the Garden. She was much closer to me, now, and I could see how beautiful she really was. She had the sort of face that all Hollywood sex symbols would kill ten people to own forever. Her flesh was sleek and unlined, and all else absolutely ideal: for magazine covers, celluloid, framed portraits in bedrooms and on busts in museums. A one-hundred-
percent doll of femininity. I felt like calling her Theresa and moaning it over and over again, in a low voice. And that was a bad sign.

  "So?" she wanted to know, not raising her voice a hair—or even a change in quality. "He's not the first man I've balled with. He won't be the last . . . Wanted to see what an old, tired hoodlum might be like. I was surprised. He wasn't bad at all . . . For an old guy, he's groovy enough. That's why I'm so curious about you, Ed. Will you be half as good? I wonder."

  "We may never know," I said, and started to rise, to get away from her. If it had been 1942 or even 1965, it would have been a far different story. Probably with me climbing all over her and making like that Marine who'd been stranded on a desert island for ten years. But this was 1973 and I'd parked my old sexuality in more comfortable perspective. I was wrong, though. Terry Ricco was way ahead of me. She didn't know from time periods or my kind of man. With a low cry that was half-woman and half-something-else, she sprang forward, got a good football hold on my legs and brought me back down to the rug. She was all over me in a second, as skillful and as sure of herself as any woman has ever been. Any she-cat.

  Before I could rally or try something about her own ideas of rape, she scored a few very necessary points. For herself, anyway.

  Her red mouth mashed down on my mouth, sweet and violent and hot, and ten busy fingers, deft as a virtuoso on a difficult instrument, roved, explored and plucked. There was heat lightning pulsing through her hands and her naked, writhing body and she soon made an electrical contact. "Only human" sounds like a weak gag, I know, but when a Terry Ricco stunner drops the hook into you and makes no bones about wanting you, just how much fighting back do you do? I wasn't born a minister's son and with what she had going for her, it was almost No Contest.

  I'll never really know if we would have, of if I would have, or if what we were doing or about to do would ever have, any remote sort of connection with the murder of Giovanni Junkyard of Tenth Avenue. There are some things we can never know.

  For which, we have two choices. You either thank God or blame the devil. Either way, it's kind of a Mexican standoff.

  ". . . Ed—Eddie . . . do me—— Don't fight it . . . you want me . . . I know you do—— Your battery's warmed up . . . already——"

  ". . . you crazy little——"

  I had slipped too far already, over the edge of self-imposed coldbloodedness and her slender, warming hands were starting to build too many fires that would glaze into a conflagration if I didn't get away from her. She was ramming at me, digging at me, as insistent as a hungry dog after a bone. I tried to roll out from under her and she hooked a nubile thigh across my waist and her breath and that damned fragrance filled my face. I certainly wasn't going to hit her to defend my manhood but——

  Suddenly, that wasn't necessary.

  Suddenly, the only necessary thing in the world was survival.

  And sex, as it always does at times like that, becomes the least important thing in the universe. It never did hold its own with self-preservation and that is one of its greatest failings. Sad but true.

  There came an explosive sound of glass breaking, a violently loud crash of abrupt destruction and then a hissing and crackling pop too close by to be ignored. Terry Ricco let out a low cry and, startled, rolled away from me like a startled fawn interrupted while lapping from a forest stream.

  I bolted upright, hand instinctively flying for the shoulder holster that held the .45. Glass fragments and shards glittered like bits of ice on the red rug and there by crimson-draped windows on the street side of the apartment. For a charged moment it was impossible to see the shattered window through which some massive object had been flung. Nothing else could have made such a racket. Nothing. It had taken only seconds to hear the noise, and one other second to react. And, in that last second, I saw what had come sailing in through Terry Ricco's window from the ground-level garden sidewalk just beyond and obviously thrown by some human being. But inhuman would have been a far more appropriate description.

  It had landed nearly in the center of the room, bounding like a rubber ball and finally coming to a rest on the red rug. Like a rolling egg.

  Someone had extraordinarily good aim.

  Someone's timing was perfect—if the intention was to kill two beings about to make love in the center core of that oddball apartment.

  The second when I recognized the object for the hand grenade it was, was the same second in which to realize that there was no time left at all—not hardly . . . in which to live. Hand grenades aren't built to provide breathing pauses in the clock department. The theory behind hand grenades is now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. A terrible weapon, on any count. Or, by any standards of modern civilized warfare, What a laugh!

  Terry Ricco had probably never seen one before, not up close.

  I had.

  ——But that wasn't going to make a stick of difference. It was going to blow up in my face, just as well as her's.——

  And it did.

  There wasn't a thing I could do to stop it.

  BOMB

  The blast, when it came, lifted up the top of the world. There was a holocaust of thunder, red lightning, mushrooming destruction and that very awful stench of burned cordite and eye-blinding terror. I lost track of everything for longer than I can remember . . . like a great, slamming hand come down from outer space and fastening its five fingers on the outline of my skull. My ears became a storage place for screaming sirens, hammering gongs and police whistles all going off in unison. The room exploded.

  I lost sight of the naked lady, too. She might have vanished.

  There was nothing to see or understand for many roaring, tumultuous, horror-filled moments. The pelting hail of metal and scattering shrapnel, so like that long-ago war, was a dizzying, mind-blowing experience. Everything stood still.

  The universe of midnight in Manhattan, Terry Ricco's bizarre apartment, my own disorderly, unconventional existence, had all gone reeling off on a wild dance of insanity and self-destruction.—Where hand grenades were tossed through funny ground floor windows and naked young swingers offered their bodies as casually as smoking a cigarette.—Where nobody really knew who their friends or lovers were.

  I came up from the dark red floor somewhere, choking, coughing, and probably the most amazed man alive. I hadn't been hit, not anyplace and it finally permeated my dense senses that I was emerging from behind one of the oddly functional and erotically silly pieces of furniture that must have passed for a chair of some kind.

  Old habits are very hard to break, the good ones as well as the bad, and that ancient U.S. Army warning "hit the dirt" just might have saved my bacon. Reflexively, without thought, just as the egg-shaped messenger landed on the red rug, I rolled like a bowling ball as far away as I could to take cover. That crazy chair, one of its odd arms splintered by a twisted chunk of shrapnel, had absorbed whatever came sailing at me when the grenade burst. The walls, the furnishings, the screwball murals, poster and graffiti things and all the occult folderol were literally splattered with dark and ugly buckshot. The low red lighting of the room could not conceal the damage. And that invisible hi-fi suddenly started, by itself, into a paradoxically sardonic, soft version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." (Bacharach never sounded cornier.)

  And Terry Ricco—?

  I flung myself gasping and petrified with what I might see or find about the room, searching wildly among the smoke still billowing all around. The nose-clogging stink of gunpowder filled the atmosphere. My hero's halo was on real crooked. I had ducked for cover to escape grenade, without a single thought for Miss Ricco's lovely nude hide. There simply had not been time enough to make like Superman or any of that crowd. I'd reacted very personally and it was too late to change that. So I didn't try.

  I found her after several very bad seconds. Unharmed.

  She lay trembling, doubled up in the fetal position, using the underside of another of her crazy-house furnishings as the womb of safety. Even as I cal
led her name, pulling her out to me, it flashed across my memory that grenades explode and do not implode and nearly all their force and impact is upward and outward, which accounted for the terrible condition the walls were in. She shuddered violently as my hands touched her bare shoulders. Then she bubbled and babbled something and I gathered her in my arms. She was shaking like a bowl of Jello: everything on her body moved. But sex was the furthest from our minds just then. Even hers. Whatever her limit was, her shut-off button had been pushed. The acrid and agonizingly violent stench of the room was like a night in Hell.

  Outside on the street, or in the house itself, raucous shouts and yells had gone up. The old, familiar aftermath of all metropolitan disaster and trouble. The angry cries and the terrified questions, the outburst emitted by any in the background of our lives: the nameless, faceless speakers who never give testimony or bear witness—the uninvolved ones.

  Terry Ricco was crying now. Low, violent sobs, her lithe and still hot body pressing against me as if she wanted to climb into my damaged Brooks Brothers suit with me, as if she were hungry to change identities. Be someone else for a change. Not even a woman.

  "—ohmyGod . . . what are they all trying to do to me!"

  "Easy, now. It's all over. You're not hurt . . . anywhere?"

  "—oh, Eddie. . . . who'd want to do a thing like that? WHO?"

  "I don't know. You don't know how lucky we are. All I can say, lady, is you sure made a friend somewhere. That was a hand grenade we just missed. Haven't seen one of those in years . . . come on, hang on to me . . . over to that couch . . . I'll get you a drink——Hang onto your nerve, Terry. It's all over."

  "Oh, you're something else—you know that—?"