“Nah, take me back to our hotel and show me a good time instead,” smiled Andrew.
“Come on, then,” said Brian and stood up to leave the bar, swigging back the remains of his coffee. Andrew mirrored him and they went back to the hotel room and fucked each other until dawn. Then they had a hearty breakfast in the diner opposite their hotel and headed back to Baltimore. And the ever-present knowledge that Pete was a dead man.
24
Lagotti had mentioned to Frank he should have a chat with Mary Lou as the security was being stepped up in the bank and Frank could see no reason why she shouldn’t brief the big bankroll about the new deal.
So Mary Lou strolled into the repair shop one Tuesday afternoon, just as Paul and Luigi were heading home after a day spent playing penuckle for dimes. Luigi opened the door to Lagotti’s office for her and caught up with Paul, who was already revving his engine impatiently.
As she headed to sit down in the only available chair that wasn’t occupied, Lagotti signaled her with a beckoning hand and she went towards him instead. She had no idea why she did that, but the man commanded the room, even without a word being spoken.
He smiled at her as she stood leaning against his desk but he carried on looking through his girlie magazine for another minute, before opening the top drawer, throwing the picture book inside and slamming the drawer shut, which made Mary Lou noticeably flinch. Ever so slightly.
He smiled again.
“Don’t be alarmed my dear,” he said, “only a drawer.” He laughed for a second, throwing his head back momentarily, and then leaned forward and briefly placed one hand on hers, as Mary Lou was half leaning on the desk using her arms as leverage to half stand with her butt against the edge of the fake oak veneer.
She glanced down at his hand as he patted hers and she saw he was watching her looking at him.
“So tell me about the new security arrangements they are putting in place. My Frank has described the situation to me, but I would like to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.” He patted her hand once more and then proceeded to listen intently as Mary Lou described cameras, doors and reinforced steel to him in great detail.
Finally she stopped talking and Lagotti nodded.
“Can you sketch what the vault room looks like?” he asked, eventually. Mary Lou scrunched her face up quizzically for a half second and then shrugged and said: “Sure.”
◆◆◆
She turned round to face his desk and Lagotti stood up and scrabbled about the top surface and drawers searching for some paper - in the bottom drawer - and something to write with - just by the table lamp, hidden under some receipts.
As Mary Lou started drawing a rectangle to represent the vault room itself, Lagotti stood behind and to one side of her to not block out the light but also to be able to see. The more she sketched and talked, the more he leaned in to see.
By the time she had drawn the bars that separated the safe from the main room and the shelving with the safe deposit boxes, Lagotti was leaning so far in Mary Lou could feel his arm around her neck, lazily hanging there just so he could see the whole sketch, she told herself. He volleyed questions about that vault at her for another five, maybe ten, minutes. All the while leaving his arm on her shoulder, eventually leaning in so far she could feel his torso against her arm, against her body. Feel the warmth of his body.
“I assume you didn’t just talk with the bank clerk to find all this out? You fucked him, right?”
At this point she decided enough was enough and that Frank Senior had gone too far. Even if he was Frank Senior. So she bent her right arm to make her elbow stick out and gently point into Lagotti’s body.
“Don’t be like that, dear,” he snarled and quickly whipped his arm off her neck and grabbed her hair, yanking her head back and making her let out a muted scream. She knew they were alone and she knew shouting wasn’t going to make things any better.
Lagotti pushed her down onto the desk, all the while her hair was tightly bound in his hand. Face down on the desk, she could feel his other hand jerking down on her pants until they were past her hips and then she heard him unzip his jeans.
The next thing she knew he was inside her, pumping hard and fast, hurting, hurting, hurting her. When he was finished, her pushed her head down against the cold hard flatness of his desk and intoned: “Get outta my fuckin’ sight, you bitch whore.”
Mary Lou sobbed as she pulled up her pants, feeling how damp they were at the back where he had dripped spunk on her clothes as he withdrew. Clinging to herself as she left the room, she didn’t turn round and she didn’t close the door behind her. Then she walked out of the repair shop and ran into the night.
She didn’t let Frank touch her for ten days and it was another week before she’d let herself be naked with either him or Carter.
One thing was certain and she said this to herself every night before she went to sleep for weeks afterwards: “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.” And she knew she meant it.
MAY
25
The sun was shining bright and high in the late morning sky. Frank was itching to get the job over and done with so his dreams could become a reality. So he could leave Baltimore behind him and take Mary Lou to Vegas or Los Angeles or anywhere else on the west coast. He wanted to see the Grand Canyon and find some place with a beach and a quiet wood shack to hang out. Most of all he wanted to keep his freedom and he knew the best way to secure that freedom was to hide in plain sight in a different part of the country. And the other part of his freedom was to be secure with Mary Lou, to know she was with him and he could trust her. Because once they left Baltimore, there was no turning back. They’d need each other far more than they did now. In Mary Lou and money we trust.
He was pretty sure he could rely on her, but a couple of months ago he was not so sure. When they got back from Miami, she started blowing cold to him and he couldn’t figure out why, because they had been so hot together in Florida.
In fact, she was so cold she wouldn’t let him touch her for a week. At that point, he thought it was a bad case of the curse but she wouldn’t let him inside her for another two weeks after that. No curse, just misery.
Then Frank got to thinking about where she’d been and who she’d met. Had Carter turned her head? Had she met some new guy?
Frank thought over and over about the events trailing away from Miami. Each conversation with Mary Lou, each touch, each time they’d fucked. Finally, he remembered he hadn’t seen her for two days after she popped over to Uncle Frank to talk through the new security arrangements. He figured she’d just been hanging out with Carter to extract more info.
Then it struck him: when he saw her next, she had changed. That was the turning point. When Mary Lou met Uncle Frank.
And if that was the turning point and Mary Lou wasn’t going to let herself be touched afterwards that meant that Uncle Frank had touched her. Messed with her. Uncle Frank had fucked his girl. His Uncle Frank. His girl. And if that was the case he was going to have to kill that man. Kill his Uncle Frank. Kill the man who’d hurt his girl, his Mary Lou.
◆◆◆
At this point in his day, Frank left the apartment and went for a long walk. Then Halethorpe seemed too small to him and he got on a bus and headed for Lansdowne where there was a comforting cemetery to sit in. And there he sat for an hour or two, replaying the anger in his mind until he calmed down enough to want a cup of coffee.
Frank walked out of the cemetery, northwards, in the opposite direction to the bank until he bumped into a small diner with no customers and a jug of coffee on the hot plate. He pushed the door open and sat down at the bar, ordered a coffee and slowly stirred the three spoons of sugar and the dash of milk. Over the next nine minutes, he sipped the coffee dry, threw a couple of dollars down on the counter and walked out. He looked up and realized he was only six or seven blocks away from Carter’s house so he decided to pop round and check on what Rita was up to. He hadn’t been t
here for at least three months.
When he reached the house Frank looked up and down the street before walking over the picket fence into the backyard. Then up his tree to peer into the bedroom window. And there she was, arms behind her head stretched out on the bed. Just like the last time Frank saw her, only this time she was entirely naked and had a man’s head between her legs. And that man was definitely not Carter.
Frank smiled to himself and realized unless he wanted to stick around for his own personal porn movie, there wasn’t much to see here. Move along down the bus everyone.
Five minutes later, Frank crawled down the tree because, despite himself, he couldn’t quite manage to walk away. He was transfixed by what his eyes were showing him. When the guy raised his head to catch a breath, Rita sat up and pushed him down so he was lying on his back and she was licking him and then slid up his body until she was astride him. He pumped hard and she rode him like a rodeo buck. Only then did he turn away.
Down the tree and off along the street, round the corner and a walk back to the bus stop and home to Halethorpe.
◆◆◆
The sanctuary of that small one-room apartment made Frank feel deeply secure. The image of Rita, merging with the imagined fucking of Mary Lou and Uncle Frank, continued to unsettle him to the point where his anger had abated but he was now feeling a sense of loss and sadness. Not so much sadness for himself, but a melancholy for what Mary Lou must have been through and the fact she didn’t believe she could talk to him about it.
Given how turbulent their last few months had been, Frank understood why she hadn’t said anything, but her silence was even more painful to him precisely because how he’d behaved to her since Christmas. If this was how he treated someone who he wanted to share his west coast dreams with then what was he doing? Why was he not able to let her know how important she was to him? Really important to him. Life or death important, you know?
At this point, Frank heard the key turn in the lock, the door opened and there stood his Mary Lou.
“Hiya, hon’”
“Hi babe,” he responded immediately. Frank smiled at her and she frowned, briefly, back at him. An indication of how unusual his smiles were to her. He stood up out of the armchair and made the three paces over to her in time to catch her facing the wall as she hung up her keys on the wall hook. He gently put his arms around her waist and kissed the side of her neck. She giggled slightly and leaned her head sideways to let his lips cover more of her skin with peck-kisses.
“Hey, you. What’s all this about, then?”
Frank stopped briefly, long enough to say: “Just wanted you to know I was pleased to see you. I want you to know I’m always pleased to be with you, is all,” and he carried on kissing her neck while she raised her arms above her head and messed his hair at the back of his head with her fingers, which he liked.
Meanwhile, his hands had moved from her waist. His left hand had gone upwards, stroking her belly and up to squeeze a breast, whose nipple by now was getting quite hard. And his right hand had gone the other way, over her rose and under her skirt to feel her hairs and her moistness within.
“Wait a minute,” she said and she turned around to face him once she’d extracted herself from his octopus arms. She undid her blouse and pushed down her skirt so she was standing in just her undies. Then she undid Frank’s belt and unzipped his jeans, while Frank pulled off his tee shirt. The jeans fell to the floor and he stepped out from the denim around his ankles.
With one swift motion, he swooped one hand under her body and the other under her neck and carried her, Mary Lou giggling all the while, to their bed and deposited her on the sheets as gentle as he could. Then he pulled off her panties and kissing his way to her groin, licking the rose and everything and anything nearby. The giggles stopped pretty quickly at this point and all Frank could hear was the sound of his tongue and the murmurs and moans of his woman.
He smelled her as if for the first time and it was good. Vanilla tones in the perfume and the sweet smell of sex. He was tasting her for the first time too. Really tasting her and he didn’t want it to stop.
◆◆◆
Eventually his jaw got tired and he kissed the inside of her thighs and licked the rose again and stuck his tongue in her belly button. Then he moved up her body to find she was still wearing her bra. And then he noticed he still had his shorts on. He lifted his body up so he was kneeling over her on all fours and she took one hand and pulled down on his shorts just long enough for her other hand to grab his dick.
She leant up a bit and pulled herself up enough to be able to hold him with her knees and switch the both of them over so by the end of the maneuver, Frank was lying on his back and Mary Lou was sat astride him. Somehow, at the same time, she had managed to pull down his shorts and, as he looked down his body, he could see her damp pubes hovering less than an inch from his helmet, which Mary Lou still held in her hand, stroking the tip. He watched it vanish inside her and felt the intense warmth of her body. The dampness and her heat combined and he could feel her squeezing from inside her body. Now she had her hands free, she took off her bra, but never reducing the intensity of her squeezes around him. Then she raised herself an inch or two up, just enough for her lips to touch the tip of his dick. Mary Lou hovered there, slightly bouncing on her knees until Frank’s lips and fingertips started to tingle. Then she pushed deep down onto him and pulled up fast, over and over again. The tingles became an intense throb across the whole of his body and he felt a jet force itself out from the end of his penis. Mary Lou continued her movements and Frank thrust until he was a spent force.
Mary Lou got off him, teased his balls in her fingers and lay down beside him, facing him, draping an arm and a leg over his body so he could feel the dampness of her bush on his thigh. He let his fingers wander there for a moment.
“I’m pleased to see you too,” she whispered and they both smiled and didn’t move for a spell.
They let their hands carry on, Frank massaging her, occasionally licking his first finger so he could taste Mary Lou again. She kept stroking and nuzzling his balls with her fingertips. Eventually, unconsciousness enveloped them and within a minute of each other, they both fell asleep, content in their own juices and the pleasure they’d given each other.
26
Frank woke up first the following morning. Mary Lou was facing down with her head on its side, arms above her head and her legs straight, slightly apart. And Frank was on his side with an arm on her ass.
His hand slipped down a few inches until his first and second fingers could feel between her butt cheeks and touched her bush and massaged his way to her lips. She stirred from her sleep and rolled away from him so his hand was left in midair.
“Hey you,” she whispered, “don’t stop.” And he didn’t.
After they got up and had breakfast, they left the apartment and went in separate directions: Frank walked to his car and Mary Lou grabbed a bus to Lansdowne.
◆◆◆
Mary Lou was in the middle of a dirty dream: she and Frank were naked, rolling around in a park, over and over. He was inside her and she had clamped her knees around his legs and there was an intense energy inside her groin. And then she woke up to find the intense energy was truly inside her, caused by Frank’s fingers. She smiled to herself and rolled onto her side, the tingles from her groin traveled up her spine and into her head.
“Don’t stop,” she said and raised her right leg up so he could reach inside her again. Frank followed suit and spooned her with his body while his fingers returned to their earlier work. He smiled, still pleased to be in Mary Lou’s orbit. Still pleased his dreams were on track.
She sucked in air just as his first finger rubbed past her lips with the intensity of the sudden interaction. Then she remembered to breathe again and gave into the pulsing waves of pleasure generated by that man’s fingers. Once she got used to the spasms running up and down her body, she became aware of Frank’s dick poking into her s
ide.
She took hold of it and stroked its shaft. His fingers became more energetic in reaction to her stroking, which started to get in sync with his fingers. She was perfectly happy to let this carry on because of the number of climaxes she was experiencing. But a small part of Mary Lou’s brain also knew as soon as Frank came, it would all be over and she really didn’t want it to stop at all. Ever. Mary Lou let go of his dick and Frank’s fingers froze in kind.
“Sit up with your legs straight ahead of you,” she instructed and, sure enough, Frank rearranged himself and sat up, leaning on his hands - arms straight - with his legs in front of him, his dick pointing pretty much upwards, with a quizzical expression on his face. Mary Lou squatted on top of his dick until she felt her hairs touch it and took it inside herself.
Intense wave of pleasure.
She rocked up and down ever so gently to give Frank a chance to recover - his massive inhalation just then meant he had felt it too. He placed one of his arms on her back and the other around the back of her neck and she reciprocated. All the while Mary Lou moved herself up and down his shaft. She felt the tightness of his hard-on inside her. Could feel the throb of his dick in her. And every push and every throb was another intense wave running along her spine, up and down her arms and legs until even her eyes felt fuzzy.
She increased the pace of her rocking because the intensity was so strong now, she wasn’t sure she’d last much longer without blacking out. Just as that thought ripped across her mind, she felt the jet of Frank’s sperm spill into her and warm spunk dribbled onto her thighs. When his last reflex twinge was over, his dick shriveled up and left her and they both fell sideways, exhausted.
Frank was much better in the sack now than he ever was before, she mused, once the tingles had subsided enough for ordinary thoughts to resurface. Almost as if to thank him, she placed herself between his legs and licked his dick and balls until he was hard again. She always knew that with one of his ball sacks in her mouth, her tongue could get him to do anything.
The Heist Page 12
