Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  Not far down the hill he found the black car parked in a cul de sac. Karl was nowhere in sight. Hell, there was nothing in sight. He couldn’t have told a bush from a baboon in that fog. Was that the sound of someone walking on gravel, and was it in front of him or behind him? He pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the fog. This was right out of a vampire or werewolf movie from his childhood. You need silver bullets to kill those bastards. The crunching footsteps kept coming closer, closer, then, suddenly, someone knocked him down from behind. He waited for the werewolf to pounce.

  Karl—standing over him, pointing his pistol at Otto’s face. Otto started to laugh, but Karl looked more than pissed off this time, and Otto knew a killer’s eyes when he saw them, even in the dark. Karl seemed to catch himself and moved the gun away from Otto’s face. But Otto made a mental note. I’m watching you from now on, Big Dick. You can’t be trusted, not for a minute.

  “What now?” Otto asked.

  More questions. But Karl turned the tables this time.

  “You know what you’re gonna do now?”

  Otto shook his head; he didn’t have the foggiest.

  “You’re gonna go find the biggest fuckin’ rock you can carry, that’s what you’re gonna do. And you’re gonna bring it right back here and show it to me when you’ve found it.”

  “In this fog?” Otto complained.

  “Come on, get movin’. We don’t have much time.”

  Luckily, this part of the world included a very large number of very big rocks, so he didn’t have to go far from the car to find one. But lugging the sonuvabitching rock back to the car was another thing. If he kept this up, his swollen-up heart would surely pop like a kid’s balloon. Clasping the broad flat rock to his chest, weary as Sisyphus, he struggled back toward where he hoped to find the car. When he finally reached it, after shuffling the last few steps and dragging his feet rather than stepping with them, he could not summon any more breath from his lungs. He thought about dropping the rock but was afraid it might break in two, and then he would have to go dig for another one and carry it all the way back. He set it down and wondered if he would ever be able to stand straight up again. He grabbed the front fender of the car and gulped in the foggy night air as he slowly straightened himself upright.

  Karl was fiddling with something in the trunk. A hose drooped out of the gas tank, looking slightly obscene. Despite the circumstances, Otto couldn’t help himself, he chuckled. Looks like a guy’s dick hanging out of his fly. A little long though. He remembered the old joke about how a one-armed man counts his loose change and almost laughed out loud. He couldn’t tell what Karl was doing, so, despite Karl’s aversion to questions he had to ask.

  “What’s the deal?”

  Karl said nothing but turned around and showed Otto something in his hand. Otto craned his neck, straining to see. A bottle of liquid with a rag stuffed in the top like a wick. Must be gasoline in the bottle. A Molotov cocktail? Karl was a regular inventor. Otto remembered the chemistry set they had given him on his twelfth birthday. Worthless God-damned thing. Just a bunch of funny-colored vials of liquid and some sandy-salty-looking grains of stuff in plastic bags. He had mixed all the stuff together and fed it to the dog one night with the regular dog food. The dog didn’t even throw up.

  “Now,” Karl said, “pick up that rock of yours and follow me close. They’re in a cabin down at the end of the road. There’s a front window in the cabin. There’s a back door too. When we get there, you’re gonna throw that rock through the window and I’m gonna start firin’ in. Then you’re gonna hustle your ass to the back door. When they come out, blow them away.”

  O’KEEFE COULD NOT make the key work. “I wonder if the guy gave us the wrong damn key,” he muttered. They would have to trudge back to the van and drive back to the check-in desk. He could always break in, as he had into the house earlier in the day. He wondered what the world would be like now if he had refrained from committing that felony.

  “Let’s just stay in the van tonight,” he said.

  “Let me try it.”

  He made way for her. She did not imitate his frantic and furious jiggling. She worked the key very slowly, listening carefully, like a safecracker, for one metal groove to slide into another. In a few seconds he heard the lock click.

  “Got it,” she said, and pushed the door open. “You need to learn something about putting your key in a lock, my friend” flashing a tease of a smile.

  There was a moral there somewhere, and he thought it might be wise to remember it.

  She started to go in first, but he held her back, grabbed her pack, and forged on ahead of her like a grunt walking point in ’Nam. The light switch on the wall behind the door turned on a small lamp next to the bed. The “cabin” was really just an oversized motel room suite, unusual only in that it was freestanding and had a back door.

  He crossed the front room, flipped her pack onto the bed, and proceeded across the room to a glass sliding door, which he unlocked, slid open, and went outside. Fog. He bumped into something. Feeling along the wall outside the door, he found a light switch that turned on an ugly, yellow light bulb above him. Outdoor furniture, the iron kind. He was standing on a small porch. Maybe it had a pretty view of something in the daytime.

  Back inside the cabin, he refastened the security chain and looked into the bathroom. It was larger than most motel bathrooms, and the full-sized window added a different touch. Otherwise, it was the same old thing. Fluorescent light over the sink. Stainless steel Kleenex dispenser in the wall, a piece of Kleenex sticking out of it like a tongue. Small bottles of cheap shampoo and body lotion. Heat lamp in the ceiling, controlled by a timer device on the wall. Noisy fan. Heavy rubber shower curtain. Strip of paper below the toilet seat stretched over the toilet bowl like a footbridge.

  “Hey, O’Keefe,” he heard her say behind him, “you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  She was standing between the bed and the front door, the jumpsuit a discarded heap on the floor at her feet. The weak light from the lamp by the bed barely revealed her—half-darkness, half-light, the obscurest of revelations, like truth itself. He thought he knew what she wanted him to do, so he took off the shoulder holster first and then the rest of his clothes and walked past the foot of the bed toward her as she glided a few steps into the room to greet him. He stopped in front of her, an arm’s length away, not knowing whether to reach out for her or just keep standing there a bit wonderstruck. Behold a vision. No goddess here. A coil, thoroughly mortal. Flesh, solid but yet so incredibly soft. Her long hair flowed over her shoulders and hung down the front of her, covering the tops of her bare breasts. Skin, translucent where the light touched it just right. Veins, the blood coursing through them, streams with no outlet. Her breasts relaxed there before him, waiting for his hands to touch them, excite them, tease her to tautness, the skin of her belly and thighs and arms and breasts and shoulders a slightly flawed whiteness, honey-tinged, golden-toned. Here too were colors ineffable, another process at work, another essence entirely. How could you describe with words the luxuriance of her hair, the beckoning of her bare shoulders and breasts?

  Finally, he could stand it no longer. His hands reached for her. He did not hurry, recalling the moral of the key and the lock. She closed her eyes in a silent moan. You had to think of the Other, uniquely of her, of Tag, this profound humanscape that life would never again repeat. Somehow they were on the floor, and he cradled her in his arms and caressed her with his hands and tongue. She kept uttering small gasps of breath and saying “Oh, God.” A prayer. He was about to lose all control of himself just from touching her with his tongue and mouth and fingers, his hand gripping the strong sinews of her shoulder.

  He stopped for a moment, drew back and beheld her again. Flesh abounding, and grace too. Like a mother lays a child down softly on its back in the crib, he laid her back down on the floor and knelt between her legs. Their eyes met. He guessed they shared the same emotions now, the same ecstatic
agony of indecision, whether to prolong the pleasures of the foreplay or move toward the climax, letting yourself go, surrendering, finally out of control for once, reveling in that surging, leaping delight, precious and soon gone, among the most memorable moments of your whole life. Whatever it was she wanted from him, he hoped he was able to give it, at the very least not spoil it completely for her—with clumsiness, or causing her fear or needless pain, or the bitter regret of having given without taking.

  His hands kneaded her breasts, so ample and pliant, and moved down to her ribcage, holding firmly against the rib bones so small and brittle that they might break like dry twigs if not handled with the utmost care. He kissed the soft flesh of her stomach and made a trail with his tongue all the way down, and he felt her flinch in rebellion against the almost-unbearable pleasure his tongue gave her. He paused, heightening the delicious suspense for her, and for him too. On his knees, bent over in supplication, worshipping in a way. If there was a Grail to be found, he had found it right here. She brought her knees up and her feet back, giving him all the room he could ask for. Tiny explosions jolted her. She closed her thighs against the sides of his head and grabbed his hair with her hands. When he came up to look at her, she still had not opened her eyes. Tears wended their way lazily out of her closed eyelids. Then she was looking at him, the sheen of tears making the aqua eyes seem impossibly bright and clear.

  “Are you ready for me now?” he said.

  She moved her head up and down. Yes. And he vowed to live the rest of his days in affirmation joyful and constant, wallowing in life for all he was worth. Again she moved her feet back and sideways and flat down on the carpet, welcoming him. He put his hands flat on the floor next to her hips and pushed himself up like a gung-ho Marine and slid easily into her as she arched upward to receive him. His vision left him for a few seconds, and it was lovely to see the stars bursting before his eyes. The damp walls of muscle inside her gripped him and held him fast. He did not move any further—she did the rest, a small churning movement of her hips. His breath burst out of his lungs, and he groaned behind it. His arms quivered and then gave way, and he let himself down gently on her.

  Sail on now. Right on through. Into the next phase, the next enfolding. It did not take long to again find her flash point. She wrapped her arms around him and dug her manicured nails polished smoothly in pink into his scarred back, and they moved in perfect rhythm together until she came, and, to his surprise, he too was ready again.

  When he pulled away, they both shuddered and flinched from the shock of separation, as if these bodies, once joined, really were not to be put asunder. When he pulled her up to him, he saw that she was silently, softly crying still. He did not understand why and did not want to inquire, but he could not square it with the tough pose she had presented to him earlier in the day. He put his right arm around her and pulled her face to his chest, leaned back against the bed and petted her hair with his left hand and admired her naked shoulder while she wept on his breast. Gentle moment most solemn. A consecration of sorts.

  In a little while she looked up at him. That smile. “Bang!” she said in a throaty rasp.

  “Bang!” he echoed her.

  She shyly wiped the tears from one of her cheeks. She stood up and threw back her head, hair flying back over her shoulders, breasts bouncing like unbreakable bubbles.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, heading down a narrow hallway that led to the bathroom. “We might as well try the bed too,” he heard her say as she closed the bathroom door. “Tag, you’re it, O’Keefe.”

  Well, he wasn’t ready for an encore just yet, in the bed or anywhere else. He left his underwear on the floor but grabbed his jeans, tugged them on and fished a crushed pack of cigarettes from one of the pockets. All but one of the cigarettes were broken. He lit the unbroken cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed looking at the pack. He reached to open it.

  Another kind of bang. A detonation. The window exploding, glass flying. Something bouncing with a thump on the floor. A rock. Then something aflame. BOOM! Shards of glass tearing into his shoulder and the back of his head. Dive for the floor. Crawl down the hallway. The telltale ping of the silencer. Bullets rocketing all around him. Fire and smoke. Where was the shoulder holster? There—on the floor in front of him. A bullet nicked his foot, ricocheted against the wall beside him, whizzed past his face. Another bullet gouged a chunk out of the wall next to his head. Someone was pumping rounds in through the broken window. He found the pistol, sat up and swiveled his body toward the front of the cabin, grabbed his right wrist with his left hand, pointed the pistol at the smoke in the direction of the window, and fired three rounds.

  O’KEEFE HAD FIRED two rounds and was squeezing off the third before Karl realized that the soldier inside the cabin had a pistol of his own—a loud sonuvabitch too—and was trying to kill him with it. Death did not cross his mind, as always it seemed an impossibility, but capture did. The soldier’s pistol had no silencer attached to it. People would hear. They would be running to check out the source of the disturbance. Fatso was in the back. Should he go back and get him? No, the dumb shit might start shooting at him in the fog. And the Molotov cocktail had worked. Smoke poured from the cabin window, flames sprouted behind it. They could not stay in there. They would have to go out the back, just as he had predicted. If anybody but Fatso were waiting for them back there, they would be dead soon. But Fatso could not be trusted at all. Yet you had to work with what you had. Que sera, sera. Go back up the concrete path to the road and wait to see what happens.

  TAG, ON HER knees, opened the bathroom door and watched O’Keefe fire the pistol into the smoke. When he turned around, his eyes were bloodshot and ragged looking, and he was gasping for good air.

  “Are you all right?” she said. “Where’s my pack?”

  “Screw your pack.”

  He crawled into the bathroom with her and pointed at the window.

  “Wait ’til the smoke gets so bad you can’t stand it, then break the window and climb out.”

  “I need my pack.”

  “What for?”

  “I have clothes in it, for one thing.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m gonna get it.”

  She was heading out the bathroom door, but he pulled her back and went himself. He fought through the billowing smoke and groped blindly on the bed for the pack, hoping the bed had not yet caught fire. It had. But just then he bumped into the pack, pulled it off the bed, stomped back down the hallway, and thrust it into her hands.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Thanks?” he said in disgust. “After I go, close the door before the smoke gets in.”

  What he most certainly did not want was death by fire. He pulled open the bathroom door and dived back into the hallway, expecting to be shot at. Nothing. He moved quickly back down the hallway, around the foot of the bed and across the main room of the cabin, dived out the back door, and drove his head into a piece of the iron furniture, which stunned him for a few seconds. Someone was shooting at him, he could see the pistol flashes, and, jumping up, he fired a round in that direction. A groan of pain. Lucky hit. Heavy footsteps running hard away from him. He fired toward where he thought the sound was. Only one more bullet. He ran around to the front of the cabin where he thought the footsteps had gone.

  KARL HAD PULLED the car around and pointed it up the hill. Leaving it running, he got out and listened. He heard footsteps scratching along the gravel road. It would be either Fatso or the soldier from the van. He pointed his pistol where he knew the runner would appear. A rounded shape that looked like a giant potato stumbled in front of him and fell on its face.

  “I’m hit,” Otto said. “Help me up, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, Otto,” said Karl, “what the fuck do you suppose we do now?”

  Karl picked Otto up, dragged him to the passenger side of the car, and dumped him into the backseat.

  O’KEEFE STOOD BAREFOOT and
bare chested on the gravel road. He thought he heard a car up ahead spinning its wheels on the gravel; the wheels caught, and the car screeched off fast. Gone. At least he hoped so. But then he heard running footsteps in front of him somewhere in the fog. He fired his last bullet in the direction he guessed the footsteps were running, but he had already been vouchsafed his lucky hit for the night, and the footsteps carried on and away. He looked back at the cabin. The flames were eating their way out the front door now.

  Tag!

  “Tag!” he kept calling but got no answer as he ran around the side of the cabin. The bathroom window wasn’t broken. She had not come out that way. Is she still inside? For Christ’s sake! He circled around toward the back door. The back door stood open, smoke gushing out of the aperture. He held his breath and hurled himself into the cabin. She was not in the bathroom. The smoke knifed into his eyes. The front of the cabin was a carnival of flame. He stumbled back out the door to the porch, choking and gagging back the smoke.

  “Tag!” he bellowed into the empty night, just then understanding that it had been her footsteps he had shot at in front of the cabin. She had run away from him.

  He suddenly realized that he had no shirt or shoes on and that he was very cold. In the distance he heard sirens, and they seemed to be playing his song.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SHERIFF WAS not taking the situation kindly.

  “What kind of a puke are you anyway, O’Keefe? You find two people brutally murdered. Whoever did it is after the lady too. And what do you do? Do you report the crimes right away so maybe we can catch the killers before they crawl back under whatever rock they came out from? Do you bring the lady to the police so maybe we can protect her? No! Not you! You shack up with the God-damned gal! Let’s stop the world while Mr. O’Keefe boffs himself a piece of ass! What were you thinkin’ with? Your dick? You’re sick, you know that? You’re sick!”

  Harrigan had been leaning against the interrogation-room wall affecting boredom, a studied indifference to the sputtering rage of the demented yokel across the room. City mouse and country mouse, O’Keefe thought. Harrigan pushed himself off the wall and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table.