“You see, you went to prison a guilty wreck, sorry for what you did. Took the rap. Vehicular manslaughter. Dark foggy night and Walter high out of his mind. Your baby face sold that bullshit to the jury. But you thought you deserved more, not less. In the joint, you found God, Buddha, or maybe learned to love a man in a spiritual way. Now you’re a changed man. You did your time and made peace with yourself and decided when you got out you’d leave for good. But you still know stuff about me.”
“What do I have on you, Pop? Not a fucking thing. All that time in the joint, I didn’t say one thing. And trust me, the opportunity was there. But my knowledge of your life died five years ago. And that’s the way I want to keep it. There’s nothing I can pin on you.”
“You know shit you couldn’t possibly forget. More than I’m comfortable with. I know all about the deals the DA offered you. I kept tabs with people inside still friendly. But guilt is strong and it did a good job keeping you quiet. Now you’re out and I need to see for myself what kind of man you’ve become.”
Maybe he actually believed the shit he spouted. Yeah, I felt a little guilty about letting him kill Walter but I took the rap because it got me away from him. Prison was the first freedom I’d ever enjoyed.
“And her?” I said. “Threatening her is useless. Gonna kill her now since she serves no purpose?”
“Something like that.”
The hooker screamed around her gag.
“Let her go. You’ve got my word. Everything I could ever use against you is now forgotten. But I won’t work for you and I won’t stick around to be your puppet. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“I guess we’ll see then.”
“How does this play out? Huh? Spell it out!”
“I will soon.”
“Now.”
“Soon.”
I punched the dashboard a couple of times and yelled a bunch of shit but all of it bounced right off him. His game, his rules. Dad kept driving and I looked out the window at the woods passing by.
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll be there soon enough.”
* * * *
Thirty minutes of silence passed. Well, not silence, just no talking. Dad hummed. I tapped my thigh and the hooker moaned weakly around her gag.
I’d failed to talk my way out of this, whatever this was. Dad had planned something to ensure my trust to keep me local. I didn’t care about her anymore than an ant. But I didn’t want to watch him kill another person. Did I have a choice?
We arrived at a beat-up old cabin in the middle of Blackwater Forest. I’d never been there before but had a sickening feeling Dad had many times. The cabin had only one purpose and vacationing wasn’t it. He used to have a beat up trailer near the beach for this type of work. Apparently, he’d gone rustic since I’d gone into the joint.
“Let’s go in.” Dad killed the engine. “I’ll grab the hooker.”
He did, dragging her kicking and whimpering body inside.
The cabin smelled of fresh animal piss and death. Dull sunlight spilled through grime-covered windows. Mold had spread across most of the ceiling and down the knotty-pine walls. Blood stains covered the floor. As soon as I took in my surroundings, I understood how dad planned to gain my loyalty. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.
“I’m not going to kill her,” I said as Dad dropped the hooker between us.
“What?”
“You want her blood on my hands but I won’t kill her.”
“Is that a fact?”
“I know that’s what you want. I kill her and then you’ve got one thing you can always hold over me. That’s the loyalty you want, right?”
Dad chuckled. “No.”
“Then what, you piece of shit?”
He reached behind him and pulled out the .357 which he’d had tucked in the back of his pants. Dad pointed the gun at the hooker’s head and cocked the hammer.
“I’m gonna kill her. Not you.”
“What?”
I stepped forward, a foot away from him.
“I kill her in front of you. If you decide to rat me out, you’ll be a murderer.”
“Bullshit.”
Then I noticed Dad had gloves on. He must have pulled them on before bringing in the hooker.
“The piece look familiar?” Dad said.
The .357 looked no different than—
Mine. The one Dad gave me when I turned eighteen. Just like his but my initials on the grip.
“You kept it in your car,” Dad said. “I got it before the cops came. I made sure not to touch it with bare hands.”
Which meant it still had my prints on it.
“Still has the last three rounds you had in it last time you shot it.”
He’d preserved it the last five years. If he shot her …
“Testify, point the finger, drop a dime on any of my activities, tell a DA about some other bodies I dropped in the past, I take you with me. Run, walk, or even crawl out of town, this gun ends up on a cop’s front door with directions to the body.”
The hooker screamed around the gag.
“You work for me, son. You’re mine.”
“You’ve got me. I swear it. I’ll do whatever you want. Run powder, meth, anything. Just don’t kill her.”
“Your word means shit to me. Knowing you hold murders and drugs over my head, knowing you can run at any moment, is unacceptable. I need to stamp you with blood, son. Her blood.”
“Why not just kill me? Huh? If you’re so concerned about me, ensure I’ll never talk.”
“You’re worth more to me alive.”
“The money, okay. I’ll give you Walter’s money.”
Dad tilted his head. “What money?”
“Walter’s money. I have it. I took it the night before you killed him. He was too high to remember.”
“You set Walter up?”
“Yeah, and I’ll give you the money if you let me walk.”
“You let me kill Walter to keep the money. You did your time to pay off the guilt. And you have the nerve to judge me you little shit. Let me do your dirty work for you.”
“I paid what I owed with time. I took the rap to get away from you. And I’ll give you the money to square us and her.”
“The hundred thousand.” Dad chuckled. “I make that in a month running meth. Keeping you under my thumb is worth more than that, especially now that I know what a slimy piece of shit you truly are.”
Panic flooded me. Dad turned and looked down the barrel of the .357 into the hooker’s brown eyes. Only a few moments until he squeezed that trigger. The crazy bastard would kill her just to keep me in line, keep me close.
“Sorry, honey.”
I glanced around me for a weapon within arm’s reach. Found nothing. Then I remembered the Swiss Army knife.
I pulled the knife out of my jeans pocket, flipped the blade, and stepped forward. Dad caught me out of his peripheral, though, and twisted toward me, the switchblade springing to life in his other hand.
Closing the distance before he could bring the blade up into my guts, I shuttled forward fast and thrust the tip of the Swiss Army knife into the side of my father’s neck as he caught me in the love handle with the switchblade.
He screamed and tried to wheel around with the gun. I slapped his hand with my left, knocking the .357 to the floor. The gun erupted, shooting the round through one of the windows.
I kicked him in the back of the knee and took him to the floor. Dad tried to fight me off but I dropped all my weight on his sternum. His smoky breath hit me in the face and sent me into a stabbing rage. His hand let go of the switchblade, leaving it sunk into the soft flesh of my side.
Over and over I thrust the knife into his neck. His warm blood soaked my hand so much I lost my grip on the knife, leaving three quarters of it in the soft tissue under his jaw.
Dad’s breaths grew short then stopped. His eyes rolled up and looked toward the now shattered window. The hooker continu
ed to belt her muffled wail.
I looked at my hand. The bloody sight would have repulsed me if I didn’t know it was my father’s blood. That bit of knowledge filled me with a sense of warmth and confidence. It was over. Finally, it was over. I should have known I could never run away from him. It was always going to come down to him or me and he had to die for me to be free.
The howling of the hooker snapped me back to the now. I pulled the switchblade from my side. The wound bled like a sonofabitch but I’d live. I wiped my hand on Dad’s chest, and then went to remove the gag from her mouth.
I stopped short. She’d heard and seen everything. She could tell her story about how dad had planned to kill her. How I’d killed him to save her. But the damn whore could also say how I’d confessed to setting Walter up. How I’d stolen money and let the bastard die for it. How I’d killed Dad to save myself and couldn’t give two shits about her.
My hands started to shake. I looked at my father’s corpse and imagined landing back in prison. I was thinking like him and hated myself for it. Dad wins.
I pushed up to my feet and grabbed the .357. I looked at it in the dull light. All those years just to go back? This time for life? I couldn’t do it. I knew I wouldn’t make it. No way would I go back.
Only one solution. Only one way out of this trap.
I cocked the hammer.
Only one exit. Only one way to finally be free.
Then I heard Dad’s voice in my head say, “Why leave a living witness?”
I leveled the gun and put two rounds through the hooker’s head. Her blood mixed with dad’s in a pool engulfing their bodies.
“God damn you both.”
I left them to rot in the cabin and took dad’s Chevelle. Thirty minutes away from the cabin, I dumped the car with the gun and the knives in a lake in the middle of the night.
Now I head west, Walter’s money in hand. Now I leave this shit behind me, left dead on the floor of an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere.
The Mouth
John Everson
* * *
Thrust.
Pull back.
Buck, fist, pound.
Thrust.
Pull back.
The heart speeds up, briefly, adrenaline pumping in crazed waves.
The mouth opens and shuts, gasps for air. Moans fill the air like rain, musk melds with the stench of sweat. And then it’s over, and the attack diminishes, the cries taper, the galloping heart slows.
The defining evidence that separates sex and murder is really only the amount of blood left behind on the bed. The amount of heartache afterwards separates lust from love.
* * * *
I’ve been a slave to these passions for so long, the gaping mouths and gasping wounds have all blurred together in my head. There are memories of thrusting—hands, knives, cock—inside the mouths, mammaries and musk of blondes and brunettes, fat girls and thin, ugly trash and haute delicate skinned models. In the end they’re all sloppily the same and yet beautifully different. The tenor of their cries, the strange tics and angular movements that separate one girl from the next are delicious to watch, to feel. Some bleed heavy and thrash like mad. Others go wide-eyed in shock and disbelief. But in the end, sex or murder, fat or thin, it all comes down to moans and thrusting, hard nipples and harder cocks.
And the challenge of distancing yourself after. Both in heart and body. I’ve never had much of a problem managing either, and I didn’t expect to today.
Kyla, a D.C. hooker who’s played with me in my sex-death revolving roulette often over the years, told me the story that set me packing instantly. She knew I’d never resist the temptation. Her acne-pocked cheeks crinkled in a lopsided grin as she measured my interest and excitement.
“They call her ‘The Mouth,’ ” she whispered, and then ran a thin tongue tip across her lower lip. She knew I could rarely tear my eyes (or cock) away from an eager oral slave. That’s why so often I had her videotape our little explorations with our chosen slaves. Or, as the case may be, victims. Later I could pick up the other details missed during my initial fixation. And rerun them, again and again.
“She’s all fucked up,” Kyla explained, leaning in to nip my ear. A light chocolate breast slid out of the silk entrapment of her slip, and my hand didn’t hold back from trapping its eager nipple. She hissed and pulled away as I squeezed hard.
“Tell me,” I demanded.
Her fist pounded at my shoulder, but I didn’t ease my grip. Kyla would try to make me fuck her for the information, but I wasn’t trading.
“Later,” she moaned, nails now in action across my chest and back.
“Now.”
* * * *
And so, a few hours and a diseased fuck from Kyla later (sometimes I’m generous), and I’m in backwoods Virginia. “The Mouth” is apparently an Appalachia throwaway. A backwoods freak. Genetic disaster.
And the thought of it has me harder than nails. Kyla has her ways and her contacts and she owes me more than I owe her. Her fascination with dismemberment in the midst of orgies has been a logistical nightmare for me on many an occasion. And there’s something highly unarousing about hosing the splatter of another man’s sperm and bile off the dead girl beneath you so that you can finish your own fuck.
I hate it when Kyla cums before me.
The houses had thinned to one per mile, and for most, the only evidence that there was a dwelling behind the tangle of lush forest and vine was the rutted track that broke the barrier of heavy hedge along the gravel road. I couldn’t go above 30 mph without fearing a hernia. This was not well-travelled country.
But every time I felt lost, I’d spot one of Kyla’s landmarks passing by. A rusting John Deere overturned in a ditch. A wooden sign declaring “Keep Out. Property of O’Clannahan. Trespassers Shot First, Questioned Later.”
I stuck to the road, such as it was, and watched for the only clue I had remaining on my list of landmarks. An outhouse.
Why anyone would put an outhouse at the edge of the road out here was beyond my guessing, and why anyone would be brave enough to step inside such a structure in the midst of snake and spider and hornet country was a better question. An outhouse on an unused road would likely harbor more critters than shit, and I wouldn’t dare consider contributing to the latter given the threat of the former. Then again, many of the property warning signs might leave one a bit shy of pissing on a local bush. You might end up without privates.
The outhouse jolted out of the brambles like a belltower, and the car jerked and slid as I slammed on the brakes. A lurch, a shuddering slide, and I was skating down the rocky hillside drive that the outhouse had marked. A canopy of fern and leaf left me with the impression of driving through a poorly lit tunnel. Just as my eyes accustomed to the shade however, the forest roof broke to a clearing and in the white shine of a sweaty noon, I caught my first glimpse of The Mouth’s house.
Correction: shack.
It looked to be four or five rooms, a rotting testament to lazy carpentry. A series of mismatched gray boards jutted from the roof eaves and only a door cut through the warped boards of the front wall. I could see one window on the side of the structure, a four-paned bit of relief that threatened to disappear inside a nest of leaves. The hum of bees filled the air and as I stared at the decaying structure I saw why. A stream of fat, slow flying insects traded flightpaths from the nearby woods to a dark fissure in the roof above the window. Precisely why I avoid outhouses in the woods, I thought.
Shrugging to myself, I trampled through the kneehigh scrubgrass and tentatively knocked on the peeling white paint of the front door. Could anybody really still be living here?
From inside I heard the squeak of old floorboards and the murmur of voices. And then the door opened a crack. No more than four inches. I could see the glint of a dark eye and the grey of gray curls.
“Yeh?” came a suspicious, guttural question.
“Kyla said you’d expect me.”
Th
e door opened wider and a wrinkled short woman inspected me, hands on hips, not moving aside to let me pass ’til her consideration was finished.
“You been fixed?”
“Not broken,” I said.
She shook a heavy head.
“Fixed. You had a va-sex-tommy?” Her accent was heavy with the hills, and I stifled a smile.
Once her meaning sank in, I shook my head. “No.”
“Then no oral for you.”
I looked at her and thought that I didn’t want oral, anal or anything else from her. She was a potato sack of a woman, and long beyond childbearing years. I started to back away but she grabbed my arm and dragged me inside the dark house.
“She likes the oral, but no fixed, no oral. Deal?”
I said okay and she slapped my face, lightly. “Promise. You like her, you get it fixed. Then you kin fuck her mouth. Only then.”
Again I agreed, and she led me past a brown couch, stuffing leaking from its belly and into a brighter kitchen. She pointed to an old white wooden chair and I sat, noting that the drone of bees was louder here. I thought the window over the sink must have been the one I’d seen from the drive.
What the fuck had Kyla sent me into? Was this a punishment for something?
The inside of the house was no more kept up than the out. And in the heat of summer, with no air conditioning and no open windows, the air was stifling. And sour. Flies bumped heads against a grease-blurred window, and on the table a handful of mugs and glasses remained full of recent leavings. A glass of tomato juice, another of some light golden juice, maybe apple. A mug of coffee was in front of me, and I pushed away its curdled contents in disgust. Something with a lot of legs ran across the broken tile at my feet.
The old woman came back then, this time with a younger woman. At first glance, she was a beaut. Long raven black hair flowed over her shoulders, and a thin, ratty tank clung tightly to her and did nothing to hide the fullness of her breasts. The dark point of her left nipple pressed tightly through the fabric. A wide trail of sweat ran from the hollow of her neck to the point just above the deep pock of her bellybutton. The shirt ended there, and so did her clothing.
The Death Panel Page 19
