by John Etzil
He spotted a bottle of red wine on the end table next to an iPad that was all set up to play music. He tapped the play icon, and the low sultriness of Barry White’s “What Am I Gonna Do With You” serenaded them.
He grabbed the wine bottle, popped the cork, filled the two glasses, and did a little two-step to the music. He raised a glass for a toast and downed it.
“To us. A match made in heaven.”
What a bozo. It took all of her strength not to laugh out loud.
He reached down and opened her jeans, then slid them off her legs. He stood and stared, his eyes laser-focused on her sheer thong, his chin resting on his chest, and his voice came out in a whisper that was barely audible. “Oh my God. You are fuckin’ beautiful. Beautiful.” He looked upwards and did the sign of the cross. “Thank you, God.”
He knelt down between her legs and slipped a finger under the top of her panties to slide them down. “Up,” he said in a soft voice, motioning to her hips. She raised her butt just enough for him to slide the panties past her hips and down both legs.
He coddled her panties with both hands, like a newborn baby. He brought them up to his nose and inhaled so deep that Debbie thought he might get dizzy and fall over. He exhaled, eyes closed, with a delirious smile so wide that Debbie knew she had him.
“Please. Stop,” she said, her voice nothing more than a whimper.
“Oh, man, you are so sweet.” He pushed her knees open, leaned forward, and kissed her stomach just below her belly button.
Debbie forced a full-body quiver, then moaned. “Please. Don’t do that.”
He looked up from between her legs. “Oh, you like that, don’t you?”
“No. Stop.”
He kissed his way down to the top of her pubic hair, then ran his tongue across the top of it. Her fake moan was louder this time. “Oh God… stop.”
He lay down on his stomach and ran both arms under her thighs, clasping his hands down on her hips. He shouldered her thighs up, and she rested them against his ears with her calves on his back. He licked his way down until her moist flesh parted under his tongue. Her breath caught in her throat, and she groaned an unconvincing “Oh God no… Stop. Please.”
He chuckled. “You love this, don’t you? You slut. I knew it.”
“No. Not at all. Stop.” She flung her head from side to side, then pretended to try and squirm away, but she only succeeded in raising her hips up to his chin. She felt his hands clamp tighter around her hips. “No,” she whimpered.
He buried his face between her legs and she reacted by tightening her thighs against his ears. She moaned out loud. “Oh God, yes!” I’ve got you now.
She writhed and moaned, taking short, quick breaths. “Oh God. You’re so good.” And stupid as shit.
She lowered her left leg to the floor and rested it lightly on his right forearm. “Pinch my nipples… Please.” And seal your fate.
He slid his right arm from under her leg and up her stomach. He grabbed a handful of her breast and squeezed hard. “Yes, that’s it.” She bucked against him, luring him deeper into her web. One arm in, one arm out.
She moaned, begging him to continue. “God, that feels so good.” Almost as good as killing you is going to feel.
The first wave of her fake orgasm barreled over the horizon and she bucked and moaned between gritted teeth. “Just a little more.” And you’re as good as dead.
She slid her right calf up higher on his back until her ankle was resting on the back of his right shoulder. She lifted her left leg, placed the back of her knee across the top of her right ankle, and rested her left calf on his back.
Few more seconds…
She continued to buck and shake in her fake orgasm, and moaned loud to distract him as she inched her upper body to the right to get a better angle. She slid her left calf off of his back and quickly folded her leg down over her right ankle, and locked in the triangle choke.
Poor Sam got caught with one arm in, one arm out, a definite no-no in jiu jitsu. She brought her thighs together so tight that he gasped and his whole body froze. His face still buried against her, he tried to raise his head, but the triangle choke was locked in so deep and strong that he couldn’t move.
He raised his eyes to look up at her. She smirked down at him, a calm blackness replacing the feigned pleasure in her eyes.
“Oh, honey,” she whispered. “Please don’t stop now.” She squeezed a little tighter, then released a little pressure, playing with him like a shark tossing a baby seal in the air.
With his free hand he fumbled around on the floor, grabbed his Derringer, and pointed it at her face.
She laughed at him. She’d known the second she’d seen him point the little pistol at her that it was a two-shot .22-caliber Derringer. She even owned three of them herself, one with a very ladylike pink grip. After firing twice at London, the gun was empty. Sam pulled the trigger.
“It’s empty, you moron.” She chuckled and gave in to her sadistic side. “You shouldn’t have shot your load on a dog.”
She knew from locking in thousands of triangle chokes on her fellow jiujitsu students in over a decade of practice, that it was over. She saw the same realization in his eyes, right before they rolled up into his forehead, and she smiled.
She heard the front door crash open.
32
I suspected something was wrong when Debbie replied to my texts using one only word answers. She had two traits that mildly annoyed me: she was fiery as heck, and she could be a talker. Sometimes, especially after a few glasses of wine and before I satisfied her, she could go on about things long after the point was made. Good egg that I am, I tolerated it. It wasn’t like she was an axe murderer or anything, and as annoying as her few flaws were, her good traits way outnumbered them.
One of my “bad” traits, according to her, was that I was paranoid. I tended to think a better word was “careful,” but she wasn’t buying that, so I’d agreed that I’d work on my “paranoia.”
Just the same, tonight I was going to be a little careful, so I pulled my truck into one of the forest access trails that was close to my driveway. In the name of stealth, I intended to go it on foot from here.
I pulled my pickup around a bend in the trail so that it wouldn’t be visible from the road. In my business you always covered your tracks, even in the darkness of night, if you wanted to stay alive. And out of jail. Just being “careful”…I killed the engine, stepped out onto the pine needles and soft closed the door.
The forest always smelled so good to me. Pine and other green scents, mixed with a hint of dampness. I inhaled and soaked in the pleasant smell of nature that hadn’t changed at all since I was a kid. Good memories.
I took out my phone and turned the ringer off. My eyes had adjusted to the moonlight, and I could see the trail well enough without the need for my iPhone flashlight, so I stuffed it back in my pocket.
I trotted towards the road, my footsteps silent on the bed of soft pine needles, my breathing quiet. I heard nothing other than a soft breeze filtering through the treetops. A good sign.
I reached the gravel road that borders my acreage in a few minutes, and stepped up and over the small rock wall that surrounded my property. The ground is so rocky here that the first thing the Dutch settlers did when they arrived in the late 1700s was clear the fields of them so they could grow food. Some of the rocks were stacked up to form two-foot-thick basement or foundation walls for the new homes the settlers were building.
The others were used to create a stone wall perimeter fence that was around two feet high and a foot and a half wide at the base. My two hundred plus acres had been in my family for over a century, and with so many vacations and summer breaks spent in Eminence, I knew these stone walls like the back of my hand.
Most of our acreage was wooded, and our house was located in a big clearing that was set back from the road about two hundred feet. The driveway was gravel with a slight curve, but I wouldn’t be using that tonigh
t.
I crept between the trees, still listening hard for anything out-of-place, and heard nothing. Everything was as it should be. But I knew better. I knew something was wrong.
The wooded area around the front of my house was thinned out, but not cleared. Most of the trees were evergreen, but we still had quite a few hardwoods. The leaves they shed every fall were much crunchier than the fragile pine needles that coated the forest trail, and I had to step slow and soft to minimize the crunching sound that came with each step.
I worked my way up to the clearing that was around my A-frame log cabin and spotted Debbie’s BMW in my driveway. It was parked in front of the right-side garage door. In my spot. Me being a swell guy and all, I let her park in front of the left side garage door because it’s closest to the house.
She never parked in my spot. The fact that something was wrong couldn’t have been clearer to me if she’d held up a neon sign. Good girl. I took out my Glock.
My fears about Sam were coming true before my eyes. I chastised myself again for not ensuring that the douche was dead, but then focused on the task at hand. The fact the Debbie’s “something is wrong” signal of parking her BMW in my spot meant that someone, likely Sam, had been in her car. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known to park in my spot to alert me. But how had he managed to do that?
The most likely scenario was an armed carjack, but if this was the work of Sam, where had he gotten a gun from? All my guns were locked away in safes, so even if he’d broken into my house before Debbie arrived, he wouldn’t have gotten any of my guns. Plus she wouldn’t have known to park in my spot unless he was in her car. Had he had a second firearm on him at Mary Sue’s house? If so, how did I miss it?
And where was London? I instinctively looked over to my hammock and saw the outline of a mound in the grass. Right where he always fell asleep and waited for me. Except this time he didn’t greet me. He didn’t even move. Oh no. It hit me like a freight train.
London was hurt bad, or even dead.
I resisted the urge to go over and confirm it, but there was no way that he was okay. A ghost couldn’t come on our property without him noticing it and trotting over to check out the potential invader, which was usually a chipmunk or rabbit. “Perimeter secure, London?” was probably the most frequently spoken phrase I’ve ever said in my life.
But I would probably say it no more.
I’m not an emotional guy, but London was such a great friend, especially to Cheryl. God she loved that dog. I’d never forget the first time I went over to her condo in Princeton. She opened the door to let me in and the first thing I saw, after her lovely smile, was London sitting by her side. He didn’t bark or growl, he just sat there with his ears up and watched me.
The whole night.
Cheryl made this fantastic steak dinner, and when we finished and moved to her couch to watch a movie, he followed. He was respectful and kept his distance, but I was never out of his sight.
It took a while, but eventually he and I bonded and he relinquished the role of alpha male of the house to me. I thought about how he was one of my last attachments to Cheryl, and my eyes watered up.
He must have been wounded, most likely shot, and gone to the one place above all others that he found comfort in. By my side at the hammock. Except I wasn’t there for him.
I no longer had to assume the worst. I knew it for sure. An armed attacker was holding Debbie hostage inside my house. Or she was already dead. I took a few breaths to get control of my anger, took one last look at London, and stepped closer to the house.
I approached from the left, made it to the corner, and then slid along the front to look in the living room picture window. This was the second time in two nights I’d Peeping Tommed it, and I was already good at it. If this sheriff thing didn’t work out, I could always make a killing selling Peeping Tom videos online.
I reached the lower corner of the window and listened for any sign of life before looking in. I didn’t hear anything. I raised my head and looked in the window.
There was a fire in the fireplace and two glasses of red wine on an end table. The lights were dimmed, and I could hear the sexy bass rhythm of Barry White’s “My First, My Last, My Everything,” a song that we’d danced to so many times that just hearing a stranger hum it on line at Starbucks brought thoughts of Debbie and me locked in an intimate embrace.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw two writhing bodies on my bearskin rug. What the?
Holy Fuck. My Debbie? She was on her back, and even with the dim light I could tell that she was naked. Ostrich Boy was between her legs.
And God help me, she was smiling!
33
In slow motion, I saw Ostrich Boy raise a hand and point it towards Debbie’s face. I caught a glint of light reflecting from his hand and regained my focus. It was a gun. I almost crapped in my pants.
I raced to the front door and smashed it open, entering the living room just as I heard the click of a dry-firing pistol. The gun was empty.
Debbie looked up at me, down at Ostrich Boy, and blurted out; “I swear, honey, this isn’t what it looks like…”
God I loved her sense of humor. She looked back down at Ostrich Boy’s reddening forehead, grunted, and squeezed her legs together so tight that he dropped his pistol and his whole body went limp. Out cold.
I was in awe. “Holy shit, where’d you learn to do that?”
She smiled, but didn’t answer me.
I got on my knees and untied her. She reached up, put her arms around my neck, pulled me down and kissed me right on the lips. I thought I was going to lose my balance, so I put my hand out to brace myself, and it landed on her breast. Purely accidental, I swear.
She stopped kissing me, and I thought she was going to chastise me for feeling her up at a totally inappropriate time. She gestured down to Ostrich Boy, his red forehead still locked tight between her legs, looking like a plump tomato ready to burst.
“I’m okay with how you can’t control yourself with Barry playing in the background and all, but this is a little too kinky even for me. Perhaps you can properly dispose of douchebag, and then we can pick up where we left off?”
34
“HHMMppff. HHMMPPFFHH!”
My passenger woke up and tried to speak. I looked over at him and shook my head in disgust. Shithead.
I reached out and ripped the duct tape from his mouth so hard I left a bright red rectangle on his face. I balled the tape up and tossed it out the window.
“Fuck!” he screamed and leaned forward in pain. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, save it, dipshit.”
“You’re a dead man, do you hear me, a fucking dead man. Nobody does this to Big Sam and lives to talk about it.” He pulled at the handcuffs which I’d chained and padlocked around his size-forty-something waist.
I nodded to his lap. “Having some trouble there, Fat Sam? That chain can hold fifteen thousand pounds, so don’t even bother.”
“You’re the one with the fuckin’ trouble. I don’t know who you think you are, but I know that you’re a dead man. A fuckin’ dead man!” Spittle flew from his mouth, and he yanked violently at the chains, left and right, up and down, like a rabid animal snared in a trap who could smell the hunter closing in on him for the kill.
“Easy there, chubby, you don’t want to hurt yourself.”
“Fuck you, you piece of dog shit.” Drool came out of his mouth, and his face was so beet-red from anger that the red rectangle around his mouth blended in with the rest of his face.
I was afraid he might have a stroke, so I took out my blackjack and whacked him in the forehead, careful not to hit his nose so he wouldn’t bleed all over my interior. The last thing I needed was to clean up another goddam mess. As it was, it’d probably take me a good twenty minutes to contain and clean up the oil slick his hair had left on his seat.
I looked over at him and shook my head in disbelief. What a freakin’ bastard. After all he’
d been through, his hair was still perfect. I felt like hitting him again, but held off.
My blackjack shot to his forehead wasn’t forceful enough to knock him out, but it stunned him enough that he just sat there in a silent daze for a few minutes. I sighed and relaxed. Finally, some peace and quiet.
It was a clear night, so I dimmed the dashboard lights down and leaned forward to glance up through the windshield. The night sky was filled with stars. There were millions of them, and I could even see the Milky Way. It was so close it looked fake, like being at a planetarium. It always amazed me how clear the night became once you escaped from the air and light pollution of the big cities.
A few minutes later, my peace and quiet was interrupted by childlike sniffling coming from my passenger. Oh well, the silence had been great while it’d lasted.
I looked over, cursed him again for his hair, and saw tears streaming down his chubby cheeks mixing with snot from his nose before bubbling up at his lips. There was a big red bump on his forehead where my blackjack had kissed him. It matched the red rectangle around his mouth.
For a second I almost felt sorry for him. Then I thought of all the HFS intel I’d gathered on him and what he’d done to Debbie and Mary Sue. And London.
I felt like hitting him again. The only reason I didn’t was because I’d been up for so long that I was beyond fatigued, and I didn’t trust my aim. Missing his nose and avoiding a blood fest with two shots in a row in a moving vehicle would be pushing my luck. A man’s got to know his limitations.
“Why? What have I ever done to you?” He sounded contrite now, but he couldn’t fool me. I’d been following him through HFS for more than two years. I knew more about Sam and his family than Sam did. Not just the criminal enterprises he ran, but his personal life too.
HFS had every eavesdropping hardware imaginable in his house. We called it “Sammy’s Smarthouse,” SS for short. Every single room of his six-thousand-plus-square-foot house had multiple smart home devices, each one hacked and turned into our personal wiretap and pinhole video camera. I had a front-row seat to one of the most violent criminal enterprises ever to hit the East Coast. Sam had his greedy little fingers in anything that made him money, from heroin to small arms, to pimping little kids—he sold it all. He ran his empire like a little Napoleon, and at last count he had twenty eight dead bodies to his credit. And most painful of all, one dog.
