Well, she supposed the place had a certain raffish charm. But she didn’t figure it would be hard to coax Peter away from it.
The apartment she chose was in Riverdale, and just blocks from the one where Peter Fuhrmann had fed her a Roofie and she’d returned the favor by spiking his vodka. There was a certain symmetry that appealed to her, but she picked the neighborhood because it was easier to find a nice anonymous sublet there than in Williamsbridge or Edenwald. Riverdale was filled with Yuppies, and they were forever moving in and moving out and moving on, losing their jobs or getting better ones, breaking up with significant others, finding new lovers to move in with, and otherwise keeping the real estate market humming.
The man she sublet from was a junior executive with one of the major accounting firms, on his way to a new post in Wichita. Their deal was simple, and ideal for her purposes; it was unofficial, with no paper signed, and he’d continue to send a monthly check to the landlord while she’d send money orders to him at his new office.
Meanwhile, she gave him cash for a month’s rent, and they shook hands, and that was that. By the time he started wondering where the money order was, she’d be out of the apartment, the city, and the state.
He suggested going out for a drink to seal the bargain, and it was clear that he had more than a drink in mind. He’d been checking her out since she walked in the door. And he was cute, and she wouldn’t have minded, not in the least. Take him out for a drink, bring him home to what had just become her apartment, take him to bed and fuck his brains out, and then what? Kill him and look for another sublet?
“I really wish I could,” she said. “But these days my life’s complicated enough as it is. But some other time, huh? I mean, you never know when I might find myself in Wichita.”
There was probably a shop in Riverdale that sold sex toys, the potential customer base was certainly present, but she remembered the Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue, and it was just a subway ride away.
She picked out a batch of items, and as she was paying for them she set one aside and asked if the store could ship it for her. She wrote out the name and address.
It would be no problem, the clerk assured her. And would she like to enclose a card?
She shook her head. “She’ll know who it’s from,” she said.
She’d been staying on the cheap in a Jersey City rooming house, but once she’d sublet the Riverdale apartment she moved right in. The furniture was generic, but everything was new and neat and clean, and it would be comfortable enough for the week or two she’d be using it.
Every few days she called Peter, and was pleased when they released him right on schedule. “I’m in the van now,” he said. “It seats ten, but there’s just me and the driver. He’s taking me all the way to the halfway house.”
“In the movies,” she said, “they give you ten dollars and a cheap suit and you’re on your own.”
“They gave me the suit I was wearing when I got here. Got there, I should say, because I’m not there anymore. It doesn’t fit as well as it used to.”
“Still, I bet you look nicer in it than in the orange outfit.”
“Jesus, I hope so. They give you a ride to the halfway house because otherwise too many guys don’t make it that far.”
“They lose their way?”
“In a manner of speaking. And I can understand why. All I am right now is outside the walls, maybe thirty miles down the road, and already it feels scary.”
“Being free.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” she said, “if you miss it too much, all you have to do is find some sweet young thing and kill her. They’ll take you back in a hot second.”
The silence was profound. Had she gone too far?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was supposed to be a joke, but I guess it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”
“It just came out of the blue,” he said. “Took me by surprise.”
“I can see where it would. Forgive me?”
“Nothing to forgive, Audrey.”
“Well, I intend to make it up to you,” she said. “I got a place for us to be together. I know you have to spend nights at the halfway house, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. It’s a nice modern building, and the apartment’s all furnished and there’s even a view. Plus I went shopping.”
“Oh?”
“I bought us a nice bottle of wine,” she said. “Nuits-Saint-Georges. And I bought some toys for us to play with. You’ll see. We’ll have fun.”
She gave him two days to settle in at the halfway house, then met him around the corner. He was wearing a flannel shirt and wellworn jeans, and she had the feeling he wasn’t the first person to own them, that they’d been picked up at a thrift shop or handed out at the halfway house. Whatever the source, he looked good in them. They were an improvement on the orange jumpsuit, and a better choice than any suit he might have worn.
“That’s some place,” he said.
“Better than where you were? Or worse?”
“Well, all I had to do just now was open the door and walk out. That wasn’t an option upstate, so that makes this a big improvement. But it’s the same people, you know?We’re none of us wearing orange jumpsuits, but outside of that we haven’t changed all that much.”
“Oh?”
“A lot of the guys are drinking,” he said. “That’s a violation of the house rules, but nobody makes you take a Breathalyzer test. Still, if you’re a falling-down drunk they’re gonna throw you out. And there are a few I’m pretty sure are using.”
“Drugs?”
He nodded. “A neighborhood like this, how hard can it be to find somebody to cop from? And that’s not just against the house rules, it’s a parole violation and a quick ticket inside. You said something about a bottle of wine.”
“Right.”
“Well, it’s fine with me if you have some, but I think I’m going to pass. I was never in that much of a rush to get out of there, you know, but then you came along, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to breathe free air again. And drinking was never a problem for me, at least I never thought it was, but if not drinking gives me a better shot at staying out, well, I think I’ll give it a try. At least as long as I’m at the residence.”
“How do they feel about Coca-Cola?”
“They’re fine with Coke,” he said, “as long as it’s not the powdered variety.”
“Then screw the wine,” she said. “I’ve got Coke in the fridge and clean sheets on the bed. And there’s a gypsy cab. He’s not allowed to pick up fares on the street, but I bet he will. See? What did I tell you? This is our lucky day.”
The sex was sweet. They started kissing, and things proceeded from there at a dreamy pace, and there was never an opportune time to show him the sex toys. Easier to scrap that script, just as she’d abandoned her plans for the wine. It was a nice bottle, a slightly pricier version of what she’d brought to Rita’s dinner table, but it could remain unopened. She wouldn’t need it. And the toys could wait their turn.
Sweet kisses, sweet stroking and petting. He was quite obviously in love with her — or, perhaps more accurately, he was in what he thought was love with what he thought was her. He’d got it all wrong, but while it lasted she might as well go with the flow.
And maybe, she found herself thinking, just maybe the flow she was going with was there to bring her full circle. Maybe she had done what she had to do, maybe she’d killed enough lovers to wipe the last of her father’s touches from her flesh. Maybe the relentless cycle of couple and kill and couple and kill had finally run its course.
Maybe the love he felt for her was real, and maybe it had somehow given birth to that same emotion within her. Maybe she’d punished him enough, poisoning his playmate and sending him to jail for her murder, saddling him not only with a prison sentence but with a double burden of unwarranted guilt.
And maybe she was even now responding to his love, and what stirred her now was not an itc
h being scratched, not the excitement of sex wedded to the anticipation of another killing, but, well, love. Her own love for him, and her anticipation — incredibly — of a life free from the need to bring an endless line of men to her bed, and from it to their graves.
Maybe she could have a life, a real life, being lover and, yes, wife to this man. A good man, a man who loved her, a man whom she could love.
Maybe—
Her climax was surflike, waves rolling and rolling, tossing her, drowning her, hurling her onto the shore. For a long moment she was somewhere else entirely, lost in space and time.
And then she was in her bed, in her sublet apartment in Riverdale, with the perspiration cooling on her skin and a man lying spent at her side.
She reached out for that last thought, a thought that cried out for violins in the background, and a visual that was all pastoral fantasy, milkmaids and shepherds, white clouds in a blue sky…
Maybe—
Then again, she thought, maybe not.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.”
EIGHTEEN
The thing about Coca-Cola was it had a good strong taste. You could add almost anything to it and it would still taste like Coca-Cola.
That was the good thing about it. The bad thing was that if you dropped a pill into a glass or can or bottle of Coke, it did its Old Faithful imitation and fizzed like crazy.
She knew this because of a pre-teen experiment. The word at school was that you could get high by dissolving an aspirin tablet in a can of Coke, and she’d tried, and what you got was a geyser that bubbled all the Coke out of the can. After a couple of attempts, she figured out that the carbonation had something to do with the reaction, and that all she had to do was let the Coke get flat, and then add the aspirin. So she did, and the tablet dissolved without generating a burst of bubbles, and she drank the resultant mixture, and, of course, nothing happened. You didn’t get high. You didn’t even get sick. A big nothing all around.
But, if she’d gained nothing else from the experience, she’d learned not to drop pills into carbonated beverages. Happily, her pharmaceutical score had included a couple of little bottles of chloral hydrate, and Google had led her to all anybody needed to know about that marvelous substance. It was the active ingredient in the legendary Mickey Finn, invented a century and a half ago in San Francisco. A few drops of chloral hydrate in a beer or a highball, and the next thing you knew you were part of the crew of a clipper ship in the China trade. You’d been shanghaied — that’s where the word came from — and you were stuck there, at least until you got to the next port.
A few drops in a glass of Coke? Well, let’s see.
“Here,” she said. “Coca-Cola, with just a little lemon juice for flavoring. Come on, drink up. We’ll toast our future, Peter.”
Perfect.
“It could be a lot worse, Peter. Like, you wake up on the heaving deck of a ship bound for Hong Kong, and the last thing you remember is knocking back a glass of red-eye in a Barbary Coast saloon.” She frowned. “But maybe this is worse. It’s hard to say.”
He didn’t say anything, but how could he? He had a six-inch length of duct tape across his mouth. He was on his back, spread-eagled on the bed, held there by restraints from the Pleasure Chest. (Gentle! Will leave no marks!)
And she’d used other toys as well.
“You were sleeping so nicely,” she said, “and I thought I’d just let you sleep forever, you know? Smother you in your sleep, or give you a shot of something lethal. The good thing about that is you’d never know what happened, but that’s the bad thing, too, because, well, you’d never know what happened.”
God, the look in his eyes. He was trying to make sense out of this, and how could he? Nor was she helping, her words wandering all over the place.
“Just to fill you in,” she said, “if you’ll pardon the expression, well, that’s a butt plug you feel in your ass. Just to keep you from feeling lonesome for the hot nights in prison. No, no really, because I know you were too much of a tightass to let yourself go that way. It’s more to set the stage, but we’ll get to that.
“And the constriction at the base of your dick, well, you’re wearing a cock ring. That’s why you’ve got such a raging hard-on, even though you came like crazy less than an hour ago. The vein’s constricted, but not the artery, so the blood gets in but can’t get out, and your dick stays stiff as a board even though sex is the last thing you want right now.”
He was trying to say something. He couldn’t, of course, but a certain amount of sound came through his nose. Pathetic, really.
“Okay, cut to the chase,” she said. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing this part. Remember that woman you went to prison for?Maureen McSomething? You didn’t kill her, dumbass. I killed her.”
Wide eyes. Zero comprehension.
“You fed me a Roofie, Peter, way back when. And that wasn’t supposed to happen, because I picked you up intending to fuck you and kill you, and the next thing I knew it was morning. So we had a little party, and on the way out I spiked your vodka so that the next drink you took would be your last. But I guess you weren’t much of a vodka drinker, so Maureen got it instead, and since you told the cops about the Rohypnol, they didn’t run a good enough tox scan to find out what else might have gotten into the little darling’s system. And off you went to prison, sure you deserved whatever they gave you.”
And she explained how she hadn’t even known about it until he was a few years into his sentence, how she’d had to track him down, and how she’d been willing to do this because he was one of only three men she’d slept with who still had a pulse.
And she told him why it was important to her that he die, that she be able to cross his name off the list. She was pretty sure it wasn’t making any sense to him, if indeed it was registering at all. Hearing her own words as she spoke them, she wasn’t sure it made any sense to her, either. Why did she have to do this? What difference did it make if an ex-lover was still alive? Why should she care?
But she did care. No getting around it, she cared. Her whole life centered upon it, for better or for worse.
“So here you are,” she said. “What do you figure, is it good news or bad news? You didn’t kill that girl, so that’s a relief, right? On the other hand, you did all that time in prison and went through all that guilt for nothing, so that’s not so good, is it? But either way it doesn’t matter too much, because in a few minutes you’re going to be dead.”
She showed him the noose.
“Autoerotic asphyxiation, sweetie. To heighten your pleasure. You’ll be wearing a butt plug and a cock ring, which just might give them the idea that sex is a component here, and after you’re dead I’ll lose the restraints and the duct tape, and, well, what are they going to think? And if some CSI-type genius figures out that you had a woman around, for at least part of the proceedings, do you think they’re gonna knock themselves out looking for her? You’re a known pervert, you already drugged a girl and served time for her death, so what do they care? Poetic justice, right?”
And what would he say to that? Well, she’d never know, would she?
Two.
She sat at the white parson’s table in the windowed kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. It was a shame, she thought, that she couldn’t hang on to the apartment a little longer. But there was a dead man in the bedroom, and that meant she’d have to be moving on.
She picked up the phone, keyed in a number.
“Hello?”
“Rita?”
“Omigod, Kimmie!”
Oh, right, she was Kim, wasn’t she? And now, with Peter cooling in the other room, she never had to be Audrey again.
“I sent you a present.”
“I knew it was from you. Even if I didn’t know what it was.”
“It’s a butt plug.”
“Well, I know that now, silly. I had to Google it.”
“How? If you didn’t know—”
“I Googled ‘sex toys,’ and I found a site with everything illustrated, and I must have spent an hour just reading about one damn thing after another.”
“Just reading?”
“Kimmie!”
Funny how easy it was, talking to Rita. Funny how she’d missed this.
“…called a flange,” Rita was saying. “To keep it from, you know, getting lost in there.”
“Hard to explain to the intern in the emergency room.”
“God, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? ‘I don’t know how on earth it got all the way up there, doctor.’ ”
“They must hear a lot of stories.”
“Oh, God, you know what I read online?”
Her sudden departure was the elephant in the living room, until she had to force herself to acknowledge the beast. When the conversation hit a lull, she said, “Rita, I just had to leave. It was sudden, and I should have said goodbye, but I figured the best thing I could do was just hop on the bike and go.”
“I had this vision of you on the bike, trying to get over the Rocky Mountains.”
“I just left it at the bus station. I hated to abandon it but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it back to you.”
“I never rode it anyway. And it’d be impossible now, with a butt plug up my bottom.”
“You’re too much, Rita.”
“That’s why you left, isn’t it? Not because I’m too much, but because we were too much. That last night, when we were—”
“Jilling.”
“Yeah. It was so fucking hot, Kimmie, but then the next day it was scary.”
“I know.”
“I mean, it’s not a lesbian thing when you’re both talking about things you did with guys, right? And we never even touched each other.”
“No, but—”
“But what, Kimmie?”
“Well, if we did it again, I might have wound up sitting next to you. And I might have touched you.”
“I might have let you.”
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