“I work the swing shift today, four to midnight.”
“I don’t want to be here alone tonight.”
“I made some extra money in tips last night. Some dot-com millionaire younger than my little brother tipped me three hundred dollars before he started losing. Why don’t I take you to buy a gun? With the way the neighborhood is changing it’s probably not a bad idea anyway.”
“Are you serious?” Sarah lit up at the idea. “What kind?”
She swiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands and sat up in bed.
Josh looked at her with a bemused expression on his face. He reached out and brushed the hair from her face.
“You really aren’t like other women. You know that?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Most women would object to the idea of having a gun in the house but you can’t wait to buy one. You’re too eager, in fact. Should I be afraid here? You’re not going to use it on me, are you?”
“Not as long as you keep fucking me when I want to be fucked.”
She kissed him on his lips, then rubbed her hands over his shoulders and down his arms. His biceps were still hard and muscular despite the layer of fat he’d put on since moving to Vegas. He’d had less time to exercise and spent too much time at the buffets. She ran her hand over his belly, which had expanded quite a bit in the last few years. It jiggled as she rubbed it. She ran her hand back up to his chest. His pecs were still big and hard like a bodybuilder’s. They were even bigger than they’d been in college. Josh had begun powerlifting the last few years because it was quicker. He’d pile as much weight onto the bar as he could, do two or three reps, do that for three or four sets and then he was done. His entire routine took him less than twenty minutes a day. It was all he had time for.
He may not have had one of those ripped-up bodies full of cuts and striations with veins popping out everywhere like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but these days neither did Arnold. Josh was still a big, strong man despite his growing paunch. Sarah ran her hands over his belly, then down between his legs where he was already hard. Josh was not a small man in any regard. She hated to admit that the size of his cock had been one of the things she’d first fallen in love with. She knew that women weren’t supposed to care about the physical, especially when it came to what a man was packing. It was supposed to be all about being treated right and cared for and Josh was good at all of that too. He was patient and supportive and attentive and treated Sarah like a queen. But being hung like a porn star certainly didn’t hurt.
“Mmmmm. Is that for me?”
She crawled beneath the covers and swirled her tongue around the head of his cock, licking up and down and flicking the head with her tongue as he squirmed and moaned. She continued teasing his cock with her tongue until he couldn’t take it anymore and reached down and grabbed her by the hair, forcing his cock down her throat. She loved it when he did that. Josh wasn’t a rough lover. He was sweet and loving, preferring to make love even when she was in the mood for a good hard fuck. But she had her ways of awakening the beast in him.
Josh aggressively fucked her throat and Sarah tried her best to ignore it whenever he felt like he’d shoved his cock too far down her throat and paused to ask if she was okay. Sometimes he was so nice it almost killed the mood. Josh may have had a huge cock but no man had made her gag since she was a teenager. It was no secret that she hadn’t exactly been a virgin when they met, but Josh still treated her like she was made of china. It was usually pretty sweet but right now it was annoying. She grabbed his ass cheeks and forced his cock all the way down her throat past her tonsils; then she squirmed a finger up his ass to massage his prostate.
Sarah heard him gasp and felt his entire body tense. Right then she felt like the most powerful woman in the world. She was in complete control. He was completely helpless. A devilish part of her wanted to bite him a little just to let him know how helpless he really was, but Josh wasn’t the type of man who needed to be reminded of that type of thing. He was the type who saved women from those types of men. Instead, she swirled her tongue around his cock while it was still buried in her throat. Back in high school, she and her girlfriends had practiced giving head on carrots and bananas, until she could swallow an entire banana with no problem. They’d read in a book on sexual positions, which her friend Ellie had taken from her mother’s nightstand, that women were supposed to practice. It had paid off.
“Oh my God!” Josh cried out and his legs shot out straight and began to tremble.
He began fucking her throat harder and more urgently. His entire body quivered and he ejaculated down her throat. He was still coming as she slid her mouth back up to the end of his cock.
Josh came like a porn star too. He could shoot a fly off the wall across the room. Sarah’s mouth was completely filled with his warm semen when she rose from the covers. She gargled his seed, making bubbles and letting some dribble out of the corners of her mouth. Then she swallowed and licked her lips, scooping up the semen that had dribbled down her chin and licking it from her fingertips. She smiled, watching Josh’s jaw drop. She’d learned long ago that one of the keys to a successful marriage was throwing something new into the mix every now and again. Internet porn was a great source of new bedroom tricks. And Sarah had a lot of time on her hands to learn new things.
“That was incredible! Wh-where did you learn to do that?” Josh was still breathing hard and little spasms continued to wrack his body intermittently.
“My turn.”
She crawled up Josh’s body and straddled his face. He went to work immediately, flicking her swollen clitoris with his tongue and stabbing it up inside of her, then dragging his tongue down to her anus and giving the rose-colored bud of her asshole the same attention, alternating back and forth between clitoris and anus while Sarah scratched at the headboard and cried out in ecstasy.
“Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, my fucking God! Yes! Yes! Oh, fuck, YES!”
When she came, it was like the world was ending. Her body began to spasm and convulse as orgasms tore through her.
Suddenly, images of the neighbor began flashing through her mind. Images of him fucking her from behind, forcing her to look at him in the mirror over the vanity as he raped her ass, bent over Josh’s lifeless corpse, then slit her throat from ear to ear. Another orgasm ripped through her as she screamed. She climbed off Josh and sat with her back against the headboard, still reliving the rape.
Josh smiled, unaware.
“Wow. I can’t remember the last time you came like that. You definitely are not on your period.”
Sarah began to cry.
“What? What did I do?”
“I was raped. I was raped, Josh! The neighbor, Dale, he raped me!”
“Are you sure? You sure this wasn’t a dream?”
“He raped me!”
Josh jumped up from the bed and snatched up his clothes. He walked into the closet and came out with a semiautomatic handgun that Sarah never even knew he had. He pulled on his jeans, moving fast, and Sarah was afraid he was going to zip up his cock in his zipper. She had never seen him look so angry.
“Where’d you get that? What are you going to do?”
“I bought it a few weeks ago when one of the guys at work got beaten up in the parking lot by a bunch of teenagers, some sort of gang. It’s a Glock nine-millimeter. I’m going to put a couple of hollow points in Dale’s head. You stay here. Just call the police and tell them what happened.”
Josh walked out of the room and started down the stairs. Sarah was so confused. She didn’t know what to do, what was real, or what was in her head. She looked around the room, searching for something that would make the whole thing make some kind of sense. She looked across the street and could see Dale cutting the small six-by-eight-foot patch of lawn in his front yard with one of those old manual lawnmowers. He was sweating profusely and the muscles in his skinny little arms were quivering as he struggled to push the lawnmower. He looked so
weak and helpless. The whole thing was just so ridiculous. Dale looked like anything but a rapist and murderer. It couldn’t have been real.
“Josh, no! Wait!”
Sarah ran out of the room and dashed down the stairs to catch him.
“Wait, Josh! It was a dream. It was just a dream.”
Josh was still moving toward the front door. He cocked the nine-millimeter, jacking a round into the chamber.
“Josh, no!”
Sarah raced past him to block the front door.
“It was just a dream! Don’t kill him. I was just dreaming. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I don’t know why I keep having them. I don’t know what it is about that guy that freaks me out so much, but it was just a dream. I promise I’ll go get help. I’ll go see someone.”
Josh relaxed and gathered Sarah into his arms.
“Okay, baby. I’ll make sure we get you some help. But get dressed first. We’re going to buy you a gun.”
CHAPTER TEN
On the way to American Marksman they stopped at the hotel to get Josh’s paycheck. A white F-350 pickup truck cut them off as they drove up the ramp to the second-floor parking level and Josh had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting them. Josh leaned on the horn and the three rednecks in the car glared at him and the driver flipped him off. Sarah winced. That was one thing you didn’t do to Josh. He was not the most even-tempered guy to begin with and disrespecting him when you were in the wrong brought out his violent side. Josh was out of the car before Sarah could restrain him.
“You could have fucking killed us!”
“Fuck you! You should have been watching where you were going.”
Josh walked right up to the car and put his foot into the driver’s-side door, leaving a huge dent. The three occupants of the car leaped out. The driver was the closest to Josh and the minute he stepped out of the car Josh launched a fist into the man’s temple, knocking him cold. The passenger door closest to him had opened at the same time but the tall skinny guy in the backseat had been a little slower getting out, giving him an extra thirty seconds before Josh smeared his nose all over his face in an explosion of blood that gushed down his face, turning his white T-shirt crimson. The passenger door on the other side of the truck had opened at the same time but the overweight guy in the black and blue NASCAR hat and the multicolored Hawaiian shirt with topless hula dancers on it was in no hurry to join his friends. He held up his hands as he walked around the truck as if Josh were aiming a gun at him.
“It’s cool, man. It’s cool.”
Sarah knew that he wanted to hit the guy anyway. Josh turned reluctantly and walked back to the car. It was this side of Josh that made people certain that he abused her until they saw them together. As big and mean as her husband was, he was a teddy bear with her.
They parked in front of the hotel valet and Josh let one of the attendants know that he was just picking up his check and would be leaving in minutes, then jogged into the casino while Sarah waited for him in the car. Sarah thought about Josh beating up those two guys and began to laugh. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him beat the crap out of someone. It had been a regular part of Saturday nights back in college. If he wasn’t getting into fights on the ice during one of his hockey games he was fighting someone in a bar or a movie theater or just walking down the street. The funny thing was that he never set out to start the fights. Guys just liked fucking with him. They felt they had to prove their manhood by challenging the biggest guy in the room, which was usually Josh. Something about Sarah’s husband apparently threatened most men. It was even worse when the guys were drunk and feeling ten feet tall and bulletproof. Josh never hesitated to rip the S off a guy’s chest and remind him of his mortality. Sarah suspected that he secretly delighted in it. Still, guys were always trying to test him, which drove him crazy.
It was hard for Sarah to rectify the softhearted gentleman she knew with the guy who had just minutes ago knocked out two guys in the parking garage. But Sarah loved the fact that he had that in him. It made her feel safe and, truth be told, it turned her on more than a little bit.
Josh returned to the car and after tipping the valet for letting him leave his car there, he drove out of the garage and back onto Las Vegas Boulevard. The 215 expressway was only a couple blocks away and soon they were headed southwest at seventy miles per hour. It took them less than twenty minutes to make it across town and soon they were exiting the freeway on Eastern Avenue.
American Marksman was a big store that looked like a supermarket from the outside; located in a strip mall on Eastern Avenue, it was by far the biggest store on the block. Sarah was surprised by how many people were packed into the store shopping with their families. Apparently, small-town folks weren’t the only people who clung to guns when the economy went bad.
Some of them had infants in strollers as if they were just out bargain hunting at Wal-Mart. She was even more surprised by the number of single women, young and old, shopping for handguns, rifles, and shotguns. There were the typical rednecks, cops, and wannabe gangsters too. She wondered how often criminals were in here shopping for guns right alongside the cops who would later arrest them?
Josh and Sarah walked over to one of the many display cases. A salesman with a thick Alabama accent walked over to them.
“Good morning. What can I do ya fer?”
“I’m looking for a handgun for my wife.”
“Something little?”
“No. Something big,” Sarah said.
Both Josh and the salesman looked at her, surprised.
“Well, okay then little lady. You ever handled a weapon before?”
“My father was a lifetime NRA member. He taught all of us how to shoot. It’s been about fifteen or twenty years though, so I’m sure I’m rusty.”
“You wantin’ this for home protection or to carry around witcha?”
Sarah looked at Josh, who shrugged in response.
“Home, I guess.”
“Then how about a .38 Special? Smith and Wesson makes a nice one and it’s relatively cheap.”
“I don’t want a revolver.”
“Okay. Well, the customer’s always right.” He reached under the counter and took out a small semiautomatic. “How about a .380? It has about the same stopping power as a .38.”
“Too small. I want to put a big-ass hole in whatever I shoot at.”
Sarah didn’t smile when she spoke.
“Then you want a .40. It has more stopping power than the nine-millimeter but it doesn’t have the extra kick of a .44. Glock and Sig Sauer make nice ones but they’re pretty pricey. We do have a used Sig on sale for five hundred dollars.”
“That’s a sale? How much is it regular price?”
“Nine hundred dollars.”
“Wow. I guess that is a sale then.” She turned to Josh. “Can we afford it?”
“Well, the mortgage is paid and we don’t have a car payment. We’ll have to tighten the belts a bit but, yeah, we can afford it.”
“Then that’s what I want.”
“How many bullets you want?”
“I want two or three boxes so I can practice.”
“How about two boxes of target ammo and then a box of hollow points for that stopping power ya want? How’s that sound?”
“That sounds about right.”
“You want to try it out first? We got an indoor range here in the back.”
“Sounds like a great idea to me. What do you say?” Josh said.
Sarah shrugged.
“Then let’s go for it. I guess.”
The salesman handed them both a pair of plastic goggles, headphones, and a couple of paper targets with a bull’s-eye in the center.
“Do you have any of those targets that look like people?”
The salesman cocked an eyebrow at her, then looked at Josh as if to say, “Are you sure you know what you’re doin’ here, buddy?”
“Yeah. They’s two dollars a piece.”
“I’ll take five.”
The salesman shook his head and took five targets out of a cabinet behind the counter. The targets had pictures of men in ski masks holding guns. They looked like the type of criminals Batman beat up in between fighting supervillains in the comic books Sarah had read as a child. The salesman handed the targets to Sarah, then opened the door and led the way into the shooting range.
“My name’s Mike by the way.”
He held out a big, meaty hand with hairy knuckles.
Josh shook his hand first and then Sarah did the same.
“Josh and Sarah Lincoln.”
“Pleased to meet you both. Go ahead and put the goggles and headphones on before we get in there.”
He put on his own, then waited while Sarah and Josh donned their own protective equipment.
The range was full of people lined up putting holes in paper targets. There were couples like Josh and Sarah, fathers with their sons, and single men and women. The sound of the gunshots was deafening. They walked up to an empty booth and the salesman put the gun on the table along with two boxes of ammo and ejected the clip, laying the gun and the clip side by side.
“Now you load the clip like this.”
The salesman shook out eight bullets into his hand, picked up the clip, and began pushing the bullets into it one at a time with his thumb. Then he took them all back out and handed the clip to Sarah.
“You try it.”
Sarah loaded the clip, pushing the bullets in with her thumb just as Mike had done.
“Then you slide the clip into the gun like this, click the safety off. See that red dot? When you see that dot that means the safety’s off. You just pull the slide back like this and that puts a round in the chamber there. Now you’re ready to go. Just line up the sights, like this. Take a deep breath. Hold it. And squeeze the trigger.”
Sarah went through a hundred rounds of ammo. By the time they were done she felt like an old pro. She was almost eager for someone to come walking into her bedroom uninvited. She wanted to see what those hollow points would do to human flesh.
The Resurrectionist Page 6
