Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  Sin Hellcat

  Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  ONE

  I saw Jodi again the other day. She’s a whore now making twelve thou a year, doing quite well at it. I remember, way back in college days, thinking to myself, now, Jodi’s not the marrying type. There stands (or sits or lies prone) a career woman if there ever lived one. It was nice to know I’d been right, and that she was doing so well.

  She offered me some, no charge of course, for old time’s sake, but I just couldn’t get into the mood. I mean, it would be like taking free legal advice. I mean, it’s the girl’s profession.

  So we sat around at her place—lovely little apartment in a hotel on Lexington Avenue—and talked over old times together, college days and what happened to so-and-so, and what we’ve both been doing since, and we both got a little smashed on Scotch—a bottle of Vat 69 given her by one of her admirers for some symbolic reason or other.

  It had been ten years since I’d seen Jodi, and Lord how she’d changed! Those huge soulful dark eyes were even deeper and more level and piercing than they’d been when she was twenty-one and could still remember back to the loss of her virginity. And her body had filled out very nicely—lovely surging breasts and firm hips and the kind of solid thighs that can constrict a man if he doesn’t watch himself—the inevitable result, I suppose, all that filling out, of her constant activity. She’d had two more abortions since last we’d met, she told me, making a grand total of three, and the unlicensed fraud who committed (I can’t say performed) the third one slipped a bit, and now dear Jodi can rest assured that there will never be opportunity or necessity for a fourth.

  It was mid-afternoon, a Tuesday in fact, and so both early in the day and early in the week for Jodi to be down and about, making a living. She was wearing a green knit sheath dress—it went well with her naturally-tanned complexion and honey-blonde hair—and she persisted in crossing her legs, revealing the long tanned underslope of one rounded thigh. That was distracting as hell, but I averted my eyes, and compromised by looking intently at her breasts instead, outlined individually by the tight green knit, proclaiming twice that she wore no bra beneath.

  I knew I’d get a grumbly sort of hell from Marty for not coming back to the office after lunch, but this old school reunion was just too good to miss. Besides, I had all my copy in on the Dexter Frozen Dinners—“A Square Deal On A Square Meal”—and didn’t really have anything to do until I got the go-ahead from the Dexter people. So old time-clock Marty could go to hell with himself. I would spend a quiet afternoon here with dear old Jodi, and take my normal train back to Helen.

  I thought of Helen, my wifey-wife, the frigid witch of the Ramopos, icily waiting off in our Rockland County suburban hideawee, and I glanced again up under Jodi’s green skirt, and I shuddered at the contrast.

  We sat and chatted and got quietly snockered, and I contemplated sliding the palm of my hand up along that thigh, fingers extended, and in a happy glow composed of one part Vat 69 to one part reminiscence, I remembered the first time I had ever taken dear old Jodi to bed.…

  Spring of my sophomore year, it was, twelve years ago. I was nineteen, only recently devirginized myself, and suddenly discovering in me some of the common aspects of the bull, with the exception that I seemed to be eager all the time.

  It was Friday afternoon, I remember, in late May, and a bunch of us had cut classes to go down to the lake and swim. There were about twelve of us, evenly divided into boys and girls—which is always the best way, I think, after all—and we’d begun as simply an amorphous pack, only gradually pairing off. I’d taken Jodi to a movie once upon a time, but aside from some sporadic breast-clutching in the darkened balcony of the theater, nothing much had happened. I looked at her that afternoon, and I knew at once that that was a mistake that had to be rectified, and the sooner the better.

  God, she was lovely! Picture this, if you’ll be so kind: A girl of eighteen, just tall enough so that the top of her head was even with my shoulder. Long slender legs, tanned an amber gold. Smooth tanned arms, cameo shoulders and neck, the softest downiest throat in all creation. A longish pixyish face shaped somewhat like an inverted triangle. No! What a ghastly picture, that isn’t what I mean at all! Picture an elf, with the straight slanting jawline, the high cheekbones, and somehow hungry look. Add to this picture a flawless tanned complexion, two huge round dark eyes as deep as night, a straight not-too-narrow nose, and cupid-bow lips of a red that would put Titian to shame. That was her face, framed by honey-blonde hair cut rather short and brushed very straight, curling around the shells of the ears.

  I purposely left the portion encased in the bathing suit till last. The bathing suit itself, of course, was black. Two straps curved over those lovely shoulders and shot down toward the breasts. Firm breasts, not yet very large, but exciting to touch for all that. And, below, the bathing suit hugged down across a perfectly flat belly. And now we turn her around, as though she were a work of art upon a pedestal, and we stare for a while at the back view.

  The lovely breasts around front distracted us so that we didn’t really notice her waist. Now, with the aft portion facing us, we can see that she has a hell of a good waist indeed, the sides sloping in from beneath the arms—that’s just a hint of breast-curve we can see there, when she raises her arm that way, and isn’t that the most beautiful sight in all the world?—and the sloping-in ends at a waist that is just the perfect degree of slenderness, without the malnutrition look that goes over so big in the clothing ads. And below the waist, the whole business starts to slope out again, curving this way and that, in the cutest rear you’ve ever seen. You just want to walk up behind her and pinch, and lean your chin on that soft shoulder and whisper into that soft ear, “Hiya, Jodi.”

  That was Jodi.

  At any rate, we all cut classes and went off to the lake for an afternoon of swimming and fooling around. It was, as I said, late May, and too early for the lake to be filled with tourists and vacationers and cabin-owners, so we had the place pretty much to ourselves. We ran shouting into the chilly water at the public beach and immediately swam around to one of the better private beaches, where we knew the owners hadn’t yet put in their annual arrival. One poor fool—old Jack Fleming, I think it was—tried to swim the whole way one-handed, holding a portable radio up in the air with the other arm, and of course the result was that he practically drowned himself and gave that radio a hell of a good soaking.

  But they really made radios in those days. We opened the silly thing up and let it dry in the sun for two or three minutes, and then we slapped it back together and turned it on, and by God it played! It played mainly static, of course, but here and there you could detect a note of music in the garble, so we turned it up to top volume and then spent the afternoon screaming over it.

  I went after Jodi right away. She’d spent a short while going steady with a guy named Andy Clark, but he wasn’t there that afternoon, and the whole thing between them was finished with anyway, so she was unattached, and I made damn sure I was the first one to attach myself to her.

  It was the usual routine that afternoon. We swam around a while, and then we splashed each other, and chased each other around in the shoulder-deep water, and I dunked her a couple of times, and then I kissed her. Her lips were cool from the water, the rounded double-front of her bathing-suit-covered breasts was rough and exciting ag
ainst my chest, and her waist, way down beneath the water’s surface, was cool, the perfect size for my arm.

  And she responded beautifully. She clung to me, her arms around my back, returning the kiss—eyes closed, in the manner of young girls everywhere—and when I parted my lips and probed hesitantly with a quivering tongue, she opened her mouth at once to accept it.

  That was all, for a while. We splashed and chased and occasionally kissed, and finally I got my courage up—I was only nineteen, after all—and hidden beneath the water I slid my arm around her side, beneath her arm, and clutched her tender breast.

  There was a difference. Why was there a difference? Even now, I don’t know. All I know is that there was that difference, and that the difference always holds true. In the balcony of the movie theater Jodi’s breasts had been soft and pliant, in feeling they were whipped cream mountains topped by wrinkled cherries. To touch those cherries was to make dear Jodi moan and writhe in delight. Underwater, encased in a bathing suit rather than blouse and bra, the breasts were firm and strong, the cherries as hard as anything one would want, and the whole thing, if possible, even more exciting than before.

  The second time my hand fondled those wonderful breasts as we kissed, my other hand encircled her and cupped a rounded buttock, and she closed her eyes and moved against me, the water cool and invigorating, the vibrant girl in my arms too exciting to be stood, and I confess a wild oat was lost in the depths of the sea.

  It was a long and—now I look back on it—horribly frustrating afternoon. We stayed in the water awhile, and then we stretched out on a blanket onshore, a bit away from the others, ostensibly to get some sun, but actually to get some fondling done. I caressed that precious body, leaned down to kiss the breasts with lips that grew stronger and harsher until at last her moans of pleasure were muffled by a stifled scream of pain, and my hand roamed the front of her body, building courage, stroking the coarse front of that bathing suit, moving ever closer, until finally she sighed and gripped me tighter and kissed me so furiously I thought she would break my neck.

  But farther than that we could not go. Her bathing suit, top and bottom, was too snug-fitting. And there were, after all, ten other youngsters right nearby.

  And so the afternoon was played away, with mutual frustration. Around seven, one of the more organizational-minded males of our group took up a collection for food and drink—I donated two dollars, I remember—and went away, to shortly return with pizza and beer, the pizzas cold and the beer warm. But we were all young, and hardships didn’t bother us, so we ate the cold pizza and drank the warm beer, and at every opportunity I caressed Jodi’s fantastic body.

  It must have been around eight o’clock when one of our group mentioned the baseball game. Now, here’s the situation: Every college worthy of the name has the three intercollegiate sports, football and basketball and baseball. And our college was, in that respect, worthy of the name. Now, everyone attends the football games, of course, particularly when one’s own team is an odds-on favorite to win, which ours inevitably was, and about half the normal student body jumps at the chance to watch a basketball game. But no one in college goes to look at a collegiate baseball game, absolutely no one. Why this is I don’t know, but it is. We twelve had, therefore, neither the knowledge that a baseball game was to be played by our jolly team tonight, nor much interest in what the hell our baseball team was doing any night.

  And so it was that the announcement that our baseball team was playing an away game that very night was met, at first, with an overwhelming display of public apathy. At first. But then someone else—or it might have been the same person, I no longer remember—suggested that it might be a great odd-ball idea to go watch this here baseball game, cheer our team extravagantly, and get happily mashed.

  The concept of going to a college baseball game was so radical, so unexpected, so completely absurd, that we all, naturally, agreed at once, and immediately began to pack the remaining beer into auto backseats, while two of the drivers huddled together over a roadmap, trying to find out (1) where the hell Ylicaw, where the game was to take place, might be, and (2) how the hell to get there.

  Then someone came up with a disgusting thought. “Hey!” cried this someone. “What kind of baseball team do we have, anyway? Are they good or are they lousy?”

  A quick headcount demonstrated that no one present knew what kind of baseball team we had.

  “I don’t want,” said this someone, “to watch our lousy baseball team get beat.”

  True enough. But the problem was solved by someone else, who said, “Hell, we won’t know which team is ours, anyway. What difference does it make?”

  None at all, obviously. We piled into cars—Jodi curled beautifully upon my lap—and tore away in the general direction of Ylicaw.

  We got lost, of course—several times—which didn’t bother me in the least. I was scrunched into a corner of the back seat, Jodi on my lap, and my hands and lips were kept very busy indeed. By the time we finally did straggle into Ylicaw, I was as eager as a Cape Canaveral launching pad and as frustrated as a soap opera heroine. You could have fried an egg on me.

  Ylicaw, by the by, was the other side of a state line or two, so I suppose I should have spent the next twenty years in jail. My purposes, concerning Jodi, were about as basic as it is possible to get.

  At any rate, what with leaving the lake so late and getting lost now and again, we arrived at the greenwood stadium in Ylicaw just in time to watch our school bus pull away, toting the ball team back home again. We had managed to miss the game.

  So there we were in the thriving metropolis of Ylicaw at ten-thirty of a weekday evening. None of us had ever been in that town before—what possible reason would anyone have for going to Ylicaw?—and from the look of the place we had arrived too late to watch them roll up the sidewalks.

  We clambered out of our two-car caravan and conferenced around a lonely streetlight. There were no other pedestrians in sight. The stadium—barely large enough to deserve the name—lay shrouded in darkness, a condition shared by all the buildings we could see up and down the street. The only bit of neon in sight belonged, believe it or not, to a feed store.

  And so we talked it over. We had come all this way, with great difficulty, and none of us wanted to simply turn around again and drive all the way back. We had to do something first, doggone it!

  Unfortunately, Ylicaw was about the most unlikely spot for doing something that any of us had ever seen. At least that portion of it in view was pretty unlikely.

  We finally decided to split into scouting groups, each heading off in a different direction, and we would all reassemble here at the cars in half an hour. If there was any life to be found anywhere in Ylicaw, one of our scouting parties would find it.

  Jodi and I were a complete scouting party. We started walking, turned two corners, walked and additional block, and discovered a park. It was a small and dark and empty little park, about the size of a desktop, sporting grass and trees and assorted shrubbery and a couple of footpaths.

  We looked at one another, and we looked at the park, and we looked at one another again. Jodi squeezed my hand, and her eyes were brighter than the streetlight across the way.

  Without a word being spoken between us, we both turned as one and strolled into the park. We had half an hour before we were to return to the others. Half an hour would surely be sufficient. In fact, the condition I was in, an hour would be more than sufficient.

  We strolled along the footpath, passing a bench to our right, two trees to our left, shrubbery to our right—

  We turned right.

  It was pitch black in there. Twigs crackled underfoot, bushes tugged at our knees and entrapped our ankles, a low-hanging tree branch brushed my face with coarse leaves. Jodi held my hand clenched tight in hers, and in all that blackness the only thing I could see was the bright gleam of her eyes, and above the thunder of our passage I could hear her breathing, as loud and irregular as my own.
r />   We blundered and crashed our way into the shrubbery and came, all at once, to a cleared spot, completely encircled. Jodi whispered “Whew!” and immediately sat down. I flopped down beside her, reached for her, kissed her, and we toppled backward, lying prone on the barren ground.

  Active hands, active hands. We were still in our bathing suits, and I had the straps of her suit unhooked and the top half folded down, and I was doing all sorts of interesting things to her bare and beautiful breasts, when the cop suddenly put in his appearance.

  He shone a flashlight on us, the blasted Peeping Tom, the beam centered on Jodi’s tanned and pink-tipped breasts and she screamed. I didn’t blame her, I felt like screaming myself.

  I was blinded by the light at first, but then I could make out the shadowy form leaning over the bushes on the side opposite the direction of our entry. As I peered trying to make out who or what this was, a voice said, rather gruffly and much too loudly, “What’s going on here?” So I knew that it had to be an officer of the law. Anyone else would have known what was going on there. And had the decency not to interrupt.

  The long and the short of it is that Jodi and I—her top half once again barely covered by the bathing suit—were bundled into what Ylicaw apparently considered a prowl car (a dilapidated Chevy, three or four years old) and driven away to what Ylicaw apparently considered a police headquarters (a dilapidated brick structure, perhaps a hundred years old), where a short fat bald man with a red face and a red head threatened us with all sorts of unlikely punishments, grumbled at us, and wrote endlessly on sheet after sheet of paper.

  Jodi, wearing only her bathing suit, carried, of course, neither money nor identification. I, however, as supply sergeant of our scouting party, had tucked my wallet into the waist of my bathing suit, and so I had identification and eight dollars. The bald man—a desk sergeant or some such thing, I suppose—took my wallet with claws that snatched, and wrote my name and home address down at least half a dozen times. I gave him a phony name for Jodi—what the name was I have no idea, at this late date—and he lectured and threatened and grumbled at us for a while again, finally releasing us with a warning to leave town at once.