This was much simpler. And he cooperated, putting his hands where she told him, spread-eagling himself on the bed. And making little jokes while she did what she had to do.
By the time she was done, he was already semi-erect. She wrapped the base with an elastic band. “Sort of a roach motel,” she said. “The blood gets in and it can’t get out, so you stay firm.”
“Is it safe?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It’s an old Indian trick. And now you can do something for me, and after that everything will be entirely one hundred percent for you.” And she sat on his face and he did what he was supposed to do, and he was pretty good at it, too. He didn’t have to be, she was so excited right now that great technique on his part was by no means required, but this made it even better.
“Now that was just wonderful,” she said. She went to her bag, got out the duct tape, and cut off an eight-inch length. “And I wanted to do that first,” she went on, “because that’s our last chance for that particular activity.”
And she slapped the tape over his mouth.
Oh, the look in his eyes! Worth the price of admission right there. He wasn’t quite sure whether this was going to make it even more exciting for him, or whether it was maybe something he ought to worry about.
But why worry? What good would that do? What good would anything do?
“See, isn’t this neat? You’re harder than ever. And you’re going to stay that way.”
She mounted him, sat facing his feet in the reliable Reverse Cowgirl, felt him swelling impossibly larger inside her. “Mmmm, nice,” she said. “Oh, yes. Very nice.”
She rode him for a long time. Her climaxes came one after the other, and all they did was pitch her excitement higher. After a few of them she changed position so that she could watch his face while she rode him, and that was a treat, because the wide-eyed desperation was something to see. At last she fell forward, her breasts crushed against his chest. A smooth chest would have been nice, but a hairy chest was nice, too. Everything was nice when you could do whatever you wanted, and when you knew just how it was going to end.
She got up because she wanted to be able to see his eyes now. “I told you some lies,” she said. “My name’s not Lucky. Or Lucretia, or any of that. My last name’s not Eagle, or Eagle Feather, and don’t ask me how I came up with all of that on the spur of the moment. As far as I know, I haven’t got a drop of Indian blood in me. A third Indian! How could anybody be a third anything? I mean, you’ve got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents—I mean, do the math. You’re the one who knows all the odds on the crap table, so you would have to know that you can only be half or a fourth or an eighth or three-sixteenths or whatever you are of anything.”
She wagged a finger at him. “You weren’t paying attention, Hank. Little Henry there was doing your thinking for you. And that’s another lie I told you, incidentally. That it’s safe to wrap you up like that. If you don’t loosen it in time, you can do permanent damage.”
She left the bed, reached into her purse, found the knife. She let him see the blade. She let the tip of the blade graze his cheek as she mounted him one more time.
“God, it’s bigger than ever,” she told him. “You’re in pain now, aren’t you? Oh, dear, I’m afraid that’s going to get worse. Well, more intense, anyway. Optima futura, you know. That’s Latin. It means the best is yet to be. For me, that is. For you, well, maybe not.”
She left with close to five thousand dollars in cash and chips, and stopped downstairs at the cashier’s cage to turn the chips into currency. Then she got in her car and started driving.
She’d left his one-dollar chips in the room. She’d left his credit cards, too, and a gold signet ring that had to be worth a few hundred dollars. She took the slide from his string tie, just because she liked it, and she took her cuffs and cords and scarves, because it would be a nuisance to replace them. But she left the elastic band in place.
And she took the scalp, tucked away in a plastic bag. It was just such good theater to scalp him, what with having been drawn to his hair in the first place, and then the whole Indian motif of their encounter. Before she was halfway done with the process she regretted having begun it in the first place, because even minor scalp cuts bleed like crazy, and when you scalp a person altogether—well, the Indians probably waited to scalp people until they were safely dead, and disinclined to bleed, but she went ahead and finished what she’d started, and it was almost worth it when she shook the scalp in front of him and let him gape at it.
She’d cleaned up her fingerprints, but she knew she’d left plenty of DNA evidence, and people at the casino could furnish a description of her. But she’d been working variations on this theme for a good long while now, and she always got away with it, and she figured all she could do was play out the string. And she’d ditch his scalp where it wouldn’t be found, and the scalping would guarantee a lot of press, and a manhunt for some unforgiving Indian seeking vengeance for Wounded Knee.
Yes, she’d just go ahead and play out the string. Because it kept getting better, didn’t it? Optima futura. That pretty much said it all.
FIVE
Toledo. What did she know about Toledo?
Like, Holy Toledo. The original city, in Spain, was famous for fine swords, and the newspaper here in Ohio called itself The Toledo Blade. That was a better name than the Mud Hens, which was what they called the baseball team.
And here she was in Toledo.
There was a Starbucks just across the street from the building where he had his office, and she settled in at a window table a little before five. She thought she might be in for a long wait. In New York, young associates at law firms typically worked until midnight and took lunch and dinner at their desks. Was it the same in Toledo?
Well, the cappuccino was the same. She sipped hers, making it last, and was about to go to the counter for another when she saw him.
But was it him? He was tall and slender, wearing a dark suit and a tie, clutching a briefcase, walking with purpose. His hair when she’d known him was long and shaggy, a match for the jeans and T-shirt that was his usual costume, and now it was cut to match the suit and the briefcase. And he wore glasses now, and they gave him a serious, studious look. He hadn’t worn them then, and he’d certainly never looked studious.
But it was Douglas. No question, it was him.
She rose from her chair, hit the door, quickened her pace to catch up with him at the corner. She said, “Doug? Douglas Pratter?”
He turned, and she caught the puzzlement in his eyes. She helped him out. “It’s Kit,” she said. “Katherine Tolliver.” She smiled softly. “A voice from the past. Well, a whole person from the past, actually.”
“My God,” he said. “It’s really you.”
“I was having a cup of coffee,” she said, “and looking out the window and wishing I knew somebody in this town, and when I saw you I thought you were a mirage. Or that you were just somebody who looked the way Doug Pratter might look eight years later.”
“Is that how long it’s been?”
“Just about. I was fifteen and I’m twenty-three now. You were two years older.”
“Still am. That much hasn’t changed.”
“And your family picked up and moved right in the middle of your junior year of high school.”
“My dad got a job he couldn’t say no to. He was going to send for us at the end of the term, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. We’d all be too lonely is what she said. It took me years before I realized she just didn’t trust him on his own.”
“Was he not to be trusted?”
“I don’t know about that, but the marriage failed two years later anyway. He went a little nuts and wound up in California. He got it in his head that he wanted to be a surfer.”
“Seriously? Well, good for him, I guess.”
“Not all that good for him. He drowned.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Who know
s? Maybe that’s what he wanted, whether he knew it or not. Mom’s still alive and well.”
“In Toledo?”
“Bowling Green.”
“That’s it. I knew you’d moved to Ohio, and I couldn’t remember the city, and I didn’t think it was Toledo. Bowling Green.”
“I’ve always thought of it as a color. Lime green, forest green, and bowling green.”
“Same old Doug.”
“You think? I wear a suit and go to an office. Christ, I wear glasses.”
“And a wedding ring.” And, before he could tell her about his wife and kiddies and adorable suburban house, she said, “But you’ve got to get home, and I’ve got plans of my own. I want to catch up, though. Have you got any time tomorrow?”
It’s Kit. Katherine Tolliver.
Just saying her name had taken her back in time. She hadn’t been Kit or Katherine or Tolliver in years. Names were like clothes, she’d put them on and wear them for a while and then let them go. The analogy only went so far, because you could wash clothes when you’d soiled them, but there was no dry cleaner for a name that had outlived its usefulness.
Katherine “Kit” Tolliver. That wasn’t the name on the ID she was carrying, or the one she’d signed on the motel register. But once she’d identified herself to Doug Pratter, she’d become the person she’d proclaimed herself to be. She was Kit again—and, at the same time, she wasn’t.
Interesting, the whole business.
Back in her motel room, she surfed her way around the TV channels, then switched off the set and took a shower. Afterward she spent a few minutes studying her nude body and wondering how it would look to him. She was a little fuller in the breasts than she’d been eight years before, a little rounder in the butt, a little closer to ripeness overall. She had always been confident of her attractiveness, but she couldn’t help wondering what she might look like to those eyes that had seen her years ago.
Of course, he hadn’t needed glasses back in the day.
She had read somewhere that a man who has once had a particular woman somehow assumes he can have her again. She didn’t know how true this might be, but it seemed to her that something similar applied to women. A woman who had once been with a particular man was ordained to doubt her ability to attract him a second time. And so she felt a little of that uncertainty, but willed herself to dismiss it.
He was married, and might well be in love with his wife. He was busy establishing himself in his profession, and settling into an orderly existence. Why would he want a meaningless fling with an old girlfriend, who’d had to say her name before he could even place her?
She smiled. Lunch, he’d said. We’ll have lunch tomorrow.
Funny how it started.
She was in Kansas City, sitting at a table with six or seven others, a mix of men and women in their twenties. And one of the men mentioned a woman she didn’t know, though most of the others seemed to know her. And one of the women said, “That slut.”
And the next thing she knew, the putative slut was forgotten while the whole table turned to the question of just what constituted sluttiness. Was it a matter of attitude? Of specific behavior? Was one born to slutdom, or was the status acquired?
Was it solely a female province? Could you have male sluts?
That got nipped in the bud. “A man can take sex too casually,” one of the men asserted, “and he can consequently be an asshole, and deserving of a certain measure of contempt. But as far as I’m concerned, the word slut is gender-linked. Nobody with a Y chromosome can qualify as a genuine slut.”
And, finally, was there a numerical cutoff? Could an equation be drawn up? Did a certain number of partners within a certain number of years make one a slut?
“Suppose,” one woman suggested, “suppose once a month you go out after work and have a couple—”
“A couple of men?”
“A couple of drinks, you idiot, and you start flirting, and one thing leads to another, and you drag somebody home with you.”
“Once a month?”
“It could happen.”
“So that’s twelve men in a year.”
“When you put it that way,” the woman allowed, “it seems like a lot.”
“It’s also a hundred and twenty partners in ten years.”
“Except you wouldn’t keep it up for that long, because sooner or later one of those hookups would take.”
“And you’d get married and live happily ever after?”
“Or at least live together more or less monogamously for a year or two, which would cut down on the frequency of hookups, wouldn’t it?”
Throughout all of this, she barely said a word. Why bother? The conversation buzzed along quite well without her, and she was free to sit back and listen, and to wonder just what place she occupied in what someone had already labeled “the saint–slut continuum.”
“With cats,” one of the men said, “it’s nice and clear-cut.”
“Cats can be sluts?”
He shook his head. “With women and cats. A woman has one cat, or even two or three cats, she’s an animal lover. Four or more cats and she’s a demented cat lady.”
“That’s how it works?”
“That’s exactly how it works. With sluts, it looks to be more complicated.”
Another thing that complicated it, someone said, was if the woman in question had a significant other, whether husband or boyfriend. If she didn’t, and she hooked up half a dozen times a year, well, she certainly wasn’t a slut. If she was married and still fit in that many hookups on the side, well, that changed things, didn’t it?
“Let’s get personal,” one of the men said to one of the women. “How many partners have you had?”
“Me?”
“Well?”
“You mean in the past year?”
“Or lifetime. You decide.”
“If I’m going to answer a question like that,” she said, “I think we definitely need another round of drinks.”
The drinks came, and the conversation slid into a game of Truth, though it seemed to Jennifer—these people knew her as Jennifer, a name she seemed to have picked up again, after having left it behind months ago in New York—it seemed to her that the actual veracity of the responses was moot.
And then it was her turn.
“Well, Jen? How many?”
Would she ever see any of these people again? Probably not. Kansas City was all right, but she was about ready for a change of venue. So it really didn’t matter what she said.
And what she said was, “Well, it depends. How do you decide what counts?”
“What do you mean? Like blow jobs don’t count?”
“Isn’t that what Clinton said?”
“As far as I’m concerned, blow jobs count.”
“And hand jobs?”
“They don’t count,” one man said, and there seemed to be general agreement on that point. “Not that there’s anything wrong with them,” he added.
“So what’s your criterion here, exactly? Something has to be inside of something?”
“As far as the nature of the act,” one man said, “I think it has to be subjective. It counts if you think it counts. So, Jen? What’s your count?”
“Suppose you passed out, and you know something happened, but you don’t remember any of it?”
“Same answer. It counts if you think it counts.”
The conversation kept going, but she was detached from it now, thinking, remembering, working it out in her mind. How many men, if gathered around a table or a campfire, could compare notes and tell each other about her? That, she thought, was the real criterion, not what part of her anatomy had been in contact with what portion of his. Who could tell stories? Who could bear witness?
And, when the table quieted down again, she said, “Five.”
“Five? That’s all? Just five?”
“Five.”
She had arranged to meet Douglas Pratter at noon in the lobby of a downt
own hotel not far from his office. She arrived early and sat where she could watch the entrance. He was five minutes early himself, and she saw him stop to remove his glasses, polishing their lenses with a breast-pocket handkerchief. Then he put them on again and stood there, his eyes scanning the room.
She got to her feet, and now he caught sight of her, and she saw him smile. He’d always had a winning smile, optimistic and confident. Years ago, it had been one of the things she liked most about him.
She walked to meet him. Yesterday she’d been wearing a dark gray pants suit; today she’d paired the jacket with a matching skirt. The effect was still business attire, but softer, more feminine. More accessible.
“I hope you don’t mind a ride,” he told her. “There are places we could walk to, but they’re crowded and noisy and no place to have a conversation. Plus they rush you, and I don’t want to be in a hurry. Unless you’ve got an early afternoon appointment?”
She shook her head. “I had a full morning,” she said, “and there’s a cocktail party this evening that I’m supposed to go to, but until then I’m free as the breeze.”
“Then we can take our time. We’ve probably got a lot to talk about.”
As they crossed the lobby, she took his arm.
The fellow’s name in Kansas City was Lucas. She’d taken note of him early on, and his eyes had shown a certain degree of interest in her, but his interest mounted when she told the group how many sexual partners she’d had. It was he who’d said, “Five? That’s all? Just five?” When she’d confirmed her count, his eyes grabbed hers and held on.
And now he’d taken her to another bar, the lounge of the Hotel Phillips, a nice quiet place where they could really get to know each other. Just the two of them.
The lighting was soft, the décor soothing. A pianist played show tunes unobtrusively, and a waitress with an indeterminate accent took their order and brought their drinks. They touched glasses, sipped, and he said, “Five.”
“That really did it for you,” she said. “What, is it your lucky number?”
Hard Case Crime: Getting Off Page 4