Larry Boots, Exterminator

by John Inman

  “Less than three blocks from here, he struck our boy with his car. There was a sliver of headlight glass embedded deep in Tommy’s chest. He had also been run over by the car’s front tires. He had multiple broken bones.”

  “Don’t…,” the wife muttered, turning away to stare at the fire.

  But the husband ignored her. “There were no witnesses to the hit-and-run, or none that came forward. We know the driver stopped because there was a trail of blood on the road where he pulled our son’s corpse out from under his car and dragged him into the gutter. Like some inconvenient piece of garbage or a dead animal he found on the road. That’s where the first passerby found him.”

  Tommy’s mother took a long shuddering breath. After glancing at her husband’s stricken face, it was she who turned to me and continued the story.

  “It was an old woman who discovered him lying there. She was walking home from the market with three cans of soup in a paper bag because her husband had the flu.” Just like the father, tears were shining on the mother’s cheeks now. “She came to the funeral and cried over Tommy’s casket like our boy was her own.” Once again, she shifted her gaze to the fire. Her eyes were empty now. Emotionless. “I never even asked her name,” she quietly berated herself. I suspected it wasn’t the first time.

  The room fell silent.

  “But there was a witness later,” I coaxed, for I had read a lot on the case. I knew what happened next, but still I wanted to hear it from them.

  “Yes,” the father said. He was calmer now, or gave the appearance of being. His eyes never wavered from the ski mask that covered my face. It was almost as if he was trying to imagine what I looked like behind it, how I was feeling, what I was thinking. “The driver’s neighbor saw him washing his car. He knew he drove drunk all the time. He knew his license had been revoked. When he heard about the hit-and-run two days later, he called the police. By the time they came, the car was long gone. No one ever found it. We think Tommy’s killer drove it out into the desert and abandoned it, or maybe it’s sitting in the bottom of a lake somewhere. Anyway, it’s gone. And with it, any connection between John Allan Davis and the death of our son is gone as well.”

  The wife inched her way back into the conversation. She seemed stronger now, more ready to cope. Still, the hatred burned bright in her eyes. “Charges were pressed but quickly dropped for lack of evidence. Davis admitted he had a drinking problem but denied driving. Said he hadn’t done so since his license was revoked three years earlier. He swore up and down he didn’t own a car or have access to one, and there was no vehicle registered in his name, so he must have been driving a borrowed or stolen car. The police unearthed medical records of the elderly neighbor that showed he was being treated for the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Although he was still coherent, that pretty well eliminated him as a witness. Instead, the court took into evidence the fact that Davis attended all his AA meetings, as he had been mandated to do because of his previous history of drunk driving. His lies, the lack of proof that he owned or drove a car, and the disqualification of the old gentleman as a witness convinced them. The investigation by the SDPD came to a standstill, and it’s been at a standstill ever since.”

  “Until now,” the husband said, his eyes boring into mine. “Until you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Until me.”

  I moved to the pictures on the wall, studying each in turn. Baby pictures, school snapshots, family group photos. One with Tommy holding a newborn baby in his arms, looking sweetly shell-shocked. There was another framed snapshot of Tommy’s baseball team, bunched up together, standing proudly alongside another team in different-colored jerseys.

  “Was he good at baseball?” I quietly asked.

  “Yes,” the mother quickly said. “He really was.”

  “He loved the game more than he loved anything,” the father added. I turned to look at him, and for the first time that evening, I saw a smile touch the father’s face. There was such a proud sadness in the smile that a twinge of pain stuttered through me.

  I pulled a slip of paper from my shirt pocket with a prewritten amount jotted on it. I passed it to him without a word. He glanced down at it, then back to me. With his eyes still on me, he handed the paper to his wife. They shared a glance. I could sense an unspoken agreement pass between them.

  “We can pay that,” he said softly.

  “In cash,” I said. “When the job is finished.”

  He obediently nodded. “When the job is finished. Happily.”

  “Assuming I decide to take your case.”

  “Y-yes,” the father stammered. “Assuming that.”

  I nodded, retrieved the slip of paper, and stuffed it back in my pocket. “Leave your alarms and outside lights off until our business is completed. I may need to speak to you again, but not over the phone and nowhere but here. I want nothing to show we’ve ever met or spoken. Any contact from this point on will be instigated by me, not you. If you try to contact me again, even through the PO Box, I’ll disappear, and you’ll never see or hear from me again. I’m doing this to protect all three of us. Tell me you understand.”

  The husband blinked, clearly taken by surprise. “I… yes. Of course.”

  The wife nodded, cooler than her husband. Sterner. More determined. “Yes. We understand completely.”

  I took a step toward the door leading back into the dining room. When they realized I was leaving, they rose to their feet. The wife stepped forward to hug me, but I gently held her at arm’s length. She seemed to understand. The husband took my gloved hand and gave it a businesslike shake.

  I muttered goodbye and left the same way I came in.

  Five minutes later I was outside Kenny’s apartment building. I rapped once on his door, and he immediately pulled it open. He was wearing a ragged T-shirt and baggy lounging pants that looked like they had been through the laundry about a thousand times. His flaccid cock made its presence clearly known as it swayed beneath the flimsy fabric when he moved. A smile flashed across his face, and I knew he knew it was me. Without uttering a word, he reached through the doorway and pulled me inside. When the door was closed behind us, he stepped into my arms.

  We held each other for a long minute; then he gazed up at my face with a questioning look. His smile had vanished as quickly as it came.

  “You’re trembling,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s sexual.”

  I dragged a smile out for my own benefit, if not his. “I’m pretty sure it’ll be sexual in a minute.”

  “What’s wrong?” Kenny asked. “You’re upset.”

  I ached to tell him the story I had just heard, but I knew I couldn’t. I would never let Kenny know anything about what I did for a living. Not because I was ashamed of it, but because Kenny might very well be prosecuted if it became known that he was aware of my little enterprise and withheld evidence of it from the police. That I could never allow.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “Just let me calm down for a minute.”

  He stroked my arm. “Sure.”

  With Kenny close, I could feel the sadness and the repressed anger begin to melt away. My mind cleared. Something about his presence calmed me. For the first time, I looked around his apartment. It was the tidiest living space I had ever seen.

  “My humble abode,” Kenny said, as if fathoming what I was doing. “Let me get you a drink.”

  I didn’t argue.

  I noticed his white cane was nowhere in sight, yet he moved unhesitatingly across the room, neatly skirting each piece of furniture and even stopping long enough to flatten with his toe a throw rug that had rucked up as he passed. Without fumbling around, he immediately homed in on two glasses in the kitchen cupboard, clunked ice in them from the freezer door, and dolloped scotch over the ice without spilling a drop.

  I had parked myself on the couch while he was piddling around in the other room. “I’m here,” I said when he returned, so he’d know. He made a beeline for me and sat down at my sid
e, as sure of himself as a sighted person. We clinked our glasses together, and I said thanks.

  “You have the location of everything memorized, don’t you?”

  He gave me a wicked sidelong glance. “Yes. So don’t try to be cute and rearrange my furniture.”

  I laughed.

  His fingers slid across my thigh. I could smell peppermint on his breath. And now scotch.

  “Are you really all right?” he asked. “You’re not trembling anymore.”

  “I know,” I said. “And yes. I feel better now. Thanks.”

  “What was it?” he asked. “What upset you?”

  I shook my head until I realized he couldn’t see me do it. Silence bore in for a minute, but I refused to let it linger. I found a smile and said, “Life. Life upset me.”

  Wistfully, he said, “It does that sometimes.”

  I nestled closer. His fingers were still moving idly along my thigh, and his mouth had found its way to my ear. Kenny’s voice was little more than a croak. “Is there anything I can do to make it better, Larry? I might be able to come up with a trick or two to cheer you up.”

  I set my drink on the coffee table in front of me and wiggled around to pull him into my arms. He came to me with no resistance at all. I buried my lips in his hair and breathed in the scent of his shampoo.

  “It’s a funny thing,” I whispered, sliding my fingers under the hem of his raggedyass shirt so I could stroke the satin softness of his belly, “but I think you’re cheering me up already.”

  He slid his palm across my crotch and, with his fingertips, outlined the bulge he discovered there.

  Around a smile, he said, “Up being the key word in that sentence.”

  Later, I slipped away while Kenny slept.

  Chapter Nine

  THREE DAYS passed before I built up the courage to call Kenny again. He seemed surprised to hear my voice but was gracious enough not to make a big deal out of the fact that I’d ignored him for the past seventy-two hours. Before that telephone conversation was over, Kenny invited me over and, one thing leading to another, I spent the night in his bed yet again. I spent the following night alone, glowering at the dogs and berating myself for being a coward. So on the next night, which was ten days after we first met on that bench in front of the blind center, I called and asked Kenny to spend the night with me. After a long hesitation, he finally said he would.

  When I wasn’t thinking about Kenny, I was thinking about John Allan Davis. The gist of how I thought of those two separate entities was as different as night and day. Kenny was sunbeams and rainbows, laughter and lube, with a dash of twitchy uncertainty thrown in for good measure. John Allan Davis was an ache that pierced my chest like a red-hot blade, cauterizing everything it touched and leaving behind a ball of fury sealed up inside like a wad of heartburn.

  That morning, I woke to find Kenny’s smell on the pillow beside me, but of Kenny there was no sign. I pried my eyes open, stretched luxuriously, and thought about the hours we had spent making love before weariness and the expenditure of body fluids finally knocked us out. My legs were anchored to the bed by a great weight. I looked down and saw Chuck draped across my feet, sound asleep, snoring away like a Volkswagen with a busted muffler. Squinting against the rising sun and the streamers of fiery light it was shooting through the veranda window, I spotted Kenny standing outside, leaning on the rail, staring out over the canyon.

  He was naked… and the most stunning sight I had ever seen in my life.

  At his feet, François sat prissily upright. He, too, was staring out over the canyon. The only movement between the two was the lazy wapping of François’s stubby tail sweeping short strokes across the deck behind him. Kenny’s pale body shone like alabaster in the early light. I reveled in the swell of his perfect ass rising at the base of his spine. The shimmer of blond hair on the back of his thighs. The way his lean shoulders hunched inward as he rested his elbows on the railing, chin in hand, and peered out across the city.

  I dragged my feet out from under Chuck, who snorted once but didn’t wake. After flinging the covers aside, I eased myself from the bed and stepped, as naked as Kenny, out into the morning light. The sunshine, already warm, felt heavenly on my skin. Kenny’s arms, when he turned to caress me, felt even better.

  He tucked himself under my arm and rested his head on my shoulder as we gazed out at the world waking up around us. Already I could hear a stream of automobiles chasing one another along the freeway, barely in sight atop a distant knoll. The trees surrounding the veranda swayed lightly in the morning breeze, enclosing us in our own little private space, invisible to anyone else on the planet. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  Or so I desperately hoped.

  Since Kenny didn’t have to work, we had made plans the night before. The plans scared me more than they scared Kenny, which showed how unaware he was of the danger he was in.

  “What if she doesn’t like me?” he asked now, tilting his head back and closing his sleepy eyes, waiting for my reaction, listening closely for what I’d say and how I’d say it. I noticed his hair was flat on one side and puffed up like a blowfish on the other. If I remembered correctly, he had fallen asleep the night before with his head between my legs. That was probably the imprint of my sweaty balls on the side of his head.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m not sure she entirely likes me.”

  He looked doubtful. “Your mother?”

  I hawked up a wad of phlegm and spit it over the side of the deck. Classless but always butch. That’s me. “She is what she is,” I said. “You’ll understand what I mean when you meet her.”

  “Did you tell her I’m blind?”

  I jumped like he’d stuck me with a pin. “You’re blind?”

  He bumped me with his hip and grumbled, “Smartass.”

  A hummingbird hovered in front of our faces for a minute, then shot off like a rocket and disappeared over the treetops.

  “That was a hummingbird, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  I wondered if he remembered what they look like.

  “Are you independently wealthy?” Kenny asked out of the blue. “I’ve never seen you work.”

  “But you’re blind. You said so yourself. You couldn’t see me work even if you could see me work.”

  He rolled his eyes so far up into his head, I imagined them tumbling down the back of his throat like marbles rolling through a drainpipe. He then turned those empty forest-green eyes on me and simply stood there, looking determined, waiting until I deigned to answer.

  “Yes,” I finally said. “I work. What I do isn’t strictly… normal. So I’d rather you didn’t know about it.”

  “Are you a thief?” he asked, looking suddenly interested. “Is that why you won’t tell me? Are you, like, a cat burglar? A mugger? A cattle rustler?”

  I laughed. “No, I’m not a cattle rustler. When was the last time you saw a herd of cows in San Diego?”

  “Just thought I’d ask. How about a forger? A fence for stolen property?”

  “No and no.”

  “A yegg?”

  “What the hell’s a yegg?”

  “A safecracker.”

  I took umbrage at that. “Do I look like a safecracker?”

  “How the hell would I know? I’m blind. And don’t get snooty. So do you kidnap people and carve out body parts to sell?”

  “Yuck! No!” I leaned in close and wrapped my hand around his sleeping dick, which didn’t remain sleeping very long. “If I did, you’d already be missing an item or two that would be worth an absolute fortune on the black market.”

  He grinned. “You charmer, you.” Then he covered my mouth with a kiss while his dick continued to grow in my fist.

  “Do we have time to go back to bed before we meet your mom?”

  “No,” I said, “but I can solve your problem right here.”

  With that, I lowered myself to my knees and took him into my mouth. He cupped my face in h
is hands while his hips began to move. Having the time of my life, I pulled out all the tricks I knew. I gazed up and watched his head tilt back, his eyes squeeze shut, and his mouth fall open like a trap door. The muscles in his neck tightened up like guywires. I was pretty sure I could hear his heart hammering in the morning breeze.

  Gently cupping his satin balls, I took the length of him as deep into my throat as I could. When his pubic hair was brushing my nose, he began to tremble. He never stopped trembling until he suddenly tensed all over and lurched forward, spilling what felt like a quart of motor oil straight down my throat. It wasn’t really motor oil, of course. It was Kenny juice, and it was hot, thick, and delicious.

  When he was drained, he doubled up over me and held me tight against him while his spit-lubricated cock softened between my lips. He opened his mouth once to speak, but nothing came out. I sort of liked that. It meant he was having a good time.

  Later, he reciprocated. He dropped to his knees in the shower and tried not to drown in the warm spray while he did his level best to please me as much as I had pleased him, which he did with tendon-snapping success. I cried out so loudly when I came that one of the dogs in the other room slunk off to crawl under a table, thinking I was being slaughtered.

  Later, I sat at the edge of the sink and watched, naked, as Kenny blew his hair dry with my ancient blow dryer, which I never used anymore, mainly because I didn’t have any hair. When he was satisfied, he combed his pale locks with his fingers, pushing it this way and that until he was happy with the way it felt.

  “Perfect,” I said, leaning in to brush a kiss across his cheek.

  “Is your mother going to be a bitch?” he asked.

  “Probably,” I said.

  He groaned. “Great.” He waited a beat, then asked, “Will I see you tonight?”

  “Probably not. I have to work.”