by Edward Lee
Spooky grinned. “Think harder about your dad, Frankie.”
“FUCK!” Frankie bellowed. The image of his father—a man who’d beaten and sodomized Frankie from ages four through fourteen—couldn’t have presented a less-erotic reaction in Frankie’s mind. The mammoth penis went dead-flaccid in about a second.
Laughter fluttered from Spooky’s throat, gentle as a stream of moths.
“Come on, Spooky,” Nick reasoned. “Lay off him. You’re fuckin’ him up.”
“I can’t fuckin’ help it. I hate that greaseball motherfucker. Doesn’t fuckin’ matter what I say any-fuckin’-way. It’s gonna take that big lummox till next Easter to get half wood. He might as well be jerking off a fuckin’ empty rubber.”
Frankie’s dead-meat cock flapped against his leg when he turned briskly and glared at Spooky. “I oughta—”
“You oughta what? Huh? I’ll tell you what you oughta fuckin’ do. You oughta grow a dick that works, you fuckin’ pasta-scarfing piss-ant small-time mob errand-boy very-quickly-outliving-his-usefulness no-dick piece of garbage.”
Frankie bulled forward, Nick pushing him back. “I oughta fuckin’ kill you,” Frankie yelled.
Spooky laughed, raising her stumps. “Shit, I’ve been begging for someone to kill me for ten motherfuckin’ years.” Her pair of diminutive tattoos enforced this assertion: rifle-scope crosshairs over her heart and, along the front of her throat, a six-inch perforation mark and the words CUT HERE. “You don’t have the fuckin’ balls to kill me, Frankie. There’s nothing in your sack but two dead eggs.”
Nick was fighting the losing battle in trying to push Frankie away from her. “Frankie, Frankie, come on, don’t do it!” Nick yelled. “Vinch wants her alive for the scats—you kill her and we’re all lunch meat.”
“I don’t care! I’m killin’ her!”
“Did you blow your dad, or did he just fuck you in the ass, huh, Frankie?” Spooky continued to taunt. “Bet you got hard every time back then.”
“I’m gonna kill her, Nick, I’m gonna—”
“You’re an impotent waste of space, Frankie,” she saw fit to add. “Do the human race a favor. Fuckin’ hang yourself.”
“You’re dead, bitch! Dead!”
“Cool down, Frankie,” Nick implored. “Cool down. You kill her, then Vinch’ll have that psycho doctor of his do a job on both of us. You heard about what he did to Tony and Darcy, didn’t you?”
Frankie stalled momentarily. It wasn’t a pretty story. Indeed, then, he began to cool down.
A grateful impasse ensued. Frankie gained his composure. “All right, all right,” he conceded. He stood feet apart, closed his eyes, and began to masturbate again. Spooky sighed, asked Nick, “Hey, load a pipe and light me up first, will you? I’m motherfuckin’ feenin’, like, really fuckin’ bad.” This was but one inconvenience of being armless: Spooky, a clinical drug addict, couldn’t smoke drugs without assistance. Nor could she wipe her ass, effectively wash herself, clip her toenails, etc. “I’ve gotta have a hit. I got the motherfuckin’ meth bugs crawling all over me. How about it, Nick?”
“No,” Nick put his foot down. “When we’re done.”
“Fuck that motherfuckin’ shit, man! I need some ice! Now!”
“When we’re done,” Nick repeated, half-blitzed himself.
“Come on, Nick. I’ll stick my tongue up your asshole.”
Nick frowned. Such favors he couldn’t have been less interested in. All he wanted to do was ride his meth-buzz, get his cum-shot, and catch the Yankees. Clemens was pitching tonight, thank God.
“I need some batu, man! I need some fuckin’ cristy! I’m not kidding.”
“You’ll have to wait. Maybe if you gotta wait, you won’t fuck with Frankie’s head anymore.”
“Yeah,” Frankie growled; the grin on his face denoted great pride. He turned around, displaying quite an achievement: twelve inches of very erect genitals. His eyes thinned ruefully at Spooky. “How’s that for some dead dick, hose-bag?”
Spooky tossed a shoulder. “Hey, Frankie, when you were a baby, did you swallow your dad’s nut, or spit?”
Frankie’s grand twelve-incher went limp in an instant. “I’m gonna kill her!” he re-exploded, and this time Nick was off balance when he lunged to push Frankie away. “My guess is you swallowed,” Spooky conjectured, not even flinching as her ogre-sized nemesis struggled to reach her. “You look like a swallower. Bet your parents didn’t even need to buy any baby food because of all that nut you were eating every day.”
“Frankie—no!” Nick shouted, but—
SMACK!
Too late.
Frankie’s primordial rage propelled his fist over Nick’s shoulder where it connected with Spooky’s chin effectively as a Tyson right-cross. Spooky’s head snapped back, then her upper-body snapped back, all so fast she could only be seen as a chalk-white blur.
She lay perfectly still on the cheap coffee table.
Nick and Frankie gaped down, bug-eyed. They knew at a glance. Spooky’s head hung over the table edge, her eyes crossed and wide open, her tongue hanging out. The silence was absolute.
“Man. Oh, man,” Nick whispered. Beads of sweat wrung out of his pores. “Frankie, you better pray she ain’t…” He couldn’t even say the rest.
He knelt down, put an ear to her chest.
And gulped.
He felt around her neck for a pulse.
Gulped again.
Then he raged up at Frankie: “You big dumb cement-head motherfucker! You killed her!”
“I-I-I—” Frankie gaped. “No, she—”
“Fuckbrain! You broke her neck against the edge of the table!”
“No, I-I-I…” Frankie was remiss for locution. “No. She fell, and her neck… It got broke.”
“You KILLED THE BITCH! And now Vinchetti’s gonna have one of his crew KILL US! They’ll hang us upside down by meat hooks through our assholes and blowtorch us! He’ll have that crazy-ass doctor cut all our skin off!”
Frankie started to blubber he was so shit-scared. Nick sat dejected on the floor, head bowed.
“Let’s-let’s-let’s just…leave town!” Frankie suggested. “Go somewhere. Hide.”
“We could go to Mars and it wouldn’t matter—Vinchetti would find us. We could go to fuckin’ Egypt and bury ourselves a thousand feet under one of the pyramids and he would find us. We killed his best scat girl—Vinchetti loves scat. He’ll be more pissed off about this than when the Yankees lost the series to Arizona.”
“We’re dead,” Frankie blubbered.
Nick just nodded.
“Let’s just-let’s just-let’s just—leave her here,” came Frankie’s next brilliant idea. “Just say she croaked, say she OD’d or somethin’. Yeah. Leave her here.”
“It’s a fuckin’ Howard Johnsons! We can’t leave a dead meth-head whore with no arms in a Howard Johnsons! You murdered her! Our prints are all over the room! The clerk saw us come in. This is a homicide scene, Einstein.”
Frankie maintained his frantic blubbering. “Well-well-well—let’s dump her body. Dump her body in the canal. Then we can say some of Peroni’s boys muscled her away from us. Peroni’s been trying to horn in on Vinch’s scat and nek market for years, and he’s dumped a lot of bodies in the canal. The cops’d think it was Peroni.”
Nick opened his mouth to voice further objection but—
“Hmm,” he said.
“Vinch might believe it, Nick.”
“He might. He just might.” Nick glanced around, brain ticking. It was a bad plan but it was all they had. “Frankie, put your clothes back on. Then take the camera, lights, and tripods back out to the Caddy and put it all in the trunk.” Now he was looking at the long suitcase they’d carried the equipment in. “We’ll carry Spooky out in that.”
“In what?” Frankie was stepping into his slacks. “You mean the suitcase?”
“Yeah. The suitcase.”
Frankie scratched his chin. “Oh, Nick, I don’t
know. I don’t think she’ll fit.”
Nick got up and grabbed his eight-inch Gerber Mk IV sheath knife off the dresser. “She’ll fit just fine, Frankie. After I cut her legs off.”
««—»»
One time-saver was the plastic drop cloth they’d already spread out under the coffee table. This was, after all, a scat film scene. Never Leave A Mess was the rule. The trashed bathroom presented a bit of a problem, though, until Nick put the brain God gave him to work. The bathroom was padlocked shut—hence, no bath tub to cut her legs off in and, doubly hence, no place for all the blood to drain. Nick deftly cut four yard-long lengths of extension cord and began to apply the tourniquets just as they’d taught him in the Army. He cranked the first two on at the top of each thigh as close as possible to the hip joint, then two more a half-inch below the first two. He cranked them all down tight and tied them off. Next, with the Gerber, he began to cut. He cut all the way around each thigh, straight to the bone. Sharp as the Gerber was, the task proved much, much, much, much, much, much, much more difficult than one would think. Very little blood leaked out, however, due to the dual ligatures on each leg. A hammer and chisel from the Caddy’s tool box neatly cracked each thigh bone—
And off the legs came.
“Nice job, Nick,” Frankie complimented.
“Thanks.”
Spooky’s torso fit perfectly into the suitcase, and the legs went right on top. They zipped the suitcase up, slid it into the Caddy’s back seat, discarded the drop cloth into the motel dumpster, and drove away.
Nick turned on the radio and smiled. What better harbinger could he ask for? The Yankees were beating Baltimore 11-1.
And it was only the fifth inning.
««—»»
“I don’t know about the canal, Frankie.” Nick appraised the long stripe of black water from the road, trying to drive normally. “I saw two cops on the other side.”
“They were just roosting,” Frankie felt confident. “Eatin’ donuts and reading the funny papers. They’ll go back on patrol soon. Let’s just kill some time, drive around a while.”
“Frankie, we got a fuckin’ torso in a suitcase in the back seat. I’d kind of like to get rid of it as soon as fuckin’ possible, know what I mean?”
Frankie nodded, seeing the logic. “Fuck, you got any Demerol, Nick? I’m all out and I need a bang.”
“Wait till we get back to the compound. And you better pray that Vinch believes our story ’cos if he don’t you’re gonna need a shitload of Demerol for when that kooky doctor starts doing the job on you.”
“Fuck. I definitely need a hit.”
Nick pulled a u-turn, a sudden endeavor occurring to him.
“Where we going now? Those cops ain’t left the canal yet.”
“The Kwik-Mart,” Nick answered. “For Wet-Naps.”
“Wet-Naps? We goin’ for ribs?”
Nick frowned. “No, we ain’t goin’ for ribs. We—or, I mean you—gotta wipe down everything we touched.” Nick pointed to his head. “Think, Frankie. That suitcase has our prints all over it, and so does Spooky.”
“Fuck.” Frankie seemed disgruntled. “I don’t wanna wipe fingerprints off her fuckin’ corpse with Wet-Naps.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you don’t want. You got us into this mess, so you’re gonna do the job. I ain’t spendin’ the rest of my life on Riker’s with some guy named Luther usin’ my asshole for a place to party. I can’t believe how bad you fucked this up.”
“It wasn’t my fault, Nick.” Frankie was pouting now. “She asked for it. She shouldn’t oughta have said those things to me.”
Nick pulled a Demerol tab from his pocket, showed it to his cohort. “You wipe down the bitch’s body and then you can take your bang.”
“Hey, thanks!”
The front of the Kwik-Mart shimmered in neon. There were only a few vehicles in the parking lot: a mint-condition ’68 350 small-block Camaro that had been oddly spray-painted black, an old red pickup truck, and a gold Dodge Colt with a P.I.L. sticker in the back window. Nick and Frankie loped inside, Frankie beginning to sweat out some early withdrawal. “Shit, yeah!” Nick bellowed in the store. The man behind the counter, who wore a turban and bore a suspicious resemblance to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, jumped an inch off the floor at Nick’s celebratory outburst. What was Nick celebrating? There was a little television behind the counter, the Yankees game on, and somebody named Giambi just hit a grand slam. The score was now 15 to 1.
And it was only the sixth inning.
“I knew that big boat anchor was good for somethin’!” Nick railed happily. Frankie shrugged, wishing for a mainline. They bought Wet-Naps and big coffees, and as they headed back toward the Caddy, Nick said, “You know, Frankie, I’ve got a really good vibe about tonight, even after all the shit that happened with Spooky.” He shook his head hopefully. “When the Yankees beat the shit out of Baltimore, great things happen.”
“Uh, yeah,” Frankie replied, scratching himself. “I need to take a bang.”
Nick dropped his coffee when he reached to open the car door. It splashed all over his shoes.
“Nick,” Frankie asked. “What’choo drop your coffee for?”
Nick didn’t answer. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted, toppling to the pavement.
Frankie looked into the back seat and noted at once that the suitcase was gone.
««—»»
“—two grand slams in the bottom of the ninth inning against the generally automatic Mariano Rivera,” the tinny voice announced. “Yes, folks, it’s a record-setting comeback as the Baltimore Orioles beat the New York Yankees, 16 to 15!”
Callused fingers, tinged in green light, snapped the old Philco radio off. Spooky wasn’t dead, by the way. This might seem beyond belief, but in truth she hadn’t actually broken her neck against the edge of the coffee table, nor had she suffered any manner of vertebral fracture or spinal-cord-transection. The impact had merely pinched her seventh and eighth cervical nerves, resulting in a reduced heart and respiratory rate and temporary neuromuscular paralysis. The tourniquets had prevented death from blood-loss. Hence, Spooky was alive.
And not in a very good mood when she regained consciousness.
Those motherfuckin’ tube-steaks, she thought. Goombah morons can’t do any-fuckin’-thing right.
She lay in the front footwell of a vehicle whose suspension springs creaked mercilessly over the back road’s potholes and dips. At first Spooky couldn’t see—er, well, she could see enough to note that her legs had been summarily amputated, but that was about it. Above her, she made out faint green light, which she presumed were dashboard lights, but her vision was still too blurry to see the driver.
The driver, incidentally, was possessed of a very complex belief in providence. Twice a year he made these aimless drives all the way up the east coast and all the way back, not to visit relatives or to see sights, but simply to be. To contemplate himself. It proved a very self-actualizing experience. He’d merely pulled over at the Kwik-Mart, purchased a bag of Beechnut chewing tobacco, and had been walking back out of the store when—poof!—the inclination had struck him to look into the back of that big Cadillac. He’d seen the suitcase there and had simply taken it. It was providence, see?
Providence had told him to do that.
“Why, hey there,” the driver said when he noticed the head on the torso moving. “How you feelin’?”
“What kind of a dick for-brains question is that, you old fuck?” the torso replied in the softest voice. “I’ve been armless for eleven motherfuckin’ years and tonight the mafia-version of Laurel and Hardy cut my legs off in a motherfuckin’ Howard Johnsons. How the fuck do you think I feel?”
“I understand your plight, hon, and there really ain’t no cause fer profanation. Not now. See, I’se savin’ you from yer travails. Gettin’ diseases, smokin’ the drugs, gettin’ cornholed by fellas…it’s the negertive forces’a the universe that’s has caused you
to veer from the blesséd path that yer supposed to take. I’se’ll help you, missy—help you git’cherself back on the path.”
“Huh?” Spooky said.
“Jus’ you wait’n see, child,” the driver said, his grizzled face eerie and green in the dash lights. He looked down at her through the darkness. “What’cher name, darlin’?”
“Spooky,” Spooky said.
“Well, I’se pleased as punch ta meet’cha, Spooky.” The driver smiled. “My name’s Lud.”
— | — | —
THE DRITIPHILIST
“I have this…problem,” he admitted.
“Believe me, everyone who’s ever sat in that chair has a problem,” related Dr. Marsha Untermann. “Not a typical problem but a grievous one. A problem so incalculable—and so aberrant—that it rocks the imagination.” The woman’s gaze thinned. A long elegant finger traced a graceful chin. “You’re here for a reason—your own rehabilitation. You’re scared. You’re scared that I might find your ‘problem’ so deviant or absolutely appalling that I will insist that you leave my office at once and never come back.”
Nougat-brown eyes leveled at him.
“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m…very afraid of that.”
“Because if that happens, you’ll have nowhere to go?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You probably think that there is no one else in the world like you. That’s why you’ve refrained from seeking help in the past, correct?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Untermann leaned back in the chair behind her desk. She smiled as thinly as her gaze. “Then your fears are without foundation. I do not turn patients away, however foul their problems—or their crimes—may seem. It’s my job. I do my job. And I think I can safely say that this ‘problem’ of yours?” She lit a long cigarette and shook her head. “I’ve heard much worse.”
The smoke spewed from her lips like a ghostly fluid. Her eyes opened wider, inquisitive, coldly promising.
