Exhibit

by Noir, Stella

  “Oh yeah”, Carl said. “We going now”, and slapped her ass again. “Fuck those fat fingers, you dirty bitch. Fuck them good.”

  Carl picked up the bottle, drank a gulp and poured another out across Mary-Lou’s outstretched asshole. She felt it sting as it seeped into her cunt. Carl pulled out his fingers and made Mary-Lou suck her own juices. When she did, she could taste the whiskey.

  “Fuck me now, huh?” she asked him.

  “Well alright, baby-doll”, Carl said. “If it pleases you.”

  He rubbered up, grabbed the base of his dick and guided it to her cunt. She was tight, not because she was a virgin, far from it, but because she was scared. She wanted it to be over as quickly as possible and never have to return. Carl’s eyes weren’t the only ones she’d seen in the dark, and she knew the kid next door would be even more terrified than she was, his hands over his ears trying to block out what was happening in the room next door.

  Carl slid into her, pulled out and slid in again. He put a finger on her asshole and began to play, teasing the muscle and pushing his way inside. It was more for anal, but Mary-Lou didn’t want to tell him that. If she told him, he’d want to take it anyway, and maybe if she didn’t mention it, he’d be satisfied with her cunt.

  He fucked her hard, slapped her ass and pulled on her hair. He called her a bitch while he was doing it and a dirty cunt when he was getting close. She responded to his every demand, praying he’d come soon, pay her and send her away. She didn’t even care now whether he was going to pay her or not. She’d seen evil in those eyes and she didn’t want to be anywhere near him. She knew what this man was capable of.

  He was grunting and moaning like the spluttering engine of a large piece of agricultural machinery. She could feel his balls slamming mercilessly against her pussy lips with each thrust, and his finger now deeply buried in her asshole.

  Mary-Lou was moaning like she was enjoying it too, like she was riding the crest of a wave, rising and falling with him. She’d had plenty of practice, and none of the men she’d been with ever gave a shit if it was real or not. She knew Carl would be no different, but it might make him finish quicker if he thought she was enjoying it as much as he was.

  When Carl stopped spitting insults at her, stopped slapping her ass and pulling her hair, and grabbed hold of her hips instead, so tightly she thought he was going to rip the skin clean off the bone, she knew it was about to come.

  He screamed like a bear with its leg caught in a sprung trap, tilted his head to the ceiling, and thrust as deeply as he could inside her. Mary-Lou felt his balls tighten, his cock head swell and the cum travel the length of his shaft before it exploded out of his cock hole, but most of all she felt relief. She screamed and moaned and wriggled around on his cock, and pretended as convincingly as she could that he’d brought her to orgasm.

  A moment after he’d come, Carl pushed her onto the bed, away from his cock. He pulled up his trousers and guzzled down a gulp of whiskey.

  “You dirty fucking slut”, he said to her. “Get out of my fucking house.”

  Mary-Lou gathered her clothes quickly and put them on. She didn’t count the money Carl thrust at her until she was back home, the door was locked, and she was as far away from him as she could be. It was the twenty dollars they’d agreed upon, and one of the notes was blood-stained.

  Carl lay back on the bed for a while, looking up at the street lamp. Finally he got up.

  “Denny, you fuck, where are you?”

  Denny cowered in the darkest of the dark shadows under the table in the corner of the room. Carl opened the door and came in.

  “I know you’re there, you fuck, come out.”

  He kicked at the makeshift bed, and then felt it with his hand. It was empty.

  “You son of a bitch”, Carl said, surprised. “Well fuck you then, I know you’re in here somewhere.”

  He lit up a smoke, and Denny saw the devil in the eyes behind the creeping wisps of cherry red flame.

  “Tell your piece of shit mother I’m going out. And Denny, if you tell her anything else, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Denny heard the door slam, and didn’t open his eyes until he heard his mom come back from work.

  Chapter 4

  Her hand hung over the edge of the bed, fingers locked in a claw, and eyes like marbles. She had red marks across her neck, bruises along her chest and a swollen cheek. She’d been dead for several days and the policemen hovering around her already putrefying body, held their hands to their mouths to stem the smell.

  “Fucking disgrace”, one of the men said.

  In a dining booth of a smoke filled café, where paintings of celebrities hung on the walls like family portraits, and the eggs came fried with butter and bacon fat, the same man, square jawed and heavy set, with a bust nose that had never been fixed right, and eyes that looked darker than the night itself, poured sugar into his coffee until the spoon would have stood straight up if he’d let it. His name was Cleveland Duncan and opposite him, watching him with a calm sense of familiarity, was Jack.

  “Been to Old Hope, seen any of the boys?” Cleveland said, still stirring the sugary mess in the chipped enamel mug, that had a faded print of Mickey mouse on the side. He knew the answer but had to ask the question anyway, out of courtesy, and an old routine, the script of which both men knew well.

  “You know I don’t go up there anymore.”

  “Yeah, well, you been gone so long.”

  “It aint all that long.”

  Jack tapped a cigarette out of his box and put it to his lips. For a while the two men watched each other, the smoke from Jack’s cigarette meeting the steam from Cleveland’s coffee, and together, spinning majestically in the air like fighting dragons.

  “You look old”, Cleveland said.

  “Fuck you. I am old.”

  “Bust her rib and her cheek bone, you know that. Sonofabitch even fucked her after he killed her.”

  “That why you brought me up here, tell me that?”

  “You know what the police do with cases like this, they detail ‘em and then they bury ‘em.”

  He gulped a slug of his coffee and then tapped a cigarette out of Jack’s box for himself.

  “They always have”, Jack said, with a tired sense of resignation.

  “She was eighteen years old”, Cleveland said. “Eighteen years old and this piece of shit put his hands round her throat and twisted the life out of her.”

  A waitress came over with food for Cleveland. A plate of scrambled egg and butter laden toast. She let him finish what he was saying, all the time eyeing him wildly, watching him mimic the action of someone being strangled, before she pushed the plate in front of him and left, disgusted.

  “It’s a fucking mess.”

  Cleveland upturned the salt canister for a good five seconds, rescrambled the egg with his fork, mashing it into a runny pulp, and then began shoveling it into his mouth, stopping every other two mouthfuls for a puff on his cigarette.

  “Eighteen. I had an eighteen year old daughter once. You too”, Cleveland said, pointing the fork towards Jack and involuntarily launching a sticky splatter of egg onto the table in front of him. Jack wiped it away.

  “Why did you call me up here Cleveland?” Jack asked.

  “We know who it is.”

  “Good. Arrest him and send him to jail.”

  “He’s out of state.”

  “So bring him back into state.”

  Cleveland smiled, raised his eyebrows, and Jack got it.

  “I’m an old man, Jack.”

  He paused to pour more salt onto his food. “This is your type of thing, it’s just what you need. A vacation, go and see the country, feel good about yourself for once.”

  Jack pushed his cigarette out, folding the butt into the cherry, and staining his thumb with tar. Cleveland had stopped eating, his eyes on Jack, waiting for a response.

  “What do you care anyway?” he said finally. “We must have buried hundreds o
f cases like it ourselves.”

  “We never buried anything like this.” Cleveland pointed the fork at him aggressively. “We chose which cases we could follow based on police time and money. We never buried anything we could solve.”

  “That what you call it?”

  “That’s how it was”, Cleveland said, angrily. “You know it as well as I do.”

  Jack looked away for a moment. Outside the window, a boy stood with a dog, his face pressed up to the glass. They caught eyes briefly, and then the dog got disinterested and pulled the boy away. Cars drove past, the day crept on.

  “Yeah, look I don’t know Cleveland. Doesn’t sound like a lot has changed”, Jack said, turning the cigarette box in his hands, tapping each corner on the table, methodically.

  “She isn’t the only one, and she’s not going to be the last either. We know his name, and roughly where he is.”

  “And the state police?”

  “They don’t want to know about a couple of dead prostitutes Jack, especially not if they were killed five hundred miles away.”

  Cleveland pushed his plate away and lit up another cigarette. Smoke climbed into the pitted holes of the yellowed ceiling like snowdrops looking for sun.

  “And what happens if I bring him back?”

  “You bring him back, I’ll crucify the motherfucker.”

  The waitress came over again and took away Cleveland’s plate. She asked if they wanted anything else, but Jack just shook his head and smiled up at her. When she was gone, he looked back at Cleveland. Jack could almost see the weights pushing down his shoulders.

  “You talked to anyone else?” he asked.

  “Anyone like who?”

  “Spitzler, Kenny, the guy with the glass eye and the Doberman pinchers?”

  “Larry?”

  “Yeah Larry, has to drive with his head turned sideways, can only go right.”

  They both laughed. Cleveland raised his eyebrow again, smoke catching his eyes.

  “I need you to do this, Jack.”

  “I know you do”, Jack said. “I told you I was retired didn’t I?”

  “And I told you I didn’t know what that meant.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “Just bring him back to me”, Cleveland said. “The rest’ll work itself out.”

  “Well then”, Jack said, the crease of a smile lifting up the corner of his mouth. “I suppose you better tell me where he is.”

  Chapter 5

  Denny was falling when the door went. Spinning and tumbling down into the nothingness, the darkness engulfing him like night swallowing the day. He was at the summer fair, strapped into the Russian mountain roller coaster, but the safety bar didn’t fit him properly, and he slipped out when the huge metal cab turned upside down. He fell, and he watched himself falling, until he found himself, jarred awake and sweaty from his head to his feet, in a crumpled up mess under the stout wooden table, his mother calling out for him.

  At first he didn’t know why he wasn’t in his makeshift bed, and then it came to him, the horrors of the night before, until sleep took him under.

  “Denny”, Jess called.

  “Mom.”

  She groped through the darkness to his voice, and met him as he stumbled out from his hiding space, and ran into her arms.

  “Where the hell where you?” Jess said, alarmed to have not found him sleeping where he should have been, happy to have found him safe. “I was worried.”

  “I was falling”, Denny said. “In my dream. I was on the roller coaster at the summer fair, and I fell out.”

  “You’re wet”, Jess said, feeling his forehead. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  “Oh, sweetie”, she said.

  Denny buried his head into her neck and clung on tight. “I’ll be quiet, I promise.”

  “Just until Carl comes home ok?”

  “I don’t want him to come home”, Denny said, and began to cry. “I hate him.”

  “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” Jess said, trying to soothe him.

  “I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.”

  “Come on, let’s get to bed”, Jess said. “We can talk in the morning.”

  She moved towards her room, and when Denny saw where they were headed he screamed out to stop her.

  “No”, he said. “Not in there. Sleep with me, in my bed.”

  “Honey, I won’t fit.”

  “Please mom, I don’t want to go in there.”

  “Denny, has something happened?”, Jess said, concern now trimming her voice. “Let me look at you.”

  She tried to pull Denny’s head away from her neck to look at him, but he didn’t want her to. In the milky darkness she would have seen little anyway, so she decided to wait until morning.

  “Please, Mom’, Denny repeated. “Just for a while.”

  “Alright”, Jess said. “Just for a while.”

  She took Denny to his bed, and wrapped her warmth around him, cradling him like a shell does a tortoise. Her legs hung ridiculously over the end of the piled up cushions, and she tried as best as she could to get comfortable.

  “Mom?”

  She kissed his neck to let him know she had heard.

  “When are we going to leave?”

  “As soon as we can”, Jess said, and that seemed enough for Denny.

  Cradled, warm and safe, Denny finally dropped off again to sleep. Exhausted from her long days work, and despite the awkwardness of her position, Jess was soon to follow.

  Chapter 6

  Denny lifted up a spoonful of cereal, regarded it like a dead bug, and tipped it back into the bowl. Jess watched him scoop up another spoonful and do exactly the same again.

  “You gonna eat that or just play with it?”

  “When are we leaving?” Denny said, refusing to stop his game.

  Jess pulled the bowl away from him before he had a chance to continue. Denny threw his spoon against the table angrily, so it ricocheted against the far wall, spitting milk up the paintwork like a garden sprinkler.

  For a moment, Jess just looked at her son with an open mouth, amazed at what she had just seen him do. Denny knew he was in trouble, but couldn’t help himself from smiling. It was the most fun he’d had for ages.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jess said finally.

  “Don’t swear, Mom, it’s rude”, Denny said sarcastically.

  “I work my ass off to look after you, and this is how you repay me, wasting food and throwing stuff around like a baby?”

  “You work your ass off to look after Carl you mean”, Denny said.

  “Don’t you swear at me, little man.”

  Denny got up from the table. “I’m going to school”, he said.

  “We haven’t finished here”, Jess said angrily, but Denny was already on his way out. As he left, he slammed the door so hard, the whole house shook. Jess tipped a cigarette out of her packet, lit it up and took a long drag.

  The black eye on Rose’s face had healed a little, and the swelling had gone down. She’d tied her hair up into a bun, and it served perfectly as a holder for the pen she used to take orders with.

  “I have no idea what’s wrong with him”, Jess said.

  She caught sight of a stain on Rose’s dress, and affectionately tried to rub it off.

  “I think it’s blueberry pie or something, sweetie, that’s been there for months.”

  Rose sat down on the back step next to her, and together they watched a stray dog dig at a discarded rubbish bag.

  “Two days he’s not spoken to me. Not unless he wants to call me a bitch or something. He called me a whore the other day, nearly washed his mouth out with soap.”

  “I hear that”, Rose said. “My little one, Amy, only just learned to speak and she’s already cussing. Get’s it from him I expect. She aint learning it from me. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know, but something is eating him up. Something happened the
other night when I was working, but I aint sure what it is. Denny and Carl are just as tight lipped as each other. Maybe it’s just that he aint too fond of Carl.”

  “Yeah well who is?” Rose said.

  “He isn’t all bad, at least he wasn’t all that bad. Shit Rose, I don’t know anymore. He’s drinking, fighting, and he sure as hell isn’t working.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  Rose took the last drag out of her cigarette and threw it into the dirt. She hauled herself up and dusted her hands down.

  “Come on girl”, she said, helping Jess to her feet. “It’ll come out in the wash. If anything did happen, Denny’ll tell you soon enough.”

  They went back inside and Jess took her mind of it for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t think about her son or Carl even, but what she did think about was Jack. She’d not seen him for a couple of days, and she missed him. She wondered if Jack would be her knight in shining armor, the answer to her problems, or whether he was just another loser drunk, looking for a hook up.

  Denny wasn’t there at the school gates like normal. Jess couldn’t tell until she was right up at the entrance, because Denny sometimes sat with his back to the road, leaned up against one of the pillars, but as soon as she got there and definitely couldn’t see him, she began to panic.

  The school had finished half an hour ago, but the lights were still on inside. She went straight in, hoping that Denny had changed his normal routine, but knew immediately that he wasn’t going to be there. There were two teachers still there, neither one of them that had Denny in their class. They knew him of course, as the kid who sat outside, sometimes for hours, waiting for his dead beat mother to show up, but hadn’t seen him today. In fact neither of them recalled seeing him at all today. One of them took her into Denny’s classroom to check the register, and as she scanned the list to look for his name, Jess had seen it already, as clear as day without a tick next to it.

  “Fuck”, she said.

  Jess left straight away, overwhelmed by panic. She had no idea where her son would go, if it wasn’t to school. She ran home as quickly as she could, and began calling his name; even before she threw the door open.