"Opinions? I don't want to hear yer stinkin' opinions. Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one. Give me the facts!"
That's the way Lieutenant Milhaud spoke to us. Not an ounce of respect. Not a grain of sympathy. Nada. Nothing but demands, and then more demands, always followed up with the snide insinuations and the insults.
"You. Pervis. How much money are you making?"
My partner Nick Pervis squirmed in his hard wooden seat. Milhaud had him pinned to his chair and was now crawling over the web of hostility he had spun around the helpless prey, zeroing in for the kill. Pervis went into an infantile crouch and whined his response.
"Aw, come on, Lieutenant, yer the one who hands out the paychecks every Friday."
Feeble. Useless. The red faced Milhaud began to slowly walk toward the cringing detective, his beefy palms knotted behind his back.
"Pervis," he drawled in a menacing tone, speaking directly at his own wing-tipped feet," I asked you a fucking question, and you failed to answer it. I don't want to hear your opinions, your excuses, your pathetic autobiography. All I want to know is how much money the taxpayers are wasting every week supporting the sickening habits of a useless, incompetent asshole like you. Answer me, and give me an exact figure."
Mihaud approached Pervis's desk, and at precisely the instant his voice ceased its gruff booming, he lashed out with one hand and grabbed Purvis's ear and began to twist.
Pervis made with a donkey like squeal of agony. I laughed out loud, overjoyed that it was Nick who was being treated to the familiar torture routine this evening, and not me. We had both experienced the degrading wrath of lieutenant Milhaud before and there was no shame in laughing at the misfortune of the other-both Pervis and I realized that the laughter was an involuntary response, similar to that which overcomes eyewitnesses at accident sites, the old "if not but for fortune, there lies me" response which characterizes one's level of awareness of the essentially frail nature of life.
"Three thirteen a week gross!" Pervis yelled, both of his hands clawing fiercly at the red and hairy fist that twisted his ear.
Milhaud snickered, and turned to me, smiling. He was going to prolong the agony.
"How much is that after taxes, Nickypooh?"
Pervis howled and began to pound the linoleum with his heavily shod feet, screeching out the answer as a kind of curse.
"Two forty nine!"
Milhaud continued to smile at me as he twisted Nick's ear. The Lieutenant began to slowly shake his head from side to side.
"Two hundred and forty-nine bucks a week. That's good money, Nick. That's real good money, considering the kind of service you boys provide. You'd think the taxpayers might get a little pissed off that their boys in the unmarked cars and the doubleknits were spending that money in sleazy bars and massage parlors instead of doing the job their paid to do. Wouldn't you, Nicky boy?"
He gave a subtle twist of the wrist, and Pervis answered instantly.
"Lemme go ya fuckin' baboon!"
Milhaud grinned at me. I grinned back, wincing through my teeth. The show was almost over. Nick was nearly in tears, Milhaud had made his point, and if the action continued any longer, the lieutenant would have made his victim into a martyr of the calibre of Van Gogh. The last thing Milhaud wanted on his hands was a righteous martyr. He let go of Nick's ear, and began to speak, intermittently licking at the waxy ends of his pincer.
"You boys are overpaid, underworked and incompetent. Now ordinarily, in any other sort of job, that would put you at the head of the list for a fat raise in pay, and even maybe the foreman's job. Not here, assholes. I'm the foreman, and I consider job security to be my highest priority, especially when I look at the type of scumbag whose bucking for my gig."
He paused here, and looked both of us over carefully. I went into the "hear no evil" stance, while partner Nick covered his mouth in the "speak no evil" posture. Milhaud pinched his nostrils together and droned on.
"That's right, you monkeys, seal off your organs of perception. Hell, what does it matter, you've been working on the Shitty Dick case for six months now and haven't even come up with a dingleberry's worth of hard evidence. No suspect. No leads. Nothing. Just two dozen of our fairest maidens violated brutally by a psychopathic rapist, left to die with torn and bleeding rectums, shattered dignity, permanent psychological damage, and what do you boys come up with? Opinions. 'Gee Lieutenant, maybe its the girls fault, maybe they were leading old Shitty Dick on.' Maybe. Maybe not. It's up to you boys to find out, not to ask me a bunch of fucking questions. If you want to ask question, trundle your sick asses downstairs to 302. There's another innocent victim down there, just came in from the hospital. She's ready to talk now."
Milhaud had timing. He certainly had perfected his sense of the dramatic, building us up with abuse, going through the whole torture and insult routine, and then laying a fresh hulk of pink, recently violated evidence right in our laps, adding a dose of insult to the injuries already so skillfully bruised upon our consciousnesses. We sulked out the door with our poodle collars frayed and our tails limp between our legs.
Milhaud made a parting shot. It rang in our ears as we headed down the hallway.
"You boys don't come up with something by Friday, you'll be directing traffic come Monday morning."
Nick looked at me with cocker spaniel eyes as we listened to the dying echoes of Milhaud's maniac laughter.
"Why me, Narsky, why me?" he asked, pathetic doggy tears of frustration accumulating in his sharp detective's eyes. I slung my doubleknitted arm over his paisley doubleknitted shoulder and shook my head in shared pain and understanding.
"Better than nine to five on the production line, Nick," I said, trying to see the brighter side of the situation. He stared at his shoes just as Milhaud always did, and grunted in agreement.
"The humiliations we have to put up with, Narsky, the nagging, the demands, sometimes I wonder."
I was about to agree with him on that point, that perhaps the nine to five doldrums had their innate appeal, and perhaps that appeal far out-weighed the "romantic lure" of the detective's role, but just as the thoughts were forming into coherent, snivelling words, we reached room 302, and went into our professional act.
"Whose gonna be the good cop this time, Nick?" I asked.
Pervis snarled at me, and pointed his long index finger in a jabbing motion at my sternum.
"You be the good guy. I feel like stuffing hot coals up this cunt's asshole."
Nick leered at me, and instinctively, I understood. After a session of abuse under the skillful stare of Lieutenant Milhaud, one feels like kicking the victim while she's down. I twisted the doorknob, and presto, we went to work.
Pervis took the lead with flair, immediately seizing control of his dramatic persona and lashing out with full brutality at the matron who was busy hand feeding glazed doughnuts to the rape victim.
"Mrs. Olsen, who the hell told you to stuff doughnuts down her throat? We may be obligated to serve and protect, but it don't say nothing in the rulebook about having to provide room and board. Get your fat ass out of here." He glowered at the uniformed matron, hands on his hips, staring straight into the seated "victim's" wet eyes.
Mrs. Olsen gnashed her gums and dropped her doughnut box on the floor, scurrying out just fast enough to avoid the point of Nick's wingtip as he kicked wildly at her broad butt. Nick started in on the chick the second the door slammed shut.
"Well, whorebreath," he began, walking in circles around her chair, adjusting the two-hundred fifty watt desk lamp so that it got her full in the face," Tell us your sick story. Tell us how you were minding your own business when this guy jumped out of the bushes and sprayed in your face. Come on, bitch, out with it. We've got all the time in the world to listen to your sick story, and when we're done listening, we've got a few questions for you."
The "bitch" in question, seated in the wooden, unpadded chair with the heat lamp raising beads of sweat on her face, was a quivering blonde, petite, sweet, with bare feet and scared shitless. She burst out into tears of hysteria and began to pitifully call for her Momma the second Nick stopped sneering at her. Little flecks of sugar glaze were stuck in the corners of her pink mouth and crumbs and dots of dough speckled the moist pinkness of her modest cleavage. I went into my good guy bit. The time was prime.
"Alright Pervis, let me handle this," I said calmly, making as if to restrain my partner from leaping on her form and impaling her soft head with his enraged organ of reproduction. "There, there, my sweet," I said, patting the shivering, quaking blond head, "Don't listen to my associate, Detective Pervis. He's had a very bad day and I think the sight of another rape victim has frustrated him beyond his ability to maintain the professional stance."
The pink nubbin turned her face up to me, smiled through her tears, and did a number with her tongue on the flakes of glazed doughnut. It had me erect and leaking within seconds. Goddamn it to hell if I've ever seen such a large, pink tongue on the flakes of glazed doughnut. It had me erect and leaking within seconds. Goddamn it to hell if I've ever seen such a large, pink tongue in such a tiny teen head before in my life. I maintained the professional stance, erection or no erection.
"I'm Detective Steve Narsky. My partner and I are here to help you in your hour of need. We need your help as well, my dear. We need to hear your story. We need clues if we're ever going to find the vile bastard who abused your body."
Nick felt that this was a proper time to enhance the old good-guy, bad-guy dialectic. Accordingly, he interrupted, screaming in a hyena tone.
"Ah, horseshit, Narsky," he said, walking up to the pink nubbin and planting his crotch about three millimeters from her rabbit nose. He grabbed her chin in two of his fingers and began to force her head into an involuntary up and down motion as he spoke. "Look at the bitch. Look at what she did with that tongue of hers already. You tellin' me this bitch wasn't giving out with the dripping beaver shots when the guy nailed her? You telling me that Narsky? Christalmighty, look at her, nodding like a babboon on the needle."
He pulled with his finger grip and had her nose doing its thing directly in contact with his zipper. He snorted at her.
"When did you shoot up baby? Whose your connection?"
Pervis was deep into a French Connection scenario. He was doing Academy Award quality macho brutality, and to tell the absolute truth, the as yet unnamed nubbin was getting over her stage fright. Her tongue was now busy licking his zipper as a red sore spot appeared on the end of her nose.
I put my arm over Pervis's shoulder and watched for a minute or two as he sandblasted the freckles off her snout, and then I tapped him on the back, giving him my entrance cue.
"Honey," I said, "Let's start off on the right foot. It'll make this easier for all of us. You won't get anywhere trying to blow my partner, honest you won't. Now, what's your name?"
The peachy perfect teener beamed at me as I hunkered down to her level and watched Pervis's zipper tearing the tan off the tip of her nose.
"Budgie," she whispered.
"Budgie what?" I asked.
"Budgie Ruggles."
"Where'd you get a name like that. Budgie? Out of the telephone directory?" Nick snickered, now actively humping against her face with his gaily bedecked doubleknit crotch.
Budgie began to cry again, at last hip to the abusive nature of my partner. If she wanted mercy, if she wanted a shred of dignity left in her body after the rape and after we were through questioning her, she would have but one choice-to spill her guts to me, Steve Narsky, nice guy.
"Take it easy Nick," I said, implying that my partner should ease off and leave the questioning to me. Nick winked at me, made a rapid, obscene gesture with his fingers clamped into the classic whackoff grip, and beckoned me with a final flourish to get on with the interrogation. I bowed, and pulled up a folding chair and began.
"How'd it happen Budgie?" I started in, pausing at the critical moment to yawn, "tell us. We're here to help. Did you flip him a hot beaver? Tell us the whole truth, Budgie, we've got all night." I yawned again, lit a smoke, and watched as little Miss Ruggles went into a stammering fit of confused frustration.
"Bbbbbutt I'm the one who got raped! Why are you accusing me of all these things, this...."
"What are we accusing you of, Budgie?" I asked, setting the hook in her hot, luscious jaws.
"You know. Beaver shots. My connection."
"Tell us about your beaver, Budgie. Tell us about your connection. We want the big fish, Budgie, not the worms. Spill your guts, Budgie, it'll feel great afterwards."
She made cow eyes at me, and then flipped me the middle finger.
"How'd you like it if I left you alone here with my partner, Budgie? You'd find out what goes on behind closed doors, wouldn't you? Think you'd like that action?"
She dropped her middle finger, looked up at Nick, who was stroking his crotch with his hand and dryhumping, and began a stream of consciousness cassette replay of her afternoon.
"I was down at the beach. There was hardly anyone else there, seeing as how the kids aren't out of school yet and it was kind of cool. But I went down anyway, I guess just because I was bored, having been laid off my job last week and all. Well, I was laying on my blanket, face down, getting a little tan on the backside, when I felt this weird sensation, like two eyes boring into the back of my skull, except these weren't going for the skull."
"Where were they going, Budgie, if they weren't going into the back of your skull?" I asked, bored to tears.
"Do I have to say?" Budgie asked. I nodded. She looked up at Nick.
Nick nodded. Budgie nodded. She looked down into her lap.
"They were staring into my pooper."
I watched as she turned crimson. Nick watched her constantly, reaching into his vest pocket for some clove gum, removing the wrapper and popping the slab into his jaws without taking his eyes off of her bristling face. I decided to force my options.
"What was that you say?"
"My pooper."
"She said her pooper, Steve," Nick barked.
"We better get this on tape, Nick," I said. Nick nodded and went to the desk and got out his cassette player-recorder. We made Budgie repeat herself into the microphone, and then continued on.
"So what happened after you felt a pair of eyes burning into your pooper?" I asked, desperately trying to repress my eagerness for detail-it sounded all too familiar-it sounded like Shitty Dick had scored again.
"I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was the sun coming through the clouds or something. As a matter-of-fact, that's exactly what I thought it was, and so T popped the knot holding my bikini top up, and kind of scrunched my bottoms down a little to get part of my butt tan."
"Good thinking, Budgie," I quipped. "A rapist is staring up your asshole, and you pop your top and scrunch down your panties."
"Well piss shit fuck, I didn't know it was a rapist! I told you. I thought it was the sun. Anyway, before I could do anything, he was on me. He pinned my neck to the blanket with one hand, tore off my bottoms, and did it to me, right there. Yeeeccchhhh."
"No preparations?" I asked.
"What do you mean, preparations?" she asked.
"What do you think, Budgie? Ever had it up the asshole before?"
"What do you take me for anyway, you creep!" she said.
"Come on, Budgie, just tell us whether he was lubed or not, you know, vaseline, margarine, Mazola, what the hell, STP or Penzoil will do in a jam.
"Oh," she said, finally getting the point. "No, it was a little different than that. Ahh, well, before he 'did it', he, ahh, made me turn over, and ahhh, well, he kinda forced me to you know, ahhhh, well, I had to suck on it."
Budgie turned another, far deeper shade of pink. Nick and I looked at one another and nodded in silence. It had to be. It was Standard Operating Procedure. It was another case of Shitty Dick scoring in his famous style.
"Then you got a look at him, Budgie, didn't you?" I asked, leaning forward and grabbing her chin to lift her face up so I could stare her down.
"I, ahhh, all I saw was this, this giant, dripping dickhead, and, a big pair of balls, all hairy and sweaty. Oh Christ, it was awful. They blotted out the sun, and then he pressed forward, and he just kept pressing that smelly hose into my face. I almost gagged, but I had to do it. I thought that I could get it over quick and he'd just leave me alone, but instead, when I had slobbered all over it, he just laughed, and spun me over, and then, and then, he did it in my pooper."
It was a classic Shitty Dick performance. We'd get the details from Budgie later on. In the meantime, Nick and I had a little investigating to do down at the beach....
CHAPTER TWO
Nick drove. I watched the palm trees and the laundromats drift by through the passenger side window.
Nick liked driving the oxidized beige Dodge two door. Gave him that feeling of slinky anonymity that we all crave in this single-family dwelling culture we all live in. Slinky anonymity-nothing beats it for really efficient plainclothes work....
We didn't set out with high spirits-not after the virtually worthless session with the Ruggles gal. A typical victim, she was far more interested in keeping her dignity than in helping us save our asses by catching her abuser. Hell, you can't really blame the bitch-what if she had hurled a semi-moist beaver in old Shitty Dick's direction? How's she gonna explain them nasty apples to the folks down on the farm?
"Where ya wanna go after we check out the beach, Narsky?"
Nick stared through the smog stained windshield. He expected a response in time. He expected that I'd help feed his fantasies, that I'd play the straight man for his devious intentions. That's one of the occupational hazards of working with a married partner-they always expect their bachelor buddy to lead them into the depravity they crave.
"Oh, I don't know," I yawned, "How 'bout the Sultan's Helmet? Good half-and-half action there."
Nick snorted down a quarter-pound of ripe nuggets, a deep guffaw of heartfelt agreement-he had spent many an hour on the clean linen tables at the Sultan's Helmet, having half a massage with two lovely meat grinders working out his knots for modest wages. For twenty dollars it was possible to hire two pairs of talented palms for an hour of private, sensual squirming-nothing could beat the Sultan's Helmet.
"The old standby, eh Narsky?" he quipped, coming to a stoplight with screeching brakes, "Christ, we gotta find some kind of new action."
He took off when the light turned green. I surmised that he was looking once again for creative inspiration from me, the involuntary bachelor.
"We?" I asked.
"Yeah, we," Pervis said,, briefly giving me a shot of the old hate stare through his shades, "You tryin' to tell me something, Narsky? You trying to say you don't like a little muscular relaxation in the afternoon, that it's all me? That what yer driving at, eh?"
He was a testy devil, and really, I couldn't blame him. After the morning's brutality and humiliations, he deserved a little outcall action. I didn't like having to be the co-conspirator all the time, however. I let it ride.
"Listen, Pervis," I said, trying to bring him to his senses, get his priorities straight, and get him off my case, "how's about we forget the massage parlors, the bars, the cheap hustles this week, and grab this Shitty Dick character? You want to go back to the street on Monday? Milhaud could assign you to the drag squad up in Hollywood as a further punishment too. How'd you like them apples-back in the toilets, entraping queens on trumped up charges? We got work to do, Pervis."
Nick let out a squeal of nasty laughter through his left nostril.
"Catch Shitty Dick, eh?" he said, "What the fuck do you think we've been trying to do for the past six months? You got any ideas Narsky, you just tell 'em to old Nicky boy, I'm all ears."
I didn't have any ideas. Shitty Dick was as slippery as they come. He operated freely and effectively, covering his slimy tracks in a unique style. Shitty Dick never left any evidence, and every eyewitness had the same old story-"All I saw was this giant dickhead, and a pair of hairy wonders hanging below it." Not much to go on, seeing as how that description might easily apply to half the human race.
Every one of Shitty Dick's victims gave us this half ass kind of story. We could never be sure that they were telling the truth, half the truth, or only a tiny piece of the truth. Sometimes, we didn't know for sure that we were really looking for the same attacker in each case. The sole piece of consistent information was the same one we got just this morning from Budgie Ruggles-first in the face, then up the poopchute. I had the typed copy of the Ruggles report on my lap in the car. I read while Nick drove the rest of the way in silence.
The medical examination was the only really interesting part-I knew Budgie's statistics, her age, tit-size, whereabouts, lack of a criminal record. The interns had done their usual thorough job-they carefully marked down the presence of anal bruises, lesions and severely stretched sphincters-Shitty Dick had diameter, that's for sure. As far as length, that was an unknown, but diameter, diameter had been proven beyond a doubt.
The man we sought was thick as a brick.
Shitty Dick had maintained his modus operandi to the tee-there was no visible sign of discharge. This always stumped us. Was the man a towering inferno of frustration and self-denial? Did he risk life and limb with his unwilling partners only to withdraw at the critical juncture and run from the scene with blue balls?
Nick and I had suggested to Milhaud that we take samples of spermy remnant from each victim and have them analyzed at the lab to see if our basic thesis, that all of the anal rapes were carried out by a John Doe called Shitty Dick, was in fact true. Milhaud had bellowed in laughter, and then lashed out at us. He informed us that there were no "spermy remnants" to be found, and that he himself would have had the evidence off airmail to Washington long ago if there had been even a trace of it-the FBI had a sperm file on the entire population that the trace could be compared against. As he politely informed us, there were no traces.
"Budgie's got no bugs on her," I remarked to Nick. He knew what I meant.
"Shitty Dick's got diameter, self-control and a sense of class."
Nick was beginning to build up a kind of affection for his prey. Nothing unusual in police work, not at all, especially when one is dealing with an elusive character, and a character who's very criminal activity has a kind of broad-based, socially acceptable appeal-after all, what difference is there is substance between Shitty Dick and some mythic figure of the Old West who takes what he wants whenever he wants it? What difference in deed but the near invisible barrier between friction and fiction-a thin line.
Nick enjoyed crossing the thin line, and who can blame him? Hell, it is as plain as day that most regular guys don't give a flinging dingle-berry about rape, as long as their own daughters, wives, mothers or cousins aren't directly involved. Most fellows, and most women as well, feel that there is something excruciatingly juicy about the idea of forced sex-if they didn't think so, you wouldn't see bondage and dominance parlors springing up in every suburban shopping center, now would you?
You've got to keep things like this in mind when you're dealing with a shitty character like Shitty Dick. You've got to examine the facts, slim as they might be, to see what connections there might be between the perpetrator and the victim. You're not out to protect the rapist's rights-not at all you've just got to establish certain facts-was there an exposed beaver involved-did the victim have a past history of "inviting attack"-did she answer ads in the local underground paper for "mild B&D, Water sports, and Greek"?
Nick pulled the car into the beach lot and flipped his badge in the attendant's face. The teen twirp guffawed in sycophantic heat.
"You guys on the SWAT team?" he asked.
"Yeah," drawled Nick, "You wanna die kid?"
The teenager thought about it for a while, rubbing his jaw and shuffling his tennis shoes.
"Will I be on TV?" he asked.
"Well," Nick said carefully, "I could have the mobile unit down here in half an hour and blow you away in front of the cameras. How's that grab you?"
The kid went over his options carefully, he had more questions. "How'll you do it?"
"Dum-dum shell in the back of the neck, tear gas grenade up your asshole, tire chains in the interrogation room. Hell, it's up to you, kid."
The kid began to shuffle faster, obviously eager for more detail.
"Can I make a couple of phone calls first, to tell my folks to be watching?"
The kid didn't understand. Nick showed him the ropes.
"Listen, kid, if you wanna die, you wanna die. Don't worry about the rest of the details, the networks are really professional these days. When the mobile unit arrives, they've got the tape cameras with them, the foxy female reporter, and even the candyass liberal to do the after-the-fact commentary. We notify next of kin half an hour before show time. Now do you want to die or not?"
The pressure was on the kid. Would he take the chance? Would he opt for forty-five seconds of superstardom, or would he balk and continue his anonymous grind as a two-dollar an hour parking lot attendant. I went into my goodguy act to help him speed his decision.
"Come here, kid," I said, motioning with my middle finger for him to stick his head in the car window. "Listen kid, what's it worth to you? You wanna sit in your wooden booth all summer long, taking tickets, passing back the spare change, watching the girls turn brown in all the hot spots while you read dirty books and jackoff in the shower? What do you want out of life anyway kid, a safe, boring routine, or some real manly thrills?
Take my advice kid, go apeshit, we'll call in the mobile unit, and you'll be on all three networks tonight at six o'clock. That's an offer you can't refuse, eh?"
The kid was going to refuse. I can tell the type. He started to laugh, as if it was all a big joke, a put on. I drew my revolver and jammed the muzzle into his left nostril and then cocked it.
"Make up your mind, kid."
He balked. The cold steel had brought him back to his senses. The kid wasn't made of the right stuff. He'd spend the rest of his days as a parking attendant. What the hell, I thought, superstar material has always been in short supply.
I put my snubnose .38 back in my vest holster, looked over at Nick and he floored the accelerator. We brodied into the beach lot, leaving the punk gagging in a cloud of burnt rubber and fresh smog.
We trudged the width of the beach in our heavy wingtips, and sat down by the shoreline, where the smelly waves gnawed at the tar spotted sand. The crisp ocean breezes loosened the nicotine parched insides of our nostrils, and soon both of us were rheumy eyed in ecological hypnosis.
"Beats the shit out of the office," I said, staring out at the oil slicks, the three-hulled sailboats heading back into the confines of the Marine, their crews hell-bent on martinis and rim-jobs, the squawking gulls, in feeding frenzy over the Big Mac remnants cast off the sterns of the sailboats.
Nick blew his nose and nodded in agreement.
"Ah, pig shit, Narsky. I'd trade in my gun, my badge, my goddamned wife, anything, just to be able to spend my days down here, a regular beachcomber. Shit, that'd be the life. Picking up on young honeys, inviting them back to the beachfront pad for a little drinky-winky, tearing into their thighs with my teeth. Nothing like stubbly jaws over sunburned teenage thighs for thrills, Narsky. Believe me."
I laughed through my nose at him.
"How the fuck would you know, Pervis? The only thing you've bitten into in years is Charmane's asshole."
Charmane was Nick's wive. I got him where it hurts, buddy-buddy style.
"Fuck you, Narsky, you jerked off ninny. I've had my share of chippies."
I snorted hot mucus again.
"At the Sultan's Helmet. That's a long way from the beach, Pervis, a long way from young stuff."
He looked down into his wingtips, righteously battered about the ego. I didn't want to continue the abuse much longer.
"Let's look for some clues, Pervis. Let's get our asses in gear."
We stood up, and began to walk along the beach. Not five yards from where we had hunkered in the sand, we found a fresh Trojan, used, of course.
"Look, Narsky, a scumbag," Nick said, pointing with a nicotine stained finger.
"Whaddaya want to do with it, Nick? Suck it?"
Pervis snarled at me, livid with rage and with glee from having found a clue, a first lead, a sign, a symbol of recent debauchery.
"Come on, Narsky," he said in a low-pitched nasal whine. "We'll bring it back to the station and give it to Milhaud. It'll make him happy. It's something, for Christsake. At least it tangible, its at the scene of the crime, maybe its got some shit stains on it. Hell, it could be what we've been waiting for."
It was pathetic. I left Pervis standing there, guarding the precious evidence and trundled back across the sand to the car to get a Baggie. This is what we were paid to do. Gather the evidence. Milhaud couldn't complain. It would shut him up for a while at least. But in the end, Christ, it was a pathetic piece of evidence. Whose scumbag was it? We'd have to show it to Budgie Ruggles after Milhaud had sniffed at it, and then it would go to the crime lab. Twenty-four hours would pass, and we'd get the one page report. "Nada."
How can you link a single scumbag to a series of brutal anal rapes? How can you get a fix on the perpetrator, the notorious Shitty Dick from a piece of punctured evidence? No way. I opened the glove compartment, got a Baggie and a tissue, and trundled back to where Pervis stood over the evidence. He stooped, pinched, and sealed the Baggie, and we both huffed and puffed back to the car.
"Let's get out of here," Pervis said, gunning the motor in that certain style which always meant he was hot for the Sultan's Helmet and the harem of hand job houris who awaited him there.
"We're off to see the Sultan," I sang in an infantile voice, and Pervis broke up laughing.
"Damn straight, Narsky, it's part of our fringe benefits."
We took the freeway back, and made the mandatory rights and lefts which took us to the Sultan's sleazy joint. Wanda met us at the door.
"Any luck today boys?" she asked, in her mellow, cum lubricated voice. She knew we were hot on the trail of Shitty Dick, and she knew that we hadn't had a clue in the six months we had been working on it.
"Oh," I yawned, reaching out to pinch Wanda's clit from the rear, "Yes and no. We found a scumbag down at the beach today, but it was hours after our man had split the scene."
Wanda nodded. We all walked inside into the plush red velvet womb of the waiting room. Wanda wasted no time once we were safely inside.
"What'll it be, fellas? The usual?"
Pervis was up for it. I wasn't.
"I'll have a half-and-half, Wanda, with Terri and Nadja," Pervis belched. Wanda winked at him, pressed some buttons on the wall, and then rotated in my direction.
"And you, Steviepooh?" she asked, giving me a nice shot of tongue over chin and upper lip.
I gave it no thought at all. I wasn't in the mood. All I could think of was coming into work on Monday and being marched out to some smelly intersection downtown to swelter all day long as the bus drivers screeched at me and the scrape racers flipped me the finger.
"I'll just wait in the bar, Wanda."
She wrinkled up her nose at me in disdain, grabbed ahold of Pervis's crotch bulge and led him into the private rooms in the back. I marched out of the waiting room and went into the Flying Carpet bar and ordered a triple vodka martini with an olive.
The Dodgers were on the tube on the color TV suspended above the bar. Nothing worse than the Dodgers on an already dull day. The chick behind the bar was a topless Chicana, about eighteen. I decided to play brute with her.
"Aren't you kinda young to be working behind a bar, honey?" I asked, pulling out my badge as I spoke. She went into a flurry of confusion, grabbing her purse and opening it, to draw out her wallet, with all the phony ID a cop could want, including her alien visa, her pictures of the family, the home town in Lower Chingata, the chickens moulting in the background of the faded Polaroid black and whites. It was more depressing than the Dodgers. I motioned for her to take it away from my sight, to spare me the agony.
I polished off the martini in three gulps and pushed the glass across the bar, right between her tits, and she stirred up another drink. I nodded at her, and sipped at the refill.
It would be a good twenty minutes before Nick Pervis had achieved his form of satori in the back. I had to keep myself under control. No point in coming back to the station with a hangover at three in the afternoon, not with an important interrogation of Budgie Ruggles coming up.
I sat there, watching the tube, waiting for Pervis. It was lonely. It was dull. It wasn't helping me on the case, and it was wasting precious time as far as I was concerned. Hell, Shitty Dick wasn't wasting his precious time in a massage parlor bar. He was out there, somewhere, lining up his sights on some tight, anal virgin. While Pervis and I stumbled around, always one step behind, passive, like rats in a Skinner box, Dr. Dick was chuckling and getting ready to make his next move.
Little did I know that he was planning a coup de grace at that moment. Little did anyone know just how clever and devious our foe really was, how hip he was to our mystification, our lack of solid evidence. Little did any of us know how sharp and ruthless he was, how at that very moment, he was playing us for fools, socking it to none other than Charmane Pervis, right in Nick's own castle, right in his own marital sack.
CHAPTER THREE
Nick got home that night and found his wife lying on her belly on the bathroom floor, spraying Solarcaine over her bruised asshole.
A victim of Shitty Dick? That's right, sports fans. They call it poetic justice in some circles, they call it irony in others. For Nick Pervis, call it the straw that broke the camel's back.
Actually, to tell the whole truth, the camel's back had probably been severely weakened already. Let me give you an idea of what I mean, before we plunge into the taped transcripts of Charmane Pervis's experience with Shitty Dick himself.
The Sultan's Helmet, like all really progressive outfits on the local massage parlor scene, had a special service for those more inclined to "watch" than actually perpetrate some slick action with one or more of their rented lovelies. The afternoon before, when I had sat at the bar waiting for Nick to consummate his half-and-half, I was let in on this secret voyeuristic delight by none other than Wanda herself, the proprietress.
As I gobbled lazily at the wet rim of my third martini, Wanda strutted into the bar and took the seat beside me, lighting up a smoke, and staring at our mismatched reflections in the bar mirror.
"Lonely, sailor?" she asked, quickly going in to her patented dry heaving laughter.
I snorted a hot clump of mucus, cowboy style, and filled my mouth with anti-freeze and ice-cubes.
"C'mon, Narsky," she complained, giving me an elbow to the side, "how come a big, burly devil like you isn't in the back room having his plumbing fixed? Your partner knows how to live. What gives with you? The old limp dick syndrome?"
Not very well mannered, asking such personal, Masters and Johnson type questions to a member of the clientele. I sucked on my drink and snorted back at her.
"Look, Wanda, Pervis is Pervis, and Narsky is Narsky. We may both have curlicue tails and enjoy eating out of a trough, but that doesn't mean we were both popped out of the same mold. We relax in different ways. Me, I like to have a nice soothing drink. In private. In quiet. My partner in law enforcement, well, he's more highly strung, perhaps because of his metabolism, perhaps because he's got six months less seniority than me. Hell I don't know anything more than he likes a nice double-header in the afternoon. Who am I to be critical?"
I thought that would settle her hash. I thought she might get the point, the conception of privacy, solitude, quiet reflection. I thought she might take her stringy, flabby ass and haul it out of the room and tend to her own fucking business. I thought wrong.
"Critical?" she asked, raising her eyebrows in the mirror, "Who's being critical? All I want to know for Chrissakes is why you ain't in the back room with some slinky number in high heels and fishnet hose, sucking hot venereal warts, like your buddy? You know it's on the house, so why not take advantage?"
Wanda worked in a profession that was relatively tension free. How could she know the pressure that I worked under? Had she ever experi enced the likes of enraged Milhaud? Had she ever been threatened with demotion to traffic detail? Had she ever run around the city trying to catch a firm toe-hold on a psychopath who kidnapped young suburban housewives for the purpose of humiliating and degrading them with his forced entrance into their most personal realm of privacy, their pink, virginal anal canals?
"Wanda," I started in, speaking slowly, emphasizing each word and enunciating it so that she could not fail to follow, "you got no idea how it is. Day after day, the threats, the humiliations, the insults, and the endless stream of victims. I tell you Wanda, its enough to make a man drown in the bottle. We've been working on this case for over six months, interviewing victim after victim, getting nowhere. The heat is on, Wanda, the heat is coming from upstairs. From Lieurtenant Milhaud. You know him?"
"Vaguely, Narsky, vaguely. Go on. Tell me more."
We were doing the deadbeat Ann Landers scene. Here we were, in the middle of the afternoon, just at that special mellow time when office workers and the guys and gals who man the production lines are going into the final stall of the day, waiting for five o'clock to creep around, a frustrated officer and a frizzled floozy, crabbing and jawing at one another like Chill Wills and Walter Brennan in senile overdrive at the Movieland Home for the Terminally Obnoxious. I ordered a fourth martini from the illegal alien bartendress, and drooled on, my voice getting itself worked up into a late night talk show whine. Perfect for AM radio audiences.
"Wanda, it's like the man says. 'I can't get no respect.' What do I do about that? Do I do like Pervis, and have a pair of hired hornies work out on me, so I can have that momentary spasm, that cold spark of temporary relief, only to head back into the same fucking mess the second my tubing has been parched? Or do I just take an aspirin? That'd be the ideal solution for Pervis. Aspirin. Me, I prefer this."
I took a long draught on the ice-cold glass, unmindful of the toothpick stuck in the floating olive, which went right up my left nostril and almost got stuck in the soft membranes back there.
"You got it rough, Narsky," Wanda said, slightly sarcastically. I didn't dig the tone in her voice one bit. I was finally feeling the effect of the drinks, and I rose to the occasion.
"Don't be a wise ass with me, Wanda. Stay cool and stay in business."
I thought that was blunt enough. Evidently, Wanda didn't take me too seriously. She laughed like a hyena, showing me her sperm stained teeth in the mirror. I was too drunk to be repelled. As a matter-of-fact, the sight of her smegma permeated mouth kind of excited me-I got a weird, sort of nauseating semi-erection and laughed back at her through my nose, reaching around with my right arm to give her right tit-end a nasty pinch. She giggled like a hyena, thinking that her formidable and grotesque charm had finally "lit my fire."
Wanda stood up from her bar stool, arched her back, and bellowed at me to follow her. I grinned at the barmaid, who made no expression whatsoever, and then I stood up.
I shouldn't have stood quite so fast, not after the fourth martini. I literally had to place my hands around my throat to prevent myself from spewing a high velocity stream of vomit all over the shiny black lineoleum.
Wanda and the barmaid broke up at the sight I made, standing in the center of the empty barroom, choking myself like an inmate in the self-destruct wards at Cammarillo. It broke up their dull routine, I guess.
I recovered, squelching the viscous churnings in my burning gut and I stumbled along behind Wanda.
She slowed her pace as she made her way through the locking doors leading back into the antiseptic smelling corridors of the parlor. She turned around, and made with a single erect finger over her lips.
"Quiet now, Narsky," she whispered. "Step lightly!"
I steeped along behind her grinning in a sick kind of heat. All kinds of weird, twisted fantasies kept running through my head-I thought, this was the moment, I was going to score with Wanda, the madam of a whorehouse, a woman who in all likelihood knew "every trick in the book" and had probably added a few chapters herself. She would introduce me to practices beyond the pale of the imagination, devious, nasty, damp practices the likes of which were reserved for the enjoyment of visiting Mafiosos, pornographic book publishers, readers of underground papers, the scum of the earth.
Belts, whips, chrome chains, moist towels, brown, thick substances that smelled like surgical tubing, broken glass, insects, Nazi regalia-all of it went through my mind, as I focused in on Wanda's flabby butt, a butt that no doubt had endured the duress of many an assault equal to that provided by the notorious Shitty Dick.
Wanda turned around again, and made an obscene, whacking off gesture at mouth level, and then pointed to a doorway.
"Just look. Don't say a fucking word. The glass is only a quarter inch thick, and if you start to yammer they'll hear you, and I don't want any fucking gunfire in my place of business. Understand?"
I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, but I nodded like a babboon and followed her inside. It was a taste treat, believe me friends.
Nick Pervis under Glass-that was the name of the dish, and if you have an appetite like Lieutenant Milhaud, or perhaps even the nemesis himself, Shitty Dick, you'll be feasting on degradation shortly. Nick Pervis was in far worse condition than I had thought possible-Wanda was pointing out to me in a crystal clear illustrative style just how far gone my partner's mind was-it was as if to say, "Talk all you want, Narsky, when it comes down to brass tacks, you'll never have the kind of insight into the nature of the male beast that twenty years in the fresh meat trade gives a lady."
Nick was standing over the bed in the parlor booth, naked except for gunbelt, service revolver and tie, and of course, his wingtips and flat grey socks. One half of his half-and-half was pretending to be in a state of sleep on the bed, wearing a transparent, high necked nightie, while the other half was kneeling on the floor, giving rapid fire oral attention to Nick's red root.
The stunner was that Nick had one of the girl's fishnet nylons over his face. That's right fans, the nemisis had taken over Nick's sense of self, and the servant and protector of the public was playing the role of none other than Shitty Dick himself, and on company time, to boot.
I instantly sobered up at the sight. Wanda's repressed squeals of high-pitched laughter and the constant jabbing of her elbow into my spliting side also helped in minimizing the effect of my drinking. She was really into the voyeuristic ironies of the situation.
I was just plain stunned and goggle-eyed. It was a combination of horror at the revelation of my partner's closet craziness, and it was also partially due to the time-honored paralytic effect of watching real hardcore action-live action. Let's get some of the details on this case-they're important, especially in light of what happened to Pervis after he went home later and found his wife moaning in the toilet with the Solarcaine spray.
The creampie on her knees on the floor was doing a hang-up Linda Lovelace on Nick's police issue pecker. That's right, gang, to make it in the massage business, or for that matter, any business these days, a gal has to master the old voicebox relaxation routine. This one had an advanced degree. She was wolfing down hot pork at a truly phenomenal rate. Strange as it may seem, the old technique leaves a lot to be desired, as far as the watcher is concerned, something that hardcore film producers ought to give some thought to. You see, when the male organ is entirely impaled in the girlish gorge, all the guy watching can catch is the sight of a pair of stretched out lips mashing into a wad of male pubic brillo-its just like the gal is sucking on a beard. Not real exciting, not unless you have X-ray eyes, or a powerful sense of identification with the male being chewed", or the female being choked.
Nick, it was obvious, was interested in the sleeping beauty on the bed-he was deeply and hypnotically into his Shitty Dick psychosis. He was actually practicing the lesson of the old saw, "if you can't fight 'em, join 'em." That's all right if you're talking about some other kind of behavior, or some other kind of conflict, but to join forces, spiritual forces, with the likes of Shitty Dick, your own sworn enemy, well, it borders on psychosis, friends. Pervis was ready for the loony bin long before the real Shitty Dick rebored his wife's alimentary canal from the backside.
Pervis gave the kneeling gal a twist to one ear, evidently some sort of signal for her to go into a kind of wallowing, licking frenzy. She slowly uncorked herself from the spit in her throat, opened her eyes, smiled devilishly, and went into feeding frenzy on Pervis's penis head. She licked like a baboon let loose at Baskin-Robbins, in the banana split department. Hog was sucked in true hardcore style, with much audible moaning, much sloshing, and quite a bit of artistic drooling. The gal had her moves down to a science, and I doubt that any male could have withstood such a furious assault for more than forty-seconds or so-not unless they were in a semi-hypnotic condition, like Pervis.
Through the nylon mask, you could easily see that his eyes were fixed on only one tiny spot-he didn't even look down on the lovely who worked masterfully on his pork, licking, pumping with one wrist, and twisting his sack with her other hand. He was glazed, totally hypnotized by the sight on the sheet.
The lovely on the bed was lying belly down, face away from Pervis, with eyes closed. Her nightgown stopped halfway down her butt, which was where Pervis was staring. Every now and then, the girl on the bed sort of giggled with her eyes closed, and stuck her thumb in her mouth baby style, and began to suck it off. It was as if Pervis was supposed to be interrupting her mid-afternoon erotic nap, or, perhaps the chick on the bed knew damn well that somebody, Wanda or whoever, was at that moment looking at the action, and she just wanted to communicate that she thought the client was a bit out of his tree, and a bit of an infant. Who knows.
Pervis reached down without looking and twisted the Deep Throater's nose to one side. That was evidently the signal that he felt erect enough to continue on his own-Jesus Christ, it was sticking out from his crotch like a fishing gaff-a wicked, red hook of dripping meat. Any gal in the world would have handed Pervis the Potency Prize for that erection alone. As it was, the one who was going to get it hadn't even seen it. She continued to sleep, sucking her thumb.
Pervis should have piped in some Wagnerian music for accompaniment. His consummation of the action was taken right off the transcriptions of tapes we had made of victim's down at the station. He grabbed the "sleeper" by the back of the neck, flipped her over, and rammed the gaffing hook right into her stunned jaws.
The little lady evidently lost her cool at this point. Her eyes went buggy as inch after inch of sweet meat slipped down her gorge. She grabbed hold of Pervis's wrist with her feeble hands, and he just pushed harder. It was obvious if anybody had stopped the action at that moment, and asked her to describe her assailant, she would have come up with the same description that Budgy Ruggles had given us that very morning-"all I saw was this big, dripping dickhead, and a pair of hairy balls."
Pervis's belly button slapped into the girl's forehead with a popping noise as he pumped into her face. The thin glass was no real barrier to sound-only to sight, having been coated on one side with reflecting mylar.
"Suck whore," Pervis said. Christ, it was like the Exorcist or something to see him so transfigured, so totally into the role he was playing. Lay the blame on overwork, on fear, on the frustrations of the case, at the feet of Lieutenant Milhaud. Hell, I don't know where the blame should be put, but I do know who was paying the dues behind it-the poor chick on the sheet.
"Splatttt, splattt," was the noise the contact between Pervis humping belly and her forehead made as he ended each full-length thrust into her gorge
-I certainly hope she had been practicing on her techniques earlier that day-if not, it was going to take a long visit to the eye, ear, nose and throat man to fix her up after Pervis was done with her.
"Suck bitch, harder!" he yelled at her. I was too paralyzed to bolt for the door and pull the crazed maniac off of her-that's hardcore for you, it'll do it every time, rendering the most loyal, depend able, law-abiding citizen into a wildly whacking off species of lower primate. I wasn't even aware of Wanda, gently kicking at my shins with her spike heels as I watched. Only much later on in the day, after I was home in my apartment, drinking a soothing beer and watching the news did I remember where the bruises on the legs had come from.
Pervis held the gal's neck with one beefy palm and pulled her face up and down the length of his inflamed pork, while he ripped her nightgown to shreds with his other hand. Finally, when she was stark naked except for her heels, he had had enough of the preliminaries, and he popped his dart out of her face, mashing his sweaty balls on her tear streaked cheeks as he chuckled at the ceiling.
He used both hands to wrestle her onto her belly again, and then she started to scream in earnest.
"Not that! No, you filthy, stinking bastard, not that! I won't allow it, I'll call for Wanda, I'll get the cops after you, you fucking swine." She was bellowing at the top of her lungs, and evidently, it was for real, in a way. They must have had some idea of what was going to happen, made some arrangements before they got down to brass tacks, but I think the girl was genuinely a bit afraid of Pervis by this time. The other gal, however seemed to be enjoying the tragedy on the Shakespearian level-she used one hand on Pervis's pork, and leaned across her girlfriend to lap eagerly at the victim's asshole with her tongue. Maybe Pervis and this gal had done the arranging, at the expense of the other. Who knows.
Nick strutted behind the pinned-down bitch on the bed like a stallion on the Fly. He scrambled up on the bed, on his knees and with a deft, single nod to the grinning gal assisting him, he launched his spear up into the writhing and twitching asshole of his victim.
"Ohhhhhhhaaahhhggghhh!" she screamed, seemingly in genuine pain. It seemed to stimulate Pervis even more-he pushed like a coolie in heat, burying his pulsing prick in her asshole, rotating his own butt to intensify the sensations he no doubt was feeling.
"Feel that, Whore?" he shouted.
"It hurts so much. Stop it, you bastard, you're killing me," she yelped in throttled response, Pervis ramming her face into the top, of the pillow with another of his brutal strokes. He was grinning, and clenching his teeth now, obviously overexcited by actually having had the nerve to realize this most strange and particularly clear-cut fantasy. The other girl was helping to speed along his climax by standing behind him and yanking on his balls in perfect rhythm to his strokes into the clenching depths of his victim's butt. She was also grinning like a baboon, directly at us, invisible behind the silvered glass. Later, at home, I admired her cool. At the moment, the sight of her grinning like that, with a seedbag in her painted hand, and a pair of deviants of the lowest order working out at full steam a foot from her elbow, well it just added to the ambiance of unbridled nastiness and depressing ferocity of the scene I was watching.
Wanda's ear pricked up at the coming of the climax. She had the nerve to slip her jewelry encrusted claw into the nook in my elbow, matron style, as the big moment approached, coaching me to pay strict attention to detail.
"Watch how Terri milks those nuts, Narsky. You've never felt anything like that in your sick life. You've just got to get up the courage, son, like your partner, Pervis. He's not an inhibited drunk. He knows how to enjoy himself."
She was actually attacking me for my restraint! Sure, I'll admit any time that Tern's nut pinching technique was all the match for her scum sucking Linda Lovelace imitations. Sure, I'll admit that in the presence of Pervis's act, I was excited, aroused, leaking a little bit deep within the confines of my double knits. But for Chrissakes, he was sick! Sick, sick, sick. He was doing Shitty Dick's act. He was living up to the standard set by the lowest form of life that yet threatened the stability and morality of our community. I didn't give a shit what he did on his own time, in the privacy of his own house, with his consenting or non-consenting wife. What irked me was that he was stark raving mad, and a definite threat to me-if Pervis had his way, there'd be two Shitty Dicks in town, on the loose, and I'd be after both of them, with no fucking chance at all of avoiding permanent assignment to the traffic detail.
Wanda gave me a mild wrenching pull to the elbow, leaning her cracked and heavily rouged lips next to my ear.
"We have to leave now, Steviepooh," she hissed, her sarcasm and sadism coming through loud and clear, "I know how much you boys love those cum shots, but we have to make ourselves presentable in the waiting room when Nicolas is done refreshing himself. Tu compris, cherie?"
I compris. I understand very well what the bitch had in mind. That's what they're like, these lowlife types. Your average Joe thinks, what the fuck, wouldn't it be a blast to be taken on a guided, closet tour of a massage outfit like the Sultan's Helmet, on the arm of the proprietress, the scrawny, but ever so experienced Wanda. That's what the average guy thinks, and that's why he remains an average guy. He just doesn't understand that sex is only a tiny part of the bargain, and that money is always the real motivation behind every freebie.
Nick Pervis was getting a free half-and-half. On the house, no holds barred, semi-forced anal rape action for next to nothing. Sure, he lost a little dignity, what with his victim giggling, and the other one using the old nut-pincher technique to hasten his orgasm, in order to make room for the next client. But all in all, he was getting a freebie, and I was getting some choice closet action, watching my partner pretend he was a psychopath behind the one way mirror. Great shakes, eh?
You ask, what the fuck are you complaining about, you shithead, and I have to admire your tenacity, your utter cool, considering the circumstances. You ask what I'm complaining about, and I answer, isn't it obvious?
Wanda said it. Wanda got off on her little coitus interruptus scam. I was going to miss the cum shot. Now I ask you friends, what the fuck point is there in waiting through a good half hour of live, two on one hardcore action to miss the cum shot in the end?
No point. Not for me. But for Wanda, yes indeedydo, that's where there was some really sleazy satisfying action. Wanda had spotted my telltale bulge, the probably leaking weak spot in my external plumbing. She knew the effects of closet hardcore action. She knew that I was randy, confused, greedy, expectant, and well paid. She was working on the strategic level, friends, out to convince me that it might well be worth my time to hem and haw with her a while in the hallway, look over her merchandise, and spend a few moments on the sheets with some benzedrine cranked handjob artist of hers.
I've got to admit that I was sorely tempted. I whined and gnashed my teeth, stuffing my mouth with knuckles to prevent bellowing out loud in Cro-Magnon frustration as she pulled on my elbow with her chicken claw.
"Narrghhhrumphh," I said, "I wanna see the cum shot. Lemme go."
She giggled, as only a fifty-five-year-old whore can giggle, right through the nostrils-the stains, the memories of a thousand nights spent in motel toilets, sucking warty stumps and hideously reeking orifices.
"Snartsnartsnart," she hissed, "Wanna see the cum shot, honey? Why not step into the next room, and we'll see how high you can spray?"
"Nargarumph. The fuck I will, Wanda. I wanna see the cum shot, and I wanna see it now."
I stuck to my guns, and I kept my eyes on Pervis and his pair of trained animals. They were reaching the peace that far surpasseth understanding. Pervis was hooking into the chick's butthole with total abandon, using every ounce of energy in his body to batter her internal organs totally out of shape. She was screaming like a banshee, cursing the day she was hatched from her primal egg into a world of pure chauvanist piggery. Tears streamed down her face as her forehead bashed into the headboard at the end of the massage table.
Terri, the one with the freehand technique, was deep into her act as well, roving over both their bodies, sticking her fingers into assholes, mashing balls, pinching tits, pulling at her partners' dangling and unused vaginal lips. In general, she was making a nuisance of herself, but what the hell, her girlfriend was in so much pain that she could have hardly noticed, and Pervis, well Pervis was in a state beyond normal consciousness-he was in hate heaven, his teeth nearly bared like some kind of starved sled dog, his hair matted down on his forehead like a Mongolian idiot, his chest heaving with the strain of exertion, a stream of the vilest obscenities ever uttered pouring forth from between his clenched jaws like the dying wheezes of a medieval martyr.
"Fucking Mother of Cuntal Crevices, squeeze my dork, you whore. Squeeze, you filthy bitch, I'm going to blow your kidneys out your nostrils when I cum!"
It was like watching an axe murderer fry in the electric chair. You know how thrilling that must be, don't you? That's the kind of closet action senators, congressmen, archdukes, papal ministers and pretenders to the throne thrive on. Pervis's final tumescence approached that kind of quality-he was literally singing a psalm to penetration.
"Squeeze! O sucking Mother of terminal whorebreath, squeeze on my divine rod of retribution and righteous frustration. Pinch on my pole with your wrinkled portal. Rotate thine ass, o sleazy mother of infertile onanistic energy!"
It was beyond belief. He had short circuited totally. Never mind the poor masseuse. She was screaming for the fire department by the time Pervis got into his Biblical act. Her rear end would have to be soaked in epsom salts and a broth of potatoe water and beeswax for at least a week before she would be able to sit straight again.
I was dead set on seeing Pervis make the cum shot. I wouldn't let Wanda have her stinking blackmailing way with me. Even in the throes of total visual arousal, I kept my cool, going into a crab-like stance, bending forward at the waist, and planting my nose against the glass. I was swollen in agony, but I would not budge-I needed to see that cum shot-it would explain a whole lot about Shitty Dick, and his mode of operation.
Wanda pulled on me, using both her scrawny arms on my elbow. I was already into a three-point Sumo defensive stance, however, and she was no match for me at all. I snickered at her, under my breath.
"Thought you'd get me onto a table," I sneered, "Didn't you Wanda? Thought you'd get me onto a table, and have Terri, or someone else give me a nice whack, while you worked the camera behind the mirrors? Smart move Wanda. But not smart enough!"
I gave her the bird, with one cramped hand, at waist level. I doubt if she saw it. No matter, I had made my point, and I had stalled long enough for Pervis to pull off the climactic exercise. Just as I thought, he did it Shitty Dick style. Not even the totally demented and vile Terri could believe the depths he had sunk to.
Pervis bellowed one last, inarticulate bellow, and then, with a great gasping intake of air, he popped his piston free from the girl's rear end with a brutal backpeddling reverse thrust, putting just enough English on the cue to spin the sweating, crying recepticle of his abuse on her backside.
In a quick flash, he hobbled the length of her torso with his knees spread, and before she knew what had hit her, her entire face was jammed into the darkness of his crotch.
He used his fingers deftly to find her mouth, and he pried the gagging lips open and then filled the cavity with smega and shit-stained meat. Terri the tart began to dryheave and wretch to one side of the headboard upon seeing this novel action, but she was curious as well, and with one hand over her nostrils, she bent over to get a close up look, as Pervis jerked himself off into the girl's tearslobbering chops.
Disgusting, you say. Disgusting, perhaps, I reply, noting that it is only the clinical, and more important, the criminal aspect of Pervis' performance that interested me.
That's right, I said criminal. Now it is obvious that it is ordinarily perfectly legal to do as one's glands command when one is safely within the perimeter of a reputable massage parlor. That is our constitutional right, as burly machos. But it is quite another thing to impersonate the precise behavior of a criminal psychopath, especially if one is entrusted by the taxpayers at large to be actively searching for the psychopath with the goal in mind of placing him in a chair wired for frying.
Pervis had gone beyond the pale. He was no longer fit to be entrusted with the public confidence after his display of personality disintegration. The quest for Shitty Dick had totally overtaken his rational faculties. It is not unusual in law enforcement for an officer to admire, at a distance, of course, the skill and finese of an especially gifted and cagey foe, but this shit, well, it was too much. Admiration, a chivalrous attitude, a toss of the hat as the felon frys in his own juices on the judgement day, these are part and parcel of the law man's code of ethics. But to yield to the dark urge, to take on the grossest and most repellent aspects of the prey, forget it Jack-I wasn't about to let Pervis' nasty mental disorder become the lever that would pry me out of my class doubleknits and my unmarked car and force me back out on the streets, waving my hands like an aircraft carrier deck hand guiding the Kamakazies in from a long day out in the Pacific, hurling themselves into foxholes and frigates.
Pervis, in the popular junior high school lingo of our time, had blown it. I watched as the shrapnel from his mortar shell dripped off the blubbering masseuses eyebrows, her chin, down the long, dark crack between her tits, and as the dripping sheets of slippery yeeeccch settled into a puddle on the sheets and poured off her knees, sobriety wafted up from my own bloated and screaming crotch, and I hobbled out of the viewing closet, down the hallway, and back to the bar, unaided by the quietly swearing Wanda, who remained at the one way window, hissing "What hath God Wrought" over and over against the dewy mylar.
Back in the bar, I awaited the arrival of my partner, and I wondered how I was going to break the news to him. I ordered another freebie martini, sucked at it slowly, and debated whether or not Milhaud was even capable of understanding what I had to tell him. How would he react to a tale of "battle fatigue"-Milhaud, who fashioned himself a reincarnation of Vince Lombafdi, or perhaps General Patton-he wouldn't even listen. He'd be actively slapping both of us around the office at the mere mention of "battle fatigue." Lame ass pansies, he would call us, wimps in heat, undercover assholes, secret ninnies. He would have no mercy on Pervis, and he would not thank me for spilling the beans on my partner in any way that would save me from the odious task of licking them off the floor as they rolled off of Pervis's whip-scarred back....
Nick came out of the self-locking, buzzer equipped door as if nothing had happened. He quipped at my grotesquely drawn mug in the mirror.
"What's the matter with you, Narsky? Find a turd on your toothpick?"
How could I front him with my knowledge of his closet antics? What the fuck could I say that wouldn't have us facing off like hockey superstars, right in the bar, with blazing service revolvers? Nothing. I opted for the time-honored chickenshit stance, deciding that discretion was not only the better part of valor where closet psychopaths are concerned, but also that silence can be golden if you don't take any wooden nickels.
"Nah," I grunted, easing my way into a Mickey Spillane style bar stance, "What the fuck took you so long? Couldn't get it up?"
A good offense is the best defense, I thought, so I needled him, using the old whorehouse virility complex to throw him off guard.
"Hargh, snart," he guffawed, waddling up to me and spreading his polyester sheathed ass on the bar stool next to me "Had two of the sweeties at once, Narsky. You gotta try that action sometime. Wanda'll set you up. I can ask her if yer shy."
I cringed deeply within myself at his quick repartee. I would have liked to have showered the top of the bar with half a dozen eight-by-ten glossies of himself doing his Shitty Dick act right then and there-he would have puked his guts out with self-hatred and paranoid hysteria. I could have bartered the negatives off to him and his wife for half his paycheck every week for the next twentyseven years. I would have liked that action, just to see the expression on his face. But I didn't have the pictures, so instead, I did head fakes.
"Don't worry about me and my sex life, Pervis," I snorted, polishing off my drink and standing up, "Worry about what happens when Wanda gives your old lady a call some afternoon and invites her down to watch through a keyhole while your working out on a pair of scumsuckers. That's what you've got to worry about."
Nick stood up, looking fit as a fiddle, and more relaxed than I'd seen him in months.
"Ah, fuck you, Narsky. You're a ninny. Whad'ya you worried about with Wanda? She guarantees privacy, and we guarantee that she keeps her doors open. Give and take, Narsky, give and take. Let's get outta here," he said, snapping his head to one side, and spinning on his wingtips to march to the justly famous door.
It was the last time Nick would see the inside of the Sultan's Helmet for quite some time. As a matter-of-fact, the next morning, he'd be in the station rubber room, ready to be shipped out to a rest home in the Valley for the next three months. Nicky had a little surprise waiting for him in the toilet that he called his home.
CHAPTER FOUR
Now we're ready to take a long look up Charmane Pervis' rear end, just like hubby Nick did the night he got home from the massage parlor. It was dark in there for Nick, dark as a dungeon, but true to form, instead of striking a match and shedding any light on the subject, he blew a fuse once again, and went into a cold-blooded kind of psychopathia. Fortunately, it only lasted about twelve hours, and we have the tapes that he made of his wife's "confession," but for Nick, it was the last act in a short, sick career-a career that was on the rocks the minute Shitty Dick first socked a tubesteak up a suburban shitter. Nick just happened to be the first male casualty in a long line of mind wrenching rapes.
I'm not implying that Nick was raped, physically. No, he just got the spiritual spear up the asshole, or, if you object to that figure of speech, he got the shitty dick in the ear, and in the process, lost quite a few ounces of grey matter.
We know all about Charmane and Shitty Dick because Nick's last act as an enforcer of the law was to force his wife to make a tape of her tale. He found her in the head, apparently went into a frozen stance of professional cool, marched out to the den and got his cassette machine, and then went back into the toilet and pulled his revolver out, inserted the snub nose in Charmane's exhaust port and told her not to leave out any of the details.
At the station the next morning, Nick arrived at eight-thirty, marched me up to Milhaud's office, set the machine on "play," and this is what we heard, blow by blow.
"Who did it?" Nick asked. We could hear the faint squishing noise as the snub nose twisted deep in bruised crack. She blubbered a bit, and complained.
"Nickypooh," she whispered, "Take that thing out of my butt, dear, I'm tender here. You've got no idea what it's like, having to endure such brutality, such an animal."
Here the tape is interrupted by the sound of Nick's zipper being lowered, and there is a long pause, containing much dull grunting and moaning. Evidently, the officer was priming the victim, loosening up her vocal chords in preparation for the confession.
"MMMMmmmmmmmm, that's sweet meat, Nicky. Tastes like green peppers and Italian sausages" Charmane hummed, evidently slightly warped from her experiences of the afternoon.
"Let it out, bitch. Tell me, who was it? How did it happen?"
She hemmed and hawed a bit more, smacking her lips and moaning for Nick to let her have another teensie-weensie taste before she told her tale, sort of a before dinner aperitif. We could hear Nick snarling, and then the sound of him thrashing his enraged pork across her jaws. She was ready to spill the beans.
"Christ, Nick," she started, "It all happened so fast. It was exactly like you described it to me so many times before. I couldn't believe it really was happening. I never really felt much of anything for all those other girls who'd had it done to them. I figured they were tramps anyway. You know what I mean, don't you, honey?"
Here there is another brief pause, perhaps a partial erasure, and then more chewing noises, some squishing, and a few feeble moans from Charmane. Evidently, she needed sustenance to carry on her confession, or report, or tall tale, however you want to look at it, and in between bursts of lucid aural hardcore renderings, she was busy suckling Nick's formidable tool.
"Go on. Go on, give me the whole story."
"All right! You know what I meant, though, about those other girls. I thought they were cheap, that they had asked for it, and probably got just what they deserved. Flipping beaver shots, wearing those see-through clothes, Christ, what do they expect from men anyway? I guess I was wrong in a lotta ways, though.
"All I was doing was sunning myself out in the backyard. You know the six foot redwood fence we put up last year? Hell, it's high enough so that the only person who can see in is someone who happens to be in a helicoptor. I thought it was safe. And it was. I was in the folding chaise lounge, doing my tummy when I decided, what the fuck, why not brown the old cleavage? It was hotter than hell, no one was watching, so I popped the top of my bikini off, and just let tits fry for awhile, like Mother Nature intended them to be fried.
"I had stewed up a pitcher of Daquiri mix, and was sipping intermitently at my tall glass as I baked out there, and after a while, it was just like heaven. I was a little high, hot as a burner, and woozy from the icy booze. You know what that combination does to me, don't you Honey? You remember what happened when we went to Vegas last Summer? That's when I gave you your first rim job. I still can taste that one!
"It was a day just like today, out by the pool. I had been drinking, the sun was like a blow torch, and all of the sudden, I had the urge real bad. Remember that?"
Nick grunted inarticulately, and then there was more slurping and sloshing noises. Charmane's story was keeping Milhaud's interest. He didn't twitch or move a muscle. It was the first time I'd seen him remain quiet and attentive in over six years of daily contact. Something about taped hardcore that increases the ability to concentrate, to listen for detail, to give each word its proper due.
Charmane clicked on, inch by inch on the cassette, revealing the most intimate, and interesting of marital sidelights to her attentive audience.
"Well you know how that ended, with me dragging you back into the room, and without even a shower or any preparation, just going at it full steam, with you on your hands and knees on the carpet? Well, that's exactly the way I felt this afternoon, except you were at work. What was I supposed to do?
"I was going plumb out of my mind, grinding my butt into the hot nylon netting of the chair, pinching and squeezing my nips like a mad women. God, was I horny. After about ten minutes, I stood up and said to hell with it, I'm going to go inside and jack off. That's all there was for me to do. Hell, there's nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly normal and sometimes it's the only way out of a tight situation when hubby is out smoking the bacon.
"I stretched, and walked into the house, using the sliding glass door. I left my top outside, and just strutted into the bathroom in my panties and got a jar of vasoline out of the cabinet, and then I went out to the living room to get the new copy of Snatch that had arrived in the morning. I opened it up to the centerfold to see if there was anything dreamy I could get off on while I stretched my flaps, and believe me, there was.
"Joe Beef was the centerfold boy, and there were no staples on his significant spot-just twelve inches of rancid, limp fire hose. Christ almighty, Nick, I was cumming and dripping without even having touched myself, just thinking about that foot of slippery pork. I'd have given my right arm and my Sears charge card just to take a look at that tool in its erect state. Fuck, that's the trouble with Snatch and all the rest of the new beefcake magazines-they just tease a girl to the point where she's almost out of her mind, sucking and licking the pages, but never any stiff ones. They must use Masters and Johnson rejects for the models, or else they just have no idea of what they're doing. A girl wants stiff meat, honey, everybody knows that a limp one is about as useless as not having one at all. I had another knee-wobbling heat flash, and ran to the bedroom and stretched out on the carpet.
"I opened up the jar of gook, took a fingerfull and spread it out on my flaps and clit, and then, holding the centerfold over my face, I began to tease and tickly myself, dreaming of Joe Beef and his porterhouse, his T-bone, his slinky Spencer steak. I stirred my pot very gently for about five minutes, dryhumping my ass on the carpets, slobbering my tongue all over my face Sensuous Woman style, and trying to prolong the agony for as long as possible.
"It wasn't much use, however, because the second my finger hit my clit, I went into a grinchy little cum that kept on building and building, and fuck, with ten seconds I was totally out of my mind, sucking on the rolled up magazine and whirling my entire fist in my honey pot. The panzer divisions could have been rolling through the tract just then, and I wouldn't even have blinked an eye, or twitched an ear. The blood was pounding in my head, thinned out as it was by a pint of icy Daquiri and the ninety degree heat-I couldn't hear anything except for my heart and the faint squish of my flaps juicing around my finger.
"I knew I was headed for a multiple run. I could feel all of the orgasms lining up behind each other, waiting for their turn to splash around in my crotch. I clenched my teeth, and brought myself over the first hump with ease-just a little grinding cum. Not much, but it left me relaxed and ready for the big one, Number Two, the critical link in the chain. I tell you, Nicky, once you get past Number Two, you can keep 'em coming as long as your wrist holds out. That's the truth, dear. It's too bad that boys don't have the, ahh, ability. I think that's basically the whole problem between the sexes. If only the poor boys could have a nice chain reaction like the girls, they wouldn't guard their feeble, nasty little squirts so carefully. After all, you take your average man, get him to squirt, and Christ, there he is, either sound asleep, or wheezing against the headboard with a cigarette in his mouth, praying that he hasn't just shot his final load of a lifetime."
Nick wasn't about to let that kind of Lib bullshit go by him without a suitable reaction. We could clearly hear him truncheoning her cheeks with his wet and slobber coated dick as he laid into the bitch with full frontal-lobe hostility.
"Goddam it to hell with your stinkin' multiple cums, you shameless hussy," he hissed at her, "just give me the fuckin' details, the fuckin' facts, I don't need to hear your goddam fruit-commie philosophy. 'Nasty little squirts,' huh? You don't know what your talkin about, you slimy whore. How the hell could you? You ever fired a gun? You ever parachuted out of a plane forty miles behind enemy lines? You ever whacked off in the shower after a sixty-five yard drive in the fading minutes of the fourth Quarter? Ever caught a hockey puck between your teeth and spit it back at the bastard who fired the shot? What the fuck do you know about cums? Go on, out with it!"
He gave her a couple of teasing inches, and then it popped aback out, Charmane wiped her bruised gums and continued.
"Take it easy, Attila!" she snarled, "Jesus Christ, I was only trying to be helpful! Where was I?"
"Jacking off."
"That's right. So I got into second gear. It was great, I got so excited when I double-clutched and went into the shift that I bit through the magazine. Lucky you weren't there, honey, or you'd be in County General right now, in Intensive Care, waiting for the transplant that'll never come. I stepped on the accelerator, brought my knees up, and out and touched my tits with my knee caps to get the penetration I need for the upshift into Third. I revved up, looked in the rearview mirror, and snapped my clit between my thumb and forefinger, and presto, I was shivering from the top of my head to my toes, deep into Number Three, when all of the sudden, I could perceive faintly that the room had darkened.
"I opened my eyes, almost losing Number Three in the process, and I nearly gagged with excitement. It was a hallucination, I thought, a gift of the gods, money from home, what the hell. There, dangling in front of my mouth, about two inches away from my dried out lips was a scrotum torn fresh from the pages of Snatch-big eggs, grade triple A cholesteral cuties they were. Round, hairy, moist with smegma and sweat, emmmmmmm, heavenly, just the way I like 'em.
"I was so far into my trip that I thought nothing of it, except how wonderful it was going to feel to have those scrambled eggs in my mouth as I went into Fourth Gear. I just licked my lips, reached out with my hand, and began to finger the balls. They were real. My heart almost jumped out of my chest. The second I made contact with them, they started to swivel around in their bag. I gave them a nice pinching and a little squeeze just to see if they were full, and shit, the second I squeezed them, I got a big drop of clear goo right on the end of the nose. I opened my eyes a little wider, and there it hung-semi-erect, heavy equipment, Nick. I went into Number Four just on visual stimulation."
Nick was understandably outraged that his wife had not yet even betrayed the slightest hint of fear, after all he had told her about Shitty Dick, and his method of operation. She should have known better, and he let her know it.
"You tryin' ta tell me that you just went ahead and started to suck a strange dick? You tryin' to tell me you didn't even think to ask who the fuck it might be, in my house, in the bedroom, standing there naked, dripping into your face?"
Charmane giggled. You could almost see her shrugging from the sound she made on the tape.
"Nick," she said, "I told you how I felt. How hot it was, how I was ripe for it, just like when I gave you the rim job. Really, Nicky, I'm surprised at you. You ought to know how I get when I'm on Number Four."
There were more slapping noises, then she went on.
"I didn't think. I just did what comes naturally when a healthy young woman is confronted with half a pound of semi-erect steak and the hunger is burning holes in her belly. I closed my eyes, raised my head off the carpet, and began to suck like a vacuum cleaner. It went crazy in my mouth, like a snake with jumper cables fastened to its tail. In less than two seconds, it was full length, and it was being pushed down my throat. I gagged, and began to moan for him to stop, and that's when it hit me. I knew, this is it. I'm in trouble, and I'm in deep.
"All I heard was a short, blunt snicker of laughter, and then I felt a pair of big, rough hands grabbing hunks of my hair, pulling my head forward, and presto, instantly I was doing Linda Lovelace on him, with the end of his pecker buried somewhere in my gorge, about level with my tits. I thought I was going to die right there, of asphyxiation.
"I didn't, though. I just started to naturally breath through my nose. It was amazing, Nick, really amazing. I mean, here I was, on the floor with at least nine inches of red hot pecker jammed in my throat and a good half pound of balls smashed into my chin, doing something I've tried with you maybe a thousand times, failing every time, sometimes even barfing under the strain, and I was doing it!"
This was one of the additional straws that no doubt helped send Pervis to the rubber room. How do you like them apples, sports fans? A man comes home after a hard day's work, chasing down a rapist, stops off at the massage parlor and does an imitation of the very rapist he is out after, then steps through the doors of his castle to find out that his wife has just overcome a lifetime of nauseous rebellion against the practice of larynx love, and she's done it with none other than the fucking rapist her hubby's been chasing unsuccessfully for over half a year. Irony? Sounds more like conspiracy, doesn't it?
Hell, any man resents being denied certain favorite practices by his mate, and he resents even more having that mate criticize his genetic orgasmic limitations. But when out of the same mate's mouth comes the revelation that she's been having encounter group therapy with a total maniac, well that would tend to settle one's hash in a very nasty, bitter style.
We heard the first signs of Pervis' collapse right on the tape. Instead of giving her eight inches into the sternum, we heard him blubbering like a Gerber baby. Charmane was appropriately merciless.
"Nickypooh!" she whispered, "Don't let it bother you! It's wonderful. From now on, I'm sure I'll be able to do the same for you. I guess I just needed a little forcing, you know. That's it, dry those eyes, and I'll tell you the rest.
"Let's see. After I had it all the way in, and even had some of his short hairs up my nose, I heard him grunt, and he began to pump it back and forth. That's something else. You've got to try it sometime, honey, maybe you can pick up a sailor, or maybe go up to Hollywood and hire one of those glitter boys to help out. You can't believe the sensations-its just like your head comes a giant cunt, and your voicebox turns into a clit. I made Number Five after only ten or fifteen thrusts.
"I could tell this guy really knew his moves when he pulled all the way out, pried open my jaws and started to stuff his balls in my mouth with his fingers. You know how much I gag and whine whenever you try and do that with me? Well I just sucked those orbs down like they were the freshest pair of oysters I'd ever seen. I pulled my teeth back, leaned my neck out and up, jammed my tongue against the bottom of my mouth, and low and behold, I had both of them in my cheeks. I must have looked like a squirrel on the last day of summer the way my cheeks were puffed out. I couldn't very well use my tongue on them, so I just kind of hummed, and twisted my head around a lot. He dug it, and started to twist my earlobes in perfect rhythm. We'll have to try that sometime, sweetie, now that I know I can do it.
"Things got nasty quick after that ball sucking action. I guess it really lit his fuse, because he started to huff and puff like he was going to squirt, and the hell if I wanted him to squirt all over my hair. I wanted that dick buried in my snatch, and to signal that it was time, I started to grind his balls with my molars. You should have seen how quick he pulled them out when I started that routine! Evidently he didn't like that so much, because before I even had a chance to get a look at him, wham, he spun me by the ears over on my belly, and then slapped my rump with his palm.
"I raised my ass, lowered my face into the carpet, and then he did it. No fingering, no tenderness, not even a scoop of grease, just bam, right up the asshole with all that bloated meat. Let me tell you, if I hadn't been jacking myself off and hadn't had quite a bit of hot slop running out of my pussy down into my asshole, I'd be in the emergency ward right now, hooked up to the kidney machines.
"Want to talk about pain for a while, Nick? Having your cherry popped is one thing, this was something else. God made all little girls with juicy cherries, just so that they can be popped tastefully, and rather painlessly. God did not make the asshole juicy, and he didn't make it stretch either. It was like having a tree trunk rammed up my asshole. I screamed like a banshee, and pounded my fists against the carpet. I tried to reach underneath me to grab his balls and twist them off. I filled my mouth with carpeting to try and squelch the pain and the tears. It was no use. He had me pinned in position, and he was strong as a bear. He pushed it in without hesitating for a second, and once it was grinding against my intestines, buried up to the balls in my asshole, he started that awful pumping.
He was an expert, and I was a complete novice, an anal virgin. I wasn't getting any pleasure from it at all, not until he started in twittering with my clit.
"That was what got me confused. That was when I really started to get scared. He started to twang my nub between his beefy thumb and forefinger, and began pumping in my butt in time to his pinchings. I was feeling pain, orgasm, humiliation and fear at the same time. I couldn't tell what was going on, so many different things were happening to my tenderest parts. I started to yammer like an ape in need of a heating pad, and he laughed at me, and doubled the speed of his fingers on my nub. I went into Numbers Five through Nine right then, mouth full of carpet, ears ringing, asshole stuffed with hot pork. I was being totally dominated, and Christ, I was loving every nasty, degrading minute of it.
"I knew that he wasn't they type to just leave it at that. All the pleasure and pain being mine to enjoy. You never did let me in on the details of your rapist's way of finishing off, and I'm glad you didn't, because I don't think I could have lived through the experience if I knew what was coming up next. If I had to wait for that, and know it was coming, I would have probably just puked and died right there.
"I knew it had to extra specially nauseating, that was for sure, but I've got a clean mind, and I couldn't ever have fantasized in a million years the kind of climax that Shitty Dick was going to have. That's strictly for the Male Chauvanist Pig mind. It's got to be.
"I felt him swelling up inside my asshole like a ballooon bursting with ninety weight motor oil, and I was ready to get my first anal creaming. I knew that it would soothe my sore ass, and I could dig that it was the proper conclusion to a bizarre sequence of events. I was ready for that, but not what I got.
"What I got was a brutal pop of his dick out of ass on a swift backstroke, and then he flipped me over on my backside and hobbled up across my thighs and chest on his knees, and with wicked movements of his fingers on my jaws, he pried me open again, and gave it to me right in the face. I got a mouth full of shitty dick, and a faceful of grotesque kumquats, the thickness and copiousness of which had to be equal to a fucking bull in heat. It was the worst mess I'd ever entertained in my whole life. I was drenched with the stuff, Nicky, all over my hair, up my nose, dribbling off my chin-I felt like a garbage pail."
That's where the cassette stopped. There wasn't a word or a grunt more on it.
We sat in Milhaud's office, staring at the floor, our shoes, at each others mugs. Milhaud raised his eyebrows, glanced at the whirring machine, and reached out to shut it off. I was about to console Nick, give him a few words of encouragement before the Lieutenant lashed out at us for not getting a good description of the assailant, when Nick Pervis went totally apeshit.
He went into a low, building wail of utter degradation and self-loathing. It built up and up, growing in pitch and tone till it was a scream of Neanderthal deprivation lust and frustration agony. Milhaud stared at him, and picked at his own nose as lie punched buttons on the intercom unit. I stared bugeyed at my partner, my hand creeping slowly up to my vest holster, just in case he should have to be dealt with quickly, like a horse with a busted kneecap. I fingered the trigger of my gun beneath my sleek paisley dotted doubleknit lapel, and Pervis rolled out of his chair on to the carpeted floor, still whining like some kind of stricken animal, and gradually, his limbs began to fold and contract as he assumed the classic "too much too soon" fetal position of complete and sometimes permanent withdrawal from the Vale of Tears.
The uniformed boys from downstairs burst into Milhaud's office and glanced over to where their leader sat behind his desk, chuckling, with one finger sealing his lips to signal silence to the rest of the disbelieving horde of fellow officers.
"This is tasty," he whispered, now pointing at Pervis and beaming like a brain surgeon at Auswitch, relishing the display of inner-directed self-destruction. "Relax a second boys, and watch the dignity drain out of him."
Lizard Milhaud. Reptilian consciousness at its nadir of evolutionary development. Lots of citizens probably would not believe that such a cold-blooded creature, hatched from a rubbery, greasy egg in the basement of an experimental laboratory, could actually climb the bureaucratic ladder to a position of such force and influence in the field of law enforcement. Lots of citizens would probably like to see Milhaud drawn and quartered, and they would equally find satisfaction in seeing Nick Pervis immortalized in a made for TV movie about the decline and fall of a loyal, but frustrated officer.
Citizens are free to express whatever opinions they might have, as long as they don't interfere with the business of law enforcement. That's what the citizen fails to understand when confronted with the likes of Milhaud, when confronted with the contrast between rattlesnake consciousness and the basic smarmy sympathies evoked by Pervis and his type.
That's because citizens only see things as they relate to their own neurotic fears and hostilities they have no appreciation of the need for men like Milhaud-men who can keep a rapist on the streets for months, even years at a time, and keep the tax cash flowing into Depart mental coffers the whole time-they have no idea of how important solid business sense is to the maintenance of an efficiently self-sustaining law enforcement entity. The citizen may have his likes and dislikes, and he may have his opinions, and his latent mammal sensitivities may flow outward in the direction of the irony stricken Nick Pervis, but the citizen shall never grasp the essential kernel of crassness that maintains our system of one way give-and-take and provides the basic adrenalin that keeps all of our flabby hearts pumping healthy doses of hatred through our clogged and choked tubing.
Milhaud continued to pick at his broad, dark nostrils, now swivelling to and fro in his desk chair, one beefy palm raised against the uniformed officers standing in the doorway, delaying their mission of mercy so that he, Milhaud the malevolent, could bask uninterrupted for a few more moments before the sight of his labor in full fruition.
No doubt he was thinking about the gross quantities of public money that would be required to rehabilitate Pervis, the months, and maybe even years that Pervis would be housed in a quiet country sanatorium, being spoon fed tranquilizers and baby food as he made the slow crawl back to alert, hostile adulthood from the cringing state of infantile psychic implosion he was now writing in on the station floor.
I continued to fondle the trigger and muzzle of my revolver, watching, waiting, steeling myself for the moment when Pervis might need to be put out of his miseries pronto. Milhaud was adept at prolonging the agony, however, and I should have known that with his talents at the Western male high Art of kicking 'em while they're down would save the day, and put my fears of having to blast my buddy back to the pre-natal condition into the wastebasket of transitory hysteria. Milhaud was now showing his brown teeth in a display of utter bliss and satisfaction. It was time for me to make a move with the goal of self-preservation in mind.
I replaced my revolver into the shoulder holster, and made a quick survey of the room. Then I stood up and stretched, yawning loudly to show all concerned that I was above being affected by the scene of the floor, that it had not effected me emotionally, that I wasn't going to over-react in a melodramatic made for TV style, showering my superiors with the hot, crusty barf of human kindness and occupational cameraderie.
"Well," I started, vibrating my hand over my mouth to emphasize my boredom and to modulate my voice so that no quiver of latent wimpo hysteria might be detected by my peers and superiors, "I think I'll hit the street. You boys take it easy with Pervis, now, you hear me. I think a nice stretch in the rubber room's what the boy needs."
I began to strut across the room to the doorway, hitching up my slacks butch style and glowering menacingly at anyone who dared make eye-contact with me. Milhaud signalled with one finger of one hand for the uniformed lads to approach the fetalized Pervis, while with the middle finger of his other hand, he urged me to approach his desk.
Great choking waves of nausea and panic swept up from my crotch and pounded at my diaphrahm like boxing gloves against a tympani drum. Milhaud was going to give me one of his parting shots. Lord have mercy.
"Narsky," he wheezed between his reeking teeth, "See what incompetence hath wrought? Look at him, Narsky. Don't shy away from it, boy, show some balls. You've got to learn to feast on sights like this. You've got to learn from every experience, unless you want to remain a goddamn rookie all your life. You're partly responsible for this, you know. Take a good look at it. Think about what the average taxpayer might have to say about it, and what he might think of you. That's right Narsky, the average taxpayer'd say to himself, 'One less knight in shining polyester out on the streets, serving and protecting. And why? Because of Steve Narsky. Incompetent, unfocused, ineffectual Steve Narsky. He let his buddy down. He cheated at the weekly poker game. He's a scum bag. If Steve Narsky had done his job, Nick Pervis wouldn't be going to the rubber room.' That'a what the average citizen would say. And he'd be right. His previous taxes are now going to be funneled out of efficient law enforcement work on the streets and into the sticky grasp of psychiatric social workers who are going to give Pervis a thorough overhaul. Money that could have gone into dum-dum shells, flare guns; tear gas and countless suburban shoot outs is now going into the fists of malarky spewing creeps with kinky hair who are going to dawdle over Pervis' nauseating sensitivities for god know how long. How do you like them apples, Narsky? What the fuck are you going to do about it?"
High pressure. Milhaud reached out and began to toy with my hand with his snot and nicotine stained fingers. I recoiled like a rat on a conditioning grid. I began to yammer for mercy.
"Cut it out Lieutenant. Christ almighty, you think I wanted that to happen to Pervis?"
The old answer a question with a question routine. It never failed to bring Milhaud's kettle to boil, smacking of greasy middle European dialectic hair-splitting.
"Snartahargh," he grunted through his smogplugged nostrils, "And why the fuck not, Narsky? It fits your nauseating character like a glove. Burn your partner, and then go out and nab Shitty Dick by yourself, taking all the glory, and maybe even getting a forty-five second spot on the local news to boot. Fits you to a tee, Narsky."
"I'm gonna hit the street, Lieutenant."
I was almost whining now. It was time for Milhaud to let me go after a final subtle threat. His timing was always impeccable.
"That's right, Narsky, avoid confronting the truth at all costs. Go out on the street, by all means. Spend the rest of the week out there, doing your thing at the Sultan's Helmet. Why not even give Pervis' wife a visit while you're at it-you owe her the fucking courtesy. Tell her what's left of her hubby, and maybe she'll break down and throw you a quick hand job. In the meantime, just remember, on Monday, you'll be in your dress blues, out on the corner of Figueroa and Chingata, dodging the scrape racers and the pimpmobiles. Think about that while you're out there today, looking for your friend with the smelly penis. Think about it, Narsky."
The uniformed boys rushed by me at that moment, bearing their straight jacketed comrade. I could hear the low grumbling of Milhaud's nasal laughter, and all I could think of was how much I wanted a drink....
CHAPTER FIVE
My task wasn't growing anymore complicated at all. It had always been relatively simple-catch Shitty Dick-and now it was even simplified further by the removal of Pervis from the scene. All he had every really been interested in anyway was exploiting his badge and revolver to facilitate chippying on his wife while on the job. Now it was up to me alone to bring in the culprit.
What did add a certain aura of complication to the status of the case was the new boldness of my adversary. Evidently, whether by chance or by design, his latest victim had been intimately connected with the law enforcement apparatus that was busy trying to nail him. It could have been pure chance-there was plenty of evidence to back up the claims of Fate as the motivating factor.
First off, there was Charmane Pervis' character to consider. Lounging topless in the backyard on a boiling hot summer day, half cranked out of her mind in liquor, horny as an entire herd of rutting Wildbeest-she was probably broadcasting hypnotic pudendal scents across half the Los Angeles basin yesterday afternoon. No wonder Shitty Dick had answered her siren call to arms.
There was also the element of Nick's personal Karma, as the members of Glitter and Soy Bean generation like to call it. Nick had been flaunting his extra-marital activities, spending more and more time at the Sultan's Helmet, seeking out newer and kinkier massage parlors in his own free time, no doubt. His wife couldn't help but notice his inattentions in the sack. It was quite possible that his stories of Shitty Dick had planted the idea in her mind to seek ou the services of the anal assailant. Perhaps the real irony of her encounter and its subsequent effects on the already twisted mind of her cheating husband was that it was precisely adequate punishment for his sins. Not that I'm any moralist about a little innocent chippying, especially when its done in the slick discretion of a reputable massage parlor, but the Karmic factor just can't be ignored.
Fate, Chance and mere coincidence seem to pale rather feebly, however, when you give a little extra effort to thinking about precisely what had happened. I was inclined to think that it was more like a conscious conspiracy. It had to be. Shitty Dick was playing a shitty game. He was teasing, striking behind the lines, so to speak. He was delivering heavy body blows to those who were directly responsible for catching his ass in the steel trap of the law.
There had to be more than just coincidence at work here. Shitty Dick knew the names and addresses of the officers assigned to chasing him down. Shitty Dick had struck close to home once, and the problem that confronted me, as I headed down the stairs to the subterranean parking lot after the stimulating morning scene in Milhaud's office, was, what would Shitty Dick do to me, a single male?
Would he attempt anal rape, prison style? It had been known to happen before. I would be ready for that. Or would he go for some subtler form of hit and run attack, perhaps leaving a steaming turd in my bathtub, or jacking off on the new Boston Fern I had purchased last week at Akron in order to impress the teen strumpets I brought up to my apartment on more that rare occasions? Would he rummage through my closets, and soil my doubleknits? Would he let the air out of the tires on my pink Pinto? Would he poison my gold fish? What the hell could he do to me?
I got into my unmarked cruiser, made sure the dispatch radio was shut off, and I headed up the ramp to make my rounds. The first stop would be the gas station on the corner of Puerco de Pinedo and Calle de Cabrone, managed by Merc Fenton, an old high school buddy of mine from the sweet El Monte days. I needed some gas of reasonable octane, the stuff they rationed out at the Depart mental garage being a totally inadequate mixture of corn oil and kerosene, and I also wanted to jaw with Fenton, one of my most reliable and knowledgable informants. If anyone in town knew any inside skinny on the nature and identity of Shitty Dick, it would have to be Fenton. It had been at least a month since I had last checked him out he might have a lead for me by now.
I squirreled into the station and brodied to a stop by the Premium pumps, and Fenton sidled up to the open window on the passenger side. He curled his blackened nails over the door sill and gave me a wicked insect smile through his broken teeth.
"Got a nice fourteen-year-old runaway stashed in the men's room, Narsky. I'll let you have ten minutes in there with him for ten bucks," he said, trying to rub me the wrong way with his puerile insinuation..
"Got anything more tender, Merc? They get kind of scrawny and tough once they sprout pubes.
I only take choice stuff, Merc, fresh off the Greyhounds."
I laid it on thick with the demented creep. He needed those vile undercurrents of closet nastiness and child molesting lust to get up for a little face to face action with me, an enforcer of the law. He had to re-establish the nauseating lineage of our crossed bloodlines and dimly remembered shared experiences in order to cough up even the most vague and tenuous of leads. Merc Fenton was the kind of subhuman swine they like to flash in on as "local color" on your made for TV screen whitewashes of police procedure. Merc was the real thing-no cute eccentric with a half-hearted ambivalence toward the forces of righteousness he was a full bore psychopathic degenerate, happy only when he had a squirming runaway boy underneath his greasy, sweaty body, humping against the bawling child's earlobes with his warty masculine tumor at half mast and copiously dribbling a vomitous stream of veneral pus out of its knarled and purple knob.
As they say in chickenshit after-the-news editorials, it takes all kinds to make a thriving, modern metropolis tick, and Merc Fenton was thus allowed a license to live out his disgusting protozoan lifestyle. Without mercenary creeps like Fenton, your Department would have its hands tied, like it or not.
Since this kind of relationship is so vital to the progress of law enforcement, each member of the municipal team is expected to bring into the scheme of contacts one additional source of underworld and underground information-as you have no doubt guessed, Merc Fenton was my prize.
I had known him since I was in the eighth grade, growing up in the vacant lots of East El Monte, way back in the late Fifties, before the Dry Look, before the switch to the knits, before white hush puppies, and way before hot Pachanga music had to be imported from the frozen wastes of Piccadily Circus.
Fenton was a buddy of my older brother, Nerf Narsky. Fenton had fallen out of the back of a pickup truck when he was just a little tyke, a clean slate, all ready for the crass conditioning of early childhood. He was auctioned off to a family of dryheaving Funda mentalists, the Fentons who lived down the block from my family. Rumor had it that his real mother had been an alchoholic, arthritic junky who had evaporated one Fourth of July afternoon while watching the Chamber of Commerce's annual parade in downtown El Monte. Some said she was crushed to death under the prancing heels of the silver and gold encrusted Mexican horses with their gaucho riders waving their sombreros at the heat wasted crowd-no matter, all that is important is the Little Merc came from the gentic frying pan of his mother's sick womb only to fall into the hellfire of the Fenton household down the street.
A family of reptilian hypocrites of the lowest order, the Fentons made short work of Little Merc, using him as a whipping boy, punching bag and garbage pail-his only free time was spent out in the vacant lots, hunting lizards and moulting jackrabbits with his BB gun, and torturing the wounded creatures for hours as compensation for the brutalities he suffered under the duress of Ma and Pa Fenton.
By the time my brother Nerf got to know him, when I was in the eighth grade and Nerf and Merc were greasers de luxe in and out of the Tom Joad Memorial Vocational School for Incorrigible Lowlife, Merc had grown scales over a good portion of his body, and his tongue had turned a sickly black and had begun to develop a unique split. Merc was a classic example of what parents refer to as a "bad influence."
The timelessly profound pattern of behavior Merc was to leave as his legacy in the greater El Monte area was the novel and profitable way that he exploited the classified Ad section of the Times. Merc would go out to the vast vacant lots that surrounded the town and tear the engines out of wrecked and rusting vehicles. Then he and my brother Nerf would drag their haul to a service station, hose it down with high pressure soap and water, and then strip off all the rotten and crusted hoses and wires, leaving just the crankcase, the heads and the intake manifold. They'd spray paint over the whole mess with a thick coat of primer, then hit it with some engine enamel. The useless junk would shine like thos rebuilts you see in the Pep Boy's display.
Merc would then place an add in the Times classified, by phone, of course, under a phony name. They'd stash the shit in a garage, wait till Sunday came around, and then Merc would man the phone at a booth, the number of which he had placed at the end of the Ad for "rebuilt engines." In order to keep the booth free for the one day that he needed it, Merc developed a very unique strategy. He would go out to the edge of town, to the barrio of tin shacks and paper where the Mexicans lived, and he would order about ten bowls of rancid Menudo at one of the unsavory and unsanitary little restaurants there, and wolf down the steaming, spicy crud like a starved hyena. When the point was reached where he was ready to barf, he'd get Nerf to drive him up to the phone booth, and Merc would stand there and wait for the crap to settle in his large intestines. At the moment gravity did its number, he would drop his chino slacks down, face ass against the booth's glass walls, and he would spray the sickest, thickest load of diarrehea imaginable all over the sides of the booth. Any passerby interested in using that booth would have to have a stomach of steel to withstand the stench of the tripe and stomach acid stew that clung to the glass.
Merc had it down to a science. On Sunday afternoon, he'd mosey on down to the phone booth, with a can of wheel bearing grease. Before entering through the thick cloud of flies and wasps that buzzed in feeding frenzy over the reeking crust of diarrhea, he'd open the can, and jam a finger full of the thick industrial jelly up each nostril.
Not only did it allows him to enter the booth in comfort and sit there all day answering the nonstop calls from Okie morons all over the county, but it gave his voice a deep nasal twang that men appreciate when they're about to invest two or three hundred dollars in a piece of top quality re-built automotive hardware. The suckers called for hours, and Merc always used the same line on them, that, Yes, he had a few choice short blocks left, and some complete motors as well, and that the customer would have to meet him at exactly three-thirty at this or that address to seal the deal.
At three-thirty, Merc would leave the booth, use his hanky to scrap the thick grease out of his nostrils, and he'd be picked up by my brother to make the trip down to the garage. They'd be met there by a crowd of greedy morons, all eager to chew the fat and jaw about lifters, sticky valves, blown head gaskets, slipping bands in the tranny, stripped gears in the differential, all that can be seen, but not touched-all that craved the skilled hand of the master engine rebuilder-Merc Fenton.
Merc would jaw with them on their own level, wasting time, prolonging their agonies, greeting each new arrival with a cold eye, making them squirm in guilt for having arrived late. By four-thirty, the nameless Okie assholes would be bidding against one another for the gleaming, but useless engines, shaking fistfuls of twenty dollar bills in each other's faces.
Merc and Nerf would get about eight hundred on an average weekend, and up to twelve hundred on an exceptional Sunday. My brother would take his hundred buck share and stare at it in utter disbelief, marveling at the ease with which the good green stuff had slipped into his dirty palm.
What did Merc do with his grand share of the illicit haul? What do you think he did-he put it all into the chopped and channeled Forty-nine Mercury two-door that he kept in the backyard, up on blocks, eternally in a state of semi-disrepair. The primered beast was clean, however, clean in a fashion that set it in direct, dialectical opposition to its owner, who lounged at the far end of the spectrum of hygiene, wallowing in material and spiritual filth. Merc Fenton had the vilest, smelliest, scabbiest mind and body in El Monte, and he had the cleanest, most fetish perfect Merc coupe that ever voluptuously basked beneath the brutal Southern California sun.
Merc and Nerf ran their classified ads scam as many times as they could throughout their careers in El Monte, and by the time that last summer after graduation rolled around, my brother Nerf was on his way out of town to study Chiropracty at the Tusk and Jowl Institute in Bowdoin, Kansas, and Merc was cruising the main streets of the greater San Gabriel Valley in a ground-scraping, purple and metallic yellow piece of High Bondo Fine Art.
Since he had been repeatedly caught by the local law enforcement apparatus in flagrant violation of the sodomy codes many times before his graduation, he wasn't worried about the draft, having been declared unfit by the Selective service. Merc thus had for the first time in his life relative free play on the streets-he made the most of it, especially as the ranks of his male competition were thinned by the call to arms.
He became the king of the Drive-in circuit that summer, copping hefty and memorable feels off of the finest in cheerleader stock available to him. Many a virginal El Monte miss languished in the pits of degradation with Merc after having succumbed to the autoerotic charm of his gaudy chariot. "I got fifteen hundred bucks in the paint alone, baby. Suck my dick." That was his line, and you might be surprised at how very successful a line it was. You might be surprised, unless of course, you've had similar success using a variation on that standard seduction theme.
To make a sick story short, I lost track of Merc Fenton for quite a while, years and years to be exact, and it wasn't until I was in my rookie year on the force, working on a stolen car operation that our paths crossed again.
I was a uniformed turkey then, striving with all my instinctual greed for the break that would lift me out of my totalitarian togs and place me into the slick, knitted comfort and class of the undercover and plainclothes division-I was looking for the golden opportunity for advancement, that swiftly cracked case that allows the common foot soldier in the war against crime to ascend to the heights of depart mental glory. Needless to say, Merc Fenton was the catalyst that caused the change.
From an anonymous informant, it came to my attention that there was strange business occurring in the depths of night at a certain service station on the corner of Pinedo and Cabrone, and I staked out the joint. The marquee over the pumps reading "Fenton's Service" was all that I needed to know that my man was in action in his legendary style I watched, and waited patient, and very confident that the reptile would lay his eggs out in the open. Merc performed in yoeman style, receiving an entire Ryder truck full of freshly ripped off Mustang bucket seats the third night I waited in the dark, across the street in a phone booth.
His crime was quite secondary in its effects on my career to the effect gained by bringing him into the spectrum of reliable underground snitches. The department didn't give a flung dingleberry whether or not another petty fence was brought to trial what they were after was the placement of another source of deep closet secrets on the cash payroll. I brought Merc in, whining and farting about the nerve of an "old buddy" turning out to be a "fuggin' cop," but his greasy reptilian tears turned into a flood of nauseating joy once he realized that he was never going to spend a minute behind bars, and instead, he would receive hearty cash bonuses for information he shuffled through to his mentors in the unmarked cars.
From reptile to human yo-yo in a single, profound night of transformation. It was quite a change for Merc, and even a more profound change for me. My superior at that time could see the kind of quality lowlife that I had brought into the elite circle of informants, and he nodded vigorously at me when I marched the mangy, smelly Merc Fenton into his office for the brass tacks dealing. Merc left that night with restored sense of self, and a license to stick his fingers into any low grade operation that might fall into his lap, and I walked out of the office for the last time in my Gestapo garb. One week later, I was in the knits, sucking down martinis in air-conditioned bars while Merc was back at the service station, luring runaways into the men's room.
"Ten bucks, Narsky. I'll give yer car a lube job while yer working that steam off over the toilet seat." Fenton always drove a seductive, hard bargain, but I wasn't really up for a wrestling match with an unwilling, underage male in a gas station toilet in the middle of the day. I was out for information, leads, a sense of direction, a feeble ray of light, or hope, something that might put me on the trail of Shitty Dick.
"Ah, shit," I said, avoiding looking at Merc's leering face, "I don't go that way, Merc. How many times I gotta tell ya, I don't go that way. Give me a nice runaway girl, 'bout thirteen or fourteen, scared shitless, high on bennies and Romilar, lock me in the toilet with her, and I'll show you what kind of stuff I'm made out of."
Merc really needed that kind of talk to warm him up, being a lizard at heart. He wanted to establish the ground rules of the game, make sure that I wasn't about to pull the old prim, moralistic switcheroo on him. He snarled through his furstuffed nostrils and wiped his black, shiny beatle brows with his forearm before he replied.
"Whaddya mean you don't go 'that way'? What the fuck's that supposed to mean, anyhow, Narsky?"
He was being difficult. He was leading up to something. I'd have to play along.
"It's as plain as day, Merc. If I want a nice piece of boy butt, why all I got to do is cruise up the street to Las Palmas or the corner of Sunset and Smegma, roll down my window, and wink. I'm just not into boy butt, friend. Now you come up with a nice, fresh slab of girl butt, and you might earn yourself a ten spot."
I gave him an academy award quality Peckinpah snigger, and he sniggered back with guttural gasps and the hawking of a preposterously rancid lugar on the face of the premium pump.
My ears pricked up. Could he be innocently offering me a stab at some junky bitch's used rear sphincter, or was he wading in the deep waters of Shitty Dick's terrain? I had to follow the game plan.
"Oh, I know it's dear, Merc. Why, I believe to my soul that girl butt's all the rage these days, and the price just follows supply and demand. Tell me, Merc," I said, reaching deep in my pocket and extracting a thick wad of tens and twenties which I furled with my fingers as I spoke, "How much would I have to pay if I just had to have me a nice slab of virgin asshole right now?"
I looked up at him, unconsciously flipping the bills with the end of my thumb in a rhythmic routine. Merc's forked tongue slithered out of his warty mouth, and his cold eyes rotated in their crinkled sockets. He wanted his portion of that wad. I could feel the magnetic pull on my hands as he stared at the crisp money.
"Well, shucks, Steve," he whispered, sticking his head into the open window and sniffing lightly at the bills, "You know, the way I hear it, some guys are gettin' theirs for free. You hear about that fellow that nailed the cop's wife last night? Now that fella got him a slab of prime asshole for less than pennies. 'Sodomistic attack.' That's what they called it on the news, Steve. All it takes is a little courage, a little balls, you know. Of course, if you ain't got the balls, or the guts, I guess I could fix you up for, oh, let's say...."
"Twenty bucks," I interrupted, handing him a crisp not off the top, "Twenty bucks says you might know something about this fella, this sport who gets it for free. Right, Merc?"
He clawed for the money, and I let him have the bill. It slithered out the open window and crumpled into the open pocket in his overalls.
"Twenty bucks says that you can step over to the ladies toilet and have a look see for as long as you want, Narsky. Twenty bucks doesn't come close to opening up a nice young girl's buttcheeks these days. Twenty bucks says to me that I know this here fella yer interested in happened to nail your partner's old lady, and nothing more."
The game was getting spicy. The adrenalin was flowing in both our systems, and we were verbally sparring in a style that was all the equal any made for TV epic of lowlife and law enforcement working in twisted tandem to protect suburban property rights. This was the utter opposite of dealing with Milhaud, of putting up with Pervis, of interviewing the likes of the Ruggles girl-this was one of those rare moments when all Nature squeals in high harmony to the hoggish low notes let out by windbags wrestling for closet secrets.
I opened the driver's door and got out of the Pinto and stretched.
"Put the car up on the rack for awhile, Merc. You and I have some talkin' to do. In the meantime, I'm going to take my twenty dollars worth over there in the ladies room."
He guffawed and shot huge clumps of gristly phlegm all over the asphalt, and then greedily jumped into the drivers seat and squirreled the car over to the stall while I walked slowly around the back of the station and approached the toilets.
I wondered what he had stashed in there. On previous visits, it had usually been something worthless, and thoroughly unappetizing-something that called for immediate action of behalf of the SPCA-Mere had a thing about runaway boys and dogs. Whatever it was, it was something that would stimulate the Id and the sense of wonder at what gross miracles could be worked in a world fixated on the fast buck and the innate spice of the illicit fuck. I leaned over the viewing slot, placed my hands on the wall to brace myself, and I squinted down and focused.
The fluorescent lights were on and the water running, in mandatory toilet fashion, and on the floor, bare but for her nylon hose and her spike heels was a fox torn straight from the pages of Penthouse or some such publication favoring the now popular out-of-focus brand of sensuality, her knees grinding into the tiles as her head burrowed betwixt the wrinkled, black-veined thighs of a female senior citizen, who rubbed the top of the starlet's shag hairdo with one hand as she quaffed Ripple wine from a pint bottle. The senior citizen was getting class head from the starlet, and the tableau was indeed worth every bit of the twenty dollars worth of taxpayer's money.
Merc had had a lot of action in his toilets, but this scene far exceeded any of the others in the universality of its appeal, in the paradigm of class conjunction that it portrayed. Finer by far than the mating of the wino with the interior decorator, a theme that has become justly famous in other, less sophisticated toilets of our time, the scene before me at this moment capitalized on the classic pitch of arousal that comes from observing tasty lesbian degradation. Merc had scored. He would be a fool not to rent a suitable vehicle and put this show on the road. Think of the profits he could make in Des Moines, or Newark, or even in the nation's capitol with such a classic and at the same time unusual variation on the theme of Young and Old, Rich and Poor, Polished and Putrefied, Tender and Tough.
The baby starlet nibbled and sucked voraciously at the rag picker's crotch, lapping with asshole to belly button strokes of her powerful tongue, pausing and lingering at the center of the pool for special lingual attentions to the needs of the Old Man in the Sea, the legendary man in the boat, Captain Clitoris. The thum-sized organ glistened in the objective white light, purple and wet, it twittered and vibrated, every so often slipping up into one of the Starlet's tiny flared nostrils. The clean cut young thing laughed at these accidental parries, and attacked the hot nub with renewed vigor at each such juncture, causing the old hag to writhe and twitch on the toilet set, and take another slug of the cheap wine.
The starlet must have had great strength in her tongue to have aroused the senior citizen from the foggy haze of the wine and put her into her frenzy-either that was the case, or she had been lapping quite a long time, for it was quite evident that the elder partner was in the midst of a series of grinding cums, each new height ushering a piggish grunt from her purple-stained mouth.
She exposed her hideous teeth and gums, and grunted softly when she finished draining the bottle. She placed the wine bottle on the sink ledge, and then looked down on her hungry friend, and lowered both her fat hands onto the starlet's elaborate hairdo. The hag snickered evilly through her nose, and then took the starlet's pink ears in her grasp and began to mash her twat into the young one's face with abandon, evidently aroused to a final pitch of orgasmic hysteria.
"Unnnnnuu uugghhhhh," she called out, rolling her red eyes at the ceiling as the starlet pressed onward, intent on the satisfaction of her partner. She was moaning as well, and I saw why-as she pressed into the pit of the old woman's p'udendal pie, both of her own hands were pulling unmercifully at her own dangling flaps, rubbing them, parting them, twiddling with her own clit as she gobbled greying goulash with her active teeth.
I paused for a moment, backed away from the scene, and took a deep breath. It was exciting. It was different. It had class. I walked away with deep regrets that I didn't have the time to linger on and watch as the hag returned the favors of the young princess. I had to congratulate Merc on the outstanding show, and I had to pry more information from him. I had work to do, work that couldn't wait, for if I failed, I would never again have the opportunity to leisurely approach Merc' station and sample the unique pleasures afforded in his sparkling conveniences. Priorities, my friends.
I circled around the building with a fierce bulge in my slacks. Satisfaction was being delayed too long-after my day in the Sultan's Helmet, after the tapes of Charmane's graphic rehash of her experiences with Shitty Dick, and after this, this priceless toilet hardcore, I had a case of blue balls that could only be cured by an evening tryst with one of the local teen harlots who hung around the neighborhood bar. I would be spraying quarts of hot spinal fluid tonight, after work, after I had purchased the vital lead from Merc Fenton.
Merc was leaning against the door of my car as I entered the service bay, making an obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger at waist level. He grinned at me, and raised his leathery eyebrows in question.
"How'd you like them apples, Narsky? Ever seen quality like that?" he asked, making rapid movements near his crotch with the clamped fist.
"You got that on film, Merc?" I inquired.
"Super eight loops'll cost you twenty a piece, Sixteen millimeter color-sound go for a cool one hundred dollars a reel."
"Merc," I said, shaking my head from side to side," You're a born business man. Where'd you find that pair?"
He snickered in deep glee, making a kind of clicking sound with his tongue against his fangs which implied, "shame on you."
"That's a trade secret, Narsky. I can tell you that it don't come easy. Like I was saying before, girl butt don't go for pesos, and well, when yer talkin' quality girl-to-girl action, that's when they separate the men from the boys in my line of work."
Pretty vague. I didn't care. All I wanted was for him to keep talking, to get back to the flow of things, to what he knew of Shitty Dick. I peeled another twenty dollar bill off the top of the stack and waved it in front of Merc's face.
"Say, Merc. How'd you know this fella was my partner? The one whose old lady got nailed?"
"Sheeit, Narsky," he said, kicking the floor, and writhing in front of the money," I know Pervis. I know you guys is working on that rapist case. I know'd cause they gave the name of the officer on the fuckin' news program."
I turned red. I was following the wrong tack. I lifted the bill high over his slicked back head, and tried another angle. The direct approach.
"Out with it, Fenton. What the fuck do you know about this character? Where can I find him? Who the hell is he? How did he know about Pervis's home address?"
I blitzed him with questions. He yammered. He balked. He needed a threat.
"Out with it. You wanna take a ride downtown with your friends in the toilet? You want those films seized? Or do you want another twenty?"
He hemmed and hawed. He reached for the bill. I snapped it out of his grasp.
"Talk."
"Shit, Narsky," he whined, "All ya gotta do is pay attention. What more can I say? You know the ropes. Keep yer eyes open. Don't let things slide by. For instance, take a real close listen and look at the news tonight on TV."
He reached for the twenty. I kicked him in the shin. Fenton bellowed with stinging pain and began to grovel and writhe on the oily floor.
"Merc , you gotta lot of nerve. For forty bucks you're telling me to watch the fuckin' TV news? We keep those assholes in business, son, just like we keep you in business. You better come up with something a little sharper than that for your money."
I let him have another taste of wingtip to the butt as he writhed.
"Ahhhh, fuck, Narsky. I'm tellin' you all I know. Just watch the news real careful. It'll be there all right. Everything you need to know."
I gave him a third and final kick to the back of the neck, and jammed the crumbled twenty into his teeth.
"You're crusin' for a bruisin', Fenton." I sneered at him, smoothing my drylook down, adjusting my lapels, and turning to open my car door, "When I come to you, I want everything you know, not fucking advice on what to do in my spare time. One more incident like this, Merc, and I'll personally enter your name on the Depart mental shit list. Its a long list, Merc, but they'll get you. You'll never know when its coming, Merc, when it does come, you'll be whining and begging and they'll be no one there to listen. You understand me, Merc?" I asked through the window as I started the car.
He looked up from the floor at me and just gave me a sick grin, and then flipped me the bird.
I spat on him, jammed the lever into reverse, and squealed rubber out of the stall....
CHAPTER SIX
I was pissed at myself, at Merc, at Shitty Dick, and I was as horny as a rhino in heat. I decided to give Charmane Pervis a little visit to see if she could be of any service in apprehending the fellow who had raped her asshole and her husband's mind. It seemed like the right thing to do, given the circumstances.
The circumstances ought to be clear to you by now. They were as clear and sharp to me as a fistful of rusty razorblades. It was now late Tuesday morning, almost afternoon-I had wasted a good deal of precious investigative time leering at Merc's aquarium style display in the Ladies toilet, and a good deal more time jawing with the leperous, unreliable lowlife himself-I had three and a half full days left, and then one weekend to sweat through, and it would all be over.
I'd be back on salary, with no fringe benefits, no liquid lunches, no secret ninny lustings in the Sultan's Helmet, and my doubleknits would fall prey to the moths in the closets of my apartment. That would be my feeble Fate upon my failure to bring the hogtied corpse of Shitty Dick into the stationhouse come Monday morning. Milhaud would snort down pounds of hot snot as he picked up the dispatch phone and ordered a set of transfer documents for me. He would watch coolly as I squirmed in his office in the pits of utter humiliation and degradation. It would be one of the high points of his entire career.
These thoughts assailed me as I negotiated my oversize, un-airconditioned hulk of Detroit shit through the sweltering, packed streets. I had not even the faintest clue as to who it was I was after-I had no description to work from, only a specific, but thoroughly commonplace modus of operation-the quick, blunt attack, the exposure of the genitals, the forced sodomistic attack on the lingual region, followed by the brutal and prolonged plumbing operation in the rear end, and then the mandatory coup de grace-the hardcore loop style "cum shot."
Images came to my mind as I rolled down all of the windows in the unmarked black Polara to vent the odors of the melting vinyl interior. I saw the faceless enemy in sihlouette, the angry, righteous organ of forced entrance at the ready, in hand, poised in a dripping, arched state before the face of the anonymous victim. I heard his snickers of sadistic delight as his prey feebly attempted to pinch her nostrils and thus avoid the clouds of grey, acrid smegma stench wafting up from his moi??ure damped crotch.
Then, with a nifty hooking motion, he impaled the sickening sword up to its furry hilt in her heaving, gagging gorge, and began to pummel full length, back and forth into her unwilling throat. I stepped down on the gas pedal and burnt a few fractions of inch off the rear tires as this image soaked in, and the squealing of the tires seemed to echo the pathetic choking and gagging of the paralyzed, yet, unbound victim.
It was morbid that no one could provide me with help. Milhaud, who had access to all of the Depart mental forensic skills, he had come up with nothing. Pervis, who had been assigned to the Shitty Dick affair from the very beginning-he had wasted away his previous time terrorizing the victims with his Kojak style interrogations, and in the end, he had succumbed to the lure of the enemy's own method of operation-had had become that which he sought to destroy.
The phenomenon is not that rare. Our late and sorely lamented Generalissimo, He Who Resigned, he suffered the same fate. He had merely sought to guarantee the National Security, and, yea, lo, in doing that, in securing his madate, he had stepped across the line and become at one with the methodology of the Commie buttlicker.
Pervis suffced a similar fate, I thought, but his was spiced with a devious, conscious awareness of the essentially evil nature of his own means, and the way those means stacked up against those of this sworn foe, the shadowy Shitty Dick. Pervis had gone one step further than our former fuerher-he had identified his authoritarian persona, his cop identity, with that of the criminal-he had stepped across the line of wimp morality as a kind of dare, and a challenge to his own ability to withstand the strain of bearing up under twin identities within a single corpus. Pervis had been rent assunder by the strain.
He hadn't flipped out, however, until ironic justice had been done, until the enemy had slipped behind the lines and hit him in the supply depot Charmane's seemingly willing rectum. Perhaps in that sorry household I would find some clue, some tiny shred of a lead as yet undiscovered in the playing of the obscene tapes. Perhaps.
I thought about Pervis, how he had performed in the Sultan's Helmet with the twin rented meathooks. He had rigorously and strenuously followed in Shitty Dick's footsteps. A common law enforcement tactic, by the way. We often take recourse to following down to the last revolting detail the progress of a crime in hopes of determining some flaw in the criminal's character, some sure way of making hirn show his stained and greedy hand.
Perhaps that is exactly what Nick was doing in the massage parlor. Perhaps he was not so mad, and there was meaning in his actions aside from the decadent influence of the cagey rapist bastard.
Perhaps. Perhaps I should try it myself.
I squelched the thought with another wild foot to the floorboard antic, and once again, ironic justice stepped forth to compound my embarrassment and lay additional stumbling blocks in the path of my quest for the turd smeared, mother-raping son of a bitch. Bright red lights appeared in my rear view mirror-just what I needed, a pair of overzealous rookies zeroing in on me like a common scrape racer. I'd give them a taste of doubleknitted and Dryiooked detective cool.
I pulled over and did a nice sliding brody to the curb, taking the right front wheel up over the sidewalk and putting a nice crease in the right front fender against a freshly painted and pissed-on fire hydrant. The rookies in the mirror both left the squad car, placing their nightsticks in their belt loops TV style. I practically gagged with laughter. I'd make them pay for their sins.
"May I see your driver's license, sir," the twirp asked.
"Maybe," I said, looking straight through the windshield.
"Let's not make things worse than they are, sir.
You were going forty in a twenty-five Mile per hour zone and putting on what we like to call a "show of speed" to boot. If you wanna go downtown in the back of the squad car, that can be arranged. The license." He stuck his beefy hand into the open window. The other rookie walked back to the squad car and started to dial in for the long make-the call to Sacramento computer headquarters for registration, priors, acne, warts, tumors, bad breath, etc.
"Wanna die, kid?" I asked, giving my voice the proper chilled tone that instantly provokes an officer of the law to terminal hand gun hysteria.
"Listen, asshole, I've had enough from you. Get out."
He began to pull open the door.
I let him.
When it was all the way open, he found a revolver, my revolver, pressed tightly against the regulation bulge in his black rookie monkey suit.
"Don't move kid, just act natural, if you can remember how."
He snarled like a baboon deprived of his heating pad in the midst of a stirring wetdream. I laughed and snorted brittle clumps of dry, smog-stained mucus down my parched gorge.
"Call for your buddy, kid. Don't try nothin' funny if you ever want to jack off again."
He called, and junior came running. Junior geeked the glint of my blue nosed barrel jutting out from underneath the kid's crotch and froze solid.
"Good boy Junior," I spat at him," You got that sense of self-preservation. Now lets talk business. You guys ever been on the local news?"
Two negative shakes of the head.
"How'd you boys like to become Network quality stuff?"
They eyed each other, shrugged a couple of times, looked around for anyone who might be observing the scene, and began to grin and nod like tourists on the Universal Studios promotional hype. They were hot for it, just like all of today's crop, more interested in headlines than in hunting for illicit and sleazy head in parked cars and telephone booths. They just don't have the same gusto as the Old Guard.
"OK. I got Magnum dum-dums in this piece of blue of mine, it'll be over real quick. I'll make it painless for you, Junior, and you, Kid, I'm going to give you a dum-dum to the liver. You'll last about forty-five minutes, just long enough for you to tell the mop-up crew that it was a seven foot nigger in a Caddy who done you in, then they'll take you to County General where you can die with a TV camera shoved up your ass. How's that action grab you? Better than wiatin' for leukemia, eh?"
I rubbed their noses in it, knowing full well that I was going to have to let the scumbags go.
"Sure as hell beats leukemia, mister, but I was kinda savin' myself for the SWAT team. My mom always wanted me to die storming a barricade, or calling in an air strike against the Symbionese. But hell, this beats it all to shit. Fire at will," the Kid signed off, all ready to meet his Maker. I gave Junior heavy eye-contact, implying that he should busy himself with his parting words. Junior performed.
"Gosh, mister, I was going to join SWAT just next month too. But shit, this is a whole lot better, dying in the street, being on TV and everything just like Police Story. Shit, can't you give me the slug in the liver so that I can writhe in pain for awhile, and maybe that cool fox on Channel Six, that Kristine Hundt will get my dying words and I'll make Network." Junior had class. He had gusto.
Greed was getting in between the rookies, however. The Kid wanted that prolonged death agony I had promised. They started to argue.
"Hey, I got two weeks more seniority than you, Junior. I'm gonna take the liver shot. Maybe Marcus Welby will perform a miraculous cure on me. You never know," said the Kid, turning to me with a smile. I shrugged and yawned, and clicked the safety off on my gun.
"Gimme the liver shot, Mister," pleaded Junior, stepping dangerously close. It was time to pull the strings on this pair of yo-yo's-show'em who was boss.
"Allright, allright. Assholes," I started in, deftly drawing the snub nose out of the Kid's crotch and extricating myself from the front seat as I spoke, and dipped into my ass pocket for my ID, "The show's over, twirps. Narsky, detective, 67th Precinct."
I flashed the heavy badge. They began to gawk, and aweshucks like a pair of crackers caught with their fingers in a poontang pie. I kicked them both in the shins, and then knocked their shades off as they stooped like braceros for their hats. It was a tasty sight, deeply satisfying.
"You punks want to die?" I questioned them, getting firm and fatherly on them now that my cover was securely blown out my ass.
"Aw shit," said Junior, guffawing and shuffling his feet in a conditioned infantile response, "Not now, you took all the fun out of it."
"Yeah," chimed in the Kid, "What's the point of getting blown away by another porker? That'd just make asses out of all of us. No glory in that scene. No Network coverage behind that gross bullshit."
I snarled in my wisdom. They still hadn't got the ropes on PR.
"What the fuck. You'd make the best "parting shot" for the Networks they'd ever had. I can see it now, Walter Cronkite chuckling like Santa Claus, telling how two puke-sucking rookies were blown away by an irate detective who they stopped for some petty traffic violation while he was in hot pursuit of a raping cunt thumper. The Networks pay for jewels like that, asshole," I sneered. They hung their heads and began to sway like Krishna freaks on Quualude.
I shoved them back from my car and got back into the driver's seat and started it. I gave them a final taste of experienced advice.
"If you want to die, you gotta die with gusto, ya hear? Get yer priorities straight, punks. Make up yer minds. Are you gonna be wimps, or are you gonna be Chimps? You gonna deny that urge to splatter yourself all over the street and get fifteen seconds of local coverage for your efforts, or are you gonna go all the way, with gusto, and call in an air strike on some barricaded puke? It's up to you."
I floored the Dodge and left them spluttering in a cloud of blue haze, cautiously feeling for the remnants of their masculinity. They'd ponder the vagaries of my last words for a few weeks, then they'd stash it in their sick memories, and soon they'd be out on the streets again, blissfully unaware of the potential for stardom that lurks behind every trash can in every stinking alley in this city.
I felt a whole helluva lot better after that refreshing reaffirmation of my value as a member of the Team. I still had some worth, some use, even if Milhaud couldn't see it. My story would make a fine episode in any sensitive portrayal of a policeman demoted through bureaucratic crassness. I gave serious thought to quitting the force right then and there and making a hot beeline to Studio City, where slick fruits in Pierre Cardin suits had a healthy respect for mordant melodrama, where my story might succeed in wrenching a nice double figure salary out of the studio moguls who understood the value of authenticity when scripting made for TV action. I didn't necessarily have to be at the mercy of Milhaud. I might do better on celluloid. Others had done it. Why not me?
Why not? Because I had pride. I was out to bring in my man. I wasn't going to wind up in the booby hatch with Pervis, I wasn't going to wind up rolling around on Milhaud's office floor whining for mercy, and I certainly wasn't about to head out to the Valley to throw away an entire career based on the feeble hope that some manicured Arabian swine might hire me on as a technical advisor to some non-existent TV series. I still had my sense of priorities. I wasn't any lame as a rookie, out for a martyr's death, out to have Kristine Hundt palming my sweaty brow as I strained over a bedpan in the terminal wards. Fuck the hyena that dwells in our genetic laundry bag, the furry beast that whines for comfort. Fuck 'em all. I was dead set on choking the truth out of Charmane Pervis, come hell or high water.
I wheeled the now overheating and badly disfigured service Dodge onto the freeway for the final approach to the Pervis tract home. I secretly hoped the bitch was primping her pubic bush out in the backyard, waiting for a return engagement by the Backdoor Man. After hearing that tape, my sympathies were entirely with Nick-he may have disgusted me when he went bozo in the massage parlor, but compared to his wife's open invitation to the rapist, he was as clean as a cookie cutter. She had some explaining to do, some serious explaining.
I cruised in the left lane with my right foot against the floor and my left palm on the horn ring-the only way to negotiate the freeways, in my opinion-puts the psycho fear into the herd, gets 'em outa your way in a hurry. The truckers are the only tough customers when you're using straight ahead horn tactics, but if they get salty with you, all you've got to do is flip out your badge, and they crawl back into their Buck Owens stupor and start to yessir nosir you to death.
Just thinking about truckers brought back the image of Merc Fenton to me, he being made of the same fundamentally corrupt horseshit as your average long distance man. The squirmy little turd had told me nothing short of to go fuck myself watch the TV-was he for real? What kind of collosal gall was it that propelled that worm along through the sewer of life? Where did he get off, giving me advice like that? What the fuck, he was a paid informant-he was supposed to suck ass with his peers and then spill dingleberries when we came around to collect. I didn't need any advice on my viewing habits. I knew what to watch. I knew where the action was-certainly not on the fucking TV.
Sure, those sick bastards thrive on police work. Where would they get all those tasty wreck shots, those stories about the pachuco baby that locked itself in a freezer in a vacant lot, the numbers about some flit's Siamese cat that treed itself and had to be rescued by the paramedics? Sure as shit they depend on us for their daily bread, but for chrissakes, we don't have to suck their raw hemmies to bring home the bacon. AH that shit-it's second rate. It's just slimy pablum for all the ornery bastards in rest homes who have to have a little blood letting before they can get it up enough to attack the night duty nurse. Sure as shit the likes of Narsky ain't going to get any hot leads from the local news.
What ever it was Merc was trying to say, all he succeeded in doing was pissing me off. I was dead set on shaking his tree after Friday rolled around. If I hadn't caught Shitty Dick by then, Merc Fenton was going to fry in the same rancid grease that I was destined to be browned in. He'd regret every wise ass perverted quip he'd ever made once I got through spreading the word on him.
Times flys when you're pissed out of your mind, and before long, I was at the offramp to the Pervis estate. My temper was rising nicely to match the ambient air temperature-by the time Charmane got around to opening the front door, my breath would be hot enough to melt her seethrough polyester pantsuit. Served her right to suf fer. Served her right to be alone. Slimey. Twotimer. Son of a bitch.
I wheeled the hulk pig of a car down the tree-lined suburban street going easy on the accelerator now that steam was visibly rising up from underneath the hood and I could hear the freeze-plugs wailing in agony in their rusty sockets, waiting for that perfect instant when they would attain freeze-plug liberation, and blast themselves into the asphalt in a cringing crescendo of malfuntioning, inorganic hysteria. I spotted Charmane's gross pink Mark IV convertible and brodied my steed into the driveway behind it.
I was dripping with sweat as I walked briskly up the flagstones to the front door, and I was ready to begin my interrogation of the 'victim' with an impromptu choking session-I'd get my foot in the door, and follow quickly with both sets of hands I'd fling myself upon her in a righteous rage and wring the truth out of her cum-stained vocal chords just like Conrad Nagel swore to do it to Greta Garbo in Mysterious Lady. I'd settle the bitch's hash. I'd make her realize that her wanton ways would not go unpunished, that her responsibility for what happened to Nick would trail her, and dog her to the ends of earth.
I pressed the Buffum's semi-antique, semimoderne door buzzer and waited on the thick, black rubber doormat, my wingtips shuffling nervously as I played a quick, dual-handed game of pocket pool, attempting feebly to disengage my sweaty scrotum from its deathgrip on my left thigh-with my last paycheck, I certainly owed it to myself to go down to the local Ah Men franchise and buy at least a dozen pairs of those fishnet posing straps they advertise in the back of Esquire perfect foundation garments for directing traffic in a black wool uniform.
Since the Pervis home was fully carpeted with deeply piled shag, from toilets to sunken living room, I did not expect to hear the telltale clicking of high heels as Charmane made her way to the front door. I was all set to pounce the minute it swung open, but when that fateful moment arrived, I remained paralyzed and open-mouthed, rivers of tickling sweat running down both sides of my nose, the portrait of glandular hypnosis.
Charmane opened the vast colonial door and greeted me with her deepthroat husky whisper of welcome. I yammered nonsensical babooneries at her flexing neck-she was bedecked in Frederick's of Hollywood from her purplelacquered toenails to her high fashion harlot hairpiece.
Mother of the urine bloated consciousness that sprayed wild oats from here to Tierra del Fuego Charmane was a knockout-she wore seethrough Toreador pants of some obscene doily material and a cleavage enhancing top piece of similar material. Her heels elevated her to such a degree that my nose was pointed right at the polished depths of the deeply bronzed slot betwixt her heaving, and excruciatingly well-defined breasts. I whined in primal tit-fixation staring into the blackness, wishing, hoping, praying that I would be allowed thereupon to lower my zipper, and place my leaking eddifice betwixt those wondrous globes and rock slowly back and forth till sweet release came unto me....
"Steve! How thoughtful of you to come by," she said, joyously lifting her cocktail glass high in one hand, and cocking her head to one side to give me a nice sidelong shot at her cleavage. Rivers of pre-coital slop began to pour down the insides of my legs, co-mingling with the sweat to form a vertical viaduct of sensual sleaze that might soon be forming into puddles around my ankles.
"Nargrumphhh," I said, opening my nostrils and daring to take a sniff at the lavender cloud of precious mating scents she was unleashing from her powdered, oiled and polished breast crack.
"Excuse me," she laughed, reaching out with her free hand to rub my stomach, "What did you say?"
I steeled myself to prevent dysfunction. Oh cursed by the day that God wrought the primal differentiation between male and female and granted the weaker sex internal organs, organs protected by layers of fat and muscles against embarassment, engorgement, and the awful, visible remnant of premature ejaculation. I snapped both of my hands over my swollen crotch and went into the fetal position on the doormat, moaning and rocking and nodding like an addict in the terminal stages of Pablum withdrawal.
Charmane let out a low-pitched grunt of alarm. She had no idea of what was happening. She went into a made for TV matriarchal response.
"Are you hurt? Did you receive a wound in the line of duty? What the hell's wrong with you Narsky, you're going to have all the neighbors wondering what's going on if you don't straighten out this minute. Get to your feet! Act like a mench, for Chrissakes!" she hissed at me, looking up and down the street as she hunkered down on her high heels and pulled on my lapels.
I refused to budge. My hands were locked between my legs and my head was nodding uncontrollably. I was happy for the first time in weeks. The sight of that cleavage-the scent of her massage parlor quality body-the slick, greasy quality of her voice-the weight of her recent cassette experience-the fate of her hubby-all of these factors melted and flowed together in my hatefilled and overheated mind, and I spitefully refused to cooperate.
"Hmmmmmm," said Charmane, letting go of my suit coat, and thoughtfully posing for a second while she wrestled with the dilemma of a detective on the doormat, "This can't go on, dear. Think of my reputation, think of the scandal. If you must over-react, who can't you at least do it indoors, instead of on the doorstep?"
She cocked her head again as I peeked at her quizzically smiling face. She raised her eyebrows, polished off her drink and set the glass aside, and then stood up and stepped over my cowering body and turned her back to the street.
"Sorry, Steviepooh, but you're asking for it," she whispered with a shrug, and then she began to brutally pepper my back with kicks from her heels. I squealed in pig agony, and began to writhe across the doormat and into the living room. Within a matter of split seconds, I was totally within the cool comfort of the hallway, and Charmane slammed the door shut behind her back and stood there, towering over me, slightly, and very sensuously out of breath, her cleavage expanding and contracting with ball wrenching precision.
She wiped her brow of the tiny beads of sweat that had formed there, and with a huff she stepped over my fetalized body and asked if I wanted a drink. I went into another spasm of cramping and brute lust, and she rolled her eyes heavenward in despair and bounced into the kitchen to drain a couple of icy drinks from her pitcher.
When she returned bearing her cocktail glasses, I was seated with my back against the wall, still nodding like a junky, feebly cupping my crotch with one hand.
"Here, dear," she said, bending over and placing the rim of the glass between my parched lips, "This ought to do you some good."
I quaffed like an infant, fiercely sucking up the ice, vodka and mixer as if it were nectar offered from the hand of Aphrodite herself. It had a wonderful, soothing effect on me, and when I had drained the glass, I shook my head, and managed to stand up and smile sheepishly at the wise and beaming Charmane, who stood with one out-thrust hip against the wall, the drink poised between her jackoff fingers.
"Gosh, Charmane," I guffawed like a Boy Scout caught in the act of spraying hot spinal fluid over the lingerie pages of the Sears Catalogue, "It must have been the heat or something. They oughta put air-conditioning in those goddamn cars."
Charmane nodded and grinned lasiviously, reaching out to wipe the drool off my chin like Mommy with Gerber baby.
"They ought to put a spoonful of saltpeter in your morning coffee, too, Steve. Just look at that wet spot on your pants," she whispered coyly, reaching down to finger the dark stain, and then coquettishly licking her fingers.
My face turned red as a baboon's asshole, and I went into a tooth grinding jaw clamp. What the hell are you supposed to say to that kind of remark? I opted for sheepish silence.
"Do you always leak like that when you see a pretty girl, Steve? I thought only teenage boys did that," she remarked rather matter of factly, reaching out again to squeeze the damp clump of polyester below my central pouch. I almost went up the wall with hardcore tension. I gnashed my teeth and growled at her.
She giggled, sent her tongue flying over her face and winked at me.
"Why don't we sit down in the living room. It's cool in there and we can talk," she said, giving her butt a mighty twitch and leading the way. Her rear cleavage was all the equal to her front-even more inviting in many ways, especially since a small rivulet of sweat was trickling down it and past the waist band of her low-slung pants, into the warm valley between her buttocks. I locked my molars together and hobbled along behind her, my eyes fixed on her flexing, grinding buttocks beneath the transparent fabric of her pants.
She beckoned me to sit down on a broad sofa, again in the luxurious decorator style perfected by Buffums, and I did so, staring out at the sliding glass doors and the cool pool beyond.
"Shall I bring the pitcher out, Steve?" Charmane asked, running a finger around inside the rim of her own glass, and then fellating the digit with her lips as she continued to question with her animated, wide blue eyes. I nodded like a chimp that has been offered a banana split, and she strutted out to the kitchen.
Thankfully, the first drink was now taking effect, and I could feel the slow return of my cool welling up from my chilled gut. The drinks would do me well, and they might serve to loosen up the bitch's lying tongue. I was almost fully collected, with wits at the ready when she returned with the full, dripping and dew covered pitcher of vodka, ice and mixer. It would be a worthwhile afternoon.
"Christ, Charmane, I don't know what the hell came over me out there on the porch. It had to be the fucking heat," I said, shaking my head, and stretching my neck.
She nodded, and then bent down right in front of me, giving me an awful overdose of moist, dark cleavage. I went haywire inside my doubleknits, the prickly heat running over my body like trained ants.
"Well, Steve," she said, standing up straight after having poured two full drinks. "I don't really think that the temperature has much to do with it. I mean, the kind of heat you seem to be feeling is more like the kind you see at the zoo. Do you follow me. Steve?" she asked, strutting around the coffee table and sitting down practically on my lap. I could feel her thigh against mine like a blowtorch. I almost went paralytic again.
"Yabbayabba. sure thing. Charmane." I spluttered, twisting in my pants like a snake soaked in corn starch.
She decided to show me a little mercy by thankfully changing the topic.
"What brings you out this way Steve? Are you here on business, or just pleasure?" she asked, accenting the last word in such a way that I began to see lingerie ads in my mind's eye.
"I'm here for a bit of both, Charmane. I thought if d be nice to pay you a little visit to see how you were doing under the strain of the past few days, and I wanted to ask you a few more questions about the, ah incident with, the ah, yeah. The sodomistic attack." Stick to the jargon, Narsky. Keep cool.
"How nice of you. Why the last time you came by must have been at least three months ago. Do I look different to you?" she asked, turning so that her sultry face was in front of mine, and her ample right tit was sensuously squashed against my shoulder.
"You look fine, honey. Christ, it's amazing how well you look considering what's happened. A woman loses her dignity one day, her hubby the next, and shucks, she looks good enough to eat in spite of it all. You're made of quality stuff, Charmane," I said, strategically working with her feminine psychology, loosening her up for the kill.
"Why thank you, Steve," she hummed in response, placing a well manicured and highly skilled fistful of fingers over the damp spot on my trousers, "I figure there's just no sense in letting myself go to pieces over all this. I've got to keep my chin up, and concentrate on the positive things. Sure, Nick will be away indefinitely, but I've got a nice income from the disability checks, and I've got the house, the pool, and the car. My backside is still a little tender, but I'm almost fully recovered now, honey," she whispered, starting the slow back and forth motion on my trouser leg, keenly and coyly avoiding direct contact with the rigid pole that was prominently out-lined by my pants.
"That's swell, Charmane," I hissed through my teeth, "Say, do you mind if I kind of loosen up my collar a bit?" I asked, practically choking on the waves of electrical energy that were rising up from my crotch.
"Steve!" she squealed in surprise, "Feel free to relax. Here, let me help you with that jacket."
She swivelled on her ass and threw her arms around me, mashing her cleavage in my face, my nose went right between her tits, and the lights went off. I was immersed in the softest, most pliant cushions a man could ever hope to suffocate in. I went apeshit with my tongue, licking at the sweat between her jugs like a lap dog in a frenzy. She giggled, and struggled with my jacket and tie, exploiting the opportunity by rotating her bust on the axis of my nose.
As quick as she had advanced, she withdrew, standing up, and dangling my jacket off one finger in front of my face. She threw it over the back of a nearby chair, and then motioned with her finger for me to stand up. I rose like a zombie, and Charmane attacked my tie. In a jiffy, it too was dangling from her finger, and hurled over the suit coat. She then went at the buttons on my Arrow pin stripe shirt, and had that one unbuttoned down to the navel in seconds. She inserted both hands inside the shirt and roughly jerked it out from beneath the tension of my belt.
"There," she said, standing with hands on hips in front of me, licking her lips as she went over my furry chest with her eyes, "Aren't you more comfy now, Steve?"
The cool breeze wafted over my skin and made me tingle with arousal. I could see her broad, fat pink nips underneath the fabric of her fetishy top and the dark, mysteriousness of her pubic thatch beneath the transparent crotch of her pants. I was ready for interrogation action, standing there with my tent pole pressing painfully against my zipper.
"I sure am, Charmane. Say, why don't we pour another drink, and then I'll ask you a few short questions, and we can call it a day?" I said smartly, sitting down, and almost breaking my prick off at the root. Charmane picked up on my blunder immediately, and began to chuckle mischievously.
"You better watch your moves, officer, or you'll snap your twig," she said, resuming her seated posture next to me, this time immediately placing her hand right in my crotch, and gently rubbing there with fingers precisely tuned in on the whereabouts of my still dribbling helmet.
I went into my interrogation act, refusing to submit to the feelings of seductive pressure.
"Did you get a good look at this guy, Charmane? Be honest. At least you know whether he was a Caucasian or not, right?" I asked.
Charmane took a swig of her drink, and lowered her active palm so that now she was fondling my eggs as she replied.
"Don't be silly Steve. Of course he was a Caucasian. Do you think I'd have submitted to that treatment from a Spade?" she asked, as if it were toally self-evident.
I nodded, and fired another barb at her.
"Tell me, Charmane, did you see his face? Could you pick him out from a line up if we went down to the station and showed you mug shots, or a line of suspects?" I asked, lifting my entire butt off the couch to increase the pressure of her nimble fingers.
"Harder, Steve? You like it rough?" Charmane asked, grabbing hold of my root and beginning a really intense up-and-down whack-off rhythm. I gritted my teeth and hissed for her to answer the question.
"Not really, Steve. You see, it was exactly like I said. All I got a look at was the reproductive equipment. Now if you were to show me some close ups of naked suspects, I might be able to help you, but as far as I know, from what Nick told me before his nervous breakdown, you don't have a suspect. Right?"
Hmmm. She was right, and I was quickly losing all interest in verbal intercourse. What I wanted, and evidently, what Charmane craved, was a little intimacy between bereaved friends. A kind of soothing, brotherly-sisterly exercise in the relief of mutually shared grief and tension.
She batted her big eyes at me, and I followed them as they lowered slowly and stared at the hand vibrating and squeezing in my crotch. She looked up briefly, licked her puffy lips again, and reached for the handle on my zipper.
I sighed, spread my legs, and clamped my teeth together with all possible force. I squeezed my eyes shut tight momentarily as the noise of my zipper filled the room, and then I dove full force at her, planting my face in her cleavage and wallowing there as she deftly extricated my red hose from its subterranean locker, and she began to pummel its length with her fingers....
CHAPTER SEVEN
"My god, Steve," she panted, "Its leaking like a ruptured fire hose. Don't you ever jackoff, or go to the massage parlor to relive those awful tensions?" she asked.
I gritted my teeth and managed a strained reply.
"Not on working time. Your old man used to though. I sat in the bar, and he'd go for the halfand-half. I saw it once. Terrifying."
Charmane pushed my face out of her tits, and increased her deathgrip on my flailing and flexing central tube. She was curious as to her hubby's habits. Who wouldn't be.
"What's a half-and-half?" she asked, giving me special treatment in the slot of my weenie head with an artful fingernail.
"Oh, its two girls. For a price somewhere in between the cost of hiring them one at a time, you get to be "massaged" by both of them at once. How do you like them apples?" I asked, feeling a tiny, but satisfying wrench of cruelty building up in my system as she expertly massaged the length and height of my manly mast.
"Humph," she said, dropping my dick for a moment to paddle my balls for a while, "Male chauvanist piggery at its height of development, if you ask me. Doesn't it seem like a waste to you too? I mean how many guys do you think can really handle a Woman, a single woman in a satisfactory style? Not many, buddy, believe me. Normally, they squirt once, and that's it, for the night. Very meagre squirts as well, I might add. How are they gonna satisfy two polyorgasmic females at once, eh?" she asked, tweaking the bulb of my flowing fountain.
I didn't want a rehash of her diatribe on the multiple orgasm. The busty vibrator trained beauty was notorious for her cumming ability already. I didn't need to hear more of the same.
"Ever hear of fingers, Charmane? Or tongues?"
"Sure. I've heard all about 'em," she replied, increasing the tempo of her crotchly ministrations in order to seal off my verbal parries, "I've been around a little, Steve. Oh hell yes, I might have been a virgin when I married Nickypooh, but since then, I've had my share. Vacuum cleaner salesmen, clerks at the supermarket, delivery boys from the pharmacy, sailors, lifeguards, you name, I've sampled it. I know what I'm talking about, Steve. I don't have any macho image to support, understand?"
I didn't understand, and of course, I couldn't reply-I was leaking like the hull of the Titanic by now-it was flowing over Charmane's well turned knuckles and down her forearm. All I could manage in the way of a response was a simple grunting. It sufficed. She rapped on.
"You see, Steve," she droned, switching her butt on the couch, and leaning into me, "Nickypooh was and still is a one squirt a night man. To understand what that means to a polyorgasmic pussy like me you have to be able to relate it to your own sickening sexual drives. How 'bout this for example. What if I were to just stop what I'm doing right now and take a nice leisurely yawn, and then go off to the toilet for a few hours? How would you like that action, Steve? How would you like to have me pull that sort of stunt on you, and leave with your plumbing all clogged up with clumps of pressurized cum? That would be awful nasty, wouldn't it?"
She paused, and let go of my twittering dick for a few seconds to let the physical reality seep in it worked like a charm-I started whining like a stuck pig. Mercifully, she gave me a hot chuckle, and replaced her slick fingers on my master control knob and dialed in a nice frequency.
"That is the horrors, isn't it, Stevie? Well, that's exactly what its like for me when Nicky squirts after I've only hit number Two or even number Three. My tubes are clogged, my clit twitches and burns, my flaps are left hanging out to dry and whither, and I feel like an unflushed John. Now you figure it out, deary. You mentioned the use of the tongue and fingers. Fine. Just one problem. It takes a certain amount of skill with those appendages to equal the effect of one average slab of male pork, and most of the fellows I've sampled are far and away mere children when it comes to the fine art of fingers and tongues. There is another approach, however, a very exciting one that often turns the trick without having to resort to the tongue, the vibrator, or the fabled finger."
She grabbed my nose with her free hand, and forced me to stare into her grinning face. I struggled with a reply.
"What might that be?"
"Oh dear," she mocked me, "Must I tell you dirty stories too? Isn't it clear from what I said to Nick when he was interrogating me after the 'attack'?"
"No. Nothing's clear to me Charmane. You're very vague as a matter of plain fact, and I'm get ting a bit tired of it."
Where I mustered the nerve to make such a brash statement I'll never know, but the response it elicited from the broadly grinning and greasy palmed Mrs. Pervis was worth eighteen visits to the Sultan's Helmet.
"Vague, eh?" she said, dropping her greenrouged lids over her blueeyes, "Well, Mr. One Squirt, see how clear I can be when I want to be."
She let go of my arched and thoroughly sopping tool and stood up quickly, popping open her top as she rose, and strutting out to the center of the room, wearing nothing but her heels and her Toreador pants.
"They say on a clear day you can see forever," she laughed, stepping out of the flare-legged Frederick's erection getters, and turning her backside to me. Charmane gave her head a twist, looked over her shoulders at me and winked, and then threw her torso forward, touched her toes, squatted deeply, bringing her hands up to her asscheeks, gave a hard pull, and exposed a polished, gleaming, pink, puckered ring to my sweating eyes.
I bellowed out at the ceiling in primate rectal fixation. Now at last I understood the lack of cooperation we had had from our victims. Now at last I understood why there was never a description of Shitty Dick. I understood why none of the victims ever referred to their "abuser" in hostile terms, how they faked it for him, how they served his purposes when they came into our hands, how they lied for him and protected him.
Charmane ground her butt in an inviting, hypnotic circle, energetically flexing her rectal opening like a great winking pink and brown cow's eye. It seemed to beckon me, calling out for penetration, crying for brutal thrusting, for degrading treatment.
"Look into it, Steve," Charmane whispered, "Isn't it lovely? Doesn't it make you hot looking at it? It's tight, Steve. Christ, you know its got to be tight-it's only been punched one. Once is not enough Steve, not after you've tasted it. What are you waiting for, honey? This is your chance to make your One Squirt do some good. Oh, Christ almighty, get off your ass and lick my butt!"
Commands like that are not easily ignored. Commands on that order are considered carefully, and then instantly obeyed. I hobbled off the couch, tripping over my own slacks, and wound up with my face in Charmane's asshole, nose first.
"Mmmmmmmmmhhh, good eatin'" she whispered, slowly rotating her pink butt, mashing it against my face, slipping the flexing, pinching sphincter over my nose and the pressing back to achieve partial penetration.
I worked with cool instinct. I had been enlightened greatly by her "confession" of anal addiction, and now I had only a single responsibility. The responsibility that I owed to my own shrieking glands and my own hardcore Id-I had the responsibility to spray my wild oats.
The initial repulsion was quickly overcome as Charmane had the presence of mind to keep a clean butt-she had evidently spent many tedious hours in the powder room, polishing, depilitating, deep cleansing, and finally perfuming her exhaust pipe for such treatment. I worked teeth and tongue, wallowing in the nipping, rubbery orifice. It squeaked in freshness against my teeth. I lapped the moist interior of her thighs, and made a trail of hot oral slop all up and down her central cranny, lingering in gourmet heat at the anal aperture, the rosette rectum, the primal pooper-the pinnacle and seat of her arousal.
In one afternoon of sensuous mindlessness, under the brutal ministration of a notorious rapist, Charmane had discovered a whole new erogenous world. Evidently, the wisdom of Shitty Dick was founded upon his choice of unwilling, and highly virginal victims. Their frustrations were heavy cargo for them to carry about with them-when Shitty Dick finally arrived on the scene, it was as if they were liberated and violated in one fell stroke of Chance.
They suffered no guilt-they had not invited him to do his nasty deed-but they did profit grossly from the experience. They had their cake, and ate it too. They were not murdered, only forcefully initiated into novel, sensuous practices-a new zone of zealous titilliation was opened up to them by their encounter with the violent intruder. They profited from the experience by learning a new game that they could use to entice their hubbys and lovers into that Second Effort, that all important Second Squirt.
Great hostility and great hunger motivated me as I worked my tongue up into Charmane's quality intestinal tract. She encouraged me with more verbal hardcore, appealing to the fetishism inherent in my animalistic male soul.
"Deeper, Steve. Pretend its a pussy. Pretend that there's an Oreo cookie in there and you're about two years old and hungry as hell. Get anal Steve. Get into it. Dig for that cookie, baby."
No male needs more than the merest glimmer of verbal stimulus to be turned into a modern model of ancient rape and pillage proficiency at the forced arts. Her words entered my ears, and began to eat away at the civilized sheath of Honky morality that protected the world at large from the Hun within. Images of concentration camps, burning martyrs, fields dessicated by drought, towns immersed in rampaging flood waters filled the area between my ears, and I attacked with renewed zeal.
She enjoyed it. She absolutely was wallowing in the depravity of it all. She called for more brutal, more inventive action.
"Do it, Steve. Do anything you want. I'm on Number Three right now, and they're cumming one right after another. Forget your badge, forget Nick, forget the heat, and forget about Shitty Dick for once."
That was all I needed. A reference to the Source itself-the well spring of Neo-Nazi anality and the Mother of Intestinal Invention. I bit into Charmane's asscheek and drew blood, and then I rose up from the floor and my knees.
I placed my hand on her wet back and gradually trailed upwards, till I had her neck in my grip. I turned her around by the neck, and brought her face a few inches away from my swollen crotch.
"Mmmmmmmm," she moaned, briefly looking up from her cramped posture. God only knows what she saw in my face. Perhaps a gorilla, perhaps an amoeba, perhaps only the merest shadow of the man she had known as the loyal partner of her husband. Whatever she saw, it had a tremendous effect on her appetite, for she immediately set to licking and tonging my sausage like a starved Nazi in a concrete bunker with only his Luger to keep him company.
Charmane was skilled in the oral arts, there's no doubt about that. What puzzled me was why her husband had spent so much time in the massage parlors with such an avid and hungry partner waiting at home. Then it struck me. He had deprived her of her anal arousal. His chickenshit morality prevented him from acting out his Shitty Dick fantasies with her until it was too late, and he had already shortcircuited, probably to the point where he was beyond repair. If only he had known the key to her sensuous nature. Such a waste. I grabbed Charmane's ears, and slipped her eight solid inches, down the gorge, and began to pump furiously.
"Unnnnunghhh" she moaned piteously, enjoying the forced aspects of the pleasant suburban scene nearly as much as myself. I thrashed wildly into her slick throat, loving every minute of it, how she winced and twitched each time the bulbous end of my trained warthog rammed into her vocal chords and caused her to gag and moan again.
I continued to pummel into her head, and when I felt her hands creeping up my butt and beginning, to toy with the fabulously erotic area between my asshole and my dangling eggs, I let go of her ears, and bent slightly to discard the slacks that lay bunched up around my ankles. I used the heel and toe technique to get rid of my shoes, and then, at long last, I was ready for her to return the favor.
I brutally wrenched her off my inflamed pork with my fingers, on her jewel decorated earlobes, and then I spun around, touched my own toes, and screamed at the top of my lungs. "Suck my butt, whore!"
I clamped my eyes shut and waited for the flicking of her tongue across the virulently blistered surface of my prostate. I waited with fingers tearing my own buttcheeks apart for the sweet sensations of her teeth nibbling at my hemorrhoids and lesions. I waited, and I waited, and finally, I heard her giggling like a three year old.
"What the fuck's wrong with you, Charmane?" I asked, "Turnabout's fair play, eh?"
"Are you kidding, Narsky?" she replied, "You think I'm going to touch that Cro-Magnon pit with my dentures? You out of your mind or something?"
I was stunned. I had been at the very height of arousal. I felt like choking her to death, like bawling, like tearing the carpeting up with my teeth.
"What's wrong? I did it for you, now you do it for me."
"Fat chance, Narsky. Once I touch that sick sore of yours with my tongue, everything in your system will squirt out all at once. I'm not wasting my time with a vibrator anymore. I know how to handle you One Squirt cavemen. Jesus Christ, Steve, I can see your fucking prostate from here. It looks like a grapefruit. That's really unhealthy. I don't intend on letting my insides rot like that from frustration. I'm going to have my cums, then you'll have yours."
She was so sure of herself. She was so certain she had the handle on a healthy lifestyle for swinging singles. I'd show her.
I turned around and slapped her across the face with my dick, and liking the sound of wet meat against soft, pink cheek, I grabbed the base of my dick between my fingers and really gave her a going over. She loved it, giggling and laughing, trying to catch my pork in her wide open mouth, lashing out at it with her tongue. It infuriated me. It made me see red. I grabbed for her earlobes again, caught them, and forced her to stand up.
"All right, Ms. Masters and Johnson, turn around and touch your toes. I'm going to drill it up your ass till it pops out of your jaws."
She gave a little snicker of teasing approval, looked at me over her slinky shoulder once again, and bent down, and spread her asscheeks wide as a barn door. I buried myself up to the hilt on the first stroke. It lifted her off the carpets and drove her face into the shag. By the time I was on the first backpeddle, she had a mouth full of shredded carpeting, and was shaking her tail like an exercise machine.
"Deeper, Steve. Touch ground," she called out feebly, relishing the feeling of having her ass stuffed to the brim with spicy warthog flesh. The sight of her and the sound of her moaning approval of my entrance touched off a hailstorm of repressed sensual hatred in my sick system. I began to flail into her rear end with awful, hooking shots to the kidneys. She would remember this anal impalement long after I had gone. She wouldn't be able to flail into her rear end with awful, hooking shots to the kidneys. She wouldn't be able to walk properly for a month if I was to have my way with her.
I placed my palms under her tight belly and lifted her ass higher to get more friction on the backstrokes, and then, when she was adjusted to this position, and was happily rotating in counter motion to my own corkscrewing thrusts, I began to twiddle her dripping clit with both hands. This lit her fire. She went into a true chimpanzee mating frenzy, writhing, umpaled on my ever-swelling snake like a hog on the barbeque rack.
"Ohhhh, fucking Christ, not even He did that! Ohhh, shit, that feels divine, Steve. Rub momma's twat while you ream her asshole. Harder!"
She was again wallowing in it, and I must say, Charnane was the best I'd ever had on the obscene side of life. No one had her imagination, not even the embittered and thoroughly thrashed Wanda at the Sultan's Helmet. Charmane had been brought over the edge of decency by her experience with Shitty Dick, and I had to take my hat off to him, motherfucker that he was.
I cringed deeply at this insight, fully aware that it was this sort of admiration that had ruined Pervis. And now, Christ, I was actually following right in his footsteps, or pricksteps, with his own wife. Shitty Dick had had a powerful effect on the three of us, along with his coundess other victims. It was possible that the man had something going for him, something quite similar to the success some Hollywood producers have in picking and choosing amongst projects to find out Which one strikes the lowest common denominator-the Exorcist Syndrome-the Leukemia Neurosis Syndrome-and the highly profitable Burning Building Syndrome being perfect examples. Shitty Dick preyed upon early toilet training flaws in the community character. Shitty Dick was sharp-he knew the media, and how to use it.
I was in the process of doing my own form of in depth study in media relations-plumbing the wrinkled and contracting matrix of mucus membrances that served as the nutrient bath for my hungry rectal rhino. Just as the fish takes to water, as the bird to the skies, as the Chimpanzee takes to the tallest and most succulent of trees, so I was in my natural, ecological niche-Charmane's twisting rump. It was a place of respite from the contradictions of the working world....
Here there was no shouting, sacrastic Milhaud. Here the scrape racers and the pimpmobiles faded and fragmented into idiot visions of welfare grubbing-cheap wine flowed through the Saturday Night of my mind as my lips thickened, my hair matted and snarled into the primal brillo, and the flavor of warm barbeque sauce wafted up from Charmane's glistening back. The deep, rhythmically syncopated bass notes sounded each time I met with her intestinal tract on my forward passage, and as I slammed into the buried pink cushion of flesh, my niche pinched down cooperatively on the root of my being, and milked away each of my irriating, worldly cares....
It was a kind of wicked epiphany-a unique and bold blending of utter hatred and timeless affection. The semi-forced aspects of our living room antics had more than compensated for Charmane's frustrations-she was beyond counting, beyond the quantitative measure of satisfaction-she let me know it in her subtle verbal style.
"Hose in my asshole, deary. Ohhhhhh, yesss, mmmmmmmmhhhh, sock it to me, flush my butt, spray hot kwats in there, Steve, and put out my fire."
The renewed oral hardcore brought me back out of my hallucination of Negritude and media blitzing, and brought to the surface the ancient, honorable Neanderthal spraying fixation. Charmane wildly rotated her ass, bent over in the football lineman's posture, with left knuckles on the carpet, and right hand free to rip at the opposing tackle. Kindly, instead of flailing her right forearm into the mythical tackle's stubby jaw, she deftly brought her right hand up underneath me, between her legs, and proceeded to twist on my scrotum.
"Shit, fuck, piss, Stevie, they must weigh a good pound and a half. Come on, stud, spray that greasy load!" she commanded, beginning to squeeze and yank on the delicate soft boiled eggs till the pressure in my tubing was unbearable.
The vibration of her skilled fingers on my storehouse of seeds was like the proverbial cold slap in the face. I snarled with depraved meat lust as the gates of my sperm bank slowly parted and the first shock troops began to line up at the rear cargo doors, waiting patiently for their Captain to bellow the fateful command, and the battle cry of the Airborne division-Geronimo.
"Geronimo!" I screamed at the ceiling with eyes clamped shut and teeth bared in primate girl greed, "Geronimo, you slimy sack of shit," I continued, brought to another irrational peak of sensuous imagining by my own lack of inhibition. I planted my feet firmly, wiggled my wet ass, grabbed ahold of Charmane's tight and slippery waist, and then I pulled myself free with one grunting effort.
The popping, slurping noise was music to my ears, music that completely drowned out Charmane's agonized howl of brute frustration.
"Oh, horseshit!" she screamed, with a bitter tear in her voice, "You nauseating, semidysfunctioning asshole. How could you? How could you interrupt such bliss, you chickenshit moron? Stick it back in for God's sake, you sadistic gay lib bastard. I need a hosing so bad I can taste it."
I knew she needed that hosing, but after the One Squirt put downs, after the nearly endless series of castrating innuendos, the sarcastic tirade of polyorgasmic, feminist cliches, I was not about to be told where I should spray. If I have but one squirt to give for my species, I thought, then I alone shall determine which orifice shall receive the blessing.
Accordingly, I took control of the situation in the time-honored fashion, grabbing onto Charmane's reddened earlobes with my dual Monkey Grip, I spun the bad-mouthing bitch over on her back, and then wrenched her partially back up to the kneeling posture. She looked up and gave me big, pleading cow eyes.
"Oh no, Steve," she mumbled, shaking her head as best she could, tossing her blonde locks about in pathetic little quivers of hysteria, "Not that. I can't take it again. It's obscene. It's disgusting. It's the worst kind of macho piggery. I never let Nicky squirt in my face. Please, Steve, think of me as a person, not a sex object...."
I cut her off in midstream with a bellow of laughter. Oh my fucking god, she was begging for a missionary style climax! It would be a great pleasure to deny her the favor. This was to be the ultimate triumph of the one squirt mentality. I snickered and coughed loudly, and began to slap my stained steak across her cheeks as she went into a catatonic babbling.
"Not that Steve. No, anything but the cum shot. I'm not some porno star, willing to take whatever comes up. Not me Steve. I need fulfillment. I need a little tenderness...."
I laughed in her face, and then growing inflamed by her piteous appearance, I pried open her gagging jaws and fed her my drooling helmet. She feebly lapped at it, still shaking her head, trying desperately to pinch off her nostrils with one hand. I was having none of that. I slapped her hand out of the way, and pressed forward, from the knees, snickering as the length of my torpedo sank into her boiler room.
"Narghhphlumph," she gagged as I gyrated my hips and began a teasing, slow withdrawal of the root, fiercely twisting at her earlobes all the time. I reached downward, picked up her limp arm, and stuffed her hand into my crotch. She latched on to my balls with her fingers and began the instinctive squeezing.
The double titillation had a marked effect-my temperature rose another degree or so, and my spray equipment began to boil and bubble in randy readiness. Charmane's unique position allowed her to gauge the closeness of my climax, and she began to secrete bitter tears of hatred and degradation as the tubing stretched out her cheeks and throat. There was nothing she could do now except to speed the inevitable on its course. If I had my druthers, I would have prolonged the agony for hours, forcing her to wolf hot sausage for an interminable length of time, and then finishing her off with both barrels square in the back of the head.
She could surmise my attitude easily enough by the fashion in which I chose to deliver the parting shot. She reacted by planting her free hand in my asscrack, and inserting three full fingers deep into its mysterious and swollen depths-the choice was hers, she opted for the classic rape victim's posture-the best defense is a good offense, let the bastard squirt.
I didn't give a flinging damn anymore. The pressure had built up to the point of complete NeoFascist frenzy. My scrotum felt like twin basketballs in her hot mitt, and the lead Phazer felt like a swollen storm drain buried in her sloshing face. The second her nails began to explore the convoluted surface of my prostate, I let fly, pulling out in mid-contraction to shower her with pints of steaming spinal fluid.
"Nargh," she gasped as the first gusher splattered against her soft pallet and began to recoil and flow out of her flared nostrils and down over her chin. I reveled in the authenticity and grittiness of the classic hardcore tableau. If I had had my presence of mind, and had brought along my SX-70, I could very well have become quite rich and famous from that afternoon. I could have made eightby-ten glossies of the polaroid snaps and sold them under the counter at Adult bookstores the length and breadth of Hollywood Blvd. So classic and terminally debauched was the cum shot that I'm sure each print would have garnered a minimum of ten dollars for me, cash on the barrelhead.
The contractions came one after another, and Charmane soon fell desperately far behind in her ability to wolf the goo down-it flowed down her chin and over her bubbling breasts from out of her mouth and her dribbling nostrils and still it came onward, and out of the end of my uncontrollably pulsing pipe. She was nearly drowning by the time the last curds oozed out of the chewed up end of my sex snout, her hair daintly shimmering with beads of clotted yeech, her hands soaked in it, and her face and torso shimmering with rapidly crusting strings of primeval slop.
I did slow deep knee bends when I was finished, dragging the limp tumor over Charmane's babbling face, allowing her to lap up all of the table scraps she could manage. She wolfed greedily, now pleasantly satisfying the tremendous hunger that had built up in her after the day's exertions. When she was finished, she wiped her chin on the carpet, grabbed one of my socks and scoured inside her nostrils for potentially clogging residues, and then, with a deep sigh, she lay back on the rug and began to twiddle gently at her unused flaps.
I headed straight for the toilet and took a long, very cramped pee, and washed my face. I didn't bother to look in the mirror, deathly afraid of seeing a strange mug staring back at me through a mask of stretched nylon hose. I padded back out into the living room and prepared to dress myself, and head out on the streets in hot pursuit of the anal assailant.
"Why don't you give up, Steve?" Charmane whispered huskily from her posture on the floor, now lying with raised and open flexed legs, one finger making tiny, squirmy noises as it danced upon her grossly distended central nub, "Why don't you just admit it to yourself, that you, Nicky, your boss Milhaud, none of you are any different from Shitty Dick? You're all made out of the same, ass-fucking, baby-raping raw material. Why not just own up to it? Let him go, Steve. He's just acting out all of your sick male fantasies. You need him, Steve, you and the rest of your pathetic, limp pals."
I didn't like the tone of that comment. I should have gotten some wet towels out of the bathroom and tied Charmane up to the lighting fixture on the ceiling and given her a sound thrashing with my belt. I should have, but instead, I snarled, pulled up my slacks, zipped up, and walked over to her barefoot and placed the naked sole of my right foot on her belly and began to press.
"Yeah?" I sneered, "Sez you, baby. I sez Steve Narsky always gets his man. How do you like them apples, baby?" I asked, pressing downward for emphasis.
Charmane gagged, and then giggled.
"You're funny, Steve," she laughed, "Such a blatant hyprocrite. Fucking your best friend's wife. Fucking her up the ass, just like the rapist you're trying to catch, and then, to top it all off, forcing her to suck your slimy cock in the final moment. You're sick, Steve, just as sick and dangerous as that guy who nailed me yesterday. You've got no more right to put him in jail than anyone else. You both belong in an institution. Put him under the classification anal, and put yourself in under the oral pigeonhole. Two peas in a pod, if you ask me.
She winked at me, and made the familiar gesture with forefinger and thumb that implied I should go straight to the toilet and whack off. I didn't need that shit, but I was pretty relaxed after the tremendous relief of built up tensions I had just enjoyed, so I didn't follow through with the kick to the gut she deserved. I just sniggered at her.
"Snart, hargrgh," I growled, turning away after lifting my foot off her tight tummy, "You forget, Charmane, this is a business just like any other that I'm in. If I don't deliver the goods, I don't get that fat bonus at the end of the year. If I deliver the goods too soon, then the Department has to make adjustments, and lay fellow workers off. If that happens, I'm a pariah-they'll never let me back on the force. If s a delicate situation, buddy, and my delicate orbs are hanging in the balance, and I don't intend on hanging them out to dry," I finished, pointing at my crotch with a firm finger.
"Well," she replied with a shrug of the shoulders, "I certainly hope they let you keep your balls, even if you can't find your pal and soul brother out there by Friday. But if they lay you off, feel free to come by any time to cry on my shoulder, Stevie."
I slipped on my jacket and sat down to tie my wingtips. I'd be by again, she had nothing to worry about concerning that, but I wanted to pay my return visit on my own terms, not with hung head and tail between my legs. I wanted to return with pride swelling my soul, with Shitty Dick just a notch on my gun butt. She'd receive the hosing of her life when I had my man safely ensconced in his reserved cell on Death Row....
CHAPTER EIGHT
Needless to say, after the strain and the activity, the day was entirely shot to hell. It was almost five-thirty by the time I had dressed and left the Pervis home to get back into my wounded car and make the long drive back to my apartment in East Hawaiian Gardens.
I had never felt so thoroughly drained and soothed in my lifetime. I had to hand it to Charmane, she had every reason in the world to thank her lucky stars that Shitty Dick had decided in his infinite wisdom to pay her that initial visit. She had been loosened up to the heights of sensual adaptation, and she was enjoying a whole new region of exciting, novel, and satisfying stimulation. I was just the first lucky guy in what would probably be a long chain of anal adventurers in her classy canal.
To be sure, she had been raped, and I'll be the first to admit that I followed suit, and kept true to form with the forced cum shot routine. Brutal, hypocritical, yes indeed, heaven known the slick and sassy little lady had hit the nail right on the head in her appraisal of my fundamental drives. But, in the long run, one might ask, so what?
That's right, friends, so what? So she enjoys a little forced aggravation of the body's tenderest zones. Didn't I enjoy it too? Isn't enjoyment the secret to a long and healthful life? Of course. Everyone worth his weight in vibrators will tell you that it's the truth, especially in this slimy, promiscuous era of our nation's bold history. The contradiction comes about when one sees that being forced to do anything runs contrary to the basic tenents of the liberated, freedom loving lifestyle. It just doesn't seem to fit in-why should swinging, sensuous individuals get off on dredging their Ids and degrading one another by forcing themselves to commit repulsive acts of brutal, sadistic, rapistic animalism?
Simple, especially when one has just succeeded in pulling off a classic cum shot into the face of a gagging, shuddering victim. It gets those deepseated psychic rocks rumbling in their ancient sockets. It works miracles for re-establishing the basic patterns of brute existence in an era that is inclined to wallow and nibble at the upturned toes of the interior decorator. That's the slick truth, friends. We're so lost in our mod consciousness that we really don't know which way we're coming or going, not even in the marital sack, or in the quiet peace of the dimly lit massage parlor.
It's nauseating to see the personal ads in the underground papers, the endless columns of "slaves" erstwhile successful and stable males who offer themselves to dominant females interested in cross-dressing, heavy B&D, Water Sports and the like-males who are so unsure of their own identity that the only time they can really feel secure is when they are in their rubber panties, licking the shit off the shoes of their haughty, black vinyl clad mistresses.
Sickening, eh? Of course it is. Makes a red blooded go-getter whine with rage and hysteria against the tide of unisexual debauchery that runs rampant through all the subcultures of our quickly rotting social system. There's a cure, of course. Not too many have the courage to face up to it, but it's there, for the taking.
Shitty Dick knows the cure-that's why he makes headline news with each new conquest. That's why the local news gives him at least a full ninety seconds per night when he's been inactive, and the lead-off story every time he strikes again. Shitty Dick knows what's happening out there in the sleepy suburbs. He knows that gals like Charmane Purvis are in the toilet all day long, rubbing that hot vaseline over their gushy flaps, inserting their vibrators, their fingers, anything that is longer than it is wide up into their foxholes, reaching for Number Four, straining for Number Five, climbing the walls and coating the ceilings with crusty female starch when Number Six comes thumping up out of their bellies and sets the lights on red behind their eyes....
Shitty Dick, the subhuman superstar. He knew exactly what the folks out there wanted to see, and Shitty Dick delivered. The folks craved a little solid action, a return to primal form, back to basics-Shitty Dick gave them the Cro-Magnon sensibility, and thus he deserved their undying gratitude, their applause, the constant attention lavished on him by the hairsprayed newsmen who followed his stained trail of rectal abuse throughout the city.
There was the feigned protest, of course. Kristine Hundt repeatedly referred to him as the "ultimate chauvinist pig," much as Charmane had referred to me before the completion of the act in the living room. It was lip service, friends, mere feminine guile to bring the beast out of his lair. I wonder whether or not there was any logical sequence between the strident editorials by the hip Ms.
Hundt and the activities of Mr. Dick? I'd have to check on that.
No matter how much the lady doth protest, once she is impaled, wriggling on the meaty hook of her brutal male, her cries seem vainglorious, mere superfluous nonsense compared to the crystalline re-affirmation of basic truth the impalement broadcasts to all who care to watch, or partake in by themselves. Yes, that is the point. Shitty Dick helped heal the wounds of our shattered sexual consciousness. He reaffirmed the ancient role playing in the simplest, most gritty style. All who watched the news, all who read the papers, all of the housewives who peered through the slits in their venetion blinds, trembling, waiting with short breath for the dreaded, and yet secretly craved breaking of the glass marking the entrance of the faceless Violator, all instinctively knew the essential value of his daring role. He was the CroMagnon reborn, and the Primal Ancestor of all of us, cringing in our doubleknits, unsure of whether or not we are male or female. In Shitty Dick, we stared at the brute himself, the self-confident Stalker, the Hunter, the rabid penetrator of the poopchute.
His mystical effect on suburban consciousness had been proved to me beyond a doubt by now. As I torqued in the Dodge down the left lane of the freeway heading for the interchange, I was sure I had the handle on him. I had seen how he had changed Nick Pervis into a Storm Trooper of Sensuality, how he had wreaked havoc on the sensibilities of Charmane, conditioning her in one fell swoop to permanent anal addiction, and I had seen how effective his techniques were in relieving my own grotesque burden of repressed rage and frustration.
I had to hand it to him, the nameless maniac had class. He deserved the attention he got, and it was little wonder that with so very many subconscious allies as he had out there in Television Land, that he was a mighty tough critter to bring to justice.
My job remained at stake, however, and along with my job hung the credibility of the Department. I had to bring him in, loathsome as the task now seemed in retrospect. He who served so well as a catalyst of social sensibility, he who martyred himself so that we could all vicariously return together to those wondrous days of yore, before the Dry Look, before the Glitter Look, before the Unisexual Miasma of the sick present, when men were men and women were mere soft holes floating in the humid matrix of space, eager and passive, to be filled with whatever it was that became tumescent in the dank fetidness of night on the floor of the primal cave, it was he whose active career I had to put to an end if I wanted to keep those weekly checks rolling in.
I snapped out of my reverie when a fully loaded semi went into a tasty jacknifing spin to my right and crushed a pair of ground-scrapping sixty-five Chevvies into scrap metal against the right hand lane divider. I wheeled across four lanes of traffic and geeked the curling clouds of thick, greasy smoke rising behind me in the rearview mirror. Just some illegal alien trash, nothing to panic about. They wouldn't even merit a mini-camera report on the news.
I negotiated the tricky interchange at top speed, and then floored the bloated hulk of shit I was driving when I made the ramp onto the Harbor Freeway. It was clear sailing the rest of the way, with the bulk of the traffic heading downtown, cars filled with eager drivers, ready with cash in hand to deal away their lives on the crisp sheets of the East Hollywood massage parlors, to make their seedy connections with the pusher man, to rampage through the unprotected mail boxes of countless apartment houses, seeking that fat social security check which could easily be redeemed for a plump bag of stale Mexican smack....
The sirens would be loud tonight in the big city, but old Steve Narsky was finished for the day. He had done his duty, had established his priorities, cleaned his tubing, and re-assessed the nature of his sworn foe. He was headed home, ready for a nice hot bath, a cool quart of Bud, and a leisurely evening spent first in front of the TV, and then, when his poor dogs were cool, he'd march his polished butt down the street to Sparkle City, the local bar, to pass the night away, quaffing suds, and watching the bare-midriffed and braless teen strumpets strutting their stuff on the dance floor.
If only things would follow my feeblest plans for once, I could relax, and approach the problem with a clear head tomorrow morning.
Little did I know what fate had in store for me. I had been deluding myself sorely all the while I drove, so hypnotized and calm was I in my postcoital siesta. A curve ball began to break in my direction, and I was too soothed, too slowed down and mellowed out to duck....
My off ramp came up shortly, and I motored down the broad, uncrowded lanes with one hand on the wheel and one arm outstretched over the top cushion of the bench seat, cowboy style. I was sitting at the top of the world, enjoying the calm before the storm, the great boiling thunder clouds of certain doom invisible on the smog stained horizon. I should have been alert-I should have realized that the agony was only beginning, that I was headed for the grossest of rude awakenings my state of calm and peace should have been sufficient warning in itself, after all, I was trained to be a suspicious bastard, ever on the trail of trouble, why should it cease to stalk me now? Too Late. The coup had already begun, way back late in the afternoon, no doubt at the precise moment I had achieved my own special form of Satori in Charmane's dripping mouth.
I coasted to the red light, and made the right turn on Enchilada Ave and fishtailed around the corner, steaming straight for home, for the chilled Bud in my refrigerator, for the cool waters of my tub, for the soothing hysteria of the color TV set. I beamed and grinned like a freshly caught trout, eager for the frying pan, the melted butter, the classy place on the plate next to the mound of crisp fries. I had sunk into vegetable consciousness, and I was about to reap the reward for such a lapse in character.
My pecky cedar sheathed apartment complex appeared on the horizon, and I felt the last squiggle of tension leave my body as I floored the pig car and made a beeline for the parking lot. I jumped the curb and brodied to a rest, opened the door, hurling it directly into the side of my downstairs neighbor's station wagon, grinding off the paint down to bare metal, and then I kicked it shut, and with glee, bounded up the wrought iron -lined stairwell to Old Three Thirteen-the homestead.
I went straight for the refrigerator, tearing through the brown lettuce, the clotted clumps of mouldy whitebread and the diseased hunks of BHT soaked baloney and bacon to the back of the shelf where rested the untouched six pack of halfquarts. I stood before the refrigerator and downed one can right on the spot, tore into the next one, and marched out to the living room and turned on the television with a single kick from my right wingtip.
It was early. The news wasn't on yet. They were doing re-runs of last year's top new crime series, "Sty Story," the continuing tale of a mother who had raised fourteen sons to be policemen, her trials and tribulations, the crisis of her menopause, the tragedy and the triumph of each of her brood as they warily left the trough of home, the Sacred Sty where they were nurtured on Law and Order at Mom's greying dugs, and how they fared in the never ending war against welfare chiselers, food stamp suckers, malicious winos, ingrate middleclass marijuana twirps, white-baiting Commie agitators in the ghettoes, all the sundry trash that makes life a morass of unending redtape and paranoia. Just what the folks in suburbia want to see, and deserve to see. A strong, fatherless nuclear family, hell bent on the preservation of order and social stratification-the maintenance of the timeless cheap labor chain, the thin blue line that stands between the two dollar and ten cent an hour bracero termite and the foundations of the split-level condominium in Benedict Canyon.
I switched the stations by remote control and got a tasty shot of an early Merv Griffin kinescope-he was slightly tipsy, and really digging deep in Arthur Treacher's rubbery ribs with all kinds of nasty double entendres about the sexual proclivities of the English serving class. I snorted hot clumps of nasal mucus and poured cold suds down my throat as the senile Briton turned blue with rage, crossing his legs and giving the viewing audience a close-up shot of his fish net nylons and the high heeled women's shoes he was wearing. The stinkin' foreign pervert....
I went round the dial one full time, pausing briefly at the so-called educational TV station to watch in disbelief as a bitch in jackboots with a ducktailed hairdo marched a cadre of uniformed multiracial children around a potted plant, all of them chanting Maoist slogans, and blaming the fern's terminal cause of root-rot on "Imperialist lackies who poison our atmosphere with their gasguzzling Tiger tanks, all for the sake of the filthy dollar." The butch commander then marched in for a close-up and begged the audience to send their tax-deductible contributions to the Beverly Hills Center for the Study of Macrame, Real Estate Zoning, and Class Struggle. I roared with outrage at the sight, spewing hot Budweiser over the carpeting as I yowled and kicked at the remote control device. The fucking nerve of the asslicking Commie perverts! I couldn't believe the FCC allowed such patently vomitous propaganda on the public airwaves. I snapped the set back to the news station, and there was Kristine Hundt, the perfect anchorperson, ranting the pre-show hype.
"Shut your doors, turn off the lights and huddle about your TV sets, ladies and gentlemen," she hummed in her professional, dramatic monotone, "The maniac rapist has struck again! Full details in a moment, and more, including a frightful accident of the Barstow-Tujunga Freeway involving a semi trailer and two, mind you, not one, scrape racin' Chevvies. The gory details, and lots more, weather, sports, mild B&D, Greek, French, and special report from Rex Phlegm on the plight of migrant ass-lickers in the scumbag fleatraps of West Hollywood. Stay tuned."
I froze in my sweat stained slacks. I coughed suds up through my snout and seared my larynx in humiliated rage. Shitty Dick had struck again, a second blow in one week. I was in for it tomorrow morning. Milhaud would be sitting there, waiting for me with my traveling papers and the gelding knife. I would be unfit to take any job other than as janitor for the Beverly Hills Macrame Institute. I wiped the dribbling snot and beer off my upper lip and began to weep bitter tears of emasculated humiliation as some ball-ripping piece of foxmeat demonstrated the use of a hair-removing chemical on the insides of her thighs.
Another commercial segued out of the fox's central duct, and asswipe was being licked and fondled by dotty housewives in the aisles of a supermarket. More mundane crap came on, all of it extraneous, off the mark, out of the question-totally distracting from the real news, the events of the day, the latest notch on Shitty Dick's warty appendage. I blubbered in maniac frustration as the commercial rolled on, prolonging my agony, forcing me to see all that I would never possess once Milhaud had busted me down to toilet licker, and the fat paychecks disappeared for the duration.
Ms. Hundt came back on finally, after the mandatory soul-music segue into the newsroom scene. I listened with reptillian concentration, hunting for clues, for the faint hope of redemption amidst the condemnations and catastrophes of the moment.
"Start practicing your karate, gals, and guys, get the shotguns out of the closets, because the mad rapist is back again, the second time in one week, a new record for the sodomistic sadist. Yes, folks, after six months of intermittent attacks, the darling of the depraved set has broken his own record and scored two victims in one week's time. The first, Charmane Purvis of North Cudahy, is now recovering from gross shock and wounds in the comfort of her own home. As you remember, our Johnny on the Spot, or Johnny on the Pot, if you like, Rex Phlegm, interviewed Lieutenant Milhaud of the Detective's office yesterday and confirmed our suspicions that Ms. Pervis was indeed the wife of one Sgt. Nick Pervis, a detective assigned to the Rapist detail!
"Today's news only compounds the irony of the situation the police find themselves in, for the sodomistic sadist has once again struck behind the lines, this time, where it really hurts. Although the police offer their usual pansy no comment, we at NoseWitness News have learned that the latest victim was none other than Lieutenant Milhaud's own seventeen-year-old daughter, Debbie Milhaud."
I sprayed hot vomit all over my lap and chewed right through the top of my beer can. I stood up and took off my coat and tried to choke myself to death with it on the spot. What was the use? He would simply shoot me down the second I stepped into his office in the morning, and as far as I was concerned, he'd have every right to. Tears of hysteria and mortification ran down my cheeks as I shook and twitched with self-loathing and fear. I had no choice but to listen.
"Lots of citizens are just plain outraged that the police seem to be totally ineffectual in their efforts to nab the nasty marauder, and we here at NoseWitness News feel the same way. We're on your side folks. We don't cotten to ass-raping chauvanist pigs in our neighborhoods, and we've decided to do something about it.
"We sent our own investigative team out today to the degenerate flat lands of West Hollywood to search in the fleatraps and scumbag motels for the anal rapist, knowing full well that such a mindless piece of male-aggressive crud would have to be hiding out near an adult bookstore or a massage parlor. Rex Phelgm headed up the team, and here's his report. Find any stains, Rex?"
The camera beamed in on the sharply dressed and neatly hairsprayed Rex Phelgm, standing in front of the Institute of Anal Lust on Santa Monica Blvd. He began in the high-pitched nasal wail that all of the Nose-Witness Team has perfected to a tee, even the sultry unisexual Ms. Hundt.
"Well, Kristine, we spent the entire day up here in the asshole of the Universe, and I've just got to say right off, you folks living out there in the comfort of Simi and the splendor of West Anaheim, well, you just have no idea how lucky you are. Just take a look behind me. See that? That's deca dence, folks, that's puking Commie social engineering and permissive free-lance dogshit. The Institute of Anal Lust, a perfect front for an assraping son of a bitch like the maniac who nailed the Lieutenant's daughter today. We went inside the Institute, and we went into every fleabag fag bar, every dyke hole, every semi-hip doughnut stand and every service station toilet in the area, looking for the telltale signs of sodomy and forced anal attention.
"We found buckets of slop in the bedrooms of this area. We opened up trashcans and found shit stained condoms stacked three feet deep inside. We visited massage parlors and talked price with the hot chippies inside, and our cameraman Ted Turk even risked venereal disease to have a socalled half-and-half with a pair of spaced-out runaways from Acne, Kansas. We looked in every nook and cranny, and we found pubic hairs, bloody kotexes, empty syringes, roaches, soiled issues of Women's Wear Daily and After Dark, not to mention many a rolled up and half shit-stained copy of the Daily Worker. If we can do it, if Rex Phelgm can do it, why the fuckin' hell can't the goddamned cops do it?
Kristine cut in here for a moment to calm the frothing reporter down.
"Cut the four-letter words, Rex. A lot of our viewers are members of the Big Three, Protestant, Catholic, and Arab, not to mention all of our crippled viewers, the nose-pickers, the twirps, the pansies, the aged, the infirm, ones with boils, warts, lesions, terminal crotch rot, and the like. These folks don't have to be upset while they're busy swilling down their soy extract and their nice, tall glass of refreshing tit juice. What else is new, Rex?
Rex made his famous dryheaving throat scrape and continued on, feathers still ruffled with outrage, but cooler, more collected.
"Christ, Kristine," he began, gesturing wildly to the big neon sign behind him, "It's obvious that the anal attacker is holed up in one of these sordid dens of debauchery, sniveling over his hardcore glossies, his polaroids of his victims, probably he's even watching right now, reveling in the misery and humiliation he's wrought on our community, relishing the pain and confusion he's inflicted on innocent people everywhere. All I have to say to him, if he's listening, is that we're gonna get you, you sickening little jackoff artist. We're following in your slimy tracks, and no matter how long it takes, white American males are going to get you. We're going to hang your sick gourd out to dry, and we're going to parade your nauseating corpse through the streets of Pacoima and Torrance when we've got you. It may take days, it may take weeks, but even if it takes years, remember, you barbarous little bastard, we'll get you, and you'll wish you'd never been hatched out of your egg when we do."
Back to Kristine.
"Coming up, the story of the Last Pachanga. Four illegal aliens, crushed to a revolting pulp beneath the wheels of an out of control truck on the Barstow-Tujunga Freeway. Details after these important words from our sponsors."
The thick, semi-colloidal slop was crusting in my lap as I sat there and listened to the dying echoes of Rex Phlegm's report. There was more than irony at work here. What of Marc Fenton? Did they search his station toilet? Did they find the slinky starlet and the hag, in the midst of their exciting act? How did Marc know that it was from the media that I would get my leads? I began to snarl in unutterable hatred for him, my informant, and the wise-ass way that he had told me to watch the TV news. How did he know the next attack would be coming? How did he know that Rex Phlegm would be covering it in detail, or did he know? Was it a lucky gesture, a wise-ass remark that somehow came true?
I thought, dribbled more barf, and then the phone rang. My heart tried to leap out of my left ear. I knew who it was. I began to blubber again, and walked across the carpet to answer it, as if on my way to the executioner's block.
I picked up the receiver and remained stone silent-I would not assist in my own deserved, but highly undesired assassination.
"Steve? I say, Steve, old buddy?"
My nose twitched in rodent fear-the voice, sweltering and floundering in a thick bath of put-on charm and folksiness though it was, was entirely recognizable as that of Lieutenant Milhaud. He was preparing to both kick me while I was down and to prolong my agony-he was going to give me a complete and highly professional demonstration of the twin American Caucasian fine arts of soul torture. I clicked the thick, heavy heels of my wingtips and wheezed a noncommittal reponse.
"Sssssaaaayyyyy."
I could feel the smile of sadistic delight at the other end of the line. Milhaud puffed himself up, and then poured on the charm.
"Hi, Steve. Say, boy, I sure hope you saw the news tonight. You see what your pal done this time?" he asked, fully aware that I knew what he was talking about, and more than fully aware that I was suffering the heights of incompetence hysteria and the depths of depression and frustration.
He had me with hook set in jaw, and he was yanking his pole.
"Gee, Lieutenant," I smarmed back, "I'm awful sorry about what happened to Debbie, and if there's anything at all that I can...."
He cut me off quickly. It was his show, after all.
"Never mind, Steve. The girl's already coming out of it. She'll have to stay flat on her belly in bed for a week or so, but she can talk now. I'll take the responsibility of getting her story on tape-I think that's only right that the father should hear her story first. Can't argue with that, can you, Steve?"
I wasn't going to argue. AH I wanted to do was have my passport renewed, head for the bank, and take off the next morning for an extended holiday tour of my genetic homeland, Poland. I said nothing.
"Listen, Steve. What I called to tell you is this. Seeing as how we've had two incidents this week alone, I think it's best if you stay out on the streets, actively looking for your man. I don't think either of our purposes will be served if you come in to the station till Monday. Are you following me, Steve?"
I was following like a poodle might follow the scent of Alpo directly into the jaws of a dog-raping wino. Milhaud knew that if I set foot in the precinct office, there was nothing anyone could do to prevent him from using his Magnum on me right then and there. Milhaud was exploiting the time honored skill of defensive driving-he was strategically eliminating the possibility of himself being brought up on charges of abusing another officer to the point of death. The Lieutenant was allowing me full responsibility for bringing in "my man," and at the same time, he was justifying the brutalities he would inflict upon me whence Monday morning rolled around, and I finally showed up, sans Shitty Dick, and sans my own pathetically shriveled and dessicated organ of reproduction. I now understood the coolness of his demeanor.
"Yeah," I said, realizing that tape-recorded grunts do not hold up in a court of law.
"Fine, fine. So tell me, Steve, what do you think of the way the NoseWitness Team got into depth tonight, covering the massage scene, the toilet scene, the Anal Institute scene? Put us to shame, didn't they?"
What was I supposed to do-argue with him? I tried.
"I was up there too, chief. I saw my contact, Marc Fenton, grabbed some hot leads."
I heard a snarl through the receiver that told me Milhaud was at the breaking point, that if the conversation continued much longer, he would be bellowing at me over the phone, roasting my ear with the blowtorch of his hatred.
"That is swell, Steve. I certainly hope those leads turn out to be fruitful come Monday morning. I sure would like to see them bear some fruit. Do you get my meaning, Steve?"
I got his meaning, his sick little puns. He'd turn me into something less highly evolved than a fig or a peach if I showed up empty handed on Monday. I had to admire Milhaud's restraint.
"Sure thing, Lieutenant," I replied, maintaining the vague stance.
"Great, Steve. Did you happen to go by Charmane Pervis's home this afternoon, Steve? Remember, you were supposed to make the courtesy visit on behalf of the precinct. I realize you are busy on the case, but I think it's only proper that you make the visit. After all, Nick was your best friend, not to mention, your partner. Right, Steve?"
"Gee, Lieutenant, I couldn't make it over there today, but I'll try it tomorrow." I said, waiting for the telltale snicker from the unseen Milhaud that would inform me that he had my afternoon escapade down on video-tape, and was replaying it in slow motion for himself at the very moment, on his home equipment, in the den.
"Wonderful, Steve," he snarmed again, his voice soaked in thick, sweet Knott's Berry Farm syrup, "Glad to have such a considerate, sensitive man on the force. Judging from my daughter's condition, Charmane could probably use a heating pad, some nicely boxed chocolates, and maybe even a few slick magazines, you know the type, Beaver, Young and Hung, maybe even People's World, just to keep her mind off the traumatic events of the past few days."
"Sure thing, Lieutenant," I replied, now impatient, nervous, and sure that Milhaud was going to maintain the tension to the end. He would not go apeshit-he would prolong my agony till Monday morning, and then he would unleash the vast reservoir of hostility and rage in one awful flood of bile and spleen.
"Well, Steve, I've got those tapes to make. Never a dull moment in law enforcement, not even at home! You take it easy tonight, old buddy, get your beauty rest, and tomorrow morning, after you've seen to Charmane's needs, you spring out of your corner like a light heavy-weight, and go out there and get your man. You hear me, son?"
I glanced over at the TV set. Kristine Hundt was narrating the accident film, the choice footage of the meat wagons towing away the four charbroiled illegal alien corpses. I grunted in response to Milhaud's sarcastic words of encouragement.
"Good boy. We'll see on Monday morning, then. Good luck. Ten four."
I stood there, vomit and curdled beer running and crusting on my shirt, the receiver buzzing in my hand, the voice of Kristine Hundt attaining the heights of nasal penetration as it evoked minutiae and detail concerning the deserved fate of those who dare to encroach upon our freeways without first attaining the prerequisite status of true citizens.
Milhaud's call had been the kiss of death. The precision timing of events, the tryst with Charmane while Shitty Dick was simultaneously impaling young, pert Debbie Milhaud on his stained organ across town, was beyond the ken of more-or-less normal cognition and tolerance-it bordered upon a psychic phenomenon, a synchronicity that stank to high heaven of conspiracy. Who was out to get me-Shitty Dick? Milhaud? Fenton? Charmane? Wanda? Who the fuck was it? Why me?
I whined out loud, and replaced the phone on its hot pink Princess stand, and went into the kitchen to fetch another beer. I padded humbly across the carpeting to the refrigerator, got my suds, and padded out again to the living room to wallow in the vicarious thrill of NoseWitness journalism. After the news, I would thoroughly re-examine my options. After the news, I would embark upon setting down my own strategy of self-preservation. I would not go down without a fight. I would avenge myself upon the pervert who had caused me so much bitter travail. Death to the Dung stained Dick and all he stands for, I said to myself, as I sat in my chair, unmindful of the puddles of intestinal sewage that lapped about my sweat-socked feet.
Kristine Hundt was delivering the mandatory cute wrap-up story. It was a classic, as one has come to expect of the NoseWitness News Team.
"We have an interesting and heart-warming final story for tonight, Rex, Dr. Fishbreath, fellow members of the Team. It concerns a Dr. Pavel Stenclick of the Tito Institute for the Study Of Primate Hygiene, and his latest invention. It seems that Dr. Stenclick, an expert in the field of that commonplace twentieth century problem, dysfunctioning, has received thousands of letters and cards from drag queens and their burly partners all asking for and demanding some way of making their mating a more authentic parody of the classic, but totally obsolete heterosexual pattern. Dr. Stenclick worked on the problem for months, in his primate laboratory, trying out different solutions-the male Kotex pad, the anal dilator, the hormonal reduction of penile growths and the like. His patients enjoyed them all, but something totally new and profound was sought, something that would give modern gay blades that chilling and tempting sense of fear and imminent disaster that always holds sway in so-called "normal" sexual conquests. Dr. Stenclick believes that he has come up with the answer, in the form of what he calls the Interanal Contraceptive Device, or the Fruit Loop, for short.
"The way it works is simple. Before settling down to nice sweaty night of illicit buttfuckery, the twisted couple must first insert the Fruit Loop deep in the drag queen's asshole. Then, they go about their perverted way with that all important sense of security and conception defying technocratic dependence upon a useless appliance that transfigures their passion into an authentic parody of the basic married couple. Sounds great, doesn't it, Dr. Fishbreath?"
The camera swung over to the good doctor, who avidly picked his nose and flailed his weather pointer about the room.
"Gollygosharooty, Kristine, Fruit Loops for male hormonesexuals! A contraceptive device for those who really have no use for one. That is swell, and it just goes to show how lucky we all are to be living in the twentieth century, with science standing next to our beds, ready to assist us whenever we feel those wimpy urges to dysfunction at the critical moment."
"That's right, Doctor," smiled Kristine, "I don't know how they got along before the invention of the Fruit Loop, but now, rest assured, thanks to Dr. Stenclick, there will be a lot fewer divorces up in Hollywood!
"That's it for the News for now. Stay tuned for a special NoseWitness News Report on Poodle Care for the Crippled, coming right up. For Dr. Fishbreath, Rex Phlegm, and Poteet Smidgen, our Sportsperson, this is Kristine Hundt reminding you to catch us at eleven o'clock when we'll rehash the same garbage over again, dwelling on the nauseating details of the Sadistic Sodomite in depth. For all of us here at the NoseWitness Newsdesk, I say goodnight, and good luck, and for Christsakes, keep your windows and doors shut, keep the TV on, and keep your nose clean, or you'll wind up on the police blotter with a microphone stuck through the bars on your cell door and a NoseWitness Newsperson on your sick case."
I used the remote button to circle the set rapidly a few times, and then I shut off the sound and just let random images of pantyhose, feminine hygiene spray, dog food, asswipe, discount carpeting, Datsuns, and hemorrhoid remedies sock into my smog-wrinkled retinas as I went over my own dilemma in a state of hypnotic confusion.
I had to have a lead, and I had to have one fast. I could be dead wrong, but I was almost certain that the case of Shitty Dick, the Sodomistic Sadist, was more than it appeared to be from my point of view, and even from the point of view of the News people. It wasn't the isolated case of one clever maniac wreaking a trail of ass-pinching terror over the city. He had to be motivated. He had to have inside knowledge of the police operation, of the men assigned to his case. It had to be an inside job.
It certainly wasn't Milhaud. Raping his own daughter? Incestuous anal rape? It was beyond the ken of the imagination, or at least my imagination.
Merc Fenton? Merc had earned himself a thorough investigation by his sarcasm alone. The fact that it was he who had told me to "watch the News" sealed his fate as far as I was concerned if he wasn't the Sadistic Sodomite himself, then he had the inside track on the scurvy bastard and he was thus withholding prized information from the authorities. Merc Fenton had earned himself a visit from me, and that visit was going to be consummated pronto.
I switched off the set and went into the bathroom and ran cold water in the stall shower. I had to freshen up-I had serious thinking to do, and I had even more serious action to take. I wasn't going to sit still and let the forces of chance and conspiracy work together to barbeque my ass. I was going free-lance, tonight, back up to Hollywood, back to see Marc Fenton, back into the turf labelled so clearly as the Asshole of the Universe by Rex Phlegm. I was going to teach Merc a lesson in obedience, and I was out to track down the poopchute pariah at the same time. I would stalk him in his own ecological niche, among the garbage pails filled with used Fruit Loops, the toilets harboring hideous scenes of debauchery, in the sick mauve shadows of the Institute of Anal Lust on Santa Monica Boulevard. He would not escape me-he would not run free to humiliate and degrade another frustrated housewife again. It was up to me, and as the cold water soaked through the crusted barf on my shirt and sluiced it down the drain, I felt up to the task, ready to meet him on his own terms, and ready to make an example of him for the rest of his kind to see.
When I got hold of Shitty Dick, he would learn the fine art of respect. He would learn it, or he would eat hot dum-dums, on the spot, courtesy of Steve Narsky. If Shitty Dick turned out to be none other than Merc Fenton (my first choice), respect would come after the dum-dum din-din. No one had ever fucked with me the way Merc had fucked with me that afternoon, when he turned me on to the sideshow in the service station toilet. If Merc had been a wise-ass the whole time, if he had known that the anal paraside was busy at work while I fucked about looking through the keyhold, and in spite of it all he had failed to warn me, embarrassed me, humiliated me, risked my job for the sake of prolonging my agonies over capturing the slimy cretin, then Marc Fenton was headed for a short, brutal end.
If Merc was innocent, however, if he had only a premonitiion, or worse, had made a lucky guess that the shit-sucking ass-fucker was going into action that very afternoon, and the results of his actions would be reported that night on the news as a mere matter of course, well then, the most I could do would be to jam a high pressure air hose up his ass and give him a taste of his own, practical joke style medicine. If Merc was innocent, I was in deep trouble again, for I would be no closer to the truth, no closer to getting my man, no closer to saving my ass on Monday morning.
CHAPTER NINE
Pulling off the ramp of the freeway onto Sunset I had to make a vital decision as to my approach should I hit Merc Fenton head on with a wingtip to the crotch and ask questions later, or should I opt for the more-orless standard wormy approach, perfected by the legion of brute authoritarians who had preceded me on the force-the ultimate choice might have great bearing on my success or failure, and the choice was entirely up to me.
I reached the corner where the station sat, pulled the Dodge over to the curb, doused the lights and contented myself with mere observation for a while. The station still had its lights on, and there was quite a crowd of passing cars, but none were at the pumps guzzling high octane Arabian juice. Merc had metal drums blocking off the pumps, a clear enough warning to the out of gas yahoo to stay clear. The service bays were empty as well, except for Merc's own lowered and primered sixty-five Riviera. Merc had the same taste in automobiles that he had in his sensual preferences the sleazier, the better.
He was nowhere in sight. It didn't surprise me in the least. To be sure, in the case of a creature like Merc Fenton, the nose, not the eyeball is the proper organ of sense to put into play for purposes of detection. Accordingly, I lowered the window on the Dodge, extended my head outside, lowered my eyelids, and sniffed-ah, misery, amidst the flow of noxious hydro-carbons, the heavy molecules of overcooked Big Mac's, and the predominant scent of vaginal mucus, there it wafted, the precision flavoring often called reptilian musk, that of aged and cultured penile drippings, the primal scent of the male lizard as it slinks about at ankle level-the odor of cock cheese, that of smegma.
He was there allright, probably out back next to the toilet glory hole, watching the hag finishing off the starlet for the evening with a toothpick, removing the wads of pubic hair from betwixt her stumpy dentures. If I knew Merc, that was exactly where he was. I made my move, opening the cardoor, locking the beast, feeling for my revolver beneath my lapel. I skipped across Sunset like a gleeful sailor on shore leave in Bombay, his wallet stuffed with green, his eyes and mind fixated on twelveyear old vegetarian butthole. The Hindu Hots. The Brahmin Buggery Urge. No one would have expected anything less from my appearance, bedecked as I was in touristic doubleknits and tie, with freshly polished, heavy brown shoes. I slinked into the station, and began to inch my way around its perimeter toward the toilets.
There were two of them in front of the toilet. Merc was easy to spot, his facial scales glimmering in cold lust-rage in the artificial light, a cloud of lizard stench surrounding his head as he leaned against the whitewashed wall, picking his teeth with the tang of a small bastard file. The other fellow was actively dryhumping against the doorknob as he watched, occasionally pausing to turn his face up to the bored and shuffling Merc's to express his heart felt thanks at being allowed the opportunity to observe such classic nastiness. I strained to listen, and was rewarded minimally.
"Take it easy now Ted," Merc whispered, "It's gonna be awhile before she sluices. They been at it all day, you understand."
The observing one glanced briefly up at Merc. "Shit on stick, Merc, you gotta let me come back and get this on tape."
Merc gave him a blunt nasal snort. "Anytime, Ted, anytime. Just like I told you, the shows's twenty bucks, and another twenty per hour if yer tapin' it. I got plenty more class acts for ya too, come out of the same toilet, I might add."
Ted? Who the fuck was Ted. Certainly not your everyday closet moron, out for some keen toilet action. No, Ted had all the marks of the big time. The Gucci workshirt, the French jeans with the elaborately done stitching on the rump that spelled out "success" in screaming tones to anyone hip to the chic levi scene in the uppercrust of our tailspinning society. They were one hundred fifty dollar numbers, imports from flit dominated Paris, purchased abroad, perhaps, purchased in Beverly Hills probably. Ted was no common turkey.
Turkey? Ted Turkey? Was that the name Rex Phlegm had mentioned. The name of the cameraman who had risked the health and safety of his reproductive apparatus for the sake of the NoseWitness News in the massage parlor? The one who had endured the "half-and-half treatment at the hands of the runaways from Acne, Kansas? Was this Ted Turk? What was he doing hanging around with the likes of Merc Fenton? What the fuck was going on, anyway? I decided to make my appearance, to show my hand. I stepped boldly out of the shadows, and tripped over a compressor line, shattering the fabric on my slacks and making one knee into strawberry jam.
"Look what just crawled out of the woodwork, Ted," Merc said as I hobbled up to the pair of perverts, clenching my teeth in agony, and holding my badge forth in one hand. "Look at that sucker. What the fuck you want Steve? You comin' round to roust me again?"
I didn't want to hear Merc's defensive whine. I cut him off.
"Who's your asshole buddy here, Merc?" I asked, finally able to stand up straight, but still wincing formidably in acute pain.
"Aw, shit, Steve. I let you look for free. This is one of my paying customers. You ain't gonna try and ruin my side business, are you?" he pleaded, shuffling like the nitwit hillbilly he was. I turned to the other man, and fired on him.
"Got ID, creep?" I squirted, turning my palm open in front of his pocked and sweating nose. He dug deep, and handed me his sealed driver's license. I pushed his hand to one side with a snort.
"Don't gimme that shit. I need some real ID. You got Mastercharge? You got BankAmericard?"
He went on the offensive, lisping like a parvenue in financial heat at the Turkish border, his trunk stuffed with White slaves.
"Will American Express do?" he lisped, putting on the style for his degenerate buddy, no doubt.
I grabbed the card and read it. Theodore Turk. Ted for short. Ted Turk, member in good standing of the NoseWitness mobile team, headed up by Rex Phlegm. My own nose was working overtime. I had a connection. I wasn't about to blow it.
"You the same Ted Turk that was up here this afternoon with the TV crew, filming the lowlife, making snotty, vicious comments about law enforcement officers?" I asked, rubbing the blunt end of my wingtip over his shin to show him that I meant business.
"Yessir, that's me," he quipped, winking broadly at Merc. I gave him a gentle kick below the knee to remind him of his manners. He snarled in pain and rage as he massaged his expensively sheathed patella with his hands.
"What the fuck you doing staring into the women's toilet at this gas station in the company of a known pervert?" I didn't mince words. I wanted him on the defensive.
"Gee whiz, officer," he whined, fiercely grimacing as the needles of pain made their way up his thigh into the pit of his puking pervert belly, "I was just doing a little freelance. Everybody's got to make a buck."
Freelance? What the fuck was he up to? I placed the snout of my good foot next to his unbruised shin and began another teasing rubdown.
"Freelance? What the fuck do you mean by that, creep?"
Ted Turk knew I meant business. He shimmied backward, against the wall, attempting to escape the potential punishment I was ready to deal out with my agile foot. "Just some side action, officer," he answered, "You know, to supplement my measly salary. I look around for some nice softcore, some raunchy hardcore, something old, something new, something different, like this act here, with the toothy starlet being chewed beyond recognition by the rag picker. That's class toilet action. I can get big bucks for a twenty minute video cassette loop of that quality action up in Be verly Hills."
His eyes went down to where my shoe rubbed fiercely and impatiently against his shin. He went into closet withdrawal, deadly afraid of the consequences of having been discovered in the act of watching hardcore, even more afraid of the possible damage public revelation of his gross habits might have on his career, on his position within the community, on his relationship with his wife. I decided to press the point.
"How'd you like to take a short ride downtown and explain your freelance career to the vicesquad?" I asked, employing less than subtle pressures with my shoe, and my knee, which I deftly brought up between his denimed thighs and upon which danced his withered reproductive seed bags.
He went infantile on me. It was tasty.
"Aw, c'mon officer, you can't do that to me. I gotta go back to the studio and report in for the eleven o'clock NoseWitness broadcast. I got a wife and kids to think about. I got my job, officer. What's wrong with watchin' a little semi-simulated softcore, amongst consenting humanoids?"
A wise ass. He had segued out of the infantile whining into snotty ACLU style rationalization. I gave him both psychic barrels.
You should have thought of your wife, your kids, your slimy job before you handed this creep," I gestured to Merc with a swift snap of the head and neck, "The ten bucks to watch his sickening peep show. You're both degenerates as far as I'm concerned, and as far as the law is concerned. I could take you in on a six nine-two, and your buddy there, the one with the dark, greasy stains on his face, he could get one to life behind pandering and running an unlicensed cabaret. You understand? Want me to read you your rights?"
Ted Turk bowed his head in stereotypical middleclass humility before the steel grip of the law. Merc was used to my act, however, and he didn't wimp out. He went on the counter attack.
"Say, Narsky," he said, turning his chin up so when I looked at him all I could see was the pitchblackness of his nostrils, "Why don't you cut the jive and just tell me what you want, eh? I know you saw the fuckin' news tonight. I know why you're so fuckin' up tight, you two bit terrorist. Your buddy, the ass-raper, he scored again, didn't he? That's it, ain't it, Narsky? You're runnin' scared."
I listened as he brayed like a donkey with a flaming corncob rammed up its asshole. He thrust his elbow into Ted Turk's ribs and beckoned for the levied technician to join in the merriment. I pulled my Magnum out of my shoulder holster and decided to go into a modified Dirty Harry style emcee act.
"What do you know about it, Fenton?" I asked, keeping my shoe frictioning against Ted's shin as I inserted the broad snout of my police special into Merc's gaping left nostril. He snickered through his single port, and replied in a sinus voice.
"Just what I saw on the news, Narsky. Got yer fuckin' bosses daughter. Don't that take the cake, Ted. The ass-rapin' son of a bitch got the bosses daughter. Narsky's been tryin' to score that broad for three years. Don't that set you free, Steve?"
Both of them went into crippling wheezing fits of nasal laughter, attempting to slap each others palms pimp style, tears of unutterable hostility and sadism pouring out of their sick red eyes like a nauseating discharge from the infected plumbing of a Soto Street whore. I gave Turk a wicked shot to the shin and cocked my revolver simultaneously it cut them off in mid snicker.
"Wise asses. Shit eaters. Dog fuckers. Both of you will be lucky if you live through the night, especially you, Fenton. One more wise ass remark, and I'll be forced to blow you away in selfdefense. Mr. Turk here will be my witness, that is, if he doesn't want to get blown away with you. Do you understand, Mr. Turk?"
The rhetorical question was quite unnecessary-Mr. Turk had an innate understanding of the situation-he was nodding like a chimp on the needle, eager to please, even more eagerly looking at his fat, gold encrusted Omega watch, to see how much time was left before he had to make a beeline back to the studio for the eleven o'clock report.
"Now Fenton, I want to know exactly how you knew that Shitty Dick was going to strike, and how you knew that he was going to make the News in style, with the in-depth report. Spill the beans, Fenton, now, or later, down at the station, in Milhaud's office. You know Lieutenant Milhaud don't you? You know how deftly he handles a wet towel and a rubber truncheon? You want that action, Fenton? You want to go through the rest of your life with water on the spinal cord? You want to be reduced to a semi-crippled vegetable who can only get off on hot Pennzoil enemas? Think hard, Fenton."
I laid it on thick. I covered him with the balm of threats as only a professional can. He didn't budge an inch.
"Aw, shit Narsky, don't hand me that jive. I just use my eyes, and my nose, Narsky. I ain't got no special connection with your ass-raping pal. All I do is keep my eyes open, and my snout clean, and that's how I keep tabs on what's goin' down. If you'd ever take that fat corpse of yours out of the massage parlours for a minute, you might not have such a hard time with your work. Get me, Narsky?"
The reptile let its tongue slither out of its black, thin lips. I wanted to shoot Fenton right then and there. I wanted to blast him in half with more intensity than I had wanted to blow hot wads over Charmane Pervis's greedily gobbling face. I had no choice but to pry on.
"What the fuck do you mean, Fenton? I'd paid to use my fuckin' eyes. I spotted you, didn't I? What did you see? What did you sniff that told you Shitty Dick was on the move? Out with it."
Fenton went into another fit of high nasal laughter, his long, scaly tale slithering about in the grease spots on the service station apron, his eyes focusing in several different directions at once.
"You'll have to ask Ted here. Ted knows what I'm talkin' about, don't you, Ted?"
Fenton gave him a folksy elbow to the ribs. I leapt upon the middle-class wimpo and began to throttle him, my gun butt slamming into his sideburn.
"Out with it, snot head!" I screamed into his face, giving him a gagging dose of bilious Budweiser breath. He choked and wimpered, and then the frijoles began to trickle out of his gorge.
"That's top security material, Mr. Fenton. I can't just tell anyone NoseWitness top priority in formation!" he squealed, looking over at Merc with pleading cow eyes.
"Mr. Fenton was on his lunch break when we were shooting up on Santa Monica Blvd. He was hanging out in front of the Institute for Anal Lust, watching the goings on. He must have surmised that the report would be broadcast that very night, and he knew that we were looking for evidence of the sodomistic sadist. He put two and two together, and came up with a lucky guess. Later on, as we were packing up, he approached me with the offer to make a tape of the toilet action in the back of his station. I couldn't resist the freelance temptation."
Ted Turk let his head hang down in humiliation. I wasn't impressed with his contrite act. It didn't explain the precision nature of Merc's guesswork.
"Yea, yea," I snarled at Turk, shaking him by the lapels. "I'm not innarested in your sad story. Tell me how the hell Fenton knew that Shitty Dick had scored again. Tell me that, willya."
They looked at each other shrugged their collective shoulders and went clam silent on me.
"You boys wanna take that ride down to the station," I bluffed, knowing that if I were to bring them in, Milhaud would have me shot on the spot for tresspassing, "Or you wanna keep talkin'? Talk is cheap, pals, compared to the wet towels, the fingernail pulling, the oil truncheons."
"What's it to you, Turk?" Fenton chimed in, "What the fuck you care if you lose your job? With my connections, and your home video equipment, we can package toilet loops and make a killing at the adult bookstores. Hell, we'd have a theatre chain in a matter of months, maybe even a few arcade franchises. We'd be rolling in bucks. Spill yer guts, Turk. Get it over with."
Slimey Merc knew all the angles. I didn't like him stealing my thunder, but I had to admit that he had the knack of picking up on the man's weak spots, his yearning for tax-free, illicit, raunchy freelance dollars. I gestured to Merc to shut up, and gave Turk the pause for thought. He came through.
"You'll have to talk it over with my boss on the NoseWitness Team. He'll fill you in."
"Vague, Turk," I said, "Too vague. I need the hard stuff, the factoids, stuff that'll stand up in court. The beans, Turk, the refried ones. Spill 'em. Spill 'em, or be prepared for the worst."
He went into a modified shuffle. I set the hook with a well timed cigarette, proffered as bait. He took the filtered tube in trembling fingers, and Merc lit it up for him, like a continental gentleman in heat. Turk dragged deeply.
"All I can do for you officer is bring you back to the station with me for the Eleven O'clock report. You'll bring up your questions to Rex, and he'll give you your answers. One more point. Don't mention my name."
That was a laugh. He knew it too. We both laughed.
"Don't worry, Turk. If you've given me a lead, you'll be rewarded properly. Say, two years probation and all the freelance you can grab on the side."
Turk perked up at this mention of freelance, and winked broadly at me. I winked back. Merc winked at both of us. Turk and I began to march out from behind the station to my car, leaving Merc in his natural ecological niche, to pass the night with his pair of catpured pretties in the cozy confines of the toilet.
"Burbank?" I asked, as we started rolling on Sunset. "Burbank it is," Turk answered, still rubbing at the wounds on his shins. My own strawberry jam knee had quickly crusted into a deep brown patch which blended well with the color and texture of my knit slacks. I didn't give a shit about the knee, or the pain. I had my lead. I was heading out to the NoseWitness Newsdesk to see Rex Phlegm, to see where he fit into the slimy pattern of brutal, abusive events that had dominated my life for the past six months.
That was especially gratifying. Every night after work, when I had returned to the plush quiet of my rented digs, I had had to face Kristine Hundt and Rex Phlegm, the sarcastic commentators on the failure of the department to bring in the Man. My failure. They were like harpies on my back, unwilling to let bygones be bygones, unwilling to let me forget the failures of the day. They kept the pressure on me, and now, they were going to have the favor returned. I was going to put the thumbscrews on them. We'd soon see whose hide was thickest, who was most immune to bitter insinuation and snide innuendo. We'd see.
"You're not gonna make me confront Rex with my story, are you, officer?" Turk asked, now smoking the filter of the gift cigarette.
"We'll see, we'll see," I mumbled, relishing his sense of fear of the unknown, relishing even more deeply his position, that of traitor to the cause of NoseWitness confidentiality. It was even more tasty than the closet toilet action. This was the end all and be all of enforcement as far as I was concerned-to play Milhaud to a quivering, sweating civilian. It was the high point of my officer's career, and it was a nigh point that had steadily eluded me for as long as I had worked on the case of Shitty Dick. I longed to bring him in, his carcass torn and bleeding from my field interrogation, his muffled cries of innocence and his protestations concerning police brutality painfully cut off my wingtips to the chin and scrotum. It would be a scene worth remembering, a scene worth of promotion, perhaps to a desk job. Perhaps.
"What do you think of my profile, Turk?" I asked, giving the technician a shot of uncleft chin and heavy, oiled right sideburn. He pinched his nose with his nicotine stained fingers before he answered.
"Aren't you putting the cart before the horse, officer," was his response. He needed more stimulation to get into the spirit of the game.
"Turk, if my hunch is right, I'll be in the fuckin' Network cart after tonight's action. You get me, Turk? You see, there's been so much goddamn publicity on this case from the beginning that I figure, when it finally cracks, why it's gonna be network quality. At least a quick forty-five seconds worth, maybe even a full film report if it's a slow day in New York. I want to be ready for that action, Turk."
I could see his jaw drop. It was either because he thought I was out of my mind, or because he was stunned at being in the presence of Network quality material. I chose to believe it was the second choice. I pressed the point.
"There's room for two at the top, Turk. Get me? You could be that vital other component, the eyewitness, the main man, the civilian who worked hand in hand with the authorities to lay the grip on Shitty Dick. Think of it, Turk. Network coverage, promotion, something to tell the grandchildren about. Will I have to put on make-up?"
The off ramp came up quickly. I gave Turk a withering look that confirmed his sense of insecurity and wheeled the hog off the chute and down into the slow midweek Valley traffic. It was five to nine. Well before showtime. I'd have plenty of time to confront Rex Phlegm with the facts. I'd dig deep into his pansy psychology, ferreting for his weak spots, pressuring him where it hurts, leaning on his rusted links. He'd squeal like a stuck pig. He'd cringe before my authoritarian presence, and bow to my abusive demands. He'd learn law enforcement etiquette at the end of a gun butt.
"Which way?" I asked. The Turk gave me directions, and soon we were in line, behind a hotpink, gold vinyl roofed Mark IV, at the check-in gate for the studio. The plates on the grotesque beast ahead of us read "HUNDT 8," little Ms. Kristine's eighth member of her stable of chariots. I gave her short, nasty clips on the horn button. I got the finger in return.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you, officer," said Turk, "She's a pink-belt in emasculation techniques. Learned them in the Far East while covering the war on Hootch Maid Liberation."
I snickered in pompous authoritarian pride. Ms. Hundt might, have the studio pansies trained to obey her on reflex, but I was immune to her act. I had handled her sort on a daily basis. A wingtip to the cervix would settle her hash.
"Don't worry yourself into a fit of impotence, Turk. I can handle that quim with my little finger. It's Rex Phlegm I'm after anyway, not that sassy bitch."
Turk shriveled down into the padding of the bench seat as I hit the horn again. Ms. Hundt squealed hot rubber all the way to her reserved parking spot as I flashed my badge to the rent-a-cop in the booth.
"Hi, soul brother," I quipped to the senile uniformed asshole.
"You're not entitled to park here, sir. You're not a company employee."
"Quit the shit, jive turkey. I'm a real newsmaker, you asshole, not some overpaid executive slime ball. You wanna eat hot lead, pops? You wanna pay your dues for the company?"
The codger could sense the danger. He wisely gave me a taste of desert-seasoned, steel-blue Glendale eyes, and let me pass. I spat a clump of flakey green mucus on his shoes as I floored the car, and brought it to a screeching halt next to Ms. Hundt's reserved spot. She was still in the car, giving herself a lip job with some cum flavored cosmetic in a dildo shaped tube. She geeked me and went into company heat.
The power window rolled down on her passenger's side. "Get the fuck out of that parking spot, shit eater. That's reserved for a real human being, Rex Phlegm."
I gave her wide open eyes, shocked at her language.
"But Milady," I quipped back, using my stage voice, "Sir Phlegm is he upon whom I wait." She clamped her make-up tube closed, snarled, and opened her door. I smiled over at Turk, who was covering his face with his hands and kneeling on the floor in front of the seat. "Take it easy, Turk," I mused, "Listen to this action."
Ms. Hundt strutted quickly over to the open window on my side, and began to tongue lash me in a no nonsense style.
"Dysfunctioning dribbler, get this piece of Pachuco shit off the lot before I call the security men in. You hear me, you sniveling shit eating hyena?" she said, with her hands on her niftily pantsuited hips. I hung my wallet over the doorsill and let the Police ID hang open, just like a limp dick requesting immediate suction.
She stared at the badge in silence, her heavily made-up eyes flicking from the gold encrusted symbol to my eyes and then back again to the badge. She couldn't figure out the scene.
"Now, milady, let us start off afresh, eh?" I chortled. "When do you expect Mr. Phlegm in for work?" I asked, retracting my badge and slipping back into my vest pocket.
"He should be here any minute. What do you want with him?" she asked, her voice now modulating at an acceptable frequency, the four-letter words and feminist assumptions repressed and boiling beneath the surface.
"That is strictly between Sir Phlegm and I, Sir Steven, of the Rape Squad. We'll wait inside." I began rolling up the window, and I gave the Turk a quick, glancing blow to the forehead with my shoe. "Let's go inside, Turk." The worm didn't want to be seen with me, it was obvious. So what, I thought, I don't need him anymore. I'm in the bigtime now, an environment perfect for throwing my weight around. I opened my door, and watched as Kristine Hundt disappeared through the doorway, her horsey butt twitching indignantly beneath her pantsuit. Turk and I followed her sensual trail with our noses.
"Turk! Turk!" I screamed, like a baboon deprived of his favorite heating pad, all to no avail. The insidious NoseWitness behind-the-scenes lackey had ditched me for good. I was on my own again. No matter, thought I, I had my lead, I knew who I was looking for, and most important of all, I had my gun and my badge, and we all know the rules of hot pursuit-shoot first, ask for credit references and charge accounts later. I drew the police issue, snub-nose loaded with carefully filed dum-dums from my vest pocket, and lurked in the cables and equipment while pre-broadcast hysteria boiled around me.
The efficient, silent crew worked hastily, moving dollies, portable lighting, swiveling massive pieces of unnameable electronic drek to and fro, preparing for the live broadcast some two hours hence. I caught fleeting glimpses of familiar faces-Dr. Fishbreath, peeking out from behind a velvet curtain, a pink-faced Cubscout nursing at his belt-Ms. Kristine Hundt, her face clamped into a fearsome grip of intolerable patience as a miniskirted hormone addict applied layer after layer of thick powder to her nasal organ, dusting the visage into a mask of flawless objectivity. I kept my eye peeled for the first sight of Rex Phlegm-I wanted to take him by surprise, confront him with the evidence, and start in with the demands for a full explanation before he had the sense to call the corporate lawyer. As usual, I was using the wrong sense organ-the ears were the ideal perceivers where Rex Phlegm was concerned.
"Some asshole's got his goddam Dodge in my parking spot!"
The voice was unmistakable, even in its shrieking variant, wound up to the ultimate pitch of supreme outrage and violated humanoid sensibility. I searched eagerly for my first sight of him in his civvies. I longed to see the kind of style Rex Phlegm luxuriated in when off-camera. All I got was more shrieking.
"Seventy-five thousand a year they pay me to do my job. I've got the respect of the entire community. I'm discrete, into mild B&D, water sports, enemas and a little cross-dressing, and I can't keep the goddamn lowlife out of my fucking reserved spot! Just what the fuck is happening around here! Where the hell is Manny? Where the fuck is the producer? Isn't anybody going to help me get that goddamned Pachuco bastard out of my parking spot? Am I gonna have to wait till the burnished Avocado vinyl roof peels off of my Mark IV?"
Rex was filling the air with tempting rhetorical questions, perfect cues for my entrance on stage. I tripped out of my hiding place, gun in right hand, badge in left, and I stumbled right into him, landing on my face, with my teeth pressed into his white Hush Puppies.
"Hold it right there, Phlegm," I said, my fingers moving quickly to the safety and switching it off as the startled NoseWitness man backpeddled like a pansy Jap before the scared image of the Duke, fifty-caliber slugs of psychic race-hatred penetrating every one of his sick, oily pores.
"Who are you, baboon, and what the fuck are you doing on studio property?" he asked, pinching his nostrils in the timeless grip of class differentiation.
"Don't recognize me?" I needled him, rising to my feet, poking the business end of my blunt weapon into the wide spaces in his woven tennis top, "Ever heard of Budgie Ruggles? Debbie Milhaud? Nick Pervis? How about Charmane Pervis? Any of those names ring a bell, Phlegm?"
His eyes crinkled down into slits of robot hate as he sized me up. The hysterical demeanor of the fruit in heat evaporated as he sensed me zoning in for the kill.
"Hmmm. You must be the important baboon, Pervis's partner. What the fuck is your name anyway? Snotsky? Shitstein?" he asked, genuinely baffled, but successfully buying time.
"Narsky. Now it's my turn to ask questions, Phlegm. Just how the fuck is it that you are Johnny on the spot every time Shitty Dick makes another score? How do you keep beating the Department to the punch, Phlegm? Who's your connection? Spill the beans, Phlegm, or do you want to go downtown and deal with Milhaud himself? Lieutenant Milhaud, that is?" I pinned him back up against a temporary wall, and began my standard act with wingtip rubbing against tender shin flesh.
Phlegm kept his head immobile and scouted the room with his eyes, looking for witnesses.
"Lower your fucking voice, Narsky, if you know what's good for you. You're way out of your league Narsky. You're strictly lightweight, minor league, the bush. Don't try and fuck with the Network, Narsky. This Shitty Dick story". It's about to go national. That's right Narsky, with the very next sodomistic assault, they're going to give me forty-five seconds of prime time. I'm going to handle it, with the mobile unit. You understand the stakes, Narsky?"
The beans were up around my knees. I was swimming in hot frijoles and lard. I pressed onward.
"All I care about is getting my man, Phlegm. You're in the way. You've got information on him, and you're withholding it, using it for your own ends it seems. I could book you on that alone."
Phlegm's expression changed completely. He burst out into a hysterical giggle of disbelief.
"Don't try and pull my pud, you slimy little jerkoff artist," he spat in my face, "I already told you, this is going national, Network. The very next time Shitty Dick impales his victim, we'll be there, the NoseWitness team, and we'll be on Network hookup. It's all arranged. It's fixed. I have that from the very highest authority. Do you follow me, putz?"
I wasn't exactly sure if I followed him or not. What was he getting at? Was it pure ego, or did it go deeper, far deeper, into the pit of every violated anus Shitty Dick had claimed as his own?
"What are you driving at Phlegm? You want to tell me, or do you want to go downtown and explain yourself to Milhaud? You know what he'd do to you if he found out you were withholding the good on the guy who punctured his daughter's pooper? Think it over, Phlegm." I nuzzled the muzzle against his belly for emphasis, breathing my vile Bud breath into his Binaca reeking face.
"Ha! Milhaud's daughter. You make me want to puke, you slimy little upstart. This is beyond any personal trip, Narsky. This is my chance. I might become an anchorperson, Narsky, do you understand? I might evolve from just another hairsprayed male speech therapist for Kristine Hundt to something big. I might get the shot at a late night talk show of my own. You know what that means, don't you? Truman Capote, Rodney Dangerfield, Ethel Merman, the big time, Narsky. No reptile with a badge is standing in my way!"
He was hysterical. I cocked my gun and gave him a knee-nudge to the groin to calm him down.
"Buddy, I'm not out for your fuckin' job, I'm just tryin' to do mine," I said. "Now I wanna know who this creep is, and I wanna know now. I don't need no more jive, understand? The beans, Phlegm, gimme the beans."
He began to laugh again, and this time there was no stopping him, not on the rational level, anyhow. He needed pain. I gave him a dose, to the left shin, wingtip denting bone in one swift, silent move. Phlegm howled like the proverbial banshee with the highway flare inserted in its fluttering pink rosette rectum. I waited till he cooled down before demanding more refried pellets.
"Cut the jive, Phlegm. Gimme the skinny. Why does a creep like Merc Fenton know before anyone else that the rapist is going to strike? He got that tip from you, didn't he? You knew all along. Who is he, Phlegm? Where is he hiding out?" I threatened him with wingtip raised to tooth level. Phlegm repressed a shriek and spoke.
"You're out of your fucking mind, Narsky. You're not playing ball. This is a business, for Chrissakes, just like your business. We have to market our product, Narsky. We've got to create new markets when we've burned out the old ones. This was all arranged a long time ago, by the Network heads, in cooperation with the fucking local police. We're a team, Narsky, and .you're upsetting the applecart. The hell if I'm going to help you push it over!"
That was it as far as I was concerned. It was as good as a confession. I let fly with alternating kicks to his head and torso, and when he was reduced to a bleeding puddle of whimpering pansy flesh, I hauled him out to the car and stuffed him in the backseat for the long ride downtown.
I should have known by his laughter after he recovered consciousness that something was wrong. I should have known from the word go. I thought I had my man. I did have my man. But my man wasn't supposed to be had....
CHAPTER TEN
Pumping gas at Merc's station has given me a whole new lease on life. I make dogshit for wages, two-seventy-five an hour, but the free-lance action, the tape loops, the hardcore stills, the eight-by-ten magazines Merc and I put out on the sly they more than make up for the humiliation of actually having to work with my hands.
Phlegm was the anal rapist-Phlegm was Shitty Dick. Simple, brutal, very clever and very greedy, you still see him on the airwaves, every night of the week, starting about twelve midnight, you can catch his new act, from the "heart of Newark," the Rex Phlegm Show. He seems to have a thing for sex changes, cross-dressers, transsexuals, flits, twirps, psychic healters, dog trainers, literati from the Big Apple, and old showbiz hacks who smarm and whine about the good old days, when the studios used to provide dormitory accommodations for aspiring, contract stars and starlets.
You can take or leave Rex Phlegm, the midnight host. I enjoy his show, and whenever Merc scores some powerhouse bennies, both of us are up in the "wee wee" hours of the morning, watching Rex and his human zoo, packaging hardcore enema loops in the station office.
As far as Rex the Rapist, that is another story. Rex said he had a deal, and he was right. He had a deal with the Network-they said, "Rex, get us some hot stories, contemporary stuff, stuff that leans on the paranoia, the tension between the newly liberated quims and the psychopathic cavemen. Do that for us, Rex, go out on a limb, and we'll go out on a limb for you." Rex went off the limb, and through the windows of several suburban bedrooms, and then climbed right into the sack with several highly unwilling, and oft times underaged females, and did his "thing" with them, whether or not they liked it, like Charmane, or whether it caused permanent brain damage, as in the case of Debbie Milhaud.
Rex was part of a vast News gathering and News making team, a team that has players in Washington, New York, and in the local precinct house as well. When I brought Rex in, the desk sergeant called Milhaud on the phone, and the Lieutenant came down pronto. He greeted Rex with a big smile, and handed me my walking papers without even looking at me. They left the station arm in arm, and I distinctly heard Milhaud offer Phlegm a dinner invitation as they passed out of earshot.
I had broken the rules of team play. My punishment was not the locker room, nor the bench, but exile, out on the streets, out with the hordes of ninnies who sit nightly in front of their sets and watch with glee as Kristine Hundt goes over the daily atrocity photos with them, pointing out details, cute correspondences, neat family fun. The team depends on the loyalty of the players for success, for new stories, for feedback with the ninnies who suck up what the team offers, prechewed and pre-digested, pablum and puke, the feeders and the fed.
Rex was a creative member of the team, and Milhaud was playing his own vital part, keeping operating costs at the department soaring year after year, busting the petty loop freak, the nickle bag hustler, the unlicensed masseuse, the Oakie with the cracked tailight lens. Milhaud did his job keeping the coffers full and the public dollars rolling in to feed law enforcement families, and Rex did his job creating new paranoia, new tensions, new hysteria and dryheaving hatred amongst the ninnies. His Shitty Dick act must have brought the local station at least a twenty-five percent increase in advertising profits, and he did make the Network two short days after I was canned from the force.
Geraldo Jivaro, the Third World Network spokesman, seized upon the story of Shitty Dick, and how the insistent activities of investigative reporter Rex Phlegm forced the "ultimate chauvinist pig" to crawl back into his moist hole and leave the female population of our town at peace with themselves at long last. The spot of Jivaro's once monthly special news show, "Fuck Off, America," sandwiched in between Jivaro's own expose of the brassiere industry's tie in to the defense establishment, and the insider's report on the Enema Liberation Movement made Rex Phlegm an overnight sensation. Within two months, he had that midnight talk show of his own, and the rest of history.
I don't grudge Rex his success, and hell, I don't even grudge Milhaud his own maintenance of his job-they both played ball with the team. I only wish someone had told me earlier that I was on the team too, and that something was expected of me other than what I thought I was supposed to be doing. Sure, now it seems logical. The long term bucks of prolonging the Shitty Dick case to its limits made for the greater good-more people got more mileage out of the case than would ever have been possible had I brought Shitty Dick to justice after, say, his fifteenth anal attack. Ninnies got adrenal flashes-the NoseWitness Team got sponsorship boosts-Rex got a new job Milhaud got promoted, and his daughter got Ginsend-UFO psychotherapy at the Beverly Hills Institute for Macrame. I got shitcanned.
I have the public spirit, however. I'm not bitter. I realize that the greater good was served. I'm a real help to Merc too. Why, with my inside knowledge of Vice Squad technique, Merc doesn't even need a lawyer. We've got the inside track on new markets too, with Merc's innate sense of the sleazy. We're at the top of the heap in the loop business now, and we'll stay there. We keep a low profile. We don't fuck with the superficial aspects of the trade, the penthouse apartments, the Rolls Royces, the air-conditioned Valley plant. Hell no. We do it in the toilet out behind the station, and we package in the service bays or in the office. Keeps the overhead at a minimum, and the product, my God, the product is raunchy.
Ted Turk stopped in the other day, still looking for that side money, that freelance stuff. I filled him in on my change of trades, and he nodded and chewed the fat with me a while. I filled his tank with Premium, invited him back to the toilet to watch a pair of sailors fucking each other with chainsaws. He went for it. Lots of folks do....
