THEY RAPED TOGETHER! Lee Fallon was a sadist-a rapist, a butcherer of women; a multiple murderer. And he knew it was just a matter of time before they caught him crouched over the mutilated remains of the latest little Central Park tramp or Eighth Avenue hooker who thought she'd found a terrific stud but paid for his ser vices in the mortal agony of her ravished flesh. Lee Fallon didn't care if he was caught or not-ihe was out for kicks, and he was going to get them right up to his dying day ... from Sally, the Midwest teenage tramp, or from Dorothy, the Harlem slut who didn't mind entertaining him any way he pleased-didn't mind until she found herself lashed to her bed and saw the knifeblade coming. But it was when he met Jan Lawler, the Lesbian who looked like Cleopatra and shared his blood-lust, that Lee Fallon found the last and greatest kick of all-love! Love for his Lesbian bride, love for the foul things they could both do to their struggling mutual victims, and it was on the screaming bodies of captive teenagers and sin-trapped Greenwich Village girls that Lee and Jan consummated their marriage from Hell!
CHAPTER ONE
Morning.
He woke slowly, reluctantly, trying to claw his way back into the dream. He woke up in a lonely room. The paint on the walls was peeling like sunburnt skin, and the sheets on the sagging bed were damp with his own sweat. The dream was there, just a few yards away from him, and his mind raced after it hungrily, but the dream was too fast for him. It slipped off like a thief in the night and left him alone, and uncomfortably awake.
Traces of the dream stayed with him. There was a girl in it, her body a symphony of fleshy curves, her mouth a red raw wound in the torment of her twisted face. Her eyes flashed hate and lust at once, and her breasts pointed him out and sang a weird, painful song to him, and-
And the rest was lost. Gone, run off, lost. The girl's face grew distorted and the girl's body ceased to be familiar and turned swiftly into the dimmest of memories. There had been a dream, and during that dream he had not been alone, and now he was awake and the dream was gone and he was lonely again.
And empty.
And dimly afraid.
He sighed, heavily, and rolled over, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. His legs were thin and wiry with taut muscle, strong legs, fast legs. He reached down now, scratching absently at one thigh with his dirty fingernails. His fingers flexed, scratching. He sighed again, and yawned, and raised his free hand to stifle the yawn. He sighed a third time and stood up, turning around like a caged cat, orienting himself in the small and empty room.
His name was Lee Fallon. He was thirty-two years old, five foot ten, black hair, high forehead, brown eyes, long nose, rough stubble of beard. Weight-one fifty-two. No permanent address. In case of illness or serious injury notify: Nobody.
His name was Lee Fallon.
There was a crumpled pack of cigarettes on the nightstand at the side of the bed. He picked up the pack and thrust fingers into it, fumbling for a cigarette. There was one cigarette left and it wouldn't come out. He tore the pack in half and put the cigarette between his thin lips, then hunted for a match. He found three books of matches, all empty. He cursed flatly and began opening drawers-in the nightstand, in the ancient dresser. There were no matches. He picked up his slacks, tossed across an unsteady wooden chair. In a pocket he found a pack of matches, yanked one out, scratched it, lit the cigarette. He sucked smoke into his lungs and coughed a dry cough, then leaned back a little and blew a thin column of smoke at the ceiling. His eyes followed the smoke. It hung together in the still air of the room until it reached the ceiling then broke up and crawled along the ceiling as if in search of a place to hide.
That's what we all want, he thought sullenly. A place to hide. A refuge. That's what we all want, that's what we all spend a lifetime hunting for. And we never find it.
So why look?
A good question, he thought. A hell of a good question, a damned hell of a damned good question.
Why look? Why run, why hide, why try? It was easier to relax and let things happen than to try and make them come out right, and it did as much good. He knew that. If you worked hard, if you really sweated up a storm trying to make things break the right way for you, you wound up in the same boat with the guy who didn't try at all. Either way, you lost. Either way, you struck out.
Strike one, strike two, strike three. And that, he thought, was the ball game.
He stood up quickly, stubbing out the cigarette on the top of the nightstand. They didn't bother giving you ash trays at Rooms, he thought. Because they figured that the type of slob who would stay at Rooms wouldn't know what an ash tray was if he saw one, or it fell and hit him on the head. Rooms wasn't a particularly classy place. Not at all.
He wondered if the rooming house had a name. It had a sign, a tacky cardboard sign, fly-specked, that said Rooms with perfect simplicity, and that was what he called it. There was something nice and basic about the idea of living in a place named Rooms. It made its own kind of sense, and that was as much sense as he expected of anything.
Let it all work that way, he thought. Let the whole world get orderly and sensible for a change. If he had his own way, he would live all his life in a building named Rooms, and he would eat all his meals at a restaurant named Food, and spend his afternoons in a theater called Movies, and his nights in a bar called Drink, and, now and then, blow himself to a swift bang at a joyhouse called-Well, he thought, figure it out for yourself, world. But don't bother me, please don't bother me.
He got dressed. This was no problem for him. Other men had to face a little moment of decision every morning when they rolled out of bed. They had to decide what to wear. But Lee Fallon didn't have this little complication. He wore everything he owned, put on his sole pair of underpants, his only shirt, his one pair of slacks, his two socks, his two shoes. When his clothes were too dirty to wear he would face a problem, all right. The underwear and the socks he could wash out in the sink, but that wouldn't do with the pants.
Come to think of it, what the hell would he do? Buy a new pair of pants and throw the old ones away? Probably. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot else to do, was there?
The hell with it. He would worry about it when the time came, and not until then, and to hell with the world.
He left his room, not locking the door because there was absolutely nothing inside to steal but the furniture, and the furniture belonged to the ugly old witch who owned and operated Rooms. He went down two flights of creaking stairs, passed two people who said hello to him and one who didn't. He did not say anything to any of them. He went outside into a warm and sweaty morning and blinked at the sunlight. It was much too bright for him.
Brooklyn. Nostrand Avenue; shops, Little diners, here and there a branch bank and a loan company and other things. This, that. Brooklyn.
He walked along Nostrand Avenue until he came to a diner and went inside. He ordered scrambled eggs and toast and sausages and black coffee, and he ate the eggs and toast and sausages and drank the coffee and smoked two cigarettes. The eggs weren't bad, but the toast was soggy and the sausages were greasy and the coffee was terrible. He finished everything anyway, eating automatically, filling his belly as though he were stoking a furnace. Then he went outside and walked until he came to an intersection with a few benches, and he sat on one of the benches and smoked another cigarette, the third from the pack he had bought at the diner. That left seventeen, and then he would have to buy a new pack.
Everything was money. Two bucks a day for the rotten room. Thirty cents for every pack of cigarettes. A buck or so for a meal. Half a buck a shot for blended rye.
He took a breath. He liked and hated Brooklyn, both at once. He liked it because you could get completely lost in it. You could dig down and bury yourself in it like a worm burying itself in the earth, and everybody left you alone and pretended you didn't exist, and sometimes that was good. He hated it because it was cold and ugly, and everything cost money and he had hardly any money, and one day came after another and all he did was Live in that room and eat at that diner and smoke cigarettes and drink rye and sit on benches, and that was nothing but a hang-up, like jail. But better than jail.
Fallon had been in jail. Maybe a dozen overnight stands for drunk-and-disorderly. Thirty days for driving while intoxicated. A year for grand theft auto. Six months for mopery with intent to gawk.
If he had stayed in Ohio, he would be in jail again, maybe. It was fifty-fifty, he decided. They might have got him and they might not have, depending. It was hard to say, because they didn't know his name and they might or might not get him from the girl's description. For that matter, the girl might or might not have reported the whole thing to the local cops. You could never tell. He had read somewhere-he didn't remember where-that half the time the girls didn't report it, that they were scared or ashamed or something.
But it had not been worthwhile staying in Ohio to find out. Because it would have been a long stay in jail if they had caught him. No overnight, no thirty days, no sixty days, no six months, no year. A good long time.
Because this wasn't drunk-and-disorderly, or driving while intoxicated, or grand theft auto, or mopery with intent to gawk. This was something which, in the eyes of the law, was a good deal more serious than all those lesser charges put together.
This was rape.
He settled on the bench and closed his eyes. It was funny, he thought, how you remembered some things and forgot others, how some incidents which happened yesterday dissolved and evaporated while others which happened a week or a month ago were crystal clear in your mind, every detail as sharp as if it were happening now. The rape was one of those crystal-clear things. He remembered all of it, and all he had to do was close his eyes and think about it and every detail came into brilliant focus.
It had happened a little more than a month ago, in a town called Colver City. He had been living there for almost half a year, earning enough money to live on, slinging hash in a drive-in on Route 68 and sleeping in a little room off the main stem. The night it happened was a cloudy one, with the clouds blotting out the moon and most of the stars. It was an aimless, pointless night for him. He finished work at eight o'clock, drove his '63 Chevy into Springfield and watched a movie there, left in the middle of the second feature and drove back toward Colver City.
On the way, he passed a roadhouse named Harold's. A very ordinary sort of place, just across the county line from Colver City. There was a barn-like bar, and there were a handful of tourist cabins which tourists never stopped at, and that was Harold's.
He didn't quite pass Harold's. He started to, and then he hit the brakes hard enough to make the wheels of the old Chevy squeal in painful protest. He swung the wheel and the car scurried off the road into Harold's parking lot. He braked to a stop, cut the ignition, got out of the car.
He had never been to Harold's before. Mostly he did his drinking in a bar in Colver City where they knew him. They didn't much like him, but they knew him, and they served him drinks and tried to cut him off before he got too thoroughly smashed. When he drank too much they called a cop and he slept it off in the tank, which was neither too good nor too bad.
But now he was in Harold's, and they didn't know him. Nobody looked up when he came in, and the few people who saw him forgot him quickly. Lee Fallon had that kind of a face, the kind you look at and look away from, the kind you forget because there is nothing very remarkable about it, being neither ugly nor handsome and possessing no special feature that serves as a tag.
They looked at him and they looked away. And he went up to the bar and sat on a not-too-comfortable stool and ordered whiskey with water on the side. The bartender gave him a shot of a cheap blend and set a glass of water on the top of the bar next to him. Fallon drank the whiskey and pointed to the shot glass and the bartender filled it up again.
The rye was just forty cents a shot there, and Fallon decided that the price was about right. It was rotgut, probably distilled close to home by some penny-ante bootlegger across the West Virginia line. Or did West Virginia border Ohio there, or was it Kentucky? It didn't matter, he decided, any more than it much mattered how good or how Lrad the blended rye was. After the first three shots you couldn't do much tasting anyway. All that mattered was that it contained alcohol. It might as well be hair tonic, after the first three drinks. Just so long as it did its work and got him smashed.
It was better when you were smashed. Things didn't bother you, didn't get on your back. He drank the second drink and pointed to his glass again. The bartender filled ft. He sipped the water and tossed off the third drink, and pointed to his glass, and accepted the refill, and the fourth drink didn't taste good or bad, didn't have any taste at all as far as he could tell. It was there, and it was working on him, and that was all that mattered.
Somebody played the juke box. Rock and roll stuff, twist music, hillbilly crud. Fallon smoked a cigarette and drank off another shot and sipped water and listened to the music. His eyes moved over the room, quick and sharp as the eyes of a clever rodent. He saw men and women, drinking, sitting, talking, getting ready for a trip to one of the tourist cabins or just killing time.
More liquor. Into the shot glass, down the hatch, into the gut, spreading warmth through the body.
Then he saw the girl.
She looked just a little too good for Harold's. It was hard to decide just what it was about her that looked better than the rest of the place, but it was there. Her clothes were not expensive, but they were somehow more tasteful than those of the other women. Her figure was better, too, but in an intangible way. Some of the women may have had large breasts, but this girl's breast seemed to hold more life, more spring, more bounce, more vibrancy, more of a suggestion of prospective pleasure. The other women might have had slimmer waists, but hers was more in keeping with the rest of her body. The other women might had had lusher hips, or more tautly muscled legs; they might have been more attractive in one or another particular, might have displayed one or another part of themselves that was better than one or another part of the girl.
But she was better than any of them. Something about her, something about the way all the parts of her added up. She was the only horse in the race, when you came right down to it. She made the rest of them look like dogs.
She was young, for one thing. That was easy to tell, even in the half-light of the bar's interior. One look at her was all Fallon needed to know that Harold's was breaking a law. The girl was not twenty-one and did not come within a few years of being twenty-one. Seventeen, he guessed. Eighteen at the outside. No more than that, and he would bet on it.
Young and fresh and pretty, and promising. And alone, too. All alone at a table down front sitting and drinking beer and looking at nobody and playing the juke now and then. All alone, and young, and the blood rushed through his veins like a hungry river on its way to the sea.
The rush of passion surprised him. He hadn't been aware of the need for a woman, hadn't recognized the ache for female flesh, but now that he saw the girl he realized how much he needed her. It wasn't even a matter of realizing-the blood rushed through his veins and arteries and boiled in his brain, a naked bubbling mass of want, of need. And it was no general need, either. It was a damned specific need, a need for this one particular girl. No other woman could take the need away. He had to have this one, this special one, this young and all-alone one.
Now. Now.
He had another drink and threw it down in a hurry. For a brief moment a bolt of raw fear shot through him, fear of himself, fear of what he might do and of what might happen to him. At times in the past he had known this same special sort of fear. At times he would see himself as a man who did whatever had to be done, a man who could not control himself when something demanded doing. He felt very weak all at once, and felt very strong at the same time. It didn't make much sense, but not many things did. not when you stopped to think them over.
The fear went away. The weak-and-strong feeling went with it. Something had to be done, something which he could not control, and all that he had to do was ride with it and see what would happen. That was all.
He looked at her again. She was almost blonde, her hair a very light shade of brown. She wore it down, and it was just a little less than shoulder length. It framed a soft, sweet sort of face.
She was wearing a skirt and a sweater. The sweater was yellow, and moderately tight, and her young breasts thrust out against the front of it, pushing against it as if trying to break loose. It didn't look as though she was wearing a bra. He wasn't close enough to tell, but he had the feeling that she wasn't. Once, on her way to the juke box, they had bobbed like apples in a barrel on Halloween, and breasts in a bra did not usually display so much enthusiasm, so he had the feeling that she was not wearing one, but he could not honestly say with any certainty one way or the other.
He did know that she wasn't wearing a girdle under the black skirt. The skirt was tight, and the view thus displayed thoroughly negated the possibility of a girdle. In his mind he also dismissed the possibility of underwear, though with no real reason. He just liked to think of her that way, all soft and lush and nude, all happily naked under skirt and sweater.
His mind stripped off the skirt and sweater. His mind saw her utterly naked, a symphony of lustful flesh. His mind pinned her on her back and his mind positioned him with her, and his mind swam in hot waters with the image of his lust.
Another drink.
Another drink.
He knew better than to go to her table. Some men could manage that, but Fallon was not one of them. He knew himself well enough to realize that he was not good with women. They didn't find him attractive. The hookers would go for him, if he paid them, and sometimes a drunken woman would let him have her when she was too nearly stoned to care much one way or the other, but outside of that women left him fairly well alone. If he went to this girl's table, she would just ask him to leave her alone.
And that would ruin everything.
So he took his time, drinking just enough to retain the glow of alcohol without pushing himself over the edge. He drank, and his eyes kept returning to the girl, stripping the skirt and sweater from her fresh young body and imagining the perfection of her naked flesh. He took his time, and he was very clever. He saw the girl signal for her check. He picked that moment to toss off his last shot and slip almost unnoticed from the bar.
The air outside had a slight chill to it. Fallon walked over to his Chevy, opened the door. He slid behind the wheel and lit a cigarette, his eyes on the glowing red tip of it. He waited, and tie front door of Harold's came open, and the girl slipped out of the door and walked through the parking lot toward Fallon's car.
She was alone.
Completely alone.
She was almost at the car before he spoke. She was just drawing abreast of it when he rolled down the window and began talking to her. She almost jumped.
"Get in the car," he said. "I'll drive you home."
She stared at him.
"Do you have a car?"
"No."
"Then get in. I'll give you a ride." Her mouth worked but no words came out at first. Then she said: "I just live down the road a ways."
"Riding's better than walking."
"It's not far, though."
"Get in," he said. "It's dangerous, walking alone at night. A girl like you."
He could tell she didn't want to go with him. But the look in her eyes showed that she was more afraid to refuse him than to go in his car. He told her once more to get in, that he would give her a ride, and this time she gave a soft short sigh and walked around the car and got in. She sat far over on her side of the seat, as if she was afraid to get too close to him. He smiled quickly, a brief private smile that the girl did not see.
Afraid of him.
He liked that.
He turned the key in the ignition, got the car going. He could smell her perfume, some cheap dimestore stuff that she had used a little too much of. It stank, more or less, but at the same time it did what it was supposed to do. It excited him.
The liquor bubbled in his system now, a perfect lubricant for the machinery of lust. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. He swung the car around, moved out of the lot and onto the highway. She told him she lived off to the left, and he drove that way.
He said: "What's your name?"
"Sally."
"Sally," he said. He didn't ask her what her last name was and he didn't tell her his own name. He wasn't sure yet just what was going to happen, but he already had the feeling that it might be better for him if she did not know his name. The idea of rape had not yet come, not in so many words, although he knew intuitively that he was going to do something, that he was in one way or another going to have this fluffy blonde thing. At any rate, it would be better if she did not know his name.
"It's the next left turn," she said.
"Sure."
"Just past that cutoff," she said. "You turn left up there."
"Sure," he said.
A car passed him coming the other way, a big Thunderbird with the convertible top down. The T-Bird did not bother dimming its lights and the lights blinded Fallon for a second. As the car shot by, he caught a glimpse of four people, a boy and girl in front and a boy and girl in back. The girls were laughing.
Sure, he thought. Rich guys, a big car, a flashy car, they don't have to go dimming their lights if they don't feel like it. They get the girls, they take that Thunder-bird and park it down by some creek, they get those girls to put out for them easy as pie. Rich guys, good-looking guys. Louses.
He would show them.
All of them.
"You missed the turn," Sally said.
He hadn't even realized it. Thinking about the Thunderbird, thinking about the girl beside him, he had managed to miss the turn. He looked over at her now, a quick glance. She seemed frightened. She didn't know what was going to happen and she looked good and worried about it.
"You missed the turn-"
"Yeah," he said. "I guess I did, didn't I?"
"Look-"
"Here's another turn," he said. "We'll try this one."
"But it goes the wrong way-"
"Shut up," he said.
Her mouth snapped shut. He swung the Chevy to the right and off onto a narrow twisting dirt road, unlighted, empty. The girl was gripping the car seat with both hands. She looked very upset now, but there was not very much she could do about it. He drove a hundred yards off the road on the dirt path and cut the engine and let the old Chevy coast to a stop.
She said: "Please."
Her hand was on the door handle. She moved slowly, though, as if afraid to make him angry, and that ruined it for her. "If she had just jumped from the car as soon as it slowed down she might have had a chance, but instead she waited, hoping, and that was where she made her mistake.
She didn't get another chance.
He moved across the seat, quickly now, his head throbbing and his vision cloudy. One hand caught hold of her shoulder and fastened on it. The other reached across to the hand that gripped the door handle, opening her fingers and easing her hand away.
"Now you just take it easy," he told her. "You just take it easy and it's a lot better for the both of us."
"What-"
He hauled her over to him. She struggled, but he was tough and wiry and she was soft and weak and her struggling didn't do any good. He pulled her mouth closed and kissed her on the mouth, tasting the flavor of her red lipstick. She squirmed in his arms and he got one hand over one of her full breasts and gave a squeeze. She made a frightened, violated sound and tried to get away, but he squeezed harder and she stopped trying to escape.
No bra. He had been right.
With other guys she wouldn't fight, he thought. With other guys she would be panting up a storm, the way the professionals panted when he paid them for it. But not like them either-because they only pretended, only put it on, but she would be panting and moaning her lust into the cold night air and she would mean every bit of it, her body churning with the fury of raw passion.
With other guys.
Not with Fallon.
He kissed her again, tangled one hand in her mane of blondish hair, bruised her soft lips with his hard and hungry mouth. Her eyes flashed fear. He let her go. just for a moment, and she shrank into her seat and stared out in terror.
She said: "What are you going to do to me?"
And he said: "I'm going to rape you."
He hadn't known it until then, not so you could put it into words. It had been inevitable all along, of course, perhaps from the moment he first saw her, but he hadn't admitted it to himself until he heard the words as he spoke them. But now he knew and she knew and there was not a thing either of them could possibly conceive of doing about it. It was going to happen and that was absolutely all there was to it.
After that everything happened very quickly. She made a grab for the door handle again and this time he did not stop her. She shoved the door open and stumbled out and he came out after her, a tiger making a leap for its prey. She took three or four steps before his arms caught her around the waist and they went sprawling to the ground together. She kicked and squirmed and he fell full force upon her, rolling her over onto her back and spinning her to the ground. She opened her mouth to scream and he covered it with his hand. She tried to bite his hand. He pulled it back and slapped her across the face, hard. Her head rocked from side to side and her wide eyes rolled.
He got the sweater off first. She tried to fight him, tried to push him away, but every time she offered any resistance he would hit her. He slapped her face, drove a knee into the pit of her stomach. Before long she stopped fighting. She was crying as he tugged the sweater over her head, her soft body racked with sobs. He barely noticed this. He was too busy. No bra. Just the girl.
Her breasts were incredible. Two firm cones of flesh, utterly firm without a bra. Even now, with the girl pinned on her back, the breasts had not the slightest trace of sag to them. Their tips were pink rosebuds not yet ready to open. The flesh was soft and clear.
Fallon cupped them in his big hands, gave them a squeeze. The girl gasped. He stroked the breast flesh, took the nipples between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and began to tug at them. She whimpered and tried to get away from him. His hands cupped them again and squeezed, harder this time, harder, until every bit of his strength was devoted to the task of squeezing her to pulp. A scream tore from her throat, hung in the air and died there. He doubled up a fist and sank it into the very pit of her soft stomach and the air rushed from her body like air from a blown-out tire. She coughed and saged and then, suddenly, passed out.
He undressed her, took off her skirt and the underpants which, contrary to his fantasy, were under the skirt. Then, while she lay unconscious for a few seconds, he let his hands have their fill of her body. He stroked her almost tenderly, ran his hands over her shoulders, her breasts, and her legs. He felt the soft skin high on her legs, smoother than satin and softer than feathers.
He touched her, fondly. She was sott all over. And warm.
He rolled her over onto her stomach and cupped her buttocks with his hands, feeling the soft firmness of them, rubbing the backs of her lush legs. He rolled her over onto her back again and played with the delicious contours of her body. She was soft all over, everywhere soft and firm and perfect. Not like any of the women he had had. Much better, much softer, much warmer, and infinitely more to be desired. Before now he had slept with pigs, and now he was going to have a goddess.
The beads of sweat rolled down his forehead and onto his face. He was sweating profusely now and his body was trembling with lust. He waited, his hands busy with her body, while the girl slowly but surely regained consciousness. Because it wouldn't do to have her while she was out cold. He wanted her alive and awake, struggling and hating him and making it all that much better for him.
He watched her when her eyes opened. There was a split second during which time she did not know where she was, and then she remembered, and the shock and terror came back to her eyes. He laughed at the expression on her face.
And then, without any more preliminaries, he took her.
Fiercely.
Viciously.
Magnificently.
His body crashed down against hers. He had undressed while she was unconscious, had dropped his pants in preparation, and now he was fulry prepared. His eagerness knocked on the door to paradise, and she fought him and moaned and screamed, resisting him. His teeth found her breast and bit down hard, and tears flooded from her eyes and she screamed, and his teeth bit harder and the fight left her and he took possession of her.
Harder.
Faster.
She was crying but he could not even hear her now. He pounded at her, driving against her. She screamed and moaned but she did not fight any more because he had taken the fight out of her.
Harder.
Faster-
Then faster and faster, with his heart locked up tight and his brain flaming, and faster and faster, and better and better until he thought he would die from the sheer joy of it, and better and faster and harder and faster and better, more, more, more, until the bubble broke and the world fell apart and the whole earth dissolved completely in a furious jet of smoky steam.
For a moment it was as though he had died Everything was gone. His heart struggled to keep pace with the world and his lungs gasped for air and he lay beside her inert body, too weak to move, too thoroughly and overwhelmingly sated to feel or to think a thing.
Then, bit by bit, reality returned. She was crying. He looked down at her, saw the tears staining her cheeks, saw the agony in her eyes, heard the moans she made.
He pounded her head against the ground, once, twice, three times. The third time her eyes clouded and she went limp. He checked her pulse to make sure that he hadn't killed her. She was still alive, just unconscious.
He took a very deep breath. He stood up and began to dress, pulling on clothes. He took another breath, fumbled for a cigarette. He got it lit and smoked silently, thoughtfully. The drunkenness was wholly gone now, gone with the fury of his lustful climax. He looked at the girl's bare body and a smile came unsummoned to his thin lips.
He moved her knees again. He kicked her once, full force. There was a sound of something breaking, as though the kick had fractured her pelvis. His smile spread.
He threw his cigarette away and got into the car and drove back along with the winding dirt road, leaving her there.
CHAPTER TWO
On his bench in Brooklyn, Fallon snapped open his eyes and looked down at his hands. They were trembling. He got hold of a cigarette and got it going, smoked it. His hands went on trembling. He stood up and started to walk away, trying to shake the feeling that was going through him. This wasn't easy. He had lived with that feeling now for a little more than a month. It was becoming a part of him, a basic component of the man who was Lee Fallon. It wasn't easy to shake it.
After he had raped the girl, after he had kicked her and left her, he had behaved like a machine. He drove the car out to the road and down the road and out of the state of Ohio. He crossed the Pennsy line and picked up the Turnpike and hung on it, aiming at New York like a swallow aiming at Capistrano. He didn't know why he was going to New York. He knew that it would not be safe to stay in Colver City, and that it would be best not to stay in Ohio. And he knew that New York was big, very big, and that you could hide in it. And Fallon had to hide.
If they got him, they would beat the hell out of him. And after that they would put him on trial, and they would find him guilty, and they would send him to prison. Not for a short time, either. Maybe twenty years. Maybe life.
He didn't want that.
He had sold the car outside of New York for two hundred and fifty dollars, which seemed like a lot for the old wreck. And he wandered through New York, drifting finally into Brooklyn and taking a room at the place called Rooms. He had paid more than sixty dollars in rent so far, and more than that for food, and some for liquor, and some for movies.
He had twenty-seven dollars left.
He walked and smoked. It was getting down to the wire, he thought. The money was running out, and he would have to push to make it last another week. And there was no money coming in. He could work, maybe, but any job he could get would be another hotcha forty bucks a week deal, and he didn't want that.
Besides, they might spot him. If he got a job they would ask for references, and they would check on him, and they would probably check back as far as the Ohio prison system, and then they would find out that he was wanted for rape, and they would ship him back to Colver City and put him on trial and he would wind up in a little cell for the rest of his life. No.
No, not that.
Not ever.
He wouldn't let them take him back. They could kill him first, he decided. They would have to kill him first, because he would die before he went to jail again.
He stopped, stared into a store window. Maybe he was making a big production out of it, he thought. After all, there was always a good chance that the girl had not reported him in the first place, or that the police would not know who he was. Still-
And they didn't check your references. Not for the kind of job he could get. Forty a week washing dishes-hell, you didn't need references to be a dishwasher. All you needed was the ability to stand the work and the smell and the low pay and the lousy hours and all the rest of it.
But who needed it?
He started thinking then, and the thoughts came fast, and he knew that he had to stop and think it all out, take it easy, sit down somewhere and let his mind work on it. He found another diner, a little cleaner and fresher than the place where he usually had breakfast. He sat down and ordered a cheese Danish and a cup of coffee, ate the Danish and drank the coffee and smoked more cigarettes and let his mind work it all over. Thinking never came too easy for him. He was no genius and he realized it. But the coffee and the pastry relaxed him and his mind was able to go to work on the problem at hand.
The big thing was this-he was a criminal now, a criminal all the way. If he got caught-and he was pretty sure to get caught sooner or later, no matter what he did and no matter how he played his cards-it meant back to Ohio and back to jail for a long time.
Now he could do one of two things before he got caught. He could go on living like a pig, wearing one change of clothes and working at a crummy job and taking hell from everybody, and then get caught. Or he could take life easy and live big and high, with lots of money in his pocket and a closet full of clothes and all the rest of it, and a broad whenever he wanted her, and then get caught.
When you looked at it that way, it got pretty obvious. If you were going to get it in the neck sooner or later anyway, you might as well live as big as you could in the meantime. It all ended in zero, all wound up the same. So the play was to have all the good stuff you could until they got you.
Sure.
And you did this by taking what you wanted. Not working for it, not being a slob. Taking it.
He was already a crook. He was already going to get it in the neck, sooner or later. And when you had a rape hanging over your head, you didn't sweat at the thought of committing robbery or burglary or any of those small-time deals. When you had twenty years of life staring you in the face, the small crimes seemed fairly insignificant and nothing much to worry about.
So-
He ordered another cup of coffee. He had the feeling that he wouldn't be going back to Rooms, not that night, not ever again. He might go to jail, sooner or later, or he might wind up in a coffin, sooner or later, but that was just part of the game. No more Rooms, and no more eating in outhouses, and no more needing a woman and not being able to have one.
No more of that stuff. Lee Fallon was on the move, ready to roll. Lee Gallon was going to go out in style.
When you are in New York and you do not know the city and you are ready for action, almost any kind of action, you sooner or later get to Times Square. It always works this way. The cops know this, and they know that the odds of finding a runaway kid from some other town somewhere among the bright lights and third-run movies and hustling storefronts packed like sardines around the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street. It's no place for a runaway kid to hide, because that is where the cops always look first, but that is where the kids always go. It just seems to work that way.
Not just for kids. For everyone. Times Square is a magnet, fast and grimy and ugly and hard, and you get there sooner or later when you know nothing about the city except that you are looking for action. It is in the center, it is the hub around which all the wheels of New York revolve. If you are on the run or on the prowl or on the go, the magnet that is Times Square will draw you.
It drew Fallon.
He didn't go back to Rooms. There was nothing there-no clothing to be packed, no possessions, nothing but his sweat and his fear and his dreams. He didn't go back. He wandered, and he stopped for a beer, and he got on a subway and got off at Times Square, and he was there.
He had been there before, once or twice. But then he was a scared man trying to burrow away from the world, and Times Square was too brightly-lit for him, and whenever he came he stayed just a little while before scurrying back to the protective anonymity of Brooklyn.
Now he wasn't afraid.
Not of anyone.
He walked over Forty-second Street, past the small shops that sold nude pictures and pocket books, past the theaters, past the hot dog stands and the malted stands and the fruit juicieries, past the shooting gallery and the Fascination parlor. He walked up Broadway and into a Woolworth's, and he walked over to the toy department and looked at the toy soldiers.
Toy soldiers used to be made of lead, and brightly painted, and you could play with them and get the feeling that they were soldiers, all right, good legitimate toy soldiers, and that their guns shot real bullets and their leaden bodies held real blood. Toy soldiers are now made of colored plastic, and the illusion of reality has gone out the window. You can't really play with plastic soldiers. You can't have the same fun you could have with the old lead soldiers. Nothing's the same any more. Not even the price, because the crummy new plastic soldiers cost a lot more than the old ones ever did. This world is falling apart, all right.
Fallon didn't give a hot damn about soldiers, lead or plastic. He was just killing time, trying to be casual. He moved past the bin of plastic soldiers and found a bin of toy guns, and these he checked over carefully. Some of them were plastic-everything, he thought, is plastic-but a few were metal, and one or two looked authentic enough. Can't play around with guns, he thought. The little jerks have to play with authentic guns, don't they?
He picked up one and looked at it. Black metal, sleek and shiny, built along the lines of a Police Positive .38. He had seen a gun like that close up. He had looked down the barrel of one, when they picked him up on the auto theft charge.
A salesman appeared magically. He asked Fallon if he could help him.
Fallon said: "My sister, I'm going to visit her, and she's married. You know, she's got a kid, I wanted to bring a present along. Maybe a gun."
"If there's one thing kids like, it's a gun," the salesman said. He was an oily louse, Fallon thought.
"Yeah," he said. "I was thinking this one. How much is it?"
It was seventy-nine cents. That seemed like a lot of money for a hunk of metal, but a real gun was around fifty bucks and you needed a permit. It was a hundred bucks without a permit, if you could find somebody who would sell it to you.
Fallon gave him a dollar.
"You'll want caps," the salesman said.
"Forget it."
"It's a cap gun," the salesman said. "The little nipper wouldn't want a cap gun without caps, would he?"
Little nipper, Fallon thought. He said: "I think the kid's got caps at home."
"They get used up. And not all rolls of caps fit all guns, you know."
Fallon didn't know. He didn't really care, either. He let the clown sell him three rolls of caps. The salesman put them in a paper bag with the gun, gave him fourteen cents change from the dollar, and went away. Fallon walked out of the store. Caps yet, he thought. Caps he needed like a broken spine. It would have been a damn sight easier to steal the gun, and the hell with the salesman and his little nipper bit.
Outside, Fallon took the gun from the bag and stuck it in his pocket. He threw the bag and the caps with it into a trashcan that had a sign asking if he had made New York dirty today. He hadn't, but it sounded like a good idea.
He went back to 42nd Street and watched a movie, something about Ma Barker. She was the head of a gang of bandits in the thirties and the picture was pretty bloody. In one scene, she and her sons made her husband play Russian Roulette until he blew his brains out. The sight of the terrified man, forced to hold a pistol to his head and shoot a hole in his head while his wife stood there laughing, got Fallon so excited that he had to leave his seat and go to the men's room. He came back, though, and watched the rest of the picture. He enjoyed it.
He walked out wondering how it would feel to kill a girl and watch her die.
At ten that night he was ready. Not to kill a girl and watch her die, though the thought tempted him. He was ready to get started on the Lee Fallon campaign for a better life. The cap pistol was snug in his pants pocket. He got on the IRI subway at 42nd Street and rode uptown. He got off at 86th Street and Broadway and lit a cigarette. His eyes focused upon ,the glowing end of the cigarette, just as they had upon the end of another cigarette the night he had raped the girl. He looked up from the cigarette and scanned the street, watching. He walked up to 78th Street and saw the store he was looking for, just a few doors east of Broadway.
A liquor store. That was the natural one to hit, he thought. Liquor stores were getting held up all the time, day in and day out. Anybody who needed a few bucks in a hurry hit either a liquor store or a gas station, and liquor stores were easier to come by in New York City. Liquor dealers were getting held up constantly and they knew how to play it cool during a holdup. They didn't turn green and they didn't charge the robber and they didn't start screaming for the cops. They just opened the register and shelled out the money and prayed that they wouldn't get a hole shot in their chest any minute.
They were all insured and they were all used to the idea of facing a gun. So they were the logical place to start, and this store was as good as any. Fallon hoped it was a successful store, and he hoped there was plenty of bread in that cash box.
He threw the cigarette away and crossed the street. He was a little nervous, but the excitement he felt managed to override the nerves. He walked past the store once, checking it out. There were two customers inside. One man behind the counter, short and bald and old.
He crossed the street and merged in the shadows, waiting. One man left the store, a package under his arm. Another came in. Another left. There was now one customer in the place. Fallon finished his cigarette and threw it away and the other customer left the liquor store.
Fallon crossed the street again. His hand patted his pocket where the bulk of the toy gun greeted him reassuringly. He opened the door, went into the liquor store, walked not too slowly and not too quickly to the counter.
"Well," the liquor dealer said. "Warm enough for you?"
Fallon just nodded. "Can I help you?"
Why not? He might as well get a bottle out of the deal, along with the money. He looked at the shelf and saw a bottle of Jack Daniels at seven-fifty a fifth. A lot better than the slop he usually drank. A lot more expensive. But why shouldn't he start drinking the good stuff for a change? It wasn't going to cost him anything. What the hell.
He said: "Jack Daniels."
"A pint or a fifth?"
'You better make it a fifth,"
The man turned around. FaTIon looked at him, thought how round and soft he was. His hand dipped into his pocket and came out with the gun. The liquor dealer took the bottle from the shelf and wiped dust off it and turned around and saw the gun. His eyes went very wide.
"Put the bottle in a bag," Fallon said levelly. "Then open the register and put all the bills in the bag. You can keep the change."
The man nodded. "I don't want trouble," he said. "I got a wife, kids."
"Open the register."
"No trouble," the man said. "A wife and kids." He opened the cashbox and started putting all of the bills in the bag with the bottle of Jack Daniels. He started to to close the register, but Fallon stopped him and made him lift up the box in the drawer. There were more bills under it.
Testing him, Fallon said: "A smart guy. I ought to shoot you for that."
"Please," the man said.
He was sweating now. Fallon liked that. He remembered the picture, remembered the way Ma Barker made her husband shoot a hole in his own head, remembered the stimulation and raw excitement of the scene. He took a breath and jabbed the muzzle of the toy gun into the bald man's gut. The guy's eyes bugged out and he looked sick.
"Easy," Fallon said. "I'm not gonna kill you. Just be smart, you louse."
He turned and ran. He bolted out of the store and raced almost to the corner of Broadway, then slowed his pace abruptly and turned the corner. He walked at a regular pace now, just an ordinary guy with a package under his arm. He walked a little ways, then stepped to the curb to flag a cab.
He was inside the cab before he first heard the liquor dealer yelling for the cops.
The cab dropped Fallon at the King William Hotel on Forty-Fifth Street. He had cruised the place earlier that day, had figured that it was just right for him. The rates were reasonable but not cheap, the place was close enough to plush, and it was on Forty-Fifth between Sixth and Seventh, which was where he wanted to be. Right in the middle of things.
In the cab, he scooped a handful of money from the bag and transferred it to his wallet. Then he closed the bag tightly. He paid the cabby with a single, went into the hotel lobby and up to the desk. He told the desk clerk he wanted a single, and he wanted to rent it by the week. The clerk told him he had a room with private bath for thirty-four dollars a week. Fallon said that would be fine.
The clerk hesitated. "Uh ... you have no luggage, sir?"
"Not with me."
"I'm afraid I'll have to ask for some of the money in advance, then."
Fallon paid him a week's rent in advance. There was still money in the wallet, plus whatever was in the bag He signed the register Lee Fullmer. The clerk asked him if he was related to the boxer, and Fallon said he wasn't.
The room was clean and large and well decorated. The bathroom had a tub and a stall shower. Fallon gave the bellboy a buck and sent him away happy. Then he locked the door and pulled the window shade and threw tht bag of money and liquor on the bed. He just stood there looking at it for a moment, waiting. Then he opened the bag and counted.
The liquor store had had a fairly good night. There was a little less than two hundred bucks in the bag, not counting the thirty-four for the room or the two bucks for cab and bellhop. There was still thirty left in the wallet. All in all, the liquor dealer was out about two and a quarter. His insurance would cover it, though. Come to think of it, the louse would probably report that he had been taken for four or five hundred. So he'd make a profit on the deal before he was through.
Hell, Fallon thought. There was no honesty left in the world. Everybody was crooked.
He grinned. Things were starting to move, he thought. He was getting ready to roll. Next he would have to pick up some decent clothes, so he could walk through the hotel lobby without feeling like some kind of repairman on a call. The clothes would give him a good front, and once he had that, he had it made.
He could see it now, all nice and cool and easy. Just play it down right, living at the hotel, showing enough money but not too much money. Pull a fast job whenever the money started to run dry. Drink the good stuff, like this Jack Daniels. Love all the right women, the cool-and-hot expensive women who wouldn't give you a tumble unless you came on strong.
And no work. Why work?
Stealing was easier, and more profitable.
And more fun.
He broke the seal on the bottle of Jack Daniels, unscrewed the cap, poured liquor into a water tumbler from the bathroom. He inhaled the aroma of the liquor, took a preliminary sip. It was smoother than silk, with a good full-bodied taste to it but no bite and no harshness. Charcoal filtering, that was what did it-that and aging. Good booze. The best.
He sipped it, working slowly but surely and emptying the glass. Nothing but the best, he thought. When you were drinking good booze, rich man's booze like this stuff, you didn't have to throw it down the hatch full speed. You could take your time and enjoy it, you could roll it around in your mouth and get the full good taste of it, you could sip it slowly and pleasurably without wondering whether it was cut with Sterno or shellac or both.
Nothing but the best.
He killed half the bottle. It lasted him two hours, two hours of sitting in the room with bottle at elbow and glass in hand, two hours of relaxing and unwinding and getting his bearings. Things were going to be groovy from here on in for Lee Fallon. Things were going to swing.
And he knew damned well what made the difference. The difference, pure and simple, stemmed from the pure and simple fact that he was not afraid any more. Not of getting caught, not of losing out, not of being broke, not of dying. Not of anything at all. Because it was the fear that kept a man down. If you stayed afraid of everything you never got any place, never had the money you wanted or the free time you wanted, never got the women you wanted and did to them what you had always ached to do.
He had learned things about himself. He learned something from the viciously satisfying rape of the girl named Sally. He learned something else from his reaction to the Ma Barker movie, and learned still more from that moment when he had shoved the muzzle of the toy pistol into the liquor dealer's soft belly.
He got his kicks that way.
He wasn't a queer or a nut, nothing like that. But there were some men who found their pleasure by uniting sex with love, and there were others who found their pleasure through the union of sex and pain.
And he was one of the second group. He was a sadist.
Well, that was the word for it. A week ago he would have turned away from the world, his forehead beaded with sweat and his eyes troubled and withdrawn. But he was not the same man as he had been a week ago, and he could look at the word and let it bubble through his brain and toss it from hand to hand and not get his rear in an uproar. He could recognize it and he could admit it and it did not bother him.
There were kicks coming, big kicks, boss kicks. He knew this. There were kicks coming from crime and kicks coming from women, and he would get his share of both. There would be kicks coming, too, from combining crime with women. Rape, pain-just dwelling on the words was. enough for him to get high with the sweet thoughts of forbidden pleasures.
He finished a drink and stared at the empty glass. Someday, sooner or later, he would kill. He might kill a great many people before they got him. There was no way of telling, but he did know that sooner or later he would kill.
He picked up the toy gun and fondled it, his hands caressing that gun the way the hands of other milder men would caress the sweet bodies of women. It was good, that gun. It would serve well. But sooner or later, he thought, smiling, it would be nice to trade it in for one that would spit real bullets, one that would kill. The toy would do for a job or two, but in time he would want a real gun, and he would get it.
He put down the cap pistol and went back to the bottle.
It was almost noon when he woke up. He had gotten out of his clothes and under the covers before he passed out, and then he had slept a corpse-like sleep for hours and hours, and now he was awake, his body damp and crawling with sweat, his stomach screaming its post-alcoholic thirst to the skies. He went into the bathroom and stood under the shower for ten minutes, scrubbing the dirt and sweat out of his skin. He dried off and stood at the sink, drinking glass after glass of cold water. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. There was a stubble of coarse beard on his face and he didn't even own a razor. He had left one at Rooms in Brooklyn; the only thing he had left there. Well, hell. There were a lot of things he didn't have.
He got dressed, sick of wearing his only clothes. He went downstairs and ate breakfast at a coffee shop next to the hotel and crossed the street to a barbershop where he got a shave and a haircut and read a morning paper. There was nothing in the paper about the liquor store hold-up. A liquor store holdup in New York City is not exactly prime front-page news. It's as commonplace as a stabbing on Lenox Avenue, and unless somebody gets killed it never rates a mention in a New York paper.
Well, one of these times someone was going to get killed.
His skin tingled pleasantly from the shave. It was nice to let a barber shave you instead of doing it yourself. You got a closer shave and you didn't get cut, and instead of doing the work yourself you just sat there with your eyes closed and felt cool and happy.
He left the barbershop and stopped at a small clothing store on Sixth Avenue that was going out of business for the third time that year. The store perpetually went out of business. It was owned jointly by two brothers, and every other month one brother sold it to the other, transferring title and thus qualifying for a going-out-of-business sale. Since customers flock to a down-and-out store just as rats flee a sinking ship, the store made a go of it by looking as though it wasn't making a go of it. They would take a twenty dollar suit, list it for two weeks at fifty dollars, and then sell it for twenty at the going-out-of-business sale, and then everyone, was happy.
Actually, they had some fairly good stock. Fallon bought a suit, a sport jacket, a pair of slacks, four decent shirts, and laid in a supply of socks and underwear. He picked out a couple of ties that he liked, added a black and a brown belt, and for kicks bought a hat. The whole operation fairly well flattened him. He paid for the clothes, then had the manager put them in the back room for him.
He walked two blocks downtown, then, and found a hockshop where he bought a good second-hand suitcase for ten dollars. He took the suitcase back to the men's wear shop and packed his purchases in the case. That way when he got back to the hotel they would see that he had gotten his suitcase from the locker or checkroom or wherever, and that he wasn't the kind of bum who walked in from the street without any luggage.
He went back to the King William, suitcase in hand, and went to his room. He unpacked all the clothes and changed into the slacks and jacket-he had been able to wear those off the rack, but the new suit still needed alterations and wouldn't be ready for a day or so. He put on clean clothes from top to bottom, clean underwear and clean argyle socks and a new shirt and one of the new ties. He felt like throwing the old clothes out the window, but instead he buried them in the closet and said a quick to hell with them. Then, dressed and shaved and showered and looking like a new man and, most important, feeling like a new man, he went outside and found a restaurant and had lunch. Steak for lunch, because he was damn well hungry now and hungry for good red meat.
The clothes had been selected with care, with special attention paid to his professional requirements. He had been blessed with the least memorable face and build in creation, and he didn't want to screw up this advantage by dressing in a unique fashion. The clothes he bought would be as good for work as for play. They were nothing special, not expensive and not cheap, not dashing and not square, just stuff that was in style without being overly stylish. The clothes, like Lee Fallon, would easily pass in a crowd.
Which was fine.
The steak was good. He ate quickly and enjoyed his lunch, then wandered down around Times Square and took in a movie-a double feature, a pair of gangster films. One of them was just the usual dull stuff, but in the second picture there was one scene where two of the gangsters kidnaped a policeman's wife and tortured her until she told them where her husband was hiding. They beat her up brutally, broke both her arms, burned her with cigarettes, and then, when she finally disclosed her husband's whereabouts, one of them gripped her in a bear hug around the waist while the other one split her skull open with a double-bitted ax.
That scene drove Fallon half-crazy.
He was trembling when he left the movie house, trembling with combined excitement and anticipation. Tonight, he knew, was going to be a good night. Tonight there would be money, because he was going to go out after money just as he had done last night. His cash was running low, and he wanted to have a fat wallet at all times.
But that wasn't all. Face it, he thought. The jobs gave him a kick, and the kick was going to build each time. Money and kicks-what more did anybody want?
He grinned. So he would make money that night. He would pull a job, or maybe a couple jobs, using the toy gun to front the job and getting in and getting out in nothing flat, with a big bag of money under his arm. No point in taking liquor each time, though-that could get to be a trademark, and he didn't want to leave trademarks around. He had seen enough crime movies to know that the quickest way to draw heat was to establish a pattern.
So he would pull a job or two and make money. And then, later in the evening, he was going to do something that would provide considerably more pleasure than the jobs.
A woman.
He would have a woman.
He smiled. First the jobs, to give him boss kicks and fill his wallet and get him warmer than hell. Then a woman to expand that heat and fan it into flames, sending him on a rocket to the moon and back. He didn't know what woman he would get, or how he would get her, whether he would pay her or force her or be nice to her or hurt her or what. But one way or the other he would get her and he would have himself a shrieking ball.
He smiled softly.
For dinner, he ate a hot dog at a corner stand and washed it down with pina colada. He wasn't hungry, not after that big steak in the middle of the afternoon. He had his hot dog and his drink and went to his room at the King William. He played the radio and drank one short shot of Jack Daniels-no more than that, not when he had work to do. He sipped the short drink and listened to mood music and let his mind walk all over the world.
CHAPTER THREE
That night it was quick and easy. HE left the King William Hotel around nine-thirty and took subways; the shuttle to Grand Central and the Lexington IRT uptown. At 92nd and Lexington he hit a liquor store, a small one-man operation not unlike the West Side store he had hit the night before. His method was the same-wait until only the one man was inside, then go in and ask for a bottle, then draw a gun and hold it on the bum as soon as he turned around.
This time, though, he was a lot more confident. For one thing, he had already pulled a job before and he knew how it worked. But there was more to it than that. Last night he'had been dressed like a slob, and he must have looked fairly desperate. Now he wore a tie and a jacket and he looked respectable, more like a customer than like a stick-up man.
The man on duty was cool as ice. He didn't sweat at all, just shook his head stoically and punched No Sale on the cash register. "What the hell," he told Fallon. "I only work here. Be damned if I want to be a hero."
"You're being smart," Fallon said.
"Well," the man said; He was tall and very thin, almost gaunt, with horn-rimmed glasses perched on a hawk-like nose. He scooped up the bills, stripping the cash box bare. He pushed the pile of bills at Fallon.
"Put 'em in a bag," Fallon said.
The man nodded and put the bills in a paper bag. "No skin off my tail," he said. "Just so I stay alive. The boss, he's insured, and even if he wasn't. He don't pay me enough to take chances."
Fallon didn't say anything.
"For all I know, that's a toy gun yon got there. But I don't aim to find out. Don't be nervous with that gun. Take the money and walk out easy. I'll give you two or three minutes, I can spare that much before I have to yell for the cops. You got nothing to worry about as far as I'm concerned."
The man was as good as his word. Fallon was two blocks away in a taxi before the clerk let the world know that he had been robbed. Now there was a sensible guy, Fallon thought. And there was the kind of guy you wouldn't-want to rough up, or shoot, or anything like that. The kind that got all nervous, the kind that begged and pleaded, those were the ones you might want to give a hard time to. It was nice to watch a person sweat and cry and then beat that person down into the ground. But a good sensible type like this clerk, well, hell, there was no point making it hard for him.
It was funny, Fallon thought. The clerk almost seemed happy to play along with him. As if he hated his boss, or as if he wanted the store robbed, or as if the robbery at least brought some excitement to his dull night. Maybe that was it-maybe he worked at such a damned boring job, just selling liquor and taking money every night, that a holdup at least gave him something new to think about, something to talk over with his wife when he got home. If it had been his own store he wouldn't be like that, but just working there-yeah, Fallon thought, it added up that way. The guy got a slight charge out of being robbed, not the kick Fallon got out of robbing the place, but a small kick just the same.
He rode two blocks north in the cab, then over to Third Avenue, then three more blocks uptown. He had the cabbie let him off there, paid the guy with a single and told him to keep the change. In a dark doorway he hauled the money out of the brown paper bag, gave it a fast count, and stuffed the bills into his wallet. One hundred and thirty bucks-not too bad, not too wonderful. But pretty decent for a couple of minutes work.
Half a block north on Third Avenue he hit another store with a husband-and-wife team behind the counter. It was more kicks there because they were so scared, a couple of old people trying to save up enough dough to retire and live in Florida He let the old man have the butt of the cap pistol across the cheek, and he kicked the old lady in the leg, just enough to shake them both up nicely, just enough to get his own blood cooking a little. hod that store was paydirt, too. They were too scared to hold out on him. After they emptied the register he let them look down the mouth of the gun, and the old man started to babble about giving him more money if he would let them live. The old guy pulled out a wallet and Fallon grabbed it and tossed it in the bag with the rest of the dough. Then he marched them both into a back room, locked them inside, and got the hell out of there and into a cab.
The old couple had been good for a shade under four hundred. He had over five hundred now from the two jobs, and that meant a long time of taking it easy. He finished the rest of the Jack Daniels at the hotel, tossed the empty bottle in the wastebasket, stashed his money under the mattress for the time being, found a safe spot for the toy gun, put fifty bucks in his own wallet and carried the old man's wallet along with him.
Then he went out hunting again.
He wasn't hunting for money this time. It was getting late, past midnight, and the sky was a charcoal black with a scattering of stars and the haze of a moon. He lit a cigarette and walked up Broadway to a bar named Bar, which was almost as good, he decided, as a rooming house named Rooms. He sat in the bar and drank another straight shot of Jack Daniels, paid for it, and ordered a refill. He made the refill last a long time, letting his mind find the proper channel, letting it drift.
A woman came into the bar, found herself a stool. Fallon dragged on a cigarette and let his eyes take her in. Thirty-five, he guessed. Not bad. Tall, a little heavy, pretty well stacked. A hard face but not a bad face if you liked them tough. Good legs, from what he could see. Wide hips and a rounded behind. Green eyes -rimmed in red, a souvenir of too many stops in too many bars, too much bed and not enough sleep.
A hooker.
Fallon looked at his drink again. She was a prostitute and she was on the prowl, and she would be his if he could pay her price. How much would she charge? In Ohio a woman like this one would be good for maybe five bucks for a roll in the hay, but Ohio was not New York, not by a long shot, and in New York everything cost more money, even the women. What would she get? Ten? No, more than that. Probably fifteen, or even twenty.
Nothing he couldn't afford. If he wanted a twenty-dollar woman he could have her. For that matter, he could afford a hundred-dollar girl if he wanted one. So price didn't enter into it, not with this broad.
It was a question of whether or not he wanted her.
He finished his drink, shook his head from side to side when the bartender asked him if he wanted a refill. No, he had enough booze in him as it was. He didn't want to drink himself blind, not just yet, anyway. Maybe later, but not now.
Well? did he want this one or didn't he?
The answer was yes and no. Yes-because he did want her, in that she was a not-bad woman who knew the score, and he wanted a woman in the worst way. No-because what he really wanted was something very young, something that did not know the score, something that would give him infinite pleasure when he led her down the primrose path to pain.
He wanted a virgin, wanted a nice little virgin that he could rape and hurt and scare to death. But you did not find many virgins in Broadway bars. And he was not quite ready, either, for the type of girl he wanted. It wasn't exactly that he didn't have the nerve. It was just that he had come a long way in a very short time, with holdups and a fast life and a whole new living pattern, and he needed a little time to adjust to the new Lee Fallon.
This broad might bridge the gap. Hell, she was better than most of the pigs he had had in his life. She would do just fine.
He looked over at her. The rest of the men in the bar-the few that were there-had so far done pretty well at ignoring the woman. Fallon looked at her black hair and her black dress, all bulging with promise, and his lips curled just a little in a smile. He kept watching her. It didn't take long before she turned to face him and her eyes met his.
Fallon's smile widened.
For a moment the woman just looked at him. Then, swiftly, she smiled and winked, then looked away. He waited.
The woman paid attention to her drink then. She drank it all down, very slowly but very surely, putting it away in a single prolonged swallow. She set the glass down, and her eyes flicked very briefly to Fallon, and then her head nodded suddenly toward the door. She waited another moment, then stood up and walked out of the bar.
Fallon gave her a second or two. He stopped to light a fresh cigarette. The clock over the bar said that it was twenty minutes after one. Fallon slid off his stool and walked out of the bar. He saw the woman half a block down the street, standing in a store window and pretending to window shop. He walked to her and joined her, grinning now.
She said: "Hello."
"Hello," Fallon said.
"That bartender don't like me to hustle in that bar," she explained. "I can go there, and I can give a man the eye, but I can't pick anybody up inside or he gets upset, on account of once he ran a crew of hustlers out of that bar and the cops didn't like this and he got closed up, just thirty days because he knew somebody, but still and all that was thirty days." Her face brightened. "You want to have a party, honey? I'll show you a time like you never saw."
"How much?"
"Depends how long. Time is money, honey."
"Let's hear your price schedule."
"A quick roll, a good time but just once, is twenty. For thirty we can stay an hour and have a real party. Or, if you got fifty, we could have fun all night, my place, a really good time."
"What do you do for that money?"
"Anything in the world," she said. Up close, she didn't look so beautiful. She was a lush, he knew; you didn't get those broken blood vessels in your face any other way so far as he knew. Still, there was an animal urgency about her that excited him. But fifty was too much.
"Thirty-five," he said. "For the night."
"Hell, I do better than that in two tricks."
"Thirty-five," Fallon said. "You could make it forty. I'd be extra nice." What was five dollars? Money came easy-it might just as well go easy, Fallon thought. No sense trying to hold onto an extra five-spot, when it was so easy to pick up more than that in half a minute. But he stood, thinking it over.
"Extra nice," the prostitute said. She moved closer to him, letting her rounded middle rub against the front of him. She was soft and warm and he felt himself quickening in response. Her hand, deft and practiced, reached out to rub across the front of his pants. Her hand knew very well what it was doing and did it very well, and he warmed in reply.
"Well," she said. "You're armed, all right."
"It's no cap pistol," Fallon said. "I bet it shoots real bullets, sugar."
"It does."
"C'mon," she said. "For forty bucks I'll give you a party like you never had."
"Sold," Fallon said.
She lived on West Sixty-Eighth Street a few doors off Central Park on the second floor of a remodeled brown-stone walk-up. Her apartment was better than the usual hooker's layout. It was clean, and except for a stale whiskey smell it seemed almost respectable. There was a living room and a bathroom and a kitchen and a bedroom. She called the bedroom her office.
"Nice place," Fallon said.
"This guy was keeping me and he paid the rent. Then we split and I decided, what the hell, I would stay here and pay the rent my own self. It works okay. You want a drink?"
"Sure," Fallon said.
"Because I got a bottle and I could use one myself, what the hell. Listen, you in a hurry? I mean we could sit and have a few and get some music on the radio. This is a pretty good radio. Transistors. Made in Japan but still and all it gets about thirty stations, and nice and clear. Or if you're in a hurry-"
"No hurry. We've got all night."
She laughed at that and turned on the radio and got an all-night disc jockey who played quiet things. "Like they say, honey, I'll go slip into something more comfortable. Don't go away."
Fallon stayed and worked on his drink. It was the cheap blend he had always been used to, but after two days of getting used to Jack Daniels he found he didn't like the rotgut any more. Funny how a man could develop expensive tastes overnight, he thought. The old reliable shellac didn't taste so reliable any more. He took another small sip and put the glass down, forgetting about it, and then she came back in, in something flimsy and silken and he didn't want liquor at all.
She started to sit down, then caught herself. "That forty," she said. "I better take it now, get that much out of the way. Okay, honey? And my name's Shirley, if you wondered."
He gave her four ten dollar bills, told her his name was Lee. She said that was a nice name, all right, and she sat down next to him on the couch and took a long jolt of the whiskey straight from the bottle. She swallowed it down and put the bottle back on the coffee table and curled up on the sofa beside him like a fat cat in front of a roaring fire. Her arms reached for him and he got lost in them, responding fiercely to her.
The thing she was wearing was sheer and loose and flimsy, and there was nothing under it. He put one hand under it and rubbed her legs. They were good legs, better than he had realized. He squeezed her knees and worked his way higher, squeezing and stroking the lustful flesh. Her hips were large but there wasn't much spare flesh on them, just good muscles from all the sweet years of being nice to men.
"Oh, Lee," she said. "Oh, baby, I like that."
His hand moved higher. He stroked her and moved his hand a little bit higher and touched her just where he had been all night aching to touch her. His brain was alive with lust now, aching for her, impatient to have her.
Her hands were busy, too. She unbuttoned his shirt, one button at a time, and she rubbed his chest and petted him. She opened his pants, and he stood up awkwardly and got out of them and started to take off his underwear. But she made him stay still while she did it for him, pausing to touch quickly and kiss even more quickly, sending his itching desire on its way, flaming and steaming with the pangs of passion. "So nice," she murmured.
She pulled up the silky thing and let him see her whole body, tugged the garment over her head and cast it aside, and lay on the couch. She was the kind of woman who looked a whole hell of a lot better naked than she did with her clothes on. When she was dressed she looked a little sloppy and a little cheap and a little old and a little played-out, but when she was nude like this all you could see was the sweetness and the abundance of her.
She had boobs the size of volleyballs, Fallon saw. And his hands locked on the huge mounds of hot flesh, gripping them tightly, holding onto them and manipulating them skillfully with his big hands. Her nipples went rigid with excited tension, growing beneath his hands like little rosebuds.
"Oh!" she moaned.
He lowered his mouth and caught a breast between his lips, kissing the nipple like a baby. He wanted to kiss her until he had her whole soul out, utterly dry. His hand dipped lower again and his fingers played desperate games, and she rolled in passion and cried out her lust.
"The bedroom," she said.
"No. Here."
"Please. It gets the couch so messy."
"Here."
"Oh, hell, Lee-"
"Here," he said.
She didn't fight with him. She was a purchase, bought and paid for, and she had enough sense now to realize that he wasn't about to hold out until they got to the bedroom. She relaxed on the couch, her arms at her sides, her breasts bulging, and he threw himself to her with a vengeance, his furious lust driving to the very pit of her womanly passion.
It was quite a ride.
It was one hell of a ride.
She knew her business, all right. She met him with calculated movements of her own, and she locked her arms around him and squeezed him, holding him firmly in place. Her huge breasts cushioned him, warming his chest, and her mouth locked on his mouth, kissing him furiously. He had some sweet ideas about what she could do with that mouth of hers once she got around to it, but right now he was too busy to dwell on them at any length.
Her hands scratched and dug at his back, and her arms squeezed him in a bear hug, and he remembered how one of the gangsters in the movie had held the cop's wife while the other gangster cut her white throat, and his brain steamed up with hunger and he drove to her again and again, more and more, faster and faster.
More-
More-
He had a tiger by the tail, and the world took off and soared and bombs went off and rockets soared and the earth creaked and groaned and there was speed and sweetness, more and more, and then-
Then-
Then-
It was not as it had been when he raped the girl in Ohio, not that great, not that volcanic. But it was nothing to complain about. It had his own sort of fury and its own sort of dynamism, and it worked out fine.
His lust bubbled over, gasping and stabbing. His body twitched as she twitched with him, and the moon died and the sun turned black, and the world winked lewdly and flipped over onto its back, gasping vainly for air.
She put out her cigarette and sighed heavily, contentedly. They had moved from the couch to the bed, and they had loved again, and they were in her bed now. She had a bottle in her hand and he had a cigarette of his own. He raised himself up on one arm and looked at her, pleased with the sight of her. Her lush female body was damp with sweat, and she shone like nude flesh after a shower.
She said: "How do you feel?"
"Fine."
"Damn, you're a strong man, Lee. You been a long time without a woman, haven't you?"
"Not so long."
"But a week, anyway. Nobody loves that hard and that strong when he's been loving steady. What do you do, Lee?"
"Do?"
"I mean for a living."
"Oh," he said. Until now, it hadn't occurred to him that people would ask that question. Well, they would-she was the first person he had spent any time with, and she was thus the first to ask the question, but it was a question he would have to answer often enough. So he might as well figure out an answer.
"I sell," he said.
She grinned. "So do I. You know what I sell?"
"Tell me."
She told him in four letters. He smiled at the word and touched her and she giggled throatily, rolling away from him. He leaned over and put out their cigarettes.
"What do you sell?"
"Heavy machinery," he said. "To industry. I see maybe three, four people a week. I don't work too hard."
He thought about the words as he spoke them. It was good enough for a hooker, he knew, but he might have to refine his story a little for people he would be seeing more often. But there was no worry with Shirley. For one thing, he would probably never be seeing her again, no matter how sweet she was on couch or in bed. For another, the kind of work she did, she probably wouldn't give a damn if he told her he was a kidnaper, let alone a mild thing like a robber.
"It sounds exciting," Shirely said.
"I know something more exciting."
"Already?"
"Sure," he said.
This time, he made her stand on the floor and bend over the bed, supporting herself on her elbows. He remembered watching on the farm when he was a kid and the memory served to excite him all over again. He wished suddenly that he were a horse, a huge stallion, and that he could take this woman now and rend her in two with himself. But the desire to hurt her was a faint one, one he could control easily. He rubbed her and reached around to grasp her big boobs, and he took her quickly and easily and pleasurably, and then he tumbled into bed with her and closed his eyes and slept.
There was a dream. Nothing too bad, but a certifiable nightmare, and no nightmare is fun. He dreamed they had caught him and they were going to lynch him for the crimes he had committed. They took all his clothes off and they threw a rope over the branch of a tree and put the other end of it around his neck, and they all laughed at his nakedness and then they pulled, slowly but surely, on the other end of the rope.
And slowly but surely he was hauled up into the air, the rope growing taut around his skinny neck, and then his toes could not touch the ground any more, and they were laughing at him, and his feet kicked out at the air and his lungs shrieked for oxygen, and he woke up not screaming but close to it, with the veins on his face standing out and his eyes popping and the sweat streaming down his body.
It didn't take too long for him to come out of it. It took a while, of course, for him to get his breath, for his heart to beat at something more nearly approximate to its proper pace, for the last images of the hanging to clear from his brain. It was a nightmare, all right, and it had had a strong reaction, all right, but at the same time he knew that somehow it was not as bad as it might have been.
And he could figure out what it was.
The dream was horrible, all right. Hanging was no fun, and in the dream he had not wanted to be hanged, had not wanted it to all end for him.
But at the same time, he had liked it!
Now figure that one out, he thought. Go ahead and try to figure out a bit like that. It sure as hell didn't make any sense to him, that was for sure. Why the hell would a person enjoy having his neck stretched?
Why?
He reached over, found a pack of cigarettes, shook one out and lit it. He looked over at Shirley. She was rolled up in a ball, her head tucked between her arms, her feet brought up under her, her rear sticking up temptingly. For a short moment he thought how much fun it would be to tease her buttocks and give her a little thrill there with the lighted cigarette. She'd wake up fast, he thought. It would be a real eye-opener for her, better than a cup of Irish coffee.
He didn't do it, of course. Instead he sucked on the cigarette and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs for a long time. Then he released it, blowing a thin column of smoke at the high ceiling.
Maybe-
Maybe wanting to hurt and wanting to be hurt were two sides of the same coin, he thought. Maybe that was it. Maybe if you got a kick out of putting it to someone else, out of someone else's pain, maybe you could get a similar kick out of getting it in the neck your own self. It didn't make much sense-Who in his right mind would want to be hurt?-but it was possible.
Oh, the hell with it.
He finished the cigarette and put it out in an ash tray, then leaned back and closed his eyes. But sleep would not come this time. It wasn't that the dream returned, just that he could not manage to fall off to sleep. He wasn't sleepy any more He was tired, but tired and sleepy are not the same thing. He was pretty well worn out, but this didn't mean that he felt like sacking out any more.
How long had he slept? He crawled over Shirley's inert body, grabbing a quick feel on the way just for luck. She didn't move He found her watch on the bedside table It was a quarter to five so he had been out for around three hours, or maybe a little bit less than that.
He put the watch back. Hell, he thought, he ought to own a watch. It was a good thing to have Why have to ask somebody whenever you wanted to know what time it was? And he didn't want a cheap watch, either. Something good, something with a little class to it.
Maybe he could steal one. Everybody wore a watch-on the next stickup, he would manage to get the guy's watch along with the money. That was risky, of course, because the watch could show up as stolen and then they had you by the rocks. But that was only if you tried to sell it. As long as it stayed on your wrist, there was no sweat in that department.
So he'd take the watch. Then he remembered the wallet, the one he had taken from that nut on Third Avenue. He had to get rid of it because that was the kind of thing that got traced nine times out of ten.
Well, all he had to do was toss it down the mailbox. The Post Office Department would take care of the rest. And he laughed-something like that, he didn't even have to put a stamp on the damned thing. They'd deliver it anyway.
He sat up, opened his eyes. The hell, he thought, this was crazy. He was paying this pig forty bucks for the night and he couldn't sleep and she was out cold. Maybe the best bet was to get his clothes on and leave, but he didn't feel like it That would make it forty bucks for quick three tumbles, and while that wasn't too high, it wasn't too cheap either. If he could get one more round out of her it would bring the cost down to an even ten bucks a throw.
Which seemed reasonable.
He reached over and took hold of her shoulder. She didn't stir. He shook her a little and she made a soft sleepy sound but did not move. He squeezed her shoulder and she made another sound, nothing sensible, just a mumble. Her eyes stayed closed and she didn't move.
Hell, he thought, that pig could sleep until hell froze over. It figured, though-anybody who put away that much booze didn't have all that much trouble sleeping. The old pig got loaded and got made and then slept it off--on his time.
Well, the hell with that noise.
He rolled her over so that she was lying on her back. She still didn't make any noise. He tweaked her nipples, rolling them good and hard between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. She gave a little gasp but still her eyes stayed shut.
Damnit, he thought, why didn't she wake up? When he first started to wake her he had done it just for the hell of it, simply thinking that he was entitled to ball her again and that he wanted to get everything that was coming to him.
But that was changed now. Now the thought had served to work on him, and now he wanted her, ached for her. It wasn't a simple matter of wanting. He needed her, needed to get into this pig, and she wouldn't wake up.
Then it came to him.
At first he didn't even want to think about it. The hell, Shirley was a good kid. She was a tramp, of course, but she was all right. She was a lush, but that was all right, too. And she had treated him right, and she had not tried to gouge any extra dough out of him, and he couldn't see doing her dirty.
He didn't want to hurt her. The idea of jabbing her with a cigarette, that had just been an idea, something he had never had any real intention of doing. The pinching had been to wake her up, not to cause her any pain. He might have gotten a kick out of torturing some girls, just as he had certainly gotten a real boot out of Sally's pain, but he wasn't the kind of guy who wanted to beat up on a poor old tramp.
Still-
No, he didn't want to hurt her. But there was something he did want to do, and there was no getting away from the desire. It was too real to be casually dismissed. It was something he wanted, and the more he thought about it the more he realized that it was something he was definitely going to do. He was going to kill her.
That was it. No torture, no pain. She might not even feel a thing, not the way she was sleeping so soundly. She wouldn't feel it for more than a second, anyway, not the way she was sleeping. He would make it neat and quick, and she would be alive one second and dead the next, and that would be it.
He was trembling with the idea of it, his while body shaking violently. He could not remember ever having been this excited in his entire life. His hands shook and his breath came quickly and the idea grew in his mind with every passing second.
She wanted to sleep. Well, fine. She would sleep a long time, now. She would sleep forever.
She would never wake up.
How would he do it? He bit his lip, trying to think straight, but it was hard to think when you were so eager to get going and do something. If he had a gun, now it would be easy. A real gun, not a kid's toy cap pistol. A real gun. He would wrap it in a pillow to muffle the noise and he would put the mouth of the gun to her forehead and he would blow her brains out, just as quick as the wink of an eye.
But he didn't have a gun.
A knife, then. He got up quickly, silently, not wanting to wake her now, and he scurried into her small kitchen and started looking around. She evidently wasn't much for cooking, because he was a long time finding the only knife she had, a wicked-looking carving knife with a blade ten inches long. He tested the blade with the ball of this thumb and it was sharp as a razor.
It would do.
It would be perfect.
He went back to the bedroom, the knife held tightly in his right hand. He crawled back into bed with her. She was still sound asleep and she had begun snoring lightly. He lay down next to her and set the knife down for a moment while he played with her body, filling his hands with her flesh.
He kissed both her nipples, drawing a final taste of sweetness from them, smiling at the way they stiffened automatically even though she was unconscious. He ran his hand down lower and fooled around with her. He crouched on the bed, and he stooped down and kissed her there once, just for a second.
Then he was ready, more than ready. And then he grasped the knife tightly. He placed the tip of the blade between her big boobs and right over her heart, set it at just the perfect spot, and rested it there on her skin. Then, with just the lightest touch, he broke the skin and watched as a bead of blood appeared.
She did not open her eyes.
His body was spinning dizzily. His mind was reeling. He took a deep breath, gasped air into his lungs, and then, with all his strength, he drove the gleaming knife straight into her heart.
This time she opened her eyes. For a second they were open, and then they clouded, and then Shirley was magically and deliciously dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
The tramp's death btjrst upon htm with the fury of a climax. His body shook, stopped. He caught his breath and toppled aside, falling away from her. weak now, barely able to move. His mind swam and his eyes snapped shut and, instantly, he was asleep.
You might legitimately ask whether he fell asleep or passed out, whether he fainted or what. It was sleep.
The woman's death drained him and left him empty and fulfilled at once, and he had no strength left with which to stay awake. He did not pass out because he felt no sense of shock. He did not faint because he was not the fainting type of person. He slept.
Fallon didn't sleep long. An hour, two hours. When he awoke it was as though he had slept for three weeks, and his whole being was gloriously rested and alive. He stretched, breathed deeply. And then he reached out and touched the cool flesh of the dead woman in bed with him and recoiled at the contact. He looked at her and saw her, and she was there, in bed beside him and very dead with the knife still in her heart.
It was true, then. He had killed her. It had been no dream, it was true, he was a murderer and she had been his victim, his first victim, and probably, judging from the way he had felt then and the way he felt now, not his last victim.
It was true.
He looked at her, not sick and not sorry. He touched her flesh, looked at the surprisingly small amount of blood that she had lost. Dead bodies do not bleed, and the knife had claimed her quickly, so there was very little blood. It had already dried around the knife. He looked at her, and he was surprised not that she was dead but that this lifeless corpse in bed beside him was something that had once lived. It seemed impossible to think that she had ever been alive, incredible that she had lived just, hours ago, extraordinary that he had been the instrument of her death.
But all these things were true. And, on a more mundane level, it was also true that he ought to get the hell out of her apartment, and damned soon. She was dead and he had killed her, and there would be hell to pay if anybody ever managed to figure all that out. There would be hell to pay, and he would have to do the paying, and this did not appeal to him.
Could they pin it on him?
He didn't think so. The pickup had been elaborately casual and nobody at the bar had paid a great deal of attention to him, or to Shirley either, as far as that went. Hell, most of them were drunk. And he had never been to that bar before, and would never go there again, so it was hardly as though he had been surrounded by old friends when he picked her up, or when she picked him up, to be more accurate about it.
So nobody knew they had left together. And, except for the cabbie, nobody knew they went to her place together. And the cabbie had not paid much attention to them, had in fact ignored them entirely. And no one had seen them enter her apartment.
The only thing that was left was fingerprints. His prints were on file all over the place, what with all the times he had been picked up on one charge or another, and if they lifted his prints from the knife they would know just who they were looking for the minute they got word from Washington.
Now, fingerprints are pretty much an overrated phenomenon. You find a good one once in a while, but usually you don't, and the public tends to exaggerate their importance. They can help prove something you already know more often than they can tell you something.
In this case, they weren't going to tell anybody anything. Lee Fallon took his time, going over the apartment with the utter thoroughness of a Dutch housewife. He scrubbed and rubbed every surface that might have held a print, whether he could have touched it or not. He didn't trust his memory and he didn't leave anything , to chance. He cleaned that apartment, and when he was through his prints were not there for anybody to find. He did, all in all, one hell of a good job.
The only hard part was cleaning his prints off the knife. He had the feeling that he might have left prints on the blade of the knife, and that some of them might still be there. He had driven the knife into her chest up to the hilt, and he couldn't get away from the notion that, if he drew the knife out, all the blood in her body would come gushing out after it, as if the knife were serving as a cork. He knew this was nonsense, that dead bodies don't bleed, but the feeling remained. Finally he took a breath and yanked the knife out of her and wiped off the blood and what prints might have been on the blade, and set the knife down gingerly and wiped off the handle as well, and then, for no particular reason at all, stuck the middle finger of his right hand into the bloody hole in her chest. It gave him a thrill. He didn't know why, but it did.
He got dressed.
He left her apartment.
The day was an odd one. Before, when he had thought of killing and had more or less taken it for granted that he would kill someone, sooner or later, and that he would enjoy it-well, he had never then known just what it would be like. And it was a funny, eerie feeling. He was nervous and he was shook up and he was distraught, and he couldn't escape the feeling that everyone he passed on the street was able to look at him and see at a glance that he was in fact a killer. The old mark of Cain bit-as though the fact of Shirley's death showed itself in some mark upon his forehead.
Crud.
He knew it was crud, but knowing and feeling are two different things, which, if you stop to think about it, is probably just as well. He knew it was crud but it still felt every bit as real, no matter what he knew. He had crossed a Rubicon (although, since he had never heard of cliches, this was a phrase he would not have used). The die was cast (although he didn't know that die was half of a pair of dice, and thought that the die was cast was in reference to industrial plants, where they cast a stamping die and then stamped out the pieces; it made substantially the same sense that way). The fat, too, was in the fire.
He had killed.
He had murdered.
And this simple fact made for a new self-image for one Lee Fallon. Before he had been a penny ante crook, and then he had been a rapist on the lam, and finally he had become, through sheer will power, a reasonably successful professional stick-up man who specialized in liquor stores. But now he had to step out and upward into a thoroughly new category.
He was a killer.
He was a murderer.
It changed his whole outlook on life. It made him feel good and it made him feel evil. It shook him and it thrilled him both at once, which should not be so odd, since a thrill and a shake-up are not so far removed in respect to their basic components. But, in one way or another, it managed to change everything and to make everything different. And so his day was an odd one, as we have already seen-although nothing really odd happened that day in and of itself.
Like, he went to a shooting gallery. There's nothing so odd about this. On 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue there is a fairly large and certainly profitable establishment which houses about sixty coin-operated amusement devices ranging from pick-up-a-prize steam shovels to fortune telling machines to two-player hockey games to God knows what. In the back, there is a flea circus, which is pretty good, and a geek show, which is sickening. And in the rear and over to the left side as you walk in there is a shooting gallery, and a lot of people go there.
Like the clock in the Baltimore lobby, it is a meeting place. If you tell someone you will meet him at the shooting gallery, he knows where you mean, and he knows where it is, and you can meet there far more certainly than if you said, say, that you would meet him simply at Times Square. It's also a rather good shooting gallery in that they don't give out any prizes or tabulate any scores there. Now, this absence of prizes may not seem destined to make something good, but if you are hip and if you dwell on this, you will understand quickly enough.
To wit-a shooting gallery that has to give prizes to good score will cheat you. The targets are off whack, or the gun barrels are untrue, or some other gaff, easy to come by because there are more gaffs than cockroaches in the city of New York, which is saying something. But a shooting gallery that just sells you seven shots with a .22 Long for a quarter is not gaffed because there is nothing to win. You pay your quarter and you shoot an honest if cheap rifle at a host of honest targets, and while you don't win anything at least you don't lose anything, and that kind of a break is all anybody in his right mind should expect.
But I digress. The whole point of this is to see how killing had changed Lee Fallon, and this applies in relation to the shooting gallery. He went there.
He had gone there before, maybe two or three times, and he had always done fairly poorly. The moving targets he never hit; he didn't know how to lead them with the rifle; how to time the shot so that the bullet arrived at a given point at the same instant that the target got there. The stationary targets were easier, but not all that easy. Before he stuck a long knife into Shirley's heart he stank at the shooting gallery.
Now, though, he was good. Quite good. Almost excellent.
And the difference was simple. Before, when he shot at a cardboard duck, he thought of it as a duck. And missed.
Now he though of it as a girl. And hit it.
It was the same with all the targets. He thought of them as girls, young girls, nubile girls, naked girls, virginal girls, and he shot every one of them deader than a lox. With shooting, as with other things, all any man really needs is an incentive. And when he could imagine the targets to be girls, Fallon was one perfect ace of a marksman.
But that's just an idea, just something to get the point across. Fallon spent the day wandering. He wandered all over the place, did things, bought things, saw things. He did not do one single thing that was in the least unusual or noteworthy until seven-thirty-six in the evening, by which time the sun had set and the day was history.
Even so, it was an odd day.
Ah.
At seven-thirty-six in the evening, Lee Fallon spent one hundred dollars for a gun.
He had never bought a gun before. He had bought the cap pistol, of course, and he had used the cap pistol, but there is a veritable world of difference existing between a cap pistol and a real gun that shoots real bullets, as any fool can plainly see. And Fallon wanted to move out of the toy category. So far he had been lucky. Each holdup had gone off without a snag, and in all three instances the persons whom he held up had not wanted to find out whether the thing in his hand was a gun or not. If they didn't find out, that was all fine and dandy, and then the toy was as good as the real thing. But if they wanted to offer some genuine resistance, then the toy ceased to be valuable.
So he wanted the real thing.
At seven-thirty-six that night, he went into a pawn shop on Third Avenue in the lower Twenties, one of the last remaining pawn shops on a street that, ten years ago, swarmed with them. He went up to the counter and told the beetle-browed pawnbroker that he wanted to buy a .38-caliber gun.
"A gun," the man said.
"A revolver."
"Yes."
"You wish to spend how much?"
"Oh, fifty dollars," Fallon said. "No more than that. I'll go fifty, though, for a good gun."
"You have a permit, of course."
"Of course," Fallon said.
The pawnbroker went away for a few minutes, then came back. He had a gun in his hand that looked like a companion to the cap gun Fallon had used in the three holdups, the little Woolworth's Special that had performed so well for him. Once he saw how much the two guns looked alike, Fallon could understand why the liquor dealers never offered any resistance.
"I could let you have this," the pawnbroker said.
"For how much?"
"For fifty dollars."
"And have you got a box of ammunition?"
"I could give you a box of shells for five dollars."
"Throw them in, then."
The pawnbroker got the box of shells.
"Let's see now," Fallon said. "Let me just see if I can get the hang of this." He fitted a cartridge in place and spun the cylinder to put the bullet under the hammer. He pointed the gun at the pawnbroker.
"I don't have a permit," he said gently.
The pawnbroker turned fishbelly white.
"This is half of a stickup," Fallon said. "I don't want your money. I don't even want to steal this gun off you. You understand what I'm saying?"
The pawnbroker didn't.
"I want to buy silence," Fallon said. "This gun is fifty and this box of shells is five more, which is fifty-five. I'm not taking any money from you, I'm not even stealing this gun. Instead I'm giving you a hundred dollars."
The pawnbroker was looking at him oddly, reserving judgment. Fallon kept the gun pointed at him with his right hand and reached into a pocket with his left hand. He pulled out a wad of five twenties and put them on the counter.
"One hundred dollars," he said.
The pawnbroker didn't say anything.
"This is for you," Fallon told him. "For the gun and the shells, and for me not having a permit. And for, if the gun gets traced back to you, you give them some line of cruel about how it got out of here. Some phony description, some pack of lies."
"How do you know I'll do that?"
"Because I'm playing straight with you," Fallon said. "And because if you don't I'll find out, and if I find out I'll come back here and kill you. Slow, so it hurts a long time."
The pawnbroker nodded again, slowly. "You figured it all out," he said.
"That's the best way."
"You got nothing to worry about," the pawnbroker said. He made the five bills disappear from the counter. "I just made a nice sale," he said, "and I hold no grudges. Anyway, cops stink."
"You know it."
"If you're gonna shoot anybody with that thing," the pawnbroker said, "make it a cop. They really stink."
Fallon laughed softly. He put the gun in one pocket and the box of shells in another pocket and got out of the shop. He walked away quickly in the darkness, scurrying down toward Fourteenth Street and stopping just once to spin the cylinder of the revolver and get the live shell out from under the hammer. No sense carrying a gun that might go off all by itself at any moment. He had met a guy in stir who had done that, and had shot off the big toe from his left foot. You could get along with nine toes, maybe, but it seemed like a silly way to go through life.
At a Fourteenth Street cafeteria he stopped for a couple of hamburgers and two cups of black coffee. He ate slowly, smoked a cigarette or two in flagrant violation of the plainly visible No Smoking sign, and patted his pockets from time to time, happy each time to feel the reassuring bulk of gun and shells. The pawnbroker had been a sensible son of a gun, not too crazy about the law himself to hear him tell it, and happy to pick up a hundred dollars out of the air without doing anything.
It didn't take a lot of thinking to realize that the pawnbroker had sold unregistered guns for premium prices before, and that he would do it again. But you cannot walk in cold and lay your money on the counter and ask for an unregistered gun. You have to know the pawnbroker, or give him some sort of in-group signal, or supply references. Pawnbrokers who make sales of contraband without some sort of protection usually find themselves breaking rocks for the state. Fallon had no references, and he would never been able to buy a gun that way.
So he had taken a short cut, had removed the element of decision from the game. The pawnbroker never had a chance to say no, and now he was just as glad, and Fallon had what he wanted, and everybody was happy.
When he was through eating he left the cafeteria and took a cab back to the hotel. The desk clerk said Hello, Mr. Fullmer and the elevator operator said it was a nice evening, wasn't it, and everyone smiled at him. Why not? He was a model guest, he thought. Never made noise, never had women up to the room, never snapped at any of the employees, dressed well but not flashily, and was generally quiet and unobtrusive. He was also a crook and a rapist and a killer, but they didn't know that at the King William.
Yet.
There was a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels on the dresser, one he had bought at a package store across the street just that afternoon. He had just had one drink from the bottle so far. He took it now, unscrewed the cap, and poured a generous slug into the water tumbler that he always used. He drank it down slowly and felt a warm feeling spreading through his whole body. He put the glass down and took a deep breath and lit a cigarette.
Things to do. The cap pistol was still in the drawer where he had been hiding it. He put the real gun in its place, along with the box of shells. In the morning he would have to fool around with the gun to get the feel of it. He had used a handgun before, and as a kid he had been fairly good with a .22, just as he had been good with the .22 at the shooting gallery that afternoon. But he needed some practice. When you were playing for heavy stakes, you didn't want to miss anything you happened to be shooting at.
The next time he went out, he would get rid of the cap gun. Drop it in a mailbox, maybe, the same as he had done with that damned wallet. Or give it to some kid to play with. Or take it back to Woolworth's and ask for a refund.
A mailbox had one perfect advantage when it came to getting rid of things. Nobody could take it out once you tossed it in there. If you threw something into a trashcan, some nosy old son of a witch would be sure to drag it out again. But no nosy son of a witch could open a mailbox. Not even a cop could do that, not without a warrant or a court order or something.
But the hell with it. He poured more liquor in his glass, held it to the light and looked at the rich color of it. He sipped it, drained the glass. Nothing to do now, not for the time being. There was enough money on hand for a week without stretching it, so he sure as hell didn't have to rush out and pull a job tonight.
And he didn't want a woman, either. Not to sleep with, not to beat up, not to kill. The time with Shirley had drained his lust just as surely as it had drained her life; the only difference, he thought, was that his lust would return to him and her life was gone forever.
That called for a drink, and he had one. He could feel the good bourbon working on him now, getting into his blood and swimming in his brain. He put on the radio and listened to a jazz program, hard gutbucket music that filled the room and filled his mind as well. No woman tonight, and no crime, nothing but the liquor and the music. You and the night and the music, he said to the bottle of Jack Daniels. You and the night and the music and the memories.
He did a lot of drinking but he never got wild, not that night. He drank fairly steadily and he drank fairly hard, but he never just threw the stuff down and he never took too much too soon. He just kept working on the bottle and listening to the music, changing stations whenever they threw a news program at him, not caring too much what kind of music he was listening to just so long as it stayed there to provide a background for his thoughts.
He drank, and the time passed. Somewhere along the way he got out of his clothes and into his bed. And slept.
And slept well, with no dreams.
He woke up feeling good, ate a big breakfast and read two morning papers. He read one of the papers twice. There was a short story about the wave of liquor holdups-evidently his three jobs in two days was a one-man crime wave or something, and evidently he had been rough enough with the old couple on Third Avenue to merit a little newspaper publicity. There was also a squib, very short, about Shirley Johanssen having been found dead in bed, stabbed to death, the evident victim of a sex crime or something. The one thing that had half-worried him was that there would be a connection drawn between Shirley and the liquor stores. There wasn't, and he was just as glad of that.
He thought of keeping a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings, laughed at the idea and went back to his room. He had bought a razor because he didn't want to get in the habit of going to the barbershop every day. He shaved himself and combed his hair and got the revolver from his drawer, and then he locked the door and started practicing. He was just getting settled when the maid knocked on the door and asked if she could straighten his room. He told her he was busy and asked her to come back in an hour or so.
He took the one bullet out of the gun and put it back in the box. Then he checked each chamber to make sure that the damned gun was completely empty. It was. He hefted it in his hand, got the feel of it, appreciated its weight and balance. He sighted with It, taking careful aim at the doorknob, and squeezed the trigger. The action was a little slow and his hand jerked a little, and he knew that he had to adjust himself to the gun's action or he would not be very damned good with it.
He got a shell from the box, opened it up and spilled out all its powder. You could ruin a gun by playing around with it when it was completely empty, he knew. He put the dead cartridge in place, cocked the hammer, sighted in on the doorknob, and squeezed off a shot.
He worked this way, aiming carefully, taking his time, getting the feel of the gun. He took aim at different targets, practiced shooting from different positions. He shot standing and seated, shot while walking, even practiced while lying down on the bed. He practiced shooting with the gun held at arm's length and practiced quick draws and shooting from the hip. He practiced for an hour, and then he hid the gun again and let the maid make up the room for him.
Of course he couldn't tell whether he would have hit his targets or not. It wasn't as though he had just finished a good session on a target range, but the practice had still done him good and he knew it. He knew the gun now, he had the feel of it, and he had managed all this without wasting a bullet or making a sound. It would be nice to get out in the country and practice some real shooting, sure. It would do him a lot of good. But he was carrying a gun without a permit, and this made it risky, and besides he could use up every last shell in one day's practice, and this was silly. The shells weren't expensive, but you couldn't buy them without a permit for your gun. He could have gotten something that handled .22-long cartridges, because you could buy those anywhere for a rifle and you didn't need a permit for a rifle. But they didn't pack enough of a punch. He wanted something that would kill a man if it came close to him.
He did a lot of walking that afternoon. He wound up on the East Side and browsed around some fairly fancy jewelry shops, looking at watches. He almost felt like buying one, but that would be silly. Sooner or later he could pick up a good one in a holdup.
All day he told himself that he would lay off pulling a job for at least three days. The liquor dealers weren't any edgier than ever, maybe, but the odd luck that had gotten him space in the newspaper was not a go-ahead signal; it would be better if he held off for a little while, because in two days that newspaper story would have worn off completely. And he could afford the lay-off. He had plenty of dough, more than enough.
Still-
The trouble was that the gun was burning a hole in his pocket, just as money burns a hole in the pocket of a spendthrift. He had a gun now, a real gun, and he Was anxious to try it out. Not to shoot someone, necessarily, but to put it to use, to see how it felt when he pulled a job with a real gun in his hand. He had a hunch it would be a lot different. It wouldn't make any difference to the person facing the gun, because a real gun was the same as a toy gun when you didn't know what you were looking at. But it would make a difference to Fallon because Fallon would know.
But another liquor store-
Well, the hell with liquor stores. There were other ways.
He picked Central Park. He went there between eleven and twelve that night, took a subway to the 72nd Street entrance and slipped inside with the gun snug m his jacket pocket and a bullet in every chamber but the one under the hammer. Five bullets, all of them ready for action. He walked through the park with the blood boiling in his veins and his heart pumping hard. He steered clear of the well-lighted paths and drifted deeper and deeper into the barren and dark parts of the park.
Central Park was no place to go at night, he knew. People with any sense in their heads stayed away from it. But there would be people there. Kids with no place else to go, and perverts looking to get picked up, and damned fools who figured a shortcut across the park was better than popping a buck on a cab-ride around. With any luck at all, somebody would drift by that Fallon could hit. He didn't figure to get much money, people with that much money did not walk through Central Park even in the daytime. But he might get a few bucks and he might get a watch, and he sure as hell would get his kicks.
He waited, still and silent in the gathering darkness. He smoked half of a cigarette, then decided that he could live without smoking for the time being. Somebody might see the glowing end of his cigarette and he was taking no chances, not even the slim ones. He put out the cigarette and did not light another.
He had a very long wait. A crew of punk kids in black leather jackets came through. They didn't see Fallon and he let them pass. They were competition, maybe, but they were certainly not targets. He had better things to do than have a fight with a bunch of damn juvies.
He waited.
And then he saw his man. He heard him coming before he actually saw him, the footsteps quick and regular on the asphalt path. Then the man came into view and Fallon took one long look at him and smiled weirdly.
A tall lean man, very well dressed, expensive shoes, an aristocratic face. Long hair carefully and elaborately combed, black on top, neatly gray at the temples. An affected walk. A cigarette in an ebony holder.
A faggot.
Pervert.
An old jerk out looking for punk kids. An old nut on the prowl. Fallon looked at him and felt his fury rising like steam on a winter morning. He knew about them, all right. He had met them all over the place, and he had met plenty a couple of times when he was in stir. A lot of guys went ape in prison. No women, nothing to do, and pretty soon a man started getting his kicks with other men.
They had tried to get to Fallon, too. At first he stayed away from them, and then he had used them when he needed them, letting them worship him while he closed his eyes and tried to pretend they were women instead of men. Afterward he always hated them and despised himself.
Now he was getting even.
He came in on the guy, moved in quickly and quietly, the gun in his hand. He gripped the revolver by its snub barrel and brought it high overhead in a looping car, sending it down hard and fast, taking the old guy on the side of his head just behind the ear. It was all done quickly and it was all done in a single motion, and there was the sharp sound of the gun butt hitting the man and the soft sound of the man crumpling like a felled ox, hitting the ground without a whimper.
Fallon dragged him into the bushes. He was out cold and he would stay that way, which was both good and bad. It was good because Fallon didn't want any trouble and it was bad because he wanted this guy to feel it, wanted to give it to him but good. He worked on him quickly, finding his wallet, stripping the bills from it, pocketing them, tossing the wallet to one side. Sixty bucks-not bad for such a quick touch, because the rotten pervert hadn't even gotten a look at him, hadn't even known he was hit. He got the watch, too, got a good Elgin from the man's dainty wrist. He put it on his own wrist and admired it. A good watch, and he was lucky it hadn't broken when the man went down for the count.
But what could he do to him? He didn't want to kill him, not for any moral reason but because he wanted to hurt the man more than he wanted to leave him dead. But how could you hurt a man who was out cold?
The answer was easy. Do something to him that would hurt him when he came to.
Fallon grinned quickly. He stripped the guy and threw his clothes into the bushes. Then, with quick measured kicks, he caved in a few ribs on each side. That would do for openers.
And then, placing the heel of one shoe on the man's body, he put all of his weight on that foot. He hopped up and down, crushing the old boy to pulp. His smile spread and he had to hold himself to keep from laughing aloud. The old boy wouldn't be getting much joy now, and probably not for the rest of his life. His equipment was ruined.
He would have liked to stick around and watch the guy wake up, but that would have been stupid. Instead he hurried through the park, heading for the street. It was time to go, time to get lost, time to get back to his hotel and relax with the spoils of the job and the happy memory of it.
But he didn't get to the street.
He heard a sound, and the sound stopped him. He listened to it, tuned in on it, and let it draw him like a magnet drawing iron filings. The sound was a personal sound, a sound of people. He followed the sound of the path and into a grove of bushes, and he saw what was making the sound.
A boy. And a girl. Together, with the girl on the ground and the boy with her.
Fallon watched them, his eyes wild and his hands clenched into tight little fists. He stared.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was quite a little scene.
Fallon watched them. They were far too wrapped up in what they were doing-and with each other-to know that he was there. The girl was lying on her back, stark naked, with her arms wound tightly around the boy, and her mouth was glued to his. The boy. also naked, bobbing vigorously as he thrust against the girl. The boy was dark and well-muscled. Fallon couldn't see too much of the girl; the boy hid her breasts. But he could tell she was good-looking, and it was obvious that she was one perfect hell of a fine partner.
He went on watching and they went on performing. The crisis was coming, he saw, and it looked as though they were both going to hit the peak at the same time. He watched the signs of the impending crisis with the critical scrutiny of a Broadway reviewer at an opening night. He studied them, and he watched, and he felt their excitement and saw it as well, and they moved faster and the girl made a whole series of little barnyard noises from somewhere deep in her throat, and her back arched and she moaned intensely and the boy went rigid and they hit the crest together.
They went limp, completely and utterly limp. The girl sagged and collapsed and the boy sprawled against her, too weak and too spent to move.
Fallon cleared his throat. "I've got seconds." he said.
They jumped a mile. The boy went rigid, spun around, looked at Fallon and stared with his eyes popping out of his head. The girl was obviously trying to scream but she was too terrified to make a sound. The boy stumbled, got to his feet, grabbed his pants and got a hand into a pocket. His eyes glared at Fallon and Fallon smiled at him.
The kid said: "You a cop?"
"No."
"Why, you louse," the kid said.
He let go of his pants and came up with the knife he had had in his pocket. He pressed a button and the blade snapped out, shining keenly and wickedly in the night. It was a good-sized switchknife with an eight-inch blade and it looked as though it would do the job it was designed to do. The boy held the knife low and moved his arm from side to side like a cobra getting ready to strike. He came toward Fallon and smiled at him.
Fallon looked at the knife, at the smile on the boy's face, and at the girl. The girl didn't look so scared now. Little witch, he thought. She wanted to see the boy cut him. Well, she was just out of luck.
Fallon smiled back at the boy. And he showed him the gun, let him look down its black muzzle, and watched the smile fade quickly from the boy's face, watched the confidence evaporate, watched the face turn sickly pale.
"You better drop that blade," he said softly.
He could see the boy thinking it over rapidly, trying to calculate the odds of knife against gun. The kid didn't have a chance and he damn well knew it. His fingers opened and the knife dropped from them, bounced once on the ground, and then lay still as death. Fallon looked at the boy and the boy looked at the knife, and then at the gun.
"I guess you win," the kid said.
"No kidding."
"What do you want?"
Fallon smiled.
"I got no money-"
"Forget money." Fallon looked at the girl-she was snow-white now, fish-white, and scared as hell. "What the hell do you think I want, you punk?"
"You want her?"
Fallon nodded.
"So she's yours, man. Hell, I had her and I'm done with her. I ain't married to her and she ain't my sister so I don't give a damn what you do to her, dig? You want her, she's all yours. See? And man, whatever you do to her, it's like I never saw you or her in my life. I don't cop out to the fuzz, see, so everything's cooL"
"Sure," Fallon said. The girl had started to cry now. The boy didn't care what happened to her and she was sick thinking about it and sicker thinking about what Fallon might do to her, and so she began to cry.
"So I'll just get my clothes on," the boy said. "And' then like I'll cut out of here."
"You're a real hero, aren't you?"
"Rather be a live coward," the boy said. He was almost cocky now that he was sure he would get away alive. "Rather be a live coward than a dead hero. She's nothing to me, man. A nice hunk of trim and all, but nothing to get killed over. A good loving and all, very choice action, but nothing more."
Fallon reached over and picked up the kid's knife.
"You can keep that if you want," the kid said generously. "It's a good blade, but if you want it, it's yours. It and her, you can keep them both."
The kid had his pants on. He was buttoning his shirt. Fallon smiled at him and stepped closer, and then he used the knife, bringing it up quickly in a vicious underhand arc. The knife was into the boy's flesh before he knew what was happening. He choked and coughed and tried to get away and never had a chance. The knife went into his stomach just above the belt and kept going up, tearing through him all the way up into his chest, all in one movement, and blood spurted like a river and the kid was dead before Fallon got the knife out of him. He was dead and he still took a step, a faltering half-step, and then he pitched over onto his face and did not move again, ever.
The girl screamed.
It was a real scream this time. It tore out of her throat, not too loud but very definitely a scream, an audible blood-chilling scream. Fallon stopped the scream expediently by kicking her in the face. He didn't kick her hard for two reasons-for one thing, he didn't want to mess her up, and for another, he didn't want to knock her out. She had to be wide awake if he was going to enjoy himself, and he damn well intended to get his kicks with her.
Because she was choice. Naked, and coated with sweat, and just through with a nice bit of love, and scared half to death, but choice just the same. She was young, too, younger than Sally, younger than anything he had ever touched. Fifteen probably. Not a day over sixteen, anyway, and he would give plenty of odds on that point.
Why not check? He said: "How old are you?" She didn't answer. "How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"That's pretty young for a tramp," he said. "It's pretty young to die, too. What's your name?"
"I ... I-"
"What's your name, tramp?"
"Linda."
"Okay, Linda," he said. "You're built nice, Linda, little Linda. Nothing little about these, though, is there? You've got a nice pair, little Linda. Big enough to bounce, aren't they?"
She didn't draw away. She let him touch her, let him play with them. He stroked the firm rich flesh and pinched the rosy nipples playfully, tugged at them and felt them stiffen. It was a pure reflex, he thought. Rub a pair of nipples and they would go stiff, whether the girl was good as a stove or cold as a refrigerator in Alaska. Just a reflex.
"Linda," he said conversationally, "you don't want to die just now, do you?"
"Oh, God-"
"Be easy to kill you. Cut you up and watch you bleed to death. Or just stick the gun in your mouth and give the trigger a little bit of a squeeze. You want that?"
"Oh-"
"Or you can just do what I want you to do. You might even like it, girl."
She looked at him, wide-eyed, and then she swallowed, and then, slowly, she nodded her head.
And she didn't fight him.
She was choice stuff. He stripped off his clothes and moved to her, and her body was smooth, and he touched all the secret parts of her sweet girlishness and he took her fiercely and she did not struggle at all, not fighting him. He thought that she could really pretend, that she did a convincing job for a girl who obviously felt about as passionate as a dishrag. She would make a very fine hooker, he thought.
If she lived long enough.
But it wasn't enough to take her. He had to hurt her, too, had to have her squirming and moaning.
So he hurt her. First he gave her a kiss, and like a willing little tramp she stuck her tongue in his mouth, and he dug his fingernails into her breast with all his strength. She gasped and he gripped her harder and twisted and her body went rigid as the pain tore through her succulent flesh. He let go of her breast and grabbed her little arm and bent it back,' straining it, putting pressure against the elbow.
And he went right on driving to her, thrilling to the sheer agony that dominated her body. He kept it up, faster and faster and faster, harder and harder, thrilling with his pleasure and taking extra measures of pleasure from the sheer luscious delight of her pain. More. More-
At the precise moment of fulfillment, as he gasped out his lust, he put a tiny extra bit of pressure on her arm. Just a little added touch, a little extra bit of energy.
Her arm snapped like a toothpick.
"Please," she said.
She had passed out when he broke her arm; the pain was too much for her and it knocked her out. She was out for almost ten minutes, and he spent that time dragging first her and then the boy's body deeper into the park, taking the dead one and the living one to a spot where nobody would possible come across them. The boy's body could stay there until it began to smell, and even then nobody would ever stumble on it. The spot he chose was hemmed in by two walls of sheer rock, and overgrown with shrubbery, a place where people dumped their garbage or threw their waste paper. They didn't exactly hold picnics there. He was going to hold a picnic now, but he had his own special ideas of what a picnic should be and not everyone would be likely to go along with them.
A picnic, all right. A great picnic.
Now they were in that spot, he and the boy and the girl, with the boy dead and the girl looking as though she wished she were dead. And she said, again: "Please."
She was stretched out on the ground, the broken arm motionless at her side. Her eyes were pools of hate and horror.
"I let you do it," she said. "I didn't fight you, I was good to you. Will you let me go now?"
"No," he said. "Are you going to kill me?"
"No."
"Why did you break my arm?"
"I wanted to."
"It hurts awful."
"I wanted it to hurt."
She digested this. "Will you hurt me any more?"
"That depends."
"Will you let me go?"
"That depends, too. If you do what I want you to do, I'll let you go."
"Honest?"
"Sure."
"Oh, hell," she said. She sat up and put her good hand on her body, touching herself to see if she was all right. Her other arm hung like the arm of a rag doll. She touched her sore breast and her eyes focused on the marks that his fingernails had made.
"You really hurt me there," she said. "What is it? You get some kind of kicks that way?"
"Something like that."
"Hell. Listen, I never hurt you, I never did nothing to you. You let me go and you don't have to worry about cops. I'm no great friend of the cops, I wouldn't tell them, I wouldn't tell anybody."
"I know."
"So you'll let me go?"
"If you do what I want."
She was almost afraid to ask. Finally she said: "What's that?"
"You kiss nice," he said. "You're good at it" She didn't understand.
"You've got a pretty mouth," he told her. "Real pretty. A young girl with a nice mouth."
She still didn't understand. She was fairly stupid, he decided. It figured that she would be. Smart fifteen-year-old girls didn't go out getting taken in Central Park in the middle of the night. Not smart ones. The ones that were both dumb and pretty, those were the ones that did, and this little frail was one of them. Her name was Linda and she was fifteen and she was gorgeous and she was about as stupid as could be.
"A nice mouth," he repeated. He reached over and ran his index finger around her lips, and poked it inside and touched her little pink tongue. And then he touched himself, the same way, and then, at long last, she got the message.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"I never did that before," she said.
"Never?"
"No. Not ever."
Well, that made her sort of a virgin, anyway. "I never killed a fifteen-year-old before," he said. "They tell me there's a first time for everything."
"That's what I have to do?"
"Uh-huh."
She swallowed. "I wish it was something else," she said hesitantly. Her eyes stayed on him now, wide and fascinated. "I wish it was anything else. That's one thing I always said I would never do."
"You could die instead."
"Oh, no," she said. She looked up at his face now, her eyes terrified. "Listen, if I do that, if I do what you want me to do, if I do it good and you have a good time and everything, if you like it, if I do it good, then will you let me go?"
"Sure."
"You promise? You swear?"
"Sure."
She nodded slowly. "All right," she said. "I ... oh, hell, I'll do it."
And she did it.
She moved toward him, slowly, dragging her broken arm after her as though it had been tied to her with string. She raised herself onto her knees and knelt before him like a devoted follower before a sacred idol, and her good arm reached around him, and he looked dawn and saw her pretty little face.
Her mouth opened.
Her mouth closed.
It was good. It was very good, it was excellent. She didn't know too much about what she was doing but you couldn't expect much more when you took her age and her lack of experience into account. You had to admit that she was a natural, and that she had a hell of a lot of potential.
She drove him crazy, drove him wild. He was holding the knife at her throat just to make things better, but she was so good that he didn't bother and he let go of the knife and let it slide to the ground. He tangled his hands in her hair and he stroked the sides of her face and his passion mounted higher and higher, and he was tickled and teased and thrilled by the most extraordinary caress on earth.
She didn't stop.
His body shook, swaying back and forth, swaying from side to side. God, he thought, he was going crazy. He was honestly and thoroughly going crazy. This was nothing normal, nothing ordinary. This was the quintessence of thrills, the answer to every lustful question. This little girl, this young thing, driving him wild.
He would lose his mind, he thought. It was so good, so thoroughly perfect, that he would just plain lose his mind. They would take him away and they would lead him to a padded cell and they would lock him up and they would throw the key in the East River and he would spend the rest of his life locked up like that, a happy little moron, just dreaming of naked young girls and remembering the lush thrills this Linda had given him. Her lips.
And more and more, and faster, and up and over the final crest, with the rivers flooding over onto the fields and deluging all they touched.
She never stopped.
It took a long while for the world to get back to normal. He sat on the ground with the knife in one hand and the gun in the other while she leaned over in the bushes and vomited a few times, emptying her stomach and making unpleasant noises. It took a while, but finally everything was back to normal and he took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. The girl came back and started putting on clothes. Just a shirt and a pair of slacks-that was all she had had. She was really dressed for action, and she had had enough action that night to last her a good long time.
"Well," she said. "I guess I'll go home now, mister."
He looked at her.
"I did what you wanted," she said. "I guess you liked it, too. It wasn't as bad as I thought."
He didn't say anything. She was buttoning her blouse now, buttoning it up over her bulging swollen breasts. He could see the mark where his fingernails had sunk into her. He could remember the way the pain had torn through her then, too. It was a happy memory.
"I'm pretty good," she said. "Huh?"
"You're great," he said, raising the gun. "I wish I didn't have to kill you, sugar."
She started begging, pleading, telling him it wasn't fair. She backed off and tried to run and slipped over a rock and fell on her hands and knees, and he came up behind her and ripped her blouse off. She tried to crawl away and he kicked her in the breast and she moaned.
He grabbed onto her pants and dragged them off of her and she was nude again and crying like a baby, absolutely hysterical with terror, because she knew that now she was going to die and there was not a thing she could do about it. She had done everything, everything he had asked her to do, and it still wasn't enough. He was going to kill her anyway.
He had no choice. There were three reasons for it, and the first and most obvious reason was that he could not afford to let her live. She might tell the police, or even if she wasn't going to talk they would find her and get it out of her, and he did not want to leave that kind of a witness walking around. He had already killed her boy friend, and he had already killed Shirley, and one more murder wouldn't make his punishment any worse. They would kill him anyway, so he had nothing to lose by killing her and he had everything to gain.
That was one thing. Another thing was that here he was with a brand-new gun, never tested, and he hadn't used it yet that night, and he wanted to know what it was like. He had killed two people with knives but he had never killed one with a gun, and he had a chance now, so why not take it?
And the third thing was very simple. This girl had been fun for him. He enjoyed her. And the only way to complete his enjoyment was by killing her, because that would be the final thrill of them all, the coup de grace, the end of it.
She was still trying to crawl away. He walked alongside her, kicking at her, and when he tired of that he caught hold of her long hair and held her back so that she could not crawl anywhere. He held her hair in his left hand, and with his right hand he reached around and shoved the gun in her face.
"Come on, now," he told her. "Open your pretty little mouth, Linda. Open your mouth and kiss the gun."
He got the gun into her mouth. She kept fighting, aware of the inevitable but unable to accept it. He rammed the gun deep into her pretty mouth and stretched out beside her, kissing her and caressing her and jabbing the gun into her mouth, and just as he thought the whole world would split apart at the seams, he squeezed the trigger and blew off the top of Linda's pretty head. The noise was tremendous but nobody heard it and nobody came and Linda was dead.
It didn't take him long to get out of there. He used the dead boy's shirt to wipe blood and dirt from his own body, and then he left them in a neat pile, with the girl lying on her back and the boy piled face down on top of her, so that anyone looking at them would think at first glance that they were making love, just as Fallon had found them in the first place. He left them arranged as a gruesome dirty joke and got his own clothes on and stuffed the gun in his pocket and took the boy's knife along too and got the living jumping hell out of Central Park. This time he didn't even take a cab. He ran down a subway arcade and bought a token and went through the turnstile and got on the D train and went back to the King William, and he got to his room and took a hot bath and had a few drinks and fell asleep right away.
The morning was dark and gloomy and rain was falling. He woke up once and looked around and groaned and fell back asleep again. He woke up again, later and went into the bathroom and showered and shaved and came out again and threw himself down on the bed He wasn't tired but he was sick to his stomach and couldn't throw up. He didn't feel like eating but he knew it would be a good idea getting some food into his stomach. It took effort, but he got into his clothes and went downstairs. He smoked a cigarette in the lobby and looked out at the rain. The desk clerk said that it was certainly coming down outside. Fallon agreed that yes, it certainly was.
There was a delicatessen three doors away. He walked through the rain to it and took one of the tables in the rear. An ugly waitress brought him a menu and said that it was certainly raining cats and dogs, wasn't it? Yes, Lee Fallon agreed. It certainly was, all right.
He ordered an Isaac's Special, which was tongue and pastrami and corned beef and turkey and Russian dressing and cole slaw, all of this between two large slices of rye bread. He washed all of it down with a bottle of cream soda and smoked two more cigarettes, paid his check and tipped the waitress and walked back through the rain to the King William.
In his room, he thought he was going to throw up. But he took a stiff drink of bourbon and his stomach settled down again.
He remembered the boy with the knife, remembered sinking that knife into that boy and cutting him up the middle.
He remembered Linda, what she had looked like, what she had sounded like, how her flesh had felt. He remembered the things she had done to him, and he remembered the things he in turn had done to her.
He remembered the old pervert.
It was funny-he had gone out to make money, and he had come back with the sixty bucks from the man and nothing else. But he had left two dead bodies behind him, two grisly souvenirs of the night's entertainment. He had gone out on business, and then he had wound up wasting all his time on pleasure, and it was funny.
Funny.
Funny as a crutch.
Funny as a hearse with a flat tire.
Funny.
Now, in the cold gray light of day, he realized something about himself. He realized now that he had crossed some special line, that he had managed to slip over the edge. This had not happened when he killed the prostitute in her apartment, the first one, the lush, Shirley. That was murder, that made him a killer, but it was different.
He didn't cross the line when he stomped the pervert. And he didn't cross the line when he knifed the kid, or when he made Linda do what she had done.
No. No, he crossed that line when he killed Linda. By all the rules he should have let her live. It might have been risky, but it was only fair. She had done all the things he had made her do, and he had killed her anyway, and that changed him from an amoral man who got weird kicks into something else, something a great deal different.
It made him a mad dog.
He realized this, just as he realized full well that it would be impossible to reverse things now that they had gotten underway. He was a mad dog, a crazy man, a lunatic. In a sense he had been right when he thought Linda would drive him crazy with her love. It amounted to that. He was crazy now and getting crazier by the minute, an utterly uncontrollable bundle of packaged rape and torture and death that no one could restrain so long as he lived.
He was calm now, of course. For the moment he was no mad dog, was just a relaxed man sitting down and having a glass of bourbon. But he himself was able to realize how temporary this stage was. No matter what he did now, sooner or later-and probably sooner-he would lose control again.
Only it would not seem like a loss of control. When it happened, it would seem perfectly reasonable. He would merely be doing what he wanted to do, would merely be going after those forbidden pleasures which were-to him-the highest form of satisfaction.
And more people would get killed.
And more, after them.
And how would it end?
In one respect, he knew very well how it would end. It would end with a policeman's bullet tearing a hole in his chest, or a knife cutting through him. Or it would end with death in the electric chair or in the gas chamber, or a slower form of death in an insane asylum. There was no question about his sanity, but from a legal point of view it could probably be argued either way, so he might get the chair or the nuthouse and there was no way to product which it would be.
Nor did it very much matter.
One way or another, it would end. And on the way be would do a lot of damage to a lot of people, and all the way he would do his best to keep from getting caught, yet he would never do the one thing most likely to save him-he would never be able to stop what he was doing. That would go on forever.
What made him the way he was? That was a question he did not know how to answer. He knew that he first realized his hunger for pain and blood when he raped the girl in Ohio, but that didn't begin to explain how the desire had been born in him.
In books and movies, they traced it all back to your childhood. Something happened in your early life and it left a scar that changed your whole development, and you got worse and worse as you grew up and eventually you turned into some kind of a nut. That was the way they figured it in the books and in the movies.
But he couldn't figure it out that way, because he couldn't remember anything in his childhood that might have touched it all off. As a matter-of-fact, he could remember virtually nothing of his younger years. He knew that he had gone to school, that he had lived with his parents-but it was all blurred and he could not seem to bring it into focus.
Why?
Why?
Plenty of questions and not a single answer.
He lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully. Cigarettes, he knew, were bad for you. They did bad things to you, and it was not healthy to smoke them. And yet he also knew that he could smoke as much as he liked because it would not really make a bit of difference, not a bit, because smoking would not kill him. He would not live long enough for cigarettes to hurt him. He would be killed, just as he killed others.
Maybe he was even looking forward to it. All at once he remembered that dream, that terrible dream, the one he had had just before he stuck the long and vicious carving knife into Shirley's heart. He had awakened from that dream with sweat coating his body, and then in the afterglow of the dream he had murdered the poor woman in her sleep.
The dream-
All about being naked and being hanged by a whole batch of people who laughed at him while they pulled on the rope and laughed at him while he kicked at the air and laughed at him while bit by bit he choked to death. And hating it and liking it at the same time, a crazy dream if ever there was one.
Did it mean something? A guy at prison, a very sharp guy, had told him once that every dream meant something or other. He had never cared much at the time because that was a stage in his life when he never dreamed anyway, so he just filed the statement somewhere in the back of his mind and forgot it for the time being. Now, though, he remembered it. What the hell did his dream mean? It was something to think about, and it would have been something to ask a psychiatrist about. But you don't go to a psychiatrist and tell him how you keep all the time murdering people and then ask him to tell you what some crummy dream meant. You don't work things that way because it doesn't make a great deal of sense.
But he wished he knew. There were a lot of things he wished he knew. He wished he knew a way to stop himself, because he knew things would only get worse and would never get better. He wished that now, while he was calm and relaxed, he had the guts to get rid of the gun so that it would not be available the next time he snapped. But he knew well enough that he could not possibly bring himself to do this. He would keep the gun, and he would use it again.
And again.
He put out one cigarette and lit another one. Well, he had a watch now. Maybe that was something. And maybe he could get more things, and more money, and-
Already the relaxed and calm mood was beginning to fade away and leave him. Already the lust for crime and pain and death was coming back.
CHAPTER SIX
Think about Lee Fallon.
Go ahead-think about him. Toss him around in your mind. He's not a very pleasant guy. He hurts people, and he takes things that don't belong to him, and he makes girls do things they don't want to do. and he murders. That's the big thing-he kills people. And he does it because it gives him a thrill.
Think about him, why don't you?
Maybe it's not fun thinking about him. Maybe it would be more fun thinking about the show on television, or the last time you made love, or the time you made the honor roll in sixth grade, or the broad next door, or any other things you may have made that were especially memorable. There are things in this world that are more enjoyable to dwell on than Lee Fallon, but what the hell, you can't always do what you want to do. So think about him.
Let's suppose for a moment that you-yeah, you, buddy-were Lee Fallon. Now, that's not the sort of thing you want to think about at all, is it? Probably not, unless you're some kind of a nut. Say you're an average Joe, you work hard, you like the same things every other average Joe likes, you want to live a good life without stepping on anybody, want to get yours without hurting anyone else more than you have to. Hell, a guy like you, you don't even want to think about changing places with a guy like Lee Fallon.
Or do you?
Well, suppose you were him. Suppose you had done what he had done, and suppose you were in the position that he was in. What in hell would you do next?
Shoot yourself? That's a pretty natural answer, and it's one that Fallon thought of. But it doesn't work that way. It didn't for Fallon, and it probably wouldn't for you. It's not a question of being scared to commit suicide, because it doesn't take too much in the way of bravery to knock yourself off. It's a question of wanting to take your own life. And Fallon wanted to live, and so would you, old pal.
Skip town? But that doesn't make much sense either. No one was looking for him in New York. He had committed crimes, and the police would have liked to get their hands on the guy who committed those crimes, but they didn't know he was the guy so they weren't bugging him at all. He wasn't even hiding. So why leave New York? He was as safe there as he could have hoped to be any place else, and he liked the town. Remember, it wasn't New York that made a killer out of him. So what would you do?
All things considered, you would probably do this-you would probably go right on, drifting with the tide, floating whichever way the wind blew, to mix a metaphor beyond repair. Most people do this. Water doesn't flow uphill, of course, and leopards do not change their spots-you can pick whichever cliche you like the best, because they all apply. A person does what he does, and that, actually, is all there is to it.
So you would probably bide your time, doing what you had to do, robbing when you wanted money, raping when you wanted to, killing when you wanted to see fresh blood. That, old friend, is very probably what you would do if you were Lee Fallon.
Anyway, it's what Fallon did.
That night, he met another resident of the King William.
The help all knew him, of course, and they all very dutifully said hello to him, and they were always pleasant. But until then it had been as though he were the only person living at that hotel, at least insofar as he was concerned. There were others there, of course. The King William did not exactly operate at capacity, but it wasn't empty either, and he passed other guests in the lobby and in the hallways and rode with them on the elevator. Still, none of them had ever made any impression upon him, or he upon them. He did not talk to them and they did not talk to him, or nod. Their paths crossed but their personalities did not, and it was as though he were living in a comfortable vacuum, devoid of human contact.
That night he met someone.
He was coming back from a fairly tasteless dinner, a flank steak at a place called Abner's, and he walked through the lobby and rode upstairs in the elevator and walked to his door, key in hand. He stuck his key in the door and started to turn it when a voice spoke his name.
Not his real name. His alias.
"Oh, Mr. Fullmer?"
One of the maids, he thought. He turned toward the voice and looked, and he saw right away that, whoever this was, it was most definitely not one of the maids. Maids wore uniforms, and this one wore a black cocktail gown cut low enough to let the tops of her breasts show. Maids were usually old and/or ugly, and this one was neither. And maids did not wear blood-red lipstick, or Cleopatra hairdos. This one wore both and on her they both looked good, so it was fairly reasonable to assume that she was not a maid. She may have been made-any number of times-but she was not one.
"You are Mr. Fullmer," she said. "Aren't you?"
"Yes," he lied.
"And I am Janice Lawler. Jan to friends, Miss Law-ler to enemies, of which I have few, thank the Lord. Aren't you going to ask me in for a drink, Mr. Fullmer?"
A hooker, he decided. A fairly expensive one, and certainly a fairly classy one, but she was hustling strangers in hotel corridors and that didn't fit in with the class routine.
"Well," he said.
She smiled archly. A good-looking one, he thought Maybe twenty-eight, maybe thirty, something like that Not too tall and not too short, not too heavy and not too thin. Heavier than skinny-a little too heavy for the fashion magazines, with her big breasts and her ample hips and her rounded rump. She wouldn't make the cover of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar, but she might be good for a fold-out in a man's magazine. Her figure wasn't fashionable, he thought, but what it promised was something that never went out of style. Love.
In capital letters. "Mr. Fullmer?"
But did he want her in his room? He wanted to love her, all right, but it was a desire that he could control for the time being. But one bang would lead to something more than that, and he knew it. He would get so that he wanted to beat her up, and then he would probably wind up maiming or killing her.
Not that he had anything against the idea of killing her. But he wasn't in a West Side apartment now, and he wasn't in Central Park either. He was in his hotel, his own hotel, the King William, and he was standing out in front of his own damned room, and it didn't make one perfect hell of a lot of sense to rape and kill some tramp in your own room.
You didn't dirty where you ate-which is an argument against a great deal of things. You didn't mix business with pleasure, either. The hotel was a front, an ideal front, and he didn't want to jeopardize it by getting eager for some twenty or fifty or hundred-dollar tramp.
He said: "I better take a rain-check. I'm kind of beat."
"I'm disappointed."
"In me?"
"Mmmmm."
"You got nothing to worry about," he said. His eyes went to her breasts. "You'll find somebody else, won't be much trouble for you. Probably do a lot better with somebody else."
She looked at him, a long and level look, and her mouth formed a little O. She said. "Oh, how silly. Why, you think I'm a prostitute, don't you, Mr. Fullmer? "You're not?"
"Oh, no. Not even on the make."
"A kindred spirit, Mr. Fullmer."
"A what?"
"A bird of the same feather. You're gtm is a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson police positive, isn't it, Mr. Fullmer? I wonder how many notches you have in it. What's the matter, Mr. Fullmer? Don't you feel well?"
He didn't feel well at all.
"And I'm not even a blackmailer," she went on. "Or a fink, for that matter, to drift into the vernacular. Mr. Fullmer, are you going to invite me into your room or am I going to stick a finger in your solar plexus? You're being very unmannerly, Mr. Fullmer."
He got the door open. Things were happening very quickly now and he couldn't keep up with them, didn't understand them. This broad knew things about him that shouldn't be known and she was coming on like Gang-busters and he suddenly didn't know which end was up, and wasn't even sure how to go about finding out. This broad knew things and he didn't even know how much, and she had an angle and he had no way of knowing what that angle was, and-
She followed him inside.
And locked the door.
"Drinks," she said. "Mr. Fullmer, that bottle must be Jack Daniels. I recognize the shape. Is it?"
"Yes."
"Pour some in a glass for me, no water, no ice. And some for yourself, because you surely look as though you need it. You do have two glasses, don't you?"
He did. He rinsed them both out and poured a good three ounces of bourbon in each of them. He took a glass and he gave her a glass and she touched her glass to his. They clinked. She sipped her drink and he sipped his drink and she asked him when, pray tell, he was going to invite her to sit down. He invited her to sit down. She sat on the edge of his bed and he sat down in the room's only armchair.
"That's better," she said over the rim of her glass. "Mr. Fullmer, you have a gun, the one I described. You come and go at reasonably odd hours and you do not seem to be gainfully employed, or even ungainfully employed, for that matter. You carry no sample case, no brief case, no attache case. All in all, I can come to only one conclusion. You are a criminal, Mr. Fullmer."
He did not say yes and he did not say no. He did not even nod, just went on looking at her and drinking his drink.
"I'm a criminal, too," she said. She finished all the bourbon in her glass and put the empty glass on the bedside table. She asked him for a cigarette and he gave her one of his. She stood there-sat there, to be more accurate-and waited until, after some several seconds, he got the message and scratched a match and lit her cigarette for her. She dragged on the cigarette and blew out a large cloud of blue-gray smoke.
"I'm a criminal, too," she said again. "And I need a partner, Mr. Fullmer, and you're elected."
She had to give him the whole thing, very slowly. She was cooling it in New York, long or. clothes and manners but very short on ready cash. She was the former partner of a good but small-time confidence man who was now cooling it far more thoroughly than she was, cooling it in a place called Dannemora, doing five-to-fifteen for fraud and grand larceny and a few miscellaneous charges which had been thrown in for the hell of it. They had been working a pigeon drop, the old lost-wallet gambit which still worked, though she couldn't imagine why, and the mark had tipped just in time and the law came down like the wolf on the fold, and she got away and he, being the roper, got nailed. Hard.
So she was in New York with no partner and no money and she did not work solo, had never wanted to and did not feel like starting now. She wanted big money fast, but the only person she had known in New York was the guy who was now doing his bit in Dannemora, and she felt very out of things.
But she knew Fallon was crooked, was sure of it, could tell it, and he was at the same hotel with her and she thought, well, why not, because what could be more natural than teaming up? They would work together, she assured him, and they would make a lot of money, and how nice that would be!
"But I'm not a con man, Jan."
"I'm sure you're not. Not smooth enough, and I do not mean that as an insult, Lee." She knew his first name now and called him by it, but she didn't know about the Fallon-Fullmer bit. "You do not seem to be a confidence man, and I can often tell."
"What do you think I do?"
"Something heavier than that. Let me see." She moved closer to him, her eyes narrowing carefully. She searched his eyes and his face and said: "You've done time."
"Not heavy time."
"No, of course not. But you've been in, I can tell that much. Let's see." He took a breath.
"You're not a professional killer. Not a gun, not you. I had that feeling at the very first, which made me think you would be not much help for me, but I changed my mind, because that type is not one which fits you. But ... oh, yes, you have killed, haven't you, Lee?"
"You can tell that?"
"I think so, yes."
"I didn't know it showed."
"It does. I think some kind of stealing, like payroll robbery, games of that ilk. Am I right?"
There was no point hiding things from this one. She knew too damned much already. "Nothing that big," he said. "Small things. Liquor stores."
"I was close."
"Yeah, close."
She found her empty glass and held it out to him. He poured a fresh drink for her but did not take any more for himself, not just yet. With this one, he thought, it would pay to be on his toes. Liquor would only confuse things.
"We'd be a good team," she said.
"What do I need with a team, Jan? All a partner is is someone to split the take with. I go in, I get the money, I get out and that's the ball game. Why a partner?"
She smiled.
"I mean except the obvious reasons," he said, his eyes on her body. "Except for them."
"Forget the obvious reasons. How much to you make in a stick-up, Lee?"
"It varies."
"A grand a shot? An average of a thousand dollars every time you point your gun at somebody?"
"Nothing like that, no. But pretty good."
"Wouldn't a grand be better? With less work and less risk out of the deal? What does it matter if you have to split the money when you make a lot more money with me?"
"How?"
"I haven't worked that out yet. Not entirely."
He laughed. "When you work it out, you call me."
"Lee."
"You could do a lot better selling that can of yours than being partners with me, Jan."
"No I couldn't. Lee, I'm not kidding around. I want to team up. I'll have ideas that'll make you reel, I swear it. Listen, there's no law after you, is there?"
He shook his head.
"Or me either. Lee, we can't miss. I have ideas, I have angles."
"Tell me about them."
She reeled off three quick plans, each of them guaranteed to yield a rock-bottom minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars. She did not give him details or names or places. Just the ideas. He could not pull the jobs without her, and he could tell from the way she talked that these were real jobs, that they were not just phonied up. The broad was nice and sharp. The broad had ideas and they sounded like good ideas, and she had more of a brain that he did. And at least he was smart enough to recognize a smarter person when he found one.
He said: "Sold."
"All the way?"
"Yeah. How do we split?"
"Half-and-half on every job."
"Fine, I'm not greedy. Well, let's shake on it, partner."
He reached out a hand and she took it. Then he moved in after the hand and sat beside her on the bed and reached for her to kiss her. She turned her head defdy aside and he kissed at air. He groped for her with eager hands and she stood up and moved away from him and shook her head. Her lips were tightly compressed and there was no mistaking the message in her eyes. She was not playing hard to get. She was not teasing. She simply did not intend to let him do anything.
"I figured on sealing the bargain," he said.
"No."
"I mean, partners-"
"Partners only in crime."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You got some other guy?"
"No."
"Then what?"
She didn't answer him. He got his breathing back to normal, found a cigarette, got it going. He filled his lungs with smoke and sat down heavily on the edge of his bed.
"I don't get it," he said.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you. You don't get it. Not today, not tomorrow, not at all."
"Why?"
"I told you. I don't want to."
"It has to be love for you?"
"It doesn't have to be love."
"You can't enjoy it?"
"That's ... closer."
"What is it?"
She thought about it for a long time. Then she sat down in the chair where he had been sitting and said: "I guess I can say it; I might as well. If we're to be working together you would learn sooner or later, and you might as well learn now. Because sleeping together is not going to be part of our partnership, it can't be, and I'll have to explain why or you'll never let me alone, will you?"
He didn't answer her.
"All right. I'm not frigid, but that's close. When I like it it's with girls."
He stared at her. "Girls," she said. "You're a dyke?"
"Lesbian is a nicer word."
"Nicer. Nobody who looks like you is a dyke."
"Thanks for the compliment, but you'd be surprised."
"This other partner of yours, the one who's in stir now. You didn't sleep with him?"
"Never."
"What was it?"
"No, he was married, as a matter-of-fact, but not to me. And I don't think he would have slept with me if I had wanted him to. He was faithful to his wife, though that may seem strange to you." She grinned. "It's not that strange. He has a pretty wife. I'd be glad to get her myself, to be truthful."
"What would you do with her?"
"Use your imagination."
He used his imagination and his mind turned over. He said: "I'd like to get you, too, and you can use your imagination what I'd like to do to you."
"I can imagine."
"Yeah, sure. But if it's out then it's out, and you don't have to worry about me pushing it. Somebody's got a particular kick, that's her kick. You can't argue about that. Everybody works his own way, far as the love part is concerned. You can't spit on a person just because he works different."
"That's a pretty speech, Lee."
"Yeah-You're a Lesbian. It's too bad, but you're entitled." He thought of the pervert he had beaten in Central Park. Well, a pervert and a Lesbian were two different things. "You're entitled," he repeated, "and we're still partners. Partners out of bed but not in it, the way you said. Deal?"
"Deal," Jan Lawler told him.
So he didn't spend the night with her after all. He had more or less planned on it from the minute she brought up the partner schtick, and he had itched to have her the minute he saw that lush body of hers, but he wasn't going to push it. And, surprisingly enough, once she was out of his room and he was alone with himself he realized that he was just as glad that she was not available to him.
Because it was better that way.
Much better.
If she let him have her, it wouldn't be long before he wanted to do more than that. He knew how he worked and what made him tick. He was a sadist and a sex-killer, and any broad that he had he would pretty shortly want to do some pretty terrible things to, and she would wind up dead, and if he managed to kill his partner-in-crime there would be hell to pay in nothing flat. You didn't mix business with pleasure, especially if you were the type of clown who mixed pleasure with pain. If you did, you wound up with a pain in the business. It was almost algebraic in its simplicity.
So it had all worked out for the better. It would be as though they were both men who worked together. They would pull a few jobs, they would have occasional dinners together, they would be good, friends, and that would be all.
No love.
Or plenty of love, maybe. But not between them. Love with girls for her, and love with girls for him, but no love with each other.
Her body would be something of a distraction. That much was obvious, because a man would have to be funny or dead to avoid getting eager just from thinking about her. But it was something he could overcome. There were forces that he couldn't resist, and he could recognize them, but this was not one of them. He could hold off. He could work with her without surrendering to the strong impulse to work on her.
He would get his love on his own.
And now he was on his own.
She was gone and he was alone in his room with liquor perking in his system. And the stimulation she had given him was not entirely gone; it merely redirected itself, away from her and toward some faceless and unknown woman somewhere in the city. He did not know who he was going to get, but he would get someone, and soon. That night.
Now.
He got dressed all over again, putting on a plaid flannel shirt he had bought the other day and a pair of gray gabardine slacks. He wanted to look casual this time, not at all formal and not especially well-dressed. He combed his hair, took a quick shave, and went downstairs and out of the hotel.
A cab took him where he wanted to go.
And where he wanted to go was not the west side, or Central Park, or back to Brooklyn. Where he wanted to go was a place where it is better not to go, maybe. A place not to go after dark, anyway, and a place which by definition gets dark quite early.
He went to Harlem.
There was a reason. He wanted action and he wanted speed and he wanted something exotic, and for all three of those things you cannot pick a better spot to look than Harlem. Harlem is the part of the city where they shove the Negroes and Puerto Ricans in and let them rot there. The people who run the city don't care what happens there, just so long as the Negroes don't move into then-own lily-white neighborhood, just so long as aqui se habia espanol doesn't appear over their properly Anglo-Saxon doorway. The powers-that-be don't care what happens in Harlem, and so the police don't care either. They look the other way, their eyes fully open only to pick up any quick money that comes their way with no questions asked.
And, because nobody cares what happens in Harlem, just about everything does. In spades.
The cabby, a Negro with long sideburns, dropped Fallon at Seventh Avenue and he gave the driver some money and started to go away and the driver said: "Hey, baby."
Nobody called Fallon baby. But he turned around anyway.
"Dig, you looking for something special?"
Fallon didn't answer him.
"I mean, you come up here for a reason?"
"Everybody has a reason," Fallon said.
"I mean, to meet a friend or something? To talk some business, hear some music, any of them things? Or did you have something else in mind, man?"
"Why?"
"Like I didn't figure you to be meeting friends, is all."
"You don't think I've got friends?"
"Not uptown, man. You don't come on like a gray cat, man, which is a cat who is white but who hangs with spades. You come on more like you are looking for a certain commodity."
Fallon didn't say anything.
"Like love," the cabby said.
Fallon still didn't say anything. But he didn't turn and go away, either. He waited the cabby out.
"If I am wrong," the cabby said, "just say so, baby, and I leave. I'm not one of those pushy drivers."
"Go on."
"Solid. You go to that bar down the block, that Rita's Roost. You see the place?"
"Yes."
"With all the neon. Spells out the name big as life. Rita's Roost."
"I see it." Fallon cleared his throat. "If you think I need your help to find love in Harlem, you must have straw for brains."
"Oh, now," the cabby said.
Fallon started to walk away. The cabbie said: "Now easy, baby. I don't mean just a tramp, if I figured you had eyes for just a tramp you are right, why, I would of let you find that just-a-tramp all by yourself. I figured you wanted some special dish of tea."
"Marijuana? No thanks."
The cabby's eyes rolled. "Hell, man. No. I was talking like in images, dig? I will tell you quick. You go to Rita's and you ask for a girl named Carmen. Carmen is about three inches taller than you and outweighs you three-to-two. Carmen is about the same color as coffee when it's all-the-way black and strong as ink and boiled too many times."
Fallon looked at him.
"Now you get more than Carmen, like. Because Carmen has this friend, her name is Lily. That's a pretty name, that Lily. Pretty girl, too. Real small, like five feet tall and thin. Real thin. And light, too. Like about the color of coffee when you mix three cups of milk with one cup of coffee. Like a very high yellow, so high she is close to flying. Dig?"
"So?"
The cabby frowned. "How you mean, so?"
"I mean so what."
"Man, this is a sister act," the cabby said. "These two little girls, Carmen and Lily, now you probably wouldn't believe it but they're sisters."
"You're a hundred per cent right," Fallon said. "I don't believe a word of it."
"Damn, course not. Too smart for that, aren't you, baby? No, they not sisters. But they sweeter than sisters. See, you pay your money, see, and like they take you back to their pad and the three of you get a little high and maybe you watch some movies, or maybe they put on a little act for you, and then they both take you off to bed. A black-as-ink one and a high-yellow one. and what more could an ofay cat like you want on a night like this, anyway?"
"Go to hell," Fallon said. And he walked away, and the cabby said something unpleasant about Fallon's mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and drove off with his tires squealing.
What the hell, Fallon thought. What the hell. A doubles team, a two-for-the-price-of-one act. Two girls to take turns with.
Well, it might be fun.
Plenty of fun.
Special Lee-Fallon-style fun.
He lit a cigarette mc looked around at Harlem. Just like any other place, he thought. Only a different color He sucked on the cigarette and wondered what kind of a guy the caboy had figured him for, anyway. Somebody with bread, in the first place. And somebody who was square enougn to get taken six ways and backward, and panting at the cabby's description of the fun and games.
Well, damn the cabbj.
Grinning just slightly. Fallon walked across the street and a few doors down to a bar called Rita's Roost.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was not the Stork. It was not Twenty-One or El Morocco or Danny's. It was not Toots Shor's or the Little Club or Car-roway's or La Guarda. It was Rita's Roost, and it was a dive. Outside, there was a lot of neon, a fly-specked window, a few beer signs. Inside there was not much light at all, just a few shaded bulbs over the back bar. The bartender was a forty-three year old Sicilian with opaque brown eyes and a fixed half-smile, who polished endless glasses with a dirty towel. A jukebox rocked with blues and houserock and torchy stuff. There was a little sawdust on the floor and there was a picture of Ralph Bunche, unsigned, on the wall over the cash register.
Half the hustlers in the world were at the bar. There were big ones and small ones, fifty-year-old ones and jailbait ones, chesty ones, fat and thin ones, white and brown and black ones. Forty of them at least, Pallon thought. More than you could shake a stick at, although there were a few he very definitely wanted to shake a stick at.
They flowed toward him the way sharks drift in when you drop a corpse overboard into the ocean, floated in like buzzards coming for a fresh kill. Damn, he thought, it had been a mistake to come here. The competition was too keen. The damn tramps would be fighting over him.
"Hey, man, you want company?"
"Why, hello, lover. Let's have a party, lover."
"Want to meet a girl can speak French, sugar? I talk a good game of it, baby. I swear I'll make you one happy man."
"Oh, mister, come with me. You come with me, baby. The price is right, baby."
He pushed them all aside, got through to the men's room and ducked into a stall, more because he wanted to get away from them than out of any physical need. He sat down on the pot and took a breath and lit a cigarette to kill part of the noxious odor of the place. He reached into a pocket and took out the knife he had taken from the boy in Central Park, the boy he had ripped up the gut. He pressed the button and the-blade flashed out and his eyes stayed on its sharp tip.
He had left the gun in his room. The knife would be enough. jfore than enough.
He took a breath-which was no pleasure, not in that bathroom-and tried to clear his head. The outer door opened and he heard two men come in and close the door. They were using the mirror. One of them scratched a match and lit a cigarette, smoking in short and intense drags. Fallon recognized the acrid smell of marijuana. The two of them passed the cigarette back and forth while Fallon sat down and listened to the two of them talking about some tramp in the other room. One of them was the tramp's manager, and the other was trying to see if he could get to the girl for free. The pimp thought he ought to pay his way.
"Man," the pimp said, "she's my sister. I can't put you to my own sister for free, man."
It was a nice world, Fallon thought. A solid-gold world front to back and top to bottom. The two clowns finished their pot and left. Fallon got out and went to the bar and ordered a shot of rye. No point in ordering good stuff at Rita's Roost, he knew. He would get the same slop anyway and would only manage to pay a higher price for it.
He threw the shot down and turned aside to light a cigarette. He ordered a refill. A girl's hand came at him and played with the front of his pants. He let her go on playing but didn't pay any attention to her, and after a few minutes she left him alone. She had gone and done a good job on him, though. He was filled with need now, full of passion and ready for action.
Carmen.
Carmen and Lily.
The sister act sounded kind of cute, but that wasn't what he wanted. You had to be a real mark to go for a routine like that, and half the time the girls didn't even exist in the first place. He didn't know Harlem, but he knew tramps and pimps and hustlers in big towns and little towns, and he could recognize a pitch when it came his way and could see the curve break a mile off. And the Carmen-and-Lily pitch was an obvious one, a very slow-breaking curve at that.
They had worked a wrinkle like that in Dayton once, him and another guy and two girls. The pitch was that the sucker would get to watch the two girls put on a show, and then would take his turn with each of the girls, and all of this for twenty bucks. That was big money in Dayton, so it wasn't too far out of line, but it was still a big come-on all the way. It worked neat, too-the other guy would rope the sucker, and the two girls would do nothing, just sit in a bar where they would be visible. Then Fallon would get half the money in advance from the sucker, or ten bucks. While the sucker was waiting for the girls, all four of them would disappear. They only pulled it a few times because by the time the ten was cut four ways it wasn't worth it, but it had gone off nicely every damned time.
And it would be the same sort of thing with Carmen and Lily, whether they existed or not. He didn't want two girls, anyway. One was plenty, one nice warm one who would be very good to him until it was time for him to be very bad to her. He patted his pocket and felt the switchblade knife and thought how very bad he would be to her, how very evil he would be.
The same girl's hand came for him again. He couldn't even see who the hand belonged to, because people were all bunched up at the bar and the hand was sort of coming from the middle of a crowd. It reached around and stroked him fondly, and then a thumb and a forefinger caught the zipper of his pants and drew it down, opening his pants for him. He looked at the chocolate-colored hand, at the scarlet polish on the long fingernails.
The hand slipped into the opening it had created and searched around. A slender hand, its fingers pleasantly warm. The polish on the nails was the approximate color of blood. The hand caught hold of what it had been looking for. The hand played, and the hand knew all the fine points of the game.
Okay, girl, he thought. You'd better slow down or you'll finish everything before it gets started. And, almost as though she had been able to read his mind, she gave him one final squeeze and moved her hand.
He zipped his pants shut, took hold of her hand, and drew her over to him. If his luck ran the way it generally did, he thought, she would wind up being a fat ugly pockmarked flat-chested pig with her hands the only attractive thing about her.
But his luck was running better. She was no pig, not by a long shot.
She was a doll.
She was smiling hugely as she stepped in next to him. She had skin with the color of good milk chocolate and the texture of velvet. Her eyes were very large and her nose was small and tip-tilted. Her mouth was as red as her nail polish and a thousand times more obscene. She wore a very tight sweater with nothing under it, and her huge breasts looked as though they might tear the sweater in two. He could see the outlines of her nipples.
Her voice didn't have the harsh hard cynicism of hip Harlem in it, either. It was liquid, the tones properly pear-shaped, the huskiness beneath it a promise and a temptation. This was a live one, he told himself. A nice combination of frank love and a cultured quality that made the lusty part just that much lustier. This was the right one.
"I think you want to play," she said softly. "Am I right?"
"Play for pay?"
"The best things in life are not free, dear."
"How expensive are they?"
"They are twenty dollars worth, sweetness. With the hand job thrown in free. Call it a sample."
"What do I get for a twenty?"
"Whatever you want." Her eyes promised the moon. "Except no dumpings. No beating up, or any of that, because I won't play those games. I don't have to, not with my looks, and the money just isn't worth it for me."
Did she know something? He wondered. Maybe she could tell, just by looking at him, that his kick was sadism, that he got his thrills that way. But probably not. If she had known that she would not have approached him in the first place, would have left him alone and would have let the other girls have him. But she was sounding him, so the stuff about no beatings was probably just a throw-away line she handed to every trick.
"Now why would anybody want to hurt you?" he said.
"Well," she said. "Twenty dollars?"
"Yes."
It was funny how little difference the price made. He would get the money back afterward, he thought, just as he had gotten the money back from Shirley after he stopped her heart with her carving knife. There was really nothing to worry about in that department. If she wanted twenty he would give her twenty. If she wanted a hundred he would give her a hundred. He was going to take the money back anyway.
Along with her life.
"You're on," he said.
And she reached out and rubbed the front of his pants again, cooing softly to him all the while, telling him that she was certain, very certain, that he would not be sorry.
She was right. He wouldn't be sorry. But she would.
She lived in a pretty rank place. If she lived there at all-he had the feeling, looking around the barren little room, that it was just a place she used for turning her tricks, just a room rented for encounters that danced to the tune of a timeclock. A bed, a bureau, a straight wooden chair. A mirror, cracked in two places to provide some poor louse with a total of fourteen years of bad luck, and fogged in some other places so that you had to look into it very carefully if you wanted to get anything resembling a true reflection. He didn't care what he looked like, though. And maybe, he thought fleetingly, he had gotten to the point where he could not be reflected by a mirror. Like a vampire.
The girl told him her name was Dorothy. She closed the door of the room and slid a bolt into the latch, then arranged an iron bar police lock against the door. The iron bar fitted into a special plate in the floor and locked into a catch on the door, thus bracing the door so that it could not possibly be opened from outside. Police locks are common in neighborhoods like Dorothy's. So are burglars, and housebreakers, and unwelcome detectives.
"Now it's just us two," Dorothy murmured. "Us two and twenty dollars, if you please."
He gave her a twenty. She put it in a drawer of the bureau and closed the drawer. Then she moved up to him, moving very slowly, and she tossed her arms around his neck and brought her mouth very close to his.
She was wearing a lot of perfume but it was not the drug store variety. It smelled good. She pushed her waist into his and rubbed her cheek against his cheek and put her lips to his ear, nibbling the lobe. In a whisper she asked him how he wanted to have his party.
"Take off your clothes," he said. "Do it real slow."
She smiled and stepped back. Her body swayed in time to some imaginary beat and she began to strip. It wasn't much of a job. She was wearing a tight sweater and a tight pair of slacks, an un-likely costume for a prostitute at that, but she had not complicated matters by wearing anything beneath either of those garments, so disrobing was easily accomplished.
Still, she did it slowly, the way he had asked her to do it. She started by taking off her shoes and socks. Her toenails were scarlet with the same blood-red polish. She stood before him, barefoot, her hips swinging from side to side. She bent over a little and put her hands on her knees, then straightened up slowly and let her hands run upward along her body until they cupped her own breasts. She gave herself a cute little squeeze and wiggled playfully before him.
Then her hands hooked on the sweater and lifted it up and off, but slowly, very slowly, so that he saw first her bare brown midriff and then got a tantalizing peek of the underside of her large breasts. Slowly, slowly, and then the nipples came into view, and then the whole of the breasts, magnificent in their entirety, and then at last the sweater was up off her shoulders and over her head and off of her arms and tossed, casually, upon the wooden chair.
Her breasts were a little lighter in color than the rest of her. Their nipples were a deep reddish brown, more red than brown, already suffused with the response to the tactile stimulation she had given them earlier. The breasts were very large and very firm. He saw that he had picked a winner. With the sort of treatment hustlers got, they rarely had especially good boobs. But Dorothy's were flawless and lovely.
His brain reeled with the though of what he would do to those breasts. It was hard holding back now, hard controlling himself. But he managed it because he had to manage it. The longer he waited the better it would be, and he wanted it to be very good now. He had the feeling that there would not be many times left for him, from here on in, and he wanted to make every opportunity count for something. It was as though he was a cardiac patient who had been told by his doctor to give it up. Every time he did might be the last time, and you could bet he would make each as good as possible.
And this would be a good one for him.
She was wriggling out of the slacks now. They were a deep brown, much darker than she was. There was a zipper on the side, and she unzipped it. Then, breasts bobbing and hips still sashaying back and forth, she began to squirm out of the slacks. She got them down over her hips and turned around to let him see her, then turned to face him again. She squirmed slowly but surely until the slacks gave up and dropped down around her ankles. A quick kick-one third down-put the slacks on the chair with the sweater.
And she was naked.
Very naked.
She moved toward him like lava down the side of a volcanic mountain, and he stood waiting for her, and her breasts and arms reached for him and she threw her arms once again around his neck and pressed into his chest. He could feel the firmness. He put his hands around her and touched her buttocks. With a firm motion she moved against him and he felt lustfulness.
"Now what?" she whispered. "Now move around a little," he said. "Touch yourself."
"Fool with myself?"
"Yes."
"With my hands?"
"And anything else you think of."
"Sure," she said. She chewed her lower Hp. "This is an awful lot for twenty dollars," she said.
What difference did it make to him? "I'll give you twenty more," he said. He fished out another bill and handed it to her. "I want to have a good time, a nice slow good time. I don't mind shooting another twenty."
She smiled gratefully and took the bill from him. Grinning, she rubbed it against a special part of herself, then turned quickly and put it in the same drawer in her bureau. She closed the drawer and began to move her body for him, touching herself and letting him watch her. She cupped her breasts, handled them, played with the nipples. He asked her if she could get them to her mouth. She answered by lifting each breast in turn and pressing her lips to the tip. They just reached. She took each nipple with her mouth and kissed it, and when she stopped there was a glowing circle of blood-red lipstick around the tip of each perfect breast.
Then she began to stroke her stomach, and her buttocks. She assumed extraordinary positions and let him watch the clever things she did. At one point she went to the bureau and got a special gadget, a thing she kept around for her occasional Lesbian customers, and she did some exercises with it.
It was something to watch.
He thought about Jan, his Lesbian partner. In three days they were going to pull the first of their jobs together. He wondered how it would go, and how well they would work together. And he wondered if he would still be alive then, or if they would have caught him or killed him by that time. "More, honey?"
She was waiting for further instructions. And he was burning up now, too eager to wait any more. No love with her, not now. And no quick and brutal murder. He knew what he wanted to do.
He wanted to hurt her.
He had her turn around. She did, waiting. He wanted to see her squirm in pain and writhe in agony and twist in desperation. That was what he wanted, and that was what he was going to have, and he was going to do it all just right.
He had her turn around. She did. waiting. He reached out, touched her shoulders, reached around, touched her breasts, released them.
And then he brought back both hands and interlocked their fingers and raised his hands high over his head and brought them down on the very base of her skull, full force, all his strength. She never knew what hit her. She went down like the ship Titanic, out cold, and he stooped down beside her and looked hungrily at the glorious flesh that was his to ruin.
When she came to fifteen minutes later she could not move and could not make a sound. The bed was an old brass one with footboard and headboard, and he had spread her upon it, both pillows underneath her rear end. He had torn the bed's top sheet into long strips and had lashed her ankles to opposite ends of the footboard and her wrists to opposite ends of the headboard. A thick gag in her mouth kept her from making any noise whatsoever. She came to and she looked up at him with eyes that simply did not understand. She tried to move and she tried to cry out and all she did was wiggle a little and say nothing at all.
He touched her. Gently at first, touching her breasts and her middle. He was naked himself now and his clothes were piled on the same chair that held her sweater and slacks. He touched her a little lower and this time he was not gentle. He hurt her and he felt her muscles go tense and rigid with the pain. But that pain was nothing in comparison to what was coming. He was barely getting started.
"No beatings," he told her. "Just like you said, no beatings. I wouldn't hit you with my fists. I wouldn't do a thing like that, Dorothy, not to you. I just want to hurt you a little."
She looked as though she could not believe it. He let her see the knife, and he thumbed the blade open, and then she had to believe it. A dozen kinds of fear winked through her eyes and he could see a vein on her forehead standing out and throbbing with the realization of what was coming next.
With the precision of a surgeon, he made a three-inch cut down her middle. The knife barely pierced the skin, merely scored it, so that a thin rivulet of blood flowed from the cut. It was a sharp knife, and the small cut did not hurt her very much, but the sight of the blood welling from the cut sent shivers of passion coursing through Fallon. His eyes fastened on it and he breathed in heavy gasps. He bent over her and kissed the blood from the cut and his head swam.
He straightened up, fighting off the wave of dizziness that swept over him. He could take his time now, he knew. The door was bolted and the police lock would keep the whole world at bay. The room's sole window faced out on a blank wall, and the window shade was drawn anyway. The girl could neither move nor cry out.
He had all the time in the world.
He used the knife again. He made little cuts on her calves, on her legs, and on her arms. He stabbed her lightly in each armpit and watched the blood seep from the cuts. He cut her breasts, just one tiny cut on the underside of each. The scarlet blood matched her nail polish perfectly and stood out in glossy relief on her brown skin.
And it was hurting her now. She was not losing enough blood to matter but the multiplicity of the cuts was in itself enough to cause pain. Each time he let her see what he was going to do, and each time she would try to squirm away from him, to keep that part of herself that he was going to cut away from his knife. But she could not move far enough, and each time the knife cut her and each time a little more pain ran through her.
He closed the knife, set it aside. He took a cigarette from his pack, tore out a match and lit it. He blew out the match very carefully, testing it with the ball of his thumb to make sure that it was out, and dropped it onto the floor. He took a long drag on his cigarette. He inhaled and exhaled.
Then he jabbed the glowing cigarette to her.
It was something to see. The burning was a lot different from the cutting. It was a sharp and fiery pain that jabbed into her middle and spread through her like wildfire. Every muscle in her body tightened up and her face was torn with agony. She screamed against the gag but no sound came out. Blood rushed to her face. Her arms and legs were taut as tightly-stretched bands of wrought iron.
A tramp could fake passion. But no one on earth could fake pain and make it this convincing. She felt it and he knew she felt it and his whole being trembled with the full realization of her pain.
He wanted her now, wanted to throw himself upon her and ravish her, wanted to take with fury what he had already bought and paid for. The pillows beneath her offered her charms to him like some sacrifice to a pagan god, and he looked at the offering and trembled with need. But he had to wait, had to bide his time.
He lit three more cigarettes, one at a time. He butted one on the very tip of each breast, grinding them into the soft-firm flesh and shaking violently as she shook with pain. Her pain was his pleasure, and she had a great deal of pain and he had a great deal of pleasure.
You can guess for yourself what he did with the third cigarette.
And that was the crowning touch. That sent her into orbit, and she twisted and writhed, bringing into play muscle that may never have been used before, not even in the practice of her profession. She did everything possible to move the cigarette but it stayed where it was, burning away, and the room was filled with the smell of burning flesh, and the smell raced through Fallon's nostrils, and he knew that it was time, now it was time, and waiting any longer would only make the taking of this woman anticlimactic. Now was the time to strike.
And he struck.
It was rape. It might seem incredible that anyone could actually rape a body he had already bought and paid for, and any prostitute who was the plaintiff in a rape case would probably find herself getting laughed out of court. But this was rape and their was no other word for it. He threw himself down and took her like the Roman Army taking Carthage. Rapidly he surged to her with an unprecedented fury. He did not have to hit her or bite her or tear at her now. Her body was a boiling ocean of pain, and all he had to do was ride the crest of that ocean while his own passion played itself out. More-
And it happened harshly and furiously and wildly, a quick action that said everything in the space of a single second.
Afterward he let her lie on the bed, tied and gagged and sobbing, while he washed her blood from his body at her sink, drying himself with her discarded clothing. He took back his two twenty-dollar bills from her drawer, took also three twenties and a ten and two fives that she had earned earlier that night, before him. It seemed to be the ultimate violation, he thought; after everything else, he was stealing from her. He dressed himself and then, leaving her where she was, he went to the window and smoked four cigarettes in a row and thought things over.
He did not burn her with the cigarettes. He had done enough, and anything else now would be superfluous and silly. He put out each cigarette in turn by dropping it to the floor and grinding it out beneath the heel of his heavy shoe. After the fourth cigarette he went over and stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at her ruined body.
Aside from the pain, she was not in desperate shape. Three thin cuts on her middle, four on her legs, two on her armpits, one on each breast. The cuts had stopped bleeding long ago. They would very probably leave thin scars, but, they would be otherwise healed in two or three days at the most. There was a burn on each nipple, and there was another burn that did not show. But that was all the real damage he had done to her body. Otherwise she was all right, physically if not emotionally, in body if not in mind.
"I'm not going to kill you," he told her. She looked at him as though she did not believe a word he had just said.
"I'm not going to kfll you," he said again.
She looked at him as though it did not much matter whether he killed her or not.
"I'm not going to kill you," he said a third time. And he took a deep breath and looked her over once more, his eyes finally locking with her eyes. "I told you I wouldn't kill you and I won't," he went on. "There wouldn't be any point in it."
He turned away from her and walked to the window again. He started to take another cigarette, then changed his mind and shoved it back into the pack. He took a breath and went back to her, stood again at the bed, filled his eyes one more time with the sight of her bare body.
"But there's one thing," he said. "You could identify me. You know who I am, what I look like, and you could tell them about me and have them find me, and then identify me, and that wouldn't be any good. No, it wouldn't be any good at all."
Her face was almost calm now. She did not understand and did not want to understand. Maybe she wanted to die. He could understand that. If someone did to him as he had done to her, it would be completely understandable if he wanted to die, to have an end to all of it.
But he wouldn't let her die.
"You got to admit it's a problem for me," he said conversationally. "I mean, everybody knows the best way to make sure there's no witness is to take them, whoever the witness is, and kill them. You know, dead men tell no tales, or dead women either, so that's the easy way. I killed a tramp a while ago but that was something different, and I didn't have to kill her, I only felt like it. But I don't feel like killing you and you got to admit that it's a problem, keeping you from being a witness without I kill you."
She didn't seem to hear. But he went on, saying the same words over and over, telling her again and again about the problem he faced. And then, his own face brightening, he told her that he had found the solution.
"It's simple," he said. "You live, but you're no witness. It's so simple that it's beautiful."
He scratched his head. Then he leaned over and put his hands on the sides of her face and stared down into her eyes. His fingers stroked her cheeks. They were oddly gentle.
"The only drawback is it might hurt," he said. "But what the hell."
His hands shifted slightly. His thumbs moved to cover her large brown eyes. He told her that he was sorry if it hurt, but there was no other way.
And then, with quick and sudden violence, he pushed at both her eyes with his thumbs. But it was no good-he hadn't saved her anything-because when he did that, her heart stopped.
For three days nothing happened.
Oh, hell. Face it-that's an exaggeration. Something always happens. There were baseball games, and international crises, and summit meetings, and stock market ups and downs. A Hollywood couple got a divorce, his third and her fourth. Police busted a wife-swapping ring in Westchester County. A man in Klamath Falls, Oregon, killed his wife and his six kids and then shot himself in the face with a .22-caliber pistol, and lived. Let's face it-things happened, here and there and everywhere.
But nothing much happened for Fallon.
He stayed close to home, spending almost all of the time in his room at the King William. He smoked a little and drank a little-but never quite managed to eat stoned-and he went out for meals and saw three 42nd Street movies and otherwise kept himself amused. Twice Jan Lawler came to his room and they sat drinking lightly and talking seriously about what they were going to do, going through all the details of the scheduled job. Jan wanted him to go with her to have a look at things, but he wanted to stay where he was. He didn't have to case the job, just so he got it all right in his head.
Sometimes it was hard to concentrate, harder to think. Sometimes he caught himself just sitting motionless in a chair or lying motionless on a bed, doing nothing and seeing nothing and, amazingly, thinking nothing, literally having not a thought in his head. It was not merely that his mind wandered at those times but that his mind did not seem to exist at all. It was slightly frightening, but he didn't dwell on it too deeply.
"You're hung up," Jan told him once. "An emotional malaise, to put it more brightly. Weltschtnertz, which means world-weariness and for which there is no suitable English term. Pretty soon we shall get ourselves into action, Lee, and all will be well."
But she didn't know. She had told him her little secret, that she was a girl who liked girls, but he had not told her his little secret and he had no intentions of telling her. She saw him as a direct and fairly rough robber type, and that was a type she could use. A lust killer was not a type she or anyone else could make much use of, and that was what he was-with a string of four corpses to prove it. Shirley, the boy, the girl, and Dorothy. One on the West Side just off the park, two in the park, and one uptown in Harlem. He spread himself around a little, anyway.
Great.
Terrific
He spent money during those days, spent it often without getting anything he either wanted or needed, spent it as if under some compulsion to get rid of money which he had so easily come by. He bought himself a new watch and threw away the stolen one. He bought an expensive alligator wallet and threw away the old billfold that had served well enough until then. He bought a ring, a star sapphire, then decided that he did not like the ring and turned around and sold it to another jeweler at a fifty per cent loss. It was almost as though he wanted to get rid of the money because it was not real for him, just chips with which you scored the drastic game he was playing.
There were sudden flashes of desire during those days. But the spasms were brief and not overly intense, and there was never any question as to his ability to subdue them. He played it cool and coolness prevailed, and the days went by one at a time. Which, of course, is what they always do and all they ever do.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The job was a natural. Every Thursday night, starting at ten, between six and eight men rented a small suite at some first-class Broadway hotel and played table stakes poker. It was not a huge game but it was not a small game either. You needed three hundred dollars to sit down, and you generally didn't get into the game with less than double that.
There is no more obvious scene for a stickup than a gambling game. It is one place where you are sure to find money instead of credit because credit among players is strictly lousy. And there is no worry about the law, because people who play cards for high stakes do not go tattling to the cops. They settle their srores on their own or write off their losses as part of the game.
But a floating game is not that easy to hit for two other reasons. By definition, it is a game which is held in a different spot every time, and only players and insiders can find out where it will be. The fact that there was a big-money game a week ago in Room 604 of the Astor does nothing for a holdup artist, because if he goes to Room 604 of the Astor a week later he will probably find a pair of honeymooners or a cigar salesman from Win-netka, while the game itself is going on at Room 428 at the Warwick.
That's one rub. The other is just as heavy. A floating game, with decent money going in it, is protected a little more strongly than a meeting of the Parkersburg Virginia Junior League Sewing Circle. There will always be at least one gun at a game, and probably two or three. There will be one man who does nothing much but watch the door. If you don't know the secret word, you don't get past this man, and if you try to push yourself in you will wind up with nothing pushed in but your own face, which is an unhappy thought at best.
Now, on a Thursday night, Jan Lawler and Lee Fallon intended to hit a floating poker game for anywhere from two to four thousand dollars.
Well, they had a method.
First of all, Jan knew about the game. Her former partner had played in it regularly, and had lost in it regularly; a good confidence man is rarely a good gambler when the game is running straight and narrow, and this one always ran that way. Jan knew the game and some of the players, and they did not know her, and this was right away an edge.
Another part of the edge came from the fact that Jan knew where the game was going to be held. This was a very big edge all by itself, and they had it because of her former partner. A newsie on West 48th Street served as the contact man. If you went to him and asked the right question he gave you the name of the hotel, and if you called the hotel and asked for Mr. Brougham they would tell you that he was in room such-and-such. You couldn't get the Brougham name from the newsie, but it was a standing name. The idea was this-the newsie could not tip anyone past the hotel itself, and anyone who found this out from him had to find out the Mr. Brougham bit from one of the approved players or hangers-on.
But Jan knew both parts of the story. Her partner had never planned on knocking the game over; it was not his type of touch and besides, he was a type who would rather play in the game than rob it. But he had told her about the Mr. Brougham bit and he had pointed out the newsie and had mentioned the passwords, and now he was in Dannemora and she was on her own.
A girl had to look out for her own interests. Her own interests had been the confidence route, but that was temporarily shot in its pure form. Fate had teamed her with a stick-up artist and she could only carry the ball over the logical route.
At eight o'clock, Fallon went to a newsstand on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 48th Street and asked for a Thursday copy of the Morning Telegraph. This might have been a logical request twelve hours earlier, but the Telegraph is a racing sheet and that morning's paper was not exactly a hot item by nightfall. The newsie nodded and looked up at him and asked him why he wanted the paper, and Fallon said he wanted to line the bottom of his birdcage. The newsie nodded again and said he didn't have a copy left, but that Joey Ruskin might.
This meant that the game was at the Ruskin, a hotel on Eighth Avenue and 43rd. It was a complex way to do things, straight out of a Herbert Philbrick hunk of crud, very cloak-and-dagger and fundamentally foolish. But it had its points. If anyone overheard the conversation, they would simply think Fallon was some kind of a nut and that the newsie was getting rid of him painlessly. And if some actual clown did happen to ask for an outdated Telegraph, he would be dispensed with easily, without being told that there was a card game floating at the Ruskin.
Half an hour later Fallon walked into the Ruskin and went up to the front desk. It was a huge old hotel, built in the days when the west side of New York's best side and Eighth Avenue was something more glorious than Tramp Row. The ceilings were high and the trim was elaborate in a sort of Edwardian way. Fallon asked the feeble old desk clerk for the number of Mr. Brougham's room, and the clerk said that there was a Mr. Claude Brougham registered in Room 1219. Fallon thanked him and turned on his heel and left the hotel.
It was all ready to roll now. In a drug store phone booth across the Avenue, Fallon smoked a cigarette and dropped a dime in the slot and called Jan at the hotel. He told her the hotel and the room and hung up. The drug store had a lunch counter. He went to it and had a chicken salad sandwich on toast and a Coke.
Jan got there just as he was draining the Coke. She slid onto the stool beside him and took a cigarette from his pack. He gave her a light right away. She was the sort of woman who more or less compelled a man to be a gentleman, and he was learning quickly. The class which she radiated, her occupation not withstanding couldn't help throwing off a few sparks. He was far more mannerly with her than he had ever been with anyone in his entire life.
A shame she had to be a dyke. Un-likely, too-she was not dressed for the part, not at all, and she was not built for the part, and she did not act the part. Maybe there was something to the fact that this girl, the only woman he had ever found himself respecting, was a Lesbian. Maybe it showed something about his standing attitude for women in general, and maybe, if you looked at it deeply enough, it said something about his need to rape them and maim them and kill them.
And stab their eyes out.
But he didn't think about this now. This was a job, a real job, with a lot of profit on the line and a lot of risk sitting there beside it. With liquor dealers he had never had reason to be afraid, but the men in the room across the street had guns and knew how to use them, and they would shoot him the second they knew what he was up to. Unless he shot them first.
Jan said: "We're almost set."
"Uh-huh."
"You've got it all memorized? You know just how it works?"
"Hell, we've been through it ten times a day. If I don't know it now I'll never know it."
"That's not what I asked you, whether or not you would ever know it. I asked if you did, now. Do you?"
"Yes, for hell's sake."
"I didn't mean to snap," she said.
"Forget it."
"Well," she said. She flicked ashes from her cigarette, set it in an ash tray, put her hand to her face. "How do I look?"
"You know the answer."
"Tell me anyway."
"All right. You look perfect."
"Enough so you want to love me?"
"No, I know better. Otherwise, yes."
She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "I won't say I'm calm," she said. "Before, in the con stuff, there was no real danger, except that you could be arrested. If a mark tipped you never had to worry about fireworks. And more: the end of the game was always sweet and neat with the mark holding a paper sack and not looking into it until we were in the next parish. The violence is more direct, I'm sure. But I'm also nervous."
"You've got a right to be," he said.
"Buy usboth another Coke." He did this. "I'm going up after this Coke, Lee. I'll expect you in an hour and a half. If anything turns foul, forget it, call it off. I'd rather get off clear than take too long a chance."
"Nothing's turning foul," he told her.
"I hope so," she said. She drank her Coke in four quick gulps and put the glass down and left. He didn't watch her go. He sipped his own Coke and finished the cigarette she had left behind. There were lipstick marks on its tip but this did not bother him.
It was her ball now and she had to carry it. Her job was to get in the room so that he would not be coming in cold, and so that the thing could go on schedule. Her part was tough-she had to go to the room, knock, and ask for a man named Irving. They would tell her that Irving wasn't there, since as far as she knew Irving did not exist. She would give them a story about having to meet Irving there, and he was supposed to be there, and could she please come in out of the rain because he was supposed to be there for her, and so on.
A man could not get away with it but a woman could, especially if she looked like Jan. They wouldn't be expecting any trouble from her, and they would have the desire to be nice to a pretty girl that is well nigh universal among males, gamblers unexcepted. And they would also have the feeling that maybe, if they let her come in, this Irving would fail to show up-and that they would wind up in the rack with her.
Right now it was up to her. He finished his Coke and waited while the time went by.
One hour later, he left the drug store and crossed the street and cased out the lobby. If there was a lookout downstairs-and there shouldn't be-then Fallon couldn't see him. A different man was on the desk. Fallon passed him quickly and went to the elevator and rode it to the fourteenth floor. The game was on the twelfth, which was one flight down, there being no thirteenth floor in most New York buildings. He got off at fourteen to keep the elevator operator from guessing where he was going, and then he walked down the hallway and smoked two cigarettes and killed a little time before walking down a flight of stairs to twelve.
He was nervous but he wasn't sweating. He knew now that Jan's part of it had gone off without a hitch. If there had been any trouble she would have come back to the drug store and that would have been the ball game. She hadn't, and this meant she was in the room, laying doggo. Now, if her timing was right, a bellhop would be on his way soon.
Fallon found Room 1219, stood a little way away from it. They did not have anybody posted in the hallway. This only stood to reason; card games are illegal, and while it is reasonably safe to hold one in a hotel, it is distinctly unsafe to call undue attention to the game, and a guard would do that if he stood around unnecessarily in the hall. Fallon waited, not even smoking now, just trying to look casual. The elevator stopped and a kid got off with a tray. Fallon stepped forward very easily and talked to the kid in a low and slow voice.
He said: "That for twelve-nineteen, kid?"
The boy said it was.
"Lemme take it in," he said. "Save you the trouble. What's the gaff?"
It came to eight dollars, a couple of sandwiches and some soda. Fallon gave the kid a ten and told him to keep the change. The kid got the message that he was supposed to get-that something was going on inside the room that he wasn't supposed to see. He got the message and he also got the tip and he went back into the hallway and rang for the elevator. Fallon waited until the elevator came and the kid got on it and the door closed behind him.
Then he walked down the hall and stowed the stupid tray on an empty chair. Jan called down for the food right on cue; they would be expecting a caller now, and he would be it. He eased the .38 from his pocket and fitted it with the silencer he had picked up for it, screwing the silencer firmly in place. He walked back to the door of 1219 and listened, gun in hand. There were card game noises, men's voices, ice cubes clinking in glasses, money rustling. Fallon koocked on the door and said: "Room Service."
Someone pulled a chair back. Someone said: "What is this, Room Service? Who had something sent up?"
"It's food and that. For Alice here, and I got a sandwich coming, and some more mix, I ordered some."
Someone else said: "Phil, get the door, huh?"
Footsteps came closer. Fallon curled his index finger round the gun's trigger. Phil, a swarthy man with very little hair on his head, opened the door partway. Fallon shot him in the face and pushed him out of the way and dosed the door behind him and the roomful of men went crazy.
One guy went for a gun. Jan kicked his hand hard, and Fallon shot him through the chest. Another man started to rush Fallon and caught a bullet in the throat. The rest of them put their hands in the air.
Fallon covered them. Jan scooped the money from the table, went through the pockets of the three dead men, then got the wallets of the men who were staring down the muzzle of Fallon's gun. One of them carried his big bills in a money belt but he had already mentioned this at the table and Jan knew about it. She made him take off the belt and got four crisp fifties from it.
There were five men left and only three bullets in his gun. But Jan gave him the gun that one of the dead men had been going for. He wrapped a pillow around it to kill the noise and he shot three of them in the head while Jan killed the other two with his gun. There was a radio going and the sounds did not carry.
He wiped off the dead man's gun and threw it aside, jammed his own gun back in his pocket. He took Jan's hand and they left the room and locked the door behind them. He walked up a flight and she walked down a flight. She caught the first elevator. He waited and caught it the second time around. He took a cab back to the King William and found her already there, in his room, with money spread out all over his bed and two drinks poured, Jack Daniels, straight, no water and no ice. He picked up a glass and touched her glass with it and they drank off the whiskey.
From the time he knocked on the door and said Room Service to the time they left the building, less than eight minutes had elapsed.
Slowly, softly, Jan said: "Forty-three hundred dollars."
He nodded. That was what it was. They had counted it twice, and he had not held out a dime and was sure she had not either. It was forty-three hundred dollars, which was higher than their top estimate. A bundle, neat and easy and beautiful.
"You were terrific," she said. "You never sweated and you never froze. I'll swear you worked like a clock, Lee. Like a mechanical man, like a machine."
"You were perfect yourself."
"It wasn't hard. I had to stand still for a little mauling, but that's part of the game. They didn't want to push it too far because they figured that Irving might show and I might make a fuss about it."
"Well, if I was Irving, then Irving made one hell of a fuss. I didn't figure on running out of bullets."
"I didn't know you were going to kill everybody."
"Kill one and you might as well kill them all. Did you ever use a gun before, Jan?"
"No."
"Ever kill anyone?"
"No, of course not."
"You got used to the idea pretty quick. Like ice, that cool. You just took the gun from me and shot them both in the face, like nothing at all."
"It's hard to miss when you're that close. And it made it nice and neat, all of them dead like that. And I took enough of their mauling, Lee, to make me happy enough to see their faces shot away. Oh, this went well, my partner. This went like a well-made clock or a well-made bomb. I'm in love with you, dear."
"What kind of love is that?"
"Friend-love, unless you turn into a woman, I'm afraid. We ought to celebrate. Forty-three yards. We ought to celebrate."
"How?"
She put a cigarette between her lips and let him fight it. "Oh, damn it," she said. "I have a way I like to celebrate, but it would mean splitting up for the evening, which is rather a shame, because this has been a togetherness venture and it would be nice to keep it that way. Of course I mean a physical celebration, and of course that means with another Lesbian, Lee."
He grinned at her. "Then we work the same way," he said. "I always need it after a job."
"Yes. Baldy."
"How do you get it? A girl you know?"
"No, I free-lance." She lowered her eyes and looked at the tip of her cigarette. "There are places. Bars, clubs. If I go there I'll get picked up, and some pretty little girl-dyke will take me back to her shabby little room, and we'll get our clothes off and play games."
He had an idea, a pretty idea. Carefully he said: "How do you feel about those pick-ups?"
"How do you mean?"
"It's not love or anything, is it?"
She laughed almost lewdly. "Love? It's something physical and that's all it is. They aren't even friends, Lee. Sometimes I actually hate them. No, I don't give them friendship rings or exchange mash notes with them. I love them and leave them and forget them, just like that."
"Because I was thinking-"
"What?"
"Well, that maybe we could stick together tonight after all"
"How?"
"Like you could pick up your girl," he said, "and have her, and then when you're done I'll have her. Like AC-DC, sort of. We switch off on the same little frail."
She was smiling at him. "Togetherness," she said.
"Something like that."
"Cute. But my little playmate won't go for the idea. Some of them think it's love, Lee, even if I don't. They wouldn't want to trade me off for somebody else just like that. And even if they would, it wouldn't be for a man. They wouldn't do it with a man for all the tea in Mexico. They don't go that way any more than I do."
"So?"
"So they wouldn't do it."
"Sure they would," he said. "I figure I'm stronger than they are, Jan."
"You mean-"
"You figure it."
He watched her while she figured it. He sucked on a cigarette and blew out a huge cloud of smoke. She was a good-looking broad, he thought, and with any luck she would pick up a good-looking dyke, and she would have the dyke and then it would be his turn, and he would force her and his rage and fury and hunger would explode with a vengeance, and-
"I see," she said.
"Yeah?"
"That's how you get your kicks. Taking it when they don't want to give it, and maybe messing people up a little. Am I close?"
"More than close."
She looked into his eyes. "Oh, yes," she said slowly. "You've done some bad things, haven't you?"
"It shows?"
"It never did before, or it did and I didn't see it, but now I see it. It's there, yes. Am I right?"
"I've killed a lot of people, Jan."
"Some newspaper stories. Was that you?"
"Part of the time."
She didn't say anything, just stood there digesting the information. He wondered what she though of him now. Her opinion was important; somehow it seemed to be the only important element now. Finally he asked her what she felt toward him.
"It's none of my business how another person gets thrills, Lee. Just so I'm not hurt."
"You never will be."
"How come? Why don't you want me that way? Because I'm a dyke?"
"No. The girl tonight'll be a dyke and I want her that way without I've seen her, even. And she won't look as good as you no matter how choice she is."
"Thank you. Why, then?"
"Because I love you." He said the words without even meaning to. They just came out by themselves. "What kind of love, Lee?"
"Friend-love," he said. "That's the only kind that works. The others are just part of a big con. You better get back to your room and change your clothes and I'll change, and we'll salt the money away for now, and then we'll go down to the Village and see what kind of stuff we can find. Let's move, partner."
The name of the bar was The Lollypop. The name, as Jan had explained on the way downtown, was a suitable one. Lollypop was another word for sucker, and they made up a good part of the clientele-because they paid a buck and a quarter for watered-down drinks, and because of what they did in private. Either way, it was applicable.
The Lollypop wasn't much. It was in a basement on Cornelia Street, a dimly lighted place with a low ceiling and smoky air. Fallon didn't follow her inside. It would have been a bad move, she explained. There were only girls in the place. No men. Once in awhile a truckdriver type would wander in and try to make trouble, but when that happened a couple of the tougher bull dykes generally beat the hell out of the guy and left him half-dead in an alley. If you were a man, it was a good move to stay outside of The Lollypop.
There was a phony beatnik coffee shop across the street and he waited there, picking a table from which he could keep an eye on the entrance of the Lesbian bar. A waitress with long hair and no breasts asked him what he would like. He figured coffee would be safe enough and ordered that.
"What kind of coffee?" she wanted to know.
"Black," he said.
"You want American coffee, then?"
"They don't grow it here," he said, helpfully. "Just Brazil, and also Colombia, which is supposed to be good but it's more expensive, the beans or something. Just old Brazil coffee is fine, kid."
"You just want a cup of plain coffee," she said .
"I think you better make it a glass of milk," he said. "Cow milk, from cows."
She brought him a glass of milk, a fairly good-sized glass, and she told him it cost forty cents. You could buy a quart for a quarter, he thought, and you could drink it in the privacy of your room instead of in a ratty trap like this place. But he wasn't going to argue with her over a gouge of forty cents for a glass of stupid milk, which she probably cut with water anyway, judging by the rest of the place. He had just earned half of forty-three hundred dollars in a few minutes and he would not think of pitching a witch for forty cents. He gave her a dollar and told her to keep the change, to show he was a good sport about it, and she gave him a dirty look and went away. He decided that she was a cruddy little pig.
His milk was a little sour so he didn't drink very much of it. He smoked a cigarette and watched the entrance to The Lollypop, waiting.
Waiting.
Waiting.
He didn't have the fun with him this time, or the knife either. He had only his hands but that would be enough or more than enough. He didn't have the gun and he didn't have the knife, but he was going to have the dyke as soon as Jan got through with her. And maybe Jan would stick around and watch. He wouldn't mind an audience, and he had the feeling she might like the show.
He had a feeling about Jan, all right. Birds of a feather were supposed to flock together, according to what they said, and he had an idea about Jan's feather and what kind of a bird she was. She had surprised him at the Hotel Ruskin that night. Not by being cool, not by doing her part well, because he had expected that much of her and would not have thrown in with her otherwise. But when she killed the two men with the gun-well, that had surprised him. She didn't figure then to be a killer. She said she had never killed before, and he believed her. But she had taken to killing like a duckling to a pond.
And he had a feeling.
Unless he was off his guess, she worked a little like him. Maybe she had never known it before. Maybe it had taken the shooting and the tension to bring it out, just as it had taken the rape of that girl Sally in Ohio to bring out the beast in Lee Fallon. But it was out now. Unless he was very wrong, she had damn well enjoyed shooting those two guys, had gotten a kick out of it, a kick that was at least partially physical.
Which could make them one hell of a team, all right.
Not too much point in worrying about it now, though. For the time being, all he had to do was handle the problem at hand, which with any luck would be a choice little girl from The Lollypop. He kept his eyes on the entrance, smoking and watching. People came in and people went out-all girls, though with some of them you had to look a second or third time to make sure. But Jan didn't show and he waited, anxious to get the ball rolling.
And then she came out, her hand holding the hand of another girl. And he gaped.
He hadn't figured on a raving beauty. He had hoped that she wouldn't pick an especially mannish dyke, but he didn't figure on something that would make his eyes bug out. And this one did.
She was a blonde, an ash blonde, and she had the face and figure to carry off the hair color. Her complexion was clear and clean and very light. She was quite tall and very slender, but her breasts, while small, were very much in evidence under the peasant blouse she wore. She didn't look any more like the typical Lesbian stereotype than Jan did. She looked like a Hollywood starlet who was being groomed for the big time, and if appearances were the deciding factor, then she would make it.
Fallon let out his breath. They were walking down Cornelia Street now and he did not want to lose them. He pushed his abandoned glass of souring milk to one side, got to his feet, slipped out the door. He paused on the stoop to light a cigarette, then began walking quickly after them, staying on the opposite side of the street and hanging back about half a block.
His eyes were glued to the ash blonde's behind. Her buttocks were sharply outlined against the fabric of the skin-tight slacks she wore. Round, choice. This one looked to be very good, he told himself. This was a good one.
They walked west one block, then turned and headed north for three blocks. Fallon didn't catch the name of the street but it didn't really matter. They would be going to the broad's apartment, and Jan would find some way to leave the door open for him, and he would slip inside while they were having a go at each other, and as soon as Jan was done it would be his turn. He was sweating now, sweating easily, and he finished his cigarette and looked at it and threw the butt into the gutter.
The blonde's building turned out to be a decaying brownstone. A sign in front proclaimed that the building would be torn down in two months. Fallon could see why. He closed in on them, slipped into the building a few seconds after they entered it. He listened to their footsteps on the stairway. They walked together up three flights of stairs, and every other board creaked on that ancient stairway.
A mess of a building, an old hulk waiting for the wrecker's hammer. The halls stank of garbage and old waste and the plaster was flaking from the walls. Fallon climbed three flights of stairs and stood in the corridor, waited another few seconds and listened for sounds from behind one of the four closed doors. That let him know which apartment belonged to the blonde.
He waited. They were in the front room now, so he had to wait for a while until they got on to bigger and better things. He had a hunch that it wouldn't take them long. The blonde might be in the mood for conversation, but he knew Jan, and she was in the mood for loving and nothing else but. He would give them five minutes; by then they would be sure to be in the rack, As it turned out, he didn't have to wait the five minutes. After half of that time had passed, he heard them hurrying from one room to another. Jan was making sexy sounds and the blonde was doing the same. He waited another few seconds and tried the door of the apartment.
It opened to his touch. Jan, clever as a bug, had stuck the flap of a paper matchbook over the latch before closing the door. It kept the little what'sit of the lock from slipping into place, so that the door looked locked but wasn't. Fallon stepped inside and closed the door after him, letting it lock this time. He took a breath and looked around the room.
The girl might be a neat dresser but she lived like a pig. There was crud all over the place; old slices of bread going moldy on the floor, unwashed dishes on tables, a general aura of filth and decay. The room had a smell to it, too, and for a moment he did not recognize it. Then it came to him. The room smelled of love.
And sounds of female passion were drifting in from the bedroom in the rear. Fallon took off his shoes; he didn't want to make any noise, not that they were likely to hear anyway. He padded noiselessly across the cluttered floor, trying not to step on any of the litter. He walked through a hallway toward the bedroom door. It was not quite closed. It was an inch open. He put his eyes to the opening and couldn't see anything. He could hear things, though, and what he could hear was getting to him.
He stepped back into the living room and took off all his clothes. That would give the little blonde dyke a real belt, he thought. She would finish loving Jan, and she would open her eyes and look wearily around, and she would see a naked man ready to leap on her. That ought to choke her up a little bit, he thought.
He walked back to the door, breathing heavily, already very much excited.
Noiselessly, he opened the door all the way.
CHAPTER NINE
It would have been hard to time it bet-ter. Earlier, they might have been distracted by his presence, might have noticed that he was there at the doorway, watching them. Later he would have missed part of the show, and it was not the sort of show you second-acted by choice. You couldn't come in for the last reel alone, like with a movie, because you couldn't stay around later to see the show over from the beginning. It didn't work that way.
So he had timed it well. He stood at the open door and stared, eyes wide, and he saw them, and they did not see him. The blood raced through his veins and every atom of his being was charged with lust. He wanted to throw himself onto the soiled bed, to join them, to join their desperate games. But he forced the desire down and made himself look but not touch.
It was something to see.
Hell, it was a tourist attraction. It was the eighth wonder of the modern world and it made the other seven wonders a little less wonderful in comparison.
And Fallon watched.
They had not quite gotten down to brass tacks yet. The blonde, the lithe ash blonde, was lying on her back on the bed. Her eyes were closed and her face was contorted. She was breathing shallowly but regularly. She was mostly naked, almost completely naked. She still had her panties on, a pair of lacy black things, and as long as she wore them only her hair dresser would know for sure whether the ash blonde hair was hers or not. But there were other things that Fallon knew about her.
He knew she was soft and creamy from head to toe. He knew that her little girl breasts, firm and pink-tipped, fitted neatly into Jan's dexterous hands. And he knew that he was going to have one hell of a time with the little quail.
The little quail, he thought. It would make a good title for a sexy book. The Little Quail. Or a detective story-"The Case of the Little Quail." Or-
But it was no time for thinking. It was a time for watching, and there was plenty to watch. Because Jan was nearly naked, too, and he had never seen Jan unclothed, and that was worth watching. Jan still had her bra and her panties on but that was all, and the bra didn't hide much. It had a hard time keeping her big breasts with a bra than you could catch a hurricane in a flimsy little bra, and you could no more harness those breasts with a bra than you could catch a hurricane in a paper bag. It was hard for him to believe that Jan was really a Lesbian, even now, even with what she was doing before his hungry eyes. You just didn't see Lesbians with boobs like hers. They were really incredible.
The position was an interesting one. The little blonde was lying on her back, her eyes closed. Jan was kneeling over her, her buttocks rested neatly upon the blonde's knees. And Jan's hand were manipulating the blonde's little breasts, playing with them, teasing them awake.
She kept up the teasing for a long time. With the tips of her index fingers she drew circles around the nipples, first clockwise and then counterclockwise. She pulled and tugged, pressed them, and poked them like doorbells. Her hands gripped them and squeezed and relaxed, flexing the lush flesh and making the blonde dizzy with desire.
Then, slowly, she changed her position. She straightened out, her legs back behind her now, her body lowering itself gently upon the body of the blonde. She kissed the blonde's lips open and Jan's tongue slipped between them, lighting little fires of incandescent passion wherever it touched. The blonde began moving now, her body an orgy in liquid grace, rolling just enough to rub against Jan magnificently.
The blonde's small hands crept around Jan's back, unhooked her bra. Jan drew herself up and the blonde took the damned bra off and threw it aside and opened her eyes long enough to catch a glimpse of Jan's breasts. The blonde gasped and Fallon knew why. Jan's breasts were extraordinary. They were as white and as firm as ivory, each tipped wrth a little cherry nipple. And Jan lowered herself again, slowly, and her breasts came in contact with the breasts of the blonde. She moved so that her nipples brushed back and forth across the blonde's.
The effect was startling. The blonde started to pant and moan, her body arching lustily, her hips rolling. Jan moved away and pulled off the blonde's panties, then rolled momentarily to one side and let the blonde perform the same service for her. Fallon looked at both of them and his mouth watered. The blonde was a real blonde and Jan was a real brunette, and they were both lovely.
"Oh, lover!" the blonde moaned.
Once more Jan tossed her passion-wracked body to the blonde girl. They were naked now, and they pressed together all the way, mouth to mouth and breasts to breasts. They moved in unison, slowly.
More.
More.
Jan moved away, inched slowly off from the blonde. The girl seemed ready to protest, but then Jan lowered herself slightly on the bed and her lips found the blonde's throat. She kissed and nibbled, and her pink tongue stroked the blonde's silken flesh.
Lower.
Fallon's palms were damp with sweat. His hands had clenched themselves into hard fists and the muscles in his calves were held so taut that they ached dully. His heart was going like a triphammer and he thought his lungs would burst. He had never seen anything like this, and nothing that he had ever seen had ever had this sort of effect upon him. It was more exciting to watch these two magnificent women in action than it would be to make actual love to most of the women on earth. They were extraordinary, terrific, great.
Jan's tongue was doing delicious things now. It stole into the deep valley between the girls breasts and bathed the spot softly and thoroughly. She moved to one side, washing one of the girl's breasts and making her squeal with passion. Jan's mouth closed over it until the girl gasped with lust. Then Jan's mouth found the other one and repeated the process.
She worked on the girl's breasts industriously, nibbling at them, kissing the sweet flesh. And the girl was going out of her mind now. She couldn't keep her body still. Her arms twitched at her sides, now reaching for Jan, now flailing at empty air, never resting, always moving.
More.
More.
And Jan moved lower. Her mouth never stopped doing its wild work. She rubbed her cheek against the girl's middle, flicked out her tongue. She planted a hundred kisses over every square inch of the girl.
Fallon was torn between two stools. He wanted them to hurry but he wanted it to go on forever at the same time. He was, on the one hand, anxious to get into the act, to bruise and ruin and rape the ash blonde. But at the same time he wanted to see this, to watch it for a very long time. It was the greatest show on earth and one look at it would make the circus fold its tent and get the hell out of town.
Jan was crouching low on the bed now, her body doubled up, her mouth against the blonde. She kissed the skin there. It was soft and it was creamy and it was lush, and it was evidently sensitive, too, because the blonde moved like a worm on a hook, babbling incoherently and making wild and weird little sounds.
Jan used her mouth.
Her lips.
Her hands moved, pinpointing the target. Her lips took aim and caught hold, and the world began to move Like crazy, and the blonde made a sound unlike anything Fallon had ever heard in his life, a long low eerie gasp that tore at his heart and guts. The blonde flailed at the air with anxious hands, and Jan gave a quick flip and turned around, and the blonde's furious hands caught hold of Jan and the blonde's mouth aimed and struck.
Swaying.
Soaring.
Moving fast.
Fast.
Faster.
Faster!
They had found the golden rule and were putting it into practice. Both of them were getting very well done, and their lust was overpowering in the little room. They moved and swayed and dipped and soared, faster and faster and faster, and in the doorway a naked man stood watching them with aching passion.
Faster-
Faster!
With the bed rocking and the world duplicating the motions of the bed, slipping off its axis and coming un-glued, and with the room soggy and wild and mad, and with the building, the condemned building, seeming more likely to fall now from the fury of their lust than from the blows of the wrecker's hammer.
Faster-
Faster!
With lips and hands, fingers and breasts, legs and hips. With all the sweet parts of two sweet bodies locked in combat.
Faster.
Faster!
With the world leaping and diving and shouting for joy, and with the crisis rushing at them full speed like an Olympic sprinter charging for the tape at the finish line. With the crisis rushing and reaching for them and grabbing at them, and with them embracing it, and with the world shifting and cracking and buckling in the full and awesome fury of gratified desire. An explosion, a bomb, a starburst-all of that, all at once, onward and upward to the crest of the very world. The rockets gave with their red flare, and the bombs burst in air, and the world crapped out in a puff of pearly smoke.
He let them get their breath. He let them get almost back to normal, let them lie soaking in their sweat upon the streaked and stained mattress. He let their hearts go back to normal, kept his passion in check that long.
And then he charged the bed.
The blonde looked up as he came toward her. She looked up and saw, from out of nowhere, a naked man in three dimensions. She stared, and turned to Jan for confirmation, and saw that Jan was somehow laughing at her. And her mouth opened and she started to scream and a fist crashed into her mouth and broke three of her teeth. The scream was stillborn. Blood gushed from her mouth. She spat out her teeth and stared at them and the man crashed down on top of her and sank his teeth into her left breast, biting down as hard as he could. The girl shrieked brittley and fainted.
Fallon raped her like that, quickly and desperately. There was no time to wait for subtleties; she didn't have to be conscious, not now, because he needed her too much to wait. There would be plenty of steam left for when she came to. Right now he only wanted to satisfy all the aching need that filled his being.
He stabbed at her and was startled to discover that she was a virgin. He had not thought that there were any left in the world. Even the fifteen-year-old in the park had been experienced. This one was experienced, of course, but only with girls. No man had ever touched her, not ever in her sweet young life.
Fallon changed that.
Completely.
He loved her as hard and as fast as he could. He didn't even try to make it last a long time because it would have been out of the question. He just wanted to get it out of his system, wanted to blow off some of the steam that the sight of those two had sent gushing through him.
He did this. He took her and he finished with her and he moved from her, and she lay still unconscious on the bed, lay in a limp red pool of blood that seeped into the mattress. He rolled away from her and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Jan. She was still there and her face was charged with something he had never seen before. Her eyes were absolutely wild.
"Oh, God," she said.
He didn't say anything.
"I knew you were watching, Lee. One time I looked up and I saw you there. But I knew you were there before then, I could feel it, your eyes on us. You don't know what that did to me. It made me crazy. I never got so ready in my life, not ever."
"Maybe you like to show off."
"Maybe, whatever, it doesn't matter. Knowing you were watching, and knowing what you were going to do to Karen. That's her name. You knocked out some of her teeth and you made her bleed and you scared her half dead. My God, look at that sweet little boob. You drew blood when you bit her. Did you realize that?"
"I didn't even notice."
She bent over and touched the spot where he had bitten the girl. "It must have been exciting tor you, Lee. Did you ever see Lesbians together before?"
"How would I do that?"
"Sometimes they put on shows. You know, two girls give a demonstration. That thing. But you knew what Lesbians do together, didn't you?"
"Well, yes. But knowing isn't seeing."
"It isn't."
"And it got me crazy. Hell, what the two of yon did. You enjoyed yourself, didn't you?"
"Yes."
He got up and went into the other room for his cigarettes. He brought them back and gave her one and took one for himself and lit them both. She took a long drag on hers and blew out smoke.
She said: "What did you feel? I mean looking at me. I know you wanted her, that wasn't hard to tell. But did you get eager for me, too?"
"No."
"No? Why? Is she prettier than I am?"
"You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life."
"Honestly?"
"Hell, yes. But we're partners and friends and I don't get like that for you any more. I don't think I could, not even if you wanted me to."
"I could make you."
"I don't think so. And don't try, Jan, because why should we hurt each other?"
"When we can hurt Karen instead," she said. "That's the idea."
She smoked her cigarette. She was naked and so was he, but neither of them were the least bit embarrassed by the fact. They were completely relaxed together, "I ought to marry you," he said. "And never sleep with me?"
"That's right. There's more important things than sleeping with. You're the world."
"I love you."
"And I love you. Go and figure that one out. You're the only woman on earth I don't want to take and the only one I give a damn about. So we love each other and we couldn't make it with each other for the world. She's going to wake up any minute now. What did you say her name was?"
"Karen."
"Nice name."
"Yes. What are you going to do to her, Lee?"
"What do you think?"
"Well, I can guess. You'll take her again, won't you? And hurt her, torture, things like that. Is that what you'll do?"
He nodded.
"And at the end?"
"Try another guess."
"I suppose you'll kill her," Jan said. "Lee, I want to stay. I can stay and watch, can't I?"
"Sure."
"I want to see it," she said, her voice husky. "I want to watch you, and I want to touch her, and when you kill her I want to watch it, I want to see her die."
She got her wish.
The hlonde girl woke up to horror. She woke up in pain, pain in her mouth, pain in her breast. She woke up to agony, and it didn't take long before they piled more agony on top of it. Fallon did most of it.
He used a cigarette and he used his teeth and he used his hands. He used them on all the soft parts of her and he made her bleed and he made her cry and he made her hurt all over until every bit of her was in pain. He broke bones in her arms and legs and hands.
When he made love to her, which he did brutally, Jan joined the game. She lit a cigarette, and while Fallon was making love to the girl she would jab the cigarette into the girl's sore flesh. Just little pokes that made the girl ache just that much more.
Then Jan made love to the girl as she had done before. And while she did it. Fallon pulled out the girl's toenails with a pliers. It was a nice added refinement, a little extra touch that showed he was using his imagination.
They had fun.
They had a lot of fun, plenty of fun.
Everybody had fun, in fact. Jan had fun and Fallon had fun. Everybody had fun but Karen, and she didn't have any fun at all. They had the fun and she paid for it, paid in pain, paid in agony, paid in torment, paid in terror. She did not scream much. Screaming did not do very much good anyway, because she was one of the few tenants left in the building. Most of them had moved out shortly after the building was scheduled for demolition. And she didn't scream much at all after Fallon had slammed the side of his hand against her windpipe, because after that it hurt like hell whenever she made a sound.
They took turns with her, and they had fun with her. And then Jan was saying: "Lee, let me kill her, please let me kill her. I want to kill her, I want it more than I ever wanted anything in my life."
And Karen knew she was going to die. Her face was horrible, a study in raw fear.
"I don't have a gun or a knife," he said.
"Let me anyway."
The thought thrilled him. "Sure," he said. "Enjoy yourself."
Karen tried to get away, but she couldn't. Fallon sat on her and kept her pinned down. He put his hands on her broken body and felt her. Jan held the girl's breasts and bent down and kissed her on the mouth, then dangled her own ripe breasts in the girl's face.
She straightened up and wrapped her hands around Karen's neck and squeezed. But her grip wasn't strong enough. She squeezed as tight as she could and Karen's qyes bulged from her skull but Jan wasn't strong enough to strangle her. She tried her best but she couldn't. No matter how hard, she couldn't. She tried for a long time and then let go and stood up and got one of the spike heeled shoes that Karen had been wearing. She sat down on the bed and put one of her hands on Karen and held her. With the other hand she gripped the high-heeled shoe by the toe. She raised it high overhead and brought it down hard, full strength, and smashed the spike heel against Karen's forehead. The first blow weakened the skull and the second smashed it and the third and fourth and fifth added insult to injury and by then Karen was dead.
They made love to her again and then left. They went back to the hotel and finished the bottle of Jack Daniels, and Fallon told her all the things he had done and they talked far into the night, and then the bottle was empty and they were tired and they went to sleep in separate rooms.
In the morning she came to his room. He let her in and she sat on his bed while he shaved and showered. He came out fully dressed and she got up from the bed and went to him, her eyes full and moist.
She said: "Last night you talked about marrying me. You didn't mean it, did you?"
"I meant it."
"Really?"
"Yes. It won't last long, though. They know my name now: I must have left prints somewhere. Last night. It couldn't be helped. And they went into high gear when they found her, believe me. The way they found her, they could be standing outside the door this minute. They're looking for Lee Fallon because they checked the prints out and found out who I am. It won't be long before they find Lee Fullmer and it'll all be over."
"For me, too."
"Yes, I guess."
"But we could have until then. Marry me, Lee."
"Are you sure?"
"More sure than I've ever been of anything, partner, friend. Yes, it's what I want."
"And what I want, too."
She stood up. "There's a town in Maryland just across the Pennsylvania State line. You can get married there without a waiting period, you just fill out a license and say I do and then you're married. We could be down there in three hours. I'm ready to pack as soon as you say the word."
"Pack," he said.
She went to her room. He took his suitcase and threw some of his clothing into it and all of the money. He left a lot of things in the hotel because he only needed the money and the gun and a few articles of clothing. The rest of the stuff he could live just as well without. He took the knife, too, and then he was ready. He went up to her room and took her suitcase for her and they went downstairs together and settled their bills and left They got in a cab and rode to Penn Station and waited twenty minutes for a train. It left on time with them on it, sitting in the club car, drinking breakfast. The club car didn't stock Jack Daniels so they were drinking something else.
"Where will we go, Lee?"
"Anywhere," he said. "But not New York. We're hot there. I am, anyway, and they'll know we left together once the hotel manages to figure out who I am. Some other state, it doesn't matter where. We'll need a car."
"We've got a lot of money. Close to five grand between us, with last night's job and the other money we had set aside. Figure fifteen hundred or two grand for a good fast car with no questions asked. Or we could steal one."
"It's not safe. It would be reported."
"Not if we killed the owner. But you're right, it's still not safe. All right, we'll buy a car. That leaves us three grand or more, and we can live on that a long time. We don't even have to pull any more jobs. We can knock off a gas station if things get tough but we won't have to, not for a long time."
She held his hand.
"We better get a long way from New York."
"It won't matter."
"No?"
"No," she said. "We're not going to stop, Lee. We didn't get married to straighten out and live like good people. We'll keep on like this and you know it."
He nodded. She was absolutely right. They would keep on like this, raping and ruining and murdering, running from one crime and into another. And they would not last long. He knew it and she knew it and it was true.
"They'll get us," she said.
"Yes."
"But well have a lot of fun until they do. It was good last night. I didn't know anything could thrill me so much."
"I know."
"I love you. We're going to be married without sleeping together. I never heard of that."
"Neither did I."
"But I really love you. I hope we have a while together, Lee, my love, my friend, my partner. I hope we have our good times together before they get us."
"I hope so."
"And I hope we die together. I wouldn't want one of us to live if the other died."
"We'll die together," he said.
They were in Maryland at three in the afternoon. They had hamburgers together at a diner and went to the courthouse and filled out a license. No waiting period was required, and no blood test. They didn't even have to show identification. They gave their names as Harold Carter and Miriam Plumnutz and the clerk took their six dollars and gave them a license.
There was no civil ceremony in Maryland. You had to find a clergyman. There was a schlock clergyman-with an office across the street from the courthouse, a man who had no pulpit, an old alcoholic who made a good living performing weddings. His wife and his secretary were witnesses. It took seven minutes, and then he pronounced them man and wife and told Fallon he could kiss the bride. Fallon kissed her on the cheek, gently.
Outside he said: "You're my wife now."
"Mrs. Harold Carter."
"Miriam Plumnutz Carter," he said. "You can get an annulment any time you want, you know, because we'll never be able to consummate our marriage. That's ground for an annulment, I think. Not making love at least once."
"We consummated our marriage last night, Lee."
"Oh?"
"Every time we get our kicks together we consummate it all over again. Don't talk about annulments."
They walked to a car agency, a used car lot, and Fallon bound a Buick he liked. It was three years old and in good shape, and the previous owner had put in dual carbs and had done a few other things to soup it up. The body was fair but not perfect, starting to rust through in spots. The dealer wanted twelve hundred for it and Fallon talked him down to an even grand. He asked to see Fallon's license. Fallon showed his marriage license.
"Oh, hell," the man said. "This isn't a motel, it's a car lot. I want to see your driver's license. I don't give a damn if you're married or not."
"The price is a thousand. Right?"
"So what?"
Fallon gave him fifteen hundred dollars. "You just settle for the marriage license," he said. "Be a good boy."
The dealer didn't argue. He took the money and made out a hokey bill of sale, copying a fake license number and fixing things up nicely. Fallon was glad that he did this. That made him an accessory and meant he couldn't tip the law.
They put their bags in the Buick's trunk and got in the car. Fallon headed the heap west and drove at a steady sixty. He didn't want to get stopped by a cop, and he didn't want to spend any more time in the East than he had to.
By the time he was ready to stop for the night they were halfway into Virginia. The car was a good one, with power under the hood and with plenty of road savvy.
The car had a radio and he kept tuning on different news shows but there was nothing about them so there was nothing to sweat about. They stopped at a motel in Chester and took a room. She stayed in the room and he went to town and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and a New York paper. It would have been safer to send her for the stuff because they had his picture by now, but he went for it himself.
Back in the room they drank bourbon while he read the paper. The paper was full of bad news. They not only knew who he was but they had traced him to the King William and knew he had left town. They also knew he was not alone, knew that Jan was with him. They had her name and description but she had never been arrested and they didn't have a picture of her. There was nothing in the paper about where they had gone; the police didn't seem to know. It did say, though, that they were presumed to have crossed state lines, and that the FBI had been called in on the case.
He read the story aloud to her and she didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said: "Well, husband lover, we'll give them a damned good run for their money."
"You're damned right we will."
"Give me more to drink. I'm not sorry about a thing. Are you?"
"No."
"Not even about the people we killed. I can't help it, I don't feel a thing for them. I know we're bad and evil and I know what we do is horrible but I can't feel sorry."
"Neither can I."
"I love you, Lee."
"And I love you, Jan."
"And we're both crazy."
"I know it. They might commit us if they caught us, instead of giving us the chair. They might say we're insane and just lock us away for the rest of our lives. I suppose maybe we are insane, don't you think?"
"Probably."
"But I don't want them to lock us up. We couldn't be together. I'd rather make them kill us and take as many of them along as we can."
"They won't catch us," he said. "Not alive."
She went into the bathroom and showered while he sat there drinking lightly and reading the rest of the paper. She came out wrapped up in a towel and he went inside and showered the grime of the road from his body. He dried off and returned to the room. She was already in her bed, with the light turned off. He went to his bed but she called to him.
"Sleep with me," she said, "You don't mean that."
"Not love," she said. "Just sleep with me, in this bed, close to me. Would that be hard for you?"
"No. I told you, I don't have any love thing for you. None."
"Would you like sleeping with me? Just sleeping."
"Yes."
He got into bed with her and she wriggled close to him, her body warm and sweet under the covers. He felt the pressure of her breasts and knew they were the best breasts under the sun but he had not been lying, he had no desire for her. He kissed her softly on the mouth and she cuddled up in his arms and closed her eyes and they slept that way all night, like sheep huddled together for warmth.
CHAPTER TEN
In the morning bright sunlight streamed into the room and woke them up early. They got out of bed and yawned and got dressed. They had not unpacked the night before so they could leave in a hurry. He loaded their bags back into the car and got in and drove into Chester for breakfast. He had bacon and eggs and grits and three cups of coffee. She had a hard roll and a glass of orange juice.
"You have to eat more than that," he said.
"I want to keep my girlish figure;
"You'll be starving later."
"No, I never eat a big breakfast."
They were on the road by eight o'clock and the Buick rolled on impressively, covering a lot of ground in damned good time. He had not driven a car since he had come to New York, had not been behind a wheel since he dumped his old Chevy after the runaway ride from Ohio to the city. That had only been a short time ago in terms of subjective time. He had come a long way since then. He had killed a lot of people, had had a lot of love, had pulled a lot of jobs. And he had lived, it seemed to him, about four hundred years between the rape of Sally in Ohio to the marriage to Jan in Maryland. Four hundred years at the very least.
Good years.
He kept the radio tuned to one of those hot-shot stations that gives you news flashes every half hour. They made the eleven-thirty news-someone in Maryland had seen their photo in the paper and had called the FBI, and the FBI knew about Maryland and found out about the marriage bit. But the car dealer hadn't spouted off so no one knew about that, at least not yet.
They raced through West Virginia and up into Ohio, but Ohio didn't seem like a good stopping place because that was where it had all started. He pushed the Buick mercilessly and they made it across into Indiana and laid up there for the night at a motel on the outskirts of Rush-ville. This time she went out for the food because his picture was all over the place. She brought back a bag of ham sandwiches and a bottle of liquor.
"They don't know where we are," she said. "I think we threw them."
"Just for the time being."
"They don't know the car. Not yet, anyway."
"They won't know it unless somebody spots us. The guy who sold it to us probably wishes he was dead right now. He's probably having visions of the cops nailing us and finding out where we got the car, tracing it back to him and locking him up for sixty years. He won't open his mouth."
"Then we're clear."
"Clear?" He had to laugh. "They'll plaster our picture all over the country. It won't be long before someone sees us and recognizes us and we can start running faster than ever. Clear is something we'll never be, honey."
"Then we might as well do whatever we want."
"We're not passing anything up," he said. "Any time you get a little hungry for blood, you let me know. I'm in the mood whenever the right thing comes along."
The right thing came along the next day, just after dark. They had slept late that morning, had slept once again in each other's arms, cozily and lovelessly, and that gave them a late start on the road. He took it easy in the car, and at seven that night they were on their way out of southern Illinois when she touched his arm, her hand already warmer than usual. She pointed and he looked over at the side of the road and saw what she was pointing at. His foot bore down firmly on the brake pedal and the car slowed and rolled to a stop.
There were a pair of kids at the side of the road, a boy and a girl in their late teens. They were hitchhiking. He wore blue jeans and she wore a skirt. He was a red-necked kid with a million freckles. The girl was a cornfed blonde with big teeth. The car stopped twenty yards ahead of them and the boy ran up to the Buick with the girl a few yards behind and hurrying after him.
Fallon slipped the revolver from his pocket and handed it to Jan. She held it in her lap. The boy reached the car and opened the door. He started to ask them how far they were going but he only got one syllable out before Jan had cocked the gun and shot him deliberately in the throat. He fell backward and he died.
The girl was still hurrying toward the car when the gun sounded. She stopped short and backed up and yelled and caught her breath and turned to run. Fallon got out on his side of the car and started after her. The girl ran like a frightened rabbit. Jan squeezed off a snap shot at her, aiming for her legs, but the shot went wide. The girl ran and Fallon raced after her, his long legs covering the hard-packed ground at a good speed. She ran almost fifty yard before he ran her down like a beagle running down a rabbit. He caught her with a tackle around the legs and smashed her down to the ground.
He put a knee in the pit of her stomach and leaned all his weight on her while he ripped the clothing from her body. He was already raping when Jan got there. The girl was clawing at Fallon's back with frightened fingers, and Jan grabbed her hands and stood on them, a foot on each hand, while Fallon finished with his brutal rape.
Then he held her while Jan took her, and Jan lay down upon the girl and put the muzzle of the gun between the girl's chunky breasts and kissed each nipple and cocked the gun and kissed the girl on the lips and dug the gun into her flesh and kissed the girl and squeezed the trigger and shot the girl in the heart.
By nightfall the police and the FBI had a make on the car and knew where they were. It was getting close now, it was going down to the wire. It was worth it.
"As many as he can," Jan said.
"Yes."
"As many as we can. Every one we kill, that's one more between us and the grave. I love to watch them die."
"We're sick people."
"We're awful people. We deserve to die."
"The sooner they catch us," he said, "the better it is."
"But I don't want them to catch us."
"No," she said. "Neither do I."
A motel was out of the question. The car was hot and so were they, and a motel was impossible. They could have pulled off the road and slept in the car but Jan didn't want to and she had another suggestion. It was a good one and he went along with it.
They found a farmhouse in Missouri, an isolated place in the middle of the Corn Belt. Fallon drove up the drive and parked the car in the garage alongside of the farmer's Plymouth. They got out and walked to the door and buzzed the buzzer. The farmer was an older man, worn by work and weather. He answered the door and asked what he could do for them, and Fallon shot him dead.
There were four others in the family, the wife and two boys and a girl. The wife ran out to see what had happened and Fallon shot her three times in the stomach and once in the head. One of the boys was halfway down the staircase when he saw the gun in Fallon's hand. Jan yelled to Fallon and he spun around and shot at the kid but the gun was empty and the hammer clicked. The kid turned and raced up the stairs.
Fallon put six bullets in the gun and went after him. He was at the head of the stairs when the boy came out of a room carrying a rifle. The boy was about fifteen. He fired one shot that missed Fallon, and then Fallon shot him twice in the chest and the kid pitched over and died.
The other boy and the girl were locked in a bedroom. The girl was crying. Fallon shot the lock off the door and went inside. The boy and the girl were huddled in the corner. The boy was about twelve and the girl was a year or two older. Fallon went to shoot the boy but Jan grabbed his arm.
He gave her the gun. She pulled the boy away from his sister and shot him in the groin and he shrieked. He fell on the floor and she put the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his head and blew his brains out.
Jan grabbed the girl. They dragged her into the master bedroom and tore her clothes off. She kept crying hysterically and Fallon thought that she might be insane. She was skinny and had hardly any breasts at all. She kept crying all the time no matter what they did.
They slept in the bed. They passed the girl back and forth all night long, taking turns with her. They made her do everything they could think of, and sometimes they made love to her simultaneously. Twice they dragged her downstairs and made her look at the bodies of her parents. Each time she got absolutely hysterical and they took turns with her again.
They slept in the farmhouse. It was a lot safer than a motel. The big bed was comfortable and the girl was always there, crying, whenever they wanted her.
In the morning Fallon found a long piece of electrical wire in a cabinet. He brought it upstairs and looped it over an exposed rafter. They made the girl stand on a chair and they fastened one end of the wire to the bedpost and looped the other end tautly around her neck, Jan pulled the chair out of the way and the girl fell a foot and the wire dug into her neck.
They had thought it would snap her neck instantly but it wasn't a long enough fall. She dangled in the air kicking and screaming. When she finally died they went out and transferred their bags to the farmer's Plymouth. They closed the garage door and locked up the house, leaving the Buick out of sight in the garage and leaving the bodies out of sight in the farmhouse. They drove away in the Plymouth. They had a rifle along now, a rifle from the farmer's house, the one the older boy had used. They had shells for it. Fallon drove like hell and headed south, pushing the Plymouth at its top speed. But it was hopeless and they both knew it.
In Kansas, Fallon switched off the car radio. Jan passed him a half-finished cigarette. He took three quick drags on it and tossed it out the open window.
He said: "It's over now."
"Yes."
"They've got. us pinpointed. They know the car. They must have roadblocks on every big road in the state. It's a miracle we haven't hit one yet."
"How much longer have we got?"
"I don't know. They'll use spotter planes. They'll send planes back and forth, and any minute now one of them is going to come by and catch sight of us. Then they can close in with a dragnet. Dum-da-dum-dum. I just want the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. Just routine questioning, ma'am."
She lit a fresh cigarette. "How many were there, Lee? How many did we get?"
"We may get more. When they nail us, we ought to take a few with us."
"But how many so far?"
He thought about it. There was Shirley, the first one. There were the two kids in Central Park. There was the tramp in Harlem. There were the seven men at the poker game. There was Karen, the Lesbian. There were the two hitchhikers in Illinois. There was the farmer and his wife and his three kids.
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen when I was with you?"
"No, there were four before then. Fifteen with you along. That's a lot,"
"A lot," she said.
"I'll tell you something. Right now I wish it was over already. I really do."
"Are you afraid?"
"I don't know. I suppose so. but I don't know exactly why. Not because it'll hurt. I'm not afraid of the pain."
"It can't hurt that much."
"Well, it doesn't matter how much it hurts. If I'm afraid, I don't know what it is that I'm afraid of. You?"
"I don't know either. I think I am. I should have met you years ago. I love you, Lee."
"Yes."
"What that drunk minister said. Until death do us part. Will it part us?"
"No. We go together."
"Until death do us part. It has a nice sound to it. There's a plane overhead, Lee."
He started to brake the car, then realized that would only call attention to them. He drove at a steady speed and hoped the plane wouldn't spot them, but he saw it circling and knew they had been seen. He braked the car after all and grabbed the rifle from the back seat and put a shell in it.
He got out of the car and raised the gun.
"You can't htt them from here," she said. "Can you?"
"I can try."
"But then they'll know who we are-"
"They know already," he said. He aimed the rifle and fired at the plane. He missed. He loaded again and fired again and missed again and the plane flew off, far out of range. He got back into the car and threw the rifle in back again and started the engine. The car sped onward.
"Lee-"
"What?"
"What happens now?"
"Well, they've got us spotted," he said calmly. He was amazed, suddenly, at how very calm he had become. "They'll move the roadblocks in," he said, "and they'll make sure that they've got everything blocked off. That means everything, which means we can't try to get away by heading down the little dirt roads, either, because they'll have them covered too."
"And?"
"And they'll send squad cars moving in toward us. Troopers or FBI agents. They'll cut all our escape routes and move in on us, and that's about it."
"So why drive?"
He looked at her.
"We might as well make a stand here as anywhere else. You don't want to try running a road block."
"No. That would be suicide."
The humor of that line hit them both at once. They laughed, and then it occurred to them at once that they had relatively little to laugh about, and they stopped laughing.
"I think you should pull off the road," she said. "Drive into a field. They'll find us, but they'll have to come to us and we'll be stationary. We can use the car as a fortress. It's hardly impregnable, I know, but its better than nothing."
He slowed the car.
"We have a rifle and a revolver," she said. "We can knock off some of them."
"They'll have machine guns."
"Yes. You know, I thought of something. You remember the little girl?"
"Yes, I remember her."
"We should have taken her along."
"What for?"
"A hostage. They couldn't shoot at us if we had her in the car. It might give us a little more time."
She was right. That would have been the smart move, certainly. With a hostage they would have a little more of a chance. But even so they would wind up the same way. Crooks took hostages all the time, but sooner or later something gave out and they wound up caught anyway.
Still, it would have been worth a try.
"You're right," he said. "We should have taken her."
"This is a fine time to think of it, though."
"Well-"
"But it was so much fun hanging her. Maybe we're better off this way, Lee. I just want you with me when I die, that's all. Nothing else matters, does it?"
"No."
"Just being together, that's all."
He had pulled the car off the road. He drove as far as he could into, the field until the car stopped and stalled. He got out the rifle from the back seat and loaded it, and he checked the revolver to make sure that all six chambers were loaded. With the butt of the gun he knocked the glass from every window in the Plymouth. He wanted to be able to shoot in any direction without interference, and he didn't want any wild shots sending shards of glass their way. He knocked all the windows out and crouched in the back seat and made her get down in front.
Then he started to hear the sirens.
Time is odd. It may fly or it may crawl, it may be nothing or it may be everything. When you sleep, an hour in the middle of the night is nothing but a wasted void, and it is over and done with without your ever being aware of its passage. A climax, in contrast, is virtually instantaneous, yet it looms up as a huge and great moment and seems to occupy far more time than it really does.
Clocks and calendars are not a true measure of time. They measure time in the real world, the objective world, and this is all very well. But human beings do not live in objective worlds. They live in subjective worlds, one to a person, each person living in his own little world with its own time scheme. An hour with a pretty girl passes more quickly than an hour on a hot stove, unless you are a mashochistic pervert, in which case quite the reverse is true. Time is a personal quantity, and any other approach to it is invalid.
Fallon had lived more than thirty years that had gone by like nothing at all. They raced by, not because they were pleasurable, not because they were spent asleep, but because nothing that had happened during their span had been of any great importance to him. They had come and they had gone and he had endured while they passed. There had been good times during those years, and there had also been bad times. There had been women and there had been stretches without women. There had been time in jail, which seemed then to crawl slowly by, but which now, in retrospect, just seemed as vast stretches of nothingness which he could scarcely remember. There had been times when he had worked and there had been occasions of petty crime. There had been liquor.
But there had been damned little in the way of vitality, damned little that gave him a sense of being vibrantly and desperately alive. And so the time went quickly and left no imprint upon the man that was Lee Fallon.
All this had changed now.
The crime had changed it. The rape had changed it. The murder had changed it.
And Jan Lawler, now Jan Lawler Fallon, had changed it more than anything else on earth.
Now, as the end came closer and closer, even the seconds were hours. When time is running out it seems to be running away too quickly, but it also takes a long while to pass. This is no paradox. It makes sense, if you think about it a little.
Fallon wasn't thinking about it. The sirens were getting louder and the police were coming closer, and he was thinking, really, about nothing at all. He was too deeply involved in what was happening to waste any time on thought. Thinking was for more restful times. He was preparing for action.
"I'll say it now," Jan said. "Because I might not get another chance, not in this world. I don't regret a thing."
"Neither do I."
"And I love you."
"That goes both ways, Jan."
"Tell me."
"I love you," he said.
And the first earful of cops came into view.
He had the pistol. He was a better shot, and it's a hell of a lot tougher to be accurate with a handgun than with a rifle, so he had let her use the rifle. He saw her now, resting the barrel over the side window and taking aim.
"Hold your fire," he said. "Until I see the whites of their eyes?"
"Until I shoot," he said. "Then make every shot count. We won't get too many."
The cop car had pulled off the road. There were lour men in it, two in front and one in back. One of them took a megaphone and held it to his face. He rolled down the window.
"Louse," Fallon said.
"Fallon," the cop roared. "You're surrounded. Yon haven't got a chance. Throw your guns out and come out with your hands up and you'll get an even break."
Fallon spat.
"You don't have a chance this way," the cop yelled again. "We'll come in after you if we have to. You'll get a fair trial, Fallon. What more do you want?"
What did he want? A good gun battle and a fast clean death, that was what he wanted. And that was one thing they couldn't take away from him no matter how hard they tried. They could and would take his life, and he knew it, but they couldn't pick the manner in which it would go. That was up to him and he had made his choice. He and Jan would go together, and quickly.
Another car drew up. Four more cops spilled out, and another car was coming-he could hear the siren.
"This is your last chance, Fallon."
He didn't mean to answer them. He hadn't wanted to give them the satisfaction of an answer. But the cop was getting on his nerves and he was sick of it. He wanted things to get moving and fast, and he was tired of all this horsing around. No matter how much the cop coaxed him, he wasn't surrendering. There was nothing on earth that could make him surrender. He was a mad dog at bay and he was going to fight it out to its inevitable end and that was all there was to it, and the sooner the cop realized that the sooner they could get the show on the road.
So he cupped his hands and yelled at the cop. He veiled three little words, and the suggestion he gave the cop was biologically impossible, even for a cop.
"Surrender," the cop yelled back.
"You got to kill me," he called. And that was all he said. They didn't ask him to surrender again. They had finally realized what they should have known all along-that he was not giving up. They would have to kill him.
The third car pulled up. Three cops got out. They were plainclothes men with machine guns and he guessed that they were Feds. FBI men in on the chase. He hoped he would get one of them, at least one of them.
"Go for the ones with the tommy-guns," he told Jan. "Aim at the one on the far left. He's out of range now, but he'll get closer. Take him the minute I fire."
He waited.
The cops came closer. He gave them enough time, and he didn't shoot until they did.
They opened fire at once. Two uniformed cops with scopes on their rifles and the three FBI men with the machine guns all opened up at once, and bullets burrowed into the steel skin of the Plymouth. He cocked the revolver and fired, and Jan squeezed the trigger of the rifle. His shot went wide but she dropped her man.
The cops dropped to the ground and kept coming in. A bullet came damned close to him but missed. He shot one cop in the shoulder and another one missed him by inches. The machine gun riddled the car with bullets.
More.
More.
And then they hit the gas tank. He cursed angrily, wishing he had thought to siphon the tank dry or pierce it and drain the gas from it. But they hit the tank and it went, and the car bust into flames. He didn't want to go that way. He kicked open the back door and hopped out, opened Jan's door and hauled her out after him.
"There goes our fortress," she said.
"It was a try."
"Sure. Everything's a try. We don't have much long-ar, honey. Not much longer at all."
"I'm not afraid."
They were lying on their stomachs with the burning car between them and the cops. But the cops were flank-ling the car and they knew it, and as soon as the cops had crawled into position it was over.
All over.
Forever.
"Jan."
"What?"
"Surrender."
"Are you crazy?"
"We're both crazy," he said. "That's got nothing to do with it. You surrender and let me get killed here. They'll be glad to have you alive."
"And they'll give me the chair."
"No. Listen to me, don't interrupt me. Fill them j full of a good story. Tell them I kidnapped you, I made you do everything. Tell them I had a gun on you all the time and you could never get away from me."
"They wouldn't believe that."
"They might."
"Never. And I wouldn't care if they did. I don't want to live without you, Lee. Not for a minute."
He started to say something but he didn't get the chance. A gun sounded and a bullet whined inches over their heads. They flattened out on the ground and he snapped off a shot in the direction of the gunfire. He didn't even know what he was shooting at but it no longer mattered.
"I love you," she said. "Don't forget that."
And, as she finished the sentence, a cop's bullet killed her.
It was that simple. He was looking at her out of the corner of his eyes and he was listening to her and there was a shot which he never even heard and a slug tore through her head, entering at her temple and blasting out through the ear on the opposite side, and she was dead.
Dead.
Jan was dead.
The rush of horror was too great for him to believe it. He felt as though a part of his own self had been cut off-or ripped off-and thrown away. That was what it was, she was part of him, and she was gone now, and he was a man possessed.
He stood up, ran around the car and charged the large mass of cops like Teddy Roosevelt racing up San Juan Hill. He ran at top speed and he did not even bother to dodge bullets. He raced straight at them and they shot at him and he fired his gun at them, missing wildly, and they kept shooting.
He did not even feel the bullets. Jan was dead, Jan was dead, they had killed her, and bullets tore into his body but he did not feel them and they did not stop him. He shot at a cop but the gun was empty and he threw the gun at a cop and more bullets tore into him and one slug picked him up and tossed him off his feet and into the air.
More bullets tore through him on the way down, but the cops were wasting their time.
