Chapter 5
"Dog tranquilizers. Did ya remember the dog tranquilizers? I ain't gettin' in no tussle with a goddamned Doberman," mumbled Speedy, slamming the accelerator to the floorboards. Charlie pulled down the brim of his black hat, clutched onto the dashboard for support and glowered at Speedy who took a hairpin turn off the freeway, slamming his passengers flat to the cab door.
"Jesus H. Christ! Would ya take it easy? You're gonna get us busted before we make our hit!" blasted Pete.
The three were old friends, having shared a cell in Santa Rita prison out on the West coast; Pete for bad checks, Charlie for embezzlement, and Speedy for auto theft. Now, dressed in black coveralls, their faces smeared with coal dust, they were riding the high tide of good luck. Henderson's last week, Carlson's this "week ... they would be sitting pretty. After tonight's hit, on to Tucson to unload the goods to Charlie's brother, their fence.
The atmosphere in the cab was sparked with tension. Charlie drew heavily on a cigarette, blowing smoke through his flaring nostrils, his deep eyes darting rabbit-like, keeping a watch out for cops. Across from him, Speedy ground the gears and crunched on butterscotch lifesavers. Squashed in between Speedy who smelled perpetually of perspiration and butterscotch lifesavers, and hollow cheeked Charlie, sat Pete, a handsome blonde haired man whose respectable appearance won him the position of scout. It was his job to scan the houses and make an estimate of its worth. A spontaneous snicker charged through the cab like lightning. Pete rubbed his hands together, smiling a faraway grin.
"What's so goddamned funny?" Charlie's deep set eyes stared into Pete's glinting ones.
"I was just thinkin' about that Carlson lady." He cut an hourglass in the air. "Chick's got a pair of tits on her you wouldn't believe ... Jesus, and her ass-"
"Knock it off, man. We ain't gettin' messed up with no rape charges." Charlie's gaze was dark and infinite as the night. He sucked in his breath, letting it out in a slow hiss that foreshadowed cringing apprehension. "Somethin' tells me we're playin' with fire hittin' the same neighborhood in a week."
Speedy's black Hawaiian eyes danced with fire. "Don' go talkin' like that, man ... you bring bad luck down on our heads." Speedy, a hefty Samoan from the islands who'd stolen aboard a freighter bound to the mainland some ten years back, had been in trouble with the law since. Still, that island mystique ruled his life.
"Cut that bullshit mystical crap...!" snapped Charlie, the pragmatist of the group.
Jill sat slumped at the kitchen table, a pile of shredded, tear-sopped kleenex piled at her elbow and a bottle of wine an easy reach away. She stared mesmerically at the bottle as if a geni inside would burst out in a puff of smoke and solve her problems forever. Her perky nose wrinkled in a sniff and she delicately dabbed at her watering eyes. What good was crying anyhow? Tears couldn't salve the wounds of an adulterous husband, any more than this wine bottle encased a geni.
An annoying scratching sound rattled her out of her misery, and the distraught woman looked up, a faint smile coming across her pallid features. Toby sat whining at the kitchen door, turning hes sleek black head now and then to shoot her a plaintive glance, begging to be let out for a night's fun with the ripe little poodle from next door.
It seems to be a night for bitches, thought Jill ruefully, wondering what little New York City hussie her husband had picked up. What did she look like? Probably a secretary ... one of those supple bodied little snips who man the front office, pulling up their skirts in exchange for lunch in some fancy restaurant. Little whores taking messages ... that's all they were! Oh, Bob probably tried to play hip by taking her to a Disco and got her drunk ... while she lay back here alone, fighting off horny TV repairmen. It wasn't fair!
"Why not, old boy?" she sniffed, scraping back the kitchen chair and rising dizzily to her feet. Her naked breasts danced provocatively beneath her gossamer nightie as she fumbled with the dead bolt. "Don't blame you-I'd like some love myself." Toby sat staring at his mistress, licking his lips and whimpering pathetically. He bounded out of the kitchen, his nose twitching orgasmically as he scampered toward the fuzzy grey poodle rubbing her hind quarters against the white wrought iron lawn furniture.
Jill burst into a flood of tears and, scurried to the living room, her visions blinded by scalding elephant tears. She flung herself defeatedly down on the sofa, her supple body shaking with anger, hurt and resentment. Her tiny hands drew up into white knuckled fists that pounded into the sofa cushions, beating them to a pulp. The harder she pounded, the harder she cried. Oh, it was no use!
To make him suffer as she suffered now became her sole objective.
Jill's wide eyes slitted with hatred. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," she hissed through clenched jaws as she lept to her feet and stomped down the hallway, shoulders squared. Yanking open the dresser drawer, she reached for the bottle of sleeping pills and rattled a few into her hand. Trance-like, she studied those magical little blue circles that promised rest and peace. What did it matter?
One trembling red lacquered fingertip toyed with the pill, turning it over, examining it until, impulsively she plucked it from her sweaty palm and threw it down her throat. Through slitted eyes she stared at the other two. Why not? Three of those little angels of mercy would put her out for a full day. Bob'll come home andfiny me lying there in bed and he'll hate himself for hurting me.
Decisively, she stepped coltishly for the dressing room where she splashed on perfume, combed her curls and redid her makeup. A hanger spun crazily against the closet wall as she yanked from it the sinfully sexual 'wet look' nightie Bob had given her for Valentine's Day ... the thigh-high red one with a boa flounce that made her look worse than naked. When Bob found her lying there in a coma, looking ravishingly desirable as a virgin sacrifice, his heart would bleed with guilt.
With the bittersweet taste of spite in her mouth, Jill lay down supine on the bed, a mysteriously ebullient feeling charging through her veins. She prepared her 'deathbed' as did pagans milleniums past, placing near her body items that would promise a safe journey. Next to the pillow she propped up the bottle of sleeping pills and closed her eyes, ready for a long, peaceful sleep. Something inside her knew she wouldn't die, but Bob had killed a certain irretrievable part of her soul, and this was her way of showing that deadening pain. Closing her eyes, she waited for the warm, numbing sensation to encompass consciousness. Thoughts of leaving a note filtered through her miasma brain, but she negated that plan. The bastard didn't deserve one!
Speedy cut the engine and the truck rumbled emptily down the slope between tree-studded Collins Avenue and Jennifer Street, coming to a jerking halt in the back alley used only by garbage collectors. The brakes squealed complainingly, for the ex-service truck had been owned by a slow-paced Mexican vegetable distributor before being 'liberated' one dark night and, in retribution for being painted black and robbed of her identity, the truck developed a case of faulty brakes. Such abuse as its driver Speedy incurred, this truck had never witnessed!
It must have been a new moon, for the sky didn't have a twinkle in it; even the stars were at rest. The only sound in the vacuous early hours of gray pre-dawn was the howl of a bitch dog in heat, followed by the whimpering of heated copulation.
"Goddamned dogs," snarled Speedy. "I ain' gettin' near the bastards."
"Don't worry, man ... you're stayin' with the truck. Pete and I do the crackin." Charlie took one final puff of his cigarette and extinguished it on the truck door, a little river of sparks fell dying to the floor.
In unison, all three necks craned, the white circles of their eyes staring out in stark contrast to their coal blackened faces. The backyard of Bob Carlson's rambling brick home stole their attention ... the perfect little two bedroom abode with its manicured lawn, trimmed hedge and small swimming pool centered in the midst of it all. The home bore all the evidence of a man on the up and up, the type of householder who bought on credit and furnished his house tastefully with money that wasn't yet his.
By the flickering light of a Bic lighter Charlie and Pete checked their tools, loaded their .38s and slipped noisily from the truck, their Addida shoes stealing over the spongy lawn of Bob Carlson's backyard. The night was unusually cool for summertime and the cool, nippy air calmed their thumping hearts and stung their flushed cheeks.
The thrill of risk taking made Pete's groin ache with excitement. Burglarizing and making love to a virgin was one and the same to him, though he wasn't the philosophical type, he'd given it some thought. It's kinda like when you 're a teenager and you got a hard-on ninety-nine per cent of the time and you're laid out in the backseat with a little honey and you got her panties down to her ankles. Do you go ahead and ram it to her ... or do you sweet talk her into wantin' it? That's how Pete described this passion. It didn't matter how you took it, only that you took it.
The house looked blissfully at rest, except for one perturbed light emanating from a far corner room. Staying close to the ground, Pete crept up to the brick wall and pausing outside the bedroom sliding glass door, peeked through the slit separating curtain and wall.
What he saw made him rock on his heels.
"Holy shit!" Pete sucked in his breath, the sight within causing a sudden lightheadedness to overcome his senses, nearly obliterating from his mind the object of his mission. Sex and crime ... sex and crime.
He hadn't expected to see her lying there stretched out as she was in a gossamer red nightgown that covered her lush nakedness in a shimmer of strawberry red. The uneven line of the fluffy boa trim skirting the thigh-high nightie was the only evidence that she was clothed in anything but a red light. She lay supine, bathed in the soft yellow glow of lamplight, her curly blonde hair glistening like cornsilk on an August afternoon. One lithe, tanned leg was bent, raising her knee and opening to his view the wide hair fringed slit of her pussy. He wiped his forehead free of perspiration and licked his lips.
Suddenly, he stiffened. Something was wrong. He squinted again. She looked (and here he gulped) ... corpse-like, all dolled up in her shorties with fresh spots of rouge on her cheeks, her pouty mouth as red and glossy as the see-through nightie she wore. Barely rising and falling, her luscious breasts that yesterday morning had provoked Bob to madness were flattened a bit, their strawberry tips little nubs of red poking up under the nylon. She looked waxen.
A noise from behind him sent him spinning around, his hand shooting toward the gun belt strapped to his back! He clicked the safety, and a second later a dog's yelp of pain whined in his ears. Across the green stretch of lawn, he focused on two dogs, a sleek black one humping up behind a grey ball of fuzz. Pete snickered and breathing easier, stared back inside the house.
Pete crooked his head, signaling in the direction of the Carlson's garage. The blackness of night their shroud, the two men hedged close to the bushes, hugging the brick wall, wary of complaining neighbors awakened from the yelping animals. Their shadows froze at the laundry room window and in a flurry of fingers and prying tools, the window opened without a crack of glass and Charlie's lankiness slithered in through, reptile-like, swallowed up in the darkness of the Carlson's home with Pete on his heels. Inside, Pete flicked his Bic lighter, his nostrils tingling from the sneezy scent of laundry soap.
"Into the kitchen," he rasped. "The living room is to the right ... check out the stereo." He pulled from his coverall pocket a pair of wire cutters and handed them to Charlie who stumbled toward the kitchen, an empty sack slung over his shoulder, the shiny metal of his gun gleaming metallicaly.
So far so good. "Ouch!" Charlie's yelp cut the silence. "Goddamned bicycle!" he hissed, limping into the kitchen where he unlocked the door and left it safely ajar.
"Give me the sheet ... I'll take care of the chick...!" Charlie dug out the chloroform-soaked sheet.
"Don' get carried away messin' around with that woman or I'll break your Goddmaned head open!" Pete was one of those men who couldn't get enough pussy.
A splash of light from the bedroom cast a dark shadow that blended shapelessly with Pete's black camouflage as he plastered himself against the bedroom door and peered within. Sweat popped out on his forehead and his mouth went dry. She hadn't moved one luscious inch! From his vantage point he could see her pouting pussy lips, red and swollen, wet with feminine juices as if crying for attention. Jill lay with her palms up in a helpless gesture, her mouthwatering pose resembling a sallow cast of Marilyn Monroe in a wax museum.
Pete craned his neck, checking about the room for burglary alarms, then pulled the surgical mask up over his nose and unfolded the chloroform sheet ready to flap it over her hapless body. Three long strides brought him to the edge of her bed where he stared down at her slumbering beauty. A lunging snarl curled his upper lip, when suddenly his eyebrows arched concernedly. Holy shit, she was barely breathing ... barely alive! His eyes fell on the bottle propped up beside the pillow, sitting there like a wordless suicide note.
Peter Parker gulped in a rare moment of gullibility. Just my luck to run onto a suicide! Had it been a male lying there he wouldn't have batted an eyelash, but to leave a pretty little woman alone to die would be cruel. For a reckless moment he considered calling the police ambulance, but then who would be committing suicide? He gulped and squinted down at the bottle, relieved to see it was nearly full; she couldn't have downed more than four.
Tentatively, he touched her. Jill's warm, soft skin pulsed with life. Pete's fear slackened and his indecision deepened. What to do? He picked up her arm and dropped it. It bounced against the mattress like a dribbled basketball and she didn't bat an eyelash. Jill slept on.
Pete's calculating mind breezed over the facts: He couldn't leave the poor bitch to die of an overdose ... or she might wake up and finding her house stripped, take a couple more sleeping pills; and he couldn't call an ambulance. He had only to recall those excitable innocent blue eyes and vivacious smile to plot his course of action, though Charlie would raise holy hell. Somehow in his twisted, criminal mind, saving the woman from self destruction compensated for stealing her blind, and he knew what he must do.
A little coffee and the right kind of exercise in the right place would perk her right up!
Out in the living room Charlie was busy as a housewife on the first day of spring, emptying out silverware chests and rattling their contents into bags. Those filled, he went for the electronic equipment-always a hot item on the market-and clipped wires and wrapped up cords in a flurry of activity. Those ready for hauling, he toted them out to the truck where Speedy packed them in the back of the van. And Jill slept on....
The living room furniture came next ... the white upholstered sofa and matching ottoman, the brass lamps and glass etageres. The three synchronized their movements in acrobatic perfection, sweeping clean the Carlson's living room, save the aquariums and ceiling high plants. The sky turned pink and the grinding of garbage trucks two blocks away shattered the silent morn.
Jill slept on....
"Gotta get the fuck outta here!" panted Speedy, his underarms two half moons of sopping sweat, the crotch of his pants hanging halfway to his knees, exposing a blubbery crevice from the rear view. Charlie was wound up with worry, shoulders hunched tight. He drummed his knobby fingers on the dashboard, rolling sweat streaking white down his gaunt, blackened cheeks. Where the hell was Pete?
"I swear to Jesus, if that sonofabitch is in there gettin' a piece of nooky, I'll blow his goddamned brains out!" Charlie gnashed his teeth, his fingers tracing the steely outline of his .38. One more felony and it was an automatic ten to life for Charlie.
Speedy's black eyebrows cocked, perspiration popping out on his forehead. "Shit, man, coulda used a little myself," he scratched his genitals and grinned crookedly.
"If we don't get the hell outta here, pussy's gonna be scarce as a Sunday suit!"
In the Carlson's rose-walled bedroom, Pete tossed aside the chloroform sheet and yanked the bedsheet loose from its tucked-in corners. Reverently, he wrapped the cool cotton around Jill's limp body, her slender legs spreading wide to give his hungry eyes a heady feast. She was all strawberries in cream, dressed up in that naughty nightie, her blonde wispy curls haloing her head. Lifelessly, she lay there, her cupie-doll face sticking up out of her cocoon. He told himself this wasn't kidnapping, but down in his dark soul he knew he wouldn't let the little bitch go until he'd had his fun with her. What the hell ... she owed him a favor for saving her life. In his nigger disguise she would never recognize him-if she could get her drugged eyes to focus-and even if she did, what could she do? Call his boss at Pete's Trusty TV Repair and complain?
Pete snickered to himself. Once out on the highway, it would be no problem dumping her off in the desert between here and Tucson. A pretty little thing like herself all dolled up wearing that naked looking nightie wouldn't have to hang out a thumb to catch a ride.
Pete stooped down ready to swing her dead weight over his shoulder, when his lizardy eye caught sight of a hand carved jewelry box. What the hell? he muttered under his breath, dumping down Jill's lax body and filling his pockets with Bob Carlson's diamond cufflinks and heirloom rings.
Out in the van Cahrlie glanced at his wristwatch. The sound of the garbage truck gnashed in his ears. "Give 'im thirty seconds and we're leaving without him," he said in a rusted voice.
Speedy scratched at his double chim and squinted at the black outline scampering over the Carlson's back yard like a rabbit on the chase, toting over his shoulder a rolled up object that neither could distinguish in the mistiness of early morn.
"Shit, man ... looks like a rolled up carpet to me...."
"Persian, if he's got any brains."
Speedy's black eyes slitted in puzzlement, then in fear as he caught a glimpse in the side view mirror of the garbage truck rumbling across the street some seventy yards behind them, two men riding the runners. "Jesus, they're closin' in on us!" His double chin jounced and a fresh bead of perspiration popped on his forehead as he jammed the truck into gear and revved up the motor. The first grind of gears synchronized with the sliding sound of the truck door closing shut, and they all breathed a little easier when they pulled out of the alley, the garbage truck grill nearly rubbing bumpers with them. "Let's get the fuck outta here!" cawed Charlie, loud enough for Pete, hugging the floorboards in the box, to hear. And Jill slept on....