Chapter 8

When she left that night I followed her home. She lived, in the garret of a brownstone on MacDougal Street. I was casing the joint-deciding whether, when the time came, we should go to her place or to a hotel, or even to my place, since I intended to move out of there immediately afterward. I decided I had to get an idea of what her place looked like inside and whether she really did live alone.

I went down a side alley. The fire escape on the brownstone next door hung down just far enough so I could reach it. My heart was a pounding lump in my throat as I scampered noiselessly up to the roof and concealed myself behind a pair of chimneys. I didn't know why I was doing this. It seemed like an unnecessary risk. If I were caught now the whole thing would be blown.

Robin's garret was directly opposite me, 15 feet away across the alley, and it was small; two rooms at most, although I suspected it was one big one. Three windows were open from the bottom with their shades half way up, but I couldn't see dividing walls through any of them. The right one framed part of the kitchen counter and a garbage can; the middle, a bare stretch of floor with part of a green plastic-covered armchair and matching ottoman in the background; and the left, the wide expanse of a water bed on the floor in a corner. The strains of a Joan Baez song drifted out from a cheap stereo somewhere in the interior, and I could hear water running-muffled, as though filtered through a closed bathroom door.

I waited for a few seconds, looking anxiously around to make sure I couldn't be seen from any nearby apartments or roofs, and then there was a noise of a door opening. Robin's legs appeared with a carelessly belted blue terry cloth robe covering their backs and sides and splitting open in the front to reveal flashes of her inner thighs almost all the way up to her crotch.

She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, and I heard her open a pop-top can. She paced up and down a bit and then crossed to the bed and threw herself down on it. She curled up on her side, and though I could only see the bottom half of her, I could tell she was agitated. I'd really scared the shit out of her.

For a few moments I waited breathlessly to see whether she would shift her position and give me a glimpse of her pussy. My groin started to throb at the thought and my cock stiffened. I saw half of a lean flank, and a good, soft piece of thigh, and even a few stray wisps of pubic hair scattered down over where the sides of her thighs went hollow. But a flap of her robe hung a corner down irritatingly over her cunt.. . .

Then her buzzer rang and she jumped up. I got a single-frame shot of her golden-furred cunt with its flaring pastel lips against the background of her lean, sinuously curving abdomen and her slender thighs and the springily bulge of her tight little ass cheeks.

She answered the door and Shirley came in. "Jesus Christ, I'm glad you're home. Boy, am I strung out You don't have any meth around, do you? Or any goddamned thing at all-I don't care. White Cross.. . . "

"I made Paul get all that shit out of here yesterday, and I don't want to hear anymore about it I've got some dope if that will help you out, but that's the limit."

"What are you on the rag about?"

"I think Angje's getting suspicious of our little food game. If he finds out my ass is grassed. I lose my job and everything. He might even press criminal charges. So that game's at an end."

"Shit!" Shirley cursed. "I mean, I'm not saying shit about the food, I'm saying shit about your good-for-nothing friends maybe having got you in trouble. I'm sorry, Robin. I hope it works out."

"Perfect," I thought to myself. "Right on the script." The almost sensual tone of Shirley's sympathy gave me a start. It almost sounded as if.. . .

Robin wandered across the room and flopped down on her bed again. This time she bent one knee up and waggled it nervously from side to side, drawing the rough terry cloth draperies back and forth over her cunt With every swing of her knee the delicate rose-petals of her inner lips opened up and out to an inviting hole about the size of a cock-head.

I wasn't the only one looking. Shirley strode across the room and flopped down next to her on the bed and pushed her robe to one side. "Look," she said. "Why don't we smoke a joint or two and try to forget our troubles. like old times."

Robin's voice was amused and sarcastic and yet it held a hint of promise. "like old times?"

"Yeah. I'll get the dope." Shirley bounced up off the bed and returned with a little green plastic container full of coarse olive-drab powder and a pack of papers and a Time Magazine to roll on. Robin shoved over and down to make room so Shirley could sit cross-legged, and that brought her entire body below the neck into view. From the bottoms of her feet up over her finely turned legs, her crotch, her belly, her softly heaving rib cage, her buoyant little tits, the whole vista of her body lay open tome.

I stuck my hand in my pants and grabbed my cock hard. At the first few rotations of the flat of my thumb against the underside of its head it threatened to shoot. I held off. There was more and better to come.

Shirley got the joint rolled and lit it and passed it to Robin, and then stood up next to the bed, out of my range of vision. But her clothes, as she discarded them, fell into my window-framed picture: a blue work shirt; a pair of jeans; a pair of brief panties, plain white nylon, with runs in the crotch. I'd barely adjusted to the sight of Robin's naked body when Shirley's joined it. My hand worked in my pants with the uncontrollable excitement that the image pounded into me. My cock started to cream and my hand got sticky. I wished I had a camera. That would be my next purchase.

Shirley really was skinny; wasted, almost. But her hips had a flare to them that demanded flesh on her ass cheeks, and it was there in nice handfuls, jutting out at me as she lay on her side facing Robin. Once in a while when she reached to pass the joint the almond-brown of a nipple flashed into view under her arm, riding high on a loose, floppy tit. But her ribs showed through like she was a skeleton wrapped in wax paper, and her arms and legs were positively skinny. Still, there was a primitive kind of magnetism about her body, as though to fuck her would be to fuck the devil herself.

Suddenly I knew why I was up on a roof crouching behind a couple of chimneys with my hands in my pants. I was going to get Shirley too. Right after Robin. I didn't know what sixth sense or animal instinct had showed me the way, but whatever it was, I suddenly trusted it and made up my mind to listen to it in the future. Maybe my brain was making subtle calculations deep down some place where I couldn't penetrate-Maybe it had deduced beforehand what I now saw with my own eyes; that Robin was not only a thief, but bisexual as well. That meant she was half a lesbian: one more thing I had on her. And three things I had on Shirley. She was a party to the free-food game, she was a speed junky, and she too was half-lesbian. At least. Both girls might laugh at the threat of their heterosexual affairs being exposed, but as far as being lesbian went, I knew society had already done a blackmailer's work for me. A couple of letters to a couple of sets of parents and I couldn't help but create more than a fuck's worth of misery.

"Look, I don't know if I can get into this," Robin said uneasily as Shirley stubbed out the first joint and reached for her crotch.

Shirley's hand paused and then its palm rubbed tentatively over Robin's abdomen in a half-motherly, half-sensual gesture. "Is it because you're upset about the food business, or because you just can't get into making it with me anymore?"

"Could be a little of both, I guess." My heart sank and I cursed. Maybe they weren't going to get into it after all. I took my hand out of my pants and looked around for the best way to get out of there unseen.

There was some mumbling that I couldn't catch. Finally Robin stripped off her robe and lay on her stomach. "I don't know," she said almost petulantly. "I guess it won't hurt me any, and if you get me turned on enough, I'll get into it." She chuckled. "like old times...."

That one line-"I guess it won't hurt me any,"-really got to me. Why did she have to say it to her skinny rat of a lesbian friend? Why couldn't she say it to me? But it turned me on all the same. In a way it was so close to, "It's yours. Take it."

Shirley laughed and slapped Robin playfully on the ass. "That's the spirit." She reached out of view to bring back a can of Budweiser that Robin had been sipping from. She took a swig and held it in her lap. "You just relax and I'll get you turned on good and proper." She took another swig and put the can aside and lay down next to Robin on her back. One hand crept beneath Robin's stomach and down to hook a few fingers up into her cunt from the front. The other patted and rubbed Robin's ass and then began to probe from the rear. Robin lay still as a corpse for the first few minutes, but when Shirley's fingertips met in her crotch and formed a cradle of fingers that pulled up into her with rippling, drumming motions, restless writhing stirred her, and she began to squirm and moan. "That's right,"

Shirley purred, "That's right. Just let yourself drift off into that fine dreamland...."

From the way her hands were going to work on Robin I guessed that Shirley was a real expert in bed. I wondered whether she'd ever picked up any money to support her speed habit by exploiting her talents.

Robin turned on her side, facing Shirley-and me-and reached meekly out to run her fingertips over Shirley's nipples. I knew she was a goner then. I unzipped my fly and took out my cock, my ears alert to any warning noises nearby. All I had to do was get caught beating my meat on a rooftop! But it was so damned fine! It wasn't really my hand stroking up and down, gripping that ancient-looking tube of flesh and conjuring its explosion out of it. It was Shirley's. She was getting me just the way she was getting Robin.

And then Shirley went for Robin's cunt with her mouth. She rolled her over and straddled her and pressed her legs up and apart with the backs of her elbows and started spreading those rose-petals with her fingers. like a curious child in an exotic garden, she stroked every tiny bit of private flesh meticulously, seducing and arousing and absorbing. She pinched Robin's cunt lips and tugged at them; she ran a finger around the opening of Robin's hole, teasing it to budding dampness. She sought out Robin's clit and bared it with a wide stretching of lips and bent to put her tongue to it. She licked down over it and plunged her tongue into Robin's hole, then withdrew it and licked around the opening, then returned to Robin's clit with nibbling lips. Meanwhile she settled her own cunt down on Robin's face-which was just out of my sight-and began humping. Her tits hung down with the upper skin of their sacks stretched and narrowed and the weight of them swinging wantonly to brush her nipples across Robin's abdomen.

Then they really got into it. Shirley's tits squashed flat to Robin's body and her tongue darted out like a snake's and her head pressed down till her mouth was one with Robin's open pussy. She licked and gobbled and sucked and pummeled and stroked and plunged like she was going after a pearl at the bottom of a deep lagoon. From the hard bucking of her hips I could tell she was close to getting off on Robin's face and struggling to take Robin with her at the same time. I held myself on the brink of ejaculation and careened along with them, trying my best to mute the sounds of my ragged breathing and the exertion of my hand on my cock.

Smothered moans and the symphony of sloshing from the water-bed and the tension that emanated from the picture of the two possessed female bodies told me that the time was near. Shirley was boring in on Robin with a wild drill-tongue that couldn't be denied. The come was welling up in me like the seawater of the rising tide.

Then a muffled shriek of abandon soaked the night air in animal erruption. Shirley had what she wanted right there in her mouth; the methodically pumping clit that reached out to her for the welcoming resistance of orgasm.

She clutched Robin to her and drank down her prize. From the bulging of the veins in her neck and the agonized expression on her face and the convulsive shuddering of her body I could tell she was getting hers too.

My come splattered onto the tar of the roof. I threw my head back and opened my eyes wide to see that it was a clear, starry, gorgeous night.

I lingered there a few seconds stroking out the last of my pleasure and breathing deeply of the air of forbidden release. Then I wiped my hand and my cock off with a kleenex, and wiped the roof up too, and retreated. I crawled on my belly to the top of the fire escape, concealed by the roofs low parapet, and peeked over to make sure I couldn't be seen. One quick vault and I was gone.

That night I packed up my belongings, now reduced to what could fit into one trunk and one large suitcase, and lay awake until almost dawn running through all my plans, checking out all my contingencies, and jerking off three or four more times at what I'd seen and what I was going to do. I slept until almost five the next day, and when I arrived at work fifteen minutes late Robin was already making a tuna fish sandwich for one of the waiting customers. I could tell she'd been worried about what it would mean if I didn't show up. She wore a plain blue sack dress, quite short, which I'd never seen before. When she reached across the counter for the mayonnaise the back of it climbed to reveal the curving bottoms of her ass-cheeks escaping from beneath her panties. "Is that for my benefit?" I asked.

"You might say so," she said sourly. "You've got a cheeseburger, a club sandwich, two spaghettis and a veal platter to make." She finished the tuna sandwich and turned to go. "After that we can talk."

People kept coming in, and orders kept flying, and "after that" didn't turn out to be until almost nine o'clock. Then we hit a slight lull and Robin came back into the kitchen. She sat down wearily with her heels up on a high rung of a stool and her cunt bulging impudently, almost casually out in the ripe pod of a pair of black lace panties. "Okay. I guess I have to make a deal with you. What do you want?"

"I won't admit to wanting anything if I can help it What are you offering?"

"Jesus, you're not making it easy on me." She fiddled with the hem of her dress and then looked up anxiously. "I don't know who you are, or what you have in mind. But you've really got me up against a wall. If you want to fuck me, I don't see how I can turn you down. Or if you want to eat me, or have me suck you off, or whatever. But if you.. . "

"I think those three activities would fill the bill admirably," I smiled.

"How many times?"

"Once. That's all. I'm not greedy."

"Really?" she asked. I could tell she'd expected me to demand more, but trying to take more was against my rules.

"That's right," I replied, feeling free to steal an obvious glance at her cunt now.

In the end she agreed. We set up a date for Monday night, when the restaurant was closed. I decided her place would do just fine as long as she made sure we wouldn't be interrupted. I had it in mind that I might try some of her marijuana It would be my first time.

I knocked on her door at seven-thirty on Monday to find her alone and drunk. Or maybe stoned; I didn't know which. Now that the deal was made and the time for payment had arrived she was scared and full of surly self-pity. "Come in," she mumbled. "Come in and bang my box!" Then she got a little hysterical. "Bang away, everybody! Free bangs at Robin's pussy!"

She sat down heavily in the green armchair as I loosened my collar and looked around. The place was an eclectically furnished mess. Besides the chair and the bed, there was a battered old bureau with a large cracked mirror, a couple of straight-backed chairs, an end table, a bunch of large yellow cushions slightly grimy, and an old steamer trunk whose top served as a coffee table. Clothing was scattered all over and papers were randomly strewn about the bed and trunk. Open sociology and history and anthropology texts lay face down in odd places like on kitchen counters.

"There's no need to be so crude about it," I said reprovingly. "Look, this doesn't have to be hell for you unless you make up your mind that it does. If you just loosen up a little bit, maybe you'll even enjoy it."

"Fat chance." She reached down beside her chair and picked up a water glass full of what looked like straight scotch on the rocks. She took a deep drink and then reached down into her pocketbook to pull out three joints. She waved them around. "You smoke this shit?"

I caught sight of a half-empty fifth of J & B on a shelf in a half-open cupboard. I got up went into the kitchen. "Never have, but I'm willing to give it a try. You don't mind if I rip off a shot or two of your scotch, do you?"

"Hell no!" She slurred her words badly. She started to say something else but her tongue got tripped up on itself. She waved impatiently and lit up a joint. I found a glass and filled it with ice and doused the ice with scotch. The acrid reek of marijuana smoke already saturated the tangy autumn air drifting in through the windows as I walked across the room and flopped casually down onto the bed.

I stole a look out the window and caught sight of two chimneys on the opposite roof. It was all different now. I felt calm, relaxed, confident, in control. At first I'd been afraid Robin would be too drunk to do anything, but I now realized it didn't matter. She wasn't Janet. I'd been right about Janet. She'd been one in a thousand. But drunk or sober, I'd get my cock into Robin before the night was over. That was what I'd come for, and that was all I had a right to expect. "Why don't you come on over here and share that with me?"

She dropped a train of ashes down the front of her blue shift-the same one she'd worn to work-and stood up. She brushed them off with a short curse. The motion jiggled her tits animatedly and she laughed a drunken laugh. She almost fell over as she bent to pick up her drink and the hem of her dress climbed to the middle of her ass. "Bet you like the view back there." She straightened up and sauntered over to me, mimicking a cheap whore. "Whatcha say, sweetie? Wanna go out?" She bent down over me and her stifled breath blew hot on my face. "Wanna get inta my box?"

She handed me the joint. "Take a real deep drag and hold it in as long as you can." She put down her scotch and grabbed her dress by the tops of the shoulders and pulled it off like she was emptying herself out of a paper bag. Before I could catch my breath she'd stripped off her panties and sat down beside me on the bed. "I must say, it's not much of a body you're getting," she sighed as she looked down at herself and then took the joint from me, pinching it daintily between long fingernails to avoid touching my hand. "But what do you want for I'll nothing?" She giggled hysterically again. "For nothing! I get my hungry friends food for nothing, and look what it gets me!" She glowered at me resentfully.

I sensed that I'd better not get her going on any long rap. I slipped off my clothes and took another half-dozen drags on the joint. I'd smoked cigarettes for a while in college, so I knew how to inhale, even though my lungs rebelled when I took in too much too deeply.

"If you've never smoked dope before," she said, lighting up a second joint when the first one was all but gone, "you might not get stoned. It usually takes a few times. This is outrageous stuff, though." She stopped abruptly and took a deep drag on the joint and looked at me with critical inquisitiveness. She let the smoke out in a long, pale blue stream. "What the hell kind of person are you, anyway?"

"I'd rather not go into it. And you don't really need to know. I'm leaving the job and the city in the middle of next week, and you'll never see me again. Fair enough?"

We sat there drinking and smoking for another half-hour, not saying a word, watching the last of the sun-fight as it faded from the western sky. Just as the city's lights spread their ground-glow up to replace the lost daylight with their huge illuminated dome she got up and turned on the stereo.

It was entrancing the way her drugged and drunken body moved. like a lurching serpent or a greased clown she oozed to a pile of records and bent over, sticking her ass brazenly out at me and squatting on her haunches. Her blonde muff split its sparsely-haired lips back at me as she picked out a record and put it on. The music was a cross between rock-and-roll and country-and-western, with dazzling lead guitar work and an easily moving beat.

She came back to the bedside and stood over me with her hands on her hips. "Well, we may as well get this over with. As soon as you're done with that thing." I was nearly finished with the third joint, but I still hadn't felt much of anything. Once or twice I'd thought I felt a little funny, but nothing like the changes in time perception and all those other things that people talked about.

Then, as Robin hovered over me eyeing the flaccid lump in my underwear with barely concealed distaste, it hit me.

It was like coming awake to the world from a whole new point of view.

I was still me. I still knew who I was and where I was and why, and I knew I could still control my body and, if necessary, my mind.. . although the control now seemed remote. But in an emergency I knew I would react as well as I would straight. Or at least I thought I knew it. But all the surroundings seemed to be closer and more vivid; every thought and action and expression seemed to present itself with singular clarity and individuality. And objects too. It was as though scotch glasses and ash trays and scraggly plants, a few of which sat on the middle windowsill, all demanded that close attention be paid them separately.

The most vivid example was Robin herself. Now maybe I understood why she stared at people in that intense way. People were very mystifying animals.

I reached up and grabbed her wrists and held them for a second, feeling her pulse throb, establishing contact. She shivered a little and I felt her wrists trembling with the impulse to pull away; but like a child who's gone to a doctor's for a shot, she made up her mind to suffer through and get things over as quickly as possible. So after a second, when I put out the remains of the last joint with my free hand, she sank to her knees on the bed beside me and hung her head gloomily, waiting for me to proceed.

I suddenly knew that, whether I spent ten seconds or a hundred years with her, she was not going to respond. She was being taken and she knew it, and that was the way it was going to have to be; I was going to have to take her, and I couldn't expect any encouragement. Well, maybe that could be exciting in its own way.

I lay back and, since she was already kneeling at my side, pushed her head down into my crotch with one hand stroked my cock a little and pointed it at her mouth with the other.

She yielded like a slow automaton. Her thin, finely bowed lips parted in grudging stages of acquiescence as they approached their target

I took my hand from the back of her head and she stopped bending. The symbolism of coercion necessary for her.

I dug my fingers back into her lush blonde curls and rested my hand lightly on the back of her head. Her descent continued until her lips touched like damp, timid feathers to the pinkly reptilian crest of my cock and tickled it with staggeringly erotic reluctance.

The dope had me blinking mentally at every new eruption of sensation, trying to see how the separate moments of time were fitted together by the continuous stream of impulse that flowed from my genitals. I looked steadfastly at the familiar girl who bent over me and now, instead of asking me for a ham sandwich and a bowl of potato salad, licked around the head of my cock with the tip of her tongue. She was a little animal; no more. And so was I. Perhaps we were squirrels, or cats, or something in between. We were drawn together by a natural magnetism, and.. . .

But of course Robin felt none of that so-called natural magnetism. At least not for me. She was sucking me timidly, fearfully, and suddenly her very touch, which communicated her emotions to me, was painful.

I would not stand for pain. Not on this night. If she couldn't do it to me, I could do it to her.

"Oh, fuck it!" I pushed her head up off me and drained my scotch glass and got up. I staggered a little with the sudden change in altitude. "If you can't suck my cock, I can fuck your mouth!" She gazed up at me with dumb incomprehension. She was really out of it "Do you want me to put on my clothes and leave right now?" I knew she no longer remembered why she didn't want me to go, but she shook her head insistently. "All right, then. Here. Get up." I reached down and grabbed a limp wrist as it waved in the air. I pulled her to her feet. "Come on. Sit in the armchair." I dragged her over to the green vinyl-covered chair and she slumped down into it. She was so gorgeously soused. "You're a necrophiliac's dream," I laughed. I didn't care. She'd wiped herself out because I'd run her down and cornered her, and I was going to have her whether she was there or not

I straddled the arms of the chair and inched my cock up toward her face. Her arms hung limply at her sides, and the rest of her body was still, but when my cock-head pressed against her lips they opened, and when I began to shove I found the channel of her throat widening for me. "Watch your teeth," I told her. "They're scraping me . . . " She covered them with her lips. "That's better." I gripped her head in my hands and planted my feet and flexed my knees and fucked her mouth.

Her soft blonde curls bounced up against my belly and the thrusting of my cock pushed her lips in and pulled them out. Her nostrils flared and the air rushed in them as she fought to keep from gagging on the thick piling of flesh that I drove down her throat. I bounced her head down onto me and twisted it back and forth, sending my rod into the corners of her mouth, up against its roof, and down against her tongue.

I leaned forward harder and my deepest thrusts pressed the back of her head deep into the vinyl. My balls swung up beneath her chin and batted against her throat and now I was going to pump her face full of it. She felt me reaching the peak and for the first time her eyes opened wide and she braced herself.

I got off with the top of my cock-head nosing hard down the gulping curve of her throat and her hp-covered teeth clamping convulsively. Her brow furrowed in drowning desperation till I pulled my still-spurting organ up into the wide cavern of her mouth and she could swallow. The flood of semen kept gushing in on her, and she gulped feverishly. The action of her gulping brought on still more and longer thrusts.

It was many minutes before I dragged my withered organ out of her mouth and stumbled over to collapse on the bed. "God, I just fucked her mouth like a cunt," I thought to myself. "I just used it like it was a fucking animal!"

After that I fucked her in everyway imaginable. I waited a few minutes for her to recover, and grabbed a towel off the rack in the kitchen and wiped her mouth off. Then I pulled her over to the bed. She was so limp and lifeless, so unresisting and unresponding, that she was like a hunk of living clay . . . a supple manikin I manipulated at will.

I fucked her on her back with her legs down flat, and then I pushed her legs up until she was doubled over with her toes brushing the mattress above her shoulders.

I turned her over and fucked her from behind, rubbing my crotch hair around in her ass crack and then spreading her cheeks so I could see my cock sliding in and out of the mangled blonde mouth.

I pulled her up to her knees and fucked her dog-style.

Then I stood her up straight and reached around to feel her tits with one hand and finger her pussy with the other, and fucked away at her like that

I made her bend over a straight backed chair, squatting a little, and I got off battering her so hard that the chair inched back until it ran up against a wall.

I sat her down in the chair with my come dribbling out of her and darkening the wood with its wetness and squishing between her ass cheeks and under her thighs. I helped myself to more scotch and managed to roll a sickly-looking joint. While I paced up and down in front of her smoking it she stared straight ahead with a Wank, glazed look. After a while she seemed to come back to life a little. She folded her arms and watched me as I walked back and forth, her head moving from side to side like she was watching a slow-motion film of a tennis match.

For some reason she made me want to fuck her until I was worn out. Maybe it was just that she wasn't going to give me any satisfaction, I had to take it for myself, and it took a lot more to satisfy me that way. If she wasn't going to give an inch, I certainly was going to take a mile. "Ready for some more?" I asked flatly.

She shrugged her shoulders as if it was ah the same to her.

I went over to her chair and pulled her legs up and rested her ankles on my shoulders and fucked her where she sat. That was nice; she was split open tike a ripe fruit and I really got her deep. Then I lowered her legs to hook them around my waist and picked her up and bounced her up and down on the fat spike of my rod.

I let her back down on the bed and lay on my back and dragged her up to sit on top of me, first facing me, then facing the other way. For a while I lay still, with my prick lost in her and jerking spasmodically as I simply absorbed the feeling. Then I started undulating like a snake, setting up rolling currents inside the water bed that lifted her up off me and eased her back down. I did that for a long time, and finally came again, with her cock-filled cunt and her ass staring me in the face.

That was all. I left her lying fucked-out on the bed. As I departed I said, "Don't forget to lock the door after me. There are all kinds of nasty perverts roaming around in New York."

I chuckled to myself on the way down the stairs, but by the time I reached the bottom the image of a wasted, lifeless person haunted me with grim reproach.

"Well, she wanted it that way," I tried to tell myself. "She could have made it shorter and sweeter if she'd wanted. Shit-she's a big-city girl, and she knows how things go. She'll get over it. If she hasn't already. Right now she may be laughing her head off at having been a necrophiliac's dream!"

But I really couldn't make myself believe that, and when I imagined myself her father or mother or brother, and how enraged I'd be if I found someone had done that to her, how I would want to tear him to pieces, I hid my face in my hands and fled to my apartment. It was only the sudden fear that right after I'd left she'd called a boy friend, or a brother, or a parent, or the police, that snapped me out of an agonizing trance of reviewing what I'd done in open-mouthed horror. I called a cab and dragged my suitcase and trunk downstairs and got the hell out of that apartment for good. I went to a small, moderately priced hotel on the llpper East Side, wondering whether I should risk going back to work the next day.

But as I lay in my soft hotel bed tossing fitfully, worriedly trying to maintain my cleverness at all costs, I suddenly knew that I would go to work the next day. I had to. I thought it through many times, and decided that it would probably be safe. But even if it wasn't completely safe, I had to go. That was the only place to start my pursuit of Shirley.