Chapter 3
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.