Chapter 1
A poster flapping in the gritty wind announced the feature attraction of the Bijou Theatre as a Payne-Hutton production for Colossal. No one on Hamilton Street was interested, though. The picture had been released for distribution six years ago.
Heavy boards were nailed over the Bijou's doors. Tin cashier's booth had long ago been demolished by vandal And the citizens of Hamilton Street had grown accustomed to seeing that last poster worn away bit by bit in summer rain and winter snow. The paper relic of the Bijou's decay was now reduced to a few letters of type, the right eye brow of Chester Morris and Richard Arlen's determine jaw.
Inside the Bijou this damp September evening, however, there was another kind of feature attraction, completely hidden from the weary citizens of Hamilton Street.
In the dark ruin of broken seats and ripped-up carpet, a seventeen-year-old girl named Rita Danilov was getting ready to take on eight boys one at a time.
Getting ready?
Hell, she was ready.
Her head buzzed with the beer she'd consumed after the boys picked her up outside Olivetti's Variety Store. She kicked off her sneaks. She could hardly wait to get free of the binding constriction of her ultra-tight, dark blue toreadors.
Wriggling and mewing like an animal in heat, Rita Danilov unfastened the zipper. She rolled her palms down her hips, pushing at the toreadors to slip them over her voluptuous, softly-gleaming hips.
The eight boys waited nervously, hypnotized by the show taking place amid the litter of beer cans, rotted popcorn and moldy gum in the wide aisle near the decrepit stage. The faces of the boys-none was over eighteen-shone in the gloom as white blurs. On the backs of their satin jackets the word Cobras was stitched in white silk.
"Hey, querida!" called a swarthy kid named Pepe. "Gonna show us everything?"
"Everything, sweetie, just everything." Rita's dark hair gleamed with inky hi-lights as she twisted and wiggled from her clothes, moaning a little. "Hunting a place for the gangbang, the boys had discovered the rear door of the Bijou hanging from its hinges. They'd turned on the only unshattered light bulb, far backstage, to provide what little ilumination they required.
Swilling from a beer can an emaciated kid said, "You hot for us, Rita?"
"Oh, baby, baby! You don't know how hot I am for you!"
A slender boy with wavy dark hair and glasses said: "Jeez, guys. I dunno-"
"You dunno what, Jack in the Box?" snarled the emaciated kid.
"Hell, it's just that Rita's Whitey's girl. We shouldn't mess around, Viper."
The emaciated kid, Viper, said with disgust, "Ah, you mother-fryer!"
"Leave J. B. alone!" ordered the swarthy kid, Pepe. "If he don't want to touch her, he don't have to."
Pepe licked his lips, staring at the white blur of Rita's body wriggling in the half-dark.
"Me, I don't want none of you crap-heads messing up my fun. Just shut up and watch the show. Whitey's at the county farm. What Whitey don't know can't hurt him. We're just takin' care of his querida, that's all."
"Oh, God, do I need taking care of!" Rita moaned.
She struggled with the toreadors, pushing them down so her navel came in sight.
"I need so much taking care of, I think I could handle the whole U. S. Army." She giggled. "Why'd you guys feed me all that beer?" Suddenly her eyes blazed. "Well, come on, come on! Take off, somebody!"
Viper swaggered forward, unzipping his jeans.
"Me first, huh, Rita? Blow, you guys."
"Aw, nuts!" said another of the gang. "Can't we watch?"
"I don't care, I don't give a damn!" Rita panted. "Just give me some action!"
Struggling, writhing her plump young hips, she couldn't seem to manage her clothes.. All of a sudden the beer turned her hands to boneless jelly. Deep in her mind she felt disgust, acute disgust-at the cheapness of the ruined theatre, at the fierce demands of her ripe body. Those demands had made her a slave to the sex-urge since she was fourteen.
Rita Danilov couldn't recall how many boys she'd had.
Hundreds?
Maybe a thousand?
She hated herself for it. Yet when she was right in the middle, racing for the wire going a million miles an hour in ecstasy, she loved it, loved it.
Tonight she'd drunk too much. One, two boys-maybe that many would have satisfied her. But eight?
The most Whitey had ever taken her at once was four times. Could she make the scene eight times? Would they hurt her? Rita didn't know. Suddenly she didn't care.
She clawed her flanks to get free of the rubber-tight toreadors and the sheer black silk panties that burned her hips like fire.
Transfixed, the boys watched Rita strip.
Her gleaming thighs came into view, soft, rounded. She dropped the toreadors and panties in a heap. Viper made an obscene gesture. Rita nodded and giggled, her eyes bright in the dim glow of the backstage bulb.
Viper couldn't take his gaze from her breasts as her wng crimson-nailed fingers tucked under the hem of her tight white sweater and pulled it upward.
Upward across a tapered plane of white belly.
Upward to reveal swelling under-cones of a lacy black bra in which the creamed hills of her size thirty-eight breasts bulged excitingly.
Upward so the whole bra was there in the weak light, showing the deep separation between the two cones that jutted to tips puckering and hardening like flashy little stones.
Tearing the sweater over her head, Rita flung it away. She reached behind her back for the hooks of her bra. Her breasts stood out like black mountains. All through her body-so voluptuous, so fully-developed for a girl of seventeen-the jets and quivers of excitement were beginning to tickle and torment. Rita couldn't help herself when she reached this stage.
A hank of lustrous black hair fell across her oval ivory face. Her dark eyes shone with coaly fire as she unhooked the bra. A gasp went up from the gang boys as her breasts burst free.
"Turn around, turn to the left," Pepe breathed. "Show us first."
Obscene cries of encouragement came from the boys, all except the downcast J.B.
Rita moved her right knee, flexed it.
"Like me, boys? Whitey sure did."
"Man, oh man, see that?" one of them whispered. "Rita, that's great, absolutely terrific."
Rita ran her palms up and down her thighs, breathless:
"For Christ's sake! This isn't a museum piece, is it? If you like me so much, somebody hurry up and take care of me."
Choking with excitement, Viper rushed forward: "I'll take care you by God-"
Rita wrapped her arm around his neck. She dragged his head into an open-lipped embrace.
She felt his tongue lash wetly in answer to hers. She suppressed a last sick tremor of guilt as she crushed her hips against his. The coarse cloth of his jeans slid back and forth across the front surfaces of her thighs.
The theatre, when they'd entered furtively, had been damp and cold. Now it was an oven. Rita's breasts mashed the boy's chest as he fought to open his shirt. Her hardening nipples, warm and red as fully-budded flowers, contacted flesh. She wanted to scream with delight.
Her body was master now. All her thoughts focused on the burning urge suffusing her. She helped the boy struggle out of his pants. Her nails dug into his shoulder-flesh so that he cursed with excitement.
The torment, the demand for satiation, had been building in Rita Danilov's young body for days. So what if the other kids watched? Who gave a damn? Not Rita, not panting sweating Rita.
She pulled the boy to a strip of befouled carpet, fell clumsily on her back. Strangely, the bruising fall excited her still further. The boy began to caress her, kissing the slope of her neck, the shadowy declivity between her breasts.
Rita felt as though a dozen fiery ropes were twisted around her thighs. The hard belly of her lover smashed hers, making her gasp.
He twisted her this way, that way. Finally he got a hand under the heaving small of her back, another on her buttocks.
"How long am I going to have to wait for you?" Rita shrilled.
"Oh, God, baby, I'm all ready."
"Then stop talking, you buzzard. Take me, take-ohhh!"
In a frenzy, Rita rolled and twisted under the caress of his whip-taut flesh. The boy's hands worked in her buttocks, worked and worked, pinching, gouging, pulling. Rita began to move with a mounting fervor.
"Come on, man!" She raked his back. "Let's make the scene!"
"Jeez, Rita-"
"Make the scene, man! Make the scene, make the scene! Oh! Oh, that's it!"
"I'll fix you, Rita, I'll give you all you can take-"
"It's not enough. Come on, man, go!"
"How's this? How-does-that-?"
"More, big man, more, more!"
Now Rita really began to get the swing of it, the rhythm and the pulse, like a bongo beat off a juke, rattling faster, faster, convulsing her whole body, lashing her ivory thighs, mashing her breasts under the boy's chest so they felt like thy wanted to gouge holes in him.
"Faster, honey!" she screamed. "Rita's on the way now! Rita's making it!"
With a convulsive shudder the boy groaned: "Oh! Ohhhh my God."
Aghast, Rita threw her head back. She stared into his pale face.
"It that all? Oh you puny louse, is that the best you can do?"
"Rita, I couldn't help it! You got me so worked up-" With a sharp cry she slashed her nails down his chest, drawing blood.
"Then get away from me!" Get away so a man can do the job!"
Through blurred eyes she saw Viper's face recede into the dark, but the hammer-hammer driving her wild there didn't recede. It intensified. She rolled against one of the damaged seats and struck her head to bring pain to keep from screaming and wanting so badly.
"Who's next?" Her voice was ragged. "Goddam it, somebody hurry up. I'm dying, dying."
"Stand aside, you mother-frying muchachos," came the bragging voice of the kid called Pepe. He shoved the goggle-eyed group aside. "Let a South American stud take care of the pretty mare. Querida, here comes a man."
Pepe hit her with such demolishing force she had to scream .They slid a full three feet down the filthy aisle from the impact. Pepe had no finesse, only brutal strength. But a moment later Rita's hurt became pure heaven.
Pepe cursed fluently in a Latin tongue. Rita couldn't understand him in the heat and excitement.
The liquid-fire knot in her loins grew tighter, tighter still. It inflamed her to the peak of passion that always threatened to tear her apart the instant before her appetites found satisfaction in the spasm-fury....
"Here you are, here you are! I been hunting all over."
A loud clatter, as of heavy shoes rattling on the dilapidated stage.
A sudden jerk and twist of Pepe's body.
Rita opened her eyes, beating her fists on the stained rug.
"Madre de Dios!" Pepe's face was a blur above her. "Whitey!"
"So this is what you do behind my back?"
Rita knew she should recognize the new voice. Should recognize its meaning. Pepe apparently did. He ripped free of the embrace with such force that Rita cried out. She seized his foot, sobbing now, trying to hold him:
"Lover, lover, what's wrong?"
Words died in her trembling throat. Above her, a slanting giant to her clouded vision, stood a flashy, good-looking guy, wide-shouldered, about twenty. He had pale straw hair and china-blue eyes and a hard, humorless smile.
Pepe scrabbled for his clothes, frantically thrust his legs into his jeans. He mumbled and sweated. The towering figure ran his eyes over the naked girl exposed in every intimate detail on the floor. Slipping his hands into the pockets of a crudely-tailored twill jacket, he advanced on the Cobras.
"All right, you creeps. How many touched her?"
"Jeez, Whitey, we thought you-" someone began.
The straw-haired boy laughed, a deep, chilling sound.
"Thought Whitey Noonan would stay cooped up on that frying correction farm just for stealing three lousy hubcaps?" Whitey spat. "Hell, fellas. I had to come back to look out for my gang, didn't I?"
A sudden crash as Whitey kicked over a half-rotted theatre chair.
"But you been lookin' out for yourselves, haven't you? With Rita!"
"Whitey, she practically begged-" began Viper.
"Shut up! Rita's a broad. Broads can't help it if they start to itch and gotta have help to stop the itch."
Dimly Rita heard the shuffle of his feet. Then a sibilant gasp of fright and a whick of steel.
"I don't blame Rita. She's got this thing-" He laughed. "She's just got to have it. Man, it's automatic with her. She can't stop."
The spectacled kid, J.B., spoke up:
"Whitey, what if the law catches up?"
"You worry about you, Jack in the Box. I'll take care of Whitey. Now. Who touched her besides the grease-ball? I never did like you much, Pepe. I let you into this bunch against my better judgement. Come on, you mother-fryers! Speak up! I want the name of every so-called friend who made it with my girl. And fast."
Tormented with the desire still knotting her loins, wishing she could stop the frantic throb in her big scarlet nipples, Rita lay on her side panting, watching. Whitey, drably dressed, menaced his underlings with an eight-inch hollow-ground switch. He moved the switch in a small, suggestive circle, waiting for an answer.
J.B. cleared his throat and took a tentative step:
"Nobody touched her, Whitey, except Pepe and-"
Viper cut him off with a glare whose threat was clear:
"Yeah, that's right. Nobody but Pepe."
"I want the truth!" Whitey snarled. "Or I'll whack them off all of you."
"That's the truth!" a voice whined. The others assented.
Pepe moved backwards, away from the switch.
"No, no I wasn't the only-Whitey! Whitey, believe me! I wasn't the only one!"
He collided with the rail of the orchestra pit. The rotted wood cracked. Pepe crashed to the pit floor, screaming.
Whitey jumped after him. An agonized howl ripped the cavern of the theatre.
After a series of thrashing noises Whitey Noonan climbed from the pit. He wiped the switch clean of red by sticking it in the woolly pile of a seat.
Then the swaggering Cobra leader dropped his clothes and gave Rita the release she craved.
At last the theatre lay dark again.
One by one, shadows slipped off into the slum night.