Chapter 1

I was parched in the searing heat as I drove my rented car rapidly down the four-lane highway and over the last hill of meadowland, my face feverish and soaked with swear. As I sucked in the hot air, my car plunged into swampland, black and forbidding, impregnable, growing so near the road and overlapping it in places that strange shadows blotted out the sun.

Water smells were strong, dull and stagnant with the hint of things dead and dying. The broad highway was pot-holed and I knew no amount of work or expense could keep a good road bed down in swamps like these.

I wiped sweat from my face and as I leaned forward to pry my soaking shirt from my back, I thought of Jamie Meadows and of the sweat on her body one day the previous summer in Rome. It was the last time I saw her and until I received her cryptic, frantic letter a few days ago, I didn't know what had happened to her.

I knew almost nothing about Jamie, except that I was obsessed with her, and that though I had been intimate as hell with her, I had never made love to her.

I passed a couple of cars as the swamp growth receded somewhat. There were bayous now, slime-green and filled with broad lily leaves and white flowers and stubs of ruined trees and in front of the highway along the water were several huge billboards advertising hotels and motels in Harrisville, Jamie's hometown to which I was headed.

Now the swamp was receding further and there was a shining blue and white service station off to the right and a couple of hundred yards further a huge Holiday Inn motel, its glass facade glistening in the sunlight.

I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, and to my left I saw a bright red building stuck on thin stilts over a bayou. A neon sign flashed BAR AND GRILL, and I jerked my foot from the accelerator, gently braked the car, then turned off the highway.

There were a dozen cars on the steaming asphalt parking lot as well as a highway patrol car. I parked at the side of the building beside a huge flowering bush.

Signs on the red building advertised Jax and Falstaff beer and Old Crow and Old Stagg bourbon. My shoes sank slightly into the molten-like asphalt and I paused on the steps to pry some asphalt loose, then shoved open the screen door and walked inside.

The booths along both walls were filled with deeply tanned men in short-sleeved shirts and' women in sleeveless cotton dresses drinking frosting cans of beer or tall ice-filled glasses of bourbon and water.

A rock-n-roll song slammed from a gaudy jukebox in the corner beneath a tall floor fan which wheezed as though suffering asthma as it stirred the humid air.

A bar crossed the back of the oblong building, and at one end sat two middle-aged couples sipping gins-and-tonic and at the other end were several men in blue suits and two highway patrolmen in blue uniforms and gray, Buster Brown hats, beer guts hanging over broad, bullet studded gun belts.

I sat at a tall bar stool between the two groups, rested my elbows on the brightly striped Formica top, and glanced at the gigantic fishnet strung across the back wall, decorated with giant, gaily colored shells and brown starfish.

A tall, plump woman in a flowered dress walked in from a back room.

"What are you drinking?" she asked, as she wiped a strand of bleached-blonde hair from her forehead.

"A can of beer," I said.

"We've got the coldest beer in the county," she said as she opened a Royal Crown Cola icebox. The dress was stretched taut across her broad buttocks, but despite the weight her fifty or so years had put on, she was still well-proportioned.

She opened the beer and shoved it across the counter, then moved down the bar to the knot of men.

"What are the chances for another stay of execution?" she asked.

"It's not-likely," one of the men in a blue suit said. "He hasn't got any more courts to appeal to now."

"I sure hope the bastard gets the chair tonight," a man with wire-framed glasses said. "After what he did. There's been enough delay now."

There was an undercurrent of muttered approval and the men sipped their drinks. I drank my beer and it was so cold it made my teeth ache.

Frank Sinatra was singing "It Was a Very Good Year" on the juke box, and I poured down the cold beer and felt some of the heat and tension draining from my body.

The woman looked over at me. "You heading for Harrisville?" she asked.

I nodded. "How much further is it?"

"About another thirty miles," she said. "You sure picked a hot day. Hottest day this summer. You ever been to Harrisville before?"

"No this is my first trip," I said.

"Well, honey, it's a good town, I reckon," she said, as she stepped down to me. "You picked a kind of bad time, in addition to the weather. There was this terrible thing happened, this trial, and it kind of stirred people up. But that's all finished now, I guess, and the town will go back to normal."

"I couldn't help but overhear your conversation," I said and drained my beer. "What kind of trial was it? Is someone going to be executed tonight? What kind of murder was it?"

"Oh, it wasn't a murder," she said. 'This guy raped little Millie Perkins. And she was only seventeen."

"And he gets the chair for that?" I asked.

"Listen, he's lucky to get the chair," she said. "The way these people were worked up, they might just have dragged him out into the swamps and taken care of him themselves."

"Yeh, it was a terrible crime," one of the men in blue said, as he turned to me. He had a pinched, wrinkled face and he stared at me a long moment. "This guy tried to slander the little Perkins girl, said all kinds of nasty things about her. He was arrogant and never showed any remorse, and he was an outsider. Had only been town a couple of months."

"People in Harrisville are the friendliest folks on earth," the woman said. "If you give them half a chance. But you got to meet them halfway and you got to respect the things that are important to them. This fella, he was kind of arrogant and a bit standoffish, and he wouldn't give a inch to folks here or their ways.

"like that Meadows fella," the man in blue said. "Of course, old Ron Meadows got so much money and power, no one in town could touch him. But there are a lot of people who would like to see him brought down a few notches."

A chill stabbed my sweating back. Ron Meadows. He was Jamie's father. I started to speak, but checked myself.

"I changed my mind," I said, after a moment. "I think I'll have another beer."

"Sure thing," the woman said, and moved to the ice box.

The blue-suited man turned back to his friends and I took the beer from the woman and poured down a deep swallow. I was thinking of what Jamie had told me of her father and his relationship with the town, when the girl's voice made me look up.

"Mama, I finished the work in the back room," she called. "I want to go home now."

"All right, honey," the woman said, without looking around.

She came from the back room, a short girl who was a little heavy, but it was all concentrated in the best places, and she had some pair of breasts which shoved against her tight, red blouse to show she wore no bra.

She stopped and stared at me, her brown eyes limpid and stupid, almost cow-like. But she was damned sexy, in a lazy, sleepy way, and she licked around her lips with the tip of a broad, pink tongue. She posed for a moment with her weight on one leg so that her jeans were drawn taut across her broad, rounded buttocks.

Then she swayed past me, smiling slightly at the men who stared at the way she rolled those buttocks with each slow step.

I drank the beer and a flood of warmth permeated my body, and I knew this was not from the humid heat. I had chanted to myself many times in the past few hours to cool the sex thing with Jamie, to forget trying to make love to her and concentrate on getting her away from Harrisville, out of whatever trouble she was in. I wanted to marry Jamie, and then worry about sex with her.

But I was one aroused bastard as I thought of the girl who had just swayed past. I drained the beer, threw some coins onto the bar and nodded at the woman, then I walked quickly across the oblong room.

I shoved open the screen door and stepped into the wet, blinding heat. The door clapped shut behind me and I stepped down onto the soft asphalt and crossed the blazing parking lot to my car.

I grabbed the handle and jerked my hand from the burning metal, then jerked around at the sound behind me.

It was the girl, and she was motioning from the flowering bush at the edge of the building. I glanced around, then stepped over.

The building was high off the ground because of the stilts and the girl moved back into the shadows beneath it. I hesitated again, took a couple more steps, then stopped. "Get under here, quick, before somebody sees us," the girl hissed.

'That's what I'm afraid of," I mumbled. But I stepped under the building.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, and as I blinked, she threw herself against me. A weakening surge of fever shot over my body as her huge breasts pressed against my chest, and she wiggled her thighs against mine. I sucked out my breath and my heart went berserk as she wrapped her legs around my thigh and started hunching.

I tried to pry her loose, but she dug her fingers into my neck and smothered my lips in a wet, sucking kiss.

I tore my mouth away. "What in the hell is this?" I whispered as I pried her loose and shoved her back.

"What does it look like, honey?" she said. "No need to whisper now. Too much noise in there for them to hear us. Don't you want me? You looked at me inside like you did. And you sure felt like it just now. Let me see again, honey."

She reached out, but I stepped back and nearly stumbled on some rocks.

"Don't go up there no further," she said. "We can lay down by the bayou, where there's some pine straw."

"This is absurd," I muttered. "How old are you?"

"I'm eighteen, sweetie," she said, and started unbuttoning her blouse. "That's the legal age in this state. Besides, I wouldn't yell rape like that imagine Perkins girl. I'm no sheltered scared debutante. Come on, hon. I could tell upstairs you got class, and now that I rubbed against you I want you more than ever."

Turn around and get the hell out of here, something sane screamed inside me.

But the ghi pulled her blouse off, and her enormous, uptilted mounds, with flat, brown nipples, screamed their own message at my hot, excited body and I stared at the broad, fleshy white thighs she was revealing as she wiggled from her jeans.

I sighed, brushed sweat from my face, and stepped to the girl. I was never the man to turn down an invitation like this.

She ripped off her pink panties and pressed her body against mine. She hunched furiously, her hot, damp body molded there between my legs as her nails dug into my neck. I cupped her squirming buttocks.

She locked her powerful thighs around my legs and hunched wildly as I lowered my head to kiss and lick at her breasts. I sucked the brown nipples and wallowed my face in the steaming, sweaty valley of flesh, and she slid her stubby fingers beneath my shorts to claw at my buttocks.

I staggered back under her weight, and gasped when a sharp nail rammed into my buttocks. I heard myself whimpering as I sucked at her lips, and my prick ached when she tongued the roof of my mouth.

I staggered again, my knees buckled, and we sank to the mat of pine straw. She helped me fumble from my soaking clothes, and with sweat smothering me, I fell to her body, skated a hand over her slick, fleshy thighs, and sucked at her breasts.

As I squeezed her breasts, the brown nipples hardened in my fingers, and she thrust her head back and forth and spread her thighs wide.

My body ached with a searing, exquisite lust as though my skin had been pealed away and I lay on her scalding, wet body with my nerve ends exposed. My prick burned and ached as I rubbed it over her thighs, and my breath came short and gasping as I sucked at her tongue, and her nails raked over my back and buttocks.

"Shove it in, mister," she moaned. "Quick and hard."

She was whimpering and gyrating her buttocks, and her stomach undulated beneath mine. That heaving stomach knew some damned provocative moves, but I was too far gone to appreciate them.

She gasped and opened her thighs as I guided my screaming, sore prick through those slick lips. I paused an instant, heard my own animal-like whimpering, then shoved hard as I grasped her pounding buttocks.

She grunted, froze for a second, and then she locked her legs around me and I bit my lips until I tasted blood.

She twisted muscles in her body and worked those buttocks and rocked her thighs, and her nails and teeth left small painful trails from my shoulders to my thighs.

Her heavy body rocked across the ground and with each move, I moaned and pumped harder. And then as I groaned and sank my teeth into her shoulder, I felt the release building somewhere deep inside me, building as though a thousand threads of searing feeling were being drawn quickly out of my body and through my prick.

I whimpered, thrust once more, then collapsed onto her quivering body, my head on her heaving breasts. She was still too; but for our gasping breath, we might have been dead.

I was weak from the release and the heat. But when I heard a sound from the parking lot, I tore myself from her sweat-slick body, and scrambled to my clothes.

While I dressed, she turned over and propped herself on her elbow, those sexy cow-eyes half closed.

"That was something, honey," she said. "But why rush off? We got plenty of time."

"It was good," I muttered. "Damn good. By the way, what's your name?"

"Gladys," she said. "And how about you?"

'Carl," I said, as I fastened my belt. "Look, it was great, but I've got to get out of here. We wouldn't want to get caught."

She shrugged and scratched her buttocks. "Guess not," she said. "But when you want some more, you know where to find me."

I paused at the edge of the building and glanced out. But the lot was deserted. I ran over, burned my hand on the handle again, and climbed onto plastic seat covers that nearly cooked me alive.

In less than a minute, I was gunning the car down the highway. I slowed down, wiped sweat from my forehead, and thought of Jamie.