Chapter 3
Nick got home that night and found his wife lying on her belly on the bathroom floor, spraying Solarcaine over her bruised asshole.
A victim of Shitty Dick? That's right, sports fans. They call it poetic justice in some circles, they call it irony in others. For Nick Pervis, call it the straw that broke the camel's back.
Actually, to tell the whole truth, the camel's back had probably been severely weakened already. Let me give you an idea of what I mean, before we plunge into the taped transcripts of Charmane Pervis's experience with Shitty Dick himself.
The Sultan's Helmet, like all really progressive outfits on the local massage parlor scene, had a special service for those more inclined to "watch" than actually perpetrate some slick action with one or more of their rented lovelies. The afternoon before, when I had sat at the bar waiting for Nick to consummate his half-and-half, I was let in on this secret voyeuristic delight by none other than Wanda herself, the proprietress.
As I gobbled lazily at the wet rim of my third martini, Wanda strutted into the bar and took the seat beside me, lighting up a smoke, and staring at our mismatched reflections in the bar mirror.
"Lonely, sailor?" she asked, quickly going in to her patented dry heaving laughter.
I snorted a hot clump of mucus, cowboy style, and filled my mouth with anti-freeze and ice-cubes.
"C'mon, Narsky," she complained, giving me an elbow to the side, "how come a big, burly devil like you isn't in the back room having his plumbing fixed? Your partner knows how to live. What gives with you? The old limp dick syndrome?"
Not very well mannered, asking such personal, Masters and Johnson type questions to a member of the clientele. I sucked on my drink and snorted back at her.
"Look, Wanda, Pervis is Pervis, and Narsky is Narsky. We may both have curlicue tails and enjoy eating out of a trough, but that doesn't mean we were both popped out of the same mold. We relax in different ways. Me, I like to have a nice soothing drink. In private. In quiet. My partner in law enforcement, well, he's more highly strung, perhaps because of his metabolism, perhaps because he's got six months less seniority than me. Hell I don't know anything more than he likes a nice double-header in the afternoon. Who am I to be critical?"
I thought that would settle her hash. I thought she might get the point, the conception of privacy, solitude, quiet reflection. I thought she might take her stringy, flabby ass and haul it out of the room and tend to her own fucking business. I thought wrong.
"Critical?" she asked, raising her eyebrows in the mirror, "Who's being critical? All I want to know for Chrissakes is why you ain't in the back room with some slinky number in high heels and fishnet hose, sucking hot venereal warts, like your buddy? You know it's on the house, so why not take advantage?"
Wanda worked in a profession that was relatively tension free. How could she know the pressure that I worked under? Had she ever experi enced the likes of enraged Milhaud? Had she ever been threatened with demotion to traffic detail? Had she ever run around the city trying to catch a firm toe-hold on a psychopath who kidnapped young suburban housewives for the purpose of humiliating and degrading them with his forced entrance into their most personal realm of privacy, their pink, virginal anal canals?
"Wanda," I started in, speaking slowly, emphasizing each word and enunciating it so that she could not fail to follow, "you got no idea how it is. Day after day, the threats, the humiliations, the insults, and the endless stream of victims. I tell you Wanda, its enough to make a man drown in the bottle. We've been working on this case for over six months, interviewing victim after victim, getting nowhere. The heat is on, Wanda, the heat is coming from upstairs. From Lieurtenant Milhaud. You know him?"
"Vaguely, Narsky, vaguely. Go on. Tell me more."
We were doing the deadbeat Ann Landers scene. Here we were, in the middle of the afternoon, just at that special mellow time when office workers and the guys and gals who man the production lines are going into the final stall of the day, waiting for five o'clock to creep around, a frustrated officer and a frizzled floozy, crabbing and jawing at one another like Chill Wills and Walter Brennan in senile overdrive at the Movieland Home for the Terminally Obnoxious. I ordered a fourth martini from the illegal alien bartendress, and drooled on, my voice getting itself worked up into a late night talk show whine. Perfect for AM radio audiences.
"Wanda, it's like the man says. 'I can't get no respect.' What do I do about that? Do I do like Pervis, and have a pair of hired hornies work out on me, so I can have that momentary spasm, that cold spark of temporary relief, only to head back into the same fucking mess the second my tubing has been parched? Or do I just take an aspirin? That'd be the ideal solution for Pervis. Aspirin. Me, I prefer this."
I took a long draught on the ice-cold glass, unmindful of the toothpick stuck in the floating olive, which went right up my left nostril and almost got stuck in the soft membranes back there.
"You got it rough, Narsky," Wanda said, slightly sarcastically. I didn't dig the tone in her voice one bit. I was finally feeling the effect of the drinks, and I rose to the occasion.
"Don't be a wise ass with me, Wanda. Stay cool and stay in business."
I thought that was blunt enough. Evidently, Wanda didn't take me too seriously. She laughed like a hyena, showing me her sperm stained teeth in the mirror. I was too drunk to be repelled. As a matter-of-fact, the sight of her smegma permeated mouth kind of excited me-I got a weird, sort of nauseating semi-erection and laughed back at her through my nose, reaching around with my right arm to give her right tit-end a nasty pinch. She giggled like a hyena, thinking that her formidable and grotesque charm had finally "lit my fire."
Wanda stood up from her bar stool, arched her back, and bellowed at me to follow her. I grinned at the barmaid, who made no expression whatsoever, and then I stood up.
I shouldn't have stood quite so fast, not after the fourth martini. I literally had to place my hands around my throat to prevent myself from spewing a high velocity stream of vomit all over the shiny black lineoleum.
Wanda and the barmaid broke up at the sight I made, standing in the center of the empty barroom, choking myself like an inmate in the self-destruct wards at Cammarillo. It broke up their dull routine, I guess.
I recovered, squelching the viscous churnings in my burning gut and I stumbled along behind Wanda.
She slowed her pace as she made her way through the locking doors leading back into the antiseptic smelling corridors of the parlor. She turned around, and made with a single erect finger over her lips.
"Quiet now, Narsky," she whispered. "Step lightly!"
I steeped along behind her grinning in a sick kind of heat. All kinds of weird, twisted fantasies kept running through my head-I thought, this was the moment, I was going to score with Wanda, the madam of a whorehouse, a woman who in all likelihood knew "every trick in the book" and had probably added a few chapters herself. She would introduce me to practices beyond the pale of the imagination, devious, nasty, damp practices the likes of which were reserved for the enjoyment of visiting Mafiosos, pornographic book publishers, readers of underground papers, the scum of the earth.
Belts, whips, chrome chains, moist towels, brown, thick substances that smelled like surgical tubing, broken glass, insects, Nazi regalia-all of it went through my mind, as I focused in on Wanda's flabby butt, a butt that no doubt had endured the duress of many an assault equal to that provided by the notorious Shitty Dick.
Wanda turned around again, and made an obscene, whacking off gesture at mouth level, and then pointed to a doorway.
"Just look. Don't say a fucking word. The glass is only a quarter inch thick, and if you start to yammer they'll hear you, and I don't want any fucking gunfire in my place of business. Understand?"
I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, but I nodded like a babboon and followed her inside. It was a taste treat, believe me friends.
Nick Pervis under Glass-that was the name of the dish, and if you have an appetite like Lieutenant Milhaud, or perhaps even the nemesis himself, Shitty Dick, you'll be feasting on degradation shortly. Nick Pervis was in far worse condition than I had thought possible-Wanda was pointing out to me in a crystal clear illustrative style just how far gone my partner's mind was-it was as if to say, "Talk all you want, Narsky, when it comes down to brass tacks, you'll never have the kind of insight into the nature of the male beast that twenty years in the fresh meat trade gives a lady."
Nick was standing over the bed in the parlor booth, naked except for gunbelt, service revolver and tie, and of course, his wingtips and flat grey socks. One half of his half-and-half was pretending to be in a state of sleep on the bed, wearing a transparent, high necked nightie, while the other half was kneeling on the floor, giving rapid fire oral attention to Nick's red root.
The stunner was that Nick had one of the girl's fishnet nylons over his face. That's right fans, the nemisis had taken over Nick's sense of self, and the servant and protector of the public was playing the role of none other than Shitty Dick himself, and on company time, to boot.
I instantly sobered up at the sight. Wanda's repressed squeals of high-pitched laughter and the constant jabbing of her elbow into my spliting side also helped in minimizing the effect of my drinking. She was really into the voyeuristic ironies of the situation.
I was just plain stunned and goggle-eyed. It was a combination of horror at the revelation of my partner's closet craziness, and it was also partially due to the time-honored paralytic effect of watching real hardcore action-live action. Let's get some of the details on this case-they're important, especially in light of what happened to Pervis after he went home later and found his wife moaning in the toilet with the Solarcaine spray.
The creampie on her knees on the floor was doing a hang-up Linda Lovelace on Nick's police issue pecker. That's right, gang, to make it in the massage business, or for that matter, any business these days, a gal has to master the old voicebox relaxation routine. This one had an advanced degree. She was wolfing down hot pork at a truly phenomenal rate. Strange as it may seem, the old technique leaves a lot to be desired, as far as the watcher is concerned, something that hardcore film producers ought to give some thought to. You see, when the male organ is entirely impaled in the girlish gorge, all the guy watching can catch is the sight of a pair of stretched out lips mashing into a wad of male pubic brillo-its just like the gal is sucking on a beard. Not real exciting, not unless you have X-ray eyes, or a powerful sense of identification with the male being chewed", or the female being choked.
Nick, it was obvious, was interested in the sleeping beauty on the bed-he was deeply and hypnotically into his Shitty Dick psychosis. He was actually practicing the lesson of the old saw, "if you can't fight 'em, join 'em." That's all right if you're talking about some other kind of behavior, or some other kind of conflict, but to join forces, spiritual forces, with the likes of Shitty Dick, your own sworn enemy, well, it borders on psychosis, friends. Pervis was ready for the loony bin long before the real Shitty Dick rebored his wife's alimentary canal from the backside.
Pervis gave the kneeling gal a twist to one ear, evidently some sort of signal for her to go into a kind of wallowing, licking frenzy. She slowly uncorked herself from the spit in her throat, opened her eyes, smiled devilishly, and went into feeding frenzy on Pervis's penis head. She licked like a baboon let loose at Baskin-Robbins, in the banana split department. Hog was sucked in true hardcore style, with much audible moaning, much sloshing, and quite a bit of artistic drooling. The gal had her moves down to a science, and I doubt that any male could have withstood such a furious assault for more than forty-seconds or so-not unless they were in a semi-hypnotic condition, like Pervis.
Through the nylon mask, you could easily see that his eyes were fixed on only one tiny spot-he didn't even look down on the lovely who worked masterfully on his pork, licking, pumping with one wrist, and twisting his sack with her other hand. He was glazed, totally hypnotized by the sight on the sheet.
The lovely on the bed was lying belly down, face away from Pervis, with eyes closed. Her nightgown stopped halfway down her butt, which was where Pervis was staring. Every now and then, the girl on the bed sort of giggled with her eyes closed, and stuck her thumb in her mouth baby style, and began to suck it off. It was as if Pervis was supposed to be interrupting her mid-afternoon erotic nap, or, perhaps the chick on the bed knew damn well that somebody, Wanda or whoever, was at that moment looking at the action, and she just wanted to communicate that she thought the client was a bit out of his tree, and a bit of an infant. Who knows.
Pervis reached down without looking and twisted the Deep Throater's nose to one side. That was evidently the signal that he felt erect enough to continue on his own-Jesus Christ, it was sticking out from his crotch like a fishing gaff-a wicked, red hook of dripping meat. Any gal in the world would have handed Pervis the Potency Prize for that erection alone. As it was, the one who was going to get it hadn't even seen it. She continued to sleep, sucking her thumb.
Pervis should have piped in some Wagnerian music for accompaniment. His consummation of the action was taken right off the transcriptions of tapes we had made of victim's down at the station. He grabbed the "sleeper" by the back of the neck, flipped her over, and rammed the gaffing hook right into her stunned jaws.
The little lady evidently lost her cool at this point. Her eyes went buggy as inch after inch of sweet meat slipped down her gorge. She grabbed hold of Pervis's wrist with her feeble hands, and he just pushed harder. It was obvious if anybody had stopped the action at that moment, and asked her to describe her assailant, she would have come up with the same description that Budgy Ruggles had given us that very morning-"all I saw was this big, dripping dickhead, and a pair of hairy balls."
Pervis's belly button slapped into the girl's forehead with a popping noise as he pumped into her face. The thin glass was no real barrier to sound-only to sight, having been coated on one side with reflecting mylar.
"Suck whore," Pervis said. Christ, it was like the Exorcist or something to see him so transfigured, so totally into the role he was playing. Lay the blame on overwork, on fear, on the frustrations of the case, at the feet of Lieutenant Milhaud. Hell, I don't know where the blame should be put, but I do know who was paying the dues behind it-the poor chick on the sheet.
"Splatttt, splattt," was the noise the contact between Pervis humping belly and her forehead made as he ended each full-length thrust into her gorge
-I certainly hope she had been practicing on her techniques earlier that day-if not, it was going to take a long visit to the eye, ear, nose and throat man to fix her up after Pervis was done with her.
"Suck bitch, harder!" he yelled at her. I was too paralyzed to bolt for the door and pull the crazed maniac off of her-that's hardcore for you, it'll do it every time, rendering the most loyal, depend able, law-abiding citizen into a wildly whacking off species of lower primate. I wasn't even aware of Wanda, gently kicking at my shins with her spike heels as I watched. Only much later on in the day, after I was home in my apartment, drinking a soothing beer and watching the news did I remember where the bruises on the legs had come from.
Pervis held the gal's neck with one beefy palm and pulled her face up and down the length of his inflamed pork, while he ripped her nightgown to shreds with his other hand. Finally, when she was stark naked except for her heels, he had had enough of the preliminaries, and he popped his dart out of her face, mashing his sweaty balls on her tear streaked cheeks as he chuckled at the ceiling.
He used both hands to wrestle her onto her belly again, and then she started to scream in earnest.
"Not that! No, you filthy, stinking bastard, not that! I won't allow it, I'll call for Wanda, I'll get the cops after you, you fucking swine." She was bellowing at the top of her lungs, and evidently, it was for real, in a way. They must have had some idea of what was going to happen, made some arrangements before they got down to brass tacks, but I think the girl was genuinely a bit afraid of Pervis by this time. The other gal, however seemed to be enjoying the tragedy on the Shakespearian level-she used one hand on Pervis's pork, and leaned across her girlfriend to lap eagerly at the victim's asshole with her tongue. Maybe Pervis and this gal had done the arranging, at the expense of the other. Who knows.
Nick strutted behind the pinned-down bitch on the bed like a stallion on the Fly. He scrambled up on the bed, on his knees and with a deft, single nod to the grinning gal assisting him, he launched his spear up into the writhing and twitching asshole of his victim.
"Ohhhhhhhaaahhhggghhh!" she screamed, seemingly in genuine pain. It seemed to stimulate Pervis even more-he pushed like a coolie in heat, burying his pulsing prick in her asshole, rotating his own butt to intensify the sensations he no doubt was feeling.
"Feel that, Whore?" he shouted.
"It hurts so much. Stop it, you bastard, you're killing me," she yelped in throttled response, Pervis ramming her face into the top, of the pillow with another of his brutal strokes. He was grinning, and clenching his teeth now, obviously overexcited by actually having had the nerve to realize this most strange and particularly clear-cut fantasy. The other girl was helping to speed along his climax by standing behind him and yanking on his balls in perfect rhythm to his strokes into the clenching depths of his victim's butt. She was also grinning like a baboon, directly at us, invisible behind the silvered glass. Later, at home, I admired her cool. At the moment, the sight of her grinning like that, with a seedbag in her painted hand, and a pair of deviants of the lowest order working out at full steam a foot from her elbow, well it just added to the ambiance of unbridled nastiness and depressing ferocity of the scene I was watching.
Wanda's ear pricked up at the coming of the climax. She had the nerve to slip her jewelry encrusted claw into the nook in my elbow, matron style, as the big moment approached, coaching me to pay strict attention to detail.
"Watch how Terri milks those nuts, Narsky. You've never felt anything like that in your sick life. You've just got to get up the courage, son, like your partner, Pervis. He's not an inhibited drunk. He knows how to enjoy himself."
She was actually attacking me for my restraint! Sure, I'll admit any time that Tern's nut pinching technique was all the match for her scum sucking Linda Lovelace imitations. Sure, I'll admit that in the presence of Pervis's act, I was excited, aroused, leaking a little bit deep within the confines of my double knits. But for Chrissakes, he was sick! Sick, sick, sick. He was doing Shitty Dick's act. He was living up to the standard set by the lowest form of life that yet threatened the stability and morality of our community. I didn't give a shit what he did on his own time, in the privacy of his own house, with his consenting or non-consenting wife. What irked me was that he was stark raving mad, and a definite threat to me-if Pervis had his way, there'd be two Shitty Dicks in town, on the loose, and I'd be after both of them, with no fucking chance at all of avoiding permanent assignment to the traffic detail.
Wanda gave me a mild wrenching pull to the elbow, leaning her cracked and heavily rouged lips next to my ear.
"We have to leave now, Steviepooh," she hissed, her sarcasm and sadism coming through loud and clear, "I know how much you boys love those cum shots, but we have to make ourselves presentable in the waiting room when Nicolas is done refreshing himself. Tu compris, cherie?"
I compris. I understand very well what the bitch had in mind. That's what they're like, these lowlife types. Your average Joe thinks, what the fuck, wouldn't it be a blast to be taken on a guided, closet tour of a massage outfit like the Sultan's Helmet, on the arm of the proprietress, the scrawny, but ever so experienced Wanda. That's what the average guy thinks, and that's why he remains an average guy. He just doesn't understand that sex is only a tiny part of the bargain, and that money is always the real motivation behind every freebie.
Nick Pervis was getting a free half-and-half. On the house, no holds barred, semi-forced anal rape action for next to nothing. Sure, he lost a little dignity, what with his victim giggling, and the other one using the old nut-pincher technique to hasten his orgasm, in order to make room for the next client. But all in all, he was getting a freebie, and I was getting some choice closet action, watching my partner pretend he was a psychopath behind the one way mirror. Great shakes, eh?
You ask, what the fuck are you complaining about, you shithead, and I have to admire your tenacity, your utter cool, considering the circumstances. You ask what I'm complaining about, and I answer, isn't it obvious?
Wanda said it. Wanda got off on her little coitus interruptus scam. I was going to miss the cum shot. Now I ask you friends, what the fuck point is there in waiting through a good half hour of live, two on one hardcore action to miss the cum shot in the end?
No point. Not for me. But for Wanda, yes indeedydo, that's where there was some really sleazy satisfying action. Wanda had spotted my telltale bulge, the probably leaking weak spot in my external plumbing. She knew the effects of closet hardcore action. She knew that I was randy, confused, greedy, expectant, and well paid. She was working on the strategic level, friends, out to convince me that it might well be worth my time to hem and haw with her a while in the hallway, look over her merchandise, and spend a few moments on the sheets with some benzedrine cranked handjob artist of hers.
I've got to admit that I was sorely tempted. I whined and gnashed my teeth, stuffing my mouth with knuckles to prevent bellowing out loud in Cro-Magnon frustration as she pulled on my elbow with her chicken claw.
"Narrghhhrumphh," I said, "I wanna see the cum shot. Lemme go."
She giggled, as only a fifty-five-year-old whore can giggle, right through the nostrils-the stains, the memories of a thousand nights spent in motel toilets, sucking warty stumps and hideously reeking orifices.
"Snartsnartsnart," she hissed, "Wanna see the cum shot, honey? Why not step into the next room, and we'll see how high you can spray?"
"Nargarumph. The fuck I will, Wanda. I wanna see the cum shot, and I wanna see it now."
I stuck to my guns, and I kept my eyes on Pervis and his pair of trained animals. They were reaching the peace that far surpasseth understanding. Pervis was hooking into the chick's butthole with total abandon, using every ounce of energy in his body to batter her internal organs totally out of shape. She was screaming like a banshee, cursing the day she was hatched from her primal egg into a world of pure chauvanist piggery. Tears streamed down her face as her forehead bashed into the headboard at the end of the massage table.
Terri, the one with the freehand technique, was deep into her act as well, roving over both their bodies, sticking her fingers into assholes, mashing balls, pinching tits, pulling at her partners' dangling and unused vaginal lips. In general, she was making a nuisance of herself, but what the hell, her girlfriend was in so much pain that she could have hardly noticed, and Pervis, well Pervis was in a state beyond normal consciousness-he was in hate heaven, his teeth nearly bared like some kind of starved sled dog, his hair matted down on his forehead like a Mongolian idiot, his chest heaving with the strain of exertion, a stream of the vilest obscenities ever uttered pouring forth from between his clenched jaws like the dying wheezes of a medieval martyr.
"Fucking Mother of Cuntal Crevices, squeeze my dork, you whore. Squeeze, you filthy bitch, I'm going to blow your kidneys out your nostrils when I cum!"
It was like watching an axe murderer fry in the electric chair. You know how thrilling that must be, don't you? That's the kind of closet action senators, congressmen, archdukes, papal ministers and pretenders to the throne thrive on. Pervis's final tumescence approached that kind of quality-he was literally singing a psalm to penetration.
"Squeeze! O sucking Mother of terminal whorebreath, squeeze on my divine rod of retribution and righteous frustration. Pinch on my pole with your wrinkled portal. Rotate thine ass, o sleazy mother of infertile onanistic energy!"
It was beyond belief. He had short circuited totally. Never mind the poor masseuse. She was screaming for the fire department by the time Pervis got into his Biblical act. Her rear end would have to be soaked in epsom salts and a broth of potatoe water and beeswax for at least a week before she would be able to sit straight again.
I was dead set on seeing Pervis make the cum shot. I wouldn't let Wanda have her stinking blackmailing way with me. Even in the throes of total visual arousal, I kept my cool, going into a crab-like stance, bending forward at the waist, and planting my nose against the glass. I was swollen in agony, but I would not budge-I needed to see that cum shot-it would explain a whole lot about Shitty Dick, and his mode of operation.
Wanda pulled on me, using both her scrawny arms on my elbow. I was already into a three-point Sumo defensive stance, however, and she was no match for me at all. I snickered at her, under my breath.
"Thought you'd get me onto a table," I sneered, "Didn't you Wanda? Thought you'd get me onto a table, and have Terri, or someone else give me a nice whack, while you worked the camera behind the mirrors? Smart move Wanda. But not smart enough!"
I gave her the bird, with one cramped hand, at waist level. I doubt if she saw it. No matter, I had made my point, and I had stalled long enough for Pervis to pull off the climactic exercise. Just as I thought, he did it Shitty Dick style. Not even the totally demented and vile Terri could believe the depths he had sunk to.
Pervis bellowed one last, inarticulate bellow, and then, with a great gasping intake of air, he popped his piston free from the girl's rear end with a brutal backpeddling reverse thrust, putting just enough English on the cue to spin the sweating, crying recepticle of his abuse on her backside.
In a quick flash, he hobbled the length of her torso with his knees spread, and before she knew what had hit her, her entire face was jammed into the darkness of his crotch.
He used his fingers deftly to find her mouth, and he pried the gagging lips open and then filled the cavity with smega and shit-stained meat. Terri the tart began to dryheave and wretch to one side of the headboard upon seeing this novel action, but she was curious as well, and with one hand over her nostrils, she bent over to get a close up look, as Pervis jerked himself off into the girl's tearslobbering chops.
Disgusting, you say. Disgusting, perhaps, I reply, noting that it is only the clinical, and more important, the criminal aspect of Pervis' performance that interested me.
That's right, I said criminal. Now it is obvious that it is ordinarily perfectly legal to do as one's glands command when one is safely within the perimeter of a reputable massage parlor. That is our constitutional right, as burly machos. But it is quite another thing to impersonate the precise behavior of a criminal psychopath, especially if one is entrusted by the taxpayers at large to be actively searching for the psychopath with the goal in mind of placing him in a chair wired for frying.
Pervis had gone beyond the pale. He was no longer fit to be entrusted with the public confidence after his display of personality disintegration. The quest for Shitty Dick had totally overtaken his rational faculties. It is not unusual in law enforcement for an officer to admire, at a distance, of course, the skill and finese of an especially gifted and cagey foe, but this shit, well, it was too much. Admiration, a chivalrous attitude, a toss of the hat as the felon frys in his own juices on the judgement day, these are part and parcel of the law man's code of ethics. But to yield to the dark urge, to take on the grossest and most repellent aspects of the prey, forget it Jack-I wasn't about to let Pervis' nasty mental disorder become the lever that would pry me out of my class doubleknits and my unmarked car and force me back out on the streets, waving my hands like an aircraft carrier deck hand guiding the Kamakazies in from a long day out in the Pacific, hurling themselves into foxholes and frigates.
Pervis, in the popular junior high school lingo of our time, had blown it. I watched as the shrapnel from his mortar shell dripped off the blubbering masseuses eyebrows, her chin, down the long, dark crack between her tits, and as the dripping sheets of slippery yeeeccch settled into a puddle on the sheets and poured off her knees, sobriety wafted up from my own bloated and screaming crotch, and I hobbled out of the viewing closet, down the hallway, and back to the bar, unaided by the quietly swearing Wanda, who remained at the one way window, hissing "What hath God Wrought" over and over against the dewy mylar.
Back in the bar, I awaited the arrival of my partner, and I wondered how I was going to break the news to him. I ordered another freebie martini, sucked at it slowly, and debated whether or not Milhaud was even capable of understanding what I had to tell him. How would he react to a tale of "battle fatigue"-Milhaud, who fashioned himself a reincarnation of Vince Lombafdi, or perhaps General Patton-he wouldn't even listen. He'd be actively slapping both of us around the office at the mere mention of "battle fatigue." Lame ass pansies, he would call us, wimps in heat, undercover assholes, secret ninnies. He would have no mercy on Pervis, and he would not thank me for spilling the beans on my partner in any way that would save me from the odious task of licking them off the floor as they rolled off of Pervis's whip-scarred back....
Nick came out of the self-locking, buzzer equipped door as if nothing had happened. He quipped at my grotesquely drawn mug in the mirror.
"What's the matter with you, Narsky? Find a turd on your toothpick?"
How could I front him with my knowledge of his closet antics? What the fuck could I say that wouldn't have us facing off like hockey superstars, right in the bar, with blazing service revolvers? Nothing. I opted for the time-honored chickenshit stance, deciding that discretion was not only the better part of valor where closet psychopaths are concerned, but also that silence can be golden if you don't take any wooden nickels.
"Nah," I grunted, easing my way into a Mickey Spillane style bar stance, "What the fuck took you so long? Couldn't get it up?"
A good offense is the best defense, I thought, so I needled him, using the old whorehouse virility complex to throw him off guard.
"Hargh, snart," he guffawed, waddling up to me and spreading his polyester sheathed ass on the bar stool next to me "Had two of the sweeties at once, Narsky. You gotta try that action sometime. Wanda'll set you up. I can ask her if yer shy."
I cringed deeply within myself at his quick repartee. I would have liked to have showered the top of the bar with half a dozen eight-by-ten glossies of himself doing his Shitty Dick act right then and there-he would have puked his guts out with self-hatred and paranoid hysteria. I could have bartered the negatives off to him and his wife for half his paycheck every week for the next twentyseven years. I would have liked that action, just to see the expression on his face. But I didn't have the pictures, so instead, I did head fakes.
"Don't worry about me and my sex life, Pervis," I snorted, polishing off my drink and standing up, "Worry about what happens when Wanda gives your old lady a call some afternoon and invites her down to watch through a keyhole while your working out on a pair of scumsuckers. That's what you've got to worry about."
Nick stood up, looking fit as a fiddle, and more relaxed than I'd seen him in months.
"Ah, fuck you, Narsky. You're a ninny. Whad'ya you worried about with Wanda? She guarantees privacy, and we guarantee that she keeps her doors open. Give and take, Narsky, give and take. Let's get outta here," he said, snapping his head to one side, and spinning on his wingtips to march to the justly famous door.
It was the last time Nick would see the inside of the Sultan's Helmet for quite some time. As a matter-of-fact, the next morning, he'd be in the station rubber room, ready to be shipped out to a rest home in the Valley for the next three months. Nicky had a little surprise waiting for him in the toilet that he called his home.