Chapter 11
"But I've kept my girls supplied with the pill," Lil protested. "I don't understand."
"Either the little shit hasn't been taking them, or they don't work on her." Joe glowered. "Anyway, I've got to do something about her. This was a jerky idea in the first place ... putting kids to work as whores."
"What are you going to do about Sissy? You won't ship her off and sell her in Mexico?"
"No. Shipping one at a time isn't good business. Not enough dough in it to make it worth the trouble. I ought to send them all off, but three kids can't disappear out of a small town without a big fuss. We don't want the FBI on our backs. There's a doctor in Cypress who'll fix her up. We'll run her over there tomorrow night. You help her figure out some kind of a story to tell her old man."
Lil shrugged. "That won't be necessary. Since his wife ran off with my father, he's drunk all the time. He doesn't pay much attention to her. I'm down, Joe. Can I have a shot?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Who were you out with?"
"A girl."
He sneered contemptuously. "You goddamned queers make me sick."
Lil flinched. Queer? He's right, she thought, but to hell with it. She remembered Eva Gordon's sweetness and her beauty and her heart lifted. So did her chin ... proudly. "I don't mind being a queer," she told Joe. "There are worse things."
He laughed harshly. "Like being a queer and a junky."
"I'm going to kick the habit."
"Oh, sure. They always are. You're fifteen years old and you're beginning to look like an old whore already. Well, that's your bag. You live in it. Here's the needle and the stuff."
"I'm going to go out and sit on the front porch for awhile," she said as she extracted the needle from her vein. "I'll be too turned on now to sleep." He didn't answer, so she put her coat back on and went into the dark, coolness of the night. She sat on the porch swing, feeling the drug wipe out her depression. Like all addicts, she believed that her thinking process went into high gear while she was under the influence of the drug, when, as a matter-of-fact, it went into almost complete abeyance, leaving only the illusion of accelerated, mental ability.
She had been there twenty minutes when the headlights of a car illuminated the street, reflecting back from the wet pavement. It stopped in front of the house and she saw that it was Mark Devlin's car. He got out and started around to the back door, but she called to him and he retraced his steps, coming onto the porch.
"What are you doing up this time of night?" she asked him.
"Morning, you mean," Mark corrected her. "I'm pulling out, Lil. I've had all of this I can take. I'm going to California. I've stood it as long as I could to protect my folks, but now I've had it. I came to ask you two questions.
One is, will you let me go? I mean will you destroy those photos that Bob Fletcher took? The other is, will you go with me? I still love you, Lil."
By an effort of will she controlled her mind, brought it into focus. "Don't worry about the pictures. I'm going to burn all of them. I'm about through here, too. I can't go with you, Mark. I'm sorry."
His face was very white in the dark. "All right," he said, his voice dull with resignation. "I didn't suppose you would. 'Bye, Lil. Can I kiss you?"
"Of course."
He bent over her and touched her lips briefly with his, then he turned quickly away and she watched him get into his car and drive off. She watched until his tail lights dwindled and disappeared down King Street, then she went into the house and to bed.
Piece by piece my life is dissolving, she thought as sleep closed in on her. But never mind. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I'll kick the drug and start a new life with Eva.
Smiling, she went to sleep.
She was up early and out of the house while Joe still slept. She was walking toward the bank, intent on seeing Eva, if only across a marble counter, when a police car pulled to the curb beside her. "Get in," Hootch Donovan said. His fat sullen and his green eyes, cold. She hesitated a second and then made up her mind. He didn't know that she had burned all the blackmail pictures that-morning in the incinerator. Couldn't possibly know. He wouldn't dare hurt her. She got into the front seat beside him, matching his silence as he drove out of town on the Fairlane County Road, wondering where he was taking her and why.
He turned the car onto a side road and braked it to a halt before a small cabin. "Come on," he said. "We're gonna have a little talk. You didn't know this was my place, did you? You'd have probably taken it away from me if you did, like the house on King Street."
She followed him up onto the rickety porch and waited while he unlocked and opened the door. It was only a shack, but she saw that it was surprisingly neat and well furnished inside.
"What's this all about?" she asked as she selected a chair, arranged her skirt and her legs to suit her and looked up at him where he towered over her, his mouth grim and his eyes triumphant with hate.
"Stanley Canfield," he said. "That's who it's all about. He killed himself last night."
Canfield? Stanley Canfield? She had to think for a moment, make an effort to remember. Oh, Stan. She knew a flashing instant of regret. He had been a marvelous lover.
"That's tough," she said. "So what?"
Donovan grinned. "He left a note to his wife. It was on his desk. We found him on the floor with his brains blown out. The note wasn't important, but I went through his desk drawers and I found something that was, a letter he'd written to you and never mailed." He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from an inside pocket. "This is hot stuff," he said. "The poor son of a bitch must have been really nuts about you. He says in here how juicy your cunt is and how glad he is that you taught him to suck it. Lots more too, like what a bang he got out of fucking you in the ass and then having you suck his cock. But that ain't the best part. The best part is where he says that, when you start bringing heroin into the town, he hopes you'll let him help you, and that maybe he can get some of his congregation started on the habit to make more customers for you. You're a smart kid, Lil. What do you think? You think this letter is worth an even swap for those pictures you took of me and the Barstow kids?"
Lil was stunned. The drug was wearing off and she was able to think clearly. She saw that he had her. The bastard had turned the tables on her, but good. She also saw that there was going to be no easy way out of this. She had no pictures to trade for the letter and he'd never believe that she'd burned them. Never in the world. She'd have to try.
"I ... I burned the pictures this morning," she told him. "I burned all of them. I'm getting out of this, going away with someone I love." Even as she was talking, she knew that, in her desperation, she was saying too much, yet she couldn't stop.
Donovan laughed. "You ain't as smart as I thought you was. Not if you expect me to believe that kind of bullshit."
"It's true. You don't dare do anything to me. Joe Maroni would kill you."
Donovan scowled. His eyes flickered with fear and then it passed. "Don't count on it," he advised her. "That hood has about gone as far as he's going in this town already. I put up with him because he cut me in on the take, but things have changed. You should read the papers. There was an election last fall and we've got a new district attorney. He's untouchable, one of these pure-minded crusader types. He's been gathering evidence all winter and he's the kind who'll call in the FBI if he has to. There's gonna soon be the goddamndest shake-up around here this town ever saw, and Hootch Donovan ain't gonna get caught on the wrong side of it. I want them pictures. De we trade, or do I sweat 'em out of you?"
"Go ahead, you dirty bastard," Lil snarled at him. She was afraid now, but her anger was greater than her fear.
"I was kinda hoping you'd want it that way," he said, smiling almost amicably. He swung his fist in a short arc and it crashed into the side of her head, knocking her from the chair. She tried to fight, but against his greater weight and strength, she was helpless. He knelt over her on the floor, and the storm of blows drove her steadily toward unconsciousness.
Lil awoke to a gradually increasing awareness of pain and discomfort. When she was able to focus both her eyes and her mind, she discovered that she was naked and that she was on a bed. Her wrists and ankles were tied to the bedposts.
Donovan stood over her, gloating. "I hope you ain't ready to give me them pictures yet," he told her. "I got a few tricks I'd like to try on you. Who the hell says you can't mix business with pleasure? This ought to be fun?" He lifted a hand into her range of vision. In it he held a fireplace poker, the round, smooth metal handle of which dripped wetly. "Turpentine," he told her. "We used to do this to stray dogs when I was a kid. You ought to of seen 'em go klylying when this hit 'em. Let's see how you dig this. You always did like getting fucked in the ass." Grinning broadly, he placed the handle of the poker against the girl's crotch and shoved.
It went into Lil's asshole very smoothly and then the pain hit her. It was like the flame from a blowtorch. She screamed and she kept on screaming, the sound reverberating like the wail of a siren as Donovan continued to fuck the poker in and out of her. He stopped at last and sat there watching her, smiling happily.
"That's just a starter, baby," he promised her. "I ain't hardly begun on you yet. But while you're thinking about it, I guess I'll fuck you. Watching you squirm and yell makes me hot. No, I ain't gonna do it in your ass. You think I want blisters on my cock from that turpentine?" He unbelted and dropped his trousers, his big, uncircumcised prick arching up from the triangle of auburn hair at his crotch.
Lil's screaming had subsided to a continuous, tortured sobbing as he mounted her and slammed himself into her. She cried out again with new pain at the sudden brutality of the onslaught. His great, crushing weight bore down on her, but she welcomed the attack. At least it helped take her mind off of the fire still burning in her asshole.
"You dirty slut!" Donovan growled in her ear. "You no-good, rotten, goddamned, shitty bitch of a whore. You're gonna give me those pictures and that ain't all. You're gonna sing to the D.A. When I get through with you, you'll sing like a birdie and that'll be the end of your smart-asses punk of a boyfriend. You know what I'll do if you don't? When I get tired of having fun with you, I'll get old Nils Rundy out here and let him have you. He's wanted in three states now for raping and killing young girls. I let him stay here because I figured he'd come in handy some day. He'll get a kick out of killing you real slow and then hanging around to fuck your dead body."
So this is how it ends. I told Mark I wanted to die young, hut I don't ... , not anymore. I want 'to live ... to go to Mexico with Eva. Oh, Eva, darling! Momma! Daddy! Mark! Stan! I'm so sorry for what I did to everyone...!"
Donovan continued fucking her with calculated ferocity. He bent his head to bite her breast. She felt the skin break under his teeth, and when he looked at her again his lips were red with blood. "How do you like it, you bitch?" he asked her. Then he began to come. He hammered her slight body with his massive hips unmercifully, his prick going in and out of her like a piston and his semen flooding her cunt.
Panting from the exertion, he got off of her, his prick still hard and dripping. "Got another little surprise for you," he said as he fumbled in his pants pocket. "How'll you have the soles of your feet, medium, well-done or just crispy?"
At the sight of the fire, Lil started to scream again, her face contorted with terror. She strained wildly against the strips of rag with which her ankles were tied.
Donovan was bending over her feet when the bedroom door was flung open. He looked up, dropping the lighter and reaching for the holstered pistol he had hung on the post at the foot of the bed. Guns Heimer, bellowing like a bull ape, stood in the doorway, a .45 automatic in his hand.
"No!" Donovan yelled, and then the sound of his cry of mortal terror was drowned in the crashing roar of the automatic as slug after slug bore into his face and chest, slamming him to the floor. He lay huddled and motionless there as the echoes died in the room. As though it was the last part of him to relinquish life, his cock, still hard, began slowly to wilt, turning gracefully down to touch the floor on the edge of a widening pool of blood.
"He hurt you?" Guns asked, solicitiously, as he bent over Lil and began to untie the strips that bound her. "Joe sent me out looking for you."
"Not too bad," Lil told him. "I'll be okay. Good thing you killed him. He was planning to double-cross us with the new district attorney. What are we going to do about his body?"
Heimer's piggy eyes grew shrewd. "Seems like a good time for a fire. What's this stuff?" He touched an open can beside the bed.
"Turpentine."
"Yeah? That'll do. Come on."
"Just a minute." Lil had finished dressing. She knelt to take a folded sheet of paper from Donovan's inside pocket. It was blood soaked and had a hole through it. She dipped it into the can of turpentine and then laid it out on the bed. She picked up the can and splashed its contents on the fallen police chief, on the bed and on the floor. She found Donovan's lighter, ignited it and held the flame to the tail of his shirt. She jumped back as the fire caught and spread instantly from his body to a trailing blanket that hung from the side of the bed. "Let's go," she said to Guns, and she turned her back on the crackling flames.
They were nearly home when Lil started to laugh, leaning her head against the back of the car seat and chortling with near-hysterical mirth.
Guns looked at her doubtfully. "What's so funny?"
"I just remembered," Lil told him, still laughing, "that I forgot to ask him how he'd have himself ... medium, well-done, or just crispy?"
The sound of a fire siren was audible in the distance.
Joe Maroni took the news of Donovan's death and cremation with unexpected equanimity. "Just as well," he grunted. "If that new D.A. can't be reached, we may have to give him the same dose. Fix yourself up," he told Lil. "You look like hell. Then get word to Sissy to be here this evening. We've got to run her over to Cypress for that abortion. Christ sakes! You'd think I was running a goddamned kindergarten or a nursery around here. What the hell business has a twelve-year-old girl got getting knocked up, anyway?"
"They do it all the time," Lil assured him. Sissy seemed not the least frightened at the prospects of undergoing an operation to relieve her of her pregnancy. She sat between Lil and Joe on the way to Cypress, chattering excitedly and obviously happy to be the center of so much attention.
"The doc who's going to take care of you has got a thing about young girls," Joe said to her as they pulled into the outskirts of town. "I told him it would be okay to fuck you before he operates. That's why he agreed to do it."
"Gee, I don't mind," Sissy replied. "I'm used to it." She giggled. "Anyway, I don't have to worry. He sure as hell can't get me any more pregnant that I am now."
Joe parked the car behind a night club and Lil looked at him questioningly.
"The doc won't do it in his own office," he told her. "I made arrangements with the guy who runs this dump to use one of his upstairs rooms. Come on, Sissy."
"Good luck," Lil whispered and kissed the young girl before Sissy slid under the wheel to join Joe and follow him into the back entrance of the building.
They were gone a long time. Lil nervously smoked a package of cigarettes while she waited alone in the car. At last she saw Joe come out. He was striding with evident haste across the graveled parking lot, a long bundle in his arms. Lil had a premonition of disaster and dreaded to learn what the long bundle contained. When Joe went of the rear of the car, raised the trunk and deposited his burden there, she was sure.
"What happened?" she asked anxiously as he got into the front seat with her and started the car's engine. "What happened to Sissy?"
"The bungling bastard killed her," Joe snarled as he wheeled the car savagely out of the lot. "At least he said he did. Maybe the old son of a bitch fucked her to death. What's the difference? Anyway, we've got her body to get rid of. God damn the luck! You know a good place to ditch her?"
Lil crowded panic and regret out of her mind, concentrating instead on her knowledge of the countryside. "There's the old Adam's Farm," she told him. "It's just over the state line. I'll show you where to turn off. The place has been abandoned for years. It has a deep well. No one ever goes there. Even the kids are scared of it because the house is supposed to be haunted.
Joe grunted his approval. And so it was done. Sissy's body was weighted with a large stone fastened to her ankles by bailing wire and she was dropped down the shaft. Sitting in the car, hiding her face with her hands, Lil nevertheless heard the faint splash.
How many more? she thought. How many more of us before it's over? I didn't mean for this to heppen, Sissy. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I want to go home and get a fix. I need it. Tomorrow I'll start breaking the habit and then I'll go away with Eva. Tomorrow.
She was so certain she could do it-so certain that she could put an end to the nightmare that had become her life. She was young. There was so much ahead of her. She was strong. She was determined to do it.