Chapter 12
"We better lay off for awhile," Joe Maroni said. He lit a cigarette, puffed on it and exhaled the smoke with a violence that suited his mood. "Even a dumb, hick coroner isn't apt to miss four bullet holes in Donovan's body, unless that shack made a hell of a lot hotter fire than I think it did. And when somebody finally realizes that Sissy has disappeared, the shit will hit the fan in this town. So we stay holed up until things quiet down."
Joe, Guns and Lil were sitting in the living room of the King Street house. Guns, as usual, had a can of beer in his hand and a litter of empties on the floor around his feet. Joe was drinking sparingly and cautiously from a bottle of Scotch and Lil was puffing with quick, compulsive drags at a joint of marijuana.
"That means you, fruity," Joe said to Lil, his sneering lips and dark eyes contemptuous. "No more wandering around looking for strange cunt to suck. Get it?"
Lil shrugged and nodded sullenly. She had spent a wretched night and morning and now it was late afternoon of what had seemed the longest day in her life. Returning home after the tragic death of Sissy, and the disposal of her body, Lil had tried to sleep, only to awake screaming from a nightmare in which there had been a blanket-wrapped figure hurtling interminably downward through a rock-lined shaft toward a pool of black water. Then Joe, awakened by her screams of terror, had decided he wanted her and had further tortured her still painfully sore ass with his long cock. When he had had his fill of her. Guns Heimer had taken over. She could easily have dissuaded the gentle, considerate killer, but she felt that, after his rescue of her from Donovan, she didn't have the right to deny him. He had been in a particularly sexy mood, having consumed just enough beer to achieve a tumescent condition of perpetual erection and had fucked her continuously for the rest of the night.
It had been an ordeal that Lil dreaded the thought of repeating. Having mentally committed herself wholeheartedly to homosexuality, she now found intimate contact with men to be repugnant and couldn't understand how she had ever considered it enjoyable.
She had no intention of obeying Joe's order to remain in the house. She was splitting, she told herself. He couldn't watch her twenty-four hours a day. Even if she had to kill the son of a bitch while he slept, she was getting out. She'd get her money from the bank, pick up Eva and, together, they'd head for Mexico. But she had to be clever, to pretend to go along with his curtailment of her liberty.
"After what happened to me yesterday morning," she said, "you couldn't pay me to go out there. I'm scared, Joe. Why don't we go to Chicago, or Cleveland?"
He grunted disdainfully, indicating that such a question was not deserving of an answer. She felt, however, that there was a slacking of the tension in his attitude toward her, and she hoped, a dulling of suspicion. She determined that she would make the attempt that night. Better now, she thought, than after confinement in the house for several days had begun to work on even his steel nerves, making him restless, jumpy and, therefore, more alert.
A million years later it was night and she could yawn and pretend to be sleepy. "Christ's sake," she muttered, "I been smoking this damned pot all day and all it does is make me dopey. I'm going to crash." She stood up, weaving slightly on her feet and effecting a vacuous, dull stare to create the impression that she was much more under the influence of the narcotic than she realized. The two men were watching the sports broadcast on television and hardly glanced up as she wandered drunkenly from the room. Wide-eyed and alert, she lay on her bed, waiting and listening. It seemed hours before the mechanical voice of the TV was silenced and she heard Joe go into the spare bedroom. They had shared a bed at first, and then he had begun spending his nights away from her, usually with one of her girls, or one of the local women he had picked up in the town.
She prayed that tonight neither he nor Guns would want her body, but in this she was disappointed. Twenty minutes after Joe had gone to bed, her own door opened and she heard Heimer's whisper in the dark. "You awake, Lil?"
"Yes," she said. Might as well get it over with, she thought with a sigh of resignation.
She hoped at least that he wouldn't have a petrified prick again.
"I got hot nuts for you, honey," Guns told her as he lowered his massive bulk to the edge of her bed. She reached up for him and drew him down to her, finding his lips with hers and throwing the covers back so that her body would be available to his hands. She didn't want him, but she was anxious to get it over with as quickly as possible.
"You're the only chick I ever had that really liked me fucking her," he confided shyly. "All the rest I had to give 'em money. I guess that's 'cause I'm so ugly."
Lil experienced a twinge of guilt. "You're not ugly," she said softly. "You're the most beautiful man I've ever known." Funny, she thought, that it was actually the truth. What a crazy, mixed up world it was where a man who looked more ape than human, and who was a paid killer for the Syndicate, could be the most decent person in her life.
"Aw, gosh, Miss Lil!" he murmured and then he buried his face between her breasts. She put a nipple in his mouth and her hands in his hair, cradling him and letting him suck like a baby. When both of her breasts were swollen and taut from his eager kisses, he slid farther down, his mouth working on the smooth, white flesh of her stomach, leaving a wet trail of saliva that led to her hips and upper thighs.
Good grief! she said to herself. I believe he's going to suck my cunt. He's never done that before. But, of course! He's in love with me. He knows I like that and he's doing it just to please me. How sweet! I didn't know any man was ever like this, not even Mark or Stan. I'm sorry I'm not in love with him. I wish I could be. If it wasn't for Eva....
She spread her legs for him and felt his tongue fumbling with the lips of her vulva, searching for her clitoris. She knew, from the way he went about it, that it was a thing he'd never done before. She lay still, letting him lick it awkwardly, wondering at the sensation he was beginning to stir in her.
Sse'd been so sure that no man could ever arouse her again. And she'd been wrong. Guns Heimer's inexpert slobbering was causing her cunt to throb and sending unexpected thrills through her entire body. She began to move her hips and she put her hands on her breasts, using her fingers to tease and titillate the nipples already sensitized by his sucking kisses.
Apparently sensing from her tightened muscles and heavy breathing that he was exciting her, driving her toward the moment of climax, Guns increased the pressure of his tongue, his powerful hands caressing her lovely thighs and digging under her to clench and unclench spasmodically in the flesh of her buttocks.
Lil squirmed and writhed in an ecstasy of rapture while a part of her mind that remained detached continued to wonder at the unusual force of the feelings he was generating in her.
She was aware that an excess of sexual indulgence had jaded her, but Guns was carrying her back in time to the summer that had passed. It was like reliving her first affair with Armond Fletcher or Nils Rundy. It was even as good as when she had first gone to bed with her mother and father, or when she had first explored the delights of lesbian love with the Barstow twins. She was a young girl again. Had that been a thousand years ago? She was on her bed in her own room, masturbating herself and sucking her own breast. Soon she would come and then the phone would ring and her mother would call from downstairs that her high school principal wanted to speak to her. So strong was the fantasy that she thought all she had to do was open her eyes and look from her bedroom window to see the blue sky of summer above the gray, decaying shingles of Harmon's barn, or look down to see the drying semen on the window of Nils Rundy's trailer.
She was coming. Good God, how she was coming! She jerked her body convulsively, her crotch bobbing up and down, washing Heimer's face with her overflowing cunt. She became divided. Part of her was there on the bed, a body given over entirely to sensation, a thing of straining muscles, throbbing cunt and twitching asshole. Part was soaring as lightly and effortlessly as a thistle in a wind, riding a gust of passion that whirled her away, sundering the surly bondage with an earth where men contented with men for money and power.
Then it was over and she floated down, drifting lazily back to join the exhausted, drained, satiated body on the bed.
"You want I should fuck you now?" Guns asked her diffidently.
"Yes. Yes, of course, Guns honey. Fuck me now. I want you to come, too."
"I liked doing that," he admitted as he mounted her. "I never wanted to do that to nobody else before. You liked it?"
"I loved it," she corrected him. "Kiss me, Guns, and then fuck me."
His big prick slid into her, filling her cunt and giving her a sense of well-being and security. He fucked her carefully and slowly. Although she didn't experience another orgasm, she derived another kind of satisfaction from having his weight on her, his cock working piston-like in her. If she'd had a big brother, she undoubtedly would have seduced him and would have loved him in a way that was only partly sexual. That was how she felt under Gun's Heimer's bulk.
His orgasm was prolonged and powerful and when it was over, he kissed her repeatedly and tenderly, murmuring his gratitude for the affection she had shown him.
They were lying side by side, smoking, when Lil responded to a sudden impulse. "Guns," she said, "I've got to get away from here, away from Joe and from all of this." Then she held her breath. Had she blown it? Would he tell Joe?
"Yeah, I know," he replied in his slow way after a long moment of silence. "I. been thinking about that. This ain't no life for a good kid like you. It ain't gonna be easy to do, though. Joe don't hardly sleep. They got an airfield at Cypress. You get that far you could get a plane for New Orleans, or someplace. After that, you better get outta the country. Look, if I was to get up and turn on the TV again, Joe wouldn't think nothing of it He'd figure you couldn't get out of the house with me up. Then we could go out and get in the car without him knowing it. King Street ain't level. I can let 'er roll a couple of blocks before I start the engine. Wanta chance it?"
"But how about you?" Lil asked. "You'll be in terrible trouble with Joe, and with the Syndicate."
She felt his heavy shoulders move in a shrug. "Piss on 'em. I'm fed up too. Mexico or someplace don't sound too bad."
"You want to go with me? I didn't tell you, Guns. I've got a girl friend."
"Yeah," he said, "I know. I wouldn't mind about her. You don't have to do nothing with me no more if you don't want. I'd just like to go along and take care of you."
She leaned across his body to kiss him. "You're the sweetest guy who ever lived," she told him earnestly. "I'll be glad to have you with us and I won't let you go without some loving. I'm not so queer I can't enjoy it with you, Guns. I guess I even love you, as much as I can love any man."
"Gosh!" he whispered, his voice strained with wonder. "Gosh! You ready? Let's go."
"I've got money in the bank at Cypress," she told him. "We can't get it out until morning."
"We won't have time," he told her. "It don't make no difference. I got plenty of dough in New Orleans. I stuck it away there in case I needed it someday. We get to Mexico, you can send for your money."
"All right," she said. "Let's go then."
They dressed and went out to the living room where Guns turned on the TV. They sat and watched it for awhile, staring unseeingly at a late-late movie as they waited to be sure it had registered on Joe's consciousness that Guns was up. At last he nodded to her and they went quietly from the house into the cool, star-hung night. The car didn't roll as easily as Guns had hoped, so he pushed while Lil steered. When they were several blocks from the house he slid under the wheel and started the engine.
"I'll only be a minute," Lil told him when he parked the car in front of Eva Gordon's hotel.
"Okay," he agreed, "but don't fool around. We don't want no shoot-out with Joe on Main Street."
Lil ran up the steps. She located Eva's room and raised her hand to knock, then she saw that there was light under the door. She tried the knob and the door swung open. What she saw was enough to make her feel that the world had been pulled out from under her. She was dizzy and sick, floundering on the edge of a vast nothingness.
Naked, Eva's beautiful body was stretched on the bed. Kneeling between her spread-eagled legs was another girl, a redhead. She stared up in surprise at Lil, the lower half of her face wet and smeary. She was Linda Barstow.
"Lil!" Eva cried. Her eyes looked like they were about to fly out of her head on long stems. "Lil! You didn't come back. I thought you...."
Lil didn't say anything. She just closed the door and ran back down the stairs. Whitefaced, her eyes blank with shock, she opened the door of the car and got in. "Go on," she said, her voice remote and emotionless. "She isn't coming."
Guns nodded, his face mirroring sympathy, but he didn't answer her. He just put the car in gear, eased the clutch and started down the main street. A mile out of town, they came to the intersection with the highway, and once on the way to Cypress, he depressed the throttle, letting the big car leap forward into the night with a muted roar of power.
The minutes fled by with Guns hunched intently over the wheel and Lil huddled in the far corner of the front seat, her mind still unable to grasp the full significance of what had happened, that there wasn't going to be any Eva for her, now or ever. She was still struggling to adjust to the idea when they swung around the last turn before the state line. Guns cursed, stamped on the brake and twisted the wheel in an attempt to control the weaving motion of the car as the brakes gripped unevenly, sloughing them first to the right and then more sharply to the left. Directly in front of them was another car. It was parked crossway of the road. Illuminated in the headlights of their own car, Joe Marconi stood in the highway, a gun in his hand.
How did he do it? Lil thought wildly. How did he get here ahead of us? Then, she knew. He'd been aware all along of their plans, had probably listened at her bedroom door and had slipped out of the house, stolen a car and had come here to waylay them. It was just like the sneaky son of a bitch, she thought bitterly. He liked doing that to people, playing with them as a cat with a mouse.
There was a dirt road that led off through the woods and Guns saw it. He jammed his foot down again on the throttle and they shot onto it.
"No! No! No, Guns!" Lil yelled, suddenly more terrorized by a realization of where they were than by the apparition of Joe back on the highway, gun in hand. "No, Guns! This is where we put Sissy. Oh, God! Don't take me there!"
He couldn't have turned back if he'd wanted to. The rutted, long-disused road, was too narrow. Headlights in their rearview mirror told them that Joe was coming after them.
Guns cursed again. Debauching into the yard of the old Adam's Farm, he saw what Lil could have told him if she'd had time ... this was the end of the road.
"We can't get out," Lil gasped. "He's got us now."
"Better this way," Guns grunted, stopping the car beside the curbing of the well. "Now we won't have the bastard chasing us no more. Get behind the car and stay there. I'll take care of Marconi."
Lil tumbled out of the door and crouched with her hands on the metal fender just as Joe's car roared into the clearing and stopped. She tried not to think about the deep shaft behind her and what it contained.
Joe got out on the far side of his car and snapped a shot at Guns who stood, fully exposed, at the rear of the car.
Watching, Lil saw the big man's right shoulder jerk, and even before the gun flew out of his hand and he began to slump, she knew that he had been hit. Joe, a sneering grin on his face, came around the hood and took two paces toward them, then stopped. "This is where you get it, you damned stupid ape," he said flatly. He very deliberately brought the pistol he carried up toward eye level.
"No!" Lil cried. "No, Joe! Not Guns!" She didn't know why she was doing it, hardly knew what she was doing as she ran around the car and straight at Joe Marconi. She just knew she didn't want Guns to die, didn't want him killed as callously and cold-bloodedly as a hunter would dispatch a wounded deer. She ran straight at the pistol, keeping her body between it and Guns.
The last thing she heard was the report of the gun. She shuddered in death and lay still.
She appeared very young and defenseless there in the moonlight.