Chapter 9
It was the first week of Christmas vacation. A foot of snow blanketed the mid-western states. On this day, however, the sun was shin ing, although the temperature was only a little above zero, but with the heater turned on, it was warmly comfortable in Mark Devlin's car. The youth drove carefully, mindful of the icy slipperiness of the highway that had been cleared by the snow plow during the night.
"Do we make the pick-up at the same place as last time?" he asked Lil, who was the car's only other occupant.
"No," she told him. "This time it's at the Riverside Apartments, Room Seven. We park in the alley and go in through the back entrance. I'm anxious to get back with the stuff and turn it over to Hootch."
Mark's lips compressed tightly and his profile grew rigid. "I suppose," he said, his voice tense with suppressed anger, "that you've got a date with that preacher again. You spend most of your spare time with him lately."
Lil grinned, her eyes as cruel as a cat's. "Jealous, aren't you? Sometimes I doubt if you'll ever grow up. Stan is dreamy. Did I tell you that he's in love with me? As soon as I'm of age, he wants to divorce his wife and marry me."
"And I suppose you've agreed to it. You're out of your mind. An old, gray-haired geezer like him!"
"Don't be so juvenile. Of course, I won't marry him. But it doesn't do any harm to let him think I will. He's even talking about quiting the church and going into the rackets with me. I'll tell you one thing, with his looks, his education and his brains, he'd make one of the greatest con men who ever lived. And don't let his white hair fool you, dear. Stan is a tiger in bed. He fucked me four times last night and I lost track of the times he sucked my cunt."
"Big deal!" Mark snorted. "I still say he's too old for you."
"I don't see why you think so," Lil responded, smiling with wicked triumph. "My mother is a lot older than you are, but she tells me you're becoming a frequent visitor at our house."
Mark blushed. "That's different," he muttered.
Lil laughed. Teasing Mark was fun, but it was a game she soon tired of. She leaned her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes. Mark, glancing at the half-smile on her lovely face, assumed she was daydreaming of the Reverend Canfield, but he was wrong. Lil's sharp, little calculator of a mind was doing mental arithmetic. Her bank balance was now in excess of ten thousand dollars, most of it representing the pure profit she enjoyed from blackmail. She had begun to make heavy demands on Bert Wharton and a few others. Her entrance into that field had taught her some surprising things about human nature. She had expected her victims to hate her but had found that all of them, with the exceptions of Hootch Donovan and Armond Fletcher, reacted in a manner completely contrary to anything she had anticipated. Once they had tasted the for bidden fruit of sexual relationship with girl children, they became so besotted with lust that they lived in a constant anguish of fear, not that Lil would eventually impoverish them by her increasing demands for money, but that she would deny them their nights of mad passion with herself, or with her girls. They seemed eager to give her any amount of money she asked. She sometimes thought that they actually liked paying off to her. Even the normally penurious Bert Wharton had made no objection to adding a thousand dollars to her bank account, as long as she continued to allow him to beat her frequently with his belt or fists.
The dope business had flourished too, although the margin of profit in marijuana, and the other psychedelics, was small. Heroin, though was big business. She looked forward to considerable profit. She would, she had decided, let Donovan handle it during the difficult, introductory phase, while addicts were being created. Later, after he had done most of the hard work, and had taken most of the risk, she would step in and take over. Visualizing the rage that would show in his cold, green eyes when this happened, but secure in the knowledge that he wouldn't dare oppose her, she smiled happily. She no longer had sex with him, but he was a frequent visitor at the King Street house, usually asking for both of the Barstow twins.
When Lil opened her eyes they were in downtown Cypress and Mark was turning the car onto a side street that would take them to the alley at the rear of the Riverside Apartments.
"You wait outside," Lil told him. "This is the big one and I was instructed to show up alone."
"You be careful," he said, frowning.
"Worrier," she replied, making a face at him as she opened the door of the car and got out. Ankle-high, fur-lined overshoes making a crunching sound on the crisp surface of the snow, she walked with confidence to the back door of the apartment house, opened it and went down the dim, musty hallway to Room Seven. She rapped lightly on the paneled door with gloved knuckles and it was opened immediately.
"Hi, Stew," Lil said casually, giving him a casual smile as she entered the room. As the door closed she saw that the one she had called "Stew", a wispy, furtive, little man, was not alone in the room.
"This here's Mr. Maroni," Stew said quickly and nervously. "He brung the stuff for you, Lil."
Lil regarded the stranger with frank curiousity. He was. she judged, possibly thirty. He was a man of average size, with black hair, dark eyes and thin features set in a swarthy face of saturnine mold. Having the feminine eye for clothes, she noted with approval that he was sharply dressed in an expensively tailored suit. There was an undefinable something about Maroni that instantly fascinated and also frightened her. It was as though he stood in the center of an invisible aura of excitement and danger. He was like a hard, bright, steel blade, steel, yet somehow living steel, ready to leap out with slashing swiftness and eager cruelty at the slightest provocation.
Lil gave him a cool smile that belied both her interest and her tingling feeling of trepidation. She nodded at Maroni, then turned to Stew. "You checked it out?" she asked him. "If I get burned with a bum batch of H, you know what happens to you."
"Sure, sure, Lil," the little man replied hastily. His eyes shifted nervously toward the silent Maroni. "You know I wouldn't let you get a bad deal. You don't have to worry none. Why, Maroni himself brung it and he's from-"
"Shut up." The command was spoken quietly, but with a force that made it crack like a whiplash in the room. "You've got a big mouth," Maroni said, his voice still low but loaded with contempt. "Get out."
"Yes, sir. Yes siree, Mr. Maroni," Stew stuttered as he fumbled for the knob of the door and almost fell over his own feet in his haste to withdraw from the room.
Lil laughed. "What have you done to Stew?" she asked Maroni. "You seem to bring out the rabbit in him."
Apparently a man without humor, Joe Maroni ignored her question and comment. He reached behind him to take a black leather briefcase from a table, opened it and extracted a small, square package. He tossed the briefcase back to the table and stood there, weighing the brown paper-wrapped package in one hand while he eyed Lil with cold speculation. "You got the dough?"
"Sure," she replied evenly. "I didn't make the trip over here because I like snow." She opened her purse and took out four flat bundles of bills, each neatly bound with paper tape that carried the name of her bank and the amount in dark print. "Three thousand. That's a lot of bread for a damned small quantity of H."
"It's uncut," Maroni said, handing her the package and taking the bills.
Lil shrugged. "Okay. Well, I better be on my way." She turned toward the door.
"Sit down," Maroni said. It was as it had been when he had told Stew to shut up. The two words were spoken quietly, yet with such command that they stopped Lil as though she had run into an invisible wall. She turned about to face him, her cheeks beginning to flush with anger. It had been a long time since she had taken orders from anyone and she resented his calm assurance that she would do exactly as she was told. Still, in spite of her growing fury, she found herself crossing the floor to the couch and sitting down.
"We've been checking on you," Joe Maroni told her in his flat, hard, unequivocal tone. "You got some pretty good things going in your town. Not bad for a kid. Not bad at all. But you haven't got the experience to handle a thing like Heroin. You're not even getting all you could out of those marks you're working and making a bunch of punk kids whore for you is peanuts. We're coming in there to show you how to set it up right and give you the protection you need in the rackets. That's what I'm here for. You got a place there I can stay?"
"Well, of all the goddamned...!" Lil stood up, her eyes electric with rage, her face pale. "Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? That's my town and my business you're talking about taking over. I don't need your protection. You step a foot into my town, you bastard, and you'll be in jail so fast you won't know what happened. Don't try to...."
She didn't finish the sentence. Joe Maroni, moving with incredible speed, and yet with apparently little effort, brought his right hand around in a swinging blow that caught her on the side of the head and knocked her to the floor. She lay there, half-stunned, her mouth open and her eyes wide with surprise.
"You want to argue it some more, just get up on your feet," he told her coldly. He took her purse from the couch where she had been sitting, opened it and withdrew the package of dope. "Get smart-assed with me," he said, "and you go back without this ... or the money. And don't try to sic that punk police chief on me either. That boy-fucking queer knows better than to cross me."
Lilith Nordstrom was a realist above all else. She knew that she was no match for Joe Maroni in a fight. His apparently intimate knowledge of Chief Donovan's faults and foibles indicated that Maroni was probably not bluffing. Although he hadn't said as much, it was suddenly clear to her that he was here in Cypress as a representative of the Syndicate. She had a healthy respect for the Mafia, although all she knew about it was from things her mother had told her and from what reading she had done on the subject. If he was from the Syndicate, and if the organization was determined to take over her small operation, she knew that she was whipped before she even started to fight. She was, however, a firm believer in the old adage that "If you can beat 'em ... join 'em." Damned if she was going to be ousted entirely. She still had one weapon ... her best one.
She looked up at Joe and smiled. "You sure are strong," she said admiringly. "I guess we might as well discuss it. Help me up?" She held a hand up to him.
"You aren't hurt that bad," Joe replied unfeelingly. Ignoring her hand he went to sit on the edge of the table where his briefcase reposed. He took a flat, silver cigarette case from an inside pocket, selected a cigarette and lit it with a silver lighter.
With a sigh of defeat, Lil got up from the floor. In that moment she was able to forsee exactly what kind of a relationship she was going to have with Joe Maroni and the future was startlingly clear to her. Dismally clear. She sat back on the couch, opening her coat and crossing her legs.
"All right," she said. "So you're from the Syndicate. What kind of a deal do I get out of it?"
"That's better." He blew a puff of cigarette smoke. "You get a break. I handle everything, but especially the dope and the blackmail. You get forty percent of the gross. With me running it, we'll expand, take in the whole county. Forty percent of fifty grand a year is a hell of a lot better than one hundred percent of ten grand. Another thing. Suppose one of those kid chippies of yours gets out of line and threatens to squeal, what could you do about it? With the organization taking care of items like that, you've got no problem. The kid disappears."
"You'd kill her?"
"No. She goes bye bye with a shot of H in her mainline, gets shipped to Mexico and sold for two grand. Neat, huh? Any other questions?"
"No, I guess not."
"Okay then, take off your clothese.""
"My what?"
"Your clothes. When I take over in a town I like having a chick to screw. You aren't bad looking and I go for young ones anyway. You might as well learn right now who your new sugar daddy is. Go on, get 'em off."
"All right," Lil replied meekly. In Maroni's presence, she felt suddenly as helpless as though she had been caught up in a whirlwind. It was a new experience for Lil. She was not sure that she liked it, but still, as she shrugged out of her coat and reached behind her to unzip her dress, she felt a tingle of excitement.
"You've got a good boy," Joe Moroni said. "Get on the couch on your hands and knees.
"Aren't you going to undress too?"
"No. I'll just take my coat and pants off." He doffed his suit coat and trousers and pulled one leg of his elastic, jockey shorts aside to reveal the longest cock Lil had ever seen.
"My God!" she exclaimed, "my cunt isn't deep enough to take all that!"
Joe shrugged. "That's okay, I'll put it in your asshole. It doesn't make any difference to me." He knelt behind her and with no preliminaries, spread her ass with cruel fingers and began to thrust himself into her.
As the lengthy weapon bored deeper and deeper, Lil though that it surely would probe right up through her intestines into her stomach. She knew pain greater than any ever inflicted upon her by Hootch Donovan, or even by Bert Wharton. She wanted to scream, but was ashamed to let him know that he was hurting her. It somehow seemed vitally important to her to maintain her reputation with him as the tough kid who ran a whole town.
Joe fucked her in the ass with methodical and ruthless brutality, drawing his long prick out until its head was barely gripped by her sphincter muscle and then ramming it back in again, jolting the cheeks of her buttocks with his hard body. It took many minutes for him to achieve an orgasm. He only grunted once while he was shooting her full of his sperm and his expressionless face changed not at all during that time. At last he pulled out of her and let her collapse on the couch, her eyes stinging with tears of pain. He tidily wiped his prick on the hem of her dress and began to pull on his trousers.
"Don't bother to get up," he told her when she stirred weakly. "I want you to meet a guy who works for me. Hey Guns," he hollered, "come on out."
A bedroom door opened and a gorilla shambled into the room. At least he looked like an overgrown ape to Lil as she stared up at him with dazed eyes. He was over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. A ridiculously small head sat on the neckless, gross, misshappen body. His nonexistent forehead and sloping jaw gave him the look of a moron. So did his dull, piggy eyes and vacuous grin. He was in his shirt sleeves and his massive chest was crossed by a leather strap that held a holstered automatic under his left armpit. He clutched a bottle of beer in one huge hand.
"This is Guns Heimer, an associate of mine," Joe Maroni said. "Guns, meet Lil. Cute kid, isn't she? You want to take a crack at her, Guns?"
"Sure," Guns said, grinning foolishly.
"Say, what the hell is this?" Lil demanded.
"Shut up," Joe told her. "I always share my chicks with my friends. Go ahead and fuck her, Guns, and then let's split the hell out of here."
Guns put his bottle of beer on an end table and unzipped his fly. He took out a prick that was bigger around than Joe's but not nearly as long. "You're awful pretty," he told Lil as he pawed her over onto her back, much as a bear turns a log in search of grubs or beatles. He knelt between her legs and mounted her.
"There's a kid waiting for me out in the parking lot," Lil said to Maroni. "He's going to wonder what's keeping me."
"I'll send Stew out to tell him to go home," Joe told her. "You'll ride back with us."
Resigning herself to her fate, Lil turned her attention to Guns Heimer as he pushed his big prick into her. To her surprise, he was amazingly gentle and unbelievably expert. He rotated his hips rhythmically, keeping his frontal bone on her vulva so that it agitated her clitoris.
The big age is good! Lil said to herself. I could even enjoy this. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and gave him her cooperation. She didn't mind the weight of his body crushing hers, or when he kissed her. She ran her tongue into his mouth and hugged him tighter.
"Fuck it into me, big boy," she encouraged him. "This is groovy."
"I like screwing you," Heimer panted. "You're the prettiest girl I ever did get. I got a colored girl on the Loop that don't screw no better than you. You like doing it with me?"
"Love it. Don't stop. I think I'm going to come pretty soon."
"I'll wait for you," he grunted and continued to fuck her with a measured, metronomic cadence.
"Come on, get it over with so we can get out of here," Maroni growled from where he sat in a chair on the other side of the room, smoking and regarding them critically.
They ignored him, enjoying each other too much to be hurried by him.
When Heimer put his big hand on her breast and began twiddling her nipple, it was too much for Lil. She began to come, lifting her hips violently against his, getting another half inch of his prick in her. She suck his tongue into her mouth and clawed at his back, drumming at his thighs with her heels.
"I gotta do it, too, baby," he grunted, emptying himself into her in pulsing spurts of hot semen that went on and on for such a remarkably long time that she was overflowing, her swollen cunt unable to contain both his big prick and his prodigious quantity of jism. It made a sticky pool below them on the couch.
"Thanks, Miss Lil," Guns Heimer said as he got up from her. "That was real nice."
"I thought so too," Lil agreed as she gathered up her clothes and headed for the bathroom. "Be with you guys in a minute."
On the ride home, Guns Heimer went to sleep in the back seat. He snored gently.
Lil sat quietly beside Joe Maroni. She wasn't sure what her feelings were concerning the gangster, who had so abruptly taken over her life. She had every reason to hate him, and sex with him was not only painful, but highly unsatisfactory as well, still he fascinated her and she felt drawn to him in a way that was outside of any experience with any other man. Perhaps, she though, it was his impersonal cruelty, his arrogant self-assurance that intrigued her. She impulsively put her hand on his lap below the steering wheel. His long cock lay flaccid beneath the material of his trousers. Experimentally, she stroked it.
"You got ants in your pants again?" he asked her.
"I could suck it while you drive," she suggested. "The way it's snowing now, no one can see inside the car.
"I don't want to be bothered," he retorted coldly. "I'm thinking. I'll let you know when I want you. Get in the back seat and suck Heimer's."
The son of a bitch! she thought, but nevertheless, she was sharply disappointed. She climbed over the back of the front, seat and began to unbuckle the sleeping man's trousers. He awoke and grinned at her sleepily.