Frankie did not take these remarks particularly well. His paste-white prescription-morphine-derivative-junkie face pinkened at the insult. “You fuckin’ armless jizz-can, I was the number one male porn star for a year!”
“Yeah, motherfucker, and what are you now? A dead-dick goombah motherfucker. Gonna take you all motherfuckin’ night to get your dick half-hard like last time?”
Frankie stood naked and shuddering like Parkinson’s, his once steroid-embellished muscles now sagging in debilitation. “Why, I oughta—”
Nick appeared weary. “Frankie, come on. We only got an hour left, and we gotta do a twenty-minute scat.”
Spooky chuckled as she sat, kind of hunched over now. At her waistline, not a single roll of fat could be seen, as if her musculature had been coated with white wall paint. “Frankie’s fuckin’ nervous ’cos he knows he won’t be able to fuckin’ get it up, and if Frankie can’t get it up, Vinch won’t have any reason to keep him around any fuckin’ more. This time next week he’ll be in one of the fuckin’ pylons on that new train bridge they’re building across the Mohawk River. Smackheads can’t get it up.” Spooky grinned ever so subtly, batting her eyes. “Live with it.”
Frankie was close to convulsions now. “I ain’t no junkie!” he bellowed, needle tracks standing out like stitches on both arms.
Even Nick spared a chuckle at this one. “Frankie, face it. You’re a junkie,” he said as he lit his pipe and sucked down some crystal meth fumes. “So let’s just get on with it. If you can’t do the wet shot, I’ll do it. Then you shit on her face at the end.”
“Oh, not another one of those,” Spooky said.
Frankie pointed his finger at her like a Beretta 92. “
Yes,
another one of those, whore. And I ate a whole plate of fried garlic and squid ravioli for lunch. Just for you.”
Spooky did not look pleased but by now this was pretty much par for her personal golf course. She raised her stumps as if she actually had arms to throw up in concession. “So let’s just do this motherfucker and get it the fuck over with.”
“Good idea.” Nick put down the pipe and was re-focusing on the coffee table. He was naked too, by the way, and nearly as emaciated as Frankie, yet not so well-endowed. At least his still worked, though, after a few Viagras which he popped a moment later. He passed the bottle to Frankie. “You’re letting the chick psych you out. Here, and hurry it up. The Yankees are on.”
Frankie, still pouting, popped half the bottle.
“Jesus, Frankie! You’ll OD!” Nick yelled.
“God, I hope so,” Spooky said.
“Just gimme a minute,” Frankie said, assured. His dick was flaccid as a handful of overcooked spaghetti,
twelve inches
of overcooked spaghetti, to be more precise. At any rate, it was impressive. Like a fuckin’ pork tenderloin between his legs.
Spooky needed no prompting when Nick put his crotch in front of her eerily still-pretty face. She sucked like the destitute, maladapted scat-junkie trooper that she was. Nick wasn’t quite so far along in the drug-induced libidinal-system debilitation as Frankie. It only took him ten minutes to pull six inches of crane.
“I’m ready,” he said. “How ’bout you?”
Frankie huffed, puffed-faced and masturbating as if working a bicycle pump to save his life. Soon, though, things south of the waistline began to inflate.
Spooky grinned. “Think harder about your dad, Frankie.”
“FUCK!” Frankie bellowed. The image of his father—a man who’d beaten and sodomized Frankie from ages four through fourteen—couldn’t have presented a less-erotic reaction in Frankie’s mind. The mammoth penis went dead-flaccid in about a second.
Laughter fluttered from Spooky’s throat, gentle as a stream of moths.
“Come on, Spooky,” Nick reasoned. “Lay off him. You’re fuckin’ him up.”
“I can’t fuckin’ help it. I hate that greaseball motherfucker. Doesn’t fuckin’ matter what I say any-fuckin’-way. It’s gonna take that big lummox till next Easter to get half wood. He might as well be jerking off a fuckin’ empty rubber.”
Frankie’s dead-meat cock flapped against his leg when he turned briskly and glared at Spooky. “I oughta—”
“You oughta
what?
Huh? I’ll tell you what you
oughta
fuckin’ do. You
oughta
grow a dick that works, you fuckin’ pasta-scarfing piss-ant small-time mob errand-boy very-quickly-outliving-his-usefulness no-dick piece of garbage.”
Frankie bulled forward, Nick pushing him back. “I oughta fuckin’ kill you,” Frankie yelled.
Spooky laughed, raising her stumps. “Shit, I’ve been begging for someone to kill me for ten motherfuckin’ years.” Her pair of diminutive tattoos enforced this assertion: rifle-scope crosshairs over her heart and, along the front of her throat, a six-inch perforation mark and the words CUT HERE. “You don’t have the fuckin’ balls to kill me, Frankie. There’s nothing in your sack but two dead eggs.”
Nick was fighting the losing battle in trying to push Frankie away from her. “Frankie, Frankie, come on, don’t do it!” Nick yelled. “Vinch wants her alive for the scats—you kill her and we’re
all
lunch meat.”
“I don’t care! I’m killin’ her!”
“Did you blow your dad, or did he just fuck you in the ass, huh, Frankie?” Spooky continued to taunt. “Bet you got hard every time back then.”
“I’m gonna kill her, Nick, I’m gonna—”
“You’re an impotent waste of space, Frankie,” she saw fit to add. “Do the human race a favor. Fuckin’ hang yourself.”
“You’re dead, bitch!
Dead!
”
“Cool down, Frankie,” Nick implored. “Cool down. You kill her, then Vinch’ll have that psycho doctor of his do a job on both of us. You heard about what he did to Tony and Darcy, didn’t you?”
Frankie stalled momentarily. It wasn’t a pretty story. Indeed, then, he began to cool down.
A grateful impasse ensued. Frankie gained his composure. “All right, all right,” he conceded. He stood feet apart, closed his eyes, and began to masturbate again. Spooky sighed, asked Nick, “Hey, load a pipe and light me up first, will you? I’m motherfuckin’ feenin’, like, really fuckin’ bad.” This was but one inconvenience of being armless: Spooky, a clinical drug addict, couldn’t smoke drugs without assistance. Nor could she wipe her ass, effectively wash herself, clip her toenails, etc. “I’ve gotta have a hit. I got the motherfuckin’ meth bugs crawling all over me. How about it, Nick?”
“No,” Nick put his foot down. “When we’re done.”
“Fuck that motherfuckin’ shit, man! I need some ice! Now!”
“When we’re done,” Nick repeated, half-blitzed himself.
“Come on, Nick. I’ll stick my tongue up your asshole.”
Nick frowned. Such favors he couldn’t have been less interested in. All he wanted to do was ride his meth-buzz, get his cum-shot, and catch the Yankees. Clemens was pitching tonight, thank God.
“I need some batu, man! I need some fuckin’ cristy! I’m not kidding.”
“You’ll have to wait. Maybe if you gotta wait, you won’t fuck with Frankie’s head anymore.”
“Yeah,” Frankie growled; the grin on his face denoted great pride. He turned around, displaying quite an achievement: twelve inches of very erect genitals. His eyes thinned ruefully at Spooky. “How’s
that
for some dead dick, hose-bag?”
Spooky tossed a shoulder. “Hey, Frankie, when you were a baby, did you swallow your dad’s nut, or spit?”
Frankie’s grand twelve-incher went limp in an instant. “I’m gonna kill her!” he re-exploded, and this time Nick was off balance when he lunged to push Frankie away. “My guess is you swallowed,” Spooky conjectured, not even flinching as her ogre-sized nemesis struggled to reach her. “You look like a swallower. Bet your parents didn’t even need to buy any baby food because of all that nut you were eating every day.”
“Frankie—no!” Nick shouted, but—
SMACK!
Too late.
Frankie’s primordial rage propelled his fist over Nick’s shoulder where it connected with Spooky’s chin effectively as a Tyson right-cross. Spooky’s head snapped back, then her upper-body snapped back, all so fast she could only be seen as a chalk-white blur.
She lay perfectly still on the cheap coffee table.
Nick and Frankie gaped down, bug-eyed. They knew at a glance. Spooky’s head hung over the table edge, her eyes crossed and wide open, her tongue hanging out. The silence was absolute.
“Man. Oh, man,” Nick whispered. Beads of sweat wrung out of his pores. “Frankie, you better pray she ain’t…” He couldn’t even say the rest.
He knelt down, put an ear to her chest.
And gulped.
He felt around her neck for a pulse.
Gulped again.
Then he raged up at Frankie: “You big dumb cement-head motherfucker! You killed her!”
“I-I-I—” Frankie gaped. “No, she—”
“Fuckbrain! You broke her neck against the edge of the table!”
“No, I-I-I…” Frankie was remiss for locution. “No. She fell, and her neck… It got broke.”
“You KILLED THE BITCH! And now Vinchetti’s gonna have one of his crew KILL US! They’ll hang us upside down by meat hooks through our assholes and blowtorch us! He’ll have that crazy-ass doctor cut all our skin off!”
Frankie started to blubber he was so shit-scared. Nick sat dejected on the floor, head bowed.
“Let’s-let’s-let’s just…leave town!” Frankie suggested. “Go somewhere. Hide.”
“We could go to Mars and it wouldn’t matter—Vinchetti would find us. We could go to fuckin’ Egypt and bury ourselves a thousand feet under one of the pyramids and he would find us. We killed his best scat girl—Vinchetti
loves
scat. He’ll be more pissed off about this than when the Yankees lost the series to Arizona.”
“We’re dead,” Frankie blubbered.
Nick just nodded.
“Let’s just-let’s just-let’s just—leave her here,” came Frankie’s next brilliant idea. “Just say she croaked, say she OD’d or somethin’. Yeah. Leave her here.”
“It’s a fuckin’ Howard Johnsons! We can’t leave a dead meth-head whore with no arms in a
Howard Johnsons!
You
murdered
her! Our prints are all over the room! The clerk saw us come in. This is a homicide scene, Einstein.”
Frankie maintained his frantic blubbering. “Well-well-well—let’s dump her body. Dump her body in the canal. Then we can say some of Peroni’s boys muscled her away from us. Peroni’s been trying to horn in on Vinch’s scat and nek market for years, and he’s dumped a lot of bodies in the canal. The cops’d think it was Peroni.”
Nick opened his mouth to voice further objection but—
“Hmm,” he said.
“Vinch might believe it, Nick.”
“He might. He just might.” Nick glanced around, brain ticking. It was a bad plan but it was all they had. “Frankie, put your clothes back on. Then take the camera, lights, and tripods back out to the Caddy and put it all in the trunk.” Now he was looking at the long suitcase they’d carried the equipment in. “We’ll carry Spooky out in that.”
“In what?” Frankie was stepping into his slacks. “You mean the suitcase?”
“Yeah. The suitcase.”
Frankie scratched his chin. “Oh, Nick, I don’t know. I don’t think she’ll fit.”
Nick got up and grabbed his eight-inch Gerber Mk IV sheath knife off the dresser. “She’ll fit just fine, Frankie. After I cut her legs off.”
««—»»
One time-saver was the plastic drop cloth they’d already spread out under the coffee table. This was, after all, a scat film scene. Never Leave A Mess was the rule. The trashed bathroom presented a bit of a problem, though, until Nick put the brain God gave him to work. The bathroom was padlocked shut—hence, no bath tub to cut her legs off in and, doubly hence, no place for all the blood to drain. Nick deftly cut four yard-long lengths of extension cord and began to apply the tourniquets just as they’d taught him in the Army. He cranked the first two on at the top of each thigh as close as possible to the hip joint, then two more a half-inch below the first two. He cranked them all down tight and tied them off. Next, with the Gerber, he began to cut. He cut all the way around each thigh, straight to the bone. Sharp as the Gerber was, the task proved much, much, much, much, much, much, much more difficult than one would think. Very little blood leaked out, however, due to the dual ligatures on each leg. A hammer and chisel from the Caddy’s tool box neatly cracked each thigh bone—
And off the legs came.
“Nice job, Nick,” Frankie complimented.
“Thanks.”
Spooky’s torso fit perfectly into the suitcase, and the legs went right on top. They zipped the suitcase up, slid it into the Caddy’s back seat, discarded the drop cloth into the motel dumpster, and drove away.
Nick turned on the radio and smiled. What better harbinger could he ask for? The Yankees were beating Baltimore 11-1.
And it was only the fifth inning.
««—»»
“I don’t know about the canal, Frankie.” Nick appraised the long stripe of black water from the road, trying to drive normally. “I saw two cops on the other side.”