“You got any
knives stuck up your sleeves, bad girl?” Norbert asked. “Wouldn’t want any nasty
surprises while we were having our fun.” He began groping and prodding, running
his hands along my thighs, lifting the waistband of my pants to peek inside,
rifling through my pockets. Wanda Kronenwetter’s treasures tumbled out.
Lipstick, band-aids, Easy-Pleasy condoms . . .
He ignored
everything else, focusing goggle-eyed on the condoms. He ripped the package
open and they spilled out like colorful coins. Norbert picked one out and
studied it, turning it over in his stubby fingers. “Goddamn,” he breathed. “You
really
are
a bad girl, Mazie. So rubbers come in neon now?”
Play along
with this.
“Yeah. And they
glow in the dark.”
He stared at me
with piggy, suspicious eyes. “You got men in that prison with you?”
Treading a
fine line here, Maguire. Make a slip and you’ll get more of Norbert
than you’d bargained for.
“Oh, those babies
aren’t for
guys
.” I was trying to sound flirtatious, but my
tendons were being stretched like
saltwater taffy and it was all I could do not to shriek. “They’re what bad
girls use on each other. I’ll show you if you cut me down.”
“Nope. You’re
stayin’ right there until the cops come.” Leering at me, he ripped the wrapper
off a red condom. “Think I’ll just try one of these on for size. What do you
bad girls do with ’em? Put ’em on a zucchini or something?” He gave a nasty
laugh.
“You want to know
what bad girls do in prison, Norbert? All kinds of naughty stuff. Kinky stuff.”
“Kinky?”
“Know what my
cellmate’s nickname is?”
His eyes snapped
to mine. He was getting into this.
“Tina the
Tongue,” I said.
Norbert ran the
back of his hand across his mouth. “What’s she look like?”
“She’s from
Brazil. She’s a model for a Brazilian bikini wax company.”
“One of them dark
Latin types?”
“She makes
Jennifer Lopez look like a pork carcass.”
More beer and
sausage fumes in my face, his breath more rapid now.
“Tina had her
boobs done before she went to prison,” I said. “She’s a forty-four.”
“Forty-four
inche
s?”
“D cup.”
“Oh, man.”
“She holds the
prison record for boob fighting.”
“I never heard of
that.”
He’d taken the
bait.
I gazed around the room, trying to scope things out without making it
too obvious. The shed’s front door was closed, but not locked. Small, narrow
windows stood above double sinks. There was a swinging door at the far end of
the shed that probably led to the milking parlor. If I could just get a
five-foot lead on Norbert, I was sure I could outrun him. Get me into a
cornfield and I’d be home free.
Norbert was
getting impatient. “Tell me about the booby fights.”
Licking my dry
lips, I tried to guess what would light Norbert’s wick. “Well, Fridays are Fun
Nights, see, so we all get naked.”
“Like, completely
no clothes?”
“Not a stitch.
Then the bigger girls become the horsies and the smaller girls climb onto the
horsies’ shoulders. They’ve got to knock their opponents off their horsies, but
their hands are tied behind their backs and they can only use their boobies.”
I didn’t know
which twisted part of my subconscious this was coming from, but it was working
like a porn video;
Norbert looked like he was about to have a stroke.
“So finally,
after everyone’s been knocked off their horsies and we’re all hot, sweaty, and
panting, we lie down on these long tables and Tina gives us Brazilian waxes—”
“Is that where
you drop candle wax on each other’s titties?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Don’t
get out much, do you, Norbert?
“Then we all sit around—we’re still
naked, remember?—and we smoke some primo weed—”
“You got dope in
prison?”
“You can get
anything in prison, Norbert.
Anything.
”
I tried to make my voice
sound sexy, but it just came out sounding like I had a case of the flu. “After
that we take out our Easy-Pleasys—”
“You mean them
candy-colored condoms?”
“Yes. And then we
. . .” I let my voice trail off.
“You what?”
“Can’t talk,” I
moaned. “My arms hurt too much.” Not an act.
Norbert was at
war. His brain was telling him I was shining him on, but Captain Winkie was in
control here, and Captain Winkie wanted what he wanted. Norbert hesitated,
clearly torn, then abruptly turned and hurried out through the shed’s rear
door. As the door swung open, I caught a glimpse of cattle stanchions on the
other side. I’d been right; it was the milking parlor. Norbert was back a few
seconds later, brandishing wire cutters.
He scowled at me.
“No funny business now.”
I nodded to
indicate that I’d behave.
Norbert snipped
the wire attached to the pipe and I crashed to the floor. “I ain’t taking off
those wires on your wrists,” he growled, jerking me upright.
I nearly cried
with the sweet relief of being able to move my arms.
“Now show me.”
Norbert’s voice was hoarse. “Show me what the bad girls do.”
This was going to
take some doing, because I’d been ad-libbing the entire scenario. I hoped I
lived long enough to tell Tina Sanchez, mother of three—who had a
mustache, stretch marks, and definitely did not bikini-wax her woo-woo—how
she’d been transformed into a Brazilian sex goddess.
I stalled, flexing
my aching shoulders to get my circulation going, thinking furiously. What did
Norbert
want
to hear?
Something nasty.
“Well, first you fill the thing with water.”
Norbert wasn’t
taking chances; he hauled me along with him over to the sinks. He held on to me
with one hand while he turned on the tap with the other, but discovered that this
didn’t work because he couldn’t jimmy the condom onto the spigot with just one
hand.
“
You
do
it,” he snarled.
“Can’t.” I held
up my wired hands.
“Kee-rist. This
better be good.” He let go of my arm and used both hands to wrap the condom’s
opening around the water tap.
Casually I took a
half step backward.
The condom
filled, stretching out like a party balloon, the lurid red turning transparent
pink. Norbert watched in a state of sexual frenzy, too preoccupied to notice
what I saw through the window. A state patrol cruiser was silently pulling into
his driveway.
“You’re doing
great,” I encouraged Norbert, edging back a bit more, figuring I had about
fifteen seconds before the cops waked in. “You’re using
warm
water,
aren’t you?”
“Hell, no. You
didn’t say it had to be warm.”
“Switch it over to hot.” My voice shook.
Every part of my body shook.
The gushing water
camouflaged the sound of the slamming car door. Now grotesquely distended, the
condom resembled the world’s most unappetizing watermelon.
“So I’m thinking
this thing works like a two-man saw,” said Norbert, breathing rapidly. It was
going to be a race as to which burst first, the condom or Norbert. “One bad
girl pushes while the other one pulls.”
Through the
window, I watched the trooper stride toward the shed.
“Tie a knot in
the end,” I told Norbert, taking another step backward.
Tongue protruding
from the corner of his mouth, Norbert worked at the knot.
“Now squeeze it.
Make it into a shape,” I coached.
“What shape?”
“What do you
think, Norbert?”
One and a half baby steps back
. I tensed all my muscles.
“I get it,” he
said, giggling. “Long enough for two bad girls.”
He squeezed the
center of the condom. It exploded.
Norbert yelled in
shock. The shed door banged open. The trooper burst in and spun toward Norbert,
startled at the yell. Going into a crouch, he whipped out his gun and aimed it
at Norbert.
I bolted toward
the shed’s rear door and barreled into the barn’s milking parlor—empty
now with the cows already milked. The room was dark after the brightness of the
shed and I was temporarily blind, unable to find the door leading outside. Blundering
around in the murk, I stumbled across a set of crude wooden steps. Behind me,
the door banged open and Norbert detonated into the barn, the trooper right
behind.
“Hold
it!” yelled the trooper.
I practically
levitated up the steps.
Norbert was
across the barn in a flash, boiling up the stairs behind me, his head popping
up out of the stairwell like an ugly rodent in a whack-a-mole game, water
streaming from his hair and face. The instant my feet hit the second-floor
deck, I heaved over the trap door, smashing the heavy planks down on Norbert’s
greasy head.
Take that, you stinking pervert!
Judging from the
string of curses, Norbert had toppled onto the trooper. I didn’t inquire; I
wove through the junkyard of prehistoric-looking mowers, reapers, and loaders
on the second floor, trying to find a way out. There it was, just a couple of
yards away—the floor-to-ceiling track doors at the far end of the barn.
Just as I reached
them, the doors rolled open with a thunderous boom. A uniformed county cop
stood silhouetted there, blinking as his eyes acclimated to the gloom of the
barn. Beside him a snarling German shepherd strained at its leash.
“She’s
up here,” the cop yelled to someone behind him. “I got her!”
Behind me the trap door banged open and
the state trooper emerged from the stairwell.
“
I
got her,” the trooper yelled.
In
that split second of jurisdictional horn-locking, I darted behind a corn smut
chucker and began tacking my way through the machinery. Norbert, frothing at
the snout and apparently believing the reward applied whether I was dead or
alive, pounded across the floor bellowing about how he was going to wring my
weasely little neck. Some dumbbell fired his gun. Pigeons erupted from the
rafters in great fluttering swarms, rats streaked across the floor, and I
darted from machine to machine, vying with the rats for hiding places.
Walkie-talkies blared, dogs barked, cops argued over who had command of the
situation, and emergency vehicles, sirens screaming full blast, poured onto the
property as though it were the site of a 747 crash.
I leaped onto
Norbert’s grain escalator, a tall, narrow metal chute used to move heavy loads
upward. It was angled at a steep but still-climbable pitch. While my pursuers
hunted me below, I inched up the escalator, hoping nobody would think to look
up. I was halfway up when my foot slipped and I crashed to my knees. The hollow
metal rang like a steel drum. Every head in the barn jerked up.
I looked down.
Norbert lumbered over to the escalator, snatched up the machine’s power cord,
and plugged it into an extension cord. The escalator suddenly clattered to
life, its cogged belt hauling me upward, Norbert cackling below.
“Come
down, Mazie!” the trooper yelled.
Yeah,
right. The escalator was carrying me up, up, up. Up to the barn’s rafters,
three stories above the barn floor. And at the end of the escalator there was .
. .
An
open cargo door framing a square of bright blue sky.
Below,
Norbert and the Smoky were wrestling over the extension cord, Norbert clutching
it tightly in his grimy fists.
“Shoot
the sonovabitch!” one of the cops growled. I hoped he meant Norbert. I was
desperately trying to scoot back down the chute now, but the thing was cranking
along at twenty-five miles an hour. I was five feet from the open cargo hatch .
. . four . . . three . . . and then the escalator spat me over the edge.
Frantically
I grabbed at the machine’s underlip with my wired hands. The steel slots kept
turning, battering my knuckles. My legs thrashed into empty space. A pigeon
nesting on the tackle block above the door observed me with beady pink eyes.
Far below I could see the manure-caked cement of the cow yard. Police cars,
ambulances, fire trucks, and TV vans were all converging on the farm, people
running every which way like ants pouring out of a stepped-on anthill.
My
eyes swiveled back to the barnyard, with its mountain of manure. My fingers
were starting to lose their grip on the escalator. Why was it I always seemed
to wind up in high places with no place to go but down?
A
cop must have rammed a cattle prod up Norbert’s ass, because the escalator
abruptly stopped. I felt it vibrating as someone in hard-soled shoes clambered
up. A man appeared in the cargo doorway. From my position I had a good view of
his nostrils. We stared at each other for a long moment, then I said, “You’re
Irving Katz.”
He
nodded. In real life he was much better-looking than on TV. His eyes were so
dark they were almost black. His mustache looked as though each hair had been
clipped individually. He wore a button-down shirt, a tie with muted stripes,
and an expensive-looking suit jacket feathered with hay chaff. He was as out of
place crouched on a grain escalator as Norbert Lautenbacher would have looked
on Macy’s mezzanine.
“You don’t look
like a marshal,” I said.
The corners of
his eyes crinkled. “You want I should wear a ten-gallon hat?”
My fingers
slipped down a couple more inches. “You’re from New York?” I asked when my
heart had resumed pumping blood.