The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (34 page)

The metal was so cold it was peeling his skin off his bare hands and feet, but the guy did not care. He did not want to fall off the balcony. He was pulling himself back over the railing when Toodles picked up two retro Eames chairs. The guy was almost back over the rail when Toodles stepped through the shattered window frame and then smashed the two backs of the chairs together like a huge pair of cymbals. The guy’s head was between them.

“Toodleoo, Motherfucker,” said Toodles, using his trademark method of saying goodbye. The guy fell over backward like Wiley Coyote having a bad dream. Toodles chucked the chairs over the rail, where they landed on the guy in the empty street. It was starting to fill with snow. In an hour he would be buried in the gutter.

“Gotta move the Caddy before they plow. Don’t want to have to dig the fucker out,” said Marblehead, but Toodles knew they had to get the coat if they were not going to get the five hundred. The girl snored evenly, but it was not convincing.

“You could fuck her in the ass, and she wouldn’t say nothing,” said Marblehead. The girl tried not to flinch about her possible ass-fucking.

“No, man. No time.” He had to get to a dentist appointment back in Manhattan. With luck they would beat the traffic and he could meet his connection first.

“You might mess up the coat, fucking her, anyway.” Then Marblehead picked up the coat with the girl inside it folded them over his arm. He patted her on the ass to calm her.

“I gotta carry you. You got no shoes.”

They went back downstairs.

The walk back to the Caddy was miserable with sleet melting down their necks. He plumped the girl down on her bottom in the plush back seat.

Marblehead said, “You need to wizz?”

She shook her head no. Her bladder was screaming for relief but she didn’t want to bother these monsters.

“You pee in that coat, you dead, you hear?”

She started to cry. Toodles looked at her and grunted.

Marbles turned to him, “She gotta pee. I can tell. It’s a panic reaction. I’ll take her down to the bodega.”

As she had no shoes but the sandals, Marblehead picked her out of the back again and carried her along the street to the bodega. This time he carried her like a bride. When he walked in with the girl in his arms, he told the owner she needed the powder room.

The owner would not have allowed this invasion of his dingy toilet, but he realized that the top of his head did not come all the way up to Marblehead’s nipple, so he figured the girl could pee on the floor if she liked.

“Careful of the coat,” Marbles told her as he set her down on the toilet on her butt, as gently as a butterfly landing. He gathered the skirt of the fur around her and put it in her lap to keep her warm. Then he closed the door and went back into the store. He looked around. He grabbed a tiny bottle of mango nectar from the chill cabinet. He thought of the stuff as gourmet cusine à la Puerto Rico.

“You got any snowballs?”

“Snowballs?” asked the owner, who looked baffled and turned his eyes to the slush in the street.

“No, man. Snowballs with coconuts. Pink, you know.”

The owner realized they were discussing snacks and not slush. That was better than talking to this lunatic about possible murders he was planning to execute in the next ten minutes. He tried smiling at Marblehead, who did not smile back.

Instead, Marblehead paid for the fruit juice and the snack cakes with a twenty. He told the owner to keep the change as the stuff was placed carefully into a paper sack with a little napkin. Then Marblehead asked for two coffees which the owner put in a separate bag.

The owner was starting to feel brotherly about Marblehead when the toilet flushed. There was no sink in the little bathroom so she couldn’t wash her hands.

The girl came out of the little room at the back of the store. She was blushing now because she figured everyone was thinking about why she had gone in there, and now she couldn’t wash her hands. But, she did feel a lot better. The owner gave her a little package of towelettes saying, “That’s on the house,” with a soft smile. She mopped her tiny hands and then he gave her a couple of paper napkins. She dried her fingers and then blew her nose loudly on the last one. She had been crying and was still sniffling.

Marblehead handed her the two bags and picked her up again since she still had no shoes. He cuddled her against his chest. She could feel a hard length of pipe in his breast pocket, but she felt safe. The coat fell open, revealing that she was naked except of course for the chinchilla. The store owner gently put the coat back over her. She smiled at him as Marblehead took her out the door and through the sleet back to the Caddy.

“Come back and see us,” said the owner, and then he threw up with relief on the floor.

Marbles surprised Toodles with the fresh hot coffee and gave the girl the juice and the snack. “You can have some of my coffee if you want something hot after,” but she was still trying to figure out why he had given her the snowballs. So was Toodles.

“We gonna have a fucking picnic? How about the Flatlands? I got a shovel in the back.” He let his eyes flick toward the girl.

“Hey, we can take her to my place. She can decide what to do from there. She ain’t gonna bother us, and if she try, who listen to a naked-assed white girl running around in the snow on Lenox Avenue? They just call Bellevue. One way ticket to Ward’s Island.”

She pulled her feet up onto the seat and started to nibble the coconut. She had the message.

They got the Caddy out of the snow and slush with a little shoving and rocking. Then they started back to Manhattan.

“One fucking ways, man. Pain in the ass.” Not wanting to be stopped, they turned the corner and started to weave their way out of Red Hook. Two minutes later, they passed a large lump in the snow. Toodles looked at it briefly.

“Asshole,” said Toodles to himself. He looked at his watch, happy in the knowledge that he could see his connection before he got to the dentist. Marbles found he was thinking about the girl waiting at home in his bedroom, which was giving him an enormous erection.

The girl in the chinchilla fell asleep in the close warmth of the Caddy’s plush back seat. The soft fur of the coat allowed it to fall open again. Coconut shreds had gathered at the corner of her mouth. A few bits of it fell on her little pink nipple. Ten minutes later they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. It snowed like hell. Red Hook wasn’t plowed for three days.

“Some fuckin’ outfit for fuckin’ February in Brooklyn,” Frodo muttered. She was climbing down the front stoop in her stilettos from the little apartment he had rented for her in the PR section of Sunset Park. His dick started to wave a little at her from inside his pants. She was in gold pedal pushers, a caramel tube top with one vertical purple stripe over her left breast, a white down jacket and pink pumps with high heels. Her hair was piled high on her head and her makeup was perfect. Little ringlets of shining black hair framed her face and emphasized her huge almond eyes.

Frodo found her totally adorable. He crammed his plaid water-proof snap-brim cap onto the remaining strands of his hair. Then he worked his way around the battered Chevy Caprice to help her over the ridge of grey frozen slush. He gave her a kiss and gently patted the firm, round curve of her bottom. Her little white teeth were as shiny as the snowflakes that swirled out of the sky. She looked him in the eye warmly, having no idea what he had grumbled when she came down the stairs since it had been in English. He settled her in the front seat. When he got in the driver’s side, she smiled her serious smile, reached across the seat and gently squeezed his joint. She was a very gentle girl when she felt like it.

“Boys,” she said and giggled deep in her throat. It made good enough sense to Frodo for him not to care. He thought about her delectable ass in those thin pedal pushers and cranked up the heater as they headed toward the docks.

Once there, Frodo was wrestling with two problems and he could not get either one of them straight. He parked the crud-covered Caprice on 30th Street under the Gowanus Expressway. His girlfriend now had her head in his lap and was slowly sucking him with a circular licking motion. She was doing a very good job, which was making him lightheaded. As an experienced suckee, he could not deny that. But, at 72, he was having trouble keeping his mind on her ass crack, even though it was tantalizingly visible from the top of her gold hip huggers.

As with all Latin women, Frodo thought of her as “PR”. She was 27, but looked 18 to most men without them even having to squint. They hoped she was at least 19. She had been shipped to the States in a cargo container from Honduras along with fifteen other girls and two boys. Once in Jersey she was forcefully invited to work off her travel expenses by learning to be fucked in the ass four times an hour by customers.

She had proven less than meek with her Lithuanian owner/ pimp. He had two older women haul her pants down to her ankles in a warehouse near Newark Airport. One of them pointed to an oil drum lying on its side. The other whacked her across the mouth prison-yard style. She pressed her lip with her fingers to stop the blood. They figured she couldn’t do much with her pants around her feet, but she could do enough.

The pimp sauntered up to her pleasantly and threatened to ice her if she didn’t bend over and take it. He was busy scooping a handful of all-purpose grease out of a plastic tub. She saved them both the trouble by cutting his throat with a razor blade she had hidden in her cheek. As she squatted down to haul up her pants, she shoved the used blade into his mouth, slicing into his tongue. It took skill to stay out of the blood. There was a lot of it. The two older girls who worked for the dead pimp did not seem disappointed when she walked out of the warehouse.

Anytime Frodo watched her walk away, his heart would pound in his ears. He had picked her up outside a truck stop in Bayonne. She was hitching with no idea where she was going. Hers was a classic wonder of an ass, in his estimation, and he was a devoted and respectful follower of Latinas from all angles. It could be a risky habit, given their volatile male relatives and friends, but very exciting. If you could get a Latin girl to grace you with a smile, the sun belonged to you. She was also not a bigot about his being a little older. He liked small boobs with dark puckered nipples. He planned to marry her, if he could figure out how to ask her.

Even with those nips in mind, he figured it would be Yom Kippur before he came again because of his second problem. He had a cash flow emergency that needed solving right away or he would not be seeing 72 and a half. It was a question of hedging his profit and loss. Frodo did not like red ink. He made between a half and two million a year, but he was always invested up to his eyeballs. If interest rates dipped too far, he was cash poor and the nature of his relationship with the IRS did not allow for going to a bank. So he borrowed from a discreet Brooklyn associate named Tony.

He owed Tony (“the Crunch”) Cavallo 8 large for a two-week loan. It was nothing, but it kept Frodo from taking bigger losses. Tony had not gotten his name for his skill with opening filberts, but nuts were his specialty. Frodo had two nuts and two grand in his pocket and he needed both pairs. The vig was mounting and he would be tapped if he ponied up the other six. He did not like to be tapped, as it brought back unpleasant memories from his dismal childhood in Utica selling kosher food in his father’s store. Tony was from Bay Ridge, a place he had never once left. He had Bell’s Palsy on the right side of his face. On top of that he was mean and ugly, but he had money from gambling and a midnight Mercedes-to-order business he ran for select customers. Frodo did not want to excite his displeasure.

In the trunk was a big part of his second problem. It was a 60-thousand-dollar chinchilla coat from the many that hung in his warehouse in Jersey. He dealt in furs and gem stones whenever he could, as they were hard to trace. Besides, they seemed romantic. He had lots of these coats, but it was the off season for coats and the economy was on the skids. Who knew? All of a sudden the broads from Saddlebrook who had bought two fur coats a week were hooking in trailers.

His girlfriend was working his pants down a little, which was not such a good idea in broad daylight under an expressway, but undeniably racy. He had a buyer for the coat. The guy was a citizen who owned a condo in Red Hook. He wanted to buy the coat for ten cents on the dollar. So naturally Frodo had told him the coat was worth 80 thousand instead of 60. If he was going to get robbed, Frodo thought, he would pick up the extra two grand. It was only money, but there was a principle here. This way he could cover the vig and a lot of the loan from Tony C. and still have some cash.

The problem was that he was sure Sylva, the girl now sucking his dick, would want the coat once she saw it. He was mistaken in that, but he had no way of knowing it. She saw a future in Frodo that extended beyond evening wear. She started sucking harder which made his vision blur and then she began to cradle his balls in her hand. She rolled them gently in her dark little fingers. Then she tickled the skin just at the point where his balls met his crotch. Frodo thought that was an idea with a future.

He had the impression she really liked him, even though he had not the slightest idea why, since she spoke no English and he spoke nothing else. He was not even quite sure of her name, which sounded like “Wilma”, like the broad in the Flintstones, but then again it sound like “Sylva”, too. He liked Sylva better, so he called her that. When he did, she would sit next to him and hold his hand, so he figured he was close enough. It was very comforting to be close to her and quiet together while they listened to the slush melt on his apartment balcony. They shared things like overstuffed pastrami sandwiches. Of course, it was not so bad when she was sucking his brain out of his skull through his dick. He had developed a complex palate for her pussy, which changed flavor with her mood. Now and then they fucked, when he had time to deal with the headache the Viagra gave him.