Top Ten (13 page)

“But I will, soon. I will soon.”

She looked at him and smiled a thank you. He came around and walked past her, opening the garage door as he went in the house.

She left her card on the hood of his car and trotted back to hers. When she looked back toward Arlo Donovan’s house from behind the wheel of her rental she could see him back in the garage, taking her card in hand, and slipping it in his shirt pocket.

Nine

Calls

Her agency quoted him two hundred dollars. When Passion got there she wanted an extra hundred to take off her clothes. Another hundred to fuck him. Two if he wanted head.

He gave her four hundred and asked if he could cum on her tits. She nodded and pulled off her top and took her purse to the bathroom to pee and lube up.

When she came back out the room was almost black.

“Hey, what gives?”

“I like the dark,” the man said from the direction of the room’s queen size bed. Passion smiled in the dark and walked that way. Her feet kicked his piled clothes. He was already naked and under the covers. This boy was ready.

She kicked off her shoes and stepped out of her jeans and slipped in bed with him. Her bare leg went over his and rubbed up and down. Her hand went to his chest and plowed through its fur. She put her face close to his and said, “How come you want me naked if you can’t see me?”

“I can feel you.”

“That’s for sure, baby,” she agreed and nuzzled her knee up toward his crotch. He breathed deep as her skin slid over him. There. Over him there. “Ooh, baby, we gotta get you more excited than
that
.”

He sucked another breath slow and let his fingers trace up her back to the back of her neck. Into her hair. Over her ear. To her cheek. Her face. Her mouth. She sucked his thumb between her lips and worked him with her leg. He was not getting hard. She scooted over, halfway on top of him, and let the soft skin of her inner thigh caress his crotch. After a minute of that, with his breaths coming faster, his condition had still not improved. Her hand began to slide up his leg and over his thigh to—

“Ride me,” he said and grabbed her hand, stopping its advance and pulling her atop him.

“But you...”

“Ride me,” he repeated and
helped
her to straddle him.

“Okay,” she said, astride him now in the dark, just a faint glow upon the motel room’s heavy drapes. She wished she’d left the bathroom light on as he began to move beneath her.

“Yes. Yes. Ride me.
Riiiide
me.”

She thrust herself on him, the sheet bunched around her ass now, feeling him under her but not in her. He was still not hard. But he was panting, and moaning, and moving like the fire was building in him. Like he was ready to shoot his load. Except, how could that be if he was not—

“Baby, go, baby, go, yeah, yeah, baby, go...”

He was driving himself up to her, against her cunt, but hadn’t penetrated. She couldn’t feel him there. Still couldn’t feel him.

“God. God. Yes. God.”

His hands reached up and grabbed her breasts, squeezing them, mashing them, pinching her nipples making them hard. Harder even than he.

“Baby–where–are–you?” Passion asked him, her breathing stuttered. Though he wasn’t inside her, the motion was working her, something down there doing a number on her clit. “Where—are—you?”

“I’m almost...almost there.”

“No,” she almost moaned. “Where’s your cock? I want your cock inside me?”

His grip bore down on her tits. Painfully down.

“Hey...”

“Shut up and ride me, cunt...”

She swung her hand at him, swatting at his hands, his fists that were hurting her. Hurting her perfect 36C’s. “I don’t do pain.”

“Do
meeee
.”

He bucked beneath her and held her on him. “Do me. Do me. Close. Close......”

“STOP IT!” she yelled and swung at his face, making contact with the palm of her hand with a loud
slap
.

“Cunt!”

She twisted herself off of him, off of the bed, and fell to the floor. She heard him move, saw his darkness come up before the drapes, and she scrambled for the light switch, finding it on the second try. When the darkness fell away she saw him upright on the bed, sitting there, the covers down at his feet. He was exposed.

She looked between his legs and shrieked.

“Oh my God!”

She grabbed her clothes from the floor and backed away from him. Backed toward the door.

He gathered the sheet with his hands and covered himself.

“Oh my God!” she repeated and stepped fast into her jeans. She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and tucked her panties in her pocket. “Jesus, mister, Jesus!”

He was panting. A sheen glossed his face. His eyes were wide. “Please. Don’t go.”

“God!” she exclaimed yet again and grabbed her purse. She stepped into her shoes, one by the dresser the other by the TV, and went for the door.

“Please...” he implored her, sadness washing across his face. His hurt face. His
disappointed
face.

But she was gone. Out the door which slammed behind her. Gone with his money. Gone with more than that.

Gone with the moment. The release.

He would have to be selfish. He had not wanted to be selfish. He had wanted her. But she had not wanted him.

It was not her fault. It was not his fault.

He slipped his hand under the sheet and closed his eyes.

He felt himself. He tingled. He began to cry.

They had paid. He shouldn’t feel this way. But he did.

He might have to revisit their trespasses.

But a larger wrong had been done him. A different wrong. That was the path he was on now. He had been
insulted
. He had been
degraded
.

The whore had been...surprised. She had not insulted. She had not degraded. If she had...

Already the next one was waiting. Still and quiet in a napoxcypherin haze. Breathing. Fearing. Ready to be made into something more beautiful. Something
of
him.
By
him.

The next day. Tuesday. In the evening, possibly. He had things to get. Things to do. He had to prepare. It had to be
right
.

Yes, right.

The whore had been unable to, but Mickey Strange could feel himself stiffening. It was her loss. Her loss.

He thought of tomorrow. He thought of tomorrow. He worked himself and thought of tomorrow.

When he came he shoved his fist into his mouth and screamed against it.

That gave him ideas.

*   *   *

An ocean and half a sea away, a call was being placed.

Valentin Gryoko sat in a wide chair in the grand parlor of the colonial era house in Tunis sipping hazelnut liqueur and waiting for the satellite phone to ring through. In between sips he slipped slivers of pickled turnip into his mouth. Bitter meeting sweet. Food like life. He almost sighed.

From where he sat presently he could see the soft waters of the Mediterranean lapping at the shore, and it made him think how far he’d come in so short a time. Ten of his fifty years he considered a small enough span, for it seemed only the day before the day before yesterday that instead of warm breezes and cool waters his life was one of snow and ice and endless reports to the
apparatchiks
in Moscow. A colonel then, he had served the Motherland for half his life. Had fought the mongrel Afghans. The petulant Chinese at their border. Would have fought the Americans if it had come to that, but then thankfully it had not. Thankfully because from America he was gaining his riches. Other lands as well, but presently it was Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam who were keeping him in silk sheets and easily impressed women.

But the money, and the things that came of the money, would not be his if it were not for his past in climes so Godforsaken he often wondered what the Great Mother Russia wanted with them. In those conditions, those testing and trying times where true civilization was thousands of miles across the wastes, he had come to know many men. Know them well. Know them true. He remembered them. And some remembered him.

The call rang through finally and was answered in an office high above Mozhinskiy Prospekt outside of Moscow proper. A secretary asked Valentin to wait. He rested his petite liqueur glass on the bulge of his stomach and watched a pair of birds skim above the water. He smiled to himself with the cold Russian static in his ear.

“Valentin?” A voice said, breaking the hollow wash of electric noise. “Valentin Yevgenovich?”

“Pavel Yurievich,” Gryoko said, nodding to the phone. “How long has it been?”

“Too long you fat bastard!”

The two men laughed. A half dozen years melted away in that burst of joviality.

“I am warm, Pavel. Are you freezing your ass off?”

“Among other things.” A quiet pause, and then: “Is that water I hear? Water moving? Not frozen?”

“Your rivers aren’t frozen yet,” Gryoko told him.

“Today. A month from today. Does it matter? You are at the ocean, aren’t you?”

“I’m tanning. Ha!”

“Hmmmm,” Pavel grunted. “It is too good for you.”

“Too good for both of us,” Gryoko said. “But I am not complaining.”

“I would not either. So, Valentin, what brings you to call me from warmer places?”

“You are still involved with matters of intelligence?”

“It is the intelligence
business
now, my friend.”

Gryoko nodded at the water. Some might call it the intelligence racket. But never the intelligence game. It had never been that. Would never be that. The stakes were too serious. Lives could depend upon it. Or, as in this case, a single life. “I am pleased to hear that.”

“So this is a business call, my friend?”

Pavel understood well, Gryoko knew. His KGB days weren’t so far gone. “I propose a transaction, Pavel. You still have your contacts?”

“Many.”

“Good,” Gryoko said and lifted the picture from where it had rested on the table beside his chair. It was clear and crisp. His man had used top quality equipment, and had waited until the American was facing almost into the sun. From a grove of date palms he had taken it, just as the American emerged from the shack. He had been happy then, Gryoko recalled. Smiling. But his man with the camera had wisely captured the image of Mills DeVane sans smile. That was good. In military identity card photos one rarely smiled. “There is a man I want you to investigate. An American. I am going to transmit you a picture very soon.”

“Very good. What do you know about him?”

“He says he was once an officer in the American Air Force.” Gryoko heard his old friend scribbling notes over the remarkably clear connection.

“Is this man a problem to you?”

Gryoko stared at the picture. “That is what you are going to tell me.”

*   *   *

The Royal Pet Center in Baton Rouge closed at nine every Monday evening. The phone rang at three minutes ‘til.

“Royal Pets,” the clerk on duty answered. She listened to the caller. Nodding. Then her whole face frowned. “Yeah, we have rats, but what do you need to know?” She listened further, and the caller seemed to repeat the same question. Her unsoured expression made that seem clear. “We feed them in the morning.”

She listened. “Only in the morning.”

She listened again. “We don’t feed them after that.”

She listened still more. “Yeah, you can probably feed them tomorrow night if you buy them in the morning.”

And listened. “We feed them at ten.”

Listened. “We open at nine.”

The caller said he’d be in at nine thirty and hung up.

Ten

Orifice

Donald Jackson, Esq., deceased, had offered some good suggestions, and the previous day outside a smoke shop in the French Quarter Lee Tran had made himself visible. That was his only mistake, exceeding his allowance by one.

And now on the board stretched between two saw horses he lay, hands tied above his head at one end, feet to the other. Only his boxers covered him. A shred of his tee shirt was shoved in his mouth. He gurgled and screamed against it, now, finally able to do so after long hours where he could do not a thing. Just listen to his heart beat and feel his chest fall and rise. And wait. Wait for the madman who’d jumped him going out the back of a bar.

But that madman had come back. Stood over him now, actually, next to the bare bulb that burned from the center of the ceiling in the oddly shaped room. Long and thin. Concrete walls. A roll up door. Lee Tran’s panicked eyes tracked all over it so that he would not have to look at the madman.

But the madman made him.

“You are not worthy,” Michaelangelo told him, and Lee Tran’s small dark eyes bugged in terror. He thrashed against his bindings. Tried to spit the gag out. None were successful endeavors. “But I will make you worthy through creation.”

The board rocked atop the saw horses. Lee Tran began to weep.

Michaelangelo lifted a small bowl from the floor, shiny metal and deep, and placed it on Lee Tran’s bucking stomach. Tested it there. Centered it, then pulled it away. Lee Tran stilled for a moment, and that was when he heard the squealing. Tiny animal squealing.

Michaelangelo brought the bowl up again and there were large gray rats clawing at the lip, desperate to escape. He wondered if they knew something. Stilled by shock, Lee Tran did not react immediately when the bowl was flipped and put upside down on his abdomen in one quick motion.

He felt the rats’ spiky claws skitter about his navel and was then screaming again into the gag. Screaming and bucking.

Michaelangelo pressed it down, held it in place until he could get the metal tape looped over it and Lee Tran and the board. Several times he worked the shiny adhesive strip around, locking the bowl and the rats trapped within in place. In vain Lee Tran tried to shake them off. Tried all that he could to get the rats off of him. After a few minutes he was sweating and wearing down.

That was when Michaelangelo raised the propane torch from where it had sat on the hard floor and flicked it to life. A jet of blue misery fired from its end. Michaelangelo adjusted it. Lee Tran stared at it.