The Swan & the Jackal

by J. A. Redmerski

  I say nothing and just listen. This is the part where Victor hangs up his suit of understanding and steps into his threatening one.

  “Izabel”—I knew he would begin his sentence with—“has it in her head that she’s going to—“he motions a hand, twirling three of his fingers as if allowing the right term to materialize on his tongue—“aide you in finding people to torture, but you and I both know that’s unacceptable. Correct?”

  “Yes, you are correct,” I say with a nod. “I don’t need her help, nor do I want it. I did it on my own before, and I can do it again. If she tries to help me, I’ll tell her that you’ll be the first to know about it.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  I pause, wanting to ask a personal question, but not sure if I should probe.

  I decide to, anyway.

  “Does it bother you,” I say, “that she and I were so close?”

  “No,” Victor answers truthfully. “Not in the way that you might be thinking. I trust Izabel alone with you—with any man—if that’s what you’re referring to.”

  “In a way it was, yes,” I say. “But really I meant it in every way. She kept things from you in order to help me.”

  “You are her family,” he states. “She’s never really had one. I’m glad that you’re there for her. You can give her things that I may never be able to give.”

  I shake my head once, rejecting his words with all due respect.

  “Not anymore.”

  He doesn’t look surprised.

  “You do know that it’ll crush her if you push her away.”

  I nod.

  “Better to push her away now than to be the reason she ends up dead later.” Part of that was also meant for Victor to heed, but I may never know if he understood the hidden message.

  Victor leaves it at that and gestures his hand toward the tall, heavy wooden door behind me.

  “It’s good to have you back,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  Izabel stops me in the hallway lined by off-white walls and shiny floors. Victor walks in the opposite direction, leaving us to be alone.

  She waits until he rounds the corner at the end of the hall before she turns to me and says, “I know he probably threatened you because of me, but look, Fredrik—”

  “He didn’t have to threaten,” I stop her. “I told him that if you ever try to help me that I’ll tell him about it right away. And I mean that.” I hold my unwavering gaze on her.

  “But you’re…Fredrik, I’m afraid for you. I just want to help.”

  “And you can by staying out of my way and out of my business.”

  A flash of hurt and conflict passes over her face.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  I start to walk down the hall, stepping around her.

  “Fredrik. Stop. Please.”

  Finally I do, but only to let her get it all out, to say whatever’s on her mind now because it’ll be the only chance I ever give her.

  I stand still with my back to her.

  “I’m not going to let you destroy yourself,” she says with buried anger and not-so-buried determination. “I don’t give a shit what kind of face you want to wear—tell me to fuck off, I don’t care—but I won’t let you fall away. From us. From me. From yourself.”

  I turn around to face her with my hands folded together down in front of me, my wrists touching the fabric of my fine black suit.

  “You’re a little late for that, I’m afraid,” I say, turn around and walk away; the sound of my dress shoes tapping against the floor left in my wake.

  Chapter Thirty

  Fredrik

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Yanking back on the woman’s long, dark ponytail, I ram my cock inside of her, my hips thrusting powerfully against her ass cheeks, her hands grasping the hotel bed sheet in a fit of pleasure and desperation.

  “Holy fucking shit!” she says with one side of her face pressed against the mattress. She wrenches her bottom lip between her teeth as I slam into her harder, my cock swelling inside of her.

  She gasps, parting her lips, unable to close them. “Oh my god, please…don’t stop! Don’t fucking stop!” She’s nearly crying. I can feel the tension and anticipation tightening around my cock as if to keep me from pulling out of her before her explosive moment. I slam into her cunt harder and lean over and across her body, sticking my fingers into her opened mouth, hooking her cheek. Pulling back her ponytail with the other hand, her neck arches stiffly and awkwardly—if I pull any harder her neck might break. I thrust in and out of her violently, satisfying all of my demons, but not myself. Not yet. She begins to whimper, forcing her ass toward me so that she can take me deeper.

  A tear rolls down her cheek and discolors the sheet beneath her face.

  I stop and pull out of her when I sense she’s going to come and I stand up from the bed, my cock throbbing painfully against my lower stomach. I take it into my hand and work on it myself slowly to maintain, but decelerate my own climax.

  The woman, still with her ass raised in the air, lifts her face from the mattress and looks across the room at me as if I’d just punched her mother.

  I snap the condom off and toss it in the trash next to the nightstand.

  “Why’d you—”

  “Come here,” I tell her, jerking my head back once and taking a seat on the chair at the small table by the window.

  With slight protest on her face, she still gets up from the bed and does as I tell her. Standing naked in front of me with that perfect body and nicely rounded ass and curved hips, I really do want to fuck her some more, but that’ll have to wait.

  “Get on your knees,” I tell her.

  She does, and already assuming she knows what I want her to do, she takes my cock into her hand without my direction—gawking for a moment at the size, I suppose—before she begins to lower her mouth down on it.

  “Did I tell you to do that yet?” I ask her, looking down at her under hooded eyes and an even expression.

  She shakes her head, looking up at me with green doe-like eyes and with my cock still in her hand.

  I make her wait a few long seconds as I study her knelt between my legs, the way her ponytail rests against the center of her bare back, the heart shape of her bare ass. She looks the same way I imagined she’d look naked when I visited her at the diner and thought about fucking her.

  She never once lets go of my cock. She wants it and she doesn’t care where. She likes having it in her hand. And I don’t mind one bit.

  “Now put me in your mouth,” I say. “Slowly,” I add just before her lips begin to slip over the head.

  My cock fills her mouth, stretching her lips around it—also like I imagined. I tilt my head back and groan a little as she takes me into the back of her throat.

  I raise both of my hands to the back of my head and interlock my fingers as I watch her between my splayed legs. I’m turned off when she stops to apologize for scraping me with her teeth—not because she scraped but because she apologized. I say nothing and let her get back to work.

  But she does it again.

  I stop her mid-sentence, collapsing my large hands about the sides of her head and forcing my cock into the back of her throat. “I don’t care if you scrape me, sweetheart—I like the pain.”

  She gags a little as she takes me all the way in, but doesn’t stop, or protest the force I continue to put on her head. I hate those gagging noises, but they excite me just the same—her discomfort, her pain, the burning tears in her eyes.

  I’m a sick bastard.

  Finally, I explode in her mouth, throwing my head back dangling over the back of the chair, my fingers wound tightly in her hair and holding her down so she’ll swallow.

  And she does. Like a good girl.

  We rest for a little while. I never get up from the chair. I just stare toward the wall, thinking of no one but her, though I can’t remember her name. Kate. Kira. Kali. I hope she doesn’t ask.

  S
he comes out of the bathroom, parading herself toward me. Shy, not-so-shy, whorish, innocent, dominant, submissive, a bitch, a sweet girl—she’ll be anything I tell her to be.

  And that’s precisely why I don’t like her much.

  I had moderate hopes for this one before I brought her here.

  Trial and error, Fredrik. Trial and fucking error.

  “Why don’t you let me ride your cock,” the girl whose name surely begins with a K says with a grin in her eyes.

  Why don’t you just ride my cock and not ask my permission?

  “Yeah,” I say aloud, “I want you to ride my cock,” and then I tear open another condom package from the nearby table and put the condom in her hand.

  “Put it on me first,” I tell her.

  Again, she does exactly what I tell her, and—I admit—she does it well, sliding it down on me with careful precision, making sure to cop a feel of my balls when she’s done, before letting go and standing up between my opened legs.

  Placing her hands on my shoulders to steady herself, she steps over my lap and straddles me on the chair. I’m hard again in under a second. I close my eyes softly when I first feel her warm, wet and swollen nether lips rubbing against my shaft.

  She fucks me for a while. And when I’m tired of sitting on the chair, I bend her over the end of the bed and fuck her there for a little while more. And when I’m tired of that, I fuck her against the wall. And when I’m tired of standing, I lay with my back against the bed and let her ride me some more before finally giving in and telling her to sit on my face.

  A couple of hours later, I’m coming out of the shower when she says to me from the bed, “Ready for another round?” with a suggestive smile plastered all over her very beautiful face.

  I barely look at her as I step into my boxers after picking them up from the floor.

  I glance at my Rolex.

  “Sorry, but I have somewhere I need to be soon.”

  She pouts. “Ah, come on. I’ll make it worth it. I promise.” She pats the mattress with the palm of her hand.

  Stepping into my dress pants I button them and then buckle my belt.

  “You’ve already made it worth it,” I say evenly. “But I’ve really got to go.”

  While buttoning my gray dress shirt and tucking the ends into my pants, she gets up from the bed and walks naked the short way across the room. She steps right up to me and places her hands on my chest, but I turn sideways away from her and finish up the last buttons.

  I notice her shoulders rise and fall with one heavy, disappointed breath.

  “Well, you mind giving me your number?” she asks. “I’d like to see you again.”

  I slip my arms down into my suit jacket and then put on my long, black winter coat.

  “Sorry, but that’s not going to happen,” I say.

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  I don’t look at her as I make my way to the door.

  “The sex was great,” I say, turning to look back at her and hoping to leave her with her dignity, at least. It was never my intention to make her feel used. “But we won’t be seeing each other again.”

  She just stares at me with a slack mouth and her eyebrows bunched in her forehead.

  And I walk out the door.

  ~~~

  I only came back to Baltimore for one thing and it certainly wasn’t the sex.

  I drive to the opposite end of town and park beside a dumpster on the side of a convenience store building, locking my doors with the press of the button on my key ring when I get out. The smell of gasoline from the car filling up at the pump fills the air. I walk slowly toward the front double glass doors and push one open to the sound of an electronic bell alerting the clerk of a new customer entering the store—the clerk doesn’t look up from whatever he’s doing behind the counter. I step into the heat to the stench of fried food, dirty mop water and bleach. A young boy with scruffy blond hair comes out of the restroom from a door on the other side of the drink coolers and zips past me, pushing the tall glass door open with all the weight of both of his skinny, boyish arms. A burst of cold air rushes inside. I watch the boy from the door for a moment as he runs toward the car at the pump, swings the back door open and jumps inside. Seconds later, the car pulls onto the street and drives away.

  I turn my focus back to Dante Furlong working behind the counter.

  Making my way toward him, I take my time, nonchalantly scanning the various overpriced gas station junk foods and individually wrapped snack cakes and tiny cans of bean dip displayed on outside shelves. Everything is lined in an orderly fashion. The floor has been mopped recently. Dante has been hard at work—on something other than selling heroin and letting addicts suck him off for a fix.

  Finally, Dante looks up.

  He does a double-take.

  The smile that only got as far as his eyes flees at the sight of me. He sucks in a sharp gasp and falls backward against the shelves displaying various medicines—two-pack Tylenol’s and Advil’s and cold and flu capsules—and merchandise falls from the brackets into a scattered mess against the floor.

  “It’s you!” He points a shaky finger at me. “Look, man, I haven’t…I-I haven’t done anything since that night! I swear it!”

  He got himself a pair of upper dentures, I see.

  Still stumbling backwards into the shelf as if he could walk right through the wall behind him, more merchandise ends up on the floor until finally he realizes he has nowhere to go.

  His entire body—dressed quite decently in a nice white shirt and a pair of clean blue jeans—shakes feverishly. His beady blue eyes seem as big around as my fists can be; the wrinkles and lines around them and in the corners deepen and stretch and pulsate. His curly black hair has been washed and doesn’t look oily underneath the burning fluorescent lights above us in the ceiling. He has certainly changed since I tortured him two months ago.

  I step the rest of the way up to the counter and stand with both hands buried in my coat pockets. Dante’s eyes move back and forth from my face to my hands, likely worried about what I might be hiding in them behind the fabric of my coat. Needles to shoot him up with? Pliers to pull out the rest of his teeth? A knife to cut out his tongue, perhaps? A gun to put him out of his misery?

  None of the above.

  “Look, I didn’t say nothin’ to no one,” he stutters with one hand facing me, palm forward. “I haven’t said shit. I haven’t did shit.” He looks around the store. “I’ve got myself a real job here. It doesn’t pay jack, but it’s an honest job.” Then his voice rises and cracks when I still don’t respond: “I haven’t done anything!”

  “I know,” I finally say. “I’ve been keeping tabs on you since I let you go that night.”

  Looking down at a box of gimmicky gum on the counter, each wrapped individually in clear plastic wrappers, I point and say, “Do you mind?”

  “Sure, sure, yeah,” he says quickly, gesturing both hands at the gum. “It’s on the house, man. In fact, you can have anything in this fuckin’ store you want.” He smiles squeamishly.

  I take a single piece of gum from the box and remove the plastic wrapper, popping it in my mouth.

  “I see you got new teeth,” I say and then start chewing.

  He nods rapidly. “Y-Yeah, I uhh, well there’s a nice dentist on the other side of town who helps addicts tryin’ to get clean. I didn’t actually lose my teeth because of Meth or anything”—I smile and continue to chew—“but he helped me. Got me a denture for real cheap and put me on a payment plan. I’ll have it paid off in a few more months.”

  I slip my hands back inside my pockets.

  “How would you like a set of permanent implants?” I ask.

  Dante’s eyebrows draw inward confusedly.

  “I don’t know what you mean?” He’s extremely nervous.

  I think I smell urine.

  I make a face. “This gum tastes like shit,” I say.

  He nods rapidly again, uncertain and still fearf
ul of my every movement and word. “Yeah, kids like that stuff….”

  “Well, Dante,” I go back to the important matter, “I have a job proposal for you. That is, if you’re interested in hearing it.”

  Silence.

  He doesn’t know what answer he wants to give, but is sure he knows what answer I want to hear.

  He opts for the in-between.

  “Umm, I’m not sure I understand.”

  Bringing the little plastic wrapper up to my lips, I spit the gum back into it and then toss it in the trash can pressed against the counter on the floor.

  “I’ve been giving it some thought,” I begin still in the same casual manner I walked in with, “and I believe you’re the right kind of man for the job. You can pay off those dentures with just a fraction of your first paycheck and afford dental implants within a month. Of course, you’ll be put through some tests—medical, among other things—and like with any honest job, you’ll be subject to piss tests every now and then, but I think you’re the right man. What do you say?”

  “Umm, well”—he scratches his head—“what exactly is the job? I mean, uh, I guess I’d want to know what was expected of me…well, I mean, if it’s OK I know before I agree?”

  Yes, that’s definitely urine I smell.

  I pull out a cashier’s check with his name on it and put it on the counter, sliding it into his view.

  He glances down nervously, having a difficult time looking only at it with me standing close enough to grab him when his guard is down.

  “Holy fuck…,” his voice trails off and finally keeping his attention on me is put on the backburner as the five figures next to his name dance in his line of sight.

  He takes the check into his hand as if to make sure that it’s real, then finally he looks back up at me through those blue eyes wide on display underneath his curly black hair.

  “You can make that much every month,” I say. “As long as you perform at the job to my complete satisfaction and approval and as long as you stay clean and don’t fuck up.”