"Those were the days, man," he told himself, wearing a goofy smile. He peered at his reflection in the rearview, brushing his dark hair out of his face. Crow's feet from his cold blue eyes betrayed his age, as did the lines on his forehead. Even the sides of his hair were starting to gray. Soon he'd be too old to fuck without taking a pill, and too ugly to find a decent piece of strange even if he did. Soon he'd be shitting and pissing in adult diapers, sucking all his meals through a straw.
Ain't that a bitch, Tony said. Best to live while the living's good.
Getting old was a bitch.
Katie could be a bitch, too, Gavin thought. The way she'd acted when he fucked her last night, after she practically begged him to fuck her, it was--
Uncalled-for, that's what it was, Tony told him. Hysterical. Just like a fuckin woman.
"Just like a woman," Gavin repeated, feeling Tony's influence like a thick finger probing in the steaming meat of his brain. "Maybe she was right about crossing the line, though. I mean, maybe I was a little too rough."
You just took what was yours, Tony assured him, the dead lights of the dash peering into Gavin's soul. She's your wife. You wanna break off a piece, that's your right as a man.
"My right as a man."
That's the undeniable truth.
"Undeniable," Gavin said, pulling up to the grimy curb at Almond Street. The woman named Indica clicked over on high cork-heeled sandals. A violet vinyl skirt hugged her thick thighs tonight, her lower stomach fold obliterating its waistline. Jade jewelry dangled from a raw hole in her navel. A flimsy piece of leopard-print fabric barely concealed her tits.
Gavin shut off the van.
"Back again, huh, sexy? You musta got your GPS set on speed-dial."
Having a smoke a few paces behind Indica, a young Asian in latex thigh-highs chuckled as she exhaled.
"Do you know a guy named Tony?" Gavin asked. The girl by the wall raised her penciled-in eyebrows and dragged eagerly on her smoke a few times, remaining quiet.
Don't go asking questions you don't want the answer to, Tony warned.
"That some kind of innuendo?" Indica smirked. "Like 'If You Seek Amy'?"
Gavin had no clue what she meant, and didn't care. "Where's the dark-haired girl? The one with the lip piercing."
I'm telling you, man, you don't wanna go asking about me or that girl.
"It's called a labret," the other woman said on a breath of smoke.
Indica sucked her teeth and looked off. "You mean Lola. She ain't workin tonight." She turned her thick eyelashes toward Gavin. "But I can help you forget alllll about that skinny-ass bitch."
"Thanks for the offer. I'm just looking for some information. Maybe your friend knows something?" he asked, indicating the smoker.
Indica threw a dismissive look over her shoulder. "Got a taste for the Orient, huh? All right. I can tell when I'm not wanted." Gavin relaxed when she stepped out of the window. She sashayed toward another vehicle and another john who'd pulled up behind the van, while the smoker held up the wall, giving Gavin a sidelong glare.
"You know who Tony is, don't you?" he asked.
"Everyone knows Tony." She took a quick drag and exhaled. "That's why the other girls are avoiding your van like it's got genital warts."
"Listen, would you mind...? I have money." He took out his wallet. "I just want to know who he is. I need to know."
You aren't gonna like what you hear, compadre.
"Put your wallet away." She came over, leaned her elbows on the window. Squinting into the darkened van, she saw the back filled with soil bags and hand tools and littered with dark earth. "You sure you don't know Tony? You aren't friends with him or anything?"
"I bought this van from an old guy at a storage facility. I swear I don't know anyone named Tony."
The girl nodded, still wary. "What's with all the dirt?"
"I'm a florist," he told her.
"I guess I shouldn't be afraid of a big bad flower man," she said, faux pouty, and opened the door. Sitting in the passenger seat, she flashed him a somewhat shy look, then held out her small right hand. "My name's Kitty."
Gavin shook it. "I'm sure you understand if I don't tell you mine."
Kitty smiled. She pushed Eject on the tape player and a cassette popped out. "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? What is that? Country music?"
Gavin started the van.
Well, hello, Kitty, Tony piped up a moment later. You know, you're prob'ly just gonna get horny again in half an hour. You get it?
Gavin ignored him.
"There's an alley where I take guys sometimes," Kitty said as they pulled away from the curb. "A few blocks over. It'll be more private there."
"I just want to talk," Gavin assured her.
Talk about the first thing that pops up, Tony quipped, and laughed uproariously.
"Sure. Talk. Fuck. Long as you've got cash, I'll walk on all fours and bark like a dog if you want."
"Now there's an idea." The words came out before Gavin could stop himself, Tony's thoughts from his mouth.
Atta boy! Guess you got a pair, after all!
Gavin flashed Kitty an apologetic look. She merely smiled.
I love a woman who knows her place, Tony mused.
"Pull over in here." Kitty pointed to the dark steaming mouth of an alley. Gavin pulled in cautiously, worried he might tear off the passenger side mirror in the narrow passage. Kitty rose to peer out her window. Her ass, a perfect heart caressed by black leather, was a distraction to driving. It was a distraction to rational thought, though rational thought had pretty much flown out the window the moment Gavin met Tony.
"You're good," she told him, and Gavin eased the van through.
Oh no, sister, Tony replied for him. I'm far from good.
"You know, you kinda look like Tony," Kitty said, scrutinizing Gavin's face in the dim light once he'd parked the van. "Cuter, though. Tony had a goatee."
Probably means a Van Dyke, Gavin thought. Not many guys have true goatees these days. He'd had a Van Dyke himself, in his younger days, but Katie had convinced him to shave it off a few months before the wedding. The clean-shaven look suited his face better, anyhow. Made him feel like a different man.
"You knew Tony well, did you?"
"We fucked a couple of times. Cheap asshole, though. Always trying to gyp me. Said I should be used to it since 'my people' bargain all the time. I'm third-generation American, I don't know what the fuck he was talking about." She flipped her sleek black hair with a hand. "He likes dark-haired girls. That chick you were asking about, with the labret? I haven't seen her around for a while."
"How long?"
"Like a month or so."
"And how long since you've seen Tony?"
"Six, maybe seven years." She shrugged. "Tony's the type of guy when he doesn't come around, you count yourself lucky. Why you wanna know so much about him, anyways? He owe you money or something?"
"I'm just curious who was in the driver's seat before me." Gavin patted the vinyl between his legs. Kitty took it for a cue and eased over onto his lap before he could stop her.
"You smell better than Tony did, too. I swear he must have bathed in Aqua Vulva." Straddling him, she leaned in to Gavin's ear. The heat of her breath prickled his spine as she nibbled on the lobe. "I'll call you Daddy," she told him, raising up on her knees and rubbing her small, hard tits over his dry lips. "I'll be your Mommy, if you want that, too," she whispered, tugging on his belt buckle.
The idea repulsed him, all of it, but when he searched his heart for a reason not to let her keep going he found it empty. Already crossed the line, he reasoned. Katie said so herself.
He helped her with his pants. His cock sprang up, and Kitty took him into her mouth. Her small, slender fingers matched the rhythm of her lips, mashing his balls against his bunched jeans. Kitty expertly reclined the seat without removing her lips from him and followed him down, taking him deep into her throat.
Gavin stretched out his limbs,
ecstasy swallowing the whole world. But the feeling they were being watched nagged at him, and eventually he had to open his eyes. Tied up and gagged, the eyes of the dead girl in the passenger seat locked on his. She turned her gaze to the back where more bloodied, beaten women sat and kneeled, straight slash wounds festering on their skin, worms and beetles skittering and squirming in the moist earth.
Each woman was stripped to her panties and tied up with nylon rope. Each one as dead as Gavin's stepmother.
It was when he saw Madison Davis among them, the grieving widow, that everything fell into place.
Thaaaaat's right, the voice in his head purred--so obviously his own voice he wondered how he hadn't noticed until now. You been tuned into WTNY longer than you care to admit. Now don't touch that dial, compadre. We're gonna play all your favorite hits tonight!
Gavin stared into the bound girl's sorrowful eyes while the cold hands of the dead roamed his body, showing an eagerness no woman had ever displayed, not even Katie, and while Kitty sucked, a smile crept onto his lips. He grabbed the whore by the hair, thrusting her head down until she gagged, her eyes widening as he unburdened himself into her willing mouth.
His orgasm racking through him, Gavin felt free. He felt powerful. He felt like himself again, and he knew exactly what he had to do.
He didn't need his alter ego to tell him his next stop was home.
❚❚
EARLIER THAT NIGHT, Katie acknowledged Gavin's emergence from the workshop with a nod from behind her computer desk. Her book was speeding along at a good clip. Gavin ordered a pizza, giving her a wide berth since what she referred to as "the incident" the night before, and went upstairs to shower. He came back down smelling of fresh soap and the new cologne she'd bought him, and while the scent awakened her urges, she couldn't help but feel an undercurrent of disgust.
Katie ate her usual two slices in front of the screen with a desk lamp illuminating her corner of the open concept living room. Gavin polished off the rest watching the final season of The Sopranos, belching loudly when he was full.
"Could you turn it down a little?" She didn't want to be a bother but it was hard to concentrate with all the macho bullshit onscreen. Instead, Gavin turned the TV off entirely and got up from the couch.
"I'm going for a drive."
Katie watched him go. He'd never been as aggressive as he'd been last night, and she'd already decided to forgive him. She knew he didn't have the balls to try it again after what she'd said. They needed to put an end to the subtle hostility, to spend some time hashing it out--all night, if that was what it took--but her deadline loomed, and she returned to the incessant blink of the cursor. In her current state of mind, Katie found it difficult not to make her protagonist seem too put-upon.
That sort of behavior doesn't just happen out of the blue, she thought, the words on the screen blurring as she chewed the ragged left temple of her glasses. He must have been thinking about it for a long time.
She thought of how gentle he'd been before, almost timid, and had to admit that until last night she preferred the new Gavin's assertiveness, at least in the bedroom. She could do without the mood swings, the late night drives, the blaring music from that awful van, and the all-around acting like a sullen, spoiled teenager.
I guess that would make me his mother, Katie thought dourly.
"That's not even the least bit funny," she told herself, and slipped her glasses back on, wondering what her editors would think if her straight-laced detective protagonist suddenly and brutally murdered her husband halfway through the book.
The words wouldn't come. The truth nagged at her. Did he rape me? Was it rape?
She'd said the word "no," that much was clear. She'd told him no and still he'd choked her until he finished, using her like a fuck doll and leaving her to clean herself off. It didn't sit well.
I can't sit well, she thought, shifting painfully in her chair. I'm all cut up inside.
Thinking this brought a conversation with Gavin's stepmother to mind, in which Deanie revealed a long-kept secret, describing Gavin's adoption in a florist's metaphor. "He's a cutting, dear," Deanie had told her. "Snipped from his birth mother's garden, and transplanted into wonderful new soil. You have to be delicate with a cutting. They take patience, and nurturing. They're more fragile. They have to grow new roots, you see. They have to hold the soil." With this Deanie had leaned in, her breath smelling of the cinnamon candy she favored, which Katie had sneaked in to the hospital room. "But a hard wood cutting must be totally submerged. That's why Julian and I never told Gavin what I've told you today. And why he must never know, my dear..."
Naturally Katie had told Gavin soon after Deanie passed, and he hadn't seemed at all surprised. It had seemed to her that he'd already known, though he never seemed to show any interest in looking up his birth parents. He'd loved his stepparents dearly, but it was clear from what little he'd told her that they had been strict. When his mother was still living, he recalled phrases like "Spare the rod, spoil the child," and "This is going to hurt me more than it'll hurt you." After her death, it was easier to remember the good times, the loving times.
Why did I think of that just now? she wondered.
Katie eyed the photo of the two of them at Machu Picchu, snapped at the summit overlooking the ruins. Gavin's smile, partially obscured by that silly goatee he'd finally shaved off before the engagement photos, reminded her of better days, happier days. He told her she had saved him on that trip. She hadn't understood, and he'd never explained. She supposed she should have asked, but she'd assumed he had meant it metaphorically.
How could he hide so much anger?
She remembered thinking he seemed like a different person the night she'd sat on the cold floor of the workshop, the night his appetite became ravenous.
He was acting strange well before that, Katie reminded herself. Ever since he brought home that fucking van.
Katie flicked the word processor aside on a whim, and brought up the web browser. She typed in "vehicle registration lookup," and clicked the first link. She entered everything she knew about the van: make, model, year, license plates. When it asked for her credit card information, she provided it.
She drummed her fingers on the desk, awaiting the results.
What it revealed drew the breath out of her.
Before Gavin, the van was registered to a Tony Gleeson--but the address provided was 223 Dayton Street--this house, their house. Before that, Tony Gleeson had been living at the Leslies' bungalow with Gavin and Deanie and Julian, who had died when Gavin was twelve. The registry listed no prior owners.
"Who the hell is Tony?" she wondered. It didn't take long to realize Tony was a fake name, that her husband had been hiding a lot more than just the anger he'd shown in the bedroom the night before. That at one point in his life before her, he'd slept in a dirty van and from the look of that old, stained mattress had done a lot worse.
Headlights swept across the living room. A moment later the van rumbled into the driveway. Katie closed the browser hastily and brought up her manuscript. Minutes passed while she chewed her glasses, waiting for Gavin to come in through the kitchen door.
She got up, tired of waiting.
Katie called out his name as she stepped out into the carport. The van idled there, thick exhaust eddying around it like mist the color of graphite. Someone sat in the passenger seat, and though she could tell it wasn't Gavin, in the dim evening light and the haze of exhaust she couldn't make out who it was--but from the small, slim figure, Katie thought it was a woman.
She crept toward the van. "Gav?"
Cold metal struck the back of her head. Blinding white pain shot across her vision. Katie cried out and fell forward, darkness overtaking her as she reached out blindly toward the van to catch herself before she hit the concrete floor.
❚❚
THE BITCH WOKE with blood clotted in her hair.
His cuttings had whispered a warning in his ear, pawing at his chest,
groping him, running their hands through his hair: the bitch wanted to take them away from him, and they wanted to be with him forever. There had been many flowers before but these were his only cuttings, snipped from the hard soil of prostitution and drug abuse and transplanted into Tony's Eternal Garden. They were his for all eternity, freed from the burden of lives filled with nothing but pain and misery. His birth mother had named him Tony and they were his cuttings.
This was his van.
This was his legacy.
A seventh flower had joined their Garden tonight: Kitty's cooling remains still graced the passenger seat, the wimp's sperm congealed in her esophagus. Tony had been obliged to strangle her himself because the wimp still had cold feet, and the bound girl--not one of his victims but his birth mother, the young prostitute Julian and Deanie Leslie had adopted him from shortly before her untimely death--had howled in agony, but Tony had made the wimp silence the filthy cooze with the back of his hand.
Soon his Garden would welcome an eighth--but first, the bitch had to bend to his will. She had to tremble in fear of his power like a flower before the hurricane.
Gavin was kneeling before her when Katie's eyes snapped open. He looked insane, a wild man stripped down to nothing but a pair of argyle socks, fingernail scratches marking his chest and stomach. He was erect, the head of his cock crusted with dead sperm. In his left hand he held a pair of gardening shears. A small, olive-skinned hand and wrist dangled from the passenger seat, ugly jewelry and painted nails, the first two torn at the quick. Katie saw this and struggled against the ropes binding her bare arms to her ribs, wondering what had happened to the man she loved, wondering where her clothes were, crying out with all of her breath as she tried to tongue away the gag from her mouth.
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