Love Me or Kill Me (The Cable Denning Mystery Series Book 2)

by James P. Alsphert

  “You can ride with me back to L.A. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on you so you don’t go off the deep end and get swallowed up by that city—"

  “—Cable, it’s past that! I’m in love with you—for God’s sake—love me or kill me—but don’t let me suffer like this!”

  I looked away and took a deep breath as I retrieved a cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes in my breast pocket. I didn’t know what else I could say. Jane had painted herself into a corner. I lit up and took a deep drag. “Again, thank you, Jane…that you should care that much…but as I said, I’m still nursing that thing in me that holds on to my heart like a bulldog’s grip and the only way I can numb it is with booze and smokes, evenings spent in memory and regret—"

  “—what about a good woman? I think that’s a hell of a lot more healing than alcohol and cigarettes—which will kill you anyhow.”

  “I can’t do it, Jane, maybe if you’d come into my life later—"

  “—fuck it, Denning! I don’t need you or anyone! I never did!”

  She turned and ran down the alley. I ran after her and caught up with her, grabbing her by the shoulders. She wriggled out of my grip. She was crying, her body rigid and she avoided my eyes. “Let me go, Cable. I’m gonna walk home to the Bluebird. I’ll be okay. I always am. Good luck, in case I don’t see you tomorrow.” Then she broke away and ran down the alley, the sound of her heels grinding the dirt under her feet as she disappeared around a corner.

  I went back inside to The Bucket of Blood. Cass was waiting patiently and I saw a knowing expression on her face. “She confronted you, didn’t she? I mean, about you and her.”

  “Yeah, something like that.” I looked around at the motley, noisy customers in the joint. I knew I would never step foot in it again. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  She took my arm and we went out into the cool night air. “Since this is your last night, can we—can we take a little ride—maybe down by the cliffs near Pirate’s Cove?”

  “Sure, why not?” We walked in the moonlight, this exquisitely beautiful young woman clinging to my arm. I opened the coupe door and let her in. I got in on the driver’s side and sat back, exhaling all the tension I had felt with Jane Slaughter. “Crap, Cass, why does life always have to do with sex, one way or another?”

  “Maybe it’s not just sex, Cable. Maybe Jane really loves you—in her way, the best way she knows how. I feel she’s sincere.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. She ran back to the Bluebird after I told her I couldn’t be her bed partner if she came back to Los Angeles with me.”

  “Oh, that must have hurt. A woman never likes to hear that—especially if she’s got her mind set on one particular man.”

  “Let’s just drive for a while,” I said, heading onto Main St.

  We drove to the cliffs of Pirate’s Cove, got out and stood at the edge, looking down at the shimmering sea in the moonlight.

  Cass turned to me and held my arm firmly. “I suppose it’s my turn now, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jane had a turn to pitch her ring into the arena of love. Now I guess it’s mine. I might surprise you, though. I might be bolder than Jane was.” Suddenly I was thinking of a way to escape, just run, anywhere, away from the emotional cat-and-mouse games people play. Even this spectacular babe holding on to my arm couldn’t stop that instinct in me from wanting to bolt, disappear into the night where no one could find me. I calmed myself by realizing it would all be gone tomorrow. I’d be on my way back to the city that bred me, turned me over daily like a bad coin, chewed me up, spat me out and took me back again the next day as one of her sons. What man had a greater love-hate relationship with that City of Angels than I had? Then I came back to the present.

  “Uh…bolder? I’m not sure what you mean, Cass.”

  “I want to be with you, Cable…while I’m still a mortal woman…to experience those feelings, like the helplessness that physical intimacy causes, taking over my heart, my life. I’ve always been so much…in control.”

  I took her hand and looked into those fire-warm eyes of hers. “As I told Jane, I’m very touched—not to mention flattered. You know, Cass, I’m kind of young in earth years, but I’ve learned a few things along the way. I learned that a man can never possess beauty—and you, young woman—you are too beautiful for words, too lovely for mortal men to know how to handle—I would get lost in you.”

  She reached for me and put her head on my chest. “Would you? Please get lost in me, Cable! So I can be lost in you and never want to know another man. Spoil me, seduce me, touch me…everywhere.”

  I broke away from her embrace as if what she said hurt me. But what it really did was bare my own nakedness and vulnerability. “If you were my lover, wherever we’d walk, men would salivate over you and plot ways to remove me from your life. Your exquisite looks would drive men mad from wanting to possess your body. And if my emotions and heart caught up with my body’s desire for you, I would only want to make you stay, possess you myself, own the essence that is you, that elusive wisp of warmth and mystique that makes men fight and die.”

  “So what’s wrong with that, if I felt the same? What if I fell in love with you? What if my own feelings became so human I would want to stay here on earth with you?”

  I took out a Lucky Strike and lit it up. I took a deep drag and let the smoke out slowly. “Then I would pity you…..pity you, because I would grow old and die right before your eyes and the young virile man who seduced you, brought you ecstasy in the night would become a creaky old man who complained about everything, and worst of all, he will have forgotten what it feels like to caress that beautiful, young dream who once upon a time slept by his side. Plus this guy you’re talking about, he’s selfish, insecure, unreliable—and looks long and hard at a pretty skirt, especially one that looks great in a low-cut sequined gown and sings romantic songs in the middle of the night in some smoky cabaret.”

  “But if I chose to stay mortal, I would grow old beside you—I would never leave you, Cable. There would always be something wonderful about you. The heart and spirit never grow old—do they?”

  “You don’t get it. In truth, no man wants an old broad hanging around him as he ages. His memory isn’t that bad. It’s a private world he retreats to, isolates himself from the outside chaos of youth and kids and war and trouble and pain. He’s had enough. He’ll fantasize about some young thing in a magazine or a signboard or someone in the last movie he saw.” I reached into my inner breast pocket and got out my silver flask of gin. I offered Cass a slug, but she refused, so I took a big gulp myself and put the flask away.

  She turned her face to the sky and moonlight lit up her perfect profile there on the hillside overlooking the sea. “I guess it’s like the sound of the surf. The waves are constant and seemingly forever. But it’s different water and different winds that cause it all to happen. Is that what you’re saying? Things look constant but they’re not?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Nothing is as constant as change, it is said…at least here. Even your mother would tell you that. Look what she’s gone through.”

  “I know my mother wanted you. But she knew that falling in love with someone is an illusion. She told me she could never possess you, so why start loving you?”

  “Smart woman. You see, I rest my case in front of you and the whole damn cosmos. I thought she was beautiful, intelligent, and sexy as hell. But I also knew she had a plate full of complications, not to mention eight kids who were now many thousands of years old.”

  “So…getting back to the present…why wouldn’t you want me?”

  I looked at her, touched her, saw her fine figure there in the moonlight. “I already told you. It has nothing to do with not desiring you, Cass. It’s my own weakness as a human. Who’s to say I wouldn’t fall in love with you and really get lost? I can’t afford that. I’ve been married to my career since I joined the police force. There’s no room for a fu
ll-time doll.” I looked out to sea. It shimmered in the moonlight, endless undulations rolling toward the shore. “Just recently, I buried the only woman I will ever be in love with—I mean really in love with. And that still hurts a lot, Cass.”

  “I’m sorry. I knew you were here to do some healing. May I ask you about this unique woman you loved? What was she like?”

  I put out my cigarette. “Adora was beautiful and simple, devoted and sexy, quiet spoken yet adventurous. I would have lived out my life being happy with her by my side. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone comes along and they just fit. Adora just fit. She was like taking in a fresh breath in the middle of a spring night, or walking into Paradise with the only person you’ll ever need. I don’t know…how do you explain these things?”

  Tears were trickling down Cass’s cheeks. “I see…thank you for telling me, Cable. I would never have known. No woman could hope to come close to what you felt for her, I can tell. So…I guess that puts me out of the running, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at her and squeezed her arm. “You were never in it, Cass. I knew up front you were the personification of the elusive dream men dream, that illusion they keep hoping comes true in every sense so they can own it. But as I said, it always disappoints. It’s far better to appreciate beauty from a distance than to complicate both lives by trying to possess what can never be possessed.”

  She looked luscious there in the moonlight and I was powerfully tempted to take her in my arms and forget everything I had just said. But it would not be true for me, and in the end, I was a truth guy. She turned to me and looked longingly into my eyes. “It’s been hard for me here on Earth. There just aren’t many Cable Dennings around—and you know how selective I am. Wouldn’t you know it, the only man who doesn’t pant after me and sell all he owns to have me—is the only man who refuses me. You’re right, this earth life thing is a perverse irony.” Then she sat on the grass and pulled me down beside her. “Could you not enjoy me as an appreciation of beauty—as I would appreciate you as intelligent, passionate, virile, aggressive, muscular and handsome? Why must we look beyond the present moment?”

  “Because, as I said before, your beauty is exceptionally rare…exquisite. I don’t know how I’d react if I was intimate with you. What if I went berserk or something? And why would I take something so beautiful and grind it into the dirt like every other lusting male does?”

  She laughed. “Put a sack over my head and pretend I’m ugly and make love to my body. I would give you that willingly, Cable.” Then she studied me carefully, sensing what was going on at the root of it all. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?"

  “Yeah, maybe I am, lady. Even with a sack over your head, your voice, your sighs, your cries and moans, the smells and tastes of you, your swollen and wet woman-hood, your heaving breasts—no, I couldn’t separate you from you. Would you want me to do that?”

  "No…I would want you to look into my eyes when you bonded with me and say nothing you didn’t want to

  say, do nothing you didn’t want to do.”

  I was getting a bit uncomfortable. “You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re talking each other into making love.”

  “Yes. And things are beginning to go that way for me, too. What choice do we have, Cable?”

  I got up, grabbed her hand and pulled her up to me. “Every day when the sun shines, Cassiopeia, I would think of this ideal woman who loved me and who one night I held in the palm of my hand, preciously. But the memory will not even be about something that might have been, but about that perfect beauty that glows—like the first time I saw you walk into that tavern. Sometimes those first snap shots are enough to last a lifetime, Cass. It’s like the star system that’s named after you—look into the night sky and long for it, Cable Denning, but you can’t touch the stars. And for me, I think it’s going to have to be…like that…”

  She put her arms around my waist and her head onto my chest. “How can I live without hearing that voice? When you talk, it comforts me, Cable. I can’t explain—but that’s the way it feels.” Then she unwrapped herself and brought her gorgeous face closer to mine. “So I’ll be this beauteous ideal locked up inside you—like—like some unattainable creature you just dream about when you get lonely?”

  “Well, not exactly. But close enough. Actually, that’s the biggest complement a girl can get…that I hold you so high that I would never want to despoil the perfect vision I have of you since the first night I saw you. That will live in me in a way no sensual earth experience can. That single vision of an ideal object of desire will still be in me beyond these years. And in my imagination, I’ll make love to her—like a god, lady.”

  “But in the meantime you’ll make love more easily to someone like Jane, won’t you? I know she desires you.”

  “You know I like Jane. I owe her one. She helped me out that night when I really needed someone to come along. But Jane’s wounded, sort of like I’m wounded, Cass. Two wounded people are unhealthy for each other. Before I can be with another woman, if you want to know the truth, I have a lot of healing to do—especially after Adora. What I didn’t tell you was that two years before losing Adora to leukemia, I lost my fiancée to a mad killer’s gun. So you can see, my romantic road hasn’t exactly been an easy one to hoe. I’m sorry, Cass, but I know the higher part of you understands.”

  “Oh, so does the lower part, Cable. It’s just that I can’t shut off desire like a switch. It’ll take some time. It’s the way I’m made. But thank you for being so honest with me and sharing what I realize you simply don’t tell just anyone.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome—and thanks for understanding.” I took her hand and we walked back up the hill to the coupe. In my head I was fighting with myself, hoping against all the stupid hopes in the world that hid out deep inside me there, that I had made the right decision. Experience with babes had taught me a lot. We don’t always make the right calls for ourselves. Sometimes you get lost in thoughts that aren’t even you and find yourself going back and forth like a ping-pong ball being batted by a mad player trying for a grand slam. Sometimes you make bad decisions. You might end up regretting a decision made years before. Hell, life’s a dice game anyway.

  CHAPTER 10

  LOVE ME OR KILL ME

  Jane Slaughter was nowhere to be found the next morning. From all that I could gather, she had checked out the night before and disappeared into the ethers of life. I was sorry. I liked Jane and would have been happy to help her find her way in Los Angeles. I knew dames like her would probably slip between the slats of society, falling further until either men or drugs or prostitution—or all of them—got a hold of her and she would die early in some dark alley one night, destroyed by the very society that bred her into the world. Or maybe not. There was always the hope that some secret stamina survived inside someone like Jane, an intelligent knowing that you could rise to better things. It was just that the Great Depression had taken away hope from so many. It was little less than a toss-up. And that was the lighter side of it. What if Gor’s thugs got a hold of her first?

  My destiny with Cassiopeia was another story. I kept hearing the music of Honey drift in and out of my head as we got ready to depart for L.A., like she was calling me back and when I got there, she’d still be singing at the Bella Notte as if nothing had happened. It was beautiful, nostalgic—and painful. But I had to hear her again, otherwise my heart would wrap up too tight and then shrink into nothingness. And that ain’t me, no matter what else. So I listened and cried inside and suffered.

  After Cass said good-bye to Art Beatle up at Nitwit Ridge, an unlikely trio rode back to L.A. with me. Cass sat next to me in Elisa’s coupe while Toggth rode in the back seat, mumbling all kinds of possible solutions to our current predicament: how to keep Gor off our trail and protect us from his widespread goon squads. Or worse, the inevitable confrontation I would have to have with him one day. I knew in my gut I couldn’t avoid
it. But I didn’t want to get Cass more involved than she was already. I knew also, that staying with me extended the possibility I might fall in love with her one day before she went back to her home planet—and she would fulfill that human young woman’s longing for sexual fulfillment by loving someone who could love her back in a way that was suited for both of them. On the surface, we made a great looking couple. I could never get over her beauty, day or night, she always looked naturally fetching, the kind of face you want to adore and kiss twenty-four hours and day—let alone the rest of her!

  “Now…your office is a deathtrap, Cable,” Toggth was saying. “If not for you, then for Cassiopeia. I’m sorry that Miss Slaughter has decided to go her own way. I fear for her. She’s a walking target for any of Cronus-Gor’s killers. Now they will kill her if they catch up with her. She’s no longer of use to them, and she knew just a little too much to be allowed to live. That’s how they think. Primitive, I know. But they are what they are.”

  Just then the rear half of the automobile lit up with a warm, yellow glow. Saturnalia’s brass orb hovered immediately next to Toggth,. “Mother!” Cass blurted out.

  “Good day, Saturnalia,” Toggth said. “Good of you to join us to help solve our strategic puzzle.”

  There was a silence. “Mother says hello, Cable,” Cass reported. “She says you’re brave and gutsy—or ignorant and bull-headed to go back to Los Angeles. But either way, she’ll support you.”

  I laughed. “Thanks a bunch, lady!” I grinned. “Seems unfair, though, that I’m out-numbered—three aliens to one gringo.”

  Again, a long silence put me into a state of feeling left out. What in the hell were they saying? I was wondering if I could develop that skill, when Toggth spoke up as Cass was nodding her head in the affirmative, quite excited and sad at the same moment. “I agree with Saturnalia’s plan—in most every detail. Here’s how she’s suggesting we proceed. We transfer the specific knowledge of the Fen de Fuqin directly into Cassiopeia’s consciousness. Then you, Cable, will no longer have it stored in your brain cells. Secondly, we’ll teleport Cass temporarily to a unique location near the Cave of the Seven Truths, in my dimension. Now, it gets sticky because we cannot hold the energy of either that information or Cass’s multi-dimensional body in that state indefinitely. At some point it will all revert. The God of Our Fathers knowledge will come snapping back into your brain because it is organically magnetized there—and even more risky, Cassiopeia will be shuttled out of my dimension—to an unknown destination. All we do know is that she must for now re-appear in a physical mortal body until Saturnalia has the strength and form to transmigrate her daughter into an astral state—and send her home in that vibrational form.”