The Hinky Bearskin Rug

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Now, for God’s sake! Her eyes closed.

  And in he came, long, thick, impossibly long, because he must be bending clear underneath her bottom, his chest pressed against her back.

  With that deep penetration she heard a crackle like thunder. Her eyes flew open. The sky was sapphire clear. The moon pulled at her blood.

  Please, she begged.

  One more time, he did the impossible. Inside her his cock swelled, moving ever so slightly, not hard enough, not far enough. She arched again, squirming against his belly, whining. Then he shrank a bit, oh, God, no. Then his cock swelled. And shrank. She felt herself stretching, felt the blood pulse in her temples, felt her eardrums pop, as he pulsed larger and smaller, beating like a heart inside her, until she tightened around him.

  Oh boy. Here it came.

  Just as she was about to beg, his hot hand settled over her mound. A clever finger pressed down on her trigger.

  She spasmed. His cock pulsed inside her. Thunder crackled, and a hundred miles of frozen lake convulsed, sending shards of ice high into the air, then falling, and frozen moonlight melted in slivers all over her thawing heart.

  o0o

  Afterward Jewel lay on her back, feeling the throbbing sink and fade while sweat dried on her skin.

  Randy seemed asleep.

  Reluctantly, she thought about his suggestion.

  Was that really why she’d started her rowdy college fuck-a-thon? Because Liddy had died, abandoned her, just like her parents and her grandparents? Would she have horndogged through the past seven years if he hadn’t taken her to bed? If the family lawyer had been a woman? Would she even have sold the farm?

  Maybe not. She might at this very moment still be wearing out her strength trying to keep the damned thing going, her back sore, her hands cracking from the contact with wet steel and the teets of stupid, needy cows.

  To be fair, would Liddy have been able to distract her with anything besides sex?

  She smiled at memory. He was so dry and funny, and he had enjoyed her youth and her smart mouth so gaily. He took this shell-shocked kid and coaxed her back into her humanity.

  Randy spoke critically of a “price.”

  But Liddy hadn’t made it seem like payment. He’d reminded her how to be alive. He taught her to feel her own pulse pounding and the sap rising in her veins. He’d told her to live gratefully.

  Don’t you ever do it for anything but the joy, my girl, Liddy had said. The world runs on sex. There’s no life without sex. Make sure you have fun at it.

  Liddy had taught her everything she ever learned about sex, the good parts anyway.

  Until Randy came along.

  She listened for Randy’s steady breathing, felt his dense body weighing down the mattress beside her, and thought, What the hell have I gotten into here?

  Chapter Six

  Twelve extremely irritating hours later, while she was at BB wrestling with a copy machine the size of her car, Ed phoned her.

  “Heiss, get your ass up to the Kraft, right now. And call your partner.”

  “I’m in the middle of copying these damned proposals. Eighty pages, double sided, two hundred copies, collated and stapled. Oh shit, another misfeed!”

  Just then Maida Sacker walked past, holding a coffeecup as if it were the Sunday offering basket. As Jewel’s cussword rang out, her head swivelled. She leaned into the copy room and shook a finger. “Language, Ms. Heiss.”

  “Myeh myeh myeh,” Jewel muttered after her.

  “I’m not kidding. This is an emergency.” Ed sounded upset.

  “Okay, okay. Let me get this d-arned thing piled up so I can figure out where I left it when I come back.”

  “Now. I need you here an hour ago. I need you yesterday.”

  “Okay!”

  “Bring your driver.” Ed ended the call.

  Jewel frowned at the dead phone. In the three months Randy had been around, this was the first time Ed had expressed a desire for his company. “Why do I think this is not gonna be good?”

  o0o

  Clay and Randy met Jewel and Ed in the basement of the Kraft Building.

  “What is this place?” Randy said.

  Jewel never came down here. The basement was used as a lair by the kind of departmental retirees who had no life to retire to.

  Clay wrinkled his nose. “Funky smelling.”

  “It’s the locker room of the old cop shop,” Ed said. “Ain’t been PD property since before the Kraft was demolished. We kind of took it over.”

  “Not me,” Jewel said, looking around fastidiously. The walls were painted that turkey-turd tan you always saw in cop shops, and the ranks of tall, battered lockers were bilious green. Flyspecks dotted the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. “Do you suppose this grime is from, like, all eighty years before the Kraft came down?”

  “Gross,” Clay said.

  “Never mind. Take a look at this.” Ed led them to a corner in front of a mangled locker door. He paused dramatically, looking over his shoulder at them, his black caterpillar eyebrows working. Then he opened the locker and leapt back as if it were full of rabid weasels.

  Jewel came to stand next to him. “What—?”

  On the floor of the locker was a pile of magazines.

  The top shelf was packed full of crumpled white paper bags.

  And in between, gyrating slowly like some kind of X-rated ballerina in a music box, a small, glistening, naked female figure danced, wiggled, simpered, beckoned, and silently giggled, like a burlesque movie with the sound turned off. She stuck her forefinger in her mouth and pulled it out slowly, sucking on it with pouty red lips. She raised one knee and stroked herself against her other thigh, arching her back, lolling her head, swinging her wheat-blonde, old-fashioned curly mane so that it played peek-a-boo with her heavy breasts. She had Marilyn’s lush figure, and apparently a complete lack of shame. She was eighteen inches high.

  Jewel was shocked, but it was actually kind of sweet. There was something hilariously wholesome and innocent about her sexual gyrating, as if the girl next door had just found out what sex was for and couldn’t wait to show her boyfriend.

  Clay whistled behind Jewel. “What is it? Three-D projection?”

  The girl in the locker seemed to hear him. She cocked her head, looked straight at Clay, and laughed, shaking her mane at him, dipping and wiggling her breasts as if to say, You silly boy, come over here and stick a twenty in my—

  “Holy. Shit.” Ed sounded flabbergasted.

  Jewel said, “It’s a poppet. You get ’em in the really bad places.” She’d never seen one this close before.

  “Pittsburgh,” Clay said.

  “Shit,” Ed repeated.

  Jewel agreed. With a poppet in the Kraft Building, there was no longer any question whether the place was hinky enough to be condemned. The feds had shut all of Pittsburgh down for just a handful of these things.

  Randy reached past Jewel and casually dipped his fingers through the figure. Jewel gasped. The poppet’s image swirled and deformed as if he had scooped up some honey. Then, when his fingers were gone, she slowly reformed into her old shape.

  “Magic,” Randy said.

  “Urk,” Ed said.

  Clay backed up. “How did you find this?”

  “Remember O’Connor?” Ed said to Jewel. “Used to do immigration until he got too fat to move around. Then he phoned taxis from home.”

  Jewel remembered. “He’s a wreck.” O’Connor was the kind of drunk who never actually fell down, but he was never sober.

  “He used to be a good investigator,” Ed said. The Department was loyal to good people. “He came in once a week to collect his check. Sometimes he sat down here all day and played cards, shot the shit with the older guys. Smartened up the young kids if they was smart enough to let him.”

  “He’s helped me a couple of times,” she admitted. Then she noticed the past tense. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. He was found dead in his apartment this m
orning. One of the guys thought he might of left some gin money in the locker, so he bust it open.”

  Jewel cracked her first smile all day. “Let me guess. Sayers?”

  “Yeah.” Ed snorted. “Poor unlucky fuck.”

  A laugh escaped Jewel. She watched the naked girlie-girl in the locker do indecent things with no more props than her own outrageously-proportioned body. “Did Sayers stroke out, or just stroke?”

  “Talk like a lady, dammit.” Ed frowned. “Sayers came up and told me, like he should. What I want youse to do is deal with this. Then go over to O’Connor’s apartment and see if there’s any clues. Find any more of it.” Raptly, he stared. The tip of his tongue touched his lower lip. Then he shuddered. “Just deal with it! And come up to my office when you’re done.”

  When he’d stumped out, Jewel looked at Clay. “Any ideas?”

  Clay shrugged. “How should I know? Does it move from locker to locker? Can we just shut the door and forget about it? How did it get down here, anyway?”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “This is a pocket zone,” Randy stated.

  “Got it in one,” Jewel said.

  Clay watched the show. “Is it alive?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Randy said crisply. He shut the locker door as much as was possible — somebody had pried it open with a crowbar, destroying the combination lock in the process — and opened the adjacent locker, which was empty. Jewel watched with fascination. Randy ran his hand over the wall shared with the infested locker, then tapped it lightly, as if testing for stickiness. Then he opened the pocket zone locker again and stared expressionlessly at the small, very womanly figure inside.

  “Well, Sherlock?” Clay said.

  Ignoring Clay, Randy squatted and gingerly pulled out one of the magazines stacked in the locker. He handed it behind him.

  Jewel grabbed it before Clay could. “Girls, Giggles, and Garters. What kind of magazine is that?”

  Clay took it from her. “Tame porn.” He flipped through, and she caught a glimpse of bare skin, black lace, red lace, bold eyes, pouting breasts. “Very, very lame, very tame porn.”

  “O’Connor was kind of a sweetheart,” she said absently. She watched Randy tease a crumpled white bag out of the top shelf of the locker. Standing, he was much closer to that dancing thing in the lower compartment.

  Jewel saw the poppet reach for him. It put its hands right through his jeans.

  “Ohmigod! Randy!” Jewel shrieked.

  Randy looked down and backed away, far too calmly in her opinion.

  The girl in the locker pouted, looked sly, beckoned, and flirted at Randy with girl-next-door blue eyes.

  Slowly he shut the door on her. “We must keep people out of here for now.”

  “That’s a big yes,” Jewel said. “Did you feel anything?”

  Randy frowned. “Hard to say.”

  “Where the hell did Clay go?”

  “Here,” Clay said, coming back into the locker room with a roll of gray duct tape. “Will this do?” He tore off a strip.

  Randy sealed the gaping steel edges shut. “Temporarily.”

  “Let’s get upstairs,” Jewel said. “See what else Ed knows.”

  o0o

  Ed was sitting behind his desk when they came into his office, but he jumped up, looking relieved. “Shut the door. You’re okay?”

  “Peachy,” Jewel said. Her skin prickled. “I don’t think it can get any worse.”

  “It’s already worse. That douchebag Bing Neebly called today. OED is interested in the Kraft.” Ed looked at Clay. “Office for Economic Development. You know how we got this building?”

  “Sure,” Clay said. “It got torn down and then it came back like magic.”

  “Don’t say that word,” Ed said automatically. “And after all the legal shit settled, the city gave it back to Consumer Services, because everybody else was scared to move in. If you’d a seen the old quarters in River North, you’d understand why the Commissioner said yes. Like a sardine can.”

  “Shit,” Jewel said, comprehension flashing on her. She turned to Clay and Randy. “This land is worth a lot of money, developed. But like this? It’s just home to dopey old Consumer Services. OED must be slavering to get their hands on it.”

  Clay said, “So I don’t get it. What’s the scam? We have use of the building because everybody’s scared because it, like, magically reappeared after demolition.”

  Jewel winced. “Don’t say that word.”

  “But now that it seems to be safe, this OED wants to take it over and sell it,” Clay said.

  “Right,” Ed said.

  “But it isn’t safe.” Clay pointed at the floor and made a va-va-voom shape in the air with his hands. “So we won’t lose the building after all.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jewel said. “OED could call in the feds and have them condemn the building, thinking maybe they can nip in and cash in.”

  “Only with a poppet in the basement, that would backfire,” Ed said. “If it’s too hinky, the feds don’t let you reuse the property. Could end up a bajillion-dollar hole in the ground.”

  Jewel scowled. “I can’t believe they would do that. You can’t get taxes out of a hole in the ground. Da mayor wouldn’t thank OED for taking a property that rich permanently off the tax rolls.”

  “You don’t know Bing Neebly,” Ed said gloomily. “He used to work here, eight-ten years ago. Mumped freebies and peddled influence and sold favors all day. Everybody hated him. Then Taylor comes in and reforms the department. Neebly cried woof to da mayor and moved over to OED just in time to avoid indictment. He’d put us out for a bent nickel.”

  “Everybody would lose,” Clay mused, with an all-too-familiar, there’s-money-in-here-somewhere-for-me look that Jewel dreaded. “The situation has possibilities.”

  Jewel shook herself. “Let’s get over to O’Connor’s place.”

  “And bring your hinky radar,” Ed said, pointing at Randy.

  Randy looked eager. She began to think he might earn his keep after all.

  Chapter Seven

  Merntice gave them the address of O’Connor’s apartment, and Jewel phoned ahead to the landlady, who sounded hysterical. The address was a yellow brick two-flat on north Kedzie in a formerly Bohemian neighborhood. The landlady and her husband met them on the front steps.

  “Thank God you haff came. My husband had heart attack,” she said. “I don’t know vot to do!”

  “I did not have a heart attack. You had a heart attack when you saw that thing. ’Cause you’re a prude,” her husband said.

  “We’re not paramedics, ma’am,” Jewel said. “Do you want us to call you an ambulance?”

  “No, no, ambulance already came and took away Mr. O’Connor.” The landlady flipped her apron up to cover her eyes. “Go look. Up there. I give you the key.”

  “I’ll show ’em,” her husband said.

  “You vill not! It’s disgusting!” his wife said. She retreated behind the screen door of the first-floor flat.

  Her husband gave a growl and mounted the stairs to the second floor with the key in his hand and Jewel’s team on his heels.

  “Whoa,” Clay said, first through the door. “Funky.”

  Jewel pushed past him. It was beyond funky. The bachelor smell of old sweat socks and stale beer thwapped her like a county-jail pillow in the face. Magazines and newspapers were piled everywhere. Girlie posters wilted on the walls in the August heat. Jewel wouldn’t have sat on the sofa for money, though clearly it had been O’Connor’s favorite spot.

  Over the funk, she smelled a sweet, flat, musty odor she recognized from hospitals, the smell of death. O’Connor had died here. She remembered him as a shapeless old fart hanging around the coffee station upstairs, and then, later, never getting above the basement lair where the other senior investigators gathered to play cards. He’d always winked at her. She hadn’t minded.

  “He was a great reader,” Randy said, reaching for a ma
gazine on a stack.

  “Don’t touch that!” she said too late.

  As he lifted the magazine, another poppet sprang up. She looked just like the first one, blonde and wholesome, with innocent blue eyes, and a very naked body that she twisted and stroked. Jewel wanted to look away, but the poppet was too — too much. She felt herself blushing. She wished the landlord would stop leering at the damned thing and go downstairs.

  “More smut,” Randy said, leafing unconcernedly through the magazine. He turned it sideways, tipping his head at the fold-out. “Remarkable.” He flipped past the centerfold.

  Jewel eyed the poppet nervously. “Will it hurt us, do you think? Hey, Lord Perv. Can we do some work here?”

  He looked up. “This is abysmally badly written.”

  Clay turned from picking over the piled bills on a huge wooden spool table. “You’re reading the porn?”

  Jewel rolled her eyes.

  “Aubrey! You are coming down here!” the landlady screamed from the bottom of the stairs.

  “You can go now,” Jewel said to the landlord. He went.

  Randy still couldn’t get over the stories. “Moreover, this is grossly improbable. One would suppose, if they had nothing but sex to write of, they could make it plausible.”

  Clay said, “That’s that lame porn again.”

  “What makes it lame?” Jewel said, to talk about anything except the teasing, flaunting pin-up poppet.

  Clay said, “It’s tame. It’s old-fashioned. It’s, like, porn for prudes. Nipples! Big whoop.”

  “And unlifelike drivel to boot.” Randy rolled up the magazine, stuffed it in his back pocket, and squatted to face the poppet. “Nothing unlifelike about you, is there?” he murmured.

  Jewel squinted at him. “This from the guy who did me on the porch of the Field Museum in the snow by moonlight?”