Duet for the Devil

by T. Winter-Damon

  “& you kind’ve figure, what the fuck? the ends justify the means…? Shit, Frank, I suppose I should knock you for it, but I can’t get too riled up— I know what a pain-in-the-ass that bureaucratic funding can be…, &, anyway, you’re a private dick, now, so—”

  “I hope you can understand what I’m up against,” Frank says. “You say you’ve read S&SV, but do you have any concept of what it’s like, I mean, following this friggin’ killer, actually, a family of killers, cutting a seemingly erratic path of bloodshed back & forth across the continental U.S., how many lives? how many lives, Rios…? & I’m the only one who’s stayed on their trail, connected the colored map pins of their mega-violence, always just a step or two behind. Always a few days, a few hundred miles too late! Thirty-odd years, man, thirty years & a job & a marriage & a family…& for what?”

  Rios can sense the rumbling geyser of pain beneath the surface of Frank’s words, & seeks to steer them back to their original conversation: “Oh, yeah, the local metro boys think that this guy, Jorge…Jorge Sota, was murdered on his sailboat somewhere off the coast of Texas in the proximity of Galveston Bay. That’s a supposition only, as the boat hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “Sorry…” Frank says, “& he had ‘7734’ carved into his chest?”

  “Plus a couple of other really nasty twists—they’d severed the fingers from both hands, as well as his chota & his huevos…& they stuffed ’em in the poor bastard’s mouth, his privates, that is.”

  “Was this Sota connected? I mean, the fingers & the genitals is a typical ‘message’ from the drug lords—”

  “Or a political thing. Metro Houston is supposed to be covering both possibilities…”

  “Okay. Looks like we’ve got four random slayings—one double homicide—all victims of your serial killer whose signature mark is ‘Seven. Seven. Three. Four.’ Or ‘hELL.’”

  “Yeah, that’s about all we have,” Rios agrees. “That & the killer’s blood type—O positive—from the sperm deposits in the first female victim—”

  “Pretty fucking thin,” Frank declares. “Heh? Didn’t the killer have sex with Mary Gruber? I thought the report—”

  “That’s the weird part, Frank. See, she was butchered up so bad that proof positive of forcible entry will be pretty hard to establish, I mean, shit! You saw the report! He.…he cut himself his own custom cula, if you follow…? This guy’s a goddamn butcher, man! We got pubic hairs for a possible match-up. & we’ve got semen, but… it’s just too weird! The lab boys made a number of chromosomal changes, MUTATIONS in his DNA-patterning! & there was this unidentifiable blue serum in suspension with his semen…”

  Frank is impressed with young Rios, & he is glad to have his help. The kid is sharp & he is likable.

  “We’re still hauling in known sex offenders, pervs into S&M, rapos, peepers, flashers, recent mental releases, but ZERO so far, nada, all we’ve got is a big goose egg.”

  The light catches Frank’s St. Michael’s medal again, prompting Rios to ask: “You’re not Catholic, are you, Frank—?”

  “Nope. WASP, born & bred.” Frank says. “No. Not Catholic. Just superstitious, I guess. That, & it belonged to a war buddy of mine, Sanchez. Always used to say, ‘negro con mi suerte,’ black as my luck, en ingles, eh, Rios? Man, & if that wasn’t the goddamn truth, too…”

  “That’s weird synchronicity, Frank, St. Michael is the patron Saint of policemen.”

  “I’ve been told that—” Frank replies.

  They are sitting at a table in Miami’s Seahorse Saloon. A country & western group mounts the bandstand. When they tear into their first shit-kicking tune, Frank says, “No offense, but how about we find another watering hole? As much as I normally dig those cryin’-in-your-beer tunes, I’m just not in the mood tonight. You know any clubs that cater to perverts? Sometimes it helps me get a line on something if I can absorb the right atmosphere. lt’s like ol’ Elijah pickin’ up the scent, you know?”

  “There are a lot of hangouts that fit that bill,” says Rios, downing the rest of his beer. “There’s The Unicorn’s Horn, real popular with your flaming faggots, & then there’s The Black Hole, god knows what genius came up with that name! & the ever-popular Skin Divers’ Delight which has nothing to do with flippers & fins.”

  “Hhhhmmm…” Frank muses.

  “Oh, yeah, & the internationally infamous Bellmer’s Dolls & Club Cuir Noir, a chic leather bar for the mixed punk-&-perv set, & probably your best bet for the hardcore S&M & B&D crowd, with the upscale elite of the one-percenters, the badass biker pushers & enforcers. Plenty of coke & crystal meth & poppers, you know the scene, right?”

  Frank laughs as they depart The Seahorse Saloon. “Might as well hit ’em all, eh, pardner?”

  [ 75 ]

  In the filthy hovel of his rented room in a Miami barrio, Slice delights in his control over the assassin. Pynchon is a pawn at his command. The New God’s dominion is absolute. All he has to do is concentrate, bring that blue fire in his mind into laser-like focus, & the zombie with a Zombie does his bidding. & the best part is, I feel what the zombie feels. His finger pulled the trigger but it was me blowing away those two chumps. & now I’m gonna fuck the luscious Lucy Nation with his cock, then we’ll cut her up & feed her to the sharks.

  Slice’s penis is leaking a blue serum-like substance but he pays no special attention to this. His mind is in Pynchon’s skull, moving Pynchon’s strong body toward the lair of the rich bitch cunt aboard Hellraiser. “I’ll show you how to raise real Hell,” he says aloud.

  “Ahh so oo ow to aise eel el,” Pynchon says as he bursts into Lucy’s stateroom.

  She jumps to her feet, spilling her glass of scotch-on-the-rocks, & says, “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be—”

  He gives her a hard backhand across the jaw.

  The harsh slap echoes through the opulently appointed velvet-&-satin of the cabin like cheap sound effects in a Kung Fu grade Z quick flick with a budget one snow-jolt short of a full kilo…

  She falls backwards over the bed, her legs sprawling aslant so that her transparent panties are visible in the soft light of the cabin. “You son of a bitch,” she hisses, “what’s wrong with you?” She rubs her stinging jaw & notices the blood stains on Pynchon’s shirt.

  He is leering at her, unzipping his slacks, licking his lips with a hideous tongue.

  “Look here, Pynchon, if you think this turns me on, you’re crazy. Now get your ass out of here right now…”

  He pulls his cock out of his pants & pulls his pistol from his shoulder holster. Leaning over the bed, he probes the lips of her sex with the silencer-fitted muzzle of the Zombie.

  In the barrio hovel Slice chuckles & says, “Juicy Lucy.”

  “Dewcy ‘ucy,” says Pynchon.

  Lucy knows she has only seconds before he sticks that gun barrel inside her. As a diversion she says, “I don’t want that, I want you inside me.” She cocks her knee as if opening herself wider in lewd invitation, then rams the ball of her foot as hard as she can into the soft, vulnerable glandmeat of his testicles. With her left hand she grabs the gun, bending it with such force that his trigger finger snaps with the unmistakable sound of breaking bone. The stainless-steel-nailed fingers of her free hand slash out, glinting coldly under the pale wash of the stateroom’s incandescent lighting, slicing five deep parallel gashes across the assassin’s right cheek, splattering them both in a hot shower of bloodrain droplets… The gun slips out of his hand, & he doubles up & falls on the bed. Lucy seizes it & rolls off the bed, landing on one knee & pointing the gun at Pynchon’s head.

  Feeling searing pain in his groin & face & finger, Slice thrashes on his sweat-soaked mattress, holding both hands to his vicariously-injured crotch. He pulls back a little from Pynchon’s mind, & wills his pain to go away…

  ««—»»

  Pynchon lifts his face to the woman with the gun, & an expression of confusion appears there. Through clouds of pain it dawns on him tha
t this is no dream. It is a living nightmare. & in that dawning he becomes aware once again of the devastating presence within him.

  This dawning is The Dawn of the Dead, not the rosy reassurance of morning. The Blue of mourning, he thinks… Then a blue fog blows in & blots out everything…

  A thousand questions are running through Lucy’s mind. As much as she wants to kill this bastard, she wants her questions answered even more. She keeps the gun targeted on him as she picks up her phone. She knows her so-called bodyguards must be dead, so she has to call for backup, then call Professor. Maybe he knows what the Hell is going on.

  Having isolated & disposed of his pain, Slice fingers his cock, this time noticing the blue discharge oozing from the tip of his penis, but he doesn’t stop to ponder this new phenomenon. He grins & proceeds to carry out his new plan.

  “Don’t move,” Lucy orders. “Unless you want to die.” She calls an unlisted number. It is answered after the first ring. “Send the backup team to my yacht, & a cleanup crew. I think I’ve got a wet scene here.”

  She watches in disbelief as Pynchon stands up on the bed & begins to masturbate. He rolls his mutilated tongue around his lips & makes ape-like noises. “Stop that, you crazy son of a bitch,” Lucy says sharply, holding the Zombie with both hands.

  Pynchon suddenly leaps off the bed, flying toward her. She squeezes the trigger. There is an abrupt ffftt, & the slug hits Pynchon in the chest. He falls to the floor at her feet, crumpling as if in SloMo. Lucy backs away. Pynchon looks up at her with a warped grin, & crawls toward her legs, reaching for her. She squeezes off another shot. Ultra-close range: ffftt… Cool blue as dripping icicles.

  The 9mm slug shatters the bridge of Pynchon’s nose, spraying fragments of bone/cartilage/flesh in an obscene rotten-tomato burst that flashes split-second reminiscences of total-grossout H.G. Lewis’ mega-gore, his face implodes as the 9mm literally blows his mind, the battered & foreshortened slug exiting via the back of his brain-pan, fragging the room with bloody rinds of skull & chunks of grey matter drenched in pools of crimson but eerily glowing with neo-Dayglo traceries of kinetic blue, sizzling & crackling on some subliminal wavelength of perception, far below the radar range of rational thought…

  “Jesus Christ,” Lucy Nation whispers.

  Then, regaining her legendary permafrost composure, she adds aloud (stoking her own bravado…?): “Shame about that jacket—top-grade Argentinean cowhide & the finest custom tailoring that dago craftsmanship can offer…” Lucy bends over the corpse of the assassin, tugging wistfully at the butter-soft leather of his right lapel. “…& I went & drilled a hole right through the motherfucker!”

  Lucy lets go of the corpse’s collar & unbends, straightening herself until she’s standing upright, surveying the aftermath of the devastation. “Gonna be one Helluva cleaning bill for this goddamn bloodbath, too, you can bet your ass on that—”

  She smooths the filmy, translucent fabric of her crumpled blood-spattered negligee with her slender, stainless-steel-nailed fingers, acting out a subconscious ritual of tidying…

  “Sort of a new wrinkle to what you said Rupert told you the other day, about ‘Whenever you’re around there’s a shitstorm brewing… & something about a goddamn bloodbath when he doesn’t see you…?’”

  At the moment of Pynchon’s death, Slice pulls all the way out, having no wish to experience the flight of the assassin’s soul. He stands & goes to the dirty mirror on the wall. No sweat that he underestimated Lucy Nation. He will deal with her in person. She saved him the trouble of killing Pynchon, didn’t she?

  He studies the face in the mirror. Blue splotches have appeared on his face & chest. One of the splotches on his face is raised, tinted bluish-purple like a particularly vicious blood blister. He touches the blister with a fingertip. No pain. I’m changing on the outside, too. Good. A God should look like a God. Fucking A!

  [ 76 ]

  Hawkes & Rios stumble into Metro-Dade Police HQ, trying heroically to avoid broadcasting an APB to the night-watch staff that their current operational capacity is a readout at DUI equivalent. Frank checks his Rolex. It’s 11:02. In double image.

  Rios is faring only slightly better.

  Both feel the urgent need for showers & a change of clothes. They reek of smoke & sweat & beer. But that’s no problem. It’s the sense of bone-deep dirt, a stale sliminess like morning-mouth but crusting every inch of skin of hair of nails: the festering psychosomatic pus that their passage through the gauntlet of local sleaze pits & kinko clubs has induced by contagion. Sodom & Gomorrah Revisited. In rainbow neon. In a slithering ever-midnight fastlane of black leather, freshly oiled & spiked & studded. In a sideshow riot of freaks & geeks & carnal carnies & hype hucksters & rat-brained rubes of every unimaginable perversion & persuasion…

  In their passage has also been seeded a bonding. Somewhere along this six-lane psycho highway between the signposts of Aphrodite’s Bearded Clam Dive & Rattan Ranch & Zorba’s Greek Escorts, the false skin of formality has been shed­—

  “Drop the ‘Mister’ shit, will you— Makes me feel like an old man. Call me ‘Frank’ or ‘Hawkes’ or ‘Hawk.’ Anything but ‘Mr. Hawkes’…”

  “Sorry…Frank.”

  [ 77 ]

  Rupert leads the rube, this cracked-out Heavy Metal wacko in his badboy black leathers, down into the subterranean pleasure pit of Mermaid’s Inn. “I’ve gotta attend to a recent checkout—” Rupert tells this high-wired hearse-heaping handjob artist.

  He motions to the brute with the shaved head & mascara & purple eyeshadow who just flowed out of nowhere. He looks like some demented, skull-shaved gene-splice between G. G. Allin, Marilyn Manson & Genesis P-Orridge… “Hey BellaDonald, show our own Mr. Death, here, to THE CHRIS WILDER ROOM, okay—”

  “Man, that’s pretty fuckin’ tacky, Dude, y’know, like I can dig this shit! Y’knowwhatImean…?” so-eloquently articulates this self-styled theatric Mr. Death. Death Burns. Satanic Deathrocker of the chart-bustin’ thrice-gold-record’ed Wicked King Wicker, lead singer & composer of such family (Manson, maybe…?) favorites as “Cum-on BA-B Lite My Pyre” & “Na-Palm Nannies” & “Burnt Orphans O-vr & E-Z.”

  (a classic punk, straight out of The Undertaker & His Pals)

  “Yeah. Tacky. That’s choice. Real choice.” The brutish BellaDonald giggles in a glass-shattering falsetto, “P-unnn-yyyyy! I like that almost as much as the one Rupert always tells me: ‘Is it live? or is it Mammary-wrex…?’ He just can’t go in the JERRY BRUDOS ROOM without wisecracking about it—”

  “Don’t tell me, Dude— that’s where y’ do all yr tit-jobs, ain’t it—? Brudos wz th’ fucker that kept fuckin’ up his plastic knocker paperweights. Right? Like I’m not fuckin’ stupid, I mean I’m inta this shit. I read about it…”

  BellaDonald leads the crack-snapped lead six doors down the corridor, & opens an iron door on the left. They seem to wade through oceanic depths in the slow-pulsing flicker of cobalt blue light.

  “There she is, the girl of your dreams—” the brute says, pointing to the skinny little Cuban cooze dressed in a white cheerleader’s outfit. The sweatshirt is emblazoned: “BLUE DEVILS.” The pleated skirt is the shortest the fastlane-jaded Mr. Death has ever seen—the flared hemline doesn’t even come close to covering her barely hair-fringed pubes. Her wrists & ankles are manacled. She’s chained with her limbs forming a crude “X” suspended from floor to ceiling.

  “Hey, Bitch, you always hang out like that—?” Mr. Burns is quite elated at his sudden flair for double entendre.

  “SsssEEEeeittt! Dude! Where th’ fuck you getcher extras—Fidel Castro Junior High—? I know that little twat sure ain’t gettin’ paid scale! & she goddamnwell as fuck ain’t no Tom Savini F/X special!”

  “May we recommend—” says BellaDonald, & gestures like some brain-burned maitre D’ to the small table just to the side of the spread-eagled youngster. The circular top is made of translucent blue glass. & the pedestal is a slender & seductive merm
aid, sculpted from a single chunk of polished bone. There is a silver tray on the table, with an even half-dozen tubes of SUPER GLUE.

  “Go ahead, Kid—get yr fingers sticky!”

  “OOOoohhhhhhhh! Holy fuckin’ SHIT, Dude! I’ve always wanted to do some little prick-teasin’ groupie… JUST LIKE THAT—”

  “No fuckin’ wonder you fuckin’ charge six big bills for this!” Death says, lifting the girl’s sweatshirt up around her outsplayed shoulders, exposing her small, budding breasts with their large, dark, fear-swollen nipples.

  “Some guys start with their lil’ sweetheart’s mouth or eyelids,” Rupert comments. (He’s just entered the room unnoticed in all of the excitement.) He pauses for emphasis: “Other guys like to start by gluing her cunt lips shut.”

  “Now, there’s some glue sniffin’ I could really get into!” says badass Mr. Death.

  “Had one guy with a real knack for it—managed to seal & peel some sixteen-year-old runaway I think it was forty-six or forty-seven times, him & a coupla buddies slidin’ it to her in between…”

  “That’s what y’ call ‘RAW SEX’ by friggin’ Jeee-Zusss n’ Mary!” BellaDonald quips to the rube.

  “Hhheeeee. Hheeeee. HHhhheeEEEEE!” Death Burns is comin’ apart at the seams, the eggshell of his sanity cracked as a stoned Humpty Dumpty. He’s got his hand down deep in his leathers, playin’ pocket pool with that jutting cue stick.

  “Yeah, ‘RAW SEX’—” the brute echoes, giving Mr. Looneytoons in Leather another deliberate push off that narrow brick wall of SANITY…

  Rupert continues, “…before she finally kicked from the shock & trauma! Fuckin’ amazing shit happens around here!” The girl screams. An Ella Fitzgerald imitation. Very convincing. Authentic although purely accidental. So piercing that the blue glass top of the table shatters…