I taught her that move, a voice in Lisa's head reminded her. A second later and my arm would have been in pieces. There was an element of pride in that; there was also an element of terror.
Mona was turned away from her, curled into herself like a babe in the womb, pillow muffling the violence of her cries. Lisa just watched, helplessly aware of just exactly how helpless she was.
"Mona," she said softly, tiptoeing to the edge of the bed. "Mona, baby, I'm sorry I scared you." She sat down gently on the mattress, her eyes never leaving Mona's arched and painfully spasming back. "And I want—"
"DON'T TOUCH ME!" Mona shrieked suddenly. Her body writhed over to the far side of the bed, still facing away. Her sobs, unmuffled, were as loud as the scream.
Lisa was on her feet before she knew she had moved, backing away from the bed and into the doorway. "I . . . I'm sorry . . ." she managed to get out, her own tears returning to haunt her. "I'll be in the . . . the other room if you need me. . ."
Then the power of speech was beyond her, too, and she stumbled back into the living room. She landed on the sofa face first, using the cushions to muffle her own sobs while her thoughts spun relentlessly forward.
Don't touch me. Lisa knew those words quite well. Oh, yes. Don't touch me. That had been her message to the world for the twelve months following good ol' Roy and Gordy. There'd been a thousand miles of terror to crawl through before she could even submit to a woman's touch. And even then, the voice had still been braying in her head: don't touch me, don't touch me, don't touch
The words ignited hatred in Lisa, hot and cold as an icicle impaling her heart. It was directed at the faceless men who d done this to Mona. It was directed back across the years at Roy and Gordy, dispersed throughout the ages at every man who ever so much as contemplated rape.
And it was directed, with surprising strength, at Paula Levin.
Yeah, right, she hissed at an imaginary Paula, who her mind's eye had made even blockier and uglier than life. Now's a good time to talk to her. Kick her while she's down. She might just snap; she's got enough rage and pain. Make a good little soldier out of her. Bend her to the cause. Never mind her heart.
You ever been raped, Paula? She was aware that her mind was getting catty. So fucking what? I doubt it. God only knows why feminism became the issue for you. Couldn't make the football team? Couldn't make the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
She told herself to shut up; this was getting out of hand. But she couldn't shake the certainty that Paula was every bit as much of a user as the male supremists she rallied against, the sluts she labeled traitors.
And she wondered what kind of dirt Paula had, blanketed over by her self-righteous morality.
Diane Beekman's opinion of Paula Levin was a bit more dispassionate, and quite possibly a bit more accurate. Being ugly and obnoxious was no picnic, after all; intelligence only made it worse. Diane had a pretty good idea why Paula was the way she was.
Diane, on the other hand, knew all about being desired.
Daddy had desired her like crazy.
Right up until the end.
Diane was standing at the heart of Hell's Kitchen. Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street formed an enormous concrete cross beside her, bustling with maggots both on foot and on wheels. Junkies and dealers and perverts, mostly male, surrounded her at the curb.
She hoped that they would follow her, one and all.
The light changed, and the little green WALK sign illuminated on the north side of Forty-second. Her pace was brisk, despite the cargo strapped to the inside of her coat. The garish lights of Show World were directly before her, attention-grabbing as the pink center of a Hustler centerfold. She moved toward it, grinning.
Waiting for the pink to turn red.
Show World was New York's foremost sleaze emporium, with four stories of jack-off entertainment for the lonely, loveless man-about-town. Floor number 4 featured live sex shows, mostly boring. Floor number 3 hosted an infinitude of booths where girls danced or talked dirty while pathetic men greased the weasel. Floor number 1 contained much of the same.
At this time of night, those three floors would be closed, and all the working girls would be gone. Which was perfect.
Floor number 2—the ground floor—was the one that she wanted.
She went in through the Forty-second Street entrance. The Show World Bookstore splayed itself out whorishly before her. There was sign at the door that boldly proclaimed UNACCOMPANIED FEMALES NOT ADMITTED. It failed to daunt her. She'd been in there twice before.
Enough to scope it out.
She had no problems with the man at the bookstore counter. With her heavy winter coat and boyish features and boyish haircut and jaunty Stetson, she could as easily pass for a pretty boy as a cute and adventurous girl. Either way, it didn't matter.
She walked through the store, letting her gaze dance along the wall to her left. Lots of videotapes and big glossy-covered magazines. Most of them featured big dicks in or on their way to one or more feminine orifices. She clocked them of in her mind as she moved: blowjob, blowjob, blowjob, straight fuck, blowjob, blowjob, anal, anal, blowjob, and an interesting triple penetration.
The effect was simultaneously titillating and droning. One thing about porn, she told herself merrily, you can love it or hate it, but you can't help but react to it. At the same time, the endless repetition of it was like a local anesthetic to the crotch.
The fantasyland inside one's mind is where the real action is.
In her own fantasyland, the sight of all those cocks in mouths triggered the inevitable memories of Daddy. How many hundreds of hundreds of times had he forced her to perform that act? There was no way of counting. They were like the rows and rows of magazine covers, blurring into each other like grains of salt in a shaker.
And, as always, she was biting it off the hot blood in her mouth.
But no. The explosions were better. The explosions were more real. For every dream of biting one off, she had blown of a dozen more in real life.
And that was better. Yes.
Oh yes indeed.
The guy at the token booth that led to Show World proper was just a bit more of a problem. It wasn't her femininity; it was the fact that she'd brought in her own twelve-ounce can of Pepsi, sheathed in a brown paper bag. "You can't bring that in here, baby," he informed her. "You wanna Pepsi? Get it outta the machine."
"Just let me finish it, okay?" she said. "I'll get my next one from the machine. I'm gonna be here for a while. She looked him straight in the eye as she spoke, unwavering. His gaze didn't waver, either, and for a second she was scared. The can was critical to the plan.
"It won't kill you," she continued, smiling. Who's gonna give a shit, right?" She gestured at the thirty-odd droneheads wandering from video booth to video booth. He followed her gaze, and nodded perfunctorily. The little green light of victory went off within her.
"Alright," he said, smiling back at last. He was a tall, skinny black man with a purple turtleneck sweater and junkie eyes. His teeth, when he smiled, were enormous. "But it still costs you a dollar to get in."
She slapped down a five and said, "That's how many tokens I want. Like I said, I'm gonna be here awhile."
The token black's grin increased. "You like to watch, huh, baby?"
"I love to watch," she assured him.
"Okay," he said, laying the requisite, tokens before her. "You need any help with that, you jus' let me know, okay?"
"I'll be thinking about you," she said, breathing the words and leaning close, "when I'm alone."
He laughed wickedly, appraising her. Not a bad laugh at all. "You crazy," he said.
"You don't know the half of it," she agreed, winking and scooping up the tokens.
Then she was beyond him, in the L-shaped corridor where the video booths reigned. They were the size of tiny linen closets: strictly one-man operations. A door. A seat. A blank video screen or two. And a series of token slots, allowing for two to four options.
As always, she couldn't believe how many ugly, lonely men were wandering the corridors around her. Even at this hour, there had to be thirty in all. It was, as always, pathetic. If she could have afforded to feel for them—if her capacity for sympathy hadn't died in the comfort of her own home, oh those many years before—her little heart would have bled by the bucketful.
As it is, she informed them silently, I'll leave the bleeding to you.
Then she turned her attention to finding the right booth for her own purposes.
There were so many. It was hard to choose. Since she wouldn't really be watching, anyway, some of the edge was of; on the other hand, there was so much that she'd never actually seen. The paucity of forbidden sights beguiled her. Should she go for the double bill of Tina's Sudsy Blowhole and Teenage Enema Queen, or opt for the more conventional interracial thrills of Plantation Owner's Daughter and Black Magic, White Bitch. Such a quandary. She could easily spend an hour agonizing over it.
But she had less than eight minutes left.
Diane finally settled on Daddy's Little Girl and Family Fuckathon; they were only too appropriate, and she'd never seen them before. She opened the door, confirmed that someone hadn't just left it open in the hope of finding a partner, then stepped in and shut the door behind her.
She liked the lock on the door. It was so convenient.
The first thing she did was slip $4.75 worth of tokens into Slot A and push the button (her last token was a souvenir). Then, in the clear light provided by Daddy's Little Girl, she opened her heavy coat and looked inside.
There were two more Pepsi cans inside, strapped carefully to the neighborhood of her belly, both ensheathed in rumpled paper bags. She pulled them and held them to her ear, one at a time.
They were both still ticking.
Good.
The insides of the cans were lined with C-4, your standard military-issue plastic explosive. On the black market circuit, scoring C-4 was as easy as scoring a lid of cheap Colombian smoke. She had turned the inner peripheries of the cans into doughnuts of death, the blasting caps nestled against them like fertilized eggs on a uterus wall.
Most of the rest of the cans were filled with regular black gunpowder, available at any decent sporting goods store. It was tight in Manhattan, but she'd found a place on Long Island that was more than adequate for her needs.
From there, she'd scored the rest of the materials down on Canal Street: a cheap wristwatch, a nine-volt battery, and some wire.
From there, it was a piece of cake.
Diane took a swig from the one real Pepsi in her hand, gave herself a minute to check out Daddy's Little Girl. The man looked old, the girl looked young, everything looked almost right. But the girl had ribbons in her hair, which Diane never did; and the man was fucking her from behind, which Daddy never did. He always wanted to look her right in the eyes, reinforcing the power he had over her. Daddy was not a back-door man.
And most importantly, they were missing the terror.
There had always been plenty of that.
The years of sexual abuse flashed back over her, filling her with the heat and rage that his memory never failed to inspire. She could see him through the eyes of a twelve-year-old. She could see him through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old. She could see him through the eyes of everything between.
And she could see him on the night that she had followed him from the Brandywine Inn. She could see him drunkenly stagger toward his metallic-blue '67 Plymouth Fury. She could see the back of his head as he drove, weaving slightly, down Interstate 81 at 3:45 in the morning.
She could see the brief flurry of sparks as her front bumper connected with the left-hand side of the Fury's ass-end, sending it hurtling through the guardrail and over the two-hundred-foot embankment to the rocks below.
And, best of all, she could see the explosion.
Diane Beekman snapped back to the present, and the objects ticking before her. A glance at her own watch told her that she had less than six minutes left. If she wanted to get any shopping done, she'd best get out of there soon.
She swigged the last of the Pepsi and slipped the empty can under her coat, where the bombs had been. One went into an outside pocket. The other one stayed in her hand.
The video clicked off, and Diane left the booth. There was a garbage can at the tip of the "L", almost overflowing. She gently deposited her first present there.
Then she rounded the corner and headed back toward the bookstore. The guy at the token booth was admitting a middle-aged executive . . .
. . . and it was Daddy, Daddy was back, his dead black eyes boring holes in her lungs to release the burgeoning scream . . .
. . . except that it wasn't Daddy, it didn't even look like Daddy, it was just some fat-headed jerk from off of the streets. A laugh welled up to replace the scream; she repressed them both, wiped the fresh cold sweat from her forehead, and started moving again.
She didn't know why she got those flashes sometimes. It was just that her mind was
(SHARP!)
like a monkey, she guessed. It liked to play tricks.
Sometimes, the joke was on her.
Chubby Face was still there when she reached the token booth. No more sales meetings for you, old buddy, she silently informed him, pulling the second bomb from her pocket. Won't your secretary be pleased.
Chubby Face wasn't paying attention. One of the great things about places like Show World was that nobody looked at anybody else. You were expected to be furtive, if anyone looked at her, they did it out of the corner of their eye.
There was another full trash can by the side of the booth. She placed the second bomb daintily within it, then moved back into the bookstore without a word.
The paperback racks were on her left now. The bondage section, in particular, caught her eye. There were a number of titles that she knew good ol' Paula would love: Mike's Dominating Ways, Sonjia Gets Hers, I Want All-Night Abuse!
Paula was so funny. Diane had been in the business for years, but she had rarely met such a tight-assed ideologue. Taking your politics seriously was one thing; most Movement people did that, at least at the hard-core level.
But to find such a combination of high intelligence and nonexistent common sense was a rarity, indeed. Her little Hitleresque antics had been transparent from the start, but they'd never been more evident than in the last conversation.
Paula and her cohort had decided that fifteen minutes was the proper evacuation time. Diane had begged to differ. Two minutes, she said, was just enough to get everybody's asses out of there. Anything more and they had time to find the bombs, call the bomb squad, possibly defuse the suckers. it increased the chance of her getting recognized; it increased the chance of the bombs never even going off at all.
But Paula had been adamant. It's the humanitarian thing to do, she had said. As if you give a shit what happens to those people, Diane had countered. We will do it the way I want it, Paula had affirmed, scowling authoritatively. And there will be no more discussion about it.
Which was true.
At least the second half.
"Paula, kid, you are a scream," Diane said to herself as she pulled the three titles from the racks and made her way to the cash register. A glance at her watch revealed that she had three minutes and ten seconds left. Plenty of time. She smiled as she paid for the books.
Then she took a last look at the layout of Show World, wishing she could film the moment as it happened.
The bombs she was using were two-step explosives. When the minute hand struck one-thirty, the blasting caps would set of the C-4. The resultant explosions would be enormous, most likely blowing the doors off every single booth on the floor. Better yet, though, it would ionize every dust particle in the air at the same time that it dispersed and ionized the highly-charged black powder.
Like charges repel. The black powder and dust would react very violently against each other, greatly magnifying the second wave of explosion.
<
br /> And also greatly magnifying the incendiary effect.
Anyone who didn't die instantly would burn to death in a maximum of fifteen seconds, their hair and clothing brilliant against their cindered flesh.
Nice.
Again, she wished that she could film it.
"Oh, well," she sighed, walking out the door and into the street.
The telephone began to ring.
Diane visualized the conversation as she crossed Forty-second with the light. Paula would inform the man that they had fifteen minutes. He would inform her that she was full of shit, they got threats like that all the time. She would insist that she was serious. She would launch into a polemic speech, and he would hang up midway through, if he lasted that long.
Diane's bus ticket to Chicago was in her breast pocket; her luggage was in a locker at the Port Authority. No sweat off her ass whatsoever. She tried to imagine Paula's face when the bombs went off, right under her ear. It was too funny.
There was a hot-dog vendor on the sidewalk in front of Port Authority. Diane ordered two, with mustard and relish, then wandered down the street to where she could look in the window of Show World.
The guy was still on the phone.
Wonderful.
She was just biting into the first hot dog when the bombs went off.
THIRTY-TWO
THE HOUSE WHERE JOHNNY LIVED
The ambulance was cruising south on Central Park West, siren undulating in frenetic, constant cadence. Billy couldn't see the red lights from where he stood, well into Seventy-second Street, but he could hear the screeching quite distinctly, cutting a deadly groove against the living night air.
He stood across the street from the Dakota, leaning against the wall of a lesser high-rise. He'd scored a wine-sized bottle of imported Fisher's beer from a neighborhood upper-class deli, and he swigged from it heartily. The night's events had whetted his appetite for something special, and he had something like cause for celebration.
The Cleanup Page 24