by Edward Lee
“But at least I found out that the rumor is true.”
“What rumor?” he asked, unable to take his eyes off her terry-covered rump as she stood aside from the set.
“He’s hung like a horse. Nine and a half inches.”
Straker gulped again. That’s a third more than I got, the son of a bitch!
“But don’t feel insecure,” she went on. “What good is a gun that doesn’t shoot?”
“I don’t have anything to feel insecure about,” he insisted, now hating Dare even more for his endowment.
“I wasn’t implying that you do. It’s just real funny how men get all uptight about guys with bigger penises.”
“Hey, I may not have the Loch Ness Monster in my pants, but at least mine works.”
“Oh, I’m quite convinced of that. The toilet and wastebasket back at my other motel are convinced too.”
Straker reddened like a beet. She’ll never let me forget that one. She giggled again, then traipsed back and forth, sipping her drink, then coming back to watch the TV. Now Dare was doing one of his rants to the microphone. Woo this and woo that. Stylin’ and profilin’ Jesus, Straker thought, totally enshrouded in despair.
“Do me a favor, will you? And don’t take this the wrong way.” Quite suddenly, she sat on the floor before the couch. Right between Straker’s knees. “Would you rub my shoulders?”
Straker nearly spat out his beer. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”
He had to catch his breath; suddenly here she was, so calmly sitting between his legs, sipping her spiked Coke and watching the tv. Almost like… Like boyfriend and girlfriend. Like husband and wife, he thought. But that was nonsense, another errant fantasy, a 13-year-old musing about the girl next door who dated jocks. His fingers trembled like delirium tremens when he reached forward and touched her shoulders. He was oblivious now, he was elsewhere. He gently squeezed her shoulder muscles and nearly ejaculated when she moaned.
“God, that feels good,” she breathed.
Touching her warm skin sent Straker to another plane of existence. He wanted to cry, she was so beautiful. Her skin like damp silk, the soap-scent lifting off her, the devastating cleavage he could see as the towel stretched across her bosom.
I would do anything for you, he mused.
He knew that if he even so much as brushed his crotch, he’d come. No doubt about it. He was so hard now it hurt. So hard he thought his dick might bust out of his jeans and start to dance. His mind struggled for discourse…
“So what was the big revelation? What principle evidence did the Wonder Boy give you?”
“We know they go to a You-Store-It in Big Stone gap,” she said.
He didn’t argue this time—he was too pent up rubbing her shoulders. Her dry hair shined over his hands.
“I—” She propped her arms up on his thighs, laxed back till her head nearly lay in his crotch. “That feels sooooo good.” Was it his imagination or could he actually see her nipples distending beneath the bath towel? Don’t be an asshole, he told himself. She no more attracted to me than than to a pile of bricks. I ain’t got the muscles. I ain’t got the bleach-blond hair and the nine and a half inch dick. I don’t style and I don’t profile.Here was the closest he’d ever get to his dream: rubbing her shoulders. Straker doubted that he’d ever been more depressed in his life. Yet he considered it a privilege just to be able to touch her, just to knead her shoulders and have contact.
Beggars can’t be choosers, he reasoned.
She took another sip of her drink. “All this shit I’ve said about wrestlers being hot? Sure, they’re good looking guys but when you get right down to it, they’re all a bunch of assholes.”
Straker tensed. It was almost as if she’d read his mood like a psychic.
“They’re all the biggest losers you could ever meet. Selfish, pretentious, arrogant. They think they’re hot shit because they can dive off the ropes and pile-drive and suplex and bodyslam. They think that their big pecs and big dicks make them men. They’re not real men. They’re carnival freaks of the new age. Most of them can barely sign their names on their paychecks. There’s more to a man than a big cock.”
Straker kneaded on. Yeah, that Everclear was loosening her up, all right. “But you’re attracted to them. Admit it.”
“Sure. And are you gonna tell me that you’re not attracted to the average silicone-filled porn star or Playboy bunny? It’s the same thing only in reverse. All body, no brains. Most of these grapplers’d be cleaning the grease pit at McDonald’s if it weren’t for wrestling. It gets to the point where you…despise them, for wasting their lives on this charade. True, in a real fight, most of them could kick ass. Most of them could take on a pro boxer on the street and win—but what does that mean?”
Straker didn’t care. His balls felt big as cueballs; his cock was about to spurt, bust, and die.
“So you’re telling me that…” He paused, reflecting. “You’ve never had an orgasm with any of these guys?”
“Nope.” Her eyes closed against the attentions of his fingers. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” she went on. “If we weren’t both professionals…I’d want to—”
Straker froze. He knew what she was about to say, and in spite of his disbelief he even supposed he knew what was coming. “Oh, fuck it,” she dismissed. She stood up, dropped her towel, and straddled him on the couch. “What the hell, right?”
“Uh. Right.”
Straker came in his pants. He shivered beneath her as she pressed her breasts to his face. Her mouth opened over his, her tongue plunging. This was too much, too soon, but Straker wasn’t going to complain. She was an angel of flesh come to absolve him. Her arms girded him, squeezing, and she torqued him out flat on the couch, then indecorously grabbed his hand and planted it on her sex. Yep, he thought. She uses that hair remover for more than her legs. Her pubis was bald as a baby’s proverbial backside, flawlessly so. Not even a nub. It was fascinatingly erotic.
“You’re really turning me on,” her hot breath gusted into his mouth. “Put your finger right…right—”
Straker’s beeper went off in his back pocket. Oh for shit sake! What is this—Hill Street Fuckin’ Blues? She giggled in his mouth. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“Hell no!” he replied, roaming his hands over her. Then the beeping stopped. “See. Wrong number.”
“Do like you were—” She squeezed tighter against him, opened her legs. Just as his finger touched her clitoris—
“God damn!”
—the beeper went off again.
“I swear to God my clitoris isn’t connected to your beeper,” she laughed. She lounged back. “Go answer it. It’s probably someone from your office.”
Straker ground his teeth together and got up from the couch. “Collier, I should’ve known,” he said when he saw the number on the Motorola pager. He had to walk funny to the phone, and the recent deposit of semen only intensified the discomfort. He nearly punched holes in the phone when he dialed.
“What do you want?” he sniped when Deputy Chief Sidney Collier answered. “Do you have any idea what you—”
Collier didn’t lolligag on the other end. “Shut up and listen. Luntville police—rube department, backwoods town clowns, just wired the VCU with a doozy—those crackers found about two dozen dead bodies near the county line. Like a mass grave, they said it was; somebody’s been throwing these bodies in it for months. It took the Hazmat Team two hours just to get a body count.”
“Luntville?” Straker blinked. “A mass grave.” What the fuck’s he talking about?
“Jan Beck inspected the scene,” Collier went on with no explanation. “The 64s on the bottom had congealed into a mass of, and I quote, ‘putrefactive effluvium.’ We’re talking a trench full of dead bodies, maggots, and slime.”
Straker could not dissimulate. Thirty seconds ago he’d been about to make love to the woman of his dreams, and now his boss was telling him about…putrefactive effluvium? This did not relate.<
br />
“You blow your brain out your nose the last time you sneezed?” Collier inquired. “I just told you we found a mass grave in Luntville, and you’re not saying anything.”
Straker shook his head. To hell with protect and serve—he wanted to get laid. “All right, boss, that’s a terrible human tragedy, but what in the living fuck has it got to do with me? I’m on a totally different case.”
“Think again, nitz. All the victims were male, late 20s, early 30s, and according to Beck and the TSD team, they’d all been, and I qoute, ‘divorced of their reproductive organs via a mode of expeditious dentation.’ To put it more bluntly, all these guys they found in the hole had their cocks bitten off.”
Straker’s eyes opened at the grotesqurie, yet his sentience remained fully disassociated, musing of Melinda: drunk and horny, and eager for him. “DC, I still don’t see what this has to do with my case—”
“It has plenty to do with it, nibblenuts, because after we ran down IDs on the victims we discovered they all had one thing in common. They were all wrestling groupies—male wrestling groupies. Sound familiar?”
Straker’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “So you’re saying that our primary suspect—”
“Yeah, this Goon motherfucker—looks like he’s swinging both ways, doing the job on the chicks and these guys.”
Yes, yes, but— A stalling thought, then Straker proposed, “It doesn’t make much sense, does it, I mean from an evidence perspective? The m.o.s are totally different, not to mention that he’s disposing of the women in a totally different manner from the way he’s disposing of the men.”
“You think I give a shit?” Collier spat back. “This case just doubled in the headache department, and there’s something else.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you with Melinda Pierce?”
“Uh, yeah, DC. We were just going over, uh, critical points regarding the Bilks murder.”
“Right. At four in the morning.”
“We’re dedicated.”
“Well put your pants back on and get ready for another bombshell.”
I didn’t have time to get them off, thanks to you, you weasel, you schmuck, you—
“Melinda Pierce ain’t no reporter,” Collier returned. “I just got a call from my buddy at the paper and he said he’s never heard of her. She’s faking her credentials, must be some kind of wacko police buff or something, but get her the hell out of there. We don’t need some civilian nutcase screwing up the investigation.”
Straker’s jaw fell open. “There’s—” He glanced at her. She lay back oblivious on the couch, casually naked, her ankles crossed and her hair spilling over her shoulders. She was waiting for him, waiting for him to come back to her.
“It’s no joke, lover boy,” Collier went on. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. Just kick her ass out of there. We don’t even have time to fool around with an obstruction charge.”
“But-but-but—”
“Do it. That’s an order. Then get your swinging dick back to HQ for the new prelims and division of record files.”
Straker turned again to glance at her but she wasn’t there.
All he heard after that was a loud clunk! He saw a lamp fall to the floor, and then realized what the clunk had been: the lamp impacting his head. Then his mind winked out.
— | — | —
Part 4
He awoke to the sound of hammering. After a moment he realized it was a combination of a fist repeatedly hitting the door and a much duller but more insistent pounding between his ears. Struggling to his feet he got to the door and threw it open to see two uniformed cops.
“Captain Straker, I’m Officer Mason and this is Officer Adams. We’ve been sent to assist with the bust or to relieve you if you’re not up to continuing.”
“I’ll be fine,” Straker lied. “We have a general idea where they’re at, we just need to check the You-Store-It in Big Stone Gap. We’ll take my car, it’ll attract less attention. It’s about a three and half hour drive. So some on.”
««—»»
When they arrived in Big Stone Gap, it was nearing 3:00 in the afternoon. Straker was almost beside himself after a gruellingly long drive where Mason and Adams had, ironicaly, talked of nothing but pro-wrestling. It was no small wonder that Adams was still in a uniform after seventeen years in law enforcement. The idiot actually thought it was for real. Mason was even worse: he had a memory for matches and past angles that bordered on idiot-savant. Straker had heard more about the history of the Deep South Wrestling TV Title Belt than any sane person would ever want to know.
Straker then met for an hour with the locals. A brusk Sheriff Tanner had a force of two deputies, giving them a total of six men to arrest what might prove to be the most dangerous serial-killer in the South. He wondered where Melinda was…and what was her angle in this; with her passion for sex, could it be that’s why she wanted to get to Goon before they did?
“The warehouses are out here on the edge of town,” said Tanner, jarring Straker out of his thoughts of Melinda’s perfect body. “We go in after it gets dark, see if we can catch these sick fucks with anything that will incriminate them. What with all the missing body parts, it’s a safe bet they’ve got trophies stashed in the warehouse.”
“We’ll split into three teams, so we’re each paired up with one of the local guys who knows the town. All the storage places are on a four block stretch here.” Tanner pointed to the map. “Straker, you go solo, but get these guys in there as soon as you see anything; and you guys pair up, and we’ll just work our way to center. As soon as you spot either one of these guys or even think you do, call for backup. We don’t want to fuck this up and have anyone get hurt. Do I hafta remind anyone about all those guys found with their dicks bitten off?”
Straker had a sick feeling that five well-armed men were terribly outnumbered by what they were going after…
A You-Store-It? That’s what Melinda had said at the motel; Straker had gotten the address she’d circled in the phone book.
And that was the sign he saw from the end of the road. These joints were all over the place. Twenty bucks a month to rent a storage garage. First thing he saw in the main lot was a long row of garages. And the second thing…
A black Winnabego sat parked in the otherwise empty lot.
None of this made sense but he didn’t care. He soft-stepped past the sign, wisked around the back of the mobile home, and paused. No gun, he realized, patting his pants. He winced at the tacky sensation of semen in his shorts. Christ, if I get killed, Jan Beck’ll have a good old laugh once she gets me into the morgue. But he had to think. What was going on?
A light shone through the Winnabego’s window. He listened at the door for a full minute, heard nothing, then entered. A small rear room showed him nothing out of the ordinary, just—
Wait a minute…
On a supply shelf he found a box of SKIN SMOOTH hair remover, the same brand he’d seen in Melinda’s travel case. Weird. What would a wrestler be doing with something like that? But a more grim discovery came next: a cardboard box on the floor full of beige plastic shower curtains, the same kind all of the bodies had been found wrapped up in. Then he heard a groan.
Straker grabbed a metal flashlight from a rack, the only weapon available, then approached the curtain before him. He quickly whipped it back and saw—
“Felander,” he said.
On the floor a husky guy with a black goatee groaned again, holding his head. “Oh, man. Who are you?”
“State police. Where’s Melinda?”
Felander winced to lean up. “Christ, that bitch hits hard.”
“You don’t have to tell me. What’s going on?”
“Look, I had no choice. It was Kevin’s fault, he’s the one that had the book.”
“Book? What are you talking about?”
“The grimoire, one of those devil-worship things Kevin collected—Kevin the Druid.
Kevin
the Druid, Straker recalled. Melinda had mentioned him, and so had Traci Wilcox. A wrestler who’d disappeared without a trace.
“He was really into all that occult shit—it wasn’t just a work. Him and me and three ringrats, we were all fucked up one night and just fooling around and somebody suggested we try one of the spells, and Goon is what we got.”
“Are you trying to tell Goon is some kind of demon?”
“I don’t know what you call him, all I know is that after we did what the book said, Kevin and the girls were ripped to pieces and this thing is telling me I have to help him out or get torn up like the others. What the fuck would you do? So we made a deal. I keep him isolated in the truck, drive him to the cards and set up the promotion, and he let’s me keep the cash. And in between…he does the girls.”
Straker paled, thinking of Melinda; he had to find Goon first before anything happened to her. “Does as in murders. You’ve been harboring a criminal. You’re guilty of accessory murder. Where’s Melinda Pierce? She came here a little while ago looking for Goon? If we can get to him, there might not be any more innocent victims!”
“Innocent victims? Melinda? You don’t get it do you? When we cast that spell, there were two of those things…” Felander offered a forlorn glance. “Melinda’s the other one.”
Straker looked around and shivered. Melinda, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The same as this monster…
“They get off on it,” Felander said, “sex, killing, drugs, just like the ones here. The only difference is that it’s been six months, and Goon told me that for some reason only one of them could exist here longer than that. They’re having a fucking contest! Goon didn’t do all those guys they found in that pit. It was Melinda…”
Straker felt his balls shrivel to the size of chickpeas. He thought of the corpses with their penises missing. Bitten off.
“One of them has to go back tonight. They’re from someplace else, Hell or whatever you want to call it. Melinda came here looking for Goon so they can have it out. The stronger one is going to get to stay here and keep killing, the other one has to go back. Where they come from, they’re bored. That’s why all the sex, drugs, booze and everything, they’re like the worst of our own scumbags and thrill-killers. Goon was their equivalent to a pathological serial-killer and Melinda is just as dangerous.”