Sex and Murder
by
Douglas Allen Rhodes
Wild Child Publishing.com
Culver City, California
Sex and Murder
Copyright © 2008
by Douglas Allen Rhodes
Cover illustration by Wild Child Publishing © 2008
For information on the cover art, please contact [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Editor: M.E Ellis
ISBN: 1-934069-
Wild Child Publishing.com
P.O. Box 4897
Culver City, CA 90231-4897
Printed in The United States of America
To my wife, Jamie.
And to Goldie, because he asked me to.
Chapter One
I killed my first person in an act of random choice—more on a whim than because of some preconceived plot. The man I chose did nothing worse than drive far too slow in front of me. My decision to kill him wasn’t fueled by rage or anything so primal; I just accepted who I am. I was meant to kill him; meant to fulfill my role. It’s what I’ve been trained and conditioned for my entire life. I’d learned about it in childhood, studied it throughout my adolescence, and honed my taste for it in the Marines. I am a killer. It’s that simple, that beautifully non-complex. But here, I’ve already made a poor start of this.
Late for work, I’d turned onto a 45 mph road behind a 35 mph driver. Normally, I would flash my lights or honk my horn, but this time I did nothing. I sat back in my seat and watched the driver in front of me—a man so afraid of life and conformed to law that he was unable to even approach the upper limit of speed to which the absent authorities had granted him access. I spent ten minutes in tedious, low speed pursuit before I realized the time had come—his time had come.
I decided he should die.
I eased back from his car and let another driver pull between us. (No easy task. As I said before, we were already going ten miles below the speed limit.) Keeping an inconspicuous distance away, I followed him for the next fifteen minutes of what turned out to be his drive home.
He stopped in front of his house and headed towards the front door. I drove past and parked a block away, around a corner, then walked back to his house. He lived in a two story red-brick in a nice suburban neighborhood. A well manicured front lawn and two neat little flower beds ran along the front of the house.
I knocked on the front door twice—hard—and stepped back to wait.
He opened the door wide, an absent-minded look on his face.
I hit him in his throat.
Gasping for air, his eyes wild with surprise, he fell to the ground. I stepped over him, into his living room, and pulled the door shut. His hand shot up to defend his face, and I kicked it out of my way. I placed my heel on his neck and took a good, long look at him.
In his forties, white, and going a little bald, his conservative appearance reeked of complacency. I pushed my foot down on his throat. He choked, sputtered, and spat out questions. At one point, he even managed several of them in a row—mainly whos and whys. Tired of hearing them, I kicked him in his teeth.
His mouth gave way beneath my shoe, and blood poured from his face. He howled and cried, alternately wailing and whimpering as the thick red of his life ran down and ingrained itself in the pastel tan of his carpet.
An excitement grew within me unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I snatched him to his feet by the front of his button down Oxford, took his mangled head in my hands—one cupping his chin, the other at the base of his skull—and snapped his neck.
He hit the ground, shivered once, and shit himself. A dark stain spread across his crotch as an erection grew, straining against the front of his slacks. His eyes lay open wide, the terror of his final second in life indelibly stamped upon them.
Drawn to those eyes, mesmerized by them, I crouched down beside the remains of his face and stared into them.
Half an hour later, I still stared into them, transfixed.
The sound of a key being inserted into the back door broke the spell.
I stood up, reluctantly releasing my study of those eyes, and waited to see who would enter. I didn’t have long to wait. The sound of the door opening gave way to the heavy, flat slapping of shoes on linoleum. Seconds later, a disgustingly obese woman in her early forties walked into the room, perusing a small bundle of mail. She stopped in the doorway (almost filling it) and, as if alerted to my presence by some long unused primal instinct, looked up from her letters and right at me.
I smiled and said, “Hello.”
Her small, piggish eyes looked down at the corpse and shot back up to lock on my own. She screamed, a shrill, earsplitting wail, and turned to run.
Before she made it more than five steps, I caught her.
With a fierce goose-stepping kick, I planted my foot in the small of her back and sent her sprawling, face first, onto the kitchen tile.
She scrambled to stand back up, her screaming growing louder and more frenzied. I drew a rather large and wicked-looking butcher knife from the cutlery stand on the counter and, just as she got to her feet, turned back to face her.
At the sight of the knife, all color deserted her face. She tried to scream again but managed to rasp out only a few plaintive ‘nos’, her pudgy hands raised in front of her in a pitiful attempt to ward me off.
With a firm grip, I held the butcher knife in the proper blade down method that would have made my former Drill Instructor proud, but, instead of stabbing her, I punched her in the face, using the knife like a roll of quarters. Her nose shattered.
She flew back against the wall, her blood trailing from my fist to the remains of her nose. Limp, her arms dropped to her sides. I raised the knife and plunged it into her throat, just above the V of her collarbone.
The warm remnants of her life splurted out, drenching my face and shirt, dousing me in the viscous orgasm of her death. My eyes widened in lust, and a tremor of furious ecstasy rolled through my body. I stood immobile, unable to do anything but shake while the woman slid down the wall and relieved herself where she landed.
The intensity of the moment passed sufficiently to let me move again. I walked to the sink and pulled on a pair of the dead woman’s rubber gloves. I rinsed the knife and, after drying it, placed it back into its slot in the cutlery stand.
A quick search of the upstairs led me to the couple’s bedroom. I found a nice white Oxford to replace my blood-soaked dress shirt. I cleaned up in their bathroom, washing the blood off of my face and neck and out of my hair, and dressed in my old clothes and new shirt.
The gloves and bloody shirt I tossed in the bathtub and doused with hairspray. I set them on fire and left them to burn.
Back in the kitchen, I grabbed a dishtowel and used it to open the front door. Tossing the cloth aside, I walked out of the house and down the street to my car.
I reached the restaurant where I worked waiting tables almost two hours late. My manager chewed my ass for another fifteen minutes before letting me get to work. Pretty soon, I settled into the mundane routine, and the rest of my shift sped by. All in all, it was a good night.
I made seventy-three dollars in tips.
* * * * *
I arrived home late to find my wife already asleep. I sat down on the bed next to her, with just enough force to wake
her up. Still sleepy, she smiled up at me, and I slid my hand beneath the covers. The warmth of her body under my hand, I began to arouse her, marveling at how full of life she was.
As she undid my pants, I kissed her on the forehead and brushed her hair back from her face. She touched me, and I looked her body over, noting several places where a hard enough strike would disable her, two places where it would kill. My eyes closed, and the scenes from earlier replayed in my mind. I watched the stabbing again and again, feeling the hot blood spray across my face.
Lust and desire overwhelmed me. I crawled on top of my wife. She moaned in ecstasy as we joined together in angry, passionate sex. Blood covered my mind, plunging me into scarlet visions of death and sending pinpoints of pleasure and pain throughout my body. Screaming my climax, I collapsed upon her.
We lay in each other’s arms, breathless from our efforts. After several minutes of silence, she ran her hand over my chest and tugged at my nipple ring.
“So,” she asked. “How was work tonight?”
Chapter Two
The next day I quit my job. I’d had enough of working for other people. Instead of waiting tables in the hopes that some jackass would deem me worthy of his wallet droppings, I would take whatever money I found on my victims. Of course, I didn’t tell my wife about my idea. She’d always been less adventurous than me, and, even though she’d never shirked at the idea when I’d talked about wanting to kill someone, she definitely would’ve wanted me to still hold down a steady job. She was like that.
So, that evening, when work time came around, I dressed in my new Oxford and slacks and pretended to leave for work. Rather than heading to the restaurant, I drove to a bar about twenty minutes away in a neighboring town—a redneck joint in the middle of an all white burg that’s known for its shitty high school sports teams and its large concentration of Klu Klux Klan members.
Before I went in I changed clothes, putting on some jeans and an old work-flannel I kept in my trunk. I strolled to a seat at the bar and sat down between two very different folks. I ordered a Jack and Coke and, while the bartender made my drink, I took stock of each of my neighbors.
The young man on my right seemed about twenty-one and already shit-faced. A cute little bargirl who couldn’t have been older than eighteen sat next to him, and the two of them argued over some nonsensical problem. The boy had just made what he seemed to consider an irrefutable point. I only caught the beginning of it (something about Jeff Gordon’s daughter and a Pepsi commercial) before the bartender returned and set my drink in front of me.
“Buck-fifty,” he said, and I slid him two dollars.
He slid two quarters back.
“Keep it,” I told him.
An old man sat to my left, a quiet guy, content to keep to himself while he nursed his Budweiser. I took a healthy swig of my drink, banged it down on the counter, and sighed.
“Goddamn government,” I said, directing my words at the old man but raising my voice enough to let others hear, “they won’t stop, I tell ya, not til they strip all our rights away.”
The old man’s head rose from his beer, his sallow, sunken eyes meeting mine. His drawn face and the emptiness in his eyes spoke volumes about him. It had obviously been a long time since anyone had willingly talked to him and an even longer time since he’d willingly answered. He mumbled something unintelligible and sank back into his beer.
“I tell ya,” I pressed, grabbing his arm, “they want everyone’s guns; I see it coming. Clinton don’t want no one bein’ able to bear arms. He’ll take them all and set himself up as dictator under martial law once the Y2K hits.”
His hollow eyes implored me to let him be. He muttered something again, and this time I made out the words ‘right’ and ‘whatever’. It seemed all he wanted in the world at that moment was for me to leave him alone so that he could drink his life away in peace.
I pressed on. “It’s coming…sure as shit it’s coming. Ya can’t trust none of them damn politicians….”
Smack dab in the middle of my tirade, a clap on my right shoulder cut me short. A hearty “That’s right!” followed.
I turned. The drunk kid leered at me and nodded in inebriated agreement.
“You can’t trust a damn one,” he slurred, his breath thick with the stink of cheap beer and cigarettes. “They’s just waiting, passing all them gun laws. It’s getting to be where honest folks can’t even protect themselves ‘gainst these niggers.”
“Ya damn right!” I shot back and swiveled in my seat to face his excitement. In the mirror behind the bar, I watched the old man behind me slide off his stool and waddle away, beer in hand, in search of quieter pastures. “Niggers gonna have guns whether it’s legal or not,” I went on. “It’s just the white folks whose guns they’re taking.”
“They ain’t taking my guns!” the kid proclaimed, slamming his fist on the bar. “‘Cept over my dead body, and not without a fight!”
That brought a broad smile to my face; he’d said everything I wanted to hear.
“Hell, no,” I said, gulping a drink of my cola and whiskey. “Mine neither. I got me a .45 and a 9mm rifle. What you got?”
The kid whooped in what I guess could be called laughter. His girlfriend joined him, and I took my first really good look at her—pretty, but trashy at the same time. A trailer whore if ever there was one. A blue jean miniskirt and an off-the-shoulder top accentuated her figure, with a pair of ankle boots rounding off the ensemble. Parted in the center, her suicide-blonde hair managed to be both teased out and flat at the same time.
“Hey, Janine,” he said, finishing off his whoop, “this fella wants to know what guns I got.”
“Oh, he’s got a mess of ‘em,” Janine rasped, her voice sounding like she’d started smoking at around age eight. “They clutter up the trailer something awful. You’d be better off asking what guns he ain’t got.”
I laid my best wide-eyed-impressed look on the two of them. “Well, shit!” I decided to play my trump card. “You folks do coke?”
Janine didn’t hesitate a second. “Well, hell yeah!”
Her boyfriend was another matter. All our ranting about government conspiracy had left him cautious—or at least as cautious as a drunken redneck can be when he’s about to be offered coke.
“Now what you asking that for?” he asked, shooting Janine a venomous sidelong glance.
“‘Cause I got a couple eight balls in my car.” I laughed. “If you got somewhere to go, I’ll bring it with me. Maybe you could show me that gun collection.”
Janine’s eyes sparkled. I saw her cutting the free coke up in her mind, portioning it out and guestimating her share. The drunk kid, however, wasn’t so easy to impress. He cast a mournful look at the bar top.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just got to drinking.”
“Oh, come on, Robby,” Janine pleaded, “you’se just here last night.”
Janine and I were going to get along just fine.
“Yeah, Robby,” I joined in. “Besides, we can stop on the way, and I’ll pick us up a case.”
“Well, shit.” He smiled. “I guess…but it’s gotta be Pabst.”
* * * * *
We took separate vehicles. I followed Robby and Janine’s truck to a local gas station and grabbed the case of Pabst Blue Ribbon I’d promised him. We drove down three very long, dark country back roads and reached a dilapidated doublewide trailer out in the middle of nowhere.
I got out of my car and followed my hosts toward the door—Janine half-carrying Robby. As we walked through the front door, I reached out and ran my hand across Janine’s backside. She turned, smiled, and lifted her eyebrows.
Inside, the trailer looked decent—at least decent enough for that kind of lifestyle. Pressed-wood furniture, made to look like a higher quality than it actually was, filled the living room area, and a large plush couch and nice sized TV rounded out the décor. Janine eased Robby onto the far end of the couch. I took a seat at the other end. J
anine plopped down between us and let out an excited giggle.
I cracked open the case and passed two beers to Robby. Janine declined the next beer out of the box so I popped it open for myself. I swigged sociably, set my can down on a cheap end table, and took out one of the eight balls, breaking it up on a Clint Black CD from off the coffee table.
Before I got three lines separated, Robby had downed his first beer and most of his second. I added extra coke to Janine’s line, leaving it noticeably bigger than the other two. I tossed Robby another beer.
Janine fished a small pink straw from her purse, and we set down to business.
Over the next two hours, I fed coke to Janine in ever increasing amounts while Robby drank every beer left in the case. Somewhere between beers, he dragged out his entire collection of semi-automatic rifles, automatic rifles, and pistols, detailing the history and specifications of each piece. Tedious. Every few guns, Robby stopped and suggested that we go outside and fire off some rounds. Each time he did, I slid a fresh line or two in front of Janine and said something non-committal about not wanting to wake up his neighbors or attract the police. And every time I said it he laughed and told me that he didn’t have any neighbors for at least a couple of miles in each direction. The police never came out this far.
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