Seeds Of Fear
Page 18
Rexer's thoughts were more metaphorical as they walked up to the wooden frame door. Yellowed Venetian blinds were askew behind the dirty glass, yet he thought that they should be encountering some kind of a steel door, the kind that might be found at the Haddon Cobras' crack house on Leavitt.
But there was no eye-slit drawn back, no click of a revolver behind the walls, as the door opened ever so slowly. The woman who stood in the doorway was so frail that she made any skell under a heat vent on Lower Wacker (Drive look like a television wrestler. She was framed in the kitchen light, not caring that her sagging breasts were outlined beneath her flowered beige nightdress.
Both cops were reminded uncomfortably of their respective mothers.
The light on the ceiling was one of those overhead jobs that consisted of two concentric rings of harsh milky white glow. The north side's version of the tesla coil, Stelfreeze always thought. Which was often, as there were three such lights in his flat on Aberdeen. The woman, Mama Tomei, was five feet two. Add another inch if the wind caught her off balance. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing "she loves me, she loves me not" with the limbs of a dead rodent might arch his own quivering brows.
"You must be Mr. Stelfreeze." A withered hand reached out towards the larger cop. "Mr. Fassl told me you would be coming by. I do so love watching the way he talks about our Cubs . . ." She mentioned the network affiliate Stelfreeze's brother-in-law worked for.
She extended her hand to Rexer, continuing her talk of baseball. "That Mark Grace is just the cutest thing!" Rexer smiled, wondering why there wasn't more expensive furniture in their immediate surroundings. Perhaps it was upstairs, and the money they were making here furnished a lakefront home in Winnetka.
They still clutched hands, their calluses touching. "I am Mama Tomei. Please to call me Mama."
"The pleasure is mine," Rexer said. He smelled meat on her breath. Stelfreeze also nodded back in greeting.
Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Castle Frankenstein, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into a shadowed gutter. A black-and-white Emerson TV, antennae angled towards two o'clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Deitrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.
"Please," the woman said, sliding into a chair. "You sit now. Celly, she is with someone now."
Bill Valent, both cops thought. Hell, they could smell the Eternity cologne he splashed on every Friday night.
"Soon," she repeated, busying herself with fluffing napkins into a wooden holder cut into the shape of a blue duck. Her nails had been painted coral, but the color was chipping away on each finger. "Would either of you gentlemen like some coffee? Mountain-grown, the best kind."
She said this with a smile as Stelfreeze glanced towards the hallway, pushing herself away from the subject of her daughter's man friends. Mama Tomei busied herself at the counter.
Rexer looked at the tablecloth of fractal images, discovering several profiles of what could be construed as silver men smoking corncob pipes.
"I thought times like these were made for Taster's Choice," he said to himself. On the television, the ending bass strings for Barney Miller, the shot of the Manhattan skyline. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of Hill Street Blues. Late-night reruns.
Rexer suddenly wanted the evening to fast-forward. "I have to use your bathroom, ma'am . . . Mama." He cleared his throat.
She told him, "First door on left, down hallway."
There was a mirror above the kitchen sink; passing it, Rexer looked at his reflection, seeing gray hairs like cobwebs in his mustache for the first time.
Let Stelfreeze sweat it out of her, he thought as he moved down the hallway, the walls bare on either side of him. Yet he still tried not to focus on any single direction for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. She thought his partner was of high recommendation and maybe Stel could be casual about it.
But Rexer was downright claustrophobic.
The hall floor was carpeted a sickly orange and magenta, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the slim cop saw shadows of branches dancing against living room bay windows. Again, as is expected in north side apartments, the bathroom light was a metal chain dangling to the right of the medicine cabinet. The pull chains always reminded him of the dog tags he wore around his neck, as a member of the air force reserves. Rexer always felt a sense of security when he touched those tags.
He turned in to the bathroom, reaching for the right spot. The white bulb flickered on, and he looked at himself in the mirror briefly. The toilet seat was broken, yellowed tape wrapped around the connected pieces.
He urinated in silence.
But he also noticed the muted amber light, a hazy cone above the stairwell landing. Then he heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.
It took him less than a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door with hopes that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.
Assumably looking forward to the excitement.
Rexer counted twelve steps and turned right at the top of the landing, finding himself facing several of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with their mournful eyes, lost dogs who gazed upon Rexer in a way that made him think of old Polish women praying at the stations of the cross at Saint Mary of Naz.
The upstairs hallway was L-shaped, and the slice of the room visible to Rexer put the nude woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. Mama Tomei's daughter lay on her back, her thin arms propped against the headboard, hands hanging limp. The handcuffs that held her that way were police-issued. With arms raised, her breasts swelled up, dark nipples pointing in a cross-eyed fashion. Rexer could smell sweat, cologne, and even a fresh aroma, like Ivory soap.
He moved to the side, looking in at a better angle, and had to bite on his palm until he drew blood. Growing out of the left side of the woman's rib cage was a small head, its eyes wide and unblinking. A vestigial twin; he recalled the phrase from growing up downstate; cows sometimes gave birth to such monstrosities. The head was much smaller than Celandine's, its hair like a discarded Kewpie doll's, a sharp chin curving down a long, rubbery neck.
Rexer jumped when it moved, falling back against whitened ribs so that he thought of a plaything lying atop a painted street gutter. He couldn't tell if it moved because of Mama Tomei's daughter shifting her weight, or because it was alive in some way.
Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight, felt the direct sun on her stupefied body.
Celandine Tomei's face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow's peak, a crooked nose and mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.
A sound came from deep within her grimaced mouth, and he would always remember what he saw next. A hand coming into view, a man's hand, fingers splayed so that it grabbed onto the vestigial head like it was a bowling ball, lifting it and letting it fall, the woman moaning louder . . .
The hand was a familiar one; he recognized a pale ring that Bill Valent had received during an altercation with a perp on PCP in the Hermitage Avenue corridor the previous summer.
But he couldn't step into the room farther, he could only stare at the head in the middle of Celandine's torso. The head had sparse black hair and was almost a pinhead, as if part of the connective skull plates were missing. It rested against Celandine's breasts as though they were deflated pillows. He could smell Valent's cologne, dammit!
The head turned towards Rexer, not of its own volition. It simply fell into the crook of the girl's arm. Orange drool formed around the mouth's gum line. Then everything started happening fast, the worst of it being the sound of a man's slacks being zipped up just beyond sight in the room. That sound would keep Rexer awake at nights for weeks to come.
He backed away, towards the stairwell, knowing his hand was on his holster. He had been blinking away red spots in his mind, wanting to grab his shirt collar and start chewing on it, uncertain . . .
The next thing he remembered was moving down the stairs as quietly as he could, and Rexer almost shrieking when he saw Stelfreeze standing in the hallway.
"Let's go," Stelfreeze said, not even bothering to nod at Mama Tomei as they moved past her to the door. Rexer thought she looked ashamed.
* * *
"What is it, partner?" Rexer said to Stelfreeze as they walked out of the alley onto Eugenie Street. "If she didn't say, I can tell you Valent was up there."
Stelfreeze told him about the stories he had heard from his brother-in-law, the ones he now knew were true. Rexer confirmed what he had seen upstairs.
The thing was: Valent wasn't getting payoffs. He was going there to do what everybody else did, only at cheaper rates. Because he was a cop and could close it up anytime he wanted.
It was like eating your cake and having it too. Have sex with Celandine and strangle the head, tear at the skin, ravage the face. All without killing anything, because Celandine Tomei's decency was long buried.
Rexer thought of the jewel case of eyeballs. The cops passed a row of two-flats that displayed either plastic palm trees, plastic crucifixes, or promo photos of Richard M. Daley in the front windows.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
"The money mostly goes for reconstructive surgery," Stelfreeze said. Both wondered what they would say to Valent. The heavens suddenly opened and the April rain came down.
Jack Stelfreeze had met Rexer in the hallway, all right. He had taken the smoking gun from his partner's shaking hands. Rexer had been disgusted by what he had seen in that room, what he had watched his own friend and sometimes partner doing with that deformed freak.
This was the part he tried to deny, even though Internal Affairs had all the facts:
Rexer had waited all of three heartbeats before pulling his privately owned .38 from his waistband and shooting at Valent. For what he was doing. For what he had been enjoying. The younger cop was taken by surprise, falling from the bed half-erect, his face smeared with the freak's lipstick. It made him look like a clown.
Two steps in then, before the freak could scream. Didn't matter, though, with the iron thunder of the gunshots. Rexer grabbed the deformed head, pulled it from its stalk of a neck, laying it over the freak's face like a pillow so he wouldn't have to see her pleading eyes as he blew her brains out. Because he felt pity for her.
The freak's body going limp, spasming once, scaring him. Stumbling down the stairs, meeting Stelfreeze, Mama Tomei already dialing 911 out of rote.
Nicholas Raymond Rexer smiling, happy, victorious.
Back on Belle Plaine, Rexer smiling from his window, a beautiful vantage point for watching a rabbit blown to bits by a Gran Torino with missing plates. Rexer smiling at the smear, waiting for the knock on the door, the gentle sound his fellow officers would make as they took him into custody, out of the crazy room and off to Stateville. The big and burly coppers making a polite taptaptap, like he was considered a damn psycho.
Keeping his trigger-grip at the ready, rolling the exercise balls in his palms. His own special kind of exercise balls, better than the ones at the Academy, the ones you had to buy at the shop on Racine where you bought your winter shirts and plastic coverings for caps when you're slated for traffic control in winter.
The exercise balls Rexer had in his hands, practicing to fire a gun he'd never hold again, were two small glassine eyeballs. They were gold-flecked and, of course, unstaring.
This story is for Lee Seymour.
I AM JOE'S PENIS
Scott H. Urban
Sure, I'm curled up behind stone-washed jeans and briefs so old they're barely attached to the waistband, but I have ways of finding things out. For instance, I know Joe's chin is about twelve inches closer to the bar than it was about an hour ago, thanks to three whiskey sours.
It's almost Zero Hour at The Wail-Eyed. The beautiful people have already paired off and headed out for the Jacuzzis. The remainder—Joe included—are trying to decide just how desperate they are. Scan the options. Christ, what are we still doing here? Catch the bartender's eye. Things'll look better through another highball. Is it worth the night's warmth to wake up with someone you'd cross the street to avoid in daylight?
No, she's never gonna grace the cover of Cosmopolitan, Joe thinks, but when was the last time you were out with a model, huh? I try to tell him don't bother, it won't work, but does he listen? Of course not, he never does.
Back at her place, they clink glasses, dim the lights, and pull back the bedspread. She steps out of her slacks. Revealed are thick pasty-white thighs that would look better in front of a Greek temple. I don't want any part of this. As a matter of fact, I try to crawl back up inside.
"It's okay. We've both had a few. Let me see what I can do," she offers.
She starts working me with her hand. I suppose it's good enough for the moment, because I stand up at attention. But it takes too long, and when she pulls away I begin to wilt like an hours-cut blossom on a hot afternoon. She stretches back against the stacked pillows. Joe positions himself between her knees. Both of them move with the exaggerated care of a lush trying to walk a straight line under the trooper's steely glare.
Talk about loose lips that could sink ships! I mean, let's face it. Great sex boils down to the gradual buildup of friction. Without something to work against. . . well, forget any fireworks. For all the friction these two have, they'd be better off trying to start a campfire by rubbing two bars of soap together. It's like diving into a sponge—no, worse, more like sinking into a platter of Jell-O.
Joe closes his eyes, tries to conjure up the face of the little nymphet in the skin flick he jerked off to last night. No good, his head is making him feel like the mattress is turning barrel rolls. She squeezes his ass, but I'm already in retreat. Joe slumps to the side with a groan.
"S'all right," she murmurs, rubbing his shoulder. "We'll try again in a li'l bit."
Luckily they curl up and let their eyelids shut. Within minutes they're snoring in each other's face. By the time morning arrives, I'm ignored, quickly tucked away like some embarrassing old uncle who drools uncontrollably out of the corner of his mouth. They politely blow each other off and scurry to work.
I've got to do something. I can't go through that again. It's time to take charge, for Joe's sake as well as my own.
I wait until the following evening. Fortunately he didn't try to hit the bars; too much to do the next day. I let him drift into REM sleep. I despise looking in on his dreams; they're so predictable, I can't even get a Peeping Tom thrill out of them. Oh great—his mother, in a see-through negligee, pirouetting in front of him. Gimme a fuckin' break.
I begin forcing the tissue I'm made of—the corpus spongiosum—back up into the rest of Joe's body. The spongiosum contains cavities I can engorge with blood —that's how I pop a boner when I need it. I begin superseding—supplanting—the normal muscle tissue with my own.
It's easy as far back as the scrotum, the anus, and the seminal vesicles. But all that's familiar territory. It's more difficult once I reach the lower abdomen. The deep abdominal muscles set up some resistance. I realize I can't encompass them entirely. I'm going to have to settle for a less-than-total takeover.
Deep within his Oedipal fantasy, Joe feels something moving up inside him. His stomach churns, and he draws his knees up toward his chest. I have to be careful. I don't want to make him so sick he wakes up. All I need is for some doctor to discover penile tissue running throughou
t Joe's body. Joe groans low in his throat and turns to the other side.
It's slow going up through the chest cavity and along the spine, but it gets easier with practice. By the time I'm spreading down through his arms and legs, I feel like an old pro.
It's a lucky thing the body works as a democratic unit.
I have the majority vote.
A week later. Joe's back at The Wail-Eyed. He tried to line up a date for the evening but hit bottom like a diver belly-flopping into an empty pool. I'm doing my best to keep him from drowning himself. He knows he came in here wanting to get blotto drunk. But now, three hours later, he's still on his second drink and doesn't even have a buzz on. He's been making eyes at this brunette, but she's hanging out with a bunch of her friends. Besides, she's not any better-looking than Miss Hand Job. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised she doesn't have a wheelbarrow beside her chair, to help her cart that ass around.
No, I didn't go to all that trouble so we could judge a dog contest. I'm more interested in the blonde in the corner booth. She's almost too beautiful to be in here. She's wearing a short floral print dress with a low scooped neckline. Her hair is piled on top of her head, with golden ringlets spilling down either side of her ears. Her legs look as if they were made just to wrap around Joe's waist.
Now, of course, Floral's playing footsie under the table with her date, the Missing Link. He's so broad, he nearly pushes her out of the booth. Joe took one look at him before and promptly filed Floral in the drawer labeled "Ones That Got Away," but I've got ideas of my own, and now I've got the means to carry them out.
The brunette is raising her glass. Joe is about to walk in her direction. But Floral and her date are getting up, heading for the door. I have to make my first overt move. It might as well be here, in front of a crowd. This way, Joe can't afford to freak out. Since I now control the spongiosum tissue in Joe's body, I can make him walk wherever I want. He's the new Pinocchio, a marionette without strings. I swing him in behind Floral.