by Barry Eisler
This time the kid blushed for sure. “I… I don’t know. I mean, it’s a good college. The people are cool. Who are you, anyway? What are you doing in Arcata?”
“Just a stop on a long trip down the coast, dealing with customer complaints.”
“What kind of customers?”
Larison had a whole backstopped story he could have unspooled, but he didn’t feel like it. If this wasn’t going to end the way he hoped, he didn’t want to waste any more time. He took a sip of beer and said, “The kind who’ve bought expensive data mining software and are disappointed to find out the applications don’t do what they’re supposed to.”
“Sounds like you spend a lot of time with unhappy people.”
“Yeah, but I try not to let it get me down.” He took another sip of beer and said, “You alone here?”
“Got some friends probably swinging by later.” For whatever reason, he didn’t sound happy about it.
“Can I ask you a question?”
The kid nodded. “Sure.”
“If I wanted to pick up a little local Humboldt County produce—you know, just something to help me kick back and relax after a day of dealing with unhappy customers—do you know of anywhere I could do that?”
The kid looked suddenly uneasy. “How do I know you’re not a cop?”
For the second time that night, Larison had to resist the urge to laugh. “I look like a cop to you?”
The kid nodded. “There’s something serious about you. And I can tell you’re in shape.”
Larison was glad he’d noticed. “You must not know too many cops.”
“What do you do? Weights? Seriously, you’re pretty… big.”
Christ, was the kid flirting, or just incredibly innocent? Either way, it was a turn-on.
“I do a little something different every day. But come on, can you help me out? I’m not a cop. Where do I go?”
The kid was quiet for a moment, then he said, “What’s your name?”
“Dave. And you?”
“I’m Seth.”
“Well, Seth?”
“I guess… I guess I know a few guys on campus.”
“Far from here?”
The kid shook his head. “Maybe a mile.”
Larison felt a little warmth spread out in his gut. “If I pick something up, will you share it with me?”
The kid looked at Larison, something suddenly eager in his eyes. He said, “Sure. Okay.”
No doubt, this was shaping up to be a very fine evening. There were risks, yeah, but sometimes the reward was worth it.
Larison finished his beer in a swallow. “Do we walk?”
“We could. But I’m parked out back. I know, lazy.”
Larison imagined parking on some quiet street under the shadow of the redwoods, the vehicle’s interior illuminated only by the glow of a shared joint, the feeling close, comfortable. Most of all, private. People lost their inhibitions in the dark, when they knew they were in a place where no one else could see them, when they couldn’t see themselves. The kid would get high, he’d feel relaxed… he’d let himself do what he’d secretly always wanted to. Larison felt his heartbeat kick up a notch. He said, “Sure, let’s take your car.”
They walked out, past the pool players, the bouncer, the hobos shifting around outside. They made a right, then another at the corner, moving along the sidewalk, not talking. Larison felt nervousness coming off the kid in waves and it excited him. He wondered if it was possible it was the kid’s first time. Christ, what a thought.
The sidewalk was dark, parked cars to their left, the solid façade of the building to their right. A short funnel of sorts, the kind of terrain Larison always instinctively avoided because it was too easy for the opposition to close off both ends and squeeze, as well as being popular with ordinary muggers, too. But no one knew he was here, and he pitied the random mugger who might try to rob him.
They came to an alley and made a right. Now they were behind the bar; further down, at the other end of the alley, was the back of the hotel. A few lights along the building façade to their right provided a feeble, yellowish glow, casting shadows under the Dumpsters and garbage cans lined up beneath. To their left was a single-story, freestanding shack, apparently a small office of some kind.
Halfway down the alley, a guy in a hoodie and lumberjack boots was leaning against the building, a cigarette burning in his hand. Larison logged him reflexively, noting long, greasy hair and a bad case of acne. A cook or bartender, ducking out back from one of the bars for a tobacco break? Maybe, but he wasn’t near a door. And he was watching them, not with idle curiosity or bored disinterest, but with a kind of focus Larison didn’t like at all. The hobos he’d seen out front had felt like regulars. They wouldn’t try to rob someone so close to where the cops would roust them for questioning. A drifter, like himself? Maybe. But he looked more like a student. Which would have downgraded him on Larison’s threat assessment scale, but there was that focused way he was watching them.
They made a left past the shack, stepping off the paved alley and onto bare gravel. Larison didn’t like that their footfalls were now causing audible crunching while the guy against the wall would be able to approach quietly from behind. He glanced back and sure enough, the guy had come off the wall and was moving in their direction. He was holding something long in one hand—a lead pipe, Larison thought. Which meant he didn’t have a gun. Ordinarily, this could have been fun, in a retard-brings-a-pipe-to-a-gunfight kind of way, but tonight it was a problem. The bouncer had seen his face, twice. He’d actually talked to the bartender. And of course there was Seth. Whatever happened, he couldn’t just shoot someone. He couldn’t kill anyone, period.
There was a faded wooden shed on their right, a small parking lot with a half dozen cars, one of them presumably Seth’s, just beyond it. Larison was about to warn Seth there was going to be trouble and pull him around to the other side of the shed, from where Larison would be able to ambush the guy with the pipe, when another guy in a hoodie stepped out from the spot where Larison had been planning to go. This one, too, gripped a pipe. He smacked it against his palm and grinned, revealing a set of crooked teeth. “What the fuck do we have here?” he said in a weirdly squeaky voice.
Larison stopped short and resisted the urge to create distance and draw the Glock. The pieces all fell instantly into place: Not muggers. Muggers don’t display pipes because a pipe isn’t a psychologically terrifying weapon. And a mugger’s interview opens with a distraction question or victim-suitability-test question—hey man, got a light? Hey man, you know how to get to 8th Street?—not with an overt challenge. No. Not a mugging, just a game of Bash the Fag, and shy, sweet-faced Seth, or whatever the fuck his name really was, with that beautiful smile and eyes that had flashed eagerness at the prospect of leaving the bar with an interested stranger, was the bait.
All of which Larison understood in less time than it had taken Squeaky to finish talking. And he understood, too, from that time when he was a teenager, that the object of the game for these guys wasn’t just to inflict a beating. That was the actual act, yes, but they would also want to enjoy the foreplay of fear and humiliation.
Which was a shame for them, really. Because Larison had never been into foreplay. He was all about getting straight to the main event.
He heard footsteps on the gravel behind him. In his peripheral vision, Larison saw Seth edging away. Squeaky smacked the pipe against his palm again and looked past Larison at his approaching buddy. “You see this?” he said. “We’ve got—”
Larison stepped in. He swept his left hand up, outer edge forward, taking hold of the pipe alongside Squeaky’s grip, and shot a right palm heel up under Squeaky’s jaw. Squeaky’s head snapped back and Larison raked his eyes with his fingers, simultaneously twisting the pipe counterclockwise, ripping it free from his grip. Squeaky made a weird squawking sound and Larison changed direction with the pipe, getting his shoulder under it, bringing it up like a surface-to-air mis
sile and stabbing it into Squeaky’s balls. Squeaky rose up on his toes from the force of the impact and the breath was driven out of him. His eyes bulged so violently that if Larison hadn’t known better he would have thought they might pop out.
Larison pulled back the pipe as though reversing a sword thrust and spun to face the first guy. Acne Boy’s face was a mask of confusion and fear. He had skidded to a halt when he saw what happened to his buddy, and was now starting frantically to backpedal. Which he was able to do only at about twenty percent of Larison’s forward speed. In other words, too slow.
Larison switched the pipe to his right hand and felt himself grinning. He reminded himself he had to hold back. Hurt them, yes, fuck them up badly, but he couldn’t leave any bodies. Acne Boy saw the grin and the fear in his face turned to terror. He dropped his pipe and started to spin counterclockwise but Larison was already on him, swinging the pipe in hard like a tennis forehand shot, the sweet spot smashing into the guy’s leading kneecap and turning it into jelly. Acne Boy howled in agony and collapsed. He rolled onto his back, gripping his ruined knee, and sucked in a huge, gasping breath. Before the breath could be converted into another scream, Larison jammed the pipe down into his face. It caught him in the mouth, plowed through all his teeth, and shut him the fuck up completely.
Larison turned back toward Squeaky, who was on his hands and knees, vomiting. Seth watched, transfixed, then started backing away, plainly petrified. “Don’t hurt me,” he said. “I didn’t—”
Larison came in close. “You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t… I didn’t know—”
Larison blasted an uppercut into his stomach. The breath whistled out of the kid’s mouth and he dropped to his knees, gasping.
Larison walked over to Squeaky, who was puking so hard he seemed oblivious to Larison’s approach. He reminded himself again not to kill anyone. He considered the way he’d just disfigured Acne Boy. It hadn’t been wise—cops would overlook a fight, but mayhem like what he had just done was unusual and would get more attention—but it wasn’t like he could take it back now. Anyway, as long as there was no body, an investigation would only go so far, especially for lowlifes like these. Besides, they had no way to track him.
He stood over Squeaky’s back, avoiding the vomit, waiting for the retching to subside. He thought in for a penny and launched a palm heel into the back of the guy’s skull. It was a knockout blow and Squeaky duly collapsed face-first into the gravel, his brain having just been jostled unforgivably hard within its small cushion of cerebrospinal fluid. Larison took hold of the back of the guy’s hoodie, dragged him face forward over to the strip of concrete a row of cars was backed up against, and placed his open mouth on the edge of it. He stood and stomped the back of Squeaky’s head, a short, controlled shot just hard enough to cause an explosion of teeth and gum matter. Then he jellified one of Squeaky’s knees with the pipe, just as he’d done to the other guy.
Larison walked back to Seth. The kid was still on his knees, trying to recover his breath. Larison looked around. No one was coming. The single scream one of them had gotten off hadn’t been enough to get past the walls and the music playing in the bars within.
“How many?” Larison said, wiping the pipe down on his jacket sleeve.
Seth’s breath heaved in and out. “How many… what do you mean?”
“How many times have you done this? You and your buddies.”
“Never! I mean, I didn’t want to. They made me.”
Larison held the end of the pipe from inside his jacket pocket, wiped a last spot, and let it drop to the gravel. It landed with a heavy thud.
“How many times have you done this? Tell me the truth and I won’t hurt you anymore.”
Seth looked desperate. “Three times,” he said. “But they made me. They made me. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry.”
No. Larison had seen that look in his eyes when Larison had asked him about sharing a joint. No one had forced him to do a fucking thing.
“Which car is yours?” Larison said.
“What… what do you…”
Larison unclipped the Commander and thumbed it open. The weak light glinted along the edge of the black blade. “Which. Fucking. Car. Is yours.”
Seth’s eyes bulged. “The Corolla,” he said, pointing to a dirty white four-door at the end of the lot. “The Corolla.”
Larison took a handful of the kid’s hair and put the knife at his throat. “Get up.”
“Please, don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up and walk with me to your car. We’re going to take a drive.”
Either the kid was too stupid not to know you never let someone take you to a secondary crime scene, or he was too scared to resist. Larison followed him through the passenger door. He made him put on his seatbelt, creating one more obstacle in case the kid came to his senses and tried to bolt, and told him to drive out to the edge of the redwood forest.
“Please,” the kid sobbed as they drove. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did. I shouldn’t have.”
Larison, his hand still gripping the kid’s hair and the knife still at the kid’s throat, didn’t answer. In his mind, he thought, Not sorry enough.
They parked on a dead-end in the shadows of the giant trees, the interior of the car glowing sepia from the glare of a distant streetlight. Larison, maintaining his grip, watched the street for a few minutes. When he was confident no one had seen them, no one was around, and no one cared, he said, “Unbuckle my seatbelt. Then yours.”
“Please,” Seth said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t make me repeat myself, Seth or whatever the fuck your name really is. It makes me angry.”
Seth undid the seatbelts.
Larison said, “Are you gay, Seth?”
“No!”
“Then why do you like to beat up gays?”
“I don’t like to!”
“So many lies, Seth. So much denial. I used to be the same. Although I never stomped anyone over it. Still, it’s always been a secret for me. A deep, dark secret I would never tell a soul. I’m only telling you because you’re a stranger and we’ll never see each other again. Isn’t that odd? I guess we have to tell someone.”
“I’m not gay.”
The dark, the privacy, the kid’s protests… the post combat aftermath. It was all turning Larison on. A lot.
“I’m going to help you through all that denial now, Seth. And here’s how. You’re going to kiss me.”
“No!”
Larison tightened his grip in the kid’s hair and pressed the knife a fraction harder against his throat. The kid whimpered.
“Lean forward, Seth, and open your mouth.”
The kid was shaking, but he complied. Larison, so turned on his heart was pounding, pressed his mouth over the kid’s, keeping the kid’s head in place with the grip he had in his hair. He pushed his tongue into the kid’s mouth and the kid moaned, in pleasure or disgust or both Larison didn’t know and didn’t care.
Larison broke the kiss and said, “Now stick out your tongue, Seth.” The kid did. Larison sucked on it. The kid tasted of alcohol and fear. The taste made Larison darkly crazy with lust.
Larison broke the kiss again. The kid was panting now. Larison could feel himself throbbing in time to it.
“Now, Seth,” Larison said, their eyes locked from inches apart. “Reach out and undo my pants.”
The kid, panting, said, “Please.”
Larison pressed the knife in and the kid cried out. “All right!” he said. “All right, I’m doing it…”
And he did. In the darkness, the sound of Larison’s zipper was huge.
“Now reach inside, Seth. Reach inside my pants and get my cock out.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Seth said. “Oh, God.” But he did it. Larison could feel the kid’s hand shaking as he gripped Larison’s cock.
“Now lean forward, Seth. That’s right, lean forward. You’re going to suck my cock, Seth or whatever
the fuck your name really is. And you better leave me happy. Because if you don’t, I’m going to leave your body in this car. You understand?”
The kid nodded, eager now, maybe because he thought he saw a way out, maybe because he couldn’t help himself.
“You’re going to swallow everything I give you. Every fucking drop. You better make me happy, kid.” It wasn’t just the pleasure Larison was after. He also didn’t want to leave DNA anywhere it could easily be collected.
The kid nodded again and leaned in, Larison’s hand still gripping his hair, the knife still at his throat.
Maybe it was the kid’s fear. Maybe it was that it was his first time. Whatever it was, it was the best head of Larison’s life.
When it was over, and the kid was sitting up again, gasping, Larison closed the knife and clipped it back in his pocket. He didn’t care if the kid ran now. It wouldn’t make a difference.
He redid his jeans and looked at the kid. “That’s what you were so afraid of,” he said. “That’s the thing you couldn’t face about yourself. Well, now you know.”
The kid, still panting, didn’t answer.
Larison said, “Now you don’t have to help your fucked-up friends jump faggots you meet in bars. Not that they’re ever going to be in a condition to again, but still.”
Again, the kid said nothing. Larison supposed he was in shock. He opened the glove compartment and found the registration.
“How do you like that,” he said. “Your name really is Seth. And now I know where you live, too. So God help you if I ever hear of a fag beating anywhere near the Lost Coast.”
“You won’t,” Seth said. “I promise.”
Larison wondered. “Get out of the car,” he said. “I’m going to drive it back into town. I’ll leave it near the plaza somewhere. You’ll have to look around, but you’ll find it. The keys will be under the front driver-side tire.”
The kid got out of the car and stood there, looking confused and afraid and forlorn. Larison slid over to the driver’s seat. He turned the key and the engine coughed to life.