Friendly was torn between elation at having caught two perps at a single stop and recognition of his own guilt in having caused a possible fatality accident through his LA cowboy tactics. He laid out a fan of road flares and radioed for an ambulance and backup, then approached the wrecked sedan.
It was a ‘74 Duster, lemon yellow under the glaze of dust, oil and bird shit that covered everything but a slit in the opaque windshield. The front end was an accordion, and Friendly knew the guy would be impaled on the steering wheel if he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
He wasn’t. He seemed to have popped most of his ribs on the steering column, breaking off the wheel. He was still conscious. Mumbling his hippie coping mantra, or something. “Gottagetheroutthetrunk!”
Friendly drew his Glock 9mm – one of the few perks of the SCPD, they let you carry your own ordnance. “Hands where I can see them, sir! Now, help is on the way, but if you’re able, show me your license, registration and proof of insurance.”
“Gotta get her out! She wants to get out!”
The driver’s fingers spasmed and clawed at the keys, while his other hand disappeared down his pants in search of CONCEALED EVIDENCE or a CONCEALED WEAPON. His gibbering devolved into a choked growl that made Friendly feel completely justified in jamming his gun in the driver’s face.
“Get your hand out of your pants, sir! Right now!”
The driver wailed, eyes locked on something closer and more urgent than the gun. “She wants out! She wants to fuck!”
Most people close their eyes and turn away from a gun, wishing themselves into a happier place and time, anywhere but staring down the barrel of the great leveler. Friendly had never before had cause to stick his gun in anybody’s face, but cops talk, and Friendly listened, inwardly preparing himself for that day.
But this asshole leaned in and grabbed the gun and, opening his mouth to expose a toothless pit of terminally diseased gums, deep-throated the muzzle and proceeded to fellate it for all he was worth. He sucked three bullets out of it before Friendly even noticed it going off as he tried to get his beloved Glock 9mm free of the pervert’s mouth. The recoil jerked the gun out of his gooey rictus even as the driver’s head flew away on hollow-point wings.
The body slumped forwards, one spastic hand pitching the keys so they jingled and struck Friendly’s washboard stomach. He stooped and picked them up, wiped his gun off on the driver’s flannel shirt before holstering it.
He raced around the car. Not noticing that the microbus was gone, checking out the keys. A San Jose Sharks bottle opener, a broken Swiss Army knife with only the corkscrew remaining, a foam rubber boner with the address for a shitty grind joint in Capitola, the door, ignition and gas keys for the Duster. Friendly unlocked the trunk and stood back as it swung open. He saw A HOSTAGE in a bundle of crushed velvet, stiff with secretions both mechanical and organic, stretched taut over the unmistakable outline of a heaving female form.
He heard it calling to him, though the air was so still he could hear his pulse. Its voice was a scent that bled into his reptilian midbrain, down to the glandular fuck/kill engines that drove his organism. Capping the driver was the perfect foreplay for what the thing in the trunk invited him to do now and for all time.
Friendly fell, pushed and pulling, into the mouth of the trunk. And as his eyelids gummed shut, it seemed the trunk slammed, or was pulled shut, just as headlights swept over the crash scene.
Hours later, when the wreck had been swept up and reports filed away and Friendly debriefed on the fatal shooting, they sent him home, told him to stay there for a few days. When he came to in the ambulance, they told him he passed out. The paramedic was also a sensitivity counselor, and if he wanted to talk about anything, or just cry it out, that’d be okay. Friendly felt too weak to hit him.
««—»»
The political correctness bullshit in Santa Cruz was like pollution nobody else could see. Signs on the county line proclaimed Santa Cruz a Nuclear Free and a Clothing Optional Zone. A Mayoral runoff election next week would pit the incumbent, a gay nudist Socialist, against a black lesbian Wiccan Communist. A church group from San Jose came over every Palm Sunday to exorcise the place.
The university waffled like a battered wife, calling the cops when the brats got onto some bad acid, but always tying their hands when push came to prosecute. They kept a lid on the serious shit, like the obligatory freshmen suicide attempts every finals week, or the serial rapist who hunted coeds unopposed for three semesters because the school valued women’s empowerment too much to provide them with escorts.
But the hippies needed someone to protect their bongs, so they voted two years ago to bring in more cops. Students graduated and took jobs at 7-11 so they could stay, but nobody wanted to be a pig, so the call went out and Brad Friendly, two days out of the Los Angeles Police Academy and suddenly pressed to leave town, signed on. For their part, the locals smelled the LA on him and showed him no love. On or off-duty, they treated him like a spy from a hostile nation. Looking around this place, it wasn’t hard to imagine it was once the Serial Killer Capital of the world, home of Ed Kemper, the Coed Killer, Herbert Mullin and John Linley Frazier.
He drove back out to the scene of the crash, looking to make sure he wasn’t followed. Just before dusk, he found what he was looking for. Stowing it in the covered bed of his matte black Ford F150 pickup, he looked around once more and climbed into the truck, drove home just slow enough not to get pulled over.
He slipped in with the bundle under his arm, looking over his shoulder at two feral kids in ankle-length tie-dyed T-shirts spying as he carried it over the threshold. He didn’t have a couch, so he laid it on his weight bench and moved to the far corner of the room, arms clenched at his sides.
He was fucking off here, not as bad as LA yet, but getting there. He was CONCEALING EVIDENCE. He was an ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT.
And it had made him do it, no it had only suggested, no, it was his idea to hide the thing at the scene and pick it up later, because they’d never understand, they’d try to take it away. And they couldn’t—
He approached on his knees and pulled back the crushed velvet veil.
There was a torso.
A woman’s torso, a Cro-Magnon goddess, a primordial Venus of voluptuous alabaster curves and folds, sculpted flesh describing archetypal angles of luscious succubi. Turgid skin glistening with iridescent oil-slick rainbow glow of gamy oysters. Neck, shoulders and hips terminated in sphincter-mouths, pouting lips trembling with arousal.
She needed neither head nor limbs to command Friendly to abase himself before her. She made him writhe on the floor in a mangled mating dance of broken instinct. Under her control, he descended to the abyss of Now, to the impulse that anchored his body, kept it from flying apart. Every cell strained against that impulse every moment of his life, the base ore of their lust to BREED sublimated into the ghost in the Brad Friendly machine’s need for MANIPULATION DOMINATION CONTROL.
The heady aroma of the Venus short-circuited Friendly’s ghost and spoke to his cells, and the voice of the aroma was all there was to SEX and Friendly was in full rut in seconds, forcing himself upon the Venus, thrusting his cock into the quivering stump-mouth where a head would have been on a mortal woman.
The other mouths attached themselves to his body and made a throbbing cock out of every inch of his flesh. He looked down at himself through oceans of red hunger and saw an undulating carpet of questing penises boring holes in the Venus, then his sight went white as cascades of orgasmic stimuli washed over his brain. He felt the millions of penetrations meld into a single vortex of force and pour down the shaft of him into Her.
He became a plumed sperm-serpent encircling the Venus, plunging into one mouth and out of another, transfixing Her and gliding through tempestuous seas of estrogen musk. Finally, he breached the pulsating core of his mate and rammed himself into it with a final surge of his last reserves of stamina, felt the furious, frail bubble of his masculine power burst
and blast its message of FRIENDLINESS into the crucible-womb of the Venus, and the shockwave rent the walls of him, the consummation of his desire opened a vacuum that sucked away blood, lymph, liquefied organs and plasma-charged brain.
Wracked with galvanic spasms, Friendly’s naked skeleton tried to pull itself away from the thing that sucked him dry. Then She lurched against him and vomited him back into himself, like a mother bird regurgitating into the mouth of its young. He tried to lift himself up and collapsed on the bare tile floor. His body was a billion bodies, and they were not on speaking terms. He fell asleep at the foot of the altar, one arm slung over the cooling hip of the Venus.
««—»»
The weeks that followed were probably, if he’d stopped to think about it, the happiest he’d ever known. As a cop, he could throw himself into the job without losing control as never before, and his performance did not go unnoticed. Men still ignored him, and women seemed to smell the musk of the Venus on him with veiled disgust, but the captain suggested that he might consider taking the sergeant’s exam next time around. He liked to think it was due to his new, objective demeanor on the job, and not the lingering odor of a goddess that aroused her interest.
Friendly stopped lifting weights, yet he’d never been in better shape in his life. He moved the weight bench into the corner and made a tent of the Venus’s shroud, a private shrine where he spent his nights and many lunch hours. His torso and arms rippled with starkly defined muscle like bundles of bridge cable. He got more than enough exercise, and burned off fat and loose skin so fast he worried about cancer and tapeworms. He burned with thirst, and he’d developed a serious craving for exotic fruit juices with weird supplements blended into them. He worried idly that he wasn’t putting on muscle, that the Venus was merely sucking him dry, drinking up the stored resins of his mortality. Was it getting fat?
The most dramatic benefit negated all other concerns in keeping him away from the hospital: his penis, never anything to shoot a Polaroid of for Ripley’s, now stood a full eleven inches out from his taut abdomen, almost every hour of the day. For this, he didn’t ask himself if she was a goddess or a circus freak. He hadn’t gone blind, he wasn’t going insane, and he wasn’t dying from any hideous disease that he knew about. If there was a God, surely he blessed their union, or was just jealous, which would explain all the bad dreams.
««—»»
Night patrol takes him into an unfamiliar corner of town, where the streets have no names and the cookie-cutter houses have none of the usual hippie-follies, mini-Stonehenges and suchlike, that reflect their inhabitants’ desperate need to seem unique. He’s asking himself if any of this needs protecting, when snow-cone lights paint his cruiser in chiaroscuro red and a horn whoops. He’s being pulled over. Friendly picks up the radio and requests an ID on the cruiser behind him, but the box squawks black static, voices breaking through like banshees incanting a pagan rosary in a nuclear blizzard.
“Virgin, Harlot and Hag, Magna Mater, the Black Goat—”
He jerks at the tapping at his window and the hand reaching in to clamp his shoulder, mag-light beam pinpricking his pupils, and he shields his eyes like a bleary drunk, sees uniforms coming out of the dark, uniforms he’s never seen before. Two cops look him over, muttering words that turn fuzzy and rot before they reach his ears.
“222-stroke-87, PR-28720a, eh?”
“DW5051-stroke-8086, yep,” his partner chuckles. He opens Friendly’s door as the first cop pries him out of the cruiser and deftly palms his Glock, looks at it like a booby prize from the county fair. His partner rips the gold foil badge off Friendly’s uniform and unwraps it, pops the chocolate surprise inside in his mouth.
He tries to pull free, tries to arrest them for ASSAULTING AN OFFICER, but the arrest turns inside out, he is IMPERSONATING AN OFFICER. He watches himself present his hands behind his back and the manacles jingle. He waits docilely to be led to the cruiser, but one of the cops squirts his hair with lighter fluid and the partner touches a lighter to his butch-waxed buzzcut and shoves him and he’s FLEEING THE SCENE, a human bomb racing through the trees to its target…
««—»»
At 5:40 one Monday morning, Friendly stopped in at Farrell’s Donuts on his way to the dayroom briefing. Aside from two post-rave punks at the Samurai Showdown machine, the dreary dining room was empty. He ordered two assortment dozens and a cranberry smoothie and sat to wash down some vitamins while they were boxed up.
A bum slipped in the door and into a booth, picking stray sprinkles and flakes of glaze off the table. A vital foundation of Santa Cruz’s ecology, bums were the town’s sacred cows. It didn’t pay to roust them, because as often as not they turned out to be lawyers or sociology professors. The bum cleaned off the booth and slid into the next one, leaned across it into Friendly’s face.
He smelled like a rendering plant. His sickdog eyes glinted through a mastodon pelt of filthy dreadlocks. The advanced decay of his person seemed to have been cultivated to Dickensian proportions. Perhaps he belonged to one of the fringe communes in the mountains between here and San Jose, come into the valley to “tox out” and cadge a free love ride miracle ticket thirty years out of date.
“Do you know why Herbert Mullin did those murders?”
Friendly shook his head once, a first and final warning.
“Believed only the shedding of blood could stop the Big One. Little bloodshed’s a small price to pay to live in paradise, isn’t it? ‘Materialism must die or mankind must stop.’ No, that was Linley Frazier.”
“Are you high on something, or just stupid?”
“Shit, fuzz, I feel at home with you because you been laying with the Lamia.” The bum drew closer and sniffed greedily, like a cat trying to steal his breath.
Friendly scrambled out of the booth, drew his baton. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Hey, man, it’s cool, I don’t want to fight, I want to fuck. Where can a guy like me get a ride on that Night-Hag, I wanna know? Guy’s gotta have cash or a badge, for some of that gash.”
The Korean cashier ordered the bum out, waving a broomstick over his head. Friendly followed him to the parking lot and kicked him as hard as he could just above the tailbone.
The bum launched into a parked car without raising defensive arms or even shouting. His soft-boiled head dented the door with a leaden crump, and Friendly had his baton under his jaw before he could lie down.
“So you think you know where I spend my nights, asshole?”
“Shit, man, I’m not trying to harsh your mellow, man. We’re both like, men of the world, right? Didn’t mean nothin’ by it…”
“You keep your filthy mouth shut about it, and show some respect. She’s a goddess.” Friendly went in and got his donuts.
Friendly went eight rounds with the Venus that night and staggered into the kitchen for a pineapple-kelp shake with spirulena and henbane, when he realized he could see with the lights off. Red flame shadows danced and devoured each other on the bare walls, silhouetting a nude woman standing before the stove. Friendly smelled burning hair. The flames haloed her head and obscured her face, but he saw the glint of tooled steel manacles on her wrists and knew who she was.
“Hello, Brad. I wish I could say I was glad you’ve finally found somebody.”
Friendly’s spine rebelled, dumped him on the sticky linoleum at the apparition’s feet. “Francine,” he managed to gasp, “I never thought I’d see you again—”
Though two years had passed, the unique circumstances of their parting had left Friendly without a sense of closure. The night after he’d marched in the Academy commencement ceremonies, he’d finally convinced Francine it was time to go all the way. She was saving herself for marriage; he’d made it clear that his becoming a cop was the next best thing, and a sure guarantee of the other. The sex was good; he lit candles and gave her a backrub first. She had to remind him to be gentle only six or seven times.
Somewhere in the middle of it, however,
Friendly lost touch with the program and got kinked on her. He pinned her arms behind her back with his brand new handcuffs and tried to force himself in her mouth. She kicked away from him and knocked over the candles, igniting her hair. His last glimpse of Francine was in her role as impromptu Passion Play martyr, pinioned arms akimbo, hair blazing, shrieking to beat the smoke alarm. She’d bolted from the bachelor apartment before he could muster his wits to put her out. That was the last time he ever saw or heard from her until now, when she’d returned, naked and blazing, to his kitchen.
“Are you a ghost? Are you… dead?”
“I’m not here about what you did to me. You have to come to grips with what you’re doing here, now.”
“I don’t need any shit from somebody who ran out on me. Besides, I’m not doing anything… wrong…”
“Has she met your parents yet, Brad?” Francine laughed, spitting tongues of fire at Friendly’s eyes. “On some level, you’ve got to recognize how deeply fucking wrong this is. You tried to rape me, and look where it’s got you. You confused love with dominance before and now you fuck a monster, and you’re falling in love with it.”
“You’re not Francine. Francine never cursed. Fuck off!”
“You believe this is how it was meant to be, and who can blame you? You’ve clubbed one and dragged it back to the cave, and it can’t crawl out again. The perfect wife for the perfect cop. You’re so sure of the dominator you have to be that you can’t see what’s dominating you. She’s using you, Brad. Think about that, for me.”
The flames died away.
Friendly lay on the floor for a while before he got up. Where he wasn’t numb with cold, he itched, and everything was frozen but his crotch. He hobbled into the bathroom and turned on the light, then turned it off again. Then on, off, on. Trying to see what he was supposed to see, and not what glared back at him.
Mighty Unclean Page 2