She looked me up and down, licked her lips.
“What are you doing?” she said, her tone deep and hinting of excitement. “It’s late.”
I shushed her, while slowly dropping down to my knees. She spread her legs as wide as they could go, and I could feel the heat radiating from her. Using my fingertips, I gently brushed her pussy outside her silky black panties. She was soaking.
“Looks like your old lover has had quite the effect on you, Stella,” I said. “You’re so wet.”
I could make out her breathing. She pulled her shirt off, exposing the black bra beneath it. She took hold of both her nipples and began pinching them through the material.
“Eat me, Vic,” she said.
I pulled her panties aside, exposed her trimmed pussy entirely. I kissed it, and then began using my tongue on her the best way I knew how. Her thighs were trembling. I could taste and smell her sweetness. Her swelled pink clit and trimmed black hair glistened in the dim lighting. I wanted to be consumed by her. Her pussy belonged to me and to me alone. I flicked my tongue over her lips until she thrust her hips out, released a scream, and came all over my face.
I stood and she quickly unbuckled my belt, pulled my hardness out. She began sucking it. She was working me so skillfully, so completely, so intensely, I knew it wasn’t going to take long until I released.
The words were coming out of my mouth, even before I created them in my brain.
“Did you think about sucking on Mackey like this?”
She freed her mouth.
“Yes,” she whispered, rubbing me. Pumping me.
“Do you miss his cock?”
“I do. But I love your cock too.”
“How big is Mackey’s cock?”
“Eight or nine inches. But not as thick as yours.”
“Do you want them both? At the same time?”
“Oh yes, how I would love that. One of you going down on me, the other cock in my mouth.”
When I released, it was like a gusher. She took as much in as she could, but it was all too much. When I was finished, she wiped her mouth and used her shirt to pick up anything that landed on her face, neck, and chest.
“That didn’t take long,” I said, zipping myself up.
She stood up.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” she said, “I do have one question for you.”
“What is it?” I said, pouring the last shot of the night.
“What were you doing outside Tara’s screen door?”
I drank my shot, and together the two of us went to bed. In the midst of the brushing of teeth, the washing of faces, and the locking of doors, I casually explained that I saw what looked to be a fire outside on Tara’s back deck. Knowing the state of mind she might be in these days, I thought it prudent to make a check on the house. When I could see that she was burning some candles and entertaining a friend, I didn’t want to disturb her or risk her thinking I was being a nosy busybody neighbor, so I quickly rushed back to the house. Simple and as innocent as all that.
“I had no idea the person she was entertaining was you,” I lied. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure I was going to visit her,” Stella said, getting into bed, throwing the comforter over her. “After Mackey and I were done with our drink, I decided to call her. She said she was home and could use a little company. I drove straight to her house. Just as simple and innocent as your story.”
“I see,” I said, getting into bed beside her. “Simple and innocent, that’s us.”
That’s when something hit me over the head. A thought. The condoms in the drawer. I got out of bed.
“Where are you going, Vic?” Stella said.
“Bathroom,” I said. “Too many drinks tonight I think. Weak bladder.”
“You’d better be careful with that stuff,” she said. “It’ll kill you one day you don’t watch out.”
Entering into the bathroom, I closed the door behind me, turned on the light. I opened Stella’s makeup drawer, reached inside for the condoms. They were all the way inside, just like I left them earlier. But Stella must have come back to the house while I was at the Craig’s. She must have come back and retrieved the box. I counted ten in the box previously. I counted them again. There were only seven condoms left.
My heart sank down around my ankles. I didn’t have a right to feel destroyed, but I did anyway. Did Stella and I have an understanding? No. It had all been a lie. A lie fabricated to make me feel better about myself. About Tara. About Allison. If Stella was fucking Mackey again, it was just something I had to accept and live with. After all, what’s good for the goose… If I felt lousy about it, I should have felt worse.
You could say, I deserved every bit of the pain.
I slipped the condom box back inside the drawer where I found it. Then, I slowly closed the drawer. I flushed the toilet just to add realism to the situation, shut off the light, and opened the door.
When I got back to bed, I said goodnight to Stella and leaned in for a kiss. The loving kiss of a good boyfriend. Then I turned the light off, knowing that in the morning I would pay Allison another visit. Now that I knew Stella was back to fucking Mackey, all bets were off. I wanted revenge, and I wanted justice. Since I couldn’t very well kill either Stella or Mackey, I would do the next best thing. I would accept Allison’s offer to murder Andrew. The act wouldn’t be at all right in the eyes of God or the law, but that wasn’t the point, was it? Killing Andrew on behalf of my art would give me the material I needed for yet another great book. It would make me rich and famous while Mackey died a slow death from writer’s block. That would be the sweetest revenge of all.
It didn’t take me long to fall asleep. But when I did, I dreamt the sweetest of dreams.
The next morning was bright, warm, and beautiful. Stella had left for work early, and I had the house to myself. I made the coffee, decided to forego the whiskey, and dug right into Savage Sins. The pages seemed to be writing themselves. It was easy when you personally experienced the plot, first hand.
But writing, as exciting as the story in progress was turning out, was a sedentary occupation. I was spending too much time sitting. I needed to get the blood flowing through the veins again. After throwing on my running shorts, a t-shirt, and a pair of sneakers, I made my way outside, breathed in the fresh morning air.
“Morning, Vic,” came a voice from across the lawn.
I turned, saw Tara standing in her driveway. She was wearing black workout tights, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The kids were running circles around her while she tried to round them up, put them into the mini-van. Her ass was heart-shaped, and her breasts filled out her tight elastic top perfectly. She looked stunning, and I wanted her in the worst way. But not now.
I waved back. She smiled, blew me a kiss.
Turning, I made my way down the length of the driveway and entered into a slow jog.
When I returned, I lifted free weights in the basement for half an hour, then showered and dressed in a pair of fresh trousers and a blue button down. Retrieving my black leather gloves from the top drawer on my dresser, I shoved them in my back pocket, then made a cup of coffee and some toast which I consumed in the car while driving to Allison’s house. As though expecting me to arrive at that very moment, she was standing outside the front door of her hilltop ranch, a cup of coffee in her hand.
She was wearing workout clothes that were very similar to the ones Tara had been wearing, as though they had attended the same workout class that morning. Perhaps they had. As I approached her, I could see that her skin was radiant, coated with a sheen of perspiration. She glowed in the light of the morning sun that poured in through the breaks in the tall trees.
“So,” she said. “What’s your answer, Vic?”
In my head, rapid-fire memories. Tara and me in her basement, a big spider hovering over her washing machine by its web. Tara and me in her kitchen, our bodies colliding like two magnets. My loosening the
basement staircase step. Her husband falling, finding death the moment his skull struck the concrete floor. Me, seated in front of my typewriter, pounding out a new story and a new novel with all the confidence of an old pro, knowing my career was about to take a turn for the better. The Sex Club at Allison’s, her scars and cuts. Finding the condoms in the drawer in the bathroom. The Craig’s S&M game. Stella meeting up with Mackey and later, with Tara. Three more missing condoms…
My life was changing rapidly.
Reaching out, I gently touched the small bruise on her face. The bruise Andrew had given her at her explicit request. She winced at my gentle touch.
“The answer is yes,” I said. “The handyman will take care of your husband problem.”
She gave me the key to the gun cabinet inside Andrew’s office.
“He goes to the range on Thursday afternoons,” she said. “Then he comes home and cleans his pistols. He’ll have been drinking with his friends, and he’ll be drinking while he takes care of the guns. It’s the ritual.”
“What time should I expect him?”
“About four.”
“Where will you be?”
“On the other side of the house.”
I nodded, stared at the key in my hand. “What day is it? Sometimes writers have a habit of losing track.”
“Thursday,” she said. “The day of power and expansion.”
“The day of reckoning,” I said.
I never left her house that day. In fact, I spent most of it in Andrew’s office. Rather than leave my prints all over the place, I covered my hands with the tight leather gloves. I then opened the gun cabinet with the key, pulled out one of the .45s on display. There was a box of .45 caliber ammo stored in one of the two bottom drawers of the cabinet. I loaded the pistol’s magazine with seven rounds, then slapped the magazine into the pistol grip. I’d done my two years in the Army during the first Gulf War, so I wasn’t a total stranger to semi-automatics. Especially .45 caliber model 1911.
Truth be told, it felt good to hold one again.
The afternoon went by slowly. Agonizingly slowly. I played a dozen different scenarios over and over again in my head. Me, waiting for Andrew in the closet, springing myself on him when he came through the office door… Me, hiding behind his desk, shooting him in the back when he returned his guns to the cabinet… Me, waiting in the next-door bathroom, then sneaking into the office and shooting him while he was seated at his desk. He wouldn’t know what hit him.
All of these ideas would probably work. But somehow, the idea of sneaking up on him just didn’t seem fair to me. Somehow, it seemed like the cowardly way to go about killing him. Like the coward, Bob Ford, who shot and killed Jesse James in the back.
How would Hemingway do it? I asked myself.
That’s when I decided to simply wait for him inside the office. Wait for him while I sat in his chair behind his desk. It was the honorable thing to do. The manly thing.
When I heard his car pull up, I felt my pulse elevate, my heartbeat pick up speed, my mouth turn dry. But at the same time, I felt good. Powerful. Like I was about to do something not for Allison, but for me and my art. My life. The answer to everything was the cold, hard .45 gripped in my shooting hand.
Andrew entered the house through the front door. Words were exchanged between Allison and Andrew. Quick, harsh words. She said he was drunk. He said he didn’t give a shit.
“Guns and booze,” she spat. “Better watch it, or you might shoot yourself.”
“You’d love that,” he countered. “Then you’d finally be free of me.” He laughed bitterly. “But then, who would you have to beat on? To punish and torture? Who would spank you? Punch you?”
They were fighting. But I sensed the playful part of their relationship—the painful playful part—wasn’t about to enter into the equation this late afternoon. I didn’t have to see the expressions on their faces nor hear the words being spoken from their mouths to taste and feel the bitterness the two held for one another. Was that bitterness enough to kill Andrew? Of course not. Nor was the insurance money I would split with Allison. But the experience I would gather in the act of the killing would be invaluable, and therein laid my entire motivation for what I was about to do. But was I about to kill the right person? I was beginning to believe it was Allison who was abusing Andrew.
Footsteps along the bare wood floor, each of them laden and heavy. Each of them like the tick of the second hand on a clock. Tick, tock, tick, tock…
I heard his breathing as he placed his hand on the doorknob, twisted it. My heart began pounding against my sternum, the gun gripped in my leather glove-covered shooting hand, my palms moist with perspiration. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him.
It was strange, because he didn’t notice me at first. It took me more than a few beats to realize he couldn’t see me very well because he wasn’t seeing straight. After all, his eyes were full of tears.
“No more,” he whispered, as he drew a semi-automatic from his hip holster, placed the barrel in his mouth.
I was so shocked at what I was seeing, my body must have reacted instinctively. I shuddered and the swivel chair I was seated in squeaked. The noise was enough to break Andrew out of his concentration. Slowly withdrawing the pistol barrel from his mouth, he turned to me.
His blue eyes went wide, his smooth face went tight.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, a single tear falling down his cheek.
“I’m a friend of Allison’s,” I said, taking aim with the .45.
His tight face went white.
“Have you fucked her?”
I nodded.
For a man at the end of his rope, he was quicker than I thought. Assuming a combat stance, both hands gripping his weapon, he planted a bead on me, finger on the trigger. A headshot from that range that would spray my brains and skull all over the window behind me.
Instinct took over. It became a simple matter of him or me.
I raised the .45 and pulled the trigger. It was his brains that sprayed the door behind him. His body dropped like a stone, and I knew his soul had already pulled an Elvis and left the building even before I had the chance to shoot up from the chair.
The king of the castle was dead.
Coming around the desk, I peered down at him and what I saw robbed me of my breath. Despite the nickel-sized hole in the center of his forehead, he bore a smile. The tears were still falling from both his eyes, one of which was wide open as if looking toward a future free of Allison, and the other looking inward at all the pain he had suffered while alive. Death must come as quite a relief to a man who despises himself. Despises his life. Andrew was proof positive of that.
He should have shot me when he had the chance. But he didn’t pull the trigger. He hesitated, because, in the end, he wanted to die more than he wanted to live. It was a remarkable thing to witness. This wasn’t about my being Allison’s handyman. It was about being Andrew’s.
I would make careful note of everything that went down inside that office over the course of the last few minutes. Andrew’s heavy footsteps outside the door, his hand on the doorknob, his slowly opening the door then closing it behind him, the tears coming from his eyes, the sound of his agonized voice telling himself he couldn’t take anymore, him drawing his weapon, the cold, bitter taste of gunmetal inside his mouth, his shock upon seeing me seated behind his desk, the moment he tried to draw on me like we were caught in some old High Noon Hollywood style Western, the blast of the .45, the concussion against my shooting hand, the nickel-sized hole in his forehead, and the spray of blood and brain matter that stained the office door.
All of it would be prime material for yet another novel, and all of it would be so real that the reader would wonder if I had actually witnessed first-hand the killing of a man by handgun, up close and personal. They might even wonder if I had performed the killing myself. But what they would never know is how good I felt about it. How good it felt to spring Andrew from the t
rap that was his home.
Then, a voice from outside the door. A faint voice that somehow sounded louder and more shocking than the blast of the .45.
“Is it done?” Allison asked.
“It’s done.”
I could only imagine if the voice she heard from the other side of the door had been Andrew’s. Now that would have been one hell of a wakeup call for her.
“Can I come in, Vic?”
I knew in my burning heart that if she entered the office, I would shoot her dead. I craved the experience being the handyman afforded me, but the last thing I needed was a mass murder on my hands.
“Not yet. Go get your phone. You’re going to need to call 911 in a minute or two. The sooner, the better. But not before I tell you. So be ready. Understand?”
“I understand,” she said.
I pictured her standing outside the door, her eyes wide, her long hair pulled back behind her ears, her heart pounding, temples pulsing.
I had work to do. It needed to get it done now.
Here’s what I did to make Andrew’s murder look like a suicide brought about by an abusive wife. I pulled the hanky from my back pocket, cleaned the .45 of my prints. Then, I placed it in Andrew’s right hand, with his thumb jammed inside the trigger guard, rather than his index finger. The pistol was positioned in his hand so that the barrel was facing him, rather than facing a hostile target on the opposite side of the room.
I then picked up the 9mm off the floor, placed that back into his hip holster like he’d never pulled it out in the first place. Judging by the way he was lying on his back, the hole dead center in his forehead, the smile on his face, the one eye open, and the other closed, it looked like the perfect suicide. Almost like he was asking himself to “Kill me. Put me out of my misery. For God’s sake kill me, please.”
Sure, the cops would wonder why he hadn’t used his 9mm when he was packing it right on his hip. But then, any cop worth his or her salt knows a single round fired from a .45 to the forehead is a sure bet to blow one’s brains out. The 9mm would have done the same, but the .45 is that much bigger. That much more powerful. There would be no question of its ability to end one’s life and end it definitively. It meant Andrew was committed to the act. He wasn’t merely calling out for help.
Naked Heat: The Handyman, Episode II Page 5