CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (27 page)

"No." He stroked the front edge of his desk as he spoke. "We can't forget that, can we?"

Molly shrugged, bored. It was all sunshine and fun outside. She could go down to the beach and lounge in the sand, walk in the surf, pick a bouquet of wild hibiscus. She could go to the marina in Ft. Lauderdale and watch the million-dollar yachts steam into dock. Yet here she was stuck in a modern white office with an understanding man. Some days she thought she actually preferred her father over the mealy-mouthed Jason Harcrafts of this world.

"It is precisely because of your father's background that the two of you are having many of your disputes," he said.

"Meaning I'm as normal as apple pie."

He wagged his thinning cranium. "I don;t know if I'd go so far as state you're behaving absolutely normally. You do have a certain talent to provoke your father into... uh...rages."

Boy, did she. She could look at him cross-eyed and he'd get mad. Why are you looking at me that way? he'd ask. What have you done that would make you look at me that way?

"He won't let me do anything, she complained. "He's worried about all the reports of drugs and sex in the schools."

"Yes, well, most parents are concerned about that..."

"He doesn't know about the guns."

That perked Jason's ears. "Guns?"

She took on her cloak of ultra-cool. She knew something the adults didn't know. All the kids knew a thousand secrets that would blow the domes off the capital buildings in every city in the country. "Kids carry them to school," she said matter-of-factly. "Lots of kids. Lots of guns. You didn't know that?"

Jason leaned forward until his elbows rested on the desktop. "Why wouldn't the teachers know about it and take preventative steps?"

Oh, so he didn't believe her. They never did. The world kids lived in was so alien to adults that they couldn't quite grasp the picture. "The teachers," she said, "don't hang out with the kids. They see them in class, that's it. During lunch they go into the teachers' lounge, they stick together."

"Why are there so many guns in school then?"

"Guys carry them for protection. There are gangs. The Jamaicans. The Vietnamese. They get picked on so they go packing. Everyone knows. Some kid not in a gang wants to be tough or he thinks he might get hassled, he packs. He lets everyone know about it too. Even some of the girls carry."

"Doesn't it scare you?"

She shrugged, the cloak of cool firmly in place. "Not much. I'm used to it. Someone's got a gun and he asks to borrow a pen or paper in class, you don't refuse him. You just do what he says and it's okay."

"Hmmm." He was back to rubbing the desk edge. "It sounds as if school is a dangerous sort of environment."

She could have said
no shit, Sherlock
, but instead she laughed. "It ain't Disney World."

"How do the kids at school hide all these guns?"

"The guys wear baggy overcoats like raincoats, you know? I know one guy carries a sawed-off shotgun fitted into a special holster under his coat."

"Where do they get hold of these weapons?"

"Buy 'em off the street. Bring them from home."

He looked so saddened, so out of touch with reality, that she felt sorry for him. "You can't tell my dad."

"About the guns?"

'Right. If you do, he'll put me in a private school. It's no better there. The richer the kids are, the looser the rules. I'm better off in the public system."

"Is it the state of the schools that causes you to argue with your father?"

At last. Jason had found a pertinent question, something that went to the real heart of the matter.

"Not really," she admitted sheepishly. "He's just a pain in the ass sometimes."

"You can't try to compromise?"

"He's too tough. He wants too much. As in perfect
fealty
. That's a Marine word, I think."

"Might it be because he loves you? He wants to protect you. He wants you to be happy?"

She thought it over. "I guess so. But that doesn't make it any easier. He just won't give me any slack. He hounds me all the fucking time." She said
fucking
to test him.

He didn't bat an eyelash. Christ on a stick, he was so understanding.

"We'll talk again," Jason said, rising from behind the massive desk. Standing, he wasn't such a tiny man. He looked more human, not like some kind of circus freak who had wandered into a room full of outsize furniture.

She knew her time was over. She could go to the beach now, but if she was late getting home her father would give her the third-degree. He set his watch by her comings and goings. He was a hawk, she his scurrying, earthbound prey.

Outside the glass-walled building in the afternoon sunshine, she paused on the steps to breathe in the fruity scent of a nearby flowering mimosa shedding its shrimp-pink blossoms in the breeze.

She might as well go home. Ask his permission. It would make things easier. She'd have to explain why she wanted to go to the beach, who she was going with, when she'd be back, what she planned to do when there. But maybe that was the kind of compromise Jason meant to encourage. Give the old man his chance to act out his role. Play along. Stop fighting the inevitable.

She did that until she couldn't do it anymore. She listened to Jason and his common sense advice until it was coming out her ears. She compromised until she wanted to scream.

And then she packed her things and hit the road.
Just like that
. Without thinking it all through.

And here she was
, opening her eyes on an adobe cantina yellowing in the morning sun, hog-tied like some animal, clothes in tatters, her body a plaything for stinking, drunken strangers, and, worst of all, hostage to another adult. One who wouldn't just yell at her for being out late or bringing home a B- or wearing her skirts too short.

She was smart all right. She was cloaked down to her toes in cool. She had swapped semi-freedom with a father who loved her for imprisonment with a man who didn't know what love meant.
She was a regular genius.

What would Jason Harcraft, the venerable counselor to troubled teens, have to say about that?

#

Cruise pushed at the girl's thighs and said, "Spread your legs more."

She wasn't much beyond Molly's age. Cruise liked her because she spoke good English. He didn't have to struggle with the language to get what he wanted.

She did as she was told and he sat back on his naked haunches to play with her. It was almost day and he had used her twice already. Soon he would order her from the pom and sleep like a baby in a silken crib.

They had brought in a noisy box fan and installed it in the window for him. The breeze wove over their bodies, ruffling his long hair, drying all her natural juices so that her soft pink flesh felt like the petals of a rose. He stroked between her upraised knees until she moaned and squirmed. Girls her age were insatiable, couldn't get enough.

Suddenly he slapped the inside of her thigh hard enough to leave a palm print. She scooted away from him, hugging her knees together. Tears stood in her dark eyes.

"Just a little love tap," he said, grinning.

"It's not funny," she said in her quirky accent.

"Come here, baby. Let me make it all better."

She shook her head and long black hair fell around her brown shoulders.

He grabbed himself and smiled. "Don't you want this? Come on over here and help me make it work again."

Lust overcame her fear as he knew it would. This little backwater whore never failed him. She did it for money and she did it out of burning need. She relaxed her legs until they were out again on the bed beside him. He gently pressed her ankles apart and leaned over her fragrant core.

"Umm, so sweet."

She reached to the bed table and dipped the tips of her long fingers into a brass dish of golden honey. She let drops of it fall past his face onto her flat belly. She smeared it in a circular fashion all around until he began to slurp from her fingers.

"Now it's sweeter," she said, arching her back for him.

Cruise relinquished himself to taste and touch, everything in the room dimming at the edges as if a fog undulated over the sparse furnishings.

"You," he murmured, pointing behind him, "come join in the fun."

The second girl who had been napping in a chair against the wall woke immediately and sidled over to the bed. She wasn't nearly as pretty or willing as the girl on the bed, but she would do. She didn't understand a word of English. She took orders from his tone of voice, from how he pointed to what he wanted.

"On your tits," he said. "Put the honey there."

She covered her small budding breasts with the golden syrup, massaging her nipples until they stood out like small milk-chocolate cones. She lowered the top half of her body

toward him.

Cruise leisurely tasted the two girls. The last time should be the best one. He had to hurry before the sun was too much higher in the sky. He couldn't concentrate when the room grew too light.

Mental flashes kept intruding so that his tongue slowed as if the battery powering it were losing energy.

Molly lying on the sand in the desert.

The convenience store clerk compliant in his arms until the knife worked a path through her throat.

The bottled water sluicing over his head.

Edward's face under the skim of river water, his mouth open in a last choking gasp.

Damn it!

He pushed off the two girls lying side by side in the bed. He ran a hand over his face, pulled on his beard until it hurt.

"What's the matter?" the pretty one asked.

"Shut up. You just shut up."

He crossed his arms over his chest and moved his hands up and down the scabrous wounds. They needed opening again.

He might be able to get it up for a final session if there was blood on the girls.

He reached beneath his hair for the knife. Both girls looked at him in horror. They knew about the knife. They had touched it during their lovemaking as if it were an icon of luck.

"Don't worry. I don't want to cut you."

He spoke the truth. He wanted to cut himself to let out the worms of anxiety. They crawled beneath his skin in tormenting waves that would not...

Would not cease.

He made small incisions an eighth of an inch deep, two and three inches long all up and down both arms from the top of his shoulders to the inside of his wrists. The blood peaked and ran. He put away the knife when he felt that he could, and held out his dripping arms over the bodies on the bed that watched him in silence and increasing dread.

Cruise didn't see how they turned their faces away when he began to lick the red honey mixture from the brown succulent skin. He didn't notice when they turned cold as statues as he mounted one and kissed the other's blood ruby lips.

THE SEVENTH NIGHT

All day Molly blistered in the sun. Heat waves rose from the Chrysler's hood, wavering and blurring her view of the cantina walls. At one point Molly was forced to beg for water. One of the girls waiting tables inside was given the message by an old man pushing a grocery cart of aluminum cans. The bar girl came out with a tall bottle of Coca Cola slippery with ice crystals. Molly thanked her profusely, her throat so dry and raw her voice sounded deeper than it really was.

The girl stood beside the car waiting to return the empty bottle inside. She appeared to think it the most natural thing in creation for someone to be held prisoner by ropes while the sun baked the town clean of pedestrians. She swiped at a cloud of black flies that hovered just at the window edge, but they came back, re-formed into the original configuration.

Molly tried to talk to the girl. She looked to be sixteen or seventeen, and she had a sweet Madonna face that did not smile. Molly wondered if the girl had ever known a situation that called for smiling.

"Will you untie me?" Molly held up her wrists as far as they would go. She lifted her ankles from the floorboard and let her feet thump down again. "Cruise won't let me go. Can't you help me? I want to go home. Wouldn't you want to go home if you were me?"

The Mexican girl stared off across the street behind the Chrysler as if she didn't understand and didn't care to. She tapped one sandaled foot in the sand, waiting for Molly to finish drinking the Coke.

Molly finished, gulping the last of the fizzing liquid down her parched throat. The rapid guzzling gave her a temporary bout of hiccups. She wouldn't turn over the bottle until she could make the girl understand. "You know Cruise, right? He carries a knife hidden in his hair, did you know that too?"

The girl reached through the window to take the bottle. Molly held it out of reach. "No, wait! Isn't there anyone here who will stand up to him? Are you all so scared, you'd let me stay prisoner in this car all night and all day? You'd let him take me away from here and kill me somewhere, leave me beside the road? How could you live with yourself? How could you let that happen? Don't you have police? Someone--anyone-- who cares?"

Molly ran out of breath and sat hiccuping, crying now, her voice so pitiful that she had made herself miserable. There were deep half moons beneath her eyes. Her lips were rough and reddened, a split caked over with scab down the center of her bottom lip. Scrapes and scratches from the fall she took in the desert left red marks on her arms and face, burn marks were raised on the flesh of her chest where the man with the mustache rubbed against her. She had managed to drape scraps of cloth from her torn blouse over her breasts, but the breeze kept blowing them aside. She tried, but couldn't get her fingers to the zipper in her jeans. They still stood open so that the top elastic of her panties showed white against her ivory freckled skin.

"Look at me." She had to scream. The girl wanted nothing to do with her beyond supplying the cold drink. She wasn't listening.

"Will you just look what he's done to me?"

The girl flinched at the shout, but she continued staring into the distance.