Futile Efforts (23 page)

No more than five seconds went by before she broke his grip.
 
The animal in him started crawling out of the hole, the rage stirring.
 
Megan twisted around and bent way over, resting her arms atop the tombstone, showing off her ass.
 
This is some freaky shit, he thought, but not much different than some of the other situations he'd been in.
 
His first screw had been with a black prostitute named Rosy weighing in at 270 that his father had brought home for him when he was thirteen.
 
You got used to strange lays after that.

"Come on, slap my ass."

"Sure," he said.

"Let him watch.
 
Let Daddy watch."

It irritated him, hearing that.
 
Holder began spanking her with his right hand while running his left underneath her neck, squeezing lightly.
 
He worked his way down to toy with her clit, still swatting her pretty roughly.

She turned and gave him the slow once over, sort of disappointed.
 
"Harder, really punish it."

"Okay."
 
He let loose and gave her a few open handed whacks that echoed like gun shots across the cemetery.
 
Her ass grew instantly red.
 
He thought about the Pope in Vatican City suddenly flinching so severely that his big funny hat flipped onto the floor.

Some people would've thought it a little weird to be doing this but he knew his Dad would've enjoyed the scene, had probably done plenty similar in his life, though maybe not on his old man's grave.
 
It gave Holder an extra incentive and he planted his heels, throwing all his weight into it as he swatted her.
 
When did this turn to abuse and violation?
 
When did it close in on murder?
 
She was grinning now, clenching her teeth and letting out a low moan broken by bitter snorts.
 
The nasty crimson of her ass grew deeper and deeper.
 
Here he was thinking of bubble baths and now this.
 
It made him scowl and he started to feel a little out of it, thinking, Am I supposed to dig this?
 
Where's the payback?
 
I don't want my
heinie
hurt.
 
He stopped in mid-whap and she quivered while he licked her neck.
 
Better, much better, none of this hostility.
 
You let that out on the rude, ugly pricks of the world, not on the young beautiful girls.

You could kill your demons with kindness.
 
She bucked and heaved backwards as he pressed his groin up behind her, dry humping her as he strained against his shorts.
  
Rosy had liked it this way, urging him on going, "That's it, honey, that's the stuff.
 
Uh huh."
  
This might actually get good.
 
Megan reached behind and undid his jeans, unzipped and yanked him out in one fluid motion, slipping it in without ever glancing over her shoulder to look at him.
 
She was close already and when he thrust into her she was so wet that drops splashed into his pubic hair.

Dad's roaring laughter filled Holder's head.
 
Rosy's
too.
 
And Matilda's and Jade's and Patricia's and others he remembered but whose names had disappeared.
 
His father had been very generous there for a while. A couple of them had been murdered the next year during the summer of the
Icepick
, when a killer had worked the streets taking the ladies out.
 
It had been an ugly time.
 
Bartenders had started getting the stink eye, cops coming around to all the pubs and back rooms, rousting anybody who came within a hundred yards of an ice pick.
 
Holder would stand around while the police tried to shake something loose, describing the way the ladies were found.
 
Sixty-four puncture wounds.
 
Ninety-seven.
 
Twenty-five in each eye.
 
Holder threw up a lot that summer.

He held onto her hips and screwed her from behind even more forcefully, not caring where he was any longer as his nuts tightened and her hair whipped back into his face.
 
She had good control and nabbed him with her muscles, snickering while he moaned.
  
He caught a whiff of some sort of extra-strength shampoo, no fruit or tropical oils, just straight detergent.
 
He wondered what went on up in that hospital to beautiful crazed women like this who danced on top of the dead.

The stone tipped an inch as she cried, "That's it, that's it, for Daddy, as hard as you can," chanting it, in rhythm with his lunges.
 
He nearly quit then, that Daddy shit was getting on his nerves, but he let the tension go, rising up the back of his neck until it drifted free.
 
He wanted to kiss her but couldn't figure a way to turn her around to face him without losing contact.
 
It worried him, the idea that she might just run off if he didn't keep his hands on her like this, so he kept hold of her.

A strong scent of sweat wafted in the air and made him a little heady.
 
She thrust backwards, fiery hand prints atop alabaster flesh.
 
You could see Nick everywhere if you wanted to.
 
He snorted into her neck and she whispered, "You can bite me if you want."
 
He did but not very hard, just enough to gather some of her flesh between his teeth as he locked up.

He slumped and laid his cheek on the spot between her shoulder blades, panting. When his eyes focused he checked her skin for teeth marks. He found a couple of spots that looked like small puncture scars and his back teeth ground together.

Is that what happened to the
Icepick
killer?
 
Did he crack wide open in his real life and they tossed him in the Falls for a nervous breakdown?
 
Did he stalk around pressing the pick to the backs of little girls, hard enough to bring up a drop of blood or two but not so deep that he'd draw attention to himself again?

Couldn't you get through an hour of life without having to wonder about some crazy bastard lining up new victims?
 
There were other evils to worry about, but sometimes it just didn't feel like it.

"I needed that," she told him.

"Me too," he huffed.

With a rough touch Megan pushed him off.
 
She waited as he pulled his pants back up.
 
She patted his groin like a new pet and then drew her own bottoms on.
 
It worried him some, that pat.

"Let's go," she said, smiling with a real understanding.
 
This girl knew more about Holder than she should have and it scared him.

"Where?"

"Home, of course," she said, and he understood exactly what she meant.

"Oh, Christ."

But he could almost feel his father urging him on in this game, telling him to play it out.

He headed for his car but she walked the other way, down the hill, so he followed.
  
They traipsed into the woods like Hansel and Gretel and came to the fifteen-foot chain-link fence separating the cemetery from the hospital.
 
He kept glancing at the buildings as they jutted and spiked the sky.
 
She knew the way easily enough and the matted carpet of sticks and craggy rock didn't appear to bother her as she walked on.
 
He'd driven by Fall Gardens a thousand times before, staring up at the indistinct faces peering down from their screened windows and seeing so many other versions of himself.
 
The people he'd barely avoided becoming.

They broke from the underbrush at a spot where the fence had been carefully cut through, at the beginning of the long manicured lawns.
 
It had once been poorly restored and then the wire clipped again.
 
Cutbacks, everything was cutbacks, the state didn't want to pay to replace the entire chain-linking.

She led him on without a care, nobody else around, until they got to the main admissions building.
 
It looked like a converted Victorian, quaint and homespun as a Rockwell painting.
 
He didn't know what to expect but it wasn't the openness and freedom he found.
 
Goddamn, it was a lot nicer than his own apartment complex.
 
You could get jealous of damn near anything.
 
He thought there'd be nurses, security guards or lemon-faced doctors around, somebody in charge handing out medication or pushing the group therapy folks around like in
Cuckoo's Nest
.

But there were just a few other patients playing ping-pong, reading in lounge chairs in the brightly-lit corners.
 
It looked like a resort and he felt another twinge of resentment.

Megan ushered him to an office with the words FREDERICK HENDERSON ADMINISTRATOR on a beveled glass door.
 
She didn't knock, walked right in, and tugged him by the sleeve to follow.
 
There was a nurse seated at the secretary's station but Megan walked past and entered the inner office.

Frederick Henderson was a fat guy, gray hair at the temples, big thick jowls hanging.
 
He probably pushed 350 and his clothes were way too tight, like he refused to believe he was that overweight and decided it wouldn't be true so long as he never went up in waist size.
 
Rosy had done the same thing but at least she'd worn skirts with elastic.
 
Holder had read that tight clothing could cause all sorts of troubles, from poor circulation to internal organ damage.
 
Freddy didn't have to worry about it anymore.
 
He was dead and had been for hours.
 
Holder touched the man and found the corpse already in rigor.
 
Near as he could figure it was heart attack.

Freddy's cologne wasn't holding up well in light of his recent turn of events.
 
The room was filled with the same smell Holder had come upon four months ago when discovering his father behind a local bodega, half-buried in the trash, smiling with his eyes open.

You could do your best to keep yourself on the narrow but once you fell off, you never quite stopped falling, you never got to the bottom.
 
Holder sighed deeply. He didn't turn around because he was sure he'd catch the ghost of his old man standing around back there, doubled-over and red-faced, hand over his mouth to hold back the snickering.

Freddy's ring of keys lay beside him.
 
Holder scooped them up and shoved them in his back pocket, hoping the doors weren't being locked behind him, one after the other, as he'd walked down the halls.
  
Who would he have to fight to get back out again?
 
Which of the patients would bet their broken cigarettes on him?

The nurse entered, wearing a stethoscope, her uniform unbuttoned too far, opened down to the waist.
 
Loops of long black curls coiled across her shoulders.
 
She had huge, looming brown eyes and a mouth a little too large for her elfin face.
 
But odd enough to be appealing.

She had the kind of smile you wanted to mash out of existence with your lips.
 
It was that indecent. He wanted to cry out for Rosy and have her come save him--Oh Rosy!
 
You could trust Rosy, but this…you just couldn't be certain what kind of perdition this was going to lead you into.
 
The nurse shrugged and the uniform started to slip from her shoulders.
 
A small growl worked around the room and Holder hoped to Christ it wasn't him doing it.

The stethoscope lay between two small up-thrust breasts topped with pink aureole she'd actually rouged with lipstick.
 
Holder hadn't seen that for a while and the sight hit him in the right place.

"Let me guess," he said, "you're the doctor in charge now."

"Of course."

"Uh huh.
 
You folks have quite the run of the place, huh?"

"It's no different than anywhere."

He thought about that and decided it was true.
 
Even behind bars and in cages you got away with murder.
 
If you got out and wandered around, who would know so long as you came back again?

"On your knees," she said.

"Boy, do you got the wrong person."
 
He grabbed for the administrator's phone but saw it had been yanked from the plug hard enough to tear loose the wiring.
 
Holder sighed again.
 
He tried the one at the nurse's station and it was the same.
 
He turned to ask Megan where another might be.
 
Before he could swing completely around he felt an incredible black pain in the back of his head and went down.