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Authors: Edward Lee

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BOOK: The House
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One night in the winter, Rocco and Knuckles had barged into the house by surprise, Knuckles shoving in a living female figure with her hands tied behind her back and a burlap sack over her head. "Get your camera, kid," Rocco had so ordered, something sharply hostile in his voice. Leonard did so, then followed the accommodating noise to the farthest bedroom—the "ready" room, Rocco called it. He called it the ready room because it was reserved for features that resulted in an invariable mess upon conclusion. These "messes" had, until tonight, of course, existed exclusively in the form of urine, feces, vomit, and semen—hence the room's perpetual carpet, so to speak, of plastic drop cloths which made cleanup quick and easy and prevented the excretions from permeating the room's hardwood floor. Yet when Leonard arrived in the ready room, it was not the expected "dime-dropping" or "holding-out" street prostitute that lay in wait. It was a robust, scrupulously clean and well-nourished woman in—Leonard guessed—her early 20s. She was beautiful, peaches and cream, the girl next-door, and Knuckles had lashed her, arms and legs widely parted, to a work bench built especially for such events. Her keen-hazel eyes couldn't have been wider in horror as they darted about. A rubber ball and strap sufficiently gagged her, reducing any vocal remonstrance to rough, muffled oddments of unpleasant noise.
Rocco shot Leonard a dagger glare. "Fuckin' Weinstein boned us bad, kid."
"Uh, who?" Leonard asked.
"Sixth District Appellate Court judge. We warned the fucker, we even offered him a hundred large to skim the case, but, no, that asshole had to think he's Super Judge. The motherfucker slapped life without parole on two of Vinch's Manhattan lieutenants. Vinch wants payback. Bigtime."
Leonard stood in a veil of subtle confusion. "So, uh, who's, uh, who's this woman?"
"Weinstein's fuckin' daughter, that's who," Rocco cracked back. "Fancy pants ritzy blue-blood bitch. She goes to Princeton, for Christ's sake. Belongs to fuckin' country clubs."
"Uh-oh," Leonard said.
"Vinch says we give her the works."
The works. This sounded rather ominous, and something deep in Leonard's gut did a quick hitch. He supposed it was the cryptic "scent of fear" that instilled itself about the room now, a hot, bitter tang wafting off the girl's skin in her sweat. Then Rocco withdrew a hypodermic needle and injected its contents into the judge's daughter's arm.
"What, uh, what's that, Mr. Rocco?" Leonard inquired.
"Pharm-grade speed. So she won't pass out from the pain. Vinch wants her feelin' the whole job," Rocco explained.
"Oh," Leonard said.
Then, Rocco again: "Knuckles. Get me Dick Nixon."
Yes, this was ominous, all right.
The masks,
 Leonard realized. Rocco pulled the jowly rubber Richard Milhous Nixon mask over his head, while Knuckles followed suit with Barry Goldwater.
At least they were keeping it all in the party.
Then the likeness of America's 37th President pointed at Leonard and, as if by executive order, snapped, "Roll 'em!"
Leonard pulled a quick tracking shot, then homed in. "Your old man fucked up, bitch," Rocco said through the President's mouth-hole, and slapped the victim in the face. "So now
you're
 fucked. We're gonna do a job on you that would make the devil puke."
Of that, Leonard had little doubt, and as the "job" began, he dissociated his sentient mind from the gist of the occasion and merely pretended he was shooting a...well, a political documentary. It was with a casual and even a
smooth
calm that Knuckles, as controversial Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, began to—
SNICK! SNICK! SNICK!
—clip off all of Ms. Weinstein's toes with a pair of boltcutters. With each
SNICK!
her back arched up off the workbench and her throat generated a sound, however muffled, reminiscent to a dog bark. Then came a series of smothered, high-tone
mewls
as Rocco pinched closed her nostrils, the gag-ball already blocking her oral airway. Her body gently convulsed as her face pinked; Rocco released her nose each time she was about to pass out. Then—
zzzip!
—he pulled out his long, thin penis and urinated liberally all over her. The urine and the fear-stench of her sweat about knocked Leonard out.
Knuckles dropped trow and stepped right up between her widely parted legs. A quick spit of saliva on her vagina and then he was humping away. For all of several seconds.
"Oooo, yeah," he grunted.
"Here comes the judge!" Rocco celebrated.
Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.
"I'm saving my nut for later, Knucks," Rocco elucidated. "The more I work on this bitch, the harder I get. Guess I had a bad childhood, huh?"
Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.
Leonard, on the other hand, had no inclination at all to laugh. He just kept his eye glued to the Canon's eyepiece and tried to get lost in its whir. The victim's gagged whine rose machinelike behind her throat as Rocco slapped Craftsman visegrips onto her rosebud nipples and
pulled
. Her eyes seemed lidless now; her delicate areolae were yanked out to a surprising length, like off-pink taffy, and Knuckles then did the same with her clitoris. Her body
bucked
, her wet back slapping the benchtop. Now Rocco was twisting the VGs, making pink corkscrews of flesh. Knuckles, far less articulate, merely stretched the clitoris and hood out as far as he could and then—
snip!
—quickly clipped off the fleshy bulb with a pair of tin-snips. This brought a sound like a gush of gravel from her muffled throat, and also a summary release of the entire contents of her bladder and bowel.
Now the room was a virtual
brew
 of unearthly aromas. Leonard quite imagined the deepest grottoes of hell smelling the same.
And certainly the
scene
, too, provided a similar image.
I am the cameraman of hell,
 Leonard mused.
With a frozen-food knife, Rocco sawed off both of her pretty little ears, with no more concern than if he were cutting off the ends of a French bread. Knuckles ran the lit end of a blow torch up and down her shins, turning them black in no time. More mewling, more bucking, more convulsant
slaps
 of her bare, wet back against the bench's top. Rocco's intramuscular injection of amphetamines into Ms. Weinstein's bloodstream did indeed keep her conscious through the job. Knuckles baked off her pubic hair and then cooked the raw meat of her genitalia until it resembled a forgotten hamburger patty left on the grill. Rocco cut a line across her forehead with a penknife and scalped her, yanking off the human wig with a suspicious expertise. The tin snips cut off her nose, and the frozen-food knife sawed off her breasts. Only now did her autonomic responses begin to simmer down to just feeble twitching.
"Knucks, gimme a shank."
Knuckles passed Rocco a knife—not the trademark German "Hoffried"-brand angel-blade that had divorced Leonard from a testicle, but a Gerber MkIII (nice shiv, by the way). "I'm hard as a fuckin' rock now," Rocco announced and slipped the blade from its sheath. "Gotta gut-fuck this bitch before she croaks."
The camera whirred and whirred and Leonard's mind swam and swam. Rocco planted the blade into her lower abdomen, then quickly crawled up and inserted his penis into the wound. He humped and humped, and without further delay—
"
Ahhhh, yeah!
I'm comin' in this bitch's stomach
fierce,
 man! Fuckin'-A!"
Whether or not Ms. Weinstein was still alive at this moment scarcely mattered. The continued meager twitches of her body could've been involuntary muscle spasms of the peri-mortal state. Rocco finished dumping his semen into her abdomen, then slithered off. "Keep that camera rollin', kid. We ain't finished yet."
Not finished?
came the aghast thought.
What else can you do to her?
Leonard found out in short order when Rocco decapitated the woman with a twelve-inch coping saw. Leonard's teeth ground at the noise, a steady wet gristly gust, rocking back and forth. Then Knuckles seared graffiti lines of char over the rest of her body.
The stench couldn't have been worse now. Burned hair, burned flesh, shit, piss, and death-sweat. Leonard was only able to breathe through wincing hiccups as he tried his best to keep the camera on angle. "Last shot, kid," Rocco instructed. "Get a good closeup."
Rocco detached the strap and ball from the head's mouth, then sat down in a metal chair, his pants down to mid-thigh. At first it appeared that he'd merely placed the scalped head in his lap but in a moment the crucial detail was made obvious. Rocco had inserted his penis into the esophagal entrance where her neck had been severed, and now—
"Ahhhh,
" Rocco intoned. "How ya like
that,
 your Honor?"
—he was urinating yet again, only now the urine spewed from the dead girl's mouth. Leonard rolled in the zoom for a close angle shot, then retreated for the final image: Richard Nixon pissing out of a severed head's mouth.
"All right, cut it, kid. Good job." When Leonard turned off the camera, Rocco dropped the head, pulled his pants up, and yanked off the Nixon mask. "We'll be back tomorrow," Rocco said, waving his hand at the stench. "Have the print developed and ready. We want to mail it to the judge soon as possible."
"Uh, right," Leonard affirmed.
Rocco and Knuckles made their exit, leaving Leonard at least with the proud credit of having just made his first official snuff film.
Later, while the film was in the processor, he buried the body and the head in the back yard, and he buried the charnel drop cloth.
The room, though, would continue to stink for weeks to come.
««—»»
Leonard supposed that the above represented the peak of his film-making for the Mob. The rare other "specials" seemed tame by comparison. Though there were some other specials. Occasionally, Rocco would bring up bums, homeless men—"rummies," he called them. Leonard filmed these unfortunate men as the even more unfortunate Sissy and Snowdrop were ordered to perform fellatio on penises that clearly had not been washed in years or even decades. Sagging, mite-infested scrotums raised a stench that even Leonard could smell halfway across the room. And sores, herpes, foreskins laden with smegma were not excuses to desist. "Go on, honey," Rocco ordered Sissy as he watched once. "A little dickcheese ain't gonna hurt ya. Hell, I shoulda brought some Ritz!"
Rocco and Knuckles busted out laughter.
On one occasion, they'd brought up an articulate, cologned mulatto man in his '50s nicknamed "Plugger." Plugger spoke in a tint of a femmy English accent, and was very well-poised. He ran the initial accounting den for Harlem's numbers racket, which Vinchetti's crime family got one-third of. He always wore a tan leisure suit with a chocolate-brown silk shirt, the collar out. Yet the front of his pants seemed...
stuffed
 with something.
Leonard saw with what when Plugger took his pants off.
"Ain't that somethin', kid?" Rocco remarked, a smile in his eye.
Plugger had a very rare disease syndrome known as endogenitalitis with resultant "counter hypogonadism." And pituitary irregularity combined with an inability to regulate zinc oxide metabolites from infancy to pre-adolescence caused this bizarre affliction which struck only one in ten million. Ninety percent of all male sufferers died by the age of eleven, while ninety-
nine
percent of females died. What the syndrome entailed exactly was a hyper-accelerated growth of the sex organs. They essentially
never stopped growing.
BOOK: The House
3.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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