Exquisite Corpse (27 page)

They hammered the lid back on, gathered their traces, and left this remote archive of poison as orderly and silent as they had found it. On the way back to New Orleans, Jay stopped to toss the bloody garbage bags into a Dumpster behind a Popeye's
fried chicken outlet. They returned to the French Quarter as if to a womb, crawled into a freshly made bed just before dawn, and slumbered for most of the day.

Jay got up once, around noon. He put in a call to the Hummingbird Hotel, asked for “Frank Booth,” and was connected with a very sleepy-sounding Tran.

“Did you meet a mysterious stranger?”

“Who is this … wait a minute … Jay?”

“How many other men have your number?”

Tran laughed. “You must be kidding. Nobody even talked to me last night. I think they smell my desperation.”

“I feel partly responsible for your desperation.”

Tran was silent; a passive indictment.

Jay thought of Andrew, asleep down the hall, dreaming, hungering. He closed his eyes and took the plunge from which there was no turning back. “I'm sorry about all that. It's been a long time since I had such an intense experience with anyone.”
(And let them live,
his mind amended.) “My cousin enjoyed meeting you, and I'd like to see you again. Why don't you join us for dinner tonight?”

“Well …” Jay could picture him all rumpled and morning-eyed, trying to sort out this unexpected situation. “I … I'd love to.”

“Good. Around eight?”

“Uh … sure.”

“See you then.”

Jay hung up, feeling a strange mix of terror and elation. His world was careening out of control, but instead of panicking as he would have done a short while ago, he found himself fascinated by its destructive path.

He slid back into the warm bed, molded his body to Andrew's, and slept again. In a few hours he would have to conjure up something for dinner, something simple but exquisite, some toothsome delicacy.

Something suitable for a beautiful boy's last meal.

·  ·  ·

Upon awakening, Jay made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table sipping it, paging blearily through the
Times-Picayune
he'd bought at the grocery last night. In the pre-Thanksgiving food section he read a detailed description of an edible creature newly invented: a gastronomic miscegenation composed of a turkey, chicken, and duck, deboned and nested from smallest to largest, each filled with a different savory stuffing.

This appealed greatly to Jay, and he phoned the delicatessen where they were made. Above protests that the shop did not normally deliver, and in any case could not do so by this evening, Jay named a discreet sum. Dinner, he was told after a hurried consultation at the other end, would arrive at his gate by seven; he need only reheat the thing for an hour.

He woke Andrew with a mug of steaming sweet black coffee and sat on the edge of the bed watching him drink it. There was something severe about Andrew's face despite the tousled spikiness of his dark hair, the clear hypnotic blue of his eyes, the handsome regularity of his features. Perhaps it was a shade of nose length or a wry twist of mouth, the things that made his face seem essentially English. Perhaps it was cruelty.

Andrew blessed him with a dark smile. Jay wondered what would be different between them when this night was over.

Jay had to remind me twice that my name was supposed to be Arthur, though it hardly seemed to matter now. By the time Tran rang at the gate, we were already pleasantly sloshed on cognac. This may have been our first mistake. In the interest of retaining some modicum of our faculties, we should have stayed sober until after dinner. But we were feeling an odd elation, perhaps at the sheer finality of what we were about to do. And we both knew we wouldn't be hungry at dinner.

Tran arrived promptly at eight carrying a bottle of chilled champagne. I wondered where the flowers and chocolates were, but said nothing. Tran and Jay had their odd little courtship, and it wasn't my place to meddle. On the contrary, I found it rather sweet. And I was quite looking forward to watching Jay kill something he had, however superficially, cared for.

Soon we had the champagne poured and the strange nested fowls on the table. Jay and I had discussed lacing Tran's food with a sedative, but we feared his prior knowledge of drugs might allow him to detect such a dose. Besides, Jay suspected that it might be easiest to make Tran swallow a pill simply by offering it to him.

As Tran ate, Jay and I swilled champagne, pushed scraps around our plates, and stared at him. A tender rump roast dangling into a den of leopards could scarcely have been more oblivious, or looked more delectable. Though I was unused to the idea of boys as potential nourishment, I had more than a passing acquaintance with them as victims, and Tran played that role so perfectly I almost believed he was doing it on purpose. He was pretty—very pretty—but so were loads of other boys. This one had something extra. How could a single person fulfill all the mannerisms, distill that vital blend of insecurity and insouciance, exude pheromones that so clearly begged
cut me, fuck me, lay me out cold and have your way with me?
It was as if all the boys of my past had been swirled into one exotic, dangerous cocktail, which Jay had (somewhat reluctantly) served to me with the appropriate garnishes.

When the champagne was drunk and the dishes cleared away, we adjourned to the parlour. It felt like nothing so much as a polite stopover en route to the bedroom. We were all crackling with sexual energy; you could smell it in the dusty parlour air if you breathed deeply enough. Jay offered Tran a snifter of cognac. The boy accepted it, and I saw their fingertips touch, Jay's index finger extending to slide over Tran's
knuckles. Tran looked at him, looked at me, drained half his cognac.

“You're meant to sip that,” I said.

“I'm not as drunk as I want to be.”

Jay caught my eye and shrugged. Maybe we wouldn't have to sedate him with pills after all.

By his second cognac, Tran was sprawled on the Oriental rug with his head tipped backward, resting on my knee. I was seated on a slippery love seat done in rose-coloured satin, Jay beside me, close but not quite touching. Suddenly, without warning, he leaned over and planted a wet kiss on my mouth. His lips tasted of cognac. In my peripheral vision I saw Tran watching us, a drunken sexy smile contorting his fine features.

As Jay ravaged my mouth, Tran turned over and ran his hand up my leg, then fumbled at my zipper. By the time he got it undone, I was hard enough to ache. He ran his tongue over the head of my cock and in a slow spiral down to my balls, gripped my thighs, and took me deep into his throat.

It felt heartbreakingly good. I gasped into Jay's mouth, gripped his shoulders, arched my back. Tran kept swallowing me, elbows splayed, head buried between my legs. Jay put his hand on the back of Tran's head and pushed down. The tip of my penis clicked past his tonsils and slid deeper into his throat, which seemed to go into peristalsis around my swollen flesh.

I felt orgasm lurking, drawing near. Then it was sinking its teeth into the back of my neck just as I had done to Jay last night. Not until it had overtaken me, mauled me, and spit me out half-alive did I realize that my hands had gone round Tran's throat, choking him as Jay forced his head onto my cock.

I fell back on the love seat. Tran flopped off of me, long strings of saliva and spunk trailing from his open mouth. Only Jay's hand tangled in his long hair kept him upright. He took a great wet gulp of air, then another. I could see that his eyes
had partly rolled back in his head, but I could not tell whether he was conscious.

Jay stood, pulling Tran upright with him. Tran wobbled on unsteady feet but did not fall. “Come on,” Jay said. “Let's get him to the bedroom.”

By the time we had Tran spread-eagled on the bed, he had begun to mutter incoherently. I pulled his jumper over his head. His hair came out of its ponytail and spilled around his bare shoulders, a luxuriant black tumble. Jay unzipped Tran's loose bluejeans and tugged them down his skinny legs. He was naked beneath, his body wonderfully smooth, his cock half-erect.

Jay and I looked at each other. His eyes asked a mute question.

“He's yours,” I said.

Jay's cold gaze shifted to the boy on the bed. He undressed slowly, touching himself every now and then as if to ascertain that he was still made of solid flesh. Only by the slight tremor of his hands could I tell how drunk he was. He knelt beside Tran and stroked the boy's flat belly with reverent fingers, bent and kissed one of his puckered brown nipples. Tran stirred but did not open his eyes.

Jay leaned over to remove an object from the nightstand drawer. For a moment I thought it was some sort of arcane sex toy. Then I saw that it was a Phillips screwdriver in quite a large size. He took the blade in his mouth, coated it lightly with spit. Then he pulled Tran's legs up, exposing the tender crack between the silken buttocks, and he jammed the screwdriver into the centre of that crack. At the same time he bent again and bit deeply into Tran's left nipple.

Tran's body convulsed in a long shudder of pain. Jay gave the screwdriver a final shove, a nasty twist, then yanked it out and held it dripping with blood and shit before the boy's wide-open, terrified eyes.

Tran lashed out and knocked it from his hand. Before Jay
could react, he was up and off the bed, lunging for the door. I grabbed for him, caught a handful of flying hair, smashed his head against the door frame. He left a smear of blood on the white paint. But the force of the blow had been insufficient to drop him. Revived by terror, Tran tore away from me and charged down the hall.

We almost caught him in the parlour. I was an arm's length behind, Jay right on my heels. Tran raged through the room, grabbing at lamps, vases, anything he might hurl at us to slow our progress. Jay snatched up a glass paperweight and sent it flying at Tran. It glanced off his skull, snapping his head forward. Still the cursed brat would not fall. He ran into the foyer, yanked at the door, opened it and stumbled into the courtyard.

In three great bounding steps he crossed it. Then he was hammering at the gate, which was impenetrable from the street side, but required only the push of a button to open it from the courtyard. A serious flaw in Jay's security system, I thought; only two days ago I had pointed it out to him. The gate slid soundlessly open and our Tran was through the widening gap in a flash, naked and bloody, but free.

I followed Jay back inside. “I'll go get him,” he was saying, more to himself than anything. “Got to put on some clothes and get some cop insurance. Yes, I'll get him.”

He walked quickly to the bedroom, threw on shirt and trousers, shoved his slender sockless feet into loafers of exquisite black Italian leather, retrieved his wallet from the dresser and had a quick peek inside. As always, the wallet contained a fat sheaf of bills. Cop insurance.

“Well, bring him back alive,” I said as Jay turned to go.

“Don't worry,” Jay told me. “We're not done with this one yet.”

H
is first thought was that the French Quarter had never looked so dark.

Here and there he could make out blurry rectangles of light that might be windows. An early string of Christmas bulbs twined through the ironwork on a high balcony, blinking gold, red, gold; a wavering gas lamp, ghostly in the deserted night. But for each point of illumination there were ten impassive brick facades, ten rusty gates that hung ajar on blackness.

Every nerve and chemical in Tran's body was telling him to be frantic with terror, and his brain could barely remember why.

He was cold. Dimly he realized this was because he was naked, but he couldn't quite remember why that mattered, either. This was the French Quarter; he'd worn almost as little on these same streets last Mardi Gras, with Luke beside him. He was hurting, and that
did
seem to matter more with every step he took. His head pounded like a huge heart; his bitten nipple throbbed as the cool air teased it erect. But those pains were nothing compared to the cramping in his gut, like a steely hand clamping onto his intestines and
twisting
…

He couldn't recall what had happened exactly. He had thought Jay was interested in him again, and it had made him horny enough to get drunk, to lose his fear of getting burned a second time. He remembered watching the cousins make out, then sucking Arthur's uncircumcised cock, intrigued with the texture and pliability of the very clean foreskin. But beyond that was oblivion, then the rending pain in his asshole and nipple. Pure instinct had sent him hurtling off the bed, and he had only the faintest memory of Arthur, face contorted with rage, smashing his head against the door frame. Now he was out here. None of it made any sense.

A few more steps and the pain doubled him over. He leaned against a wall, retching but unable to bring anything up from his damaged system. He felt a cold sick sweat springing up on his face, along his spine, under his balls. For a moment the pain in his head threatened to blot out the others, and he welcomed it; it was easier to bear than the gaudy blaze of pain in his gut.

Then suddenly hands were on him, pawing at his bare shoulder.
Jay. Arthur.
Tran jerked away, curled, fell to the sidewalk.

“Hey buddy—hey, you OK—”

He stared up into a blurry black face. Big pale-palmed hand reaching down to him, long shape slung over the guy's shoulder—a gun? no, an instrument case. Street musician on his way home. This guy would know his way around the Quarter, could help him get somewhere safe.

Tran tried to move, to take the man's hand and pull himself up, but everything felt so
heavy,
even his own hand far away at the end of his arm. He registered the locust buzz of motors pulling up nearby, the pounding of hard soles across concrete. Then the musician was grabbed from behind.