Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (23 page)

“Great,” he replied. “Well, you’d better get the fuck out of here, right?”

“Right.”

“Victim upstairs?”

“Yes. And you’re in for a treat. He’s shit himself.”

The police officer grinned. “All
riiight!”

He started up the stairs, and the intruder slipped out the back. She locked the door behind her, taped the spare key once again to the rainspout, and disappeared into the night.

F
LUSH WITH EXCITEMENT
and success, Natalie almost skipped the three blocks to where she’d left the van. She kept replaying the events of the night in her head: Peter’s almost palpable fear…the wild, desperate look in his eyes…the ease with which he’d been rendered helpless.

Suddenly she stopped short. Wasn’t this the street?

It looked like it; but her van wasn’t here.

She ran to the corner and examined the street sign. Yes, this was Sunnyside; this was where she’d left it.

Had she perhaps parked farther west than this? No, there was the house with the funny awning she’d noticed when she pulled up to the curb.

She looked up and down the street; there were no Tow Zone signs. This was, as far as she could tell, a perfectly legal place to have left the van.

Shit.

Shit on a stick.

It had been stolen.

Her fault, really. She’d never gotten around to getting that window replaced. All a thief had to do was slice open the plastic and climb in.

Shit on a shit sandwich!

She checked her watch. Just past ten-thirty. If Luigi were doing his job, he’d have called in his report by now. There was probably already an APB on someone of her height and weight wearing an olive-drab parka, lurking around this neighborhood.

This neighborhood where you seldom, if ever, saw taxicabs.

She thought her brain was going to explode.

A car pulled around the corner and she ducked behind some bushes. Of course it turned out not to be a squad car, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

She had no idea what to do. Brazen it out? Walk up Wilson acting serenely innocent? Or sneak her way home through the backyards and practically convict herself if she were caught?

She could hear a dog baying somewhere, which might be patrolling its turf behind someone’s house. With big teeth and lots of saliva.

She decided to risk brazening it out on Wilson.

It seemed like a small eternity before she reached the little bridge over the branch of the Chicago River that formed the westernmost border of Ravenswood Manor. There was no one around, so she reached into her parka, withdrew the latex Ninja Turtle mask, and flung it into the water. Then she hustled herself away, panting in relief.

She was still in danger; cars approached her, going west on Wilson, and their headlights were so bright she couldn’t tell if they were patrol cars or not. And those that came from behind were just as bad; she could hear them coming, but didn’t dare turn around to scope them out. They, on the other hand, would have plenty of time to get a good look at her as she marched on so boldly in the field of their headlamps.

Then, what she was dreading would happen, happened.

A car drew up behind her, and she could hear it slow down until it was right beside her, keeping pace with her. Was it a police vehicle? She didn’t dare look.

Time slowed to a crawl. The hum of the car’s motor was in her ears, the white blur of its body in the corner of her eye.

“Hey,” said a voice.

She furrowed her brow. Didn’t sound like a cop. She kept walking.

“Hey.
Sexy.”

Definitely not a cop. She swiveled her head a few inches and saw that her admirer was one of four Hispanic boys in a Ford Econoline van. One of them was hanging out the window, a bottle of Southern Comfort in one hand. He was almost blind drunk.

“You wan’ come for us with a li’l ride?” he slurred. His voice was breaking; he couldn’t be much past puberty.

The other three boys—including the driver of the van—were staring at her now. Her instinct was to tell them to go fuck themselves, but at any moment a police car might come down the street, looking for her in her parka.

“Sure, guys,” she said. “That’d be great!”

The driver slammed on the brake, and she trotted over to the van and hopped in the front seat. The boys were hooting and whooping.

“Man, you’re sexy,” said the boy who had called out to her. “You wan’ me to show you how sexy you are?”

“He can show you,” said the driver, while one of the boys in the back shrieked with hilarity. “Heraclio can show you good and hard, man!”

“That’s sweet of you, thanks,” said Natalie. She couldn’t believe she was actually prepared to go through with this, just to get out of the neighborhood.

“I show you good and hard, is right,” said Heraclio. He tossed back his head, took a good, long swig of Southern Comfort, then tossed his head forward again. It didn’t stop till it hit the dashboard.

He was out cold.

The boys howled with laughter. “Heraclio can’t hold his hootch for shit!” they screamed. “Herclio’s a wuss!”

The boy behind Natalie nudged the boy next to him, who sat behind the driver. “I guess that means she’s yours, man. Hey, Jimmy, she goes to ’Fredo, right? It’s ’Fredo’s turn.”

“‘S’right, ’Fredo,” said the driver, who had taken the Southern Comfort from Heraclio’s limp hand and was now chugging it himself. “You show this fine lady how sexy she is, right? Show her so she don’t forget, right?” He turned briefly to Natalie. “Okay?”

The alteration between crudity and courtliness baffled her, but they weren’t far enough from Ravenswood for her to decline and get out. “Okay,” she said with a forced smile.

She looked back at ’Fredo and met his eyes for the first time. And then the shock of recognition practically knocked her out the window. She hadn’t spent most of her adult life in the company of gay men without learning to pick them out on sight, even in a crowd. Of course, there was the occasional freak who proved invisible to her radar—Lloyd Hood, for one—but looking at ’Fredo now, at his posture, the set of his mouth, the indefinable
something
in his eyes, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was one of her boys. He probably didn’t fully know it himself yet; but he must suspect. The look of panic on his face was a giveaway; there was no way he wanted anything to do with Natalie.

“Come
on,
’Fredo,” said Jimmy, the driver. “We don’t got all night. We still gotta find me one next. I ain’t had my turn, man.”

“You can go now,” said ’Fredo. “I’ll drive.”

The third boy cackled. “You a faggot, ’Fredo? You afraid of her?”

Natalie’s anger flared. She got up, squeezed behind the driver’s seat, and grabbed ’Fredo’s hand. “Come on, big guy,” she said. He resisted ever so slightly, but he had to give in to her. His honor was at stake.

She took him to the back of the van; it was filthy, with old towels and magazines and boots and bottles piled up everywhere. She winced, but forced herself to endure it.

Then she put her hands on ’Fredo’s shoulders and forced him down. The other two boys were watching—Jimmy by way of the rearview mirror.

She craned her neck and whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry, we don’t have to. We’ll pretend. Just leave it to me.”

A look of uncomprehending gratitude stole across his face; he started to smile, then stopped himself.

She unbuckled his belt and unzipped his zipper, and pulled his jeans and boxers down. His penis dangled like a pearl earring from his abdomen, but the boys up front couldn’t see that.

“Oh, my
God,”
Natalie shrieked. “You better go easy on me with that thing!”

The boys bayed at the moon, like wolves.

Natalie loosened her own jeans and slid them down, and then her panties. She took ’Fredo by the arms and pulled him on top of her. Her head was resting on something that smelled like an old sandwich. The van went over a bump, and ’Fredo clung to her.

“Just rub against me a little,” she whispered.

But he was rigid with fear; he couldn’t seem to unbend. And so as the van headed eastward, farther away from Ravenswood and closer to the lake, Natalie bucked her hips wildly and gave easily the most overblown, exaggerated, utterly theatrical performance of her career. She screamed, she moaned, she panted outrageously; she cried, “Stop! Stop! You’re impaling me!”

And eventually she faked an orgasm that, had it been real, would have registered on the Richter scale.

“Go,
’Fredo,”
the boys yelled. “All
right!”

He was lying on top of her still, as clenched as he’d been all along. She stroked his hair and whispered, “Listen, these guys are clowns. You don’t need them. You’re perfect the way you are, and when you figure out what that is, don’t be afraid to be it. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

They were at Irving Park and the lake now. She got to her knees, zipped herself up, and said, “You can let me out here, gentlemen. I’ll walk home. That is, if I
can
walk.”

They pulled up in front of an old apartment building. Natalie climbed over the still-unconscious Heraclio and stumbled out into the night. A piece of bologna fell out of her hair and onto the grass.

As the van sped away, weaving left and right on Sheridan, she could still hear the boys, yelping and yelling at the top of their lungs.

N
ATALIE SLEPT MORE
soundly than she had in months. When she awakened, she called Luigi Gianelli.

“Well?” she asked.

“Can I call you back?” he said. “Just on my way to church.”

The corrupt homosexual cop who hocked confiscated property and had a feces fetish didn’t want to miss Mass. Life in the nineties was getting more complicated every day. “No, it can’t wait,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll fill you in and then we’re square, right?”

“Then we’re square.”

“Okay. I go upstairs, I untie your boyfriend, I help him clean himself up—”

“Very Christian of you.”

He laughed. “Fuckin’
hot
number he is, too.”

“Never mind that. You’re married, remember?”

“Hey, this was line-of-duty!”

“I don’t want to hear about it. Go on.”

“Anyway, he’s pretty shook up. He can’t remember much except he keeps tellin’ me it was a guy in a fuckin’ Donatello mask who trussed him up.”

Natalie rolled her eyes. Trust Peter to know exactly which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle it was. “Go on,” she said, carrying the phone to the kitchen.

“Well, I give him the whole story that I was just drivin’ by and saw the door hangin’ open, and that I surprised you—I mean, surprised the burglar—in midact. And he says, ‘Is that when he shot at you?’ Which kind of threw me. You didn’t fuckin’ tell me you were gonna fuckin’ blast the place apart.”

She was flinging open cabinet after cabinet, looking in vain for coffee. “It was a last-minute addition. And you said…?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s when he fuckin’ shot at me, but I managed to chase him away.’ Which your boyfriend buys, right? And when he sees that you—that the burglar—dropped the gun, man does exactly what you fuckin’ said he would. He says, ‘I wanna know where that thing came from. I wanna know where it was bought.’”

Natalie squealed with delight. She was so contented that, not being able to find any coffee, she happily dug yesterday’s filter out of the trash and put it back in the coffee maker.

“So I tell him we’ll find out,” Luigi continued. “He keeps sayin’, ‘I wanna know exactly where it came from,’ like I didn’t fuckin’ hear him the first time. So I make a full report, nothing stolen, no one hurt, end of story. He even swallows the whole idea that he must’ve left the front door unlocked.”

Of course he does, thought Natalie. Peter was always the first to blame himself for everything. She got a dirty cup and saucer from the sink and rinsed them.

“So you want the gun back?”

“No!
God,
no. Keep it.”

“You sure? Pretty fuckin’ expensive piece to just throw away like that.”

“I don’t
want
it, Luigi. It’s served its purpose.”

“Okay, your call. Anyway…I guess we’re square now, huh?”

She rinsed the film from her coffee pot and slipped it back into the coffee maker. “We sure are. You owed me big, you paid me big. You wanted your bug back, you got your bug back. We’re square as they come.”

“Great. Well—listen, I hate to just fuckin’ hang up, but Mass starts in ten, and I gotta book.”

“Go ahead, fine. Say a novena for me.”

She hung up a shivered. She didn’t mind having
that
scary bastard out of her life forever.

B
UT HOW SUCCESSFUL
had she been? Peter would certainly find out that the gun had been purchased at Lloyd’s shop. But would he blame Lloyd? At first she was certain he would. Now, however, as days passed, she though he might blame Quentin instead. Or maybe he
would
blame Lloyd, but Lloyd would talk him into forgiving him.

She had no way of knowing, and that was what ate at her. She called Quentin, who told her that yes, Lloyd had questioned him on Monday about the phony FOID card; he’d assured him he saw nothing suspicious about it. He’d also told Lloyd that the buyer had said he was a close friend and big customer of Lloyd’s and threatened to have him fired if he didn’t let him have the gun right away, as Lloyd
always
winked at the seventy-two hour rule for him. Lloyd had been furious—but Quentin had said, if Howard Roark were in that situation, he wouldn’t go running around trying to find his boss for an okay, he’d just make a decision, even if it was the wrong one, which is exactly what Quentin did. So Lloyd had dropped the matter with nothing more than a stern admonition. And then Quentin told Natalie he considered his debt to her paid, and if she called him one more time he’d come clean and tell Mr. Hood everything.

She could no longer eavesdrop on Peter and Lloyd’s bedtime conversations; and she couldn’t just call them up to chat, not after all this time. Plus, she was actually afraid of seeing Peter again. He remembered her as being about twenty pounds heavier than she was now. What if he saw her, and connected her new, emaciated build with that of the Ninja Turtle robber? (Especially since she’d blown him a parting kiss—a very Natalie-esque gesture that she’d immediately regretted having made.) She considered actually regaining those lost pounds, to cover her culpability; but alas, the idea of food still faintly repelled her.