HCC 115 - Borderline (16 page)

“Frenchie,” she said again. “A dollar, Joe.”

He gave her a dollar. She crumpled it into a paper ball and kept it in her hand, while
her other hand went to his clothing. She sat down now, on the edge of the bed, and
he stood in front of her. Her one hand still held tight to the crumpled dollar while
her other hand made itself busy.

Her hand did not excite him. It was weird now, he thought. There was very little excitement
connected with the whole affair. He was going to have sex with this girl, and he was
going to kill her, and yet the primary motivation was not overtly sexual. He had not
sought out this woman because of any great physical need. He had been sexually satisfied,
not excited or keyed-up at all.

Something was different. This same sort of calm, to a lesser degree, had been present
when he had first taken Audrey to her room. It was more secure within him now. He
had a duty to perform, and the duty was Death. This was his job, his role which he
had to play. His enjoyment of the task was secondary at best.

The girl was still handling him. Now she raised her eyes to meet his. She smiled,
briefly. Then her mouth opened, and closed.

The caress was one that Weaver had never received before. He let himself relax, let
enjoyment wash over him. His hand moved from his pocket, still holding the razor.
The girl did not notice it. He flipped it open with a flick of his wrist, and still
she did not notice it.

She
did
notice it, however, when he was holding it against her throat.

Her eyes came up again, and this time they rolled in terror. She tried to move her
head away, move it from the razor, but his other hand was at the back of her neck
and she was unable to move her head at all.

“Keep going,” he said gently. “Don’t stop.”

She went on with what she had been doing but her eyes were on Weaver’s face. Now he
was doubly excited; the caress, combined with the look of abject terror in the poor
girl’s eyes, was too much to bear. Desire welled up within him and his brain swam
in lust.

“Keep going,” he said to her, again. “Keep going, whore, slut, tramp. Keep going.”

She probably did not understand the words. But she did understand what was expected
of her. She followed his orders while he held the edge of the razor at her tender
throat.

He watched her. He saw the horror in her eyes. He looked down past them and saw her
poor little breasts. A day ago he would have slashed at those breasts, would have
cut them to ribbons until blood dripped from them. But now he was able to restrain
himself. Such extra touches were unnecessary, extraneous—just wrapping paper on the
main theme. He would not hurt this girl, would not mutilate her.

No.

She caressed him and his passion mounted. He reached the peak in a short amount of
time. And, at the precise moment, he struck quickly with the razor, slashing neatly
through the girl’s throat.

She died quickly, almost instantly. He watched her death throes with interest then
dressed himself. He stopped for a moment to dip his fingers into her blood and leave
fingerprints on the wall of the shanty. There was a small water pot in one corner
and he used the water in it to wash the blood from the tips of his fingers.

Then, anonymous as the customer of any inexpensive prostitute, he left her shack and
closed the door after him.

He was two blocks away before he heard the shrill screams of the girl who had discovered
his victim. He walked on without even quickening his pace and an automatic smile spread
across his face. His hand touched his pocket, noting with approval that the razor
was still there. He kept smiling and kept walking.

* * *

Marty picked up his cards, fanned them, arranged them. He glanced quickly at the score
pad and saw he was a little over a hundred dollars down. Nothing much at a dollar
a point. Hell, they were just getting started. If the final count didn’t run a thou
one way or the other, it would be a hell of a tight evening.

They had been playing for half an hour, and Marty was beginning to get a line on Simon’s
game. Simon wasn’t a bad player. Marty would have been surprised if he had been; bad
players can’t play dollar-a-point gin very long without running out of money. Simon
played a tight game. He knew the mathematics of the game and he had a good card memory.
Those were the two main ingredients.

But Marty was confident. Simon may have been a gin player, he thought, but he himself
was a gambler. When card ability was even, you had to play the man along with the
cards. You had to case his game and find a way to throw him off stride. This was half
of poker, where the cards didn’t mean as much as what you could do with them. But
it was also part of gin, if only a small part. It was enough to make a difference.

Simon liked to lie back and wait for gin. With the gin bonus twenty-five points and
the box bonus only ten points, it wasn’t a bad notion. But there was a way to knock
it askew. A few fast knocks would get Simon worried. Then, with the right timing,
he could get undercut a few times. And by then he’d start to wobble on the ropes.

Marty knocked early, won the hand and picked up all of five points. He got down quick
the next hand for fifteen points. The next hand he did the same thing, getting just
two points that time.

Simon came back the next hand, or tried to. He knocked with three, and Marty was sitting
pretty on two points for an undercut.

“You play a funny game,” Simon said.

“I don’t play too much gin. My game is poker.”

“I never liked it.”

Marty riffled the cards. He dealt, turned up the twenty-first card. It was the five
of spades.

“This hand’s double,” he said. He picked up his hand, fanned it, and concentrated
on the game.

* * *

Meg had dinner at Giardi’s, the Italian restaurant where she had eaten her first day
in El Paso. She sat alone at a small table at the rear and ordered scampi fra diavolo
with a bottle of the best chianti. The shrimps were delicious and the spaghetti was
fine. She ate a full meal, drank the whole bottle of sour wine, and left the waiter
a good tip. When she went outside the air was far cooler. The rain had stopped shortly
after Marty awakened her, and the afternoon had been warm, but now it was fine, not
too cool and not too hot.

She took Marty’s advice, in part. She left Giardi’s and got out of El Paso. She went
across the border, to Juarez. In a small cafe near the plaza she ordered tequila and
ignored the stares of the cafe’s other customers. She drank her tequila and tried
to think straight.

As well as she could remember, the lesbian act at Delia’s Place had started around
ten at night. It was hard to determine how long the act lasted, since it wasn’t the
sort of thing you could watch while paying attention to the time. But she guessed
that it lasted somewhere between fifteen minutes and a half hour. Maybe closer to
half an hour, since they made quite a production out of the number.

So she figured on the blonde being ready for action around ten-thirty. She didn’t
want to watch the floor show again; it would be a little too much, seeing it two nights
in a row. She wasn’t interested in watching, anyway. She was interested in getting
into the act.

In a way, it was less than ridiculous. She was a normal, healthy American woman who,
up until a very short time ago, had been married to a rich man in Chicago. But she
had since come a long ways from Borden Rector. The four years of sexual and emotional
stagnation had made a different woman out of her. Everything had been repressed, bottled
up, and now everything was exploding now that someone had taken the cork out.

Where had it started, exactly? There were a dozen answers to that one, but the most
logical was the simplest. It had started the minute the divorce decree had come through.
Once she was legally free of Borden Rector, once she was no longer his wife and no
longer a married woman at all, she was able to let herself go. All the rest had been
inevitable.

If she had not bought the pictures in Juarez, she would have been excited elsewhere,
by something else. A movie or a magazine would have done what the pictures did. And
if she had not been picked up by Marty Granger, some other man would have found her
and would have taken her to bed. The floor show at Delia’s Place took the top off
a lot of things, but some other stimulant would have had the same effect upon her
sooner or later. The blonde—the little girl with chunky breasts and a schoolgirl face—was
the final object of desire. But the instincts had been there all the time, and would
sooner or later have come to the surface, no matter where Meg went or what she did.

She sipped her tequila, lit a cigarette. A man at the bar, a very thin Mexican, was
looking her up and down and smiling seductively. There was something very sexy about
him but at the moment she was not interested. She wished he would look somewhere else.

Instead, he approached her table. In mildly accented English he asked if he might
sit with her.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” she said.

“May I wait with you?”

“I’d rather wait alone.”

He took the hint and walked sadly back to the bar. She sipped more tequila. Maybe
she should have let him sit down, she thought. Maybe she didn’t want the blonde after
all. Maybe the lesbian bit was just a reaction to the way Marty had acted that morning,
just a plate of forbidden fruit with a sign on it that said Eat Me.

There was a way to find out. All she had to do was find another man and let him take
her to a bed. Afterward, she would know whether or not she wanted the blonde. Maybe
the man would erase any lesbian desires that she had. If that was the case, it would
be pointless to find the blonde. She could stick to men.

She did nothing about it, because she didn’t have to. She finished a cigarette and
started another, and as she was finishing that one the Mexican came once again to
her table, a hopeful light in his eyes. He rested his hands on the top of the table
and leaned over.

“Your friend has not arrived,” he said.

She leaned forward, too, letting him look down the front of her dress. She could feel
his eyes burning the tops of her breasts and this excited her. It seemed to excite
him as well. His eyes were gleaming.

“May I join you, now?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” she said again, getting to her feet. “No, I’m bored with this bar. Have you
a place where we can go?”

He smiled broadly now and took her arm.

* * *

Cassie said, “I can hardly wait, Lily. I mean, to do it again tonight. I get a bang
out of it. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Lily said.

“I can’t wait at all, is what it is. I want some now, Lily. Before we go over to Delia’s.”

“Not now.”

“Please, baby?”

Lily gritted her teeth. This was a real pain in the rear, she thought. The redheaded
flat-chested little dyke never let her alone. At least with a man you got a little
rest. A man could only keep it up so long and then he let you have a moment’s peace.
But Cassie couldn’t stop itching. A gay nympho, Lily thought. She’s got to be getting
it every other minute or she shivers and starts to fold.

“No,” she said.

“Just a little taste, Lily. Just let me rub up against you a little bit, or something.
God, I’m flipping!”

“So flip, then.”

“Lily—”

“I think I know why Didi left you, Cass. You never let the poor chick alone. Get off
my back, huh?”

“Aw, Lily—”

It was too much to take. She had to get the hell away from Cassie before she went
nuts. The work was a drag, but the work was only a few hours a day, and Cassie looked
as though she was going to become a full-time proposition. She had to get out of Juarez,
had to go back to the States and set herself up the right way.

But it came back to the same thing every time. To do that, she needed money. A thou,
say. And how in hell was she going to get her hands on a thousand dollars?

“Please, Lily. Like I want it so bad I can taste it.”

“So taste it. But don’t taste me.”

“I’ll go nuts, Lily. I’ll go out of my head!”

She stood up and walked to the door. She yanked it open, then turned for a parting
look at Cassie. The redhead was on the bed, her scrawny hips rolling involuntarily.

“Use a damn candle,” she said. “I’ll see you at Delia’s. At ten. Then we’ll do whatever
you want.”

* * *

“Gin,” Marty said.

“Again?”

“Again.”

“Nuts,” Simon said.

* * *

The Mexican had a lot of money. Unlike Marty, he didn’t live in a house. He had an
apartment in the better section of Juarez, in a building with a doorman and a self-service
elevator. His apartment was tastefully furnished and his bed had smooth sheets.

In the bedroom, they did not talk. Meg got out of her dress, brushed her long dark
hair over her shoulders. The Mexican removed all his clothes and came over to her.
He took her into his arms and his mouth found hers. He had a thin mustache, and it
tickled her when he kissed her. She almost laughed, but then his arms were tight around
her like steel bands and she did not want to laugh at all. She felt her breasts being
crushed against his chest and passion leaped to life within her body.

He removed her bra and took her breasts in his hands. He stroked them and pinched
her nipples and her breath came quicker and harder. He lifted her in strong arms,
carried her to the bed.

She lay on her back and he began to touch her. His hands were surprisingly gentle
for such a strong man. He fondled her breasts, rubbed her stomach, stroked the softness
of her thighs. She felt the heat spread from the places where his fingers touched
her until her whole body was a sheet of liquid flame. She moaned softly and his mouth
came down upon hers, his tongue stabbing into her mouth and finding her tongue. She
wrapped her arms about his body, holding him close, feeling the heat of him matching
her own heat. Her legs drew him in close.