New Title 1 (4 page)

Felander stepped back toward the door. “Goon, meet Marie.”

“Maureen!” she corrected.

“Right. Maureen.”

Cool-blue irises appraised her through the eyeholes in the mask. And that big roll of cock satcheled in the jockstrap began to visibly shift as he looked at her.

“Hi,” Goon said.

But what an odd voice. Just a whisper, and something effeminate about it, like a passive gay guy. One thing was obvious, though…

He ain’t gay,
she thought.
If he’s gay, how come his dick’s about to bust out of that jock just looking at me?

“Well, I guess I’ll leave you two to your fun,” Felander said. “Nice meeting you, Marianne.”

Then she heard the door click shut behind her.

“You’re…very…beautiful,” came Goon’s peculiar whisper.

Maureen nearly fainted. And she nearly came when that big, dinner-plate-sized hand reached out and gently touched her shoulder.

“Soft…”

So gentle… It shocked her. Goon stepped right up next to her. The big hands caressed her breasts through the zebra-striped halter, ran down her bare midriff, down her hips, and then back up again. Maureen closed her eyes and sighed. Wrestlers were usually rough—real rough. Maureen, like most ringrats, had been slapped, pinched, bitten, choked, spanked, gagged, blindfolded, tied up, gang-banged, play-raped, double-poked, fist-fucked, sodomized, etc. more times than she could remember. That’s what she expected from wrestlers, and that’s what she liked. She’d sucked asses and balls and toes. She’d had more cock in her mouth than Liberace and more jizz in her hair than shampoo. And in her time she’d probably engaged in the act of sexual intercourse more times than Marilyn Chambers. Gentle lovemaking wasn’t her bag. She didn’t want to hold hands in the park with these guys. She didn’t want to be kissed and cuddled. She wanted to be balled till she bled, spewed in and spewed on, used as a thing for the primal pleasures of these looming, beefy behemoths.

In other words, she wanted to be treated like the fuck-pig she was, and that’s why this was so strange she could hardly reckon it. Any other guy and she’d be walking out the door right now, but this was Goon, and Goon was just so…

Different.

“Hold me,” he whispered.

She put her arms around him—at least as best she could, for his girth prevented her hands from meeting. Just touching him like this made her feel electrified. His fingers, large as they were, tenderly stroked her hair, brushed her cheek, smoothed over the nape of her neck. Just as tenderly, then, he cupped her face and gazed so passionately into her eyes.

And then, just as tenderly—

snap!

—he wrung her neck.

««—»»

“Traci Wilcox?”

Two eyes squinted through the gap, just over the safety chain. “Yeah? Who’re you?”

Straker flashed his badge and ID card. “Captain Philip Straker. State Police. I need to talk to you about Susan Bilks.”

“Aw, Jesus,” she muttered beneath her breath. The door shut, the chain clinked, then she let him in. Decent joint for a double-wide trailer—decent at least in that it didn’t stink like a month’s worth of dirty diapers, backed up drains, and a month’s worth of unwashed dishes. Straker, in the old days, must’ve answered a hundred domestics in trailer parks—drunken rube men beating the shit out of their drunken rube wives. The only things trashier than the occupants were the trailers themselves.

“So what happened?” Traci Wilcox griped, showing him into a cramped living room. “She get the shit beat out of her by one of them wrestlers?”

As Straker made to sit, he froze halfway down. “The shit beat out of her by
who?
”

The woman sat down with a sigh of disgust. Straker figured if he looked up the word “beat” in the dictionary, they’d have a picture of Traci Wilcox. Haggard, crow’s feet, dark circles under her eyes. Central Ident said she was twenty-nine but she looked ten or even fifteen years beyond that. She’d been a line-processor at Gronson’s Chicken for a decade. Since the goddamn governor had deregulated the state’s poultry industry in return for inside trading tips and campaign contributions spirited out of a corrupt S&L, the largest chicken producer in the country had become a legal sweatshop. Wilcox crossed her legs in the tattered corn-blue robe, hands crabbed like an old lady’s from wringing guts out of #1 Whole Fryers for the last ten years. Tacky flip-flops hung off feet whose arches had long fallen flat, and the varicose veins in her legs looked like mapwork. She didn’t seem to care that the top half of a drooping breast showed in the sagging v of the robe.

“Wrestlers, you know, pro wrestlers,” she said.

“You’re losing me, Miss Wilcox.”

“She’s a ringrat.”

“A—”

“A ringrat. A wrestling groupie. Three or four nights a week, I swear to God, she dresses up in those whory outfits and goes to these goddamn wrestling arenas.”

This was too bizarre.
Wrestlers?
“You’re telling me that she dated professional wrestlers?”

“If
fucking
a bunch of over-built grapheads whenever they’re in town means dating, then, yeah. I guess you could say that.”

The expletive slapped him in the face. He couldn’t imagine what she was talking about, but one thing was certain—

She doesn’t know,
Straker thought.
Damn it!

“Listen, Miss Wilcox, before we go on, I regret to have to inform you that Susan Bilks is dead.”

The walked-on face gaped, the pale parched lips opened, then closed. Her expression fell back to its dull, weathered platitude; her reaction to the news of her roommate’s death had lasted no more than a second.

“Figures. Half of ‘em are all fucked up on drugs is what I hear. It was only a matter of time before she got in over her head. I’ll bet she was murdered, right?”

Straker thumbed his eyes, confused. “Yes, Miss Wilcox, she was murdered via an extreme mode of violence. Her neck was broken. She was mutilated. Not to mention, she was raped repeatedly, and I might add…”

Straker stalled.
No, no, don’t tell her the rest.
You don’t just walk in and tell someone her roommate was raped post extemis—after the point of death. You don’t tell her that her hands and feet were cut off, her teeth were pulled out, her eyes were extracted—

No, you didn’t tell them that.

But this was still too convoluted to contemplate. Straker may well have tripped over a lead. “Help me out here, Miss Wilcox. You’re saying that Susan Bilks was…sexually involved with…professional wrestlers?”

Wilcox sipped lemonade from a smudged tumbler. Straker could easily smell that it had been tuned up with whiskey. “That’s right. They call them ringrats—wrestling groupies. It’s ridiculous. Susan was a cute girl. She could have pretty much any guy she wanted, but if it didn’t have bleached-blond hair and wrestling trunks, she couldn’t care less.”

“Wrestlers,” Straker stated baldly. He was still having a hard time with it.

“I didn’t really know her, we just split the place—this is a double-wide, you know, forty-eight by thirty. I live on this side, she lives on the other. She was crazy about these dopes. Hell, one night she brought one back here—Kevin the Druid, she said his name was. Kinda short but real beefy, could barely fit in the door. Dark-sandy hair and a goatee—devilish-looking, and even I gotta admit, he was a turn-on. They go back in Susan’s room and get started—Christ, I thought they were gonna knock the trailer off its bricks. All night long they did it.”

This oddity, now, was beginning to coalesce. Straker didn’t know wrestling from a hole in the ground. A stunt—that was his understanding, fake fights in an arena, characterized by phony rivalries. Each piece came as a separate thought:
Wrestlers. A wrestling groupie. Whory clothes.

The first six bodies had never been ID’d, but…garments were found in their proximities, garments which certainly could be described as “whory.” Hot pants, fishnet stockings, tight halters and tube tops, stiletto heels.

Susan Bilks was a wrestling groupie. The first six girls must’ve been wrestling groupies too.

Was it that easy? He walked into the home of this roughened chicken handler, expecting nothing. Yet Straker realized in a jolt that he was potentially one question away from solving the case.

“Miss Wilcox. If you can answer this next question, it might very well lead to the apprehension of Susan’s killer.”

She leaned over for her drink, unfazed. As she reached, the front of her robe opened wide enough to plainly show both breasts, which depended like white scrotums. Straker felt sure she was doing this on purpose. Their nipples more resembled wads of chewed raw beef.

“So what’s the question?” she asked.

“If Susan was a wrestling groupie, it’s clear that she went to a wrestling match on the night that she died. Our forensic technicians have determined with a fair degree of accuracy that she was killed three nights ago.” Straker sat up at the edge of the seat to ask the question. “Do you know where Susan went three nights ago? Like
exactly
where she went?”

The tired shoulders shrugged. “Farling Civic Center, right downtown. Believe me, that’s where she went every Wednesday night. There’s always a match there. Seems to me that all you gotta do is find out which wrestlers were there on that night and you’ll probably be able to figure out which one of the creeps killed her.”

Tell me about it.
Luck, in Straker’s business, rarely played out this quickly. He rose, a bit dizzy. “Farling Civic Center. Thank you, Miss Wilcox. You’ve been very helpful.”

The woman’s eyebrows hitched. “Maybe, uh, well—”

Straker paused at the door. “What’s that, Miss Wilcox?”

“Maybe there’s something else I can help you with,” she said, and with that remark she placed her flip-flopped feet up on the coffee table, and parted her legs. This, of course, afforded Straker a bull’s-eye view of her genitalia.

His stomach shimmied. What he was looking at reminded him more of a pile of deviled ham stuffed into a cusp of hair.

“No thanks,” Straker said. “I’m really in, uh, something of a hurry.”

Next she fully parted the robe, showing the breasts which seemed to hang like men on gibbets. “In too much of a hurry to pick up Susan’s diary?”

Straker’s thoughts locked up. “Susan Bilks kept a diary? Miss Wilcox, that diary could be crucial to this case. I need that diary.”

“And I’d be happy to give it to you, Captain…whatever your name is. But I need you to give me something in exchange.”

You gotta be shitting me!
She was blackmailing him. “That’s coercion, Miss Wilcox, not to mention a grievous obstruction of jurisprudence. I’m a professional homicide investigator. You’re asking me to commit an act of sexual turpitude that could jeopardize my job. Now you can give me that diary, or I can swear out a warrant and take it.”

“Yeah, but who knows how long that would take?” Somewhere behind those tired, give-a-shit eyes something like hopeless longing raged. “All that paperwork and all? And who knows, in the time it takes you to get a warrant, that diary could become misplaced.” She shrugged, sipped her drink. “It could even…disappear.”

Jesus Christ! Straker winced, first at the sight of her putty-like breasts and the stacked-beef vagina, then at the thought of what he was about to do.

What the hell,
he thought.
Couple of drinks first and it might not be so bad…

««—»»

When Too Hot Romeo double-flipped off the top rope, Goon caught him in two beefy arms, then did the Back-Breaker. Too Hot, whose real name was Walter Rawson, feigned the appropriate level of pain, then rolled over, groaning. He felt ripped off, but what else could he do?
I’m the most acrobatic wrestler in the bizz, and now I’m doing mid-card matches for three-hundred a week.
He’d flunked three piss-tests in a row, so WCW had made an example of him. Doing all the anti-drug promo stuff in the ghettos didn’t help; Too Hot often copped from the same dealers. So it was bye-bye to that 200 thou a year.