She lived in a split row house up on 89th and Amsterdam. Welfare housing. Not exactly a total dump but pretty damn close. Her high heels tapped up the stairs. You could smell piss faintly in the dimly-lit stairwell — did the dead still piss? — and half-erased graffiti swirls decorated the walls. Nothing to deter us. Not when you could look up and see that Class-A butt riding up and down in those jeans. We were beyond the point of no return now. That primordial toggle in the male brain had been switched to the on position for the duration.
She unlocked triple deadbolts. It looked like somebody'd smeared shit on the door. I hoped it was just more bad graffiti. Then she opened the door and switched on the lights and stepped inside. For a moment we just stood there.
'You gotta be shitting me,' John said.
Inside it looked like the Presidential Suite at the St. Regis. Whatever that might look like. Russet wall-to-wall carpet, long sable couches, finely crafted Hepplewhite furniture and one of those fifty-inch-screen tube TV’s in the corner. Some pretty high-end art hung from the walls and the curtains could've been Byzantine tapestries.
We stepped inside.
'Some joint,' John said.
Our hostess didn't respond. She just stood there appraising us while we moved into the room and looked around. I finally stated the obvious question.
'I thought that…that the dead lived on public assistance.”
“Only because that's all that people like you will allow us.”
“Come again?'
'Hey! What's this 'people like you' bullshit? You invited us here, remember?' said John.
'True. I don't have to appreciate your politics though, do I?'
'No, you don't. Though my buddy here's a liberal Democrat. But how about you cool it with the big bitch attitude, okay? Be nice.'
She nodded, smiling. 'Okay. Back to the subject. You wanted to know how I can afford all this, right?'
'Yeah.'
She slipped the tank top up over her head. Underneath she was naked.
And perfect.
'What do you think?' she said.
John groaned. 'Ah, I should've known. A fuckin' hooker. Hey, are we fuckin' morons or what?'
'That's not the deal,' I told her. I was seriously pissed off. 'You came on to us and all we did was go along. We don't pay for it.'
'You will tonight,' she said.
She slipped a big semi-auto out from behind the phone stand by the door in less time than it takes me to swallow. The gun had a long black can on the end of it. A silencer.
She pointed it at John. 'And Johnny,' she said, 'don't even think about pulling that little pea-shooter in your belt. Between your shirt and your beer-gut that thing's been harder to miss than what passes for your dick. Thumb and forefinger, champ. Take it out and drop it on the floor. Slow.' John hesitated. She cocked her gun.
'If you don't, I'll punch so many holes in you you'll whistle when the wind blows. Count of three, tough guy. One, two…'
He parted the shirt, reached down and dropped the gun to the floor. 'Now wallets. Toss 'em over here by my feet.'
We did that too. You didn't have to have a doctorate from M.I.T. to figure out now how she'd furnished her apartment. She wasn't a whore, she was an armed robber, luring guys to her apartment and then ripping them off.
A dead armed robber.
And we knew what she looked like. And we knew where she lived. She wasn't letting us out of here alive.
John looked at me and I looked at him. And I thought we were saying something a whole lot like goodbye when she fired the shot into his chest. The silenced report sounded like a single light clap of hands. He went down like a wall of mason blocks. She'd hit him directly in the heart, blood arcing a yard up out of the bullet hole.
I watched the arc dwindle. To nothing.
'I hope you sad fucks have some decent credit cards.'
Now the gun was on me. She was enjoying this. Her nipples were as long as thumbnails. I wondered if she'd always been this way or if the tumor had turned her vicious.
'Listen,' I said. I was shaking. 'We can work this out somehow. We can…'
'Shut up.' She fired two more rounds into the side of John's head. The side of his skull blew off and brains like old clotted oatmeal flecked with red were suddenly all over the floor.
I understood the russet carpet.
'Wouldn't want him to come back. Would we? The world's a better place without that drunken troll.'
All I could do was stand there expecting to die in seconds. I couldn't move. I felt stupid and slightly sad, like I'd lost an old friend. And not John, either.
'So now me?' I managed to say. 'Just like that?'
She laughed. 'You mean, 'after all we've had together?' Not necessarily.'
She was holding the gun almost lazily — like you'd hold a phone receiver you weren't exactly going to use right away. But there was a good ten feet between us. If I went for it I'd be dead on the floor right next to John.
'You can't get out,' she said. 'The door locks automatically, the windows are barred and you can yell and scream all you want to but let me tell you, the neighbors won't complain.'
Of course not. The neighbors were all dead, like her.
'So what do you mean, 'not necessarily?''
She shrugged a smooth bare shoulder. 'Whether you live or die depends on you.'
My stare told her I didn't get it.
'I see assholes like you every day. We're not even people anymore, to you we're not even human. We're nothing more than a bunch of animals.'
'That's not true. Yes, there are tons of bigots out there. But I've been trying to tell you all night long. I'm not one of them.'
I was pleading for my life, not my principles. And she knew it.
'Sure you are. You're no different. Liberal Democrat, my ass. The proof is the fact that you're here in the first place. You goddamn guys, you all think it would be a riot to have sex with the dead. Something to laugh about, something you can brag about to your buddies. Well guess what? Here's your big chance.'
She ran her finger down the gun barrel.
'And if you do a real good job, I won't kill you.'
It was crazy. It made no sense. It was what we'd come here to do in the first place and now she was turning it into some kind of weird life-and-death challenge. But could I believe her?
What choice did I have?
Strangest thing was, I knew I could do it. Even with the gun in her hand. Even with John dead on the floor. I could put the blocks to her then and there. I looked from her mouth to her breasts and was I hard already. Maybe death and fear are aphrodisiacs.
I took off my shirt and dropped it to the floor. I slid off my belt and dropped that too. 'All right,' I said quietly and took a step toward her. She started to laugh.
'You should be so lucky!'
Now I really was lost.
'Not with me, you jackass.' She reached for a door back near the drapes that opened to a block of darkness. 'Mom? Billy? Come on out.' Their stench preceded them. I could barely breathe.
'Mom burned up in a car accident,' she said. 'My brother Billy drowned in the Hudson. But they both came back. I take care of them now.'
They shuffled across the room, knelt awkwardly at John's body. The woman had no face at all, just char. Her body looked like a skeleton covered with blackened bacon. The boy's flesh was mostly green and hung slack now that he'd lost his floaters' bloat over a naked ribcage that seemed stuffed with meatloaf. Two eyes gleamed from a
