“SHE. She has a big COCK. She's a MAN.'
“Um,” his Reagan voice kicked in, “well—technically—yes.” Eventually he got her calmed down.
“Come over beside me. Nicki won't be back. I promise.” And she sat beside him and he told her all about Nicki and he tried to kiss her and she resisted at first, but he kept it up. Eventually he calmed her down and she slid back over beside him.
“How could you...” But he'd had enough questions and he overpowered her with his handsome face and his open smile, selling her again with all his charm, pulling her over so she'd be safe from the storm, promising her, inviting her, baiting her in his soft, romantic tones, and she let him start kissing her again.
“Drop-dead gorgeous, that's what you are, all right,” he said, and then he had HIS penis out and she let him guide her face down and he gently moved her closer and then he was in her mouth, hard and hot, and moving her head back and forth on him, almost choking her, telling her she was “drop-dead gorgeous,” over and over, filling her throat with him, and it seemed like a minute or less he was making a loud, fast-breathing gasping noise and she knew that he was climaxing, and he was exploding inside her mouth and she tried to pull back then, but he had hold of her hair and then he was pulling her mouth off him and the right hand did something and there was a flash of metal and she screamed as the sudden unbearable stab of pain penetrated her screaming unendurable agony as something struck deep into her mind with deadly force and Diane Taluvera was dying even as he penetrated her again.
Donna had packed most of his wardrobe, it appeared, and he joked with her about it as he unpacked slacks, hanging them back in the master closet in their bedroom, “You tryin’ to get rid of me or what? I'm only goin’ for a couple of days. I got enough clothes in here to stay a month. You guys tryin’ to get rid of me?'
“That's it. We're trying to get rid of you,” she said, coming up behind him, encircling his waist with her arms, and resting her head and upper torso on his back. He managed to get the hook of the hanger back over the rod and turned into her hug, lifting her face up to his.
“Mmwa,” she said, kissing him wetly.
“Those are my sentiments exactly,” he told her, kissing her again. Slowly and gently. It had been a perfect evening. Jonathan had been so docile Jack had decided not to chance telling her about some information he'd picked up about possible allergy therapy. Grains. Fiber. Dairy products. He'd forgotten the other things. Warning signs. He'd seen a video of kids whose behavior was similar to the little boy's. But it had been a quiet night and he wanted to keep it this way. They put their son to bed and finished packing for his trip to Texas in the morning.
“Do you really HAVE to go?” she finally said.
“I dunno,” he sighed. “I suppose not. But it'll cut us a little temporary slack. Media's not going to let Tina Hoyt go down as long as it'll get numbers. We're probably in a ratings sweep or whatever,” he said, his cynicism borne of long experience with the dauntless crusaders of electronic journalism and print.
“How'd you like to cut ME some slack,” she whispered into his ear.
Their mouths mashed hotly together. He could never get enough of her.
Big, beautiful breasts that curved slightly upward like the surreal cartoon boobs in the men's mags, the bazooms of a busty, firm young girl, still nice and high, each crowned with a full, inviting cherry. Long, silky hair, and—most of all, best of all—that attitude of delicious sensuality that was so natural and sweet. He'd come to love Donna so much.
Eichord was still awed and pleased by his wife. By the elegance of her movements. He'd seldom known anyone so totally natural, and he liked to watch the sexy way her femininity asserted itself, the feral way she held herself, her openness as they made love. She was a joy to watch at any time, but especially in their intimate times together. Yet he even liked to watch Donna run, or walk, or just curl up on the sofa. He enjoyed her awake, asleep, animated, or in repose. He thought of his lady as a mysteriously female person who was absolutely open in her ways. An eternal mystery that could still take his breath away.
“What?” she asked him.
“I said there's no bloom off these roses, honey,” Jack muttered.
“I love you,” she told him.
“Hmmmm.” He smiled, moving back a little so he could look at her. He could not say what was in his heart at that moment. Speechless, he wanted to tell her as he looked at one of the most beautiful shapes in nature. Right up there with the rainbows and sunsets and oceans and snowy meadows. Exquisite perfection, beautiful as innocents. Pure and purely feminine.
What was it that old Spanish painter had said about the most beautiful shape—was it an egg? Or the eliptical figure 8 recumbent—the infinity sign? The Greek letter? Or was it the breath-catching sight of the female S-curve, the most perfect line in nature? The glorious S of the breast and buttocks.
Jack Eichord traced a gentle, surprisingly warm line under his wife's loose clothing. “You got a great S, you know that?” he said.
“Your S ain't bad either,” Donna said, each of them beginning to satisfy the other's hungry needs.
The Amarillo cop shop was superclean. Efficient and professional to a fault. Hardly what the records of twenty years ago would have suggested. The cop work on the Iceman kills had been spectacularly shoddy, Eichord thought, and the more he looked into the crime reports, the worse it appeared. Sloppy investigation techniques. Sloppy paper work. And one of the sloppiest mishandlings of a prime suspect he'd ever seen. At least that was his strong impression two decades after the facts.
With predictability the detectives involved in the investigation were all either deceased or seemingly scattered to the four winds. Nobody in the Amarillo shop had first-person or hands-on memories of the investigation. The most glaring omission in the records—the fact that neither the NCIC computers nor MCTF stored photo or prints of the suspect, a teenager named Arthur Spoda—proved to date back to a fire in which the suspect's records were destroyed. Then even THAT proved false.
“Bullshit,” the man in the sheriffs office told him. “I remember an ole boy in Homicide tellin’ me how they lost a whole buncha stuff in the flood they had over there. Water pipe busted, is what happened. Ruined a file cabinet fulla stuff. Ah think they just had it all hauled off to the dump.'
“So you're saying nobody in law enforcement down here has got a picture or fingerprints on the primary suspect in a multiple-homicide headline case?'
“Just one of them things,” the man said. Eichord thanked him and talked again to the guy in Sex Crimes who put him on the Spoda trail as best he could.
Eichord was still driving, thirty minutes later, when he saw the VEGA sign on the outskirts of town. It reminded him of the deep South, where you can drive through residential neighborhoods and tall, centuries-old magnolias spread out over the traffic like the elm-shaded side streets of the 40s, before the national Dutch elm blight hit southern and mid-America. It was like that here. Big, unkempt trees drooping out over the highway.
A sign assured motorists Jesus Loves YOU and then another that Jesus Died for YOUR sins. Somebody had painted on the side of an underpass: Trust Jesus. Eichord passed an elderly gentleman in a slow-moving station wagon sporting a bumper sticker telling you to Honk if You Love Jesus. The phrase “Bible Belt” came to mind.
But this wasn't the Bible Belt. Perhaps it was below the belt, he thought as he drove by large stone abutments that looked like a mini-acropolis, once the supports for a massive loading dock. The compress for the cotton bales was long gone, and so in fact was the railroad that once hauled the cotton away. The gin was vanished. He passed shacks for migrant workers and signs advertising Rummy Cola, Brad's Truck Brokerage, and Velma's Salon. All rust-covered. Green frog-colored lily pads floated in stagnant roadside water. Joe's garage and muffler shop. Closed. Ivy's Cafe. Empty. no tresspassing.
A creek runs along beside a wooded area. The creek is banked by low-hanging willows, water lilies, thousands of cattails, goldenrod, water weeds of every description. An underground cable sign has all but rusted away, so that the only thing you see is the bold word W A R N I N G.
The vestiges of a ghost town without optimism or hope. A forgotten chunk of America not even the most hypo realtor could get excited about. A storm had flung mighty oak limbs into the two lane and nobody cared. He
