“Hi, Mr. Brady,” she said in that teen-age chirp.
“Hello.” My voice came from the end of a long, twisted tube, but I suppose she heard. “We ran out of bottles, so I came to restock.” I cleared my throat. “I suppose Alexander's okay.”
“Sure,” she agreed. “Not a peep out of the garage.”
I swallowed, pulling my head from the doorway and stumbling into the kitchen. I opened a cabinet and took down two full quarts of Jim Beam, wheeling and returning to the front door. I set them just inside, so that I'd fall over them on my way out.
Then I went back, just drifting along, toward the idiot-like sounds coming from the television. The fat lady was still on and they'd loaded the stage with just the sort of things she'd always needed: surfboard, water skis, mountain climbing boots, judo instructor.
I came inside and stood before Trudy, staring down at those inviting thighs. Jesus, but she had a shape. If they made people get licenses for carrying deadly weapons, they should have made her register that body. It was much too dangerous to be allowed to run around loose.
“What's up, Mr. Brady?” she asked, her voice higher than ever. “No bottles in the house?”
I sniffed. “How old are you, Trudy?” I watched her tear off another hunk of chicken and then put the bone down on the plate. Then she picked up the cake and bit into it, chewing slowly as she thought about my question. Presently she swallowed, licking her lips while I grew another hard-on. I needed help in the worst way. She took a swig of cola.
“Sixteen,” she said at last. “Anything wrong in that?”
“Nothing that couldn't land a man in San Quentin,” I muttered half under my breath.
Trudy giggled like a child, her pointed cannon breasts shaking like plates of fresh Jello, her skirt riding higher so that I caught sight of a fringe of lace that couldn't have been more than an inch below the gates of her vagina. “Golly, you sure say funny things, Mr. Brady.”
“I'm a very amusing fellow,” I managed to reply, my words coming out with a strangled sound. Sitting down across from her, I glanced casually at the television. “Do you really like to watch that sort of thing?”
Wrinkling up her button nose, she answered, “Only until the Jimmy Junkin show comes on. He's groovy. Those eyes… like wow.”
My penis was storming around inside my trousers like a caged tiger, bellowing to be fed or released or both. It had been worked up for more than an hour-with Trudy starting the ball rolling, to coin a phrase-and it still had received no satisfaction. I wondered how long it could go before it decided to explode without waiting for me to pull the trigger.
“What's up, Mr. Brady?” she asked, tilting her head like a stuffed doll under a Christmas tree. She looked so damned innocent, except for the eyes, the face and the body. Other than that, there wasn't an ounce of sex appeal in Trudy Pipp.
“Just taking a breather,” I snapped, crossing my legs, hoping to hide the bulge that she'd probably already seen.
Trudy smiled without showing her row of small white teeth, her lips curving like a snake's tail. She knew what was going on, of course, just as we both had known the moment I'd let her into the house at seven o'clock.
“Are they waiting for you at your friends' house?”
I nodded. “I'm supposed to be at the liquor store, buying out the place.”
“You came here instead.”
“Looks that way.”
“How come? You didn't want to see something special on the television, I don't suppose?”
“I suppose not.”
“Maybe you wanted to see me, Mr. Brady,” she continued, her baby blue eyes wide and unblinking. “Maybe you came back here to get into my panties.”
I signed like a man receiving a gloomy examination report from his physician. “Maybe you're right, Trudy. Maybe you're right.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I moved to the couch, trying not to seem too obviously lecherous. Sinking down at her side, I took the can of cola and sipped from it, bathing my hot and dry throat in stinging bubbles. “Ugh, how can you drink that stuff?”
“Don't knock it,” she answered. “There's only one calorie to a can and a girl has to watch her figure all the time.”
I watched her figure, letting my eyes roam as they pleased, and they were thoroughly pleased at the chance. She had a waist that couldn't have been more than twenty-four inches around and her hips were just mature enough to have that spread of excitement offered by a woman who has just become completely nubile. Her breasts strained against the sheer material of her blouse so that her nipples begged for release to the outside air. The legs I'd gone over thoroughly before and they remained as desirable as ever.
“There's nothing wrong with your figure,” I blurted, sounding like a member of the sophomore class at George Washington High. “Nothing at all.”
“Thanks, Mr. Brady, but a girl can't be too careful. They say it's easier to keep the pounds off than to have to get rid of them once they've arrived.”
“Wonderful philosophy,” I muttered, edging closer. I could smell her now. Not much female scent, just a clean young smell, like she should have been sitting nude on a shade-dappled bank of a country swimming hole. For a stud who was hotter than a cheap pistol, I was still being mighty poetic.
Clearing my throat as though preparing for a Senate speech, I continued, “You said something about an aunt when you came to the door.”
Wiping her hands and lips on a paper napkin, she blinked at me and I could feel myself falling into the void, with complete weightlessness. “My Aunt Charlotte. Me and my brother stay with her, just two blocks away from here.”
“Just two blocks?”
She smiled, showing her teeth this time, and I figured they would have grown points, but they hadn't. “We don't have any real parents. They were killed a long time ago and there's just Buddy and me and Aunt Charlotte.”
I hardly heard what she was saying, but I tacked an interested look on my face and kept it there. Then I thought about the time and Amy and the Champions. They were probably calling missing persons about now, but there was nothing I could do about that. My snake couldn't be denied any longer. It had been shut off cold by Amy when I'd come home, Alice hadn't had time to fire it and it wasn't going to be left out in the cold any longer.
“Trudy, I…”
She leaned toward me, her eyes like twin swimming pools-the kind that have soft lights under the surface of the water at night. She must have had night lights inside her skull. “Yes, Mr. Brady?” Her lips were shining, probably from cake frosting and cola mixed.
“Trudy…”
“You keep saying that, Mr. Brady.”
“You're a very attractive girl and I… well, I had to come back here to see you alone. You know that, don't you?”
“Sure I do. We both knew it when I got here at seven o'clock, right? You don't need to play around with me, Mr. Brady. I know the score.”
“And what is the score, Miss Pipp?”
She giggled at my formal use of her name, shaking her packages of goodies. “Like I said, you want to get into my pants. Don't be surprised. Lots of boys have wanted to make me. They say I seem to ask for it, but I can't help the way I'm put together.”
Groaning, I replied, “Unfortunately, I'm not one of the boys. I'm twenty-seven years old and you're sixteen. That's not a healthy age spread.”
She made a face. “One of my boy friends used to say, if they're big enough they're old enough.”
