Getting Off

He pulled up her skirt, bunched it around her hips, then reached to lower her panties. They fell to her ankles, and she would have stepped out of them but she couldn’t because he was holding her by the hips.

She thought, Greek foreplay. Brace yourself, Athena! And then he was inside her.

She had to wait at the bus station for an hour and ten minutes, and tried to will the time to pass and the bus to come. She wasn’t anxious about the time it was taking, because it would be hours before the authorities found out about Steve. She’d found a set of keys on a peg by the entrance to the kitchen, and one of them fit the outer door. With the lights out and the door locked, and the CLOSED sign already in place, there was every chance that nobody would find him before morning.

As it was, she’d missed the bus to Tucson by less than ten minutes. She could have been on it with time to spare if she hadn’t insisted on spending a full half hour in the shower, soaping and rinsing and soaping and rinsing. I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair—the song ran through her mind as she used up Marriott’s entire mini-bottle of shampoo. It left her hair smelling of orange and ginger, and wasn’t that an improvement on eau de Stavros?

And now she was dressed in clean clothes from head to toe, and a plastic bag on the bench beside her held everything she’d been wearing: skirt, blouse, panties, socks, even her shoes. And it was the bag and its contents that made her wish the bus would come, because the plastic was no barrier to that godawful smell.

There was a trash receptacle in her line of sight, and the impulse to drop the clothes into it was almost irresistible. Bad idea, she told herself, over and over. There were bloodstains on her skirt and blouse, and she could imagine what trace evidence her shoes and panties would yield. Not that an investigating officer would need a microscope, or any of the battery of tools they used on CSI. The sniff test would be plenty for anyone who’d ever been within ten yards of Steve, living or dead.

The bus would take her north, to Flagstaff. She’d stay there long enough to get rid of the bag of dirty clothes, then take another bus and get across a state line or two. She could take buses all the way to her ultimate destination, but Chicago was a long ways off, and by the time she got there she’d need a long shower just to get rid of her own smell.

Crazy the way she couldn’t stop thinking about smells. Gross, really.

She thought about Chicago, and Graham Weider. Of the four living members of her personal alumni association, he had to be the softest target. Alvin Kirkaby, if he was still alive, could still be in Iraq, on another tour of duty. Or maybe his unit had been dispatched to Afghanistan. Or maybe he’d lived and returned home, wherever home might be. She didn’t know where he hailed from, and couldn’t guess where he might be now.

She’d met Graham Weider in New York, where he bought her a good lunch before taking her back to his hotel room for their quickie, the details of which had long since faded from her mind. They arranged to meet later for a good dinner, to be followed by a not-so-quickie. When he didn’t show up, she went back to his hotel, where he’d left a note at the desk. Sorry, business meeting necessitated immediate departure. Rushing to airport and flight to L.A. Call me, love to see you again.

And there’d been a phone number, but she had neither called it nor kept it. At the time she felt a little regret at having failed to close the books on Graham Weider, but not so much that she was going to hop on a plane and hunt him down. It hadn’t seemed all that important.

It did now.

Once again she managed to get a seat all to herself, toward the front but not too close to the driver. There was room in the overhead for her suitcase, and for the bag of clothes as well. She could still smell the clothes, even in their new location, but she had the feeling that she’d still be smelling them if she’d chanced leaving them in the trash can. Her nose was full of his scent, and it would take more than distance to clear them. It would take time as well.

She’d bought a novel at the newsstand in the station, but never looked at it again until she was on the bus. Even then she waited until they’d cleared the Phoenix city limits before she switched on the overhead light.

The book was a paperback thriller. Some wild-eyed eco-terrorist, crazy as a bedbug and twice as charming, had raided a secret government laboratory, killed half a dozen scientists, and made off with enough anthrax, plague bacteria, and smallpox virus to depopulate an already troubled planet. And, astonishingly enough, the only person in the world with even a slim chance of stopping this lunatic was a beautiful young FBI agent, the identical twin sister of one of the murdered scientists.

Well, sure, she thought. These things happen.

She read for a while, dozed for a while, opened her eyes when the bus pulled to a stop in Sedona. Three people got off, two got on. Next stop, Flagstaff.

She’d had one genuine oh-shit moment in the Phoenix bus station. She’d been sitting there, the suitcase at her feet, the bag of clothes beside her, the paperback unopened on her lap, when the room went dead silent, jarring her out of her reverie.

When she turned her head to find out what everyone was looking at, what she saw was a pair of uniformed police officers striding through the entrance. One had a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.

Time, which had been crawling to begin with, came to a dead stop. She tried to think of something to do, some action to take, and came up empty.

And then the cops walked straight over to a gaunt and hollow-eyed young man, his jeans out at the knee, his arms and neck and who knew what else heavily tattooed. He evidently couldn’t think of anything to do either. She’d thought earlier that he looked like a fugitive, and evidently he was, and his days on the run were over, because he didn’t even protest, just stood up and turned around to be handcuffed.

After they’d led him out, the silence held for an instant. Then almost everybody started talking at once, and the ones who weren’t talking were hauling out their cell phones. This would make a good story for all of them, she thought. It would make an even better story for her, but one she wasn’t likely to tell.

On the last leg of the trip, she remembered what had taken place in the kitchen, with her cheek against the cutting board and her panties around her ankles. As she’d anticipated, Steve was one of those piledriver types, hammering away at her, thrusting hard and fast, like John Henry determined to beat the steam drill or die trying. When John Henry was a little babyJust a settin’ on his mammy’s kneeHe picked up a hammer an’ a little piece of steelSaid, Gonna be the death of meLord, Lord,Gonna be the death of me…

The John Henry approach had never been a favorite of hers, but she was far too excited to demand finesse. Her response was immediate and unqualified, and she didn’t see how it could have been otherwise. And that would have been the case even if he’d been true to ethnic stereotype and chosen a narrower passage than the conventional one. It might have proved painful, given the thickness of his cock and the lack of foreplay, but that wouldn’t have been enough to keep her from enjoying it.

The hammering continued, and she writhed and twisted in response, and he tightened his grip on her hindquarters, as if any movement on her part was an unwelcome diversion. Her orgasm came on anyway, and it was strong enough but somehow incomplete, as if it was just an interim stop on the way to release.

Then, with a great cry and a final powerful thrust, he finished.

Five, she thought.

And he tore himself off her and out of her, spun around, collapsed against the stainless steel triple sink. And she couldn’t wait, she just couldn’t, and so what if he didn’t see it coming? So what if she didn’t get to see his face? There were knives everywhere, and the one she grabbed was long enough and heavy enough, and she buried it in his back. And stabbed him again and again and again, five times at least, maybe more, as she was too much in the moment to keep track.

And then he stopped making noises, and stopped moving, and lay on the floor. She was pretty sure he was dead, but she stabbed him one final time, making sure the blade found the heart. She bent down and stepped out of her panties, using them to wipe the handle of the knife, the counter where she’d gripped it, and anything else she thought she might have touched.

And snatched his keys from the peg, and turned off lights, and locked the door once she was through it.

On the way to her hotel, she dropped his keys in a storm drain.

Four.

In Flagstaff she wanted to get a hotel room and bed down for the night. She was tired, and not at all eager