Getting Off

“Audrey?”

Oh, fuck. The son of a bitch was alive.

Shit. Three.

SIXTEEN

Conjugal visits, it turned out, were limited in both duration and frequency. You couldn’t stay in the fuck truck for more than two hours — which struck her as reasonable, actually — and you couldn’t go there more than once a week. On reflection, she decided that was probably reasonable, too. If prisoners got to fuck their wives any time they felt like it, they wouldn’t have sufficient energy to plan future crimes, let alone organize a decent riot.

But it certainly didn’t make her life any easier. She could visit him once a day if she wanted, could simply show up at the prison and get ushered into the big room where they’d sit on opposite sides of a window. But if she couldn’t kill him in the fuck truck, how could she kill him in the visitors room? All she could do in there was have a conversation with him, and she’d just as soon talk to herself.

“I’ll be back next week,” she told him in the visitors room, a day after their visit to the Airstream trailer. “That’s if you want me to.”

Oh, he wanted her to.

“Then I’ll come,” she said. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can bring you?”

“If it’s not too much trouble—”

“Just tell me.”

Cigarettes, he said. If she could manage a carton of cigarettes, that would be great. What brand? Well, Marlboro would be ideal.

“I’ll bring you a carton tomorrow or the next day,” she said.

“Just as soon as I can.”

Two days later she presented the requested carton of Marlboros to an attendant, and he gave her a receipt for it; it would be delivered as soon as possible to one Peter Fuhrmann. She went back to her motel and wished she could pack up and leave. Did she really have to turn up the next morning? Couldn’t she wait for her gift to work its magic?

She watched TV until she was able to sleep, then slept until she woke up. She turned up during visiting hours and was just slightly disappointed when they ushered her into the room with Fuhrmann on the other side of the window.

“I got the cigarettes,” was the first thing he said to her. “That was really nice of you. Thanks.”

“I guess you’ve been smoking like crazy ever since.”

“Oh, I don’t smoke.”

Her reaction was enough to put a smile on his face. And he went on to explain that cigarettes were the preferred currency inside prison walls, that they were better than money when it came to obtaining favors. “They’re too valuable to smoke,” he said, “and I think if I ever had the habit I’d have to quit while I was here. It’d be like lighting up dollar bills and smoking them.”

“So these packs of Marlboros just pass from hand to hand like money? Doesn’t anybody ever smoke them?”

“Oh, the smokers smoke them,” he said. “They’re addicted, so what choice do they have? But I was never a smoker.”

“And you’ve got an MBA,” she said, “so you know how to game the system.”

Which was more than she could say for herself.

Back to the motel. She packed, and found room in her suitcase for the hypodermic needle and the little vial of colorless liquid. There was still some left. She’d only used a few drops on the Marlboros.

She hadn’t even opened the carton, let alone any of the packs. There’d been no need. The hard part had been getting what she needed from a pharmacist, and she’d worked up an elaborate story which in the end she’d never needed to deliver. Because the guy behind the counter in Glens Falls practically drooled at the sight of her, so the easiest thing was to come back right around closing time and let him coax her into the back room.

He had a couch there, and she rather doubted she was the first woman he’d shared it with. But she knew she’d be the last. He went down on her first, which was promising, but before she could get anything out of it he sprang up and mounted her, and after a few thrusts he was done. That made him the fourth name on her list, but he didn’t stay on it for long; there was a large all-purpose utility knife at hand, and she came up with a use the manufacturer never thought of. He was dead before he could catch his breath.

She scooped up close to three hundred dollars from the cash register, plus a pair of fifties and three hundreds in the lower compartment. That was a decent score in the age of credit cards, and she upped it with another two hundred-plus from his wallet. All very welcome, because she could certainly use the money. Cash didn’t seem to last long. She was always on the verge of running out of it.

But there was a reason she’d picked Washburn Pharmacy instead of Dell Hardware or Pick’n’Pay Market, and she found what she was looking for in a locked cupboard alongside the couch where Gerald Washburn, RPh, had had the last orgasm of his young life. The lock looked formidable enough, but inches from it a key hung from a nail, and voila!

She took everything that looked interesting, including a syringe. What she didn’t take she scattered, leaving the place as she imagined an impatient junkie might leave it.

On the way out, she helped herself to a carton of Marlboros. Like, why not?

In the end, she decided to keep only a bare minimum of the pharmaceuticals she’d taken. She’d had the impulse to hang on to everything, because you never knew what might come in handy. But you also never knew who would go through your possessions and wonder how you’d happened to turn into a walking drugstore, and a trace of these controlled substances would lead straight to Washburn Pharmacy, and wasn’t that where they found poor Washburn with a big old knife in his chest? Say, do you suppose there could be a connection?

She’d filled the syringe, worked the needle between the edges at the end of the carton, then forced it into a pack and, assuming she’d done it correctly, expelled a few drops of its contents into a cigarette. She repeated the process a couple of times, then did the same at the carton’s other end.

It was hit or miss, she knew. There were two packs at each end of the carton, six more in the middle. If he started with an end pack, she might get results in a hurry, but if he started in the middle, well, how long could it take? If the man smoked a pack a day, within a week at the outside he’d be into one of the end packs, and sooner or later she’d get lucky even as his luck ran out.

Yeah, right. Who’d have guessed the bastard didn’t smoke at all?

Her next visit came a full week later, and the greatest moment of anxiety was at the security check. She hadn’t brought cigarettes this time, and had nothing on her person that might draw the interest of the scanner or the matron, but suppose one of her doctored Marlboros had worked its magic? Suppose an inmate had taken a deep and final drag, and someone had figured it all out?

Maybe they were looking for her, waiting for her. The possibility had dissuaded her from bringing him a second carton of cigarettes, and had nearly kept her from showing up at all. But no one looked at her twice, and if the matron’s hands were almost invasive enough to earn the woman a place on her list, well, the intrusion was over quickly, and before she knew it she was in the Airstream trailer with Peter Fuhrmann.

“You’re here,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show.”

“I said I would.”

“You might have had second thoughts. I mean, what are we to each other, Audrey? A few years ago we spent less than ten hours together, and you were unconscious for most of them.”

“The part I was awake for wasn’t so bad.”

“I drugged you, and you could have died from it.”

“But I seem to have survived, haven’t I?”

“And thank God for that, but the point is you could have died. Another girl did.”

“That’s why she’s not here, Peter.” She cocked her head. “But I am. And they won’t let us have the trailer