The last time she’d done this she’d given her partner a couple of the blue pills first, and let them knock him out before she trussed him up. That had worked fine, but she’d been stuck with a two-hour wait for the son of a bitch to wake up, and who needed that?
This was much simpler. And he cooperated, putting his hands where she told him, spread-eagling himself on the bed. And making little jokes while she did what she had to do.
By the time she was done, he was already semi-erect. She wrapped the base with an elastic band. “Sort of a roach motel,” she said. “The blood gets in and it can’t get out, so you stay firm.”
“Is it safe?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It’s an old Indian trick. And now you can do something for me, and after that everything will be entirely one hundred percent for you.” And she sat on his face and he did what he was supposed to do, and he was pretty good at it, too. He didn’t have to be, she was so excited right now that great technique on his part was by no means required, but this made it even better.
“Now that was just wonderful,” she said. She went to her bag, got out the duct tape, and cut off an eight- inch length. “And I wanted to do that first,” she went on, “because that’s our last chance for that particular activity.”
And she slapped the tape over his mouth.
Oh, the look in his eyes! Worth the price of admission right there. He wasn’t quite sure whether this was going to make it even more exciting for him, or whether it was maybe something he ought to worry about.
But why worry? What good would that do? What good would anything do?
“See, isn’t this neat? You’re harder than ever. And you’re going to stay that way.”
She mounted him, sat facing his feet in the reliable Reverse Cowgirl, felt him swelling impossibly larger inside her. “Mmmm, nice,” she said. “Oh, yes. Very nice.”
She rode him for a long time. Her climaxes came one after the other, and all they did was pitch her excitement higher. After a few of them she changed position so that she could watch his face while she rode him, and that was a treat, because the wide-eyed desperation was something to see. At last she fell forward, her breasts crushed against his chest. A smooth chest would have been nice, but a hairy chest was nice, too. Everything was nice when you could do whatever you wanted, and when you knew just how it was going to end.
She got up because she wanted to be able to see his eyes now. “I told you some lies,” she said. “My name’s not Lucky. Or Lucretia, or any of that. My last name’s not Eagle, or Eagle Feather, and don’t ask me how I came up with all of that on the spur of the moment. As far as I know, I haven’t got a drop of Indian blood in me. A third Indian! How could anybody be a third anything? I mean, you’ve got two parents, four grandparents, eight great- grandparents — I mean, do the math. You’re the one who knows all the odds on the crap table, so you would have to know that you can only be half or a fourth or an eighth or three-sixteenths or whatever you are of anything.”
She wagged a finger at him. “You weren’t paying attention, Hank. Little Henry there was doing your thinking for you. And that’s another lie I told you, incidentally. That it’s safe to wrap you up like that. If you don’t loosen it in time, you can do permanent damage.”
She left the bed, reached into her purse, found the knife. She let him see the blade. She let the tip of the blade graze his cheek as she mounted him one more time.
“God, it’s bigger than ever,” she told him. “You’re in pain now, aren’t you? Oh, dear, I’m afraid that’s going to get worse. Well, more intense, anyway.
She left with close to five thousand dollars in cash and chips, and stopped downstairs at the cashier’s cage to turn the chips into currency. Then she got in her car and started driving.
She’d left his one-dollar chips in the room. She’d left his credit cards, too, and a gold signet ring that had to be worth a few hundred dollars. She took the slide from his string tie, just because she liked it, and she took her cuffs and cords and scarves, because it would be a nuisance to replace them. But she left the elastic band in place.
And she took the scalp, tucked away in a plastic bag. It was just such good theater to scalp him, what with having been drawn to his hair in the first place, and then the whole Indian motif of their encounter. Before she was halfway done with the process she regretted having begun it in the first place, because even minor scalp cuts bleed like crazy, and when you scalp a person altogether — well, the Indians probably waited to scalp people until they were safely dead, and disinclined to bleed, but she went ahead and finished what she’d started, and it was almost worth it when she shook the scalp in front of him and let him gape at it.
She’d cleaned up her fingerprints, but she knew she’d left plenty of DNA evidence, and people at the casino could furnish a description of her. But she’d been working variations on this theme for a good long while now, and she always got away with it, and she figured all she could do was play out the string. And she’d ditch his scalp where it wouldn’t be found, and the scalping would guarantee a lot of press, and a manhunt for some unforgiving Indian seeking vengeance for Wounded Knee.
Yes, she’d just go ahead and play out the string. Because it kept getting better, didn’t it?
FIVE
Toledo. What did she know about Toledo?
Like, Holy Toledo. The original city, in Spain, was famous for fine swords, and the newspaper here in Ohio called itself
And here she was in Toledo.
There was a Starbucks just across the street from the building where he had his office, and she settled in at a window table a little before five. She thought she might be in for a long wait. In New York, young associates at law firms typically worked until midnight and took lunch and dinner at their desks. Was it the same in Toledo?
Well, the cappuccino was the same. She sipped hers, making it last, and was about to go to the counter for another when she saw him.
But was it him? He was tall and slender, wearing a dark suit and a tie, clutching a briefcase, walking with purpose. His hair when she’d known him was long and shaggy, a match for the jeans and T-shirt that was his usual costume, and now it was cut to match the suit and the briefcase. And he wore glasses now, and they gave him a serious, studious look. He hadn’t worn them then, and he’d certainly never looked studious.
But it was Douglas. No question, it was him.
She rose from her chair, hit the door, quickened her pace to catch up with him at the corner. She said, “Doug? Douglas Pratter?”
He turned, and she caught the puzzlement in his eyes. She helped him out. “It’s Kit,” she said. “Katherine Tolliver.” She smiled softly. “A voice from the past. Well, a whole person from the past, actually.”
“My God,” he said. “It’s really you.”
“I was having a cup of coffee,” she said, “and looking out the window and wishing I knew somebody in this town, and when I saw you I thought you were a mirage. Or that you were just somebody who looked the way Doug Pratter might look eight years later.”
“Is that how long it’s been?”
“Just about. I was fifteen and I’m twenty-three now. You were two years older.”
“Still am. That much hasn’t changed.”
“And your family picked up and moved right in the middle of your junior year of high school.”
“My dad got a job he couldn’t say no to. He was going to send for us at the end of the term, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. We’d all be too lonely is what she said. It took me years before I realized she just didn’t trust him on his own.”
“Was he not to be trusted?”
