life together, plain and simple, somewhere else.”
“They hunt us down.” She said it as if she could see it. “They scapegoat us for tonight’s outrages. They toy with us on the tube. They tear us apart, they torture us. They put us on Notorious next year, an extra special three-hour version, a slow hellacious juicing.”
She made him see it.
The pauses between sentences, the stare full of import and meaning, made him see it.
Winnie’s arms came about him, her lips near his friendship lobe. “Bray, my strange lovely man, one way or another, they’ll fry us. Finding the killer is our only choice.”
Bray could hear Jonquil’s words at the mike. Tough talk, thrusting iron rods up into youthful backbones. Without looking at her, he knew she was brooding on them. Her accusation might come at any moment.
Winnie felt warm and solid in his arms.
“Do you understand?” she murmured.
He kissed her neck, her cheek, her lips. Her nape felt so perfect against his palm.
“Let’s go,” he said, determined. “Let’s find him.”
Winnie took his hand. They sauntered toward the door the two women had rushed out of.
Bray thought they’d be halted at any moment. “Wait a minute,” her stern sexy voice would rise, “where do you think you’re sneaking off to?”
But through his envelope of fear, past the refreshments and out the door to the hallway, Bray and Winnie walked hand in hand, toward a meeting Bray wasn’t looking forward to at all.
On the way to his office, Futzy wracked his brain for a suspect, sharing those that came to mind with meek mousy Miss Phipps.
Maybe Zane Fronemeyer had gone insane. But anyone acquainted with Zane would scoff at the very idea.
Might it be the mean-eyed, blubber-chinned cashier in the cafeteria, Skaya something, whose face looked as though she’d been pickled in bile from the moment she was born?
Or one of the newer faculty members, the untried, untested, unknown, indeed unknowable ones fresh out of college?
“Gerber Waddell,” Miss Phipps suggested.
Futzy stopped on the stairs.
The building smelled musty, layered with dust.
“Gerber,” he repeated, mulling it.
They continued upstairs. Futzy was deep in thought. He hadn’t seen the janitor since the lights dimmed and rainbowed. Had Gerber, in his years of subservience, finally somehow triumphed over the intent of his lobotomy?
Each year, Gerber changed the designated slasher’s combination to the backways. He wrote it on the map contained in the slasher’s packet. Did anyone else know it? No one at all. Gerber always surreptitiously slipped it in, last thing before delivery. Futzy himself made a special point to avert his eyes when he gaped the mouth of the envelope to receive it.
Futzy opened his office door for Miss Phipps. As she walked past him, he caught a hint of her perfume. Lilac? Some old lady scent. Her dress was dark velvet, swaying at the ankles. Old lady dress. A crime. Behind her gold-rimmed glasses, her young face made a thin oval.
“Find the snubnose,” he said. “Top drawer, I think. I’ll check the phone. Be careful with the gun. It’s loaded.”
“All right.”
He moved to the desk and lifted the receiver.
No dial tone.
The lines had likely been cut somewhere deep in the building. But it felt as if his lair had been violated.
Gerber, the shy feeb.
It had to be him. Somehow, Futzy would find him, put a bullet in what was left of his brain, spare him the torment of being sentient when the graduating class sailed into him.
Miss Phipps rummaged in the desk drawer and lifted something out. She raised it. Against her delicate fingers, Futzy saw the velvet backing. “Is this her?” she asked. “Your daughter?”
“How…” dare you, he was about to say.
She picked up on it, flustered: “I’m sorry, I—”
“No, wait. It’s all right.” Futzy approached Miss Phipps, her look of fright softening at his reassurance. “That’s her. Yes. That’s my little girl. My Kitty.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She is,” he said. “She was.”
Miss Phipps sensed the rawness in his voice. She set the picture facedown in its drawer, which she closed. Her eyes glowed with compassion. Her body moved closer.
“Now wait a minute,” he said.
Something was blossoming in her eyes, behind those prim frames.
“I don’t want to wait any more,” she said.
Futzy took in her ache, her mouse-beauty, the look he had always assumed meant nothing more than bland respect. Now, as she came near, that look softened into something else, something warm and inviting.
“You’re… I’m—”
She surged toward him, a velvet dream, her lobebag angling as her head tilted in. A tight lipline puffed and swelled and touched his mouth, tasty, warm, moistening beneath the flicker of her tonguetip.
Some women came at you, when the moment finally arrived for such a bold move, tentatively, their hips seemingly dead, their torsos not much better. Adora Phipps wasn’t like that.
Her whole body, behind its deceptive folds of old-lady velvet, exuded urgency, pushing against him in a solid wave of give me, give me.
Futzy’s hands glided past her waist to her rump. The fabric slid over naked curves of flesh.
No undergarments.
Adora broke the kiss and hugged him fiercely, grinding herself into him.
“I don’t think we should—”
“Shut up, you!” she said, forcing his lips open with hers, tonguing him as her hands snaked below his belt and found his zipper. The mousy little English teacher, bold as any whore, had backed him up against his desk.
His hands rose and clutched as they bunched up vast accumulations of velvet, shoving them up her body like rolls of hippo fat, gathering more and more of the stuff to make them heavier still.
His organ popped out into Adora’s hand, just that little bit longer and fatter for the Tuffskin he had beefed himself up with.
She eased him back. Futzy felt hem, naked thighs, and perfectly cuppable buttocks, her cleft moist and jesus christ warm and wondrous where his fingers brushed it.
Something, a pen set, jabbed against his coat. Then it gave way, propelled off the front of the desk to smash against the floor.
Adora pillowed Futzy’s head on an unabridged dictionary and climbed aboard him, an animal, this prudish covert brainy genius thrusting her taut love-sleeve down about him, deep to the balls, riding him, her hips in sexy sway, her face hypnotic, her eyelids shut, a sheen of lovesweat even now beginning to glow upon her brow.
Futzy swam in revelation.
Opaque encounters now came clear, the many odd looks she had given him: her love for him, and, far stranger, his love for her.
He wanted her, he needed her, he adored her.
In a matchless conjoining of flesh, Adora rode him, her balance precarious but for Futzy’s hold upon her waist. He worried about her knees, a hard polished glass surface to either side of the blotter. But Adora, consumed in ecstasy, paid them no mind. She muffle-moaned into his mouth, getting off, her hip thrusts and her fierce climax bringing him off as well.
