balls, but he merely blinked faster for a moment, feeling no pain any longer. Feeling not much of anything, for that matter.
Karen moved in closer to see whether George was still conscious, since his loud breathing was becoming noticeably slower. 'Can you hear me, George? After the house burned down, Gayle had her suspicions — I must admit I still thought you were innocent, gullible me — so we hired a private eye.'
Gayle chimed in: 'From money you'd paid me to fuck you.'
Karen ignored the interruption. 'He found out you hadn't gone out of town the night the house burned down. You weren't on any book-signing tour, George. You were at the same hotel you used to meet Gayle at, until you heard the TV newscast about the fire.' She shuddered. 'Gayle's right, you are a sick fuck, George. And we're not going to let you try to ruin our lives anymore — or anyone else's, with those sick books of yours.'
She bent lower still and whispered in his ear. 'No one saw us come in, George. We made certain of that. After you die, we'll wipe off all our fingerprints. Your death is going to make all the papers, George.' She laughed. 'Finally, George makes the headlines and he won't be around to read them!'
On impulse, she rose, reached for a newspaper, crumpled the front page, and stuffed it in his mouth. 'Read that, George.' She got up, looked around. 'We'd better clean up and get out of here.'
Gayle shook her head. 'That wouldn't be polite. Eating and running, that is. Speaking of eating. ' She glanced over at the oven, opened the door, and sniffed inside. 'Mmm. Your husband is — was — quite a good cook.' She looked at the food, then at Karen. 'Shall we?'
Karen hesitated. George was definitely having trouble breathing now, between the poison and the newspaper stuffed down his throat. She shuddered and turned away. Gayle came to her side. 'Don't pity him. He deserves all this and more. Just think of how many times he tried to kill us.'
Karen shook a bit in her lover's arms. 'You're right,' she said, her voice low. She turned away from George and toward the kitchen. 'Oh hell, why not? I always loved George's blackened redfish.'
George's vision focused one last time as he watched them take their first bites of fish. He smiled as best he could, shuddered, and expired.
'Did you see that?' Gayle asked as she stuffed more of the fish into her mouth. 'It almost looked like he smiled for a second there.' She shrugged. 'This is delicious.'
'Mmm,' Karen agreed. 'Pass the water, will you? This is very good, but it's even spicier than usual.'
LULLABY & GOODNIGHT
Wayne Allen Sallee
Chicago is a political town, and that was why Patrolman Nicholas Raymond Rexer was confined to the T. D. Slatton Psychiatric Unit, pending the review of his actions by Internal Affairs and other lawsuits against him, the force, and the city. A political town where a man can be wrongly convicted and the DA's office in Cook County gets by with the adage 'He might not've been guilty, but he probably done some thing just as bad.'
And so it was that the events of April fell into August like lace over a corpse, and Nick Rexer sat in what could have passed for an efficiency apartment down in the South Loop, clutching exercise balls in his right hand, keeping his trigger-grip in good condition (because he knew he'd be back on the force; this was Chicago, after all). He was confined to the seventh- floor wing of the CPD's unofficial Disneyland North on West Belle Plaine Avenue.
The expatriate patrolman spent his days watching out the window for rodents to be run down by rush-hour motorists on Damen Avenue, exercising his trigger-grip, and reliving his vision of what had occurred down that alleyway off that near north side street four months previous.
He remembered it all so clearly, even to the very end:
A dull, beet-colored light in the alley behind Mo hawk Street washed over the two cops' faces like blood clots bathing the brain. An April wind came off the lake, but all they smelled was oil and garbage. Stelfreeze and Rexer had been standing there five minutes, watching one of their own go through the back door of a house of prostitution. They had gone to make sure that Bill Valent wasn't accepting payoffs.
It was much worse than that.
They moved forward towards the second-floor landing. Both were out of uniform. The harsh glow from behind slatted blinds was brighter than a softer light from a third-story window. A blue light wavered, and Rexer realized it was most likely a television.
With the muted sounds of evening around them, Stelfreeze said to the darkness, 'Well, here we are.' The way he announced it, Rexer thought of a car pulled over into a lovers' lane, and that the two were on a first date, the lights of the city laid out below them. This is how it is with cops partnered for fifteen years.
Stelfreeze stared at the darkness that loomed above them, his lips bloodless, cleft chin thrust out in acceptance of what they were about to do. He knew stories about this place, tales he had not shared with Rexer until later. Only because he had never expected to be looking for, or
His partner was absently running his long fingers through his Grouchoesque mustache as he also looked at the sky. Only, Stelfreeze was not staring at the April darkness, bruised black and purple, the light from the nearest stars barely making it through the pollution. The abyss Stelfreeze was aware of was a call girl with a unique angle, a whore who used the name Lullaby & Goodnight. The usage of dual names being the darkest sky of all.
She was a woman with a young girl's mind, who never spoke yet mewled at all the proper moments. Her real name was Celandine Tomei, and her mama charged upwards of fifteen yards for the ultimate in one-night stands. The highest-salaried men allegedly descended on this dilapidated two-flat on North Mo hawk, the turks of the town come to kill or mutilate the prostitute as she orgasmed in her abnormal and childlike way.
And then to return the following month to repeat the act. Mama Tomei took Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Diner's Club for the act itself. Other than living expenses, the funds received went towards plastic surgery and bone reconstruction. There were certainly no advertising costs, hence Rexer's ignorance of what the two cops would encounter here.
Stelfreeze knew too many people in the television industry, thanks to his sister marrying a sportscaster for the station that considered its biggest competitor to be MTV, not CNN. And sometimes Stelfreeze heard stories they kept off the air and held close to their disgusting hearts.
Stories about the ultimate one-night stand.
He thought long and hard on that; much of it coming out somewhat abstractly in his later Internal Affairs deposition. He realized that suicide came in a weak second to what was allegedly experienced here.
The porch was enclosed on two sides; Stelfreeze saw a swing near the north end of the landing, a strip of curled flypaper matted to the wire mesh behind it. Magazines were strewn across the well-swept flooring, the wooden boards the typical Polish gray on gray with whitened sawdust in the cracks. He wondered if they were skin magazines or, from what he had heard of the expected clientele, recent copies of
And if their cop friend was really here accepting payoffs, Stelfreeze envisioned Valent walking up these steps with his pockets stuffed with racing forms. In for a penny and all.
Rexer's thoughts were more metaphorical as they walked up to the wooden frame door. Yellowed Venetian blinds were askew behind the dirty glass, yet he thought that they should be encountering some kind of a steel door, the kind that might be found at the Haddon Cobras' crack house on Leavitt.
But there was no eye-slit drawn back, no click of a revolver behind the walls, as the door opened ever so slowly. The woman who stood in the doorway was so frail that she made any skell under a heat vent on Lower Wacker (Drive look like a television wrestler. She was framed in the kitchen light, not caring that her sagging breasts were outlined beneath her flowered beige nightdress.
Both cops were reminded uncomfortably of their respective mothers.
The light on the ceiling was one of those overhead jobs that consisted of two concentric rings of harsh milky white glow. The north side's version of the tesla coil, Stelfreeze always thought. Which was often, as there were three such lights in his flat on Aberdeen. The woman, Mama Tomei, was five feet two. Add another inch if the wind caught her off balance. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing 'she loves me,
