barroom brawl, no time served.
In the photos, Lauch looked mean enough for anything. Wouldn’t it be something if the bastard had come to L.A., cruising for good-looking blondes, somehow connected with Lisa?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if Lauch stuck around so they could pick him up? A nice easy solve so Stu could get his promotion and she could add brownie points to her file.
Fantasies, kid.
She studied Lauch’s face some more and wondered how someone like him could get Lisa to put on a little black dress and diamonds.
On the other hand, he had gotten close to Ilse Eggermann, who, by Phil Sorensen’s account, was also a looker. But a stewardess wasn’t the ex-wife of a TV star who’d experienced the good life.
Then again, Lisa had opted out of the good life. And some women, even beautiful women, liked to bottom- fish, turned on by whatever was crude and brutish, a man below them on the social ladder.
Beauty and the beastly? Lisa taking risks with rough trade and paying for it?
Petra kept staring at Lauch’s photo. The thought of allowing his flesh to come into contact with hers turned her stomach.
She liked her men intelligent, considerate, conventionally handsome.
Probably because her father was an intelligent, nice-looking, gentle man. For the most part, a gentleman.
What was Ilse Eggermann’s father like?
What was Dr. John Everett Boehlinger like when he wasn’t crazed with grief?
Enough with the psychoanalysis. She’d taken it as far as she could for the moment.
She inserted the Eggermann-Lauch data in Lisa’s murder book, crossed the room to the Nehi-orange lockers, opened hers, and took a Snickers bar from the bag she kept on the top shelf, above her gym shoes and sweats and the cheap black sweaters she kept handy for cold nights and messy corpses.
Death mops, she called them.
Acrylic that looked like acrylic. Attention, Kmart shoppers, our full-style cardigans now on sale for $13.95 in a wide range of colors. She bought five at a time, always black, threw them out the moment they got gory.
In eight months, she’d been through ten.
She hadn’t worn one to Lisa’s crime scene because the call had been an off-schedule surprise.
She hadn’t been stained by Lisa’s corpse.
Hadn’t gotten close enough.
CHAPTER
21
“Move, move, move-keep moving, you little bastard.”
Hiss-whispering in my ear, they squeeze me, poke me, push me.
She’s the angry one; he sounds afraid, nervous. He even trips a couple of times.
“Come on!” She sticks the gun in my ribs, and when I cry out she sticks me harder and says, “Shut up!” Not nervous at all.
She’s in charge.
As we get closer to where all the buggies are parked, I start to pray for some zoo person to be there this time, but there’s no one. Should I scream? No, the gun is up against me; it wouldn’t take much for her to pull the trigger and blow up my insides-now we’re at the fence. The lock is on-and it’s clamped!
“Do it,” she orders as she looks in all directions. She keeps the gun on me, and he takes a key out of his pocket and opens the lock.
They know this place.
They’re prepared. They will rape me.
He comes back, grabs me, breathes into my ear, and suddenly my stomach starts turning over and over, hard, fast, painful, like I have to go to the bathroom.
They push me forward again. It’s like I’m drifting along in some movie, playing a part, and now I realize the fear is gone and something else has taken over my mind-it’s like being asleep and awake at the same time, like being in a dream but knowing you’re in one, and you can control everything if you just concentrate, make it come out the way you want.
Maybe that’s what it’s like after you die.
We go through the gate and start climbing up, into the trees. He’s making these low wet grunting noises.
“You,” he says, squeezing my arm harder. Like I’ve done something wrong.
I keep my head down, seeing my shoes, his.
“Okay, come on, come on,” she says, waving her hand as we walk into the fern tangle, through the same path I took down, what I used to think was my secret.
They keep pushing me, telling me to move faster, lead me toward a big tree, not my eucalyptus, another one, also with low branches.
We go past it. Walk a ways till we’re in front of another tree and it’s so quiet, no one’s around, even if I scream no one will hear me.
She stands to one side, still aiming the gun, looks at her camera case. Holding on to my arm, he takes out her camera and gives it to her.
“Okay,” she tells me.
I don’t know what she wants, so I don’t speak or move.
She walks up and slaps me hard across the face and my head spins around, but it still doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
“Do it, you little shit!”
“What?” I say, but it sounds like another kid’s voice. Like I’m out of my body, watching myself move around in some robot movie.
She raises her hand to hit me again, and I try to protect my face with my arm. He knees me in the back and that hurts.
“Off with the pants, Streetsmarts-let him pull ’em down, honey.”
He lets go of me as she keeps the gun on me. I touch my pants but don’t pull them down. He pulls his down, lets them fall around his legs. He’s wearing baggy white boxers and now he reaches into the fly hole-I turn away.
“What?” She laughs. “Something you haven’t seen before? Yank ’em down, show us your good side.”
I don’t move. She slaps me again. If she didn’t have the gun, I’d stomp her face, twist her head off.
She laughs again. “Obey and it’ll all be over before you can say ouch. A little owie, that’s all.”
She makes kissy noises, and he does too.
“Sure,” that other kid’s voice says. “Sure, I know what you mean. Only…”
“Only what?” She moves closer, puts the gun up against my nose. It feels cold and it smells like a gas station.
The corner of my eye sees that his boxers are all the way down, but still around his ankles, like he doesn’t want to really take everything off. He’s moving his arm back and forth “Only,” the kid says. “I… it… like I–I can do it. Sure, okay, but you-it-like now-first I’ve got to…”
“Got to what?” The gun waves in front of my eyes.
“You know.”
“I don’t know! What? ”
“Got to… shit.”
Silence.
“Hear that?” she says to him.
