that way. Sometimes you had to hit them over the head just to get their attention.
Ahead of them, Picacho Peak loomed in the distance, its rugged gray silhouette shimmering in the heat waves that rose off the freeway’s pavement. Carlisle knew the mountain’s name as well as he knew his own, but he didn’t let on. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.
“The mountain?” the woman asked, looking at him dubiously. “I thought you said you’re from Prescott. How come you don’t know Picacho Peak?”
“My dad’s in Prescott,” he said. “In the VA hospital up there. I’m from El Paso. I’ve never been here before. What did you call it, Picacho Peak? It looks steep. Do people climb it?”
“All the time. I grew up around here. The mountain’s one of my favorite places. Actually, there’s a rest area partway up. We could make a pit stop there if you can spare the time.”
“Sure,” he said agreeably. “I’d like that.”
The parking lot at the rest area was totally deserted. A searing, hot wind blew down off the mountain and into their faces when they got out of the car. While the woman went to use the rest room, Andrew retrieved two more beers from the cooler and then sauntered over to a shaded picnic table. Across the desert came the whine of tires as vehicles sped along the Interstate several hundred yards away, but none of them slowed or stopped. Closer at hand there was no sign of life.
He took a leisurely sip from his second beer in six years. The alcohol was making him a little giddy, giving him a slight but pleasant buzz. He sat with his back against the warm concrete picnic tabletop and thought about taking her right there in the heat, in broad daylight, as it were. That excited him almost beyond bearing, but there was no sense in being stupid. Carlisle looked around. At one end of the rest area, he saw a small playground. Beyond it, a trail wound off up the mountain.
When the woman emerged from the rest room, Carlisle was gratified to see that she had applied a fresh coat of vivid red lipstick. He looked forward to the taste of it, anticipating how it would feel to crush those full lips against his own. He wondered if cosmetic companies had ever considered naming their lipsticks with his kind of flavors-“Yielding Woman” would be a good one or maybe “Blood Red.” Maybe he could get a job writing advertising copy.
As she came walking toward him, he again noticed the deep tan on her legs and the easy, sensuous sway of her generous hips. Not unaware of her effect on him, she seemed, in fact, to enjoy it.
He handed her a beer, which he’d already opened. “Ever make any money on the side?” he asked.
She smiled coquettishly over the top of the can, but she made no movement away from him. He caught a whiff of freshened perfume with its hint of tacit agreement. “That depends on what you have in mind,” she said. “Your place or mine?”
He almost choked. She was brazen as hell. Is that what had happened to women in the six-and-a-half years since 1968 when they’d locked him up? Was that what “Women’s Lib” was all about? A little reluctance might have been nice. Carlisle liked reluctance in his women. Sex was always far more interesting when the woman had to give more than she intended. This broad, for instance, thought she was in complete control. He’d be only too happy to show her otherwise.
“Right here,” he said, motioning toward the picnic table behind them.
She looked at him incredulously. “Right here? In the rest area? In this heat? What if somebody comes?”
Somebody’ll come, he thought. “A quickie,” he said, ashamed that it sounded so much like begging.
She laughed then. Something about him struck her as funny. The muscles along his jawline tightened with sudden anger.
“Sixty-five,” she said easily. “It’d be more if we had to rent a room. Let me see the money first.”
Sixty-five? he thought. What kind of price was that for a piece of ass? But he counted out the bills slowly and deliberately, giving himself time to savor the sensation. He studied the fine lines of her upturned palm as he placed the money in her hand. Would a fortune-teller have been able to read the lifeline etched there and tell what was about to happen?
She took the money from him, folded it in quarters, and stuffed the wad of bills into the tight hip pocket of her shorts. “You mean right here on the table?” she asked.
“How about down the path,” he suggested lamely, as though stricken with a sudden case of shyness. “Maybe far enough to be out of sight of the parking lot.”
She laughed again. “So you are bashful after all,” she teased.
“A little,” he admitted.
Maybe he would have let her go if she hadn’t laughed at him so much, but he doubted it. He knew himself better than that. The die had been cast the moment she slowed down to pick him up.
She set off at a brisk pace, leading him toward the path. Fierce heat leaped off the rocks and burned their faces.
“It may be too hot,” he said, dropping back as though he had changed his mind.
“There’s a spring,” she said. “Water and some shade. I’ve been here lots of times. It’s not far.”
She was right, it wasn’t far, but it was all uphill. About a quarter of a mile up the steep track, she swung off the main trail and followed another, fainter one off to the side. Andrew Carlisle struggled to keep up. By the time they neared the thick grove of mesquite trees, he was completely out of breath. His hard-on had melted into nothing.
He followed her as she disappeared into dappled shade. The ground beneath them seemed almost pleasantly cool compared to the overheated air and shale outside. A tiny spring sent a trickle of water down a short streambed into a rocky basin. Near the basin, someone had cleared a flat spot in the cool, shaded dirt.
Without a word, the woman kicked off her sandals and stripped out of her clothes. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts sagged a bit, but her figure wasn’t that bad. There were no lines or light spots in the golden tan that covered her body. She looked good for her age, and she knew it.
“Me on top or you?” she asked perfunctorily.
“Me,” Andrew Carlisle said.
“It figures,” she returned.
He undressed quickly, and she pulled him down on her, kissing him eagerly, letting her tongue explore his, expert fingers stroking his hard-on back to life. She was a pro who knew all the right buttons to push. They worked-all too well.
He had wanted to take his time, to savor every sensation, but his body worked against him. With a groan, it was over almost before it had begun, and she was laughing again, lying beneath him, giggling into the hot flesh of his shoulder.
“When you said quickie, you weren’t kidding.”
He had planned to do it anyway, but he hadn’t expected the blind rage that overcame him at the sound of that laughter. It may have been funny to her, but not to him.
Steadying himself on one elbow, he shoved his thumb into the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. Her eyes went wild, first with alarm and then with abject terror when she realized the extent of her danger. She tried to cry out, but the terrible grinding pressure that starved her of oxygen also cut off her ability to scream.
Her body arched beneath him as she fought desperately to escape. She rolled from side to side and tried futilely to scoot out from under him, but he held her fast. Her sharpened, talon-like fingernails raked down his shoulders and back, but the pain that shot through him acted as a spur, exciting him, goading him. With a sense of satisfaction, he felt himself stiffen once more.
Carlisle had learned the finer points of strangling from some of the boys on Death Row at Florence. You’d think from reading newspapers that those guys never mingle with the general prison population, but Carlisle had made it his business to make contact and take lessons.
The experts all said that once you start, you can’t let up or back off, and he didn’t. He rode her like a rodeo bronco while she writhed and bucked beneath him, carrying them both away from the dirt clearing, scraping his knees and tearing the flesh from her naked back and buttocks as she dragged them both onto jagged, unshaded, blistering shale. He rode her and came again, semen dribbling into her pubic hair, just as the woman’s eyes rolled back into her head.
He knew better than to let go too soon. He held on, lying on top of her supine body with the rocks scorching his knees and shins, until he knew for sure she would never move again.
Only then, spent and gasping for breath, did he raise up on one elbow to examine his handiwork. Her perfect
