apartment.
Lars smiled, remembering Tina’s trusting, round face and zaftig body, even fleshier than he’d imagined when she’d stripped off her bra and panty hose. Tina liked to play rough. Or at least she thought she did. Lars had shown her what rough was, once she was tied and gagged and his for the rest of the night.
His smile had become such a wide grin that a passing couple of guys, faggots, stared at him as he strode along the sidewalk. He was recalling Tina’s futile struggles and muted cries for help, the terror and pain in her eyes, and then the resignation. After all, she’d gotten herself into this, said her eyes, after Lars had patiently explained it to her over and over. It wasn’t difficult to get her to believe it; she came with guilt built in, part of the package.
She’d welcomed his advances in the club and even told him she enjoyed bondage and discipline, rough sex with a little pain. Verbal commands and the whip were okay, if used sparingly. B amp;D and S amp;M. She hadn’t mentioned which she enjoyed more. Her oversight.
In the morning he untied Tina and asked if she wanted to go out for breakfast, but she awkwardly crept from the bed with sore and stiffened limbs and cowered in a corner, staring at him in mute disbelief.
Lars laughed, and as he got dressed, he told her what a stupid bitch she was. He didn’t glance back at her when he left the apartment. He wouldn’t be surprised to see her again; she might even come looking for him. They were like that, some of them, once you took them to a higher level. They needed to go higher and higher, and Lars was willing to fly them all the way to heaven so they could escape their hell. They’d beg him to, after a while. They’d plead and pledge their souls. What they wanted, they loathed, but their problem was they loved it even more. It was like a drug addiction.
Speaking of which…Lars was going to go out of his gourd if he didn’t score some dope pretty soon.
He tried to think of something else as he roamed the gray morning streets, watching for possibilities.
The something else was Claire Briggs.
She was the type Lars liked, slender and helpless, fems all the way, natural submissives once they were shown the path, once they were kicked in the ass and shoved along the path. And she lived alone, some kind of actress, probably with a rich family that might come across once he taught her how to mooch.
Claire Briggs. Definitely worthwhile.
Lars spotted a guy he recognized standing outside the entrance to a diner, a gigantic black dude with dreadlocks, looked like a former NFL linebacker who’d taken up reggae. While bigger than Lars, he wasn’t as solid. The soft life was making him vulnerable. He was talking to a woman with straight blond hair that hung almost to her ass. The guy’s name was Handy and he dealt.
The woman said something about pancakes, then sashayed her ass inside the diner, making the long hair swish. Handy stayed outside, leaning back against the brick wall and smoking a cigarette like it was an art.
“Handy,” Lars said when he was about twenty feet away; he didn’t want the dealer to miss seeing him and go inside after the woman. “Remember me, my man?”
Handy flicked away his cigarette and gave Lars a wide, gleaming smile. “I remember your money.”
“I wanna reintroduce you,” Lars said, forgetting all about Claire Briggs.
For the moment.
20
Hiram, Missouri, 1989.
“He’s sixteen,” Milford Sand said, “of an age when he can damn well work and pull his own weight around here. Hell, I was-”
“I know,” his wife Cara said, “you were working in the mine when you were fourteen. This boy, Luther, is the only survivor of a house fire that killed his foster family in Missouri; then he somehow survived almost a year of life on the streets in Kansas City.”
“So he’s no innocent,” Milford said.
“So he needs time to heal body and soul, Milford. Please show him some compassion.”
Milford snorted and jammed his arms into his suit coat almost hard enough to split the seams. “He can heal his soul while he’s working with his body.”
Milford Sand was fifty-three, almost twenty years older than his wife, but he looked as if he could be in his late sixties. His narrow back was bent from sitting hunched over at his desk at the Hiram Lead Mine, where he kept the company books, and his face was pale and pinched. His cheap drugstore spectacles, which were too small, gave him a slightly cross-eyed appearance. Milford monitored the household money the way he tracked expenses at the mine, and there was no point in spending for prescription glasses when the ones on the revolving rack at Drexel’s Pharmacy would do just as well.
He studied his thinning brown hair, strained blue eyes, and puckered mouth as he adjusted his tie knot in the dresser mirror. He’d once overheard somebody at the mine say his natural expression was that of a man about to spit. Milford wasn’t insulted; the comment hadn’t been far off the mark. “The agency said this boy-Luther-has had some experience as a housepainter. I’ll talk to Tom Wilde about taking him on as an apprentice.”
“I don’t know-”
“That’s true,” Milford interrupted in a weary, tolerant tone. “You don’t know, and there’s no need for you to worry about that part of it. You just try and make the lad feel at home; I’ll take care of his employment this summer so he can earn his keep.”
“Maybe he should go to summer school. He’s already two grades behind.”
“Maybe he’s simply unable to do the work and needs to learn a trade.”
“Milford-”
“I have to get to the office.” He snatched up his heavy brown leather briefcase from the floor alongside the dresser, an adroit and powerful motion for such a frail-looking man, and headed for the door. Then he paused. “What time’s the agency bringing the boy?”
“One this afternoon. Try and get home if it’s at all possible.”
“I’ll speak to them at the mine.” He forced a lemony smile and hurried from the room.
A few seconds later Cara heard the screen door slam downstairs, the hollow thumping of his footfalls on the wooden porch, then after a minute or so the grinding of his car starting in the garage and the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway. Morning sounds. It was how Cara started each long day, listening to Milford leave for the mine.
The mine. All he thought about was the mine, his job, numbers, and lead. Profit and loss, this column or that. Cara thought the lead in the air was probably poisoning the whole town.
It was certainly poisoning their marriage.
Luther was surprised by the house that Saturday afternoon. He’d expected something smaller. This was a cream-colored frame monster with gray trim, a gallery porch, and a steep, tiled roof with lots of dormers. It looked like the house Luther had seen in Hansel and Gretel drawings-only much, much larger. There were a few other houses something like it on the wide, tree-lined street, but this one was the biggest and in the best condition even though it was old like the rest of them. The yard around it was wide and level, with a low stone wall in front and with lots of trees and shrubs. There was a long gravel drive that ran to a garage in back that looked newer than the house.
It was warm when he and the woman from the state agency got out of the air-conditioned car. There was plenty of shade in the yard, and twenty or thirty industrious sparrows pecking away busily on the green lawn. The sparrows all took flight when Luther slammed the car door. He hefted his lumpy duffel bag and walked around the car toward the wide wooden porch steps.
The porch was shady and had viney potted plants and a glider and rocking chair on it. “Looks like Norman fuckin’ Rockwell lives here,” Luther heard the agency woman mutter under her breath. She was slender, with lustrous blond hair, and was better-looking than most of the state employees. Luther knew she would have been pissed off if she was aware of how he’d been studying her.
Their footsteps made noise on the plank floor, and the front door opened before the agency woman pushed the doorbell button.
