Sex and Murder Magazine

By Richard J. O’Brien

I told the cops it was Dennis Parker’s idea, but they didn’t believe me. Dennis and I were driving from Raritan down to Atlantic City that night. I’d been there just a few weeks before on a work trip, delivering circuit breakers for a union job at the Pier Mall. My company screwed up the order, shipping the wrong breakers the first time around; so, they paid for me stay at one of those shit holes off the beaten track because I had to drop off the new order and pick up the old one.

The job supervisor was pissed off, but he was cool enough. He’d told me I looked like a guy who hadn’t been laid in awhile. The balls on this guy. Anyway, Alberto, that was the supervisor’s name, Alberto Cruz, told me about this little house off the beaten track near my motel. Ordinarily, I didn’t go in for hookers. But this place was a house complete with the cutest, little Vietnamese women. I didn’t doubt they were all illegal aliens, but who was I to judge? Probably brought here under the guise of freedom and then sold into modern slavery. If they were lucky they would eventually pay their way out via the oldest profession in the book. Anyway, I got a little drunk and went to visit the house.

A few weeks later, Dennis and I hung out at Teeters, a bar in Raritan, when I told him all about the Vietnamese house of pleasure. I went into all the regular details and described the girl I got for a nominal price.

“Everything?” asked Dennis.

“Yeah,” I sipped my beer.

“Well, you have to bring me there, Robbie.”

“There places closer to Raritan,” I told him. “Hell, I bet if we tried we could find some right here in town.”

I looked down the bar. There were four young pretty things in softball uniforms talking shit with some dude whose beer belly made his shirt look like an awning built to keep his balls dry. The dude with the big belly was berating the players for having lost a game. They were pretty, maybe a little overweight, but I didn’t like the way they talked. They cursed too much.

“Come on, Robbie,” Dennis was saying. He had his back to the softball girls. “I could use a road trip.”

That was other thing about Dennis. He drank too much. And because he drank too much he had two annoying habits. He fancied himself a real ladies’ man and he shot his mouth off to cops. His drinking never got him laid, but it did force him to give up his license a few years back on account of having too many DUIs under his belt.

“I don’t know, man,” I told him.

“Come on, look at me,” he pleaded. His eyes were glassy. “I need this.”

He did. Dennis lived at his mother’s house, and he worked a low-paying job at a local convenience store. His life was going nowhere. He needed to get away, if only for a weekend.


“Come on, Mr. Sayle,” the fat detective said to me.

“My name’s Robbie,” I told him, and smiled. I must have looked bad. I sure as shit felt bad.

“Ok, Robbie,” the tall, skinny detective leaned in close. His breath smelled like mints and shit. “Take us back to the beginning.”

“You think I did this?”

I held up my bum arm. I was born with it. The doctors called it a birth defect. My left arm and hand were fine. My right, the bum arm, was short and capped with a hand that look more like a fin. When I was coming up in the 1970s other kids made fun of me all the time. Then there was Dennis. He accepted me the way I was. People like Dennis were hard to find.

The tall cop leaned back. His suit fit like a loose sack.

“All-right, Robbie,” the fat one said. “You can walk whenever you want.”

“I am in a hospital,” I reminded him.

And I noticed I was still strapped into my bed with restraints. I had a hard time figuring out if it was a normal hospital or some kind of nut house. I wouldn’t have blamed them for putting me in one. A nut house, I mean. I came to my senses long after I was secured to my bed, ranting and raving about Dennis, or what was left of him, when fatty and the beanstalk showed up. They flashed their badges like cops on television.

“So you are,” the tall guy said. His last name was Greller. That much I remembered.

“Look, Robbie,” said the fat one named Wilson. “My bosses are going to be on us if we don’t come up with something. We’re just a couple of working stiffs like you. You can help us put all the pieces together and keep us out of trouble.”

He had to say pieces. I wanted to vomit.


All that week Dennis kept at me about our road trip. He had to pull some switches at work to get the weekend off. This included greasing the palm of his manager with a hundred bucks. And he had to agree to go out drinking with Abby Thorndale, a tattooed heavyweight who worked with Dennis during the evening shift. Abby was harmless, but the father of her three children wasn’t. I told Dennis to be careful. He told me not to worry.

“How did it go?” I asked Dennis when I picked him up Friday evening.

Our plan was to spend two nights, Friday and Saturday, at the hole in the wall motel where my company had put me up. I had two cases of Budweiser in the trunk and five hundred in cash on me. Dennis brought a fifth of whiskey for the ride down.

“Abby’s a remarkable woman,” he told me as he took a pull from his bottle. He offered it to me.

“No thanks,” I told him. I was driving.

“Seriously,” said Dennis. “She’s got this awesome tattoo of the Marvin the Martian from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.”

“Where?” I didn’t remember ever seeing that tattoo on Abby’s arms.

“Right above her left nipple.”

“Dennis, you didn’t.”

“She had her period,” he confessed. “So not much happened.”

“Not much?” I asked. “So what did?”

Dennis didn’t answer.

We drove through Hillsborough in silence. He didn’t speak again until we reached New Brunswick. Something was eating at Dennis, but he wouldn’t come clean. It wasn’t until we reached the Garden State Parkway that Dennis admitted the source of his anxiety.

“I only have a hundred bucks,” he told me.

“What are you going to do with that?” I said.

“How much did your girl cost?”

“Twice that,” I told him.

That was Dennis. Always broke. Always bumming money from me. I never bothered to keep track. He understood without my saying so that I would front him the money for the girl. It wasn’t like he was going to repay me anyway.

We’d gone south along the parkway a few miles shy of the exit for Route 70 when we hit a traffic jam. It took me nearly 30 minutes to inch a couple of miles to the exit. I was familiar enough with southern New Jersey. And there were plenty of back roads to get down to Atlantic City.


“That’s when you ended up lost in the Pine Barrens?” asked Greller as he leaned against the door to my room.

“We got turned around after we picked up the girl,” I told him. For a detective, he was pretty dense.

“This girl with the strawberry blond hair?” Wilson said. He flipped through his notes. “What was her name?”

“She didn’t say.”

“What road were you on when you saw her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, buddy,” Greller said. “You know New Jersey like the back of your hand. You make deliveries for a living.”

“We were on 206,” I told him. “But then there was another detour.”

“We can check that.”

“Then check it, Kojak. See if I care. Am I being accused of a crime here?”

“Robbie,” it was Wilson’s turn now. His effort to be the fat, jovial friendly cop was transparent. “We need to know about the girl.”

I tried to raise my arms, but the restraints held me in place. “Come on, detective,” I pleaded. “Could you get someone to free me up?”

Wilson nodded at Greller. The tall, thin detective rolled his eyes and exhaled as walked out of the room.

“We’ll get your restraints off,” the heavy detective said. He pulled a chair close to my bed. “Now, tell me more about the girl.”


Not long after we exited the parkway Dennis closed his eyes. He dozed for an hour as I drove south along Route 206. I was happy for the silence. When I drove making deliveries I intentionally kept the radio off. But it was never quiet for long. My dispatcher liked to ramble on over the two-way. So, when Dennis fell asleep, I took advantage, relishing the sound of the tires against the road and not much else. Oncoming traffic that passed was sporadic. Still, it took awhile to get used to the headlights. I thought for sure that the lights would bring Dennis out of his sleep, but they didn’t.

The further south I drove the thicker the fog became. The Barrens were like that; especially, the closer you got to Atlantic County. Not that I minded it. The fog made me feel like an explorer in a new world. Ten minutes into the fog I spotted yellow and red lights flashing on and off. Route 206 dipped some and the road was covered with a dense fog in the low-lying stretch there. The flashing yellow lights were from a tow truck. The red ones belonged to three cop cars parked perpendicular across Rt. 206. There was a young rookie cop waving a flashlight, motioning toward my right. As I neared him, ready to make the detour turn, I rolled down my window.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Just follow traffic, sir,” he said. “Keep moving.”

“Was it an accident?”

“Yeah, buddy. An accident. Road’s closed. Keep it moving.”

I did what I was told. There was no street sign. So, I kept going with the flow of traffic which at that hour amounted to me and six other vehicles. Two of them took the first right, moving further away from 206. Another two turned left about a half-mile down the road. The road they turned onto was a dead-end cul-de-sac with a half-dozen houses in it. I was busy watching the cul-de-sac when I lost sight of the last two vehicles. Another couple of miles down the road split into two. I yielded to the left, thinking that road would lead back to Rt. 206.

The fog was dense along that nameless road. I drove slower than the speed limit, hoping to see another street to my left where I could turn. Only, there were no turn-offs. After another four or five miles, I began to worry. That’s when Dennis woke up.

“What the fuck, dude,” he said with sleep in his voice.

I explained to him about the second detour. He suggested we turn around and head back the way we came. I wanted to keep going.

“Besides,” I started to say.

“What?”

I slowed the car down. A shadow occupied the middle of the road about a quarter mile ahead of me.

We were only ten yards away when I realized it was a young women standing in the middle of the road. She had strawberry blond hair. The girl must have been outside for a long time. Her t-shirt clung to her chest and in the headlights I could see the faintest hint of dark nipples. She wore cut-off shorts. Her legs were long, and they glistened.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

Dennis shrugged. “Honk the horn,” he said. “That should get the Piney moving.”

I had a better idea. I opened the driver side door and stepped out. When I asked her if she was ok, the girl didn’t respond.

“Maybe she’s in shock,” I told Dennis as I got back inside.

“Who gives a shit,” he patted himself down looking for his bottle. “We’re never going to get to Atlantic City.”

The girl didn’t move. She just stared at me. I honked the horn. No response. That’s when Dennis got out of the car.

He walked slowly toward her, turning back once to look at me. Dennis circled the girl. Half-way around, he stopped and made a lewd gesture behind her back. Then he stepped in front of the girl and I could no longer see her. His hands moved the way they always did whenever he talked. I didn’t have to be out there to know what he said. My fear was that the girl had been in accident. She might be disoriented, maybe even in shock. I heard about that kind of stuff all the time. Who knows, I thought. Maybe she was with others. Maybe the others were in a ditch somewhere, their car a mangled mess, clinging to life, or even dead. Or maybe she was a decoy. Robberies were not unheard of in the Pine Barrens. Some unsuspecting schlub comes down the road, not familiar with the area, and the next thing he knows he gets his car stolen. I looked to my left.

The fog blotted out the trees on the side of the road. I wondered if anyone had ever starved to death wandering lost in the Pine Barrens. I used to think all kinds of crazy shit like that. When I looked forward I saw Dennis standing beside the girl now. He placed his arm around her as she kept her head down. Then, slowly, he coaxed her toward my car.

No, I thought. Don’t bring her—

Dennis opened the passenger door. He slid the seat forward and let the girl get in first. I caught a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror as she slid across the back seat. She looked older now. At first glance, I took her to be a teenager. But her eyes gave her away. I was thinking she might be almost thirty years old when Dennis climbed into the back seat with her and pulled the door shut.

I turned around to get a better look. Just as I did the interior light went out. The woman’s face was covered in darkness. I noticed Dennis had taken the opportunity to slide closer to her; even going so far as to put his hand on her thigh.

“Come on, man,” he said, “let’s go.”

I shifted into drive and started down the road. “Do you have a name?”

Idiot, I thought. She probably thought we were a couple of rapists. If she heard me, she chose not to answer.

“She won’t say,” said Dennis. “I tried.”

The fog dissipated somewhat a few miles down the road. I checked her out in the rearview mirror again. Dennis had his left arm around her now. His hand dangled close to her left breast. He leaned in close and whispered to her. I wasn’t sure about him taking advantage of a woman who may have been suffering from shock or much worse. Still, I wasn’t sure I could stop him.


“You could have pulled over,” detective Wilson said.

Greller hadn’t come back yet. I was beginning to think that he left the hospital.

“You don’t…you didn’t know Dennis,” I told him.

“So you never learned this girl’s name?”

“That’s the thing.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s going to sound weird.”

“This whole case is far from ordinary.”

Just then the door opened. Greller came into the room with a nurse in tow. He motioned to me. The nurse was a tall guy, muscular, with a USMC bulldog tattoo on his right forearm. He unbuckled my restraints. I tried to get a look at the identification tag that hung from a lanyard around his thick neck.

“Robbie was just telling me about the girl’s name,” Wilson announced.

Greller jerked his thumb at the door. To the nurse, he said, “You can go.”

“I told you I don’t know her name,” I said.

“No name,” Greller yawned, “no girl?”

The nurse stepped out of the room and closed the door without looking back. I started thinking that maybe I wasn’t in a regular hospital. Then I started thinking I’d never get away from the detectives if I didn’t throw them some sort of bone. So, I started going over in my head all kinds of female names.

“Rose,” I told them.

Greller grabbed a chair and pulled it to the side of my bed. He sat down, crossed one long leg over the other, and took out a thin cigar.

“Now, we’re getting somewhere,” he said.

“Did you get a last name?” Wilson inquired.

“No, she never said.”

I felt bad about lying. But I knew the detectives were never going to believe my story. They lived in a world of facts and motives. They knew the Pine Barrens was a place that stretched between central Jersey and Atlantic County. They may have driven through it, but most likely they stuck to highways when they took their families to the seashore. For them, the Pine Barrens was a nuisance. They didn’t care who or, more importantly, what lived there.


Another five or ten miles down the road I looked for signs to tell me where we were. Now and then I glanced back in the rearview mirror. Dennis shared his fifth of whiskey with the girl. He whispered something and they began giggling. The girl shook her head. Glancing back once more, I saw Dennis squeezing her left breast as he rubbed his other hand between her legs.

“Robbie,” he pulled away from her, “stop the car.”

There was a cutaway off the shoulder about a hundred yards in front of me. I pulled over. There was fog, but it wasn’t as thick as it had been earlier. Dennis leaned forward between the two front seats.

“Cut the engine,” he told me.

I looked in the rearview mirror. The girl’s face looked odd there in the dark. Her brow looked more pronounced for a moment. And her chin appeared longer than I remembered it. But no sooner did I blink did she return to normal. A car passed in the other direction. I thought it might be a cop. The car kept going. I watched in the rearview as its tail lights disappeared over a rise in the road. After that, I turned off the engine. No sooner than I did, Dennis opened the passenger door. He slipped out, pulling the girl by her hand.

Once Dennis shut the door I leaned low to watch them through the passenger window. He wasted no time, hiking her shirt up and pressing her pale breasts against the glass. I heard her giggle before she spun behind Dennis and darted into the woods. Dennis held up his hands as he walked backwards, almost tripping once or twice. Then he waved, indicating I should follow him. It took only a few seconds before the fog enveloped him and he vanished.

“Dennis?” I shouted when I got out of the car.

No answer. But I heard the girl’s giggle once more. So I started into the woods. The ground was wet. And the fog was denser between the tall pine trees. I heard Dennis call to the girl. The girl laughed. Her voice echoed. I called Dennis’ name three times but he didn’t answer.

I turned to look back, to make sure I could still see my car. The vehicle was barely visible but I spotted its metallic outline through the fog-enshrouded trees. I had no doubt that if I went another ten or twenty yards into the woods I would lose sight of the car. Or worse, another car would pull up behind mine. And I wouldn’t get back to the road in time before a cop started writing me a ticket. It also occurred to me that someone might steal my car, perhaps someone working in concert with the girl we had picked up.

“Dennis, come on now,” I shouted into the woods. “Let’s go, man.”

I heard an animal growl. I didn’t know much about bears. It could have been a bear. Or was it a wolf? No way, I thought. There were no wolves in the Pine Barrens. Another noise followed. A loud snarl. After that I heard Dennis scream. I started running forward through the fog. The snarling continued along with my friend’s screams. There was one last guttural howl. Then everything went quiet. At last, I reached a clearing. A breeze blew, shifting the fog. It was the first hint of wind all evening.

I spotted Dennis’ ragged, bloodied torso first. There was a huge hole in his chest. His arms were missing. I turned to run, tripped and fell flat on my face. As I scrambled to my feet, I saw that it wasn’t a log I’d tripped over. It was one of my friend’s legs. I heard the girl’s giggle mixed with that snarl I’d heard only moments before Dennis screamed. Something thudded on the pine needle-covered ground and rolled past me. Dennis’ head bounced off a tree in front of me. I kept running until I reached the road.


“And that’s when the Absecon cops found you?” Greller asked. He sat on the edge of his seat.

The big nurse appeared in the doorway. He crossed his massive arms over his chest.

“I saw their flashing lights,” I told him. “The cops found my car before I did.”

“The officer who took you in,” said Greller. “He said you were raving like a lunatic. How about it, pal? Are you crazy?”

I was tired. I didn’t want to talk anymore.

“Come on now, Robbie,” Wilson spoke as he stood up. He closed his notebook. “We know you’re not crazy.”

“The jury’s still out,” Greller added as he rose to his feet. He kicked the chair back against the wall. “We’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe you’ll sleep tonight and think about this girl…Rose. That was her name, right?”

“I didn’t do anything to her,” I pleaded with them.

Greller nodded to the big nurse. He stepped aside when the nurse moved in and refastened my restraints. He lifted his right hand and offered a mock salute as he exited the room. The big nurse followed him.

Wilson stopped in the doorway. “Look, Robbie,” he said. “Get some rest. Tomorrow will be a better day. Maybe you’ll forget this crazy story and tell us what really happened out there in the Pine Barrens.”

Wilson exited the room. He left the door opened.

“I didn’t do anything,” I shouted after him. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

For a long time, I lay there thinking about Dennis. I had no idea what time it was. I had no idea where I was. No one would tell me what hospital I had been taken to once they took me into custody. Eventually, I did fall asleep.

The room was dark when I opened my eyes. A faint light from the hallway filled the doorway. I dreamt I heard Dennis screaming. That’s what woke me up. And that’s when I heard the girl’s giggle.

She stood in the doorway. The light behind her showed off the shape of her breasts beneath her t-shirt. She giggled once more.

“Robbie,” she said in a sing-song voice.

The girl stepped into the room. She kicked the door shut and loosed a snarl.