Sex and Murder Magazine

By Rob White

It started with a girl named Deirdre. Didi, as she was called on stage, was one of the girls who came to my house with my brother Ray and Donnie Cheetwood—his former cellie from the state pen in Trumbull County about fifty miles south of here.

My brother was released on parole following a five-year bid for armed robbery of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on Route 20. Five of us were playing cards around my kitchen table one night, sipping cheap rotgut, when he decided he had so good a turn card that he wanted to up the bet by three hundred. His wallet at the time contained nothing but Ohio air because he’d lost the last five rounds of Texas Hold ‘em. I was drawing river cards like gifts from the gods. The rest of us agreed to postpone the game while he ran upstairs to scrounge up the money. The only thing he came back down with was a black-and-silver Taurus he’d taken off me in a card game last week. That was the last I saw of him until his arraignment. The judge said that his “impairment at the time of the commission of the crime” was the only reason he wasn’t getting twenty years.

I guess it was guilt for not stopping him that night that led to what happened afterward when he showed up at the door with his psycho buddy in tow.

Every night they came back from Jefferson-on-the-Lake after the bars had closed at 1:30, drunk and stumbling around, with one or more girls picked up from The Rare Cherry on the way back. The girls giggled every time something got knocked over. They played racist Oi music and resumed boozing at my kitchen table. I lay in my bed exhausted from lack of sleep and anxious about the next day’s job. I’m a landscaper. Since I stopped drinking and hanging out with the kinds of losers my brother and I used to run with, my life was slowly getting on track. I liked being Joe Average, a tax-paying, reasonably sober citizen.

On the third night I came downstairs to complain about the noise, and discovered Didi giving head to both of them. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks blew in and out as she played over Cheetwood’s skin flute. My brother stood behind the kneeling girl, with a stiff cock, waiting for his turn. I must have made a noise. She let Cheetwood’s boner slide out of her mouth and turned to look up at me. She had eyes the color of dirty ice. My brother, ever the gentleman, decided this was the perfect time to introduce Didi. She got up from her knees, wobbling a bit, fixed herself back inside an industrial-sized bra, popped her gum once at me, and said, “Pleased to meetcha,” or something like that. I was on the verge of laughing at the absurdity of it, when the look Cheetwood drilled me with made me change my mind.

The point I recall most vividly in that whole chain of loony events was the next night when Donnie knocked me out cold with one swing of his fists. I don’t recall the punch—a fragment of memory exists of a blur on collision course with my jaw, then a wallop I could feel from my toes to the top of my head—but I reconstructed this after I came awake on the floor.

The reason was that I objected to the new stranger standing in my kitchen at three in the morning wasn’t because it was another bar pickup or lap dancer. It was because his name was Carmine Rossico, and he was a notorious figure at the resort town. He handled a sports book and was said to have been paying off the Lake cops for years. I’ve put down a few hundred on the Browns or the Indians myself with him. He can usually be found drinking at the Oak Room and acting the part of the tough wise guy with the girls he’d buy drinks for. Nobody really knew if Carmine was connected. Rumor was that he laid off his big bets with somebody in Youngstown. The remnants of the old Lenny Strollo mob from back in the day when a “Youngstown tune-up” meant something were either dead or drooling away in Alzheimer’s clinics. But Carmine was a local joke—a harmless, roly-poly, middle-aged man with grandkids.

When I realized what he was there for, I believe I got as far as calling my brother and Cheetwood “a pair of stupid braindead assholes” before the lights went out.

They had just kidnapped him. They used Didi and her oversized boobs to lure him into the parking lot for a blowjob, then Donnie and my brother snatched him, bundled him into Ray’s clapped-out Malibu, and drove him straight to my place.

When I came to, I saw Cheetwood’s bulked arms, laced with neo-Nazi gibberish all the way down to his wrecking-ball fists; he looked down at me as if I’d just uttered the lost gospels of Jesus in Aramaic. My brother said, “Come on, Jack, we can do this.” I noticed one other thing while I was lying on the floor: Cheetwood had a Beretta with a bobbed hammer stuck in his boot.

I tried to reason with them despite the pain in my jaw and the wooziness that made my head feel like a collapsed balloon. “See there, Ray? That backyard overlooks Lake Erie, not the goddamned Rio Grande. You don’t kidnap and ransom people like you’re in Neuvo Laredo or some border town shithole in Mexico.”

I must have made my stomach go in and out a hundred thousand times over the next two days trying to make my halfwit brother see reason whenever Cheetwood went downstairs into the basement to check on Carmine. No doubt they had cooked this scheme up at some bar while they were both hammered on Jack Daniels. I didn’t sleep at all after that. I kept waiting for the sound of the Sheriff’s maul smashing my door to pieces followed by an army of black-clad SWAT with guns blazing.

Donnie told me to stay away from Carmine. I knew he was down there getting information from the old man and I hoped for Carmine’s sake he had something to give him. I wanted him alive and talking when the cops finally did barge in. I wanted him to say I was as much a victim as he was.

I didn’t understand Ray. We were raised by the same father (true, a nutcase if there ever was one) but Ray was an easy-going guy before he went to prison. Doing time with those Aryan Brotherhood maniacs had hardened him. Every time I heard Cheetwood’s boots pounding up or down the basement steps, I held my breath. Cheetwood had told Ray to watch me. They took away my cell phone and ordered me to cancel my work calls, to say I had the flu, and I was not allowed to make a move my brother standing by. Once in a while Didi was assigned to watch me when Ray had to go out. She once offered to suck me off when I went into the bathroom. I declined her offer with sarcasm; she called me a filthy name.

I had no idea how these criminal masterminds were going to pull this off. Even grandmothers who watch crime shows know that kidnapping is serious crime, an FBI specialty, and the exchange is the most vulnerable point where the perps screw up.

I even tried to reason with Cheetwood once when I noticed him in one of his less malevolent mood swings. He had just come out of the bedroom where he had been romping with Didi, strings of silver jism like the strands of a busted spider web dangled from his cockhead.

“Hey, can I have a word with you?”
“What do you want, faggot?” He was undecided whether to bowl me over or listen to me.
“Carmine’s no mafia guy, man. Can’t you see that? You can’t get anybody in Youngstown to cough up a big ransom for a nobody like him. Let me drive him home. You and Ray take off. I’ll promise you a day’s head start no matter what he tells the cops.”

My neck was on the line when it came to sentencing. But I was willing to take one for my brother to wipe the slate clean.

“Shows what you know, shithead. Rossico’s goombahs are paying up tonight.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah, you heard me. Two hundred-fifty thou.”

“How—how . . .”

“How do you think, you stuttering asshole. In unmarked fifties, twenties, and tens,” Donnie said.

My confusion wasn’t over the money; it was the absurdity of this thug’s plan actually working.

What Donnie said made my knees shake. I was in deep now. How was I ever going to explain my innocence to anybody? Bad enough I didn’t make a move to release him and for all Carmine knew, I was as guilty as the others. There was a bigger reason for my fear: if Cheetwood felt sure enough of things to tell me exactly what the ransom payoff was, he had no intention of splitting it with me. Except for the merest reptilian flicker in his eyes, he wasted no more time or breath on me. I figured I had the same odds of surviving this as drawing to an inside straight.

About six o’clock that evening, Ray invited me outside.

“Got something in the garage for you to look at, Jack,” he said.

My garage is packed with my tools and landscaping equipment but a pair of wingtips sticking out of the center of a rolled-up rug next to my weed eater was hard to miss.

“Oh, Ray, you fucking moron—”

I never got past moron because the next sound I heard was oxygen whooshing out of my own lungs as Cheetwood stepped out of hiding and ripped into my solar plexus with a sucker punch.

I writhed on the ground like a broken snake, my brother’s words just penetrating through the snowstorm of pain in my guts. “Sorry, Jack, but it’s gotta be this way.”

I couldn’t stop Cheetwood from hauling me up and throwing me into the trunk of my car. The next thing I knew I was bouncing along in the cramped dark, nauseated from the ganglia of nerves Cheetwood’s blow had churned up. I was certain I was going to be as quiet as my uninvited garage guest before the night was over.

*****

I’m not religious, but I thought of praying. The last time I had prayed occurred when I was eight when my puppy got hit by a car. That’s when I learned God does answer all prayers, and it’s always one of a trio of responses—namely, No, Fuck no, or Fuck you. I wasn’t going to waste precious breath cursing that knuckle-dragging Neanderthal Cheetwood, or hoping Ray had a sudden attack of brotherly love. I was in the middle of some very bad shit and the only thing I knew I could count on was my brains.

The only guy worse off was poor Carmine, who should have expected to spend his old age wearing pants up to his nipples while lining up his next shot on some Florida putting green.

The ride slowed and then I was jostled from side to side in a series of turns. Then we were there, wherever that was.

My brother popped the trunk and looked down at me with a big loopy grin on his face. We were in the country. I knew that from the dark and the damp, which smelled of hay. We were far from traffic or city lights. Donnie hauled me out, none too gently, and placed the Beretta’s barrel next to my temple to make a point I was not to do anything rash.

They bumrushed me into a single-storied, swaybacked dump that had been a farmhouse at one time, and must have passed through some meth cook’s hands judging by the reek of cat piss. A kerosene lantern my brother carried provided all the light inside. Even in the bad light, I made out the guns Donnie had brought inside and dumped on the table.

It was enough to retake Montreal: a Smith & Wesson 686 with a four-inch barrel, a Freedom Arms 454 Casull next to a Savage Model 23 bolt-action rifle. The banana-shaped magazine of the Uzi told me it was Chinese-manufactured. Piles of boxes of Blue Hills and Federal ammo, even a couple of Black Talons and HP Silvertips—always good if you’re looking for a wider wound channel, according to good old Ray Sr., who’d taught Ray Jr. and me more about firearms than any child should ever be required to know.

Cheetwood dashed back out to get the bedrolls and I hissed to my brother: “What if something goes wrong?”

Ray gave me a look part-grin, part-sneer.

“Nothing ain’t going wrong, Jack,” Ray said. “We ain’t going for the money, see?”

Surely they weren’t sending in their third crime partner, so aptly nicknamed for her Double-D breasts?

Then it clicked. I tasted another bitter surge of adrenalin in my stomach when I realized it.

“You’re going to burn those Youngstown guys,” I said.

“That’s right,” Ray said.

I said, as low as I could, “Your crime czar outside forgot one thing. Nobody pays two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars for a corpse.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jack.”

“Shut the fuck up, Ray,” Donnie growled, coming in to hear the last part of our conversation. “He don’t need to know shit.”

My chances of surviving this thing had just dropped to zero-point-shit. “Make it a head shot, brother.”

“Shut up, Jack. Nobody’s shooting anybody in the head,” Ray said.

“Tell that to Carmine back in my garage.”

Ray laughed. “Didn’t need no gun, man. Fucker’s heart gave out.”

My stomach still felt as raw as if somebody was dripping acid down my esophagus every few seconds. Cheetwood’s laugh made me sicker.

Donnie thrust a pair of cuffs onto my wrists and looped a chain over them and secured it to a fireplace ring bolt. “You get on my nerves one more time,” he threatened, “and you’re gonna get dropped to the floor for good.”

They ignored me from then on. Thirty more minutes passed before the stab of a car’s hi beams penetrated the dark. Car doors slammed, I heard giggling. Didi’s high-pitched voice so out of sync with her titanic bellows of a chest.

She came in with another girl, somebody whose name I didn’t know, but I dimly recognized her from one of those late-night soirees in my kitchen.

Didi flung a black duffel bag onto the floor and ran straight into Donnie’s arms. She cut her eyes to me and dismissed me—not even curious why I was handcuffed to a brass ring bolt.
His look in the lantern’s glow turned wolfish. “Hey, you,” he said, “let’s fuck.”

Clothes flew off their bodies. Shoes were kicked loose in all directions. A sexual free-for-all commenced right at my feet where sleeping bags lay scattered about. Didi’s girlfriend was a bottle-blonde with dark roots and a black pubic ruff. She helped Didi out of her bra. Donnie, nude and semi-hard, improved his erection with his hand.

I thought, Sure—why not? Perfect time for an orgy.

Something else I had never seen: my brother sucking on a glass pipe and already sweating from his meth buzz.

Donnie, the ringmaster of this sex circus, gave commands to Ray and both women. If the cuffs had been nylon flex-ties, I would have bitten through them like a fox in a leghold trap and run like a Maryland farmer. I doubt anyone would have noticed me missing. Fortunately the women’s hoarse gasps and the slap of skin covered any sounds I did make, and I used their frenzy to nudge the pile of clothes my way with the tip of my boot. Somewhere in that pile was Cheetwood’s boot, the one with the little Beretta in it.

After an anguishing amount of effort that strained every nerve and fiber in me right to my teeth, I had inched the pile a tiny bit closer. I thought I detected a glint of steel—the gun was there in an ankle holster wrapped loosely around one of Cheetwood’s Doc Marten’s.

The orgy was in full-tilt boogie by now. “Fuck her pussy good,” Didi’s wild-eyed girlfriend ordered. The light from the lanterns cast a glow on their glistening bodies that was both repulsive and fascinating. If heaven is a mansion with many windows, as some goofy preacher once told us as kids in a homeless shelter, then hell must have all the doors because this was like standing in the threshold of a doorway while demons fornicated.

Cheetwood loomed up from the tangle of bodies; his massive chest heaved, and he looked around as if he sensed something suddenly wrong. I froze like a cigar store Indian. Then Didi’s face bloomed out of the darkness beside his white legs, her eyes hooded and lips puffy from alternately kissing her girlfriend’s breasts and sucking my brother’s cock. She reached out a hand to grasp his twitching organ and drew him back into the melee on the floor. If it weren’t for the sexual fog of his rutting, he would have sensed what I was doing and he’d have crossed that space and kicked me through the wall before I could make my move.

Now or never, I thought. I reached my leg out, planted my toe into the pile of clothes, and drew it toward me in achingly slow centimeters of progress. The Beretta had slipped out of sight but I knew it was in there somewhere.

I almost dislocated my shoulder from stretching to get my fingertips in there to feel for it. Then, magic. Its crosshatched butt seemed to slide all b y itself into my hand as if magnetized. I swung it up in an arc—shedding panties, bras, and t-shirts from the barrel. I had not held a gun in years but nothing had ever felt so good as thumbing that safety off.

The shot missed Donnie’s head—but not by much. The slug sizzled passed his ear. The cuffs ruined my aim but they stopped all that commotion with a deafening noise.
Cheetwood looked as frozen as one of those brawny Soviet statues in heroic pose. I adjusted the gun sight to his face—six o’clock on his mouth. I was flooded with adrenalin and sick with it.

I fired again. Another near miss.

“OK, OK, OK, motherfucker!” he roared. He raised his hands in front of him like two useless dinosaur paws.

I aimed at Didi next. I centered it between her swinging boobs.

“Get over there with him,” I said.

She stood up slowly and walked over to him. The insides of her legs glistened with the snailtracks of her fluid and semen.

“Hey,” Cheetwood said. “What are you doing, bro?”

I pointed the gun back at him and told him to shut up.

“The key,” I said. I was boiling inside.

“You ain’t got the balls to shoot me,” Cheetwood said. “Any pussy can fire warning shots.”

“Those weren’t warning shots,” I said. “You moved your head.”

“All right,” Cheetwood said. “Even shares all around.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Black Roots piped up, “you said—”
“Shut up, you cunt,” Donnie said evenly in a voice that reminded me of an old Motown tune where the lead singer goes falsetto; his teeth were gritted as if he had watermelon seeds in his mouth.

“Hand me the key, Ray,” I said. My own voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s.

Ray looked at Cheetwood, seemed to get a silent OK, and proceeded to root in the pile. He found it and tossed it to me. I had to make a one-handed stab above my head this time, and my gun hand necessarily went high with it.

Something happened I never expected: Ray took off running—straight out the door. My stomach lurched with fear, not knowing what was going on. The key in my palm turned out to be an advertising token for a porn shop.

Cheetwood never took his eyes off me even when Ray scrambled out the door with the duffel bag in his grip.

“Think about this now,” he said in a voice that still held that quaver of a falsetto. “We’re all in this. Keep cool, man.” He lowered his arms.

We all heard the car start and the engine being gunned.

“You’re part of it, too, Ray,” Didi said to me. She had one hand cocked on her hip, her big breasts swinging free. Her nudity in repose made her even more obscene.

“Donnie’s right,” Black Roots said. “Let’s all think how we can work this out.”

Donnie hissed at her through a razor-thin smile. “Did you miss somethin’ just now, bitch? There ain’t gonna be no fuckin’ split up if we don’t have the fuckin’ money.”

“Why ain’t we gonna have the money?” Black Roots was either congenitally stupid or too high to notice Ray bolting out the door; anything not in monosyllables to her would have been as complicated as a lecture on collisionless wave particles in Pashtun.

“Shut up, all of you,” I demanded. I was holding a gun on three naked freaks, but I was the one losing authority by the second. The room was rancid with sex and fear.

I hadn’t fired a gun since those camping days in the Canadian woods with the old man. My arm muscles were stiffening into knots. My torso was turned awkwardly because of the drag on my arm from the handcuffs. I knew Donnie was going crazy inside. He wanted to bull right through me to go after Ray and every second counted. It was a question of who blinked first.

The last few links of the chain were just clear of the barrel. One shot, no more time for a second. The old man’s advice came welling up out of the abyss: “Grip, stance, sight alignment, picture.” Come on, Jack, see it in your mind and put the bullet there. . .

I figured the angle where the bullet had to go without ricocheting into my belly. I leaned back hard so the chain would go taut.

Time slowed to grains of moments and then microns. Maybe it was Donnie and his predator’s gift for sensing a change in air particles. He tore out of his frozen stance as if tasered; he went straight into the outer room. The links blasted apart right where I had aimed without caroming off the iron bolt. Some shattered brick fragments blew into my hand and wrist—but I was free.

Any second Donnie was going to come roaring out of that back room and grease me to the wall.

I wasn’t waiting for anybody’s permission to vacate the premises.

Before I had cleared the front door in full throttle, Didi hit me in the back of the legs with something, and I tripped. I heard the shrieking of a cracked-out harpy as I went sprawling into the dark, the gun bucking loose as I went into the ground like a dart; face first. Then she was on my back with her teeth sunk into my shoulder her fingers tearing and clawing at my face and eyes. I rolled away and scrambled after the gun. I dug the barrel straight into the flesh of her ribs. I squeezed. Nothing, nada—the click of dry fire instead of her heart being ripped to pulp—nothing. Again, click, nothing.

Before she could anticipate my next move, I swung hard to the side of her face. It stunned her. I grabbed a hank of her hair and slid my arm around her neck to twist her head back and down. She flailed with her claws and howled some animal gibberish, writhing and twisting her sweat-slick body against my forearm. One final wallop smashed nose cartilage and blinded her. She tottered drunkenly and like a building in a slow-motion implosion, she went over with a slight tilt sideways.

My legs were spastic from the combat but my limbic brain was still screaming, urging me to flee. Worse came to worse: the tok-tok-tok of a semi-auto automatic erupted from the house not fifteen yards away. I started running fast and low. I tripped in a gopher hole, stumbled, got up hobbling from excruciating pain, and finally crawled on my belly into the life-saving darkness. Cheetwood’s slugs tore into the ground all around me. He raged a Volapük of obscenities at me, like an alpha coyote baying at the moon. He hurled curses at my treacherous brother too—but it was music because Donnie Cheetwood was not going to kill me that night or any night.

When I had enough distance, I flung myself into a mess of briars and lay panting like a rabbit. Every few minutes pinpricks of muzzle fire like fireflies outlined his profile. He scythed the weapon back and forth in a raking motion. A flock of birds roosting in the tall grass near me exploded into the air.

I heard the coughing of a car engine in the distance; the starter grinding.

My treacherous brother had stalled out in his piece-of-shit car at the bottom of the driveway. He was flooding the engine in his panic to get far as far from Cheetwood and that farmhouse as possible.

I zeroed on the sound from the winding driveway. At the first bend before the house came into view was a cleared space that separated the orchards for the tractors and wagons. It was too dark to run blind. I could knock myself out running into a tree, turn an ankle even worse than the one I had injured—but waiting to be eviscerated by hollow points was a whole lot worse on my pain scale. I staggered headlong into bushes which punctured me, past twigs that whipsawed my face bloody, and yet I plunged on in my mad, clumsy hobbling dash. My eyes were almost lashed shut. My shirt was hanging in a patch of briars but I kept going toward that beautiful sound of an engine trying to turn over.

Not yet notyetnotyet . . . I prayed as I ran, stumbled, and limped. I chanted this like a mantra as I moved toward the sound. It was like zeroing a rifle. I locked on to his invisible car ahead in the dark as efficiently as a satellite’s GPS coordinates.

Another volley from the assault rifle—but distant, too far away—the cracking of bark being blown off trees. Cheetwood, that lunatic Brand enforcer back there, cursing, firing blind into the darkness was urging me on despite the hideous pain.

Suddenly, I heard Ray’s car coming fast—slewing from one side of the road to the other and the engine whined in low gear.

A misty flame of fog rose from the marshes. I went headlong into a ditch where loose strife grew in bunches and lost a shoe in the reeking black muck. Finally, I broke through the brush where he’d have to negotiate the last bend before the gravel road straightened out and met the highway. If I missed it, I would be standing there for Cheetwood to finish off. The car careened toward me, and I leaped out of the way just before it rumbled into a steep drainage ditch.

Ray, you motherless bastard…

Mud and gravel spewed up from the spinning tires. I picked myself up from the dirt. The ditch was soft earth but not steep enough to stop the car’s forward progress. Once he had it back on the road surface, he’d be gone. I held nothing back when I dove for the passenger side door. If I missed, I wouldn’t have the strength left to crawl back into the weeds.

My hand snagged the latch and it popped open. Jack’s head swiveled in shock, his mouth hanging stupidly open—maybe he thought it was Donnie. I lay half-sprawled in the ditch, one hand feebly clutching the door. Shirtless, filthy, one shoe off—no homeless derelict could have looked worse.

Then, a miracle: Ray reached out a brotherly hand and helped me in.

He closed his mouth and gunned it. “I thought you were dead back there,” he said. I lacked air to curse him so I lay curled on the seat next to him and gasped like a hooked sturgeon waiting for the shark to put it out of its misery.

He let out a cowboy whoop as he slung the car onto Route 531 with the chassis bucking so hard on the rough shoulders a wheel cover came loose. He floored it when we hit open road. The duffel bag lay on the floorboard, opened. Ray said his mistake was stopping to open the bag to make sure he had all the money. He couldn’t resist, he said. That’s why he stalled.

As soon as I could speak coherently, I asked him how they did it.

“The money, you mean?”

I looked at him with as much hatred in my eyes as I could muster.

“See, Jack, we figured they was all set up to bag us at the pickup. That’s why we sent Didi.”

“You sent that cow-titted, dim-bulb of a stripper to make the pickup?”

“Fuckin-A, bro.”

Over the next twenty miles, I had it all. Donnie Cheetwood learned TIG welding in the joint. He and Ray had switched off a stolen dumpster with the one they told Carmine’s people to toss the duffel bag into with its quarter-of-a-million. The day before Cheetwood had cut holes in the bottom and sides and they filled it with leaf bags stuffed with newspaper to look like ordinary garbage. Every night, Didi gets done with her set at the same time, Ray said, so whoever’s watching for the kidnappers doesn’t think anything of a half-dressed stripper strolling past with her giant funbags on show.

What they don’t know, Ray went on, was that she has a key to the building, which is conveniently vacant. “She goes to the wall where the drywall, wood, and cement blocks have already been taken out and replaced with a papier-mâché front,” Ray said. “Then she reaches in, knocks the side plate loose and feels around for the duffel bag; then she exits by another door where her girlfriend is keeping watch.”

“I see,” I said. “That explains the reason for the sudden orgy back there. But what explains what was going to happen to me later?”

“Let’s just say we’re even, bro,” he said. “You turned your back on me once, remember?”

“OK, I can live with it,” I said. “Let’s split the money and go our separate ways.”

*****

Jack drove east into the sun staying on the country roads. The magenta sky turned pus-yellow and then a soft, washed-out blue replaced the cobalt of night. The gold-fringed nimbus clouds forming above us were the loveliest sight my battered, aching eyes had ever seen. The grin on my brother’s face told me he was feeling his own kind of exhilaration or maybe it was the sight of me then that improved his mirth: my pants were soaked, I smelled like a body farm, and my unshod foot was bleeding. My hair was full of seed pods and briars. I had swollen raccoon eyes and looked as if I’d been auditioning for the part of the victim in a Rob Zombie film. Jack had climbed down the beanstalk with the giant’s golden hen, but I was the one who’d paid the price.

“Where we at, bro?” he asked after it was obvious we were free and clear.

“Denmark,” I said.

“Fuck you, Denmark,” Ray said. “That’s, like, in Russia.”

“You obviously didn’t waste time on geography when you were away,” I said. “Denmark, Ohio, bro. Amish country, you thickhead.” We were back to teasing each other like the brothers we used to be before the old man finally cracked.

Denmark is a tiny township thirty minutes due south of Lake Erie. The sun was just clearing the tree line. I rolled down the windows to wash out some of the car’s funky reek. Jack nodded as if it made sense. We passed through the center of town, a dismal square of shut-up shops and glazed windows where placards announced auctions of farm sales.


The undersides of tree leaves had a dull color like pewter that shimmered to silver when the breeze lifted them up. The whole square smelled like dust and manure.

“That old fuck wrapped up in that rug back in your garage is deader than Julius Caesar, Jack. You better do something about that when you get back home.”

The marshy woodlands behind my house used to be full of skunks and raccoons, but the coyotes that came last year had driven them and the few deer out. They say opossums will attack a dead body by going through the anal passage and core it out like an apple. I knew Carmine wouldn’t last long out there in the swampy woods.

*****

Every day I waited for SWAT to crash through my door at five in the morning. My share of the money was stacked in rows of tens and twenties in a broken freezer in my basement.

The papers that week were full of frenzied headlines about Donnie Cheetwood and his bloody shootout at the farmhouse. I laughed. That stupid thug never gave two thoughts to firing off an Uzi like that, but he apparently got some long-haul trucker’s attention who had missed the highway turnoff and heard the shooting. He called the Highway Patrol on his CB. Donnie’s girls, however, made it out alive. Didi and Black Roots, whose real name was Tina Van Eyck, came stumbling out of the woods a few miles from the farmhouse, half-starved, tick-infested, and crying. Didi’s big teats were spotted with chigger bites. She told a reporter from her hospital bed where doctors were setting her broken nose (“I ran into a tree,” she said) that she and Tina were grateful to be “rescued” from that evil Donnie Cheetwood, who had kidnapped them from Jefferson-on-the-Lake and was planning to sell them into “sexual slavery.”

When the cops asked Didi where exactly Donnie had planned to bring them, she couldn’t think fast enough and said “Michigan.” When the cops asked why Michigan, she replied that laid-off autoworkers were “so horny” they’d pay any amount to “get a lap dance.”

The cops, of course, knew they were lying but had to release them anyway. With an ex-con dead in a pointless shootout, unless it had to be over the stockpile of illegal weapons, and no description of a male accomplice, much less any word of a real kidnap victim, yours truly, there was nothing else they could do. Nobody knew anything about a man held for ransom or any ransom being paid.

Two days later, a back-page article mentioned that the family of Carmine Rossico had reported him missing. The paper didn’t have any details beyond his home address and his age and a physical description. “Mr. Rossico was last seen Friday evening at the Oak Room on the strip.”

*****

I had just come in from a job planting day lilies in the city park and was looking forward to a couple cold ones in front of my TV, when I smelled it: the citrusy smell of perfume. Not an expensive perfume, either. Didi—in my house. Oh, shit.

I was reclining in my La-Z-Boy in front of the television while Rachel Ray was talking about a thirty-minute goulash from scratch. Even then, I knew it was too late to move. Just in case I had that desire, I felt a gun barrel trace a line delicately across the back of my skull to the ridge of my eyebrows.

“Hi, fuckface,” Didi said with a pleasant trill.

“Hello, I was just wondering when I’d see you again,” I said.

“Sure you were. Shut your lyin’ fuckin’ mouth. Where’s Ray and the money?”

I told her where my share was. A few minutes later, Tina of the black roots came upstairs with it; she had the stacks of banded denominations bundled in her arms, cooing at it like a baby; she wore a grin that split her fox-like face from ear to ear.

Didi rubbed her swollen nose while she stared at me with those dirty-colored eyes. The nose was definitely not the one she was born with. Not that many men would have noticed since their gaze was usually riveted to a point below her neckline.

“Where’s your asshole brother?”

“Long gone,” I said. “California, I think.”

“You should have gone with him, dumbass,” she said.

“Funny. I was just thinking that very thing,” I remarked. It sounded less cool when it came out, but Tina giggled at the cheap wit.

Didi hefted the gun lightly as if it were an accessory she wasn’t sure she needed.

“Remember that suck job I once offered you?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I’ve reconsidered.”

That was way cool, I thought—until she narrowed the gun and shot me. It felt like a hundred angry wasps let loose in my chest at once. I felt warm and very sleepy. Didi looked at me strangely; then she turned to Tina and said, “Baby, let’s get it on right here.”

For the last time in my life, I thought, I’m going to be a voyeur.

I don’t recall not being able to see, but I remember it was all sounds at first: the slap of skin, bodies touching, fingers groping . . . Sounds magnified too. The moans seemed to be at ten times normal decibel level, a new and interesting kind of stereophonic ecstasy. Finally, the olfactory sense kicked in at a higher level, and I smelled the scent of warm skin, swollen nipples and pussies, the tang of their mixed juices. I decided to slip off while they were at it like a discreet host. It was then I remembered something important: I was commissioned to create several long rows of red impatiens. I just for the life of me couldn’t remember where that was.