ZEROING IN

A KIT TOLLIVER STORY

LAWRENCE BLOCK

Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design: Jayne E. Smith

Ebook Design: JW Manus

“Kimmie, a threesome!”

“I was just looking to go home with a girl,” she said, “but she was there with her husband, and he was kind of cute.”

“You’ve got to tell me everything.”

Well, not exactly everything. She gave Rita the Reader’s Digest version, abbreviated and toned down. Even so, with Rita’s questions and exclamations, she used up a chunk of the new cell phone’s prepaid minutes.

“It added something,” she said of the husband’s presence. “But at the same time it took something away.”

“’Cause it wasn’t just the two of you.”

“Right.”

“Kimmie, I really wish you were here.”

“Me too.”

“I won’t even ask where you are.”

“Actually, I’m out west again. Not as far west as you are, though.”

“Oh?”

“A place I’ve never been before. Provo, Utah?”

“I’ve never been there either. When I was a kid we took a family trip to a national park, and I think it may have been in Utah. Arches?”

“I never heard of it.”

“It was pretty neat. There were these great natural rock formations, sandstone eroded by the wind, and there was this one huge freestanding stone arch and you could stand under it and get your picture taken. And it fell down.”

“While you were standing under it?”

“No, silly! I was there fifteen or twenty years ago, and just last year it fell down. It was on the TV news.”

“Oh.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s in Utah. Hang on. Thank you, Google. It’s in Utah, and the nearest town is Moab, and I remember now because that’s where we stayed. In a motel with fake wood paneling on the walls. Now why do I remember that?”

“Maybe the wood grain looked like a cunt.”

“Kimmie, you are just terrible!”

“I know.”

“Where did you say? Provo? Hang on. Okay, you’re a hundred and ninety-one miles away if you take Route Six. Oh, you know what? That’s where he’s from.”

“That’s where who’s from?”

“That crazy Mormon. What was his name? Not Kelly. Damn, why can’t I—Kellen!”

“The one who wouldn’t go down on you?”

“Yeah, the pig. Saving his tongue for his fiancée. Asshole.”

“Probably saving his asshole for Brigham Young.”

“Ha! You know what? You should look him up.”

“You think?”

“Sure, why not? He was pretty hot, except for what he wouldn’t do.”

“Well—”

“And wouldn’t you want the experience of screwing a hundred and fifty guys at once?”

A hundred fifty-two, she thought. And said, “What are you—oh, right, you told me. Proxy baptism?”

“That’s it.”

“But you wouldn’t mind, Rita?”

“Me? Why should I mind? I’m not the one who’s engaged to him.”

“Well, still. I mean, you saw him first.”

“And when am I gonna see him again, and why would I even want to? I don’t have to go all the way to Utah to find a guy who won’t go down on me. As a matter of fact . . .”

“What?”

“Well, I have to admit I kind of like the idea of us having him in common. It’d be a new kind of threesome, the kind with an interval.”

“Kellen,” she said. “It’d help if I knew his last name. Still, how many Kellens can there be? Unless it’s the Mormon equivalent of Jason.”

“He told me his last name. But I can’t possibly—Kimball!”

“You can’t possibly Kimball?”

“That’s it, it just popped into my mind. Kellen Kimball. Just think what your name would be if you married him.”

“Yeah, right. I probably won’t look for him, and nothing’s likely to happen even if I do.”

“But if it does,” Rita said, “I want to hear all about it.”

He remembered Rita. Vividly, it would seem, because the recollection brought a blush to his pink cheeks.

“Outside of Seattle,” he said. “I can’t recall just where.”

“Kirkland.”

“That’d be it, Kirkland. A friend and I, we saw her as part of our missionary work. She’d expressed some interest in LDS, so we paid her a home visit to discuss it with her.”

“LDS.”

“Latter-Day Saints. What you probably call the Mormon religion, the official title is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”

She’d found out where he lived, which hadn’t proved terribly difficult. There was a whole column of Kimballs in the phone book, but only one Kellen. The phone book provided his address, and finding one’s way around Provo was ridiculously simple, because the streets were in a numbered grid, and if you could count you could get anywhere you wanted to go. His apartment was on East 300 North Street, just around the corner from Dragon’s Keep, a store on University Avenue that sold games and comic books. There were items on display, sword and sorcery paraphernalia, that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Pleasure Chest. The clientele, however, was vastly different—nerds and geeks instead of pervs and players.

It was where he’d suggested they meet, and the staff there greeted him by name, which suggested that he had a rich life reading comic books and playing Dungeons & Dragons on those lonely nights when he couldn’t find somebody not to go down on.

For all that, he was a tall, good-looking young man, with the fresh-faced handsomeness of a male model in the Lands’ End catalogue. One cheek was lightly pitted with old acne scars, and that was a plus; it kept him from being too pretty.

She knew at first glance that he would certainly do. But it wasn’t his good looks that had led her to Provo, Utah, nor was it the chance to go where Rita had already gone. That was appealing, no question about it, but she had something more important in mind.

“LDS,” she said. “At first I thought you were a dyslexic talking about LSD. You know, acid? But that didn’t make sense, because Mormons don’t use drugs. Or do they?”

“I take aspirin for headaches, and anything my doctor prescribes for medicinal purposes. But in the sense of mood-altering drugs, no, that’s something we don’t do.”

“Well, I’m with you on that one,” she said. “Kellen—is it okay to call you Kellen?”

“Well, sure. That’s my name. And you’re Marsha?”

“But everybody calls me Marcy.”

“Then that’s what I’ll call you, Marcy.”

Laughter erupted from one of the tables to their right, where three nerdy-looking young men were clustered around a game board. When it died down she said, “Kellen, there’s something I need to ask you about. Could we go someplace a little quieter? And maybe get a drink or a cup of coffee?”

“Which would you prefer?”

She shrugged. “Whichever you feel like.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid they’re both out of bounds for me.”

“Oh,” she said, light dawning. “Mormons don’t drink alcohol.”

“Or coffee.”

“I didn’t know about coffee. Well, could we get a Coke? Or a cup of tea?”

He was grinning now. “Stimulants,” he said.

“So they’re a no-no?”

“I’m afraid so. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have whatever you want, and I can keep you company.”

“If we were both Mormons,” she said, “where would you take me and what would we have?”

“Well, there’s a juice bar that’s quiet and comfortable. And only a couple of blocks from here.”

“Then let’s go there.”

“But you’d be pretty much limited to fruit juice.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “In fact that sounds pretty good right about now.”

“There’s something Rita told me about you,” she said, and damned if he didn’t blush the least bit. The place he’d taken her was a little more brightly lit than your average bar, and she could see the color rise to his cheeks.

“Besides that,” she said.

“Besides—”

“Look, let’s clear the air, okay? I know you went to bed with Rita, and incidentally she said you were a wonderful lover. And I can’t say I’m surprised, because you’re certainly an attractive man. And yes, I know you’re engaged, and that’s not the point, either. I don’t mean to embarrass you, bringing all that up out of the blue, but otherwise it’s just going to hang in the air between us, and I don’t think that’s what either of us wants.”

“You’re very direct.”

“But don’t you agree?”

“Well, yes,” he said, and picked up his glass of lemonade like an alcoholic reaching for his Harvey Wallbanger. “Yes, best to clear the air.”

Right. “What Rita told me about, and what really stuck in my mind, is the experience you had with proxy baptism. See, I never even heard of that before, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I did some research online, and, well, I keep thinking about it.”

“I suppose you’d like to find out about getting your own ancestors baptized. Well, that’s not hard to arrange, and—”

“No.”

“No?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said. “See, I had this boyfriend, and we were really deeply in love.”

“Oh?”

“We were meant to be together forever, I know we were. But he was married to somebody else.”

“Oh.”

“He filed for divorce, and the legal proceedings were underway. And he and I weren’t living together, but we had, you know, a full relationship. And then—”

“Yes?”

“He died.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She reached across the table, put her hand on top of his. “It was very sudden,” she said, “and completely unexpected. We were making love, and what we were doing—I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t go into detail. Would I be embarrassing you?”

“It’s all right.”

“Well, I think they call it the Reverse Cowgirl position. He was lying on his back, like, and I was sitting astride him, but facing toward his feet. That was always a very effective position for us, because his dick hit my G-spot perfectly that way, and—is it okay to talk like this to a Mormon?”

He nodded.

“Well, that made it super good, and I could regulate the depth and everything, and he could just lie there and enjoy it. Plus I could use one hand for balance and use the other on my clit, just to, you know, help things along. Like.”

“I see.”

“So it was really great, and I had this super orgasm with bells and whistles, one of those long rolling things that just goes on forever, and when it finally stopped I said something, I don’t know what, telling him I loved him, that kind of thing, and he didn’t say anything. And the one thing I don’t like about the Reverse Cowgirl is you don’t get to see his face, and I didn’t even know if he came or not, or much of anything. And he wasn’t moving or making any sound, so I swung around to get a look at him, and, well, he was dead.”

“How awful.”

“They said he had a congenital heart condition, that it had just been there all his life and remained asymptomatic all that time, so nobody ever knew about it. And then it popped up and killed him. It could have happened while he was playing basketball or hurrying to catch a bus, or it could have happened in the middle of a night’s sleep. It was going to happen sooner or later, and the time it picked was right when I was squirming around on his dick in the throes of an amazing orgasm.”

She touched his hand again. “Anyway,” she said, “that’s what I thought of when I learned about proxy baptism.”

“You want him baptized, so that he’s guaranteed eternal life in Christ everlasting.”

“No.”

“No?”

“He was baptized as an infant. I don’t remember which denomination his parents were, and I know he’d lost his faith over the years, especially when his marriage went sour, but he was definitely baptized. Now maybe a Mormon proxy baptism would still do him some good, I don’t know about that, but if you want to put his name on the list, well, I’d have no objection to that. But it’s not what I came to Provo for.”

“Then—”

“We were meant to be together,” she said, “and I knew that from the moment I met him. And I still know it. I’ve been with other men since then, because I’m a healthy woman with healthy appetites.” Her hand brushed his. “You probably sensed that much.”

“Well, the way you were talking about the Backwards Cowboy.”

“Reverse Cowgirl. But that’s an interesting idea—someday we’ll have to work out just what the Backwards Cowboy might entail.”

A perfect blush this time, a really deep reddening of those pink cheeks.

“But here’s what I’m getting at,” she went on. “We would have been married. We were supposed to be married, and it’s what we would have done the minute his divorce became finalized. And then we’d be together forever.” She took a deep breath. “So what I want,” she said, “is a proxy marriage. I want you to stand in for him, as his proxy, and we’ll be married.”

He had a whole batch of objections. There was no such thing as proxy marriage in the LDS church, and she wasn’t a Mormon, and the person she wanted to marry hadn’t been a Mormon, so how could they go through an LDS sacrament, let alone by proxy?

“I know all that,” she said. “It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with the church, or with any church. Or with the government, either, and there wouldn’t need to be any clergy involved.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It would be a private exchange of vows,” she said. “Without witnesses. Just the two of us, just you and I, except you’d more or less become him during the ceremony, using his name and standing in for him. As his proxy—that’s what it would come down to.”

“And this ceremony—”

She reached into her purse. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve written it out. See what you think.”

He unfolded the sheet of paper, read it through. “ ‘I, Sidney Teibel’—that was his name?”

“Yes, but it’s not TEE-bel. It’s TIE-bel, rhymes with bible.”

She’d made up the surname. Read it somewhere, couldn’t even remember where, and had no idea how its original owner may have pronounced it. So why was she correcting Kellen’s pronunciation?

“ ‘I, Sidney Teibel, do hereby take you, Marsha Anne Whitlock, to be my wife in the eyes of God and man . . .’ ”

The vows were lengthy ones, and on the flowery side. She realized as she heard Kellen read them out that she might have gotten the least bit carried away.

“Ever since I met you on Race Street in Philadelphia, there has been no one in my heart but you. Your lips, your breasts, your thighs, your private parts . . .”

She’d composed their vows a few days before she got to Provo, at a computer terminal in an Internet café, and that third cup of coffee had put her one caffeinated toke over the line.

That wouldn’t have happened if she’d been an observant Mormon. Maybe they were on to something, keeping their distance from coffee. But when their alarm clocks went off, how did they keep their eyes open?

“. . . to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to have earthshaking sex with . . .”

They were in Kellen’s apartment. Over their glasses of lemonade, she’d said they would need someplace quiet and private for their exchange of vows, and he’d only hesitated for a moment before suggesting his apartment. She found this reassuring, along with the way his eyes kept dropping to her breasts.

“. . . as long as we both shall live.”

Her turn now. She took a breath, lowered her eyes to the piece of paper with her vows all printed out. “I, Marsha Anne Whitlock . . .”

Good thing she looked at the script. She’d almost said Whitcomb instead of Whitlock. A hell of a thing if she got her own name wrong in the recitation of her marriage vows.

“. . . to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to suck and to swallow, to admit and to welcome into all the openings of my body . . .”

Fucking coffee. That third cup was murder.

She’d brought the rings, matching unadorned wedding bands, gold-plated rather than solid gold, and probably a good bet to turn their fingers green if they wore them for any length of time. But they’d do for now, and he’d placed one on her ring finger, and she’d done the same for him. And now, their vows concluded, it would have been time for someone to tell him that he could kiss the bride, but in the absence of clergy he’d have to figure that out for himself.

And damned if he didn’t manage to do just that. He took a step toward her, and she picked up her cue and moved at once into the circle of his arms, and raised her mouth to his.

Lips that had never touched liquor—or tobacco or coffee or Coca-Cola, or, God help us, pussy—now touched hers, and the depth of her own response surprised her. Without any conscious thought she opened to his kiss, and put a little tongue into it, and when his hand cupped her bottom and drew her in closer, she let a moan escape her lips even as she pressed her loins into his.

“Oh, Sidney,” she said. “Sid, my darling. My beloved husband.”

He looked uncertain what to say, so she spared him the need to say anything. “We have to consummate our marriage, my darling.” And when it looked as though he might hesitate, she said, “You’re Sidney now, you’re his proxy, you’re my husband in the sight of God. So it’s not only right for us to go to bed, it’s essential.”

He nodded, swallowed, said he’d be back in a minute. He went into the bathroom, and she used his absence to get something from her purse. She tucked it between the mattress and the frame, where she could each it easily.

Then she shed her clothes. A white wedding gown would have been nice, but she’d exchanged vows in the skirt and sweater she’d worn to meet him at Dragon’s Keep, and she took them off now, took off everything, and when he emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped discreetly around his middle she met him wearing nothing but a smile.

His eyes widened at the sight of her, and his mouth fell open. And did the towel suddenly protrude a little in front, or was that her imagination?

Well, that was a question she could answer readily enough. She went to him, unhooked the towel, let it fall to the floor. He was tumescent but not fully erect, and she was pleased to note that his penis was large and nicely shaped. And circumcised, which was always a plus, but she’d known it would be. Mormons circumcised their male infants, it said so all over the Internet. They didn’t throw a party to celebrate it, the way the Jews did, but they got the job done.

“Oh, Sid,” she said, sinking to her knees before him. “I know how much you like this.” And she took his dick in her mouth.

He liked it, all right. He liked it so much that she thought he was going to consummate their marriage on the spot, and she herself was into it, and had to force herself to draw away before he could finish.

“Oh, Sid, my darling,” she said, getting to her feet, holding him by his dick. “Now, my love, I want you to do what you love to do so much.”

She led him to the bed, arranged herself upon it, and managed to indicate by gestures what she wanted him to do.

It wasn’t what he had in mind.

“I can’t,” he said. “Not until I’m married.”

“But you are married, silly. What do you think we just did?”

He shook his head, held up a hand as if to ward off Satan. “I’m engaged to be married,” he said, “and when my fiancée and I are man and wife in the eyes of the Church, then I will, uh, perform oral sex on her. But I’ve never done that with her, or with anyone else. I can’t, I won’t, I—”

“That’s why you wouldn’t go down on Rita.”

He gaped.

“Yeah, she told me. ‘This gorgeous guy, he’s got a beautiful dick, plus he’s a really great kisser, but he wouldn’t kiss me where it counts.’ But you wanted to, didn’t you?”

“If circumstances had been different—”

“They are. Look, it’s fine for Kellen Kimball to save the tip of his tongue for the girl he’s going to marry. But that’s got nothing to do with you right now, because you’re not Kellen Kimball anymore. Right now you’re Sidney Teibel, and you’re married to me, so you get to have your cake and eat me, too.”

“But—”

She touched herself, dipped her fingers into her wetness, then held her hand to his face. “Can you smell how hot I am for you?”

What was he going to do, hold his breath? He hesitated, then took hold of her wrist, brought her moist fingers to his nose, inhaled her essence.

“That’s me,” she told him. “That’s me, that’s my love for you, Sidney. You breathe me in and part of me becomes a part of you. Open your mouth.”

His lips parted. And it was his hand on her wrist that brought her fingers into his mouth. His lips closed around her fingertips, and he sucked on her fingers like a greedy infant.

“Oh, Sidney,” she said, and arranged herself again on the bed, making room for him to kneel at her feet.

“Oh, yes,” she said “Take your time, Sidney. Eat me good. Make me crazy.”

What he lacked in acquired skill he made up for in enthusiasm. He took hold of her buttocks in his hands and he glued his mouth to her crotch, and he went at her as if for sustenance. If he could have maintained an elementary tempo she’d have gone off in minutes, but he had the natural lack of rhythm of a white boy from Utah, and she kept getting thrown off stride.

Maybe she couldn’t get off, but she could tell he wasn’t more than a few strokes away, just from thrusting against the bedsheet while he worked away at her. Her hand fastened on the knife she’d wedged beneath the mattress. It was a folding stiletto, and she’d tucked it away already opened and ready for use, and she looked down at the back of his head and rehearsed the movement in her mind: lean forward, the arm swinging in a great half-circle, the blade descending . . .

No.

This wasn’t a game, for God’s sake. The marriage had to be consummated.

She put the knife out of sight, sat up, tugged at his upper arms. “Now!” she cried. “Sid, Sid, I want you inside me. Now!”

He flung himself forward—on her, in her, and she locked her thighs around his hips and met his feverish pelvic thrusts with thrusts of her own. His mouth sought hers and she tasted her own juices. He was right on the brink, and she figured she’d fake an orgasm of her own, timing it to coincide with his, but her body surprised her with a genuine orgasm before she could create a bogus one.

“Oh, Sidney,” she said, as he lay panting on top of her. “Oh, my darling husband. Oh, what could be better than this?”

And almost without effort, and certainly without a second thought, she slipped the knife right between his ribs and into his heart.

Zero.

The first thing she did was take a shower. He had one of those infinitely adjustable shower heads, and she fixed it so that hot water sprayed down on her with great force. His shampoo and conditioner were one of those overpriced signature brands they sold in hair salons, and she used them lavishly, because what good would they do anyone after she left?

Zero.

Nobody left on her list, because while there might be only a single body in the bedroom, slowly working its way from 98.6º to, say, 72º on the Fahrenheit scale, Kellen Kimball wasn’t the only man who’d just died. He’d also been Sid, the man she met on Race Street, the man who took her to bed in Philadelphia and never paid the price.

Until now. Now he was dead, and she’d killed him.

Oh, not literally. She wasn’t delusional, she knew what she’d done and to whom she’d done it. But she also knew that Kellen Kimball was a Mormon, that he’d participated in proxy baptisms, and if a proxy baptism could get some dead guy into heaven, why couldn’t a proxy marriage get Sid off her list? Yes, she’d killed Kellen—but the same thrust of the knife had killed Sid as well. And if there was a real living and breathing Sid out there, well, so what? Because in her own little world he was a dead man.

She got out of the shower, finally, and used two of his towels to dry herself. There’d been a third towel, the one he’d wrapped himself in, the one that had hidden his hard-on-in-progress when he returned to her. His sport shirt and chinos were folded on top of the lidded toilet, along with his socks and underpants, and she carried them to the bedroom and arranged them on the chair next to the bed.

She thought there ought to be another article of clothing, and she found it on a hook behind the bathroom door, a single white cotton affair with some marks on it that might have been Nordic runes, or perhaps Masonic symbols. This, she knew from her Internet research, was his Mormon garment, to be worn beneath his clothes at all times, for reasons the Internet had been unable to explain all that coherently.

Should she put it on him? It was constructed like a jumpsuit, except without arms or legs. Sort of like a clumsy and loose-fitting leotard. No cinch to get a live person into it, and sure to be trickier still with a dead one.

Never mind. He seemed a safe candidate for Mormon heaven, whatever sort of place that might prove to be, and she didn’t figure he needed to be wearing his garment to get in.

She went through his wallet. His cash came to less than a hundred dollars, but she took it all the same. If there was any more money hidden in his apartment, she certainly couldn’t find it.

She took the knife. She’d bought it in Provo, in a sporting goods store, and the clerk might remember the sale. Not that it mattered—plenty of people had seen her with Kellen, in Dragon’s Keep and the juice bar and on the streets of Provo, and they could describe her to the cops, and what good would that do them? A pretty young woman in a skirt and blouse. So?

Still, she held the knife under running water for a few minutes, then closed it and stowed it in her purse. She added the ring from her finger and went back for the one she’d placed on Kellen’s. The rings and the knife could all go in a storm drain, or could as easily be abandoned in some public place where they’d be quickly scooped up and carried off by new owners.

She left, and locked the door after herself. With any luck at all, she’d be long gone before anyone unlocked that door, or broke it down.

Zero.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LAWRENCE BLOCK published his first novel in 1958. He has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and has received Lifetime Achievement awards from the Crime Writers’ Association (UK), the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He has won the Nero, Philip Marlowe, Societe 813, and Anthony awards, and is a multiple recipient of the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon awards. He and his wife, Lynne, are devout New Yorkers and relentless world travelers.

Email: lawbloc@gmail.com

Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

Blog: LB’s Blog

Facebook: lawrence.block

Website: lawrenceblock.com

Getting Off on Amazon

For a list of all my available fiction, with my series novels listed in chronological order, go to About LB’s Fiction.

And if you LOVE any of these stories, I’d really appreciate it if you’d tell your friends—including the friends you haven’t met, by blogging, posting an online review, or otherwise spreading the word.

Thanks!

Lawrence Block

Table of Contents

Title Page

Zeroing In

About the Author