CONJUGAL RITES

LAWRENCE BLOCK

Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design: Jayne E. Smith

Ebook Design: JW Manus

When she first laid eyes on him, he’d looked preppy. That was in a bar in Riverdale, within walking distance of the last stop on the Bronx-bound Number One train, and she knew that much because she knew she’d walked there. She was drinking a Cosmopolitan when their eyes met. He bought her the next Cosmo, and the next thing she’d been able to remember was waking up in his bed.

He had looked a little less generic in the morning. In daylight she’d noted the vivid blue eyes, the once-broken nose, the pouting sensuous mouth. He was a Wall Street guy, she’d learned, and she could see him in that role, aiming to take his place as one of the self-styled masters of the universe.

That had been a while ago, and the years had taken their toll. Online, she’d learned that he’d come by the preppy look honestly. He’d been at Choate first, then Yale, then the B school at Columbia. Destiny had clearly meant him to wear suits from J. Press, khakis and polos from J. Crew.

Was it any wonder that he looked a little older and less prepossessing in a burnt-orange jumpsuit?

That would add years, all right. And it wasn’t a simple matter of costume. Just being incarcerated—that would tend to age a man, wouldn’t it?

The prison was in an upstate New York town she’d never heard of, a good deal closer to the Canadian border than to the city of New York. You had to take two buses to get there, an express to Albany and a local the rest of the way. She was one of a dozen women who migrated from the express to the local, and she figured they were all on similar errands, visiting their incarcerated mates.

An interesting word, incarcerated. As far as she could tell, it was used exclusively by persons to whom it applied—and, to be sure, by the women who loved them. The five syllables served to take the sting out; I am presently incarcerated didn’t hit as hard as The fuckers locked me up and swallowed the key.

She’d noticed one woman in particular on the Albany express, a dishwater blonde with sharp facial features and a feral look to her. Not long ago she’d watched a cable documentary on crystal meth, and every women in it looked like this one. So did half the women on any episode of Cops.

They’d exchanged glances, and she wasn’t surprised when the blonde took the seat next to her on the local bus. “I’m Barb,” she announced.

“Audrey.”

“I guess we’re going to the same place, huh?”

“I guess.”

“I’m on this bus every week. You see a lot of the same people, and then you stop seein’ some of ’em and instead you start to see different ones.”

“Like life itself.”

Barb had to think about that. Then she nodded. “Got that right,” she said. “I don’t think I seen you before.”

“First visit.”

“Yeah? Your man, right?”

And I’m standing by him. Just like Tammy Wynette wants me to do.

“Well, sort of,” she said. “But I haven’t seen him in years. We more or less lost track of each other. I’m not sure he’ll remember me.”

Barb gave her a look. “How’s anybody gonna forget you? Only question’s are you on the list. ’Cause if you’re not an approved visitor, no way they gonna let you in.”

“His lawyer said I’m approved, I won’t have any trouble.”

“Well, you’re okay, then. You figure on using the truck?”

“The truck?”

“You know, Audrey. The truck.” A sigh. “The fuck truck. Pardon the expression, but that’s what everybody calls it. What it is, it’s a trailer more’n a truck, and you get an hour in there. Like, private time.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “See, in a way I hardly know him. He’s been, uh, incarcerated for almost three years, and I didn’t even find out about it until a month ago. I’m not even sure why I’m here visiting him. Would I want private time with him? Maybe, but how do I know he’d want to go in the truck with me?”

Barb gave her a look. She said, “Three years?”

“Plus a couple of months.”

“Honey,” Barb said, “that man’d settle for private time with a nanny goat. Will he go in the truck with you? You’re kidding, right?”

But when they brought her in to see Peter Fuhrmann, it wasn’t in the designated trailer, and you couldn’t call it quiet time. After she’d passed through a scanner and been strip-searched by a matron, she wound up sitting in front of a long window. There were women on either side of her, talking to men in orange jumpsuits on the other side of the window. There was an empty chair across from her, but it didn’t remain empty for long. A man appeared, wearing the orange jumpsuit that seemed to be standard here, walked to the empty chair, and looked at her for a long moment before sitting down.

Would she have recognized him?

She knew him right away, saw the man she’d spent a night with in the man who sat across from her now. But she’d been expecting him. If she’d encountered him across the aisle in a subway car, or at adjacent tables in a diner, would any mental bells have rung?

No way to tell. And what did it matter? He was here now, and so was she.

He said, “Audrey Willard.”

“That’s right.”

“Do I know you? Because the name didn’t register when my lawyer mentioned it.”

Well, how could it? She’d never used it before. She sort of liked Audrey, it was unusual without being weird, old-fashioned without smelling of lavender sachets. He’d have known her by another name, and she was clueless as to what that name might have been.

“I may not have given you my real name,” she said.

“You look familiar, but I can’t—”

“You pulled me out of a bar in Riverdale,” she said, “or I pulled you, or we pulled each other. And the next thing I remembered was waking up the next morning.”

“Oh, God. I owe you an apology.”

“Not really,” she said, “because you gave me a repeat performance that got rid of my hangover faster than any aspirin ever did.”

“Jennifer.”

Entirely possible, she thought. She’d been Jennifer often enough back then. It had been a sort of default alias at the time.

“I knew you looked familiar. I remember you. You gave me your number. But when I called—”

“I gave you a wrong number.”

“I tried switching digits, but nothing worked.”

“So I’m the one who owes you an apology,” she said.

“Well—”

“Or maybe it’s a wash,” she said. “A wrong number, a couple of Roofies—”

“You could have died,” he said.

“Like that girl.”

He nodded. “Like Maureen McConnelly,” he said.

She was in Ohio when she discovered what had become of Peter Fuhrmann. She sat at a computer terminal and went to work, and she’d have found him in a couple of keystrokes if she’d had any idea what to look for.

His name, for instance. Google Peter Fuhrmann and he’d pop up in a heartbeat, with a flood of articles providing extensive coverage of the case. And it got a ton of ink—a good-looking Wall Street guy, a Choatie, a Yalie, all of that preppy street cred topped off with a Columbia MBA, who wakes up one fine morning with a beautiful girl in his bed. She’s a BIC, which is to say Bronx Irish Catholic, and she’s all of nineteen, in her second year at Marymount Manhattan College. And she’ll never graduate, nor will she ever be twenty, because, see, she’s dead.

If she’d been in New York when it happened, she’d almost certainly have known about it. That’s where it got a big play in the press. The story made the wire services, but it wasn’t that big a story and it didn’t play that well out of town, because Peter Fuhrmann never denied the charges. Yes, he’d picked up Maureen McConnelly in a Riverdale bar. Yes, he’d brought her home to his apartment—his bachelor pad, one tabloid called it. And yes, he’d poured her a drink, and helped his cause by dissolving a pill in it. The pill was Flunitrazepam, more popular under its trade name of Rohypnol. It was indeed the notorious date-rape drug, and date rape was precisely what happened to Maureen.

One enterprising reporter turned up a couple of young men who characterized feeding Roofies to Maureen as overkill. Reading between the lines, she got the message that you didn’t have to drug Maureen to get in her pants, didn’t have to get her drunk, didn’t have to swear undying love. All you had to do was take out your dick and wave it at her.

Well, she thought, why not? The girl’s dead, so let’s all tell each other what a whore she was.

But she didn’t spend too much time thinking about that part of the story, because there were other more important elements to consider. The drug rendered Maureen not altogether comatose but unfocused and acquiescent, a willing if not particularly active participant in what followed. One of its effects would have been retrograde amnesia, so Maureen very likely wouldn’t have remembered what happened to her, but she never got the chance to find out. Peter Fuhrmann had his way with her, and during a lull in the proceedings he paid enough attention to his silent partner to realize that she was no longer breathing.

If he’d been the least bit resourceful, she thought, he’d have got her back into her clothes, slung her over his shoulder, and left her under a bush in Van Cortlandt Park. Instead, after an unsuccessful stab at CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he’d picked up the phone and called the police.

Because it was obvious to him what had happened. He’d dosed the poor girl with a powerful drug, and it had stopped her heart and killed her.

“You called 911 right away,” she said. “You didn’t even call your lawyer first.”

“I called a lawyer later on, from the police station. I knew I’d need assistance with the plea bargaining.”

“You confessed.”

“I did it,” he said. “How was I going to say I didn’t? It was completely unintentional, I’d never heard of anybody having a bad reaction to Roofies. Maybe a headache and a hangover the next day, but you’d get that from the alcohol, wouldn’t you?”

“Normally,” she said, “it would just keep a girl from resisting. Or remembering.”

“If I could go back in time,” he said with feeling. “And wipe it out, the way the drug wipes it from a person’s memory. But you never can, can you?”

Because he was quick to confess, because he was prepared to enter a plea, the state didn’t have to knock itself out preparing a case. The post-mortem examination went looking for Flunitrazepam, and that’s what they found. They had no reason to look further, and death was accordingly attributed to cardiac and respiratory failure caused by the drug.

When she read about it, sitting in an Internet café in Ohio, she looked at a photograph of Maureen. She pictured the girl walking home with Peter, pictured her holding a glass of vodka. Pictured her dead.

I did that, she thought. I killed you.

Because, if they’d thought to look, they’d have found more than Roofies in Maureen’s system. She couldn’t even remember what she’d used, but she’d emptied the contents of a glassine envelope into a bottle of vodka before leaving Peter’s apartment. She’d hoped it would kill him, but had considered the possibility that someone else might be the first to sample the vodka. A woman, a male friend, even a tippling cleaning woman, raiding the liquor cabinet for a mid-afternoon bracer.

What did it matter, really? She’d liked the idea of leaving behind something that would kill someone, without knowing—or caring, really—who she killed, or when. A couple of times she ran scenarios in her mind, imagining what might happen, and it was exciting enough, but she’d never felt the need to find out what really did happen.

And time passed, and she more or less forgot about it.

She’d been different then. Well, no, that wasn’t it. She’d been the same person, she’d always been the same person, but her mission had been much less focused in those early days. She liked to pick up men and go home with them and have sex with them—though the sex in and of itself was never really the point. And she liked to end those evenings with more money than she started out, because you could almost always walk away with a few hundred dollars, and sometimes you scored big and left with a couple of thousand, and that made life easier and gave you a sense of accomplishment—but the money in and of itself wasn’t really the point, either.

And she liked to kill.

No question, right from the very first time she liked to kill. It really got her motor going. The sex was a whole lot hotter when she knew she was going to kill the guy, and the money was more gratifying when she could think of it as a sort of bounty that was hers for taking her partner off the board. Sometimes she got off on the terror, when they saw it coming, and sometimes she killed them in their sleep and they were dead before they knew it, and either way it worked for her.

But there was no real purpose to it back then. It just sort of was.

Consciously, anyhow. Because it seemed to her now that she’d been trying to accomplish something all along, even though she had never spelled it out for herself. And then the day came when she just plain got it: she wanted to so arrange things that there was no man alive who’d been with her, no man who could tell his friends about her, no man left to sit around remembering what he’d done with her.

Which gave her work to do. First she had to remember them, and then she had to find them, and then, finally, she had to do what she should have done in the first place.

She had to kill them.

How?

There was a cab waiting when she left the prison, and the driver took her to a motel about a mile away. The office smelled of curry, so it was no great surprise when the manager turned out to be Indian, but how Sanjit Patel and his wife had wound up playing host to prison visitors in the middle of nowhere was one of life’s great mysteries.

The room was clean, if a little shabby, and the shower was hot and the TV got sixty channels, so it would be no hardship to stay there while she worked out a plan. And that might take a while, because she didn’t know where to start.

She was on the approved visitor list, which meant she was entitled to sit across from him with nothing between them but a thick pane of glass. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t pass anything to him, and couldn’t even have on her person anything that wouldn’t get through a metal detector, and pass the scrutiny of the prison matron. There was no way she could get a weapon in with her, and even if she could, what possible good would it do her?

If she had a gun, and if she were proficient with it, and if she could sneak it in there, and if by some chance the glass wasn’t bulletproof, as she rather suspected it was, then she might conceivably be able to put a bullet in him. But she couldn’t possibly get away with it. They’d have her in custody before he fell off his chair.

So what did that leave?

The trailer was an Airstream, its sculpted silvery exterior badly pitted by the elements. It was small, designed to be towed behind a car, not moored permanently in a trailer park. Inside, thick dark curtains covered the windows. The maroon carpet was stained, and you could smell the toilet.

An unpainted plywood box held a mattress a foot off the floor. The sheets were not visibly soiled, and the stack of towels beside the bed were neatly folded, and apparently clean.

The fuck truck.

“You don’t have to go through with this,” Peter Fuhrmann said.

“But I want to.”

“Really?”

Did she? Well, it was a pretty sordid space for a romantic encounter. And Peter, dressed in his orange jumpsuit and wearing his hangdog expression, didn’t exactly set her pulse racing. But she was here, wasn’t she? And he was one of only three names left on her list, and, well—

“Right off the bat,” she said, “I can think of one thing that’s definitely worse than having sex here.”

“And what would that be?”

“Being here,” she said, “and not having sex.”

That at least got a smile from him. “It’s no place for state dinners,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”

“Or intimate conversations.”

“Or curling up with a good book.”

“Or even a bad one. Peter? Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you were—”

“With someone?” He avoided her eyes. “I haven’t been with anyone since . . .”

He couldn’t say the name, so she said it for him. “Since Maureen.”

“Yes.”

“You never—”

“No.” He was silent for a moment. “I couldn’t even think about it. It’s as if that part of my life ended when—”

“When she died.”

“Yes.”

“And in prison—”

“People find outlets,” he said. “Men hook up with each other. That’s of no interest to me. And there are screws who can smuggle a woman in for the right price. Screws, that’s what they call the guards. What we call the guards, I should say.”

“But that’s of no interest to you either, is it?”

“No. I don’t even—”

“Don’t what?”

“Masturbate.”

“That’s what I thought you were going to say. You don’t?”

“No.”

“And when the urge comes—”

“It doesn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Audrey, the last time I had sex with a woman, she died.”

“It wasn’t the sex that killed her.”

“No, it was the drug I gave her.”

No, sweetie, it was the poison I gave her.

“And here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever said to another human being. See, there’s no way to know exactly when she died. Was she already dead while I was—”

“Still fucking her.”

He winced at the word, then nodded. “I’ll never be able to know, and I don’t even want to know, but I can’t get the notion out of my mind. And I can’t bear to think about it.”

Actually, she thought, the whole idea was pretty hot. But that wasn’t something she was prepared to share with Peter.

Instead she asked him why he’d agreed to visit the trailer with her.

“Because I didn’t know how to say no,” he said. “Isn’t that a hell of a reason? And I thought maybe, oh—”

“Maybe you’d wind up wanting to.”

“I guess.”

“But you don’t.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t—”

“Be able to do anything? Is that why you gave girls Roofies? A sort of Viagra by proxy? The girl takes it and you get a hardon?”

“It may have been something like that.”

“Then let’s try a little role play, Peter. I’ll take off all my clothes and just lie there. You can pretend I’m in a coma. Or, hey, this is even better—you can pretend I’m dead.”

He stared at her.

“What’s the matter, you don’t think that’s funny? All right, let’s turn it around. You be the one in the coma.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Take off your clothes,” she said, in a tone that clearly expected obedience. “Now lie down. On your back, Peter. Eyes closed. You don’t get to see me, Peter. And you can’t move. You’re paralyzed, you’re unconscious, you’ve barely got a pulse. All you can do is lie there and breathe.”

She got out of her own clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, reached out a hand and took hold of him.

“No, don’t move. And don’t open your eyes.” Her grip tightened. “I’m not kidding. All you do is lie there, or I swear I’ll rip it off.”

She didn’t know what he was doing with his mind, how he was letting it play. She didn’t care. Her own fantasy was demanding all of her attention.

And it kept changing, insistent upon reinventing itself. At first it was pretty close to the reality of the situation: He was lying there, entirely in her power, unable to move because she had forbidden him to move, unable to see because her words were as blinding as a strip of duct tape over his eyes.

And then it changed, and in her mind he was physically immobilized, spreadeagled on the bed with his hands and feet in restraints, his mouth taped shut, a blindfold in place.

And in the third phase he was drugged. Unconscious, comatose, unable even to feel what she was doing with her hands and mouth.

And then—bingo!—he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she’d been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she’d absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own, and the last thing she wanted to do was stroke their bodies, or suck their cocks.

But this dead man was different. This corpse was warm, and sentient. And so she touched and stroked the dead flesh, and the dead penis rose up in her mouth like Lazarus, and, well, she really got into it.

There was this line from an old blues song, just a fragment of a line, something about a woman who was so hot she could make a dead man come. The words echoed in her mind, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, make a dead man come, and he was rock-hard now, and unable to lie entirely still, unable to keep from moaning, and God she felt strong, God she felt powerful, and yes! Yes!

And she did indeed make this dead man come, and his orgasm triggered one of her own, not her typical long rolling climax but something very brief but furiously intense, almost masculine in nature. There was a moment when she went away, disappeared somewhere in time and space. Just an instant, and then she was back in the Airstream fuck truck, and she realized with perfect clarity that she’d accomplished something extraordinary, something more remarkable than simply raising the dead. She’d had sex with this inert being, this man who was playing dead at her command, and by so doing she had made the fantasy a reality.

He was dead. She’d fucked him dead, she’d sucked not only the life force but the very life itself out of him, and now she could cross him off her list.

Two.

She’d have some explaining to do. But they’d searched her enough to know she’d brought nothing into the trailer but her own self and the clothes on her back, and if his heart wasn’t up to the stress of sexual activity, well, that was no fault of hers, was it? They’d let her go, they’d have to, and they’d never see her again.

“Audrey?”

Oh, fuck. The son of a bitch was alive.

Shit. Three.

Conjugal visits, it turned out, were limited in both duration and frequency. You couldn’t stay in the fuck truck for more than two hours—which struck her as reasonable, actually—and you couldn’t go there more than once a week. On reflection, she decided that was probably reasonable, too. If prisoners got to fuck their wives any time they felt like it, they wouldn’t have sufficient energy to plan future crimes, let alone organize a decent riot.

But it certainly didn’t make her life any easier. She could visit him once a day if she wanted, could simply show up at the prison and get ushered into the big room where they’d sit on opposite sides of a window. But if she couldn’t kill him in the fuck truck, how could she kill him in the visitors room? All she could do in there was have a conversation with him, and she’d just as soon talk to herself.

“I’ll be back next week,” she told him in the visitors room, a day after their visit to the Airstream trailer. “That’s if you want me to.”

Oh, he wanted her to.

“Then I’ll come,” she said. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can bring you?”

“If it’s not too much trouble—”

“Just tell me.”

Cigarettes, he said. If she could manage a carton of cigarettes, that would be great. What brand? Well, Marlboro would be ideal.

“I’ll bring you a carton tomorrow or the next day,” she said. “Just as soon as I can.”

Two days later she presented the requested carton of Marlboros to an attendant, and he gave her a receipt for it; it would be delivered as soon as possible to one Peter Fuhrmann. She went back to her motel and wished she could pack up and leave. Did she really have to turn up the next morning? Couldn’t she wait for her gift to work its magic?

She watched TV until she was able to sleep, then slept until she woke up. She turned up during visiting hours and was just slightly disappointed when they ushered her into the room with Fuhrmann on the other side of the window.

“I got the cigarettes,” was the first thing he said to her. “That was really nice of you. Thanks.”

“I guess you’ve been smoking like crazy ever since.”

“Oh, I don’t smoke.”

Her reaction was enough to put a smile on his face. And he went on to explain that cigarettes were the preferred currency inside prison walls, that they were better than money when it came to obtaining favors. “They’re too valuable to smoke,” he said, “and I think if I ever had the habit I’d have to quit while I was here. It’d be like lighting up dollar bills and smoking them.”

“So these packs of Marlboros just pass from hand to hand like money? Doesn’t anybody ever smoke them?”

“Oh, the smokers smoke them,” he said. “They’re addicted, so what choice do they have? But I was never a smoker.”

“And you’ve got an MBA,” she said, “so you know how to game the system.”

Which was more than she could say for herself.

Back to the motel. She packed, and found room in her suitcase for the hypodermic needle and the little vial of colorless liquid. There was still some left. She’d only used a few drops on the Marlboros.

She hadn’t even opened the carton, let alone any of the packs. There’d been no need. The hard part had been getting what she needed from a pharmacist, and she’d worked up an elaborate story which in the end she’d never needed to deliver. Because the guy behind the counter in Glens Falls practically drooled at the sight of her, so the easiest thing was to come back right around closing time and let him coax her into the back room.

He had a couch there, and she rather doubted she was the first woman he’d shared it with. But she knew she’d be the last. He went down on her first, which was promising, but before she could get anything out of it he sprang up and mounted her, and after a few thrusts he was done. That made him the fourth name on her list, but he didn’t stay on it for long; there was a pair of heavy-duty shears at hand, and he was dead before he could catch his breath.

She scooped up close to three hundred dollars from the cash register, plus a pair of fifties and three hundreds in the lower compartment. That was a decent score in the age of credit cards, and she upped it with another two hundred-plus from his wallet. All very welcome, because she could certainly use the money. Cash didn’t seem to last long. She was always on the verge of running out of it.

But the money was beside the point. There was a reason she’d picked Washburn Pharmacy instead of Dell Hardware or Pick’n’Pay Market, and she found what she was looking for in a locked cupboard alongside the couch where Gerald Washburn, RPh, had had the last orgasm of his young life. The lock looked formidable enough, but inches from it a key hung from a nail, and voila!

She took everything that looked interesting, including a syringe. What she didn’t take she scattered, leaving the place as she imagined an impatient junkie might leave it.

On the way out, she helped herself to a carton of Marlboros. Like, why not?

In the end, she decided to keep only a bare minimum of the pharmaceuticals she’d taken. She’d had the impulse to hang on to everything, because you never knew what might come in handy. But you also never knew who would go through your possessions and wonder how you’d happened to turn into a walking drugstore, and a trace of these controlled substances would lead straight to Washburn Pharmacy, and wasn’t that where they found poor Washburn with a pair of scissors in his chest? Say, do you suppose there could be a connection?

She’d filled the syringe, worked the needle between the edges at the end of the carton, then forced it into a pack and, assuming she’d done it correctly, expelled a few drops of its contents into a cigarette. She repeated the process a couple of times, then did the same at the carton’s other end.

It was hit or miss, she knew. There were two packs at each end of the carton, six more in the middle. If he started with an end pack, she might get results in a hurry, but if he started in the middle, well, how long could it take? If the man smoked a pack a day, within a week at the outside he’d be into one of the end packs, and sooner or later she’d get lucky even as his luck ran out.

Yeah, right. Who’d have guessed the bastard didn’t smoke at all?

Her next visit came a full week later, and the greatest moment of anxiety was at the security check. She hadn’t brought cigarettes this time, and had nothing on her person that might draw the interest of the scanner or the matron, but suppose one of her doctored Marlboros had worked its magic? Suppose an inmate had taken a deep and final drag, and someone had figured it all out?

Maybe they were looking for her, waiting for her. The possibility had dissuaded her from bringing him a second carton of cigarettes, and had nearly kept her from showing up at all. But no one looked at her twice, and if the matron’s hands were almost invasive enough to earn the woman a place on her list, well, the intrusion was over quickly, and before she knew it she was in the Airstream trailer with Peter Fuhrmann.

“You’re here,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show.”

“I said I would.”

“You might have had second thoughts. I mean, what are we to each other, Audrey? A few years ago we spent less than ten hours together, and you were unconscious for most of them.”

“The part I was awake for wasn’t so bad.”

“I drugged you, and you could have died from it.”

“But I seem to have survived, haven’t I?”

“And thank God for that, but the point is you could have died. Another girl did.”

“That’s why she’s not here, Peter.” She cocked her head. “But I am. And they won’t let us have the trailer forever, and they don’t call it the Talk Truck, do they? So do we really want to spend the whole time talking?”

“Audrey,” he said. “Audrey, Audrey, Audrey.”

Well, it wasn’t a horrible name. If he insisted upon saying it over and over, it might as well be a name she could stand.

They’d gotten past the little game of pretending he was drugged and immobilized, and their lovemaking was more spirited this time around. He’d had a week to think about what he might like to do to and with her, and he turned out to be equipped with both imagination and skill, and she didn’t have to feign her response.

Oh, it might have been better. It would have heightened her pleasure considerably if there’d been a way to conclude things with his death. As she got close, she imagined him dying in a dozen different ways—shot, stabbed, throttled, hanging from a rope—and that all helped, but it wasn’t the real thing.

The real thing would have to wait. Forever, apparently.

“Audrey.”

She rolled onto her side, laid a hand on his chest. “I like the way you say my name.”

“I didn’t even know your name. You told me your name was Jennifer, and I’d pretty much forgotten you, false name and all, until you turned up here.” He drew a breath. “And gave me a reason to live.”

Oh?

“I hadn’t planned on saying that,” he said, “but I think I’ve got to get past keeping things to myself. I wasn’t planning on killing myself, nothing like that. I’ve thought about it and rejected it.”

Well, think about it some more, why don’t you?

“But all I was doing was letting my life run its course. My sentence has three more years to run. My lawyer arranged for me to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and I’ve served two years of a five year sentence. And I figured that gave me three more years to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I didn’t mind postponing that decision.”

“And now?”

“The day before yesterday,” he said, “I filed an application for parole.”

He’d been eligible since the completion of his first year. But you had to apply, and each month he’d passed up the opportunity to do so. Because all parole would do was force him to figure out what to do with his life, and that had been a decision he was unprepared to make.

Besides, he felt he deserved to serve his full sentence. He’d killed Maureen, whether or not it had been his intention, and it was only fair that he be deprived of three years, having himself deprived her of the entire remainder of her life.

And prison wasn’t so bad. He hadn’t made friends inside the walls, but he hadn’t made enemies, either, and he’d found it easy enough to take the days one at a time and get through them that way. They fed you three times a day, and if the meals weren’t Cordon Bleu, at least they kept you alive. You could find the routine of prison life limiting and confining, or you could do as he had done and adjust to it, embracing it as something that relieved you of the burden of decision. It was, in its way, like being in the army, or working for a corporation. You did what they told you to do, and one day followed another, and you got along.

“I don’t know how you feel about me,” he said, “or even how I feel about you. Am I in love with you? It certainly feels like it, but I don’t know that I can trust the feeling. I mean, I barely know you.”

Well, you got that right.

“And as far as our having a future together, it seems pointless even to speculate. But what you’ve done, Audrey, is show me that I have a future, whatever form it takes. So I put in my application, and in two months I’ll have a hearing, and then, well, I’ll have to see how it goes. I hope I’ll see you between now and then, and I hope I’ll see you when I get out, but for now you’ve given me my life back, and I’ll always be grateful to you for that. I only wish there were something I could give you in return.”

She stretched out on the bed, parted her thighs. “We’ve got half an hour,” she said. “Maybe you can think of something.”

Two months until his hearing. Then, if the parole board decided in his favor, a few weeks to run the paperwork and let him out of there.

All at once it had become manageable. She’d never given a thought to parole, never imagined it might have been available to him all along.

Of course you couldn’t predict what the parole board might do. Back in Hawley there’d been an inspector at Motor Vehicles who made sure nobody ever passed the road test the first time through. He’d find some way to fail you. So there was always the chance some similar tightass on the Parole Board made everyone apply more than once, just on general principles. But Peter had committed no infractions of penitentiary rules, pulled no time in solitary, and indeed had led an apparently blameless life until the single unfortunate incident that had put him behind bars. It would be hard to find a better candidate for parole, and she could only assume the odds were in his favor.

So now she had to keep her distance. As soon as he was free, she’d take him to bed in some yet-to-be-determined venue a little more private than the Fuck Truck. They’d celebrate his freedom, and by the time they were done she’d have her own freedom to celebrate, and one less name on her list.

Until then, she would have to do what she could to lower her profile. Every time she walked through the metal detector and into the prison, a camera recorded the visit. They wouldn’t keep the tapes forever, but how long would it be before they recycled them? Probably a week, she figured, but it could be as long as a month, so if she wanted to avoid having her features on file somewhere . . . well, it looked as though the best way to stay out of prison was to stay out of prison.

She picked up a carton of Marlboros—undoctored, this time—and paid him a last visit to tell him through the pane of glass that he wouldn’t be seeing her for a while. “I’ll be in California,” she said. “In fact I should have been there all along. I have an aunt in Yreka who’s not in good health, and I’ve been splitting caretaker duties with my sister, and I’m long overdue to get out there and take my turn.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“You probably didn’t know about the aunt, either. I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay, and I’m not sure where I’ll be staying.”

“You can’t stay with your aunt?”

“Even if I could,” she said, “I wouldn’t.” And she riffed on what a pigpen the aunt’s house was, and then went on to explain that there was someone else she had to see, not in California, because there was a conversation she had to have, and it really ought to be face to face.

“See, I’ve sort of been in a relationship,” she said. “And, well, I don’t know what the future’s going to hold for us, Peter, but I’d like to make room for us to give it a chance. Do you know what I mean?”

“I didn’t know you were seeing anybody.”

“I know, I’m full of surprises. A sister, an aunt, and now a boyfriend. Except he’s not exactly a boyfriend, and I’ve been ready to break it off for a while now, and this is the right time.” She put her palm on the glass, and once he’d matched his palm to hers she said, “Peter, no strings. You’re not under any obligation, and how can we possibly know where this is going? But I want to give it a chance, and I hope you want to, too.”

“There’s nothing I want more.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again,” she said, “but I’ll want to keep in touch, and of course I’ll want to know what happens with your hearing, and how that goes. I suppose I could write to you, but—”

“I’ll get a cell phone.”

“They’re allowed in here?”

He nodded. “I never bothered getting one,” he said. “I never saw the point. Who would I call?”

“It’s pronounced Why–reeka,” she said, “and it’s supposed to be a Shasta Indian word meaning white mountain, but I haven’t run into any Shasta Indians who can say one way or the other.”

“Isn’t there a Eureka as well?”

“There is,” she said, “and my own theory is that they were trying to call it that and found out there already was one, so they changed how they spelled it. I mean, they were both Gold Rush boomtowns, right? But Mark Twain had another explanation.”

“Oh?”

“Something about a sign for a bakery, and it was reverse-printed on glass so it read backwards, Y–R–E–K–A, and the B was worn off. But that seems farfetched to me.”

“Because the letters would be backwards,” he said. “The R and the K, anyway.”

“What I think happened,” she said, “is Mark Twain noticed that the town’s name spelled backwards was Akery, and he just made up the story from there. I mean, he made things up, didn’t he?”

“You mean A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court didn’t really happen? Another illusion shattered. But you’re getting along all right in Yreka? Your aunt’s not driving you around the bend?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “And that’s really great news about the board. That’s a lot more important than how this place got its dumb name.”

Of course she wasn’t in Yreka, or anywhere in California. She was in Baltimore, in a three-story house on the edge of Fell’s Point, where she’d managed to rent a room. She got a part-time job clerking in a copy shop that doubled as an Internet café. One of her perks was free use of a computer during her off-hours, and she spent a lot of time free-associating her way from website to website. That was how she’d come by all that information about Yreka, which she’d passed on to Peter the next time she spoke with him.

And the following day she looked up A Connecticut Yankee. That led her to Bing Crosby, who starred in one of the film adaptations, and that led her somewhere else. The Internet, she thought, was like life itself. One thing kept leading to another.

There were singles bars nearby, and shops and restaurants that drew out-of-towners. But she kept a low profile and didn’t wander far afield. She worked and surfed the net, she took her meals at a cafeteria around the corner from the copy shop, and she watched TV.

Now and then she used the phone.

“A halfway house,” she said. “And it’s in New York City? Oh, in the Bronx? Well, that could be a good thing, Peter. And that’s just where you’ll be living, isn’t it? You can come and go as you please.”

They talked about it as a way of easing the transition from imprisonment to freedom, but what she liked was the coincidence of the location. All of this had started in the Bronx, in the Riverdale section, and it was fitting that it should end there.

“I wish I could be there when you walk through the gates,” she said. “But maybe it’s better that you’ll have a week to settle in at the halfway house first.”

Just a few more weeks now . . .

She picked up her phone, keyed in the number she’d looked up earlier. Four rings, and then the machine picked up, and clear across the country in Kirkland, Washington, Rita’s voice invited her to leave a message.

She broke the connection.

She found the halfway house on Laconia Avenue at 225th Street, somewhere around the border between two Bronx neighborhoods, Williamsbridge and Edenwald. It was an unprepossessing four-story building, its crumbling brick exterior imperfectly sheathed in aluminum siding. Four men sat on the front stoop, smoking cigarettes, and it wasn’t hard to believe they’d done time upstate.

The three-story building to the right housed a bodega, its window filled with neon beer signs. There was an empty lot on the other side, rubble-strewn, girded with a cyclone fence. To keep the rubble in? To keep the rabble out?

Well, she supposed the place had a certain raffish charm. But she didn’t figure it would be hard to coax Peter away from it.

The apartment she chose was in Riverdale, and just blocks from the one where Peter Fuhrmann had fed her a Roofie, and she’d returned the favor by spiking his vodka. There was a certain symmetry that appealed to her, but she picked the neighborhood because it was easier to find a nice anonymous sublet there than in Williamsbridge or Edenwald. Riverdale was filled with Yuppies, and they were forever moving in and moving out and moving on, losing their jobs or getting better ones, breaking up with significant others, finding new lovers to move in with, and otherwise keeping the real estate market humming.

The man she sublet from was a junior executive with one of the major accounting firms, on his way to a new post in Wichita. Their deal was simple, and ideal for her purposes; it was unofficial, with no paper signed, and he’d continue to send a monthly check to the landlord while she’d send money orders to him at his new office.

Meanwhile, she gave him cash for a month’s rent, and they shook hands, and that was that. By the time he started wondering where the money order was, she’d be out of the apartment, the city, and the state.

He suggested going out for a drink to seal the bargain, and it was clear that he had more than a drink in mind. He’d been checking her out since she walked in the door. And he was cute, and she wouldn’t have minded, not in the least. Take him out for a drink, bring him home to what had just become her apartment, take him to bed and fuck his brains out, and then what? Kill him and look for another sublet?

“I really wish I could,” she said. “But these days my life’s complicated enough as it is. But some other time, huh? I mean, you never know when I might find myself in Wichita.”

There was probably a shop in Riverdale that sold sex toys, the potential customer base was certainly present, but she remembered the Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue, and it was just a subway ride away.

She picked out a batch of items, and as she was paying for them she set one aside and asked if the store could ship it for her. She wrote out the name and address.

It would be no problem, the clerk assured her. And would she like to enclose a card?

She shook her head. “She’ll know who it’s from,” she said.

She’d been staying on the cheap in a Jersey City rooming house, but once she’d sublet the Riverdale apartment she moved right in. The furniture was generic, but everything was new and neat and clean, and it would be comfortable enough for the week or two she’d be using it.

Every few days she called Peter, and was pleased when they released him right on schedule. “I’m in the van now,” he said. “It seats ten, but there’s just me and the driver. He’s taking me all the way to the halfway house.”

“In the movies,” she said, “they give you ten dollars and a cheap suit and you’re on your own.”

“They gave me the suit I was wearing when I got here. Got there, I should say, because I’m not there anymore. It doesn’t fit as well as it used to.”

“Still, I bet you look nicer in it than in the orange outfit.”

“Jesus, I hope so. They give you a ride to the halfway house because otherwise too many guys don’t make it that far.”

“They lose their way?”

“In a manner of speaking. And I can understand why. All I am right now is outside the walls, maybe thirty miles down the road, and already it feels scary.”

“Being free.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she said, “if you miss it too much, all you have to do is find some sweet young thing and kill her. They’ll take you back in a hot second.”

The silence was profound. Had she gone too far?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was supposed to be a joke, but I guess it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

“It just came out of the blue,” he said. “Took me by surprise.”

“I can see where it would. Forgive me?”

“Nothing to forgive, Audrey.”

“Well, I intend to make it up to you,” she said. “I got a place for us to be together. I know you have to spend nights at the halfway house, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. It’s a nice modern building, and the apartment’s all furnished and there’s even a view. Plus I went shopping.”

“Oh?”

“I bought us a nice bottle of wine,” she said. “Nuits-Saint-Georges. And I bought some toys for us to play with. You’ll see. We’ll have fun.”

She gave him two days to settle in at the halfway house, then met him around the corner. He was wearing a flannel shirt and well-worn jeans, and she had the feeling he wasn’t the first person to own them, that they’d been picked up at a thrift shop or handed out at the halfway house. Whatever the source, he looked good in them. They were an improvement on the orange jumpsuit, and a better choice than any suit he might have worn.

“That’s some place,” he said.

“Better than where you were? Or worse?”

“Well, all I had to do just now was open the door and walk out. That wasn’t an option upstate, so that makes this a big improvement. But it’s the same people, you know? We’re none of us wearing orange jumpsuits, but outside of that we haven’t changed all that much.”

“Oh?”

“A lot of the guys are drinking,” he said. “That’s a violation of the house rules, but nobody makes you take a Breathalyzer test. Still, if you’re a falling-down drunk they’re gonna throw you out. And there are a few I’m pretty sure are using.”

“Drugs?”

He nodded. “A neighborhood like this, how hard can it be to find somebody to cop from? And that’s not just against the house rules, it’s a parole violation and a quick ticket inside. You said something about a bottle of wine.”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s fine with me if you have some, but I think I’m going to pass. I was never in that much of a rush to get out of there, you know, but then you came along, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to breathe free air again. And drinking was never a problem for me, at least I never thought it was, but if not drinking gives me a better shot at staying out, well, I think I’ll give it a try. At least as long as I’m at the residence.”

“How do they feel about Coca Cola?”

“They’re fine with Coke,” he said, “as long as it’s not the powdered variety.”

“Then screw the wine,” she said. “I’ve got Coke in the fridge and clean sheets on the bed. And there’s a gypsy cab. He’s not allowed to pick up fares on the street, but I bet he will. See? What did I tell you? This is our lucky day.”

The sex was sweet. They started kissing, and things proceeded from there at a dreamy pace, and there was never an opportune time to show him the sex toys. Easier to scrap that script, just as she’d abandoned her plans for the wine. It was a nice bottle, a slightly pricier version of what she’d brought to Rita’s dinner table, but it could remain unopened. She wouldn’t need it, or the toys.

Sweet kisses, sweet stroking and petting. He was quite obviously in love with her—or, perhaps more accurately, he was in what he thought was love with what he thought was her. He’d got it all wrong, but while it lasted she might as well go with the flow.

And maybe, she found herself thinking, just maybe the flow she was going with was there to bring her full circle. Maybe she had done what she had to do, maybe she’d killed enough lovers to wipe the last of her father’s touches from her flesh. Maybe the relentless cycle of couple and kill and couple and kill had finally run its course.

Maybe the love he felt for her was real, and maybe it had somehow given birth to that same emotion within her. Maybe she’d punished him enough, poisoning his playmate and sending him to jail for her murder, saddling him not only with a prison sentence but with a double burden of unwarranted guilt.

And maybe she was even now responding to his love, and what stirred her now was not an itch being scratched, not the excitement of sex wedded to the anticipation of another killing, but, well, love. Her own love for him, and her anticipation—incredibly—of a life free from the need to bring an endless line of men to her bed, and from it to their graves.

Maybe she could have a life, a real life, being lover and, yes, wife to this man. A good man, a man who loved her, a man whom she could love.

Maybe—

Her climax was surflike, waves rolling and rolling, tossing her, drowning her, hurling her onto the shore. For a long moment she was somewhere else entirely, lost in space and time.

And then she was in her bed, in her sublet apartment in Riverdale, with the perspiration cooling on her skin and a man lying spent at her side.

She reached out for that last thought, a thought that cried out for violins in the background, and a visual that was all pastoral fantasy out of an Irish Spring commercial.

Maybe—

Then again, she thought, maybe not.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

The thing about Coca Cola was it had a good strong taste. You could add almost anything to it and it would still taste like Coca Cola.

That was the good thing about it. The bad thing was that if you dropped a pill into a glass or can or bottle of Coke, it did its Old Faithful imitation and fizzed like crazy.

She knew this because of a pre-teen experiment. The word at school was that you could get high by dissolving an aspirin tablet in a can of Coke, and she’d tried, and what you got was a geyser that bubbled all the Coke out of the can. After a couple of attempts, she figured out that the carbonation had something to do with the reaction, and that all she had to do was let the Coke get flat, and then add the aspirin. So she did, and the tablet dissolved without generating a burst of bubbles, and she drank the resultant mixture, and, of course, nothing happened. You didn’t get high. You didn’t even get sick. A big nothing all around.

But, if she’d gained nothing else from the experience, she’d learned not to drop pills into carbonated beverages. Happily, her pharmaceutical score had included a couple of little bottles of chloral hydrate, and Google had led her to all anybody needed to know about that marvelous substance. It was the active ingredient in the legendary Mickey Finn, invented a century and a half ago in San Francisco. A few drops of chloral hydrate in a beer or a highball, and the next thing you knew you were part of the crew of a clipper ship in the China trade. You’d been shanghaied—that’s where the word came from—and you were stuck there, at least until you got to the next port.

A few drops in a glass of Coke? Well, let’s see.

“Here,” she said. “Coca Cola, with just a little lemon juice for flavoring. Come on, drink up. We’ll toast our future, Peter.”

Perfect.

“It could be a lot worse, Peter. Like, you wake up on the heaving deck of a ship bound for Hong Kong, and the last thing you remember is knocking back a glass of red-eye in a Barbary Coast saloon.” She frowned. “But maybe this is worse. It’s hard to say.”

He didn’t say anything, but how could he? He had a six-inch length of duct tape across his mouth. He was on his back, spreadeagled on the bed, held there by restraints from the Pleasure Chest. (Gentle! Will leave no marks!)

And she’d used other toys as well.

“You were sleeping so nicely,” she said, “and I thought I’d just let you sleep forever, you know? Smother you in your sleep, or give you a shot of something lethal. The good thing about that is you’d never know what happened, but that’s the bad thing, too, because, well, you’d never know what happened.”

God, the look in his eyes. He was trying to make sense out of this, and how could he? Nor was she helping, her words wandering all over the place.

“Just to fill you in,” she said, “if you’ll pardon the expression, well, that’s a butt plug you feel in your ass. Just to keep you from feeling lonesome for the hot nights in prison. No, no really, because I know you were too much of a tightass to let yourself go that way. It’s more to set the stage, but we’ll get to that.

“And the constriction at the base of your dick, well, you’re wearing a cock ring. That’s why you’ve got such a raging hardon, even though you came like crazy less than an hour ago. The vein’s constricted, but not the artery, so the blood gets in but can’t get out, and your dick stays stiff as a board even though sex is the last thing you want right now.”

He was trying to say something. He couldn’t, of course, but a certain amount of sound came through his nose. Pathetic, really.

“Okay, cut to the chase,” she said. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing this part. Remember that woman you went to prison for? Maureen McSomething? You didn’t kill her, dumbass. I killed her.”

Wide eyes. Zero comprehension.

“You fed me a Roofie, Peter, way back when. And that wasn’t supposed to happen, because I picked you up intending to fuck you and kill you, and the next thing I knew it was morning. So we had a little party, and on the way out I spiked your vodka so that the next drink you took would be your last. But I guess you weren’t much of a vodka drinker, so Maureen got it instead, and since you told the cops about the Rohypnol, they didn’t run a good enough tox scan to find out what else might have gotten into the little darling’s system. And off you went to prison, sure you deserved whatever they gave you.”

And she explained how she hadn’t even known about it until he was a few years into his sentence, how she’d had to track him down, and how she’d been willing to do this because he was one of only three men she’d slept with who still had a pulse.

And she told him why it was important to her that he die, that she be able to cross his name off the list. She was pretty sure it wasn’t making any sense to him, if indeed it was registering at all. Hearing her own words as she spoke them, she wasn’t sure it made any sense to her, either. Why did she have to do this? What difference did it make if an ex-lover was still alive? Why should she care?

But she did care. No getting around it, she cared. Her whole life centered upon it, for better or for worse.

“So here you are,” she said. “What do you figure, is it good news or bad news? You didn’t kill that girl, so that’s a relief, right? On the other hand, you did all those years in prison and went through all that guilt for nothing, so that’s not so good, is it? But either way it doesn’t matter too much, because in a few minutes you’re going to be dead.”

She showed him the noose.

“Autoerotic asphyxiation, sweetie. To heighten your pleasure. You’ll be wearing a butt plug and a cock ring, which just might give them the idea that sex is a component here, and after you’re dead I’ll lose the restraints and the duct tape, and, well, what are they going to think? And if some CSI-type genius figures out that you had a woman around, for at least part of the proceedings, do you think they’re gonna knock themselves out looking for her? You’re a known pervert, you already drugged a girl and served time for her death, so what do they care? Poetic justice, right?”

And what would he say to that? Well, she’d never know, would she?

Two.

She sat at the white parson’s table in the windowed kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. It was a shame, she thought, that she couldn’t hang on to the apartment a little longer. But there was a dead man in the bedroom, and that meant she’d have to be moving on.

She picked up the phone, keyed in a number.

“Hello?”

“Rita?”

“Omigod, Kimmie!”

Oh, right, she was Kim, wasn’t she? And now, with Peter cooling in the other room, she never had to be Audrey again.

“I sent you a present.”

“I knew it was from you. Even if I didn’t know what it was.”

“It’s a butt plug.”

“Well, I know that now, silly. I had to Google it.”

“How? If you didn’t know—”

“I Googled ‘sex toys,’ and I found a site with everything illustrated, and I must have spent an hour just reading about one damn thing after another.”

“Just reading?”

“Kimmie!”

Funny how easy it was, talking to Rita. Funny how she’d missed this.

“. . . called a flange,” Rita was saying. “To keep it from, you know, getting lost in there.”

“Hard to explain to the intern in the emergency room.”

“God, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? ‘I don’t know how on earth it got all the way up there, doctor.’”

“They must hear a lot of stories.”

“Oh, God, you know what I read online?”

Her sudden departure was the elephant in the living room, until she had to force herself to acknowledge the beast. When the conversation hit a lull, she said, “Rita, I just had to leave. It was sudden, and I should have said goodbye, but I figured the best thing I could do was just hop on the bike and go.”

“I had this vision of you on the bike, trying to get over the Rocky Mountains.”

“I just left it at the bus station. I hated to abandon it but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it back to you.”

“I never rode it anyway. And it’d be impossible now, with a butt plug up my bottom.”

“You’re too much, Rita.”

“That’s why you left, isn’t it? Not because I’m too much, but because we were too much. That last night, when we were—”

“Jilling.”

“Yeah. It was so fucking hot, Kimmie, but then the next day it was scary.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it’s not a lesbian thing when you’re both talking about things you did with guys, right? And we never even touched each other.”

“No, but—”

“But what, Kimmie?”

“Well, if we did it again, I might have wound up sitting next to you. And I might have touched you.”

“I might have let you.”

“The phone’s safe, though, isn’t it?”

“I was just thinking that myself.”

“Rita?”

“What?”

“You’re wet, aren’t you?”

“Kimmie!”

“You have to tell me,” she said, “because I’m thousands of miles away, so I can’t reach over and find out for myself.”

“And what about you, Miss Smarty Pants? You’re a little moist yourself, aren’t you?”

“Just my cunt.”

“Oh God. When you say that word—”

“Have you been with anybody lately?”

“A guy. Two nights ago. It was okay, it was fun. But you know what I kept thinking afterward? That I wished I could tell you about it.”

“We could probably both think of things to tell each other.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Rita? Why don’t you draw the drapes and take your clothes off and get comfy on the couch. And I’ll call you back in, like, ten minutes? And you can put me on speaker phone so you’ll have both hands free.”

“Oh God.”

“And Rita? Wear the butt plug.”

“Here’s something crazy,” she said. “After all the things we just did, and all I got out of it, I’m hotter than ever. And what’s got me dripping is the prospect of telephone sex with a woman three thousand miles away.”

She sighed. “And why am I telling you all this, Peter? You’re still dead, aren’t you?”

No question, she thought. You didn’t have to look at him twice to know it, either. The noose that strangled him had had an effect similar to that of the cock ring, and his head was engorged with blood, his swollen face a deep purple.

And the cock ring hadn’t stopped working. He was still massively erect, and she could swear he’d grown larger since she’d left him.

Jesus, it was huge. She took hold of him.

Still warm.

Hmmm.

Aloud she said, “I dunno, Peter. What do you think? It’d be a first, wouldn’t it? And something for you to tell your friends about. ‘Yeah, I’m dead, but I’m still getting a little pussy now and then.’ ”

Except, of course, he wouldn’t be telling anybody anything.

“Of course there’d be a kind of poetic justice to it. I mean, Maureen McConnelly was probably dead when you fucked her. Not when you started, maybe, but by the time you got finished. God, that must have been a shock, huh? But I guess you’re shockproof now.”

She sighed.

“Maybe it’s too kinky. Anyway, I’ve got things to do. There’s a lady on the other side of the country waiting for the phone to ring.”

But she couldn’t keep herself from reaching out and taking hold of him again. She had her cell phone in one hand and his dick in the other. It was the same color as his face. Maybe a little darker.

She said, “Waste not, want not, isn’t that what they say? And when am I gonna get a chance like this again?”

She hoisted herself into position. A little lube? No, hardly necessary, she was sopping wet. Slipped right in, and it wasn’t her imagination, he was really gigantic.

She closed her eyes, rocked to and fro.

Picked up the cell phone. Multitasking? Sure, why not?

Hit Redial.

“So are you wearing the butt plug?”

“Uh-huh. Are you?”

“No, but I’ve got something in front.”

“Oh?”

“Very natural. You’d almost think it was real.”

“Like with veins and all?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it’s in your cunt?”

“You really like that word, don’t you, Rita?”

“I love it. Tell me how it feels in your cunt.”

“No, you first. Tell me about this guy you picked up.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

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

Conjugal Rites

About the Author