“Get off!” My kidney backed into a policeman’s billy.
“I’m just an innocent bystander,” I protested. “I’m not involved!”
His answer was to hit me in the kidney again. I stepped down from the traffic island. Immediately there was another cop in front of me.
“Get out of the gutter!” He raised his club threateningly .
I stepped back on the traffic island.
“Get off here!” I was shoved into the gutter again.
“Get out of the gutter!” A club bounced off my kneecap.
I spotted a hole in the auto traffic piling up in the street and darted through it and up the block away from the park. I ran for about a block, then slowed down to a walk. Behind me, I could hear screaming.
When I got back to the Hilton, there was a message for me to call Austin’s room. He picked it up on the first ring. “I see you got away okay,” he greeted me.
“Just about. How about you? Did you get hurt?”
“One of Daley’s hoods tried to plant a riflebutt in my groin. I had to relieve him of his weapon.” Austin‘s voice was tight with anger. He was no protesting kid used to coping with angry cops. Toilets are part of the Establishment, and as far as Austin was concerned, cops were supposed to be protecting him, not assaulting him. “I never saw anything like it,” he told me. “Those cops went berserk; they went crazy for blood.” Little did he guess that this was only the mild beginning. The disgust left his voice as he changed the subject. “Come up to my room,” he said. “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”
The “someone” turned out to be an attractive blonde girl about eighteen or nineteen years old. There was a welt on her cheek with traces of dried blood under it. She was wearing a miniskirt which left a tattoo on her right thigh clearly revealed. The tattoo was of a dove with the word “Peace” in a half-circle olive branch above it. There was a button pinned to the sweater over her right breast. “Pig for President!” it proclaimed.
“Steve, meet Ginger.” Austin introduced us. “I think Ginger may be the answer to our problem.”
I studied her more closely. I could see what Austin meant. On the surface, Ginger fit all the specifications of the girl we were seeking. She was blonde, long-legged, and her bosom was obviously large enough to satisfy Ali Khat. But, there were still questions to be answered—- some of them fairly delicate.
How far had Austin gone in determining some of the answers? I cocked an eyebrow at him, not wanting to bring anything up prematurely. The look he shot back said he understood what was on my mind.
“I told Ginger she was welcome to use the bathroom,” he said diplomatically. “Playing games with the Chicago police can be a grimy business. Why don’t you go take a shower now, dear?” he asked considerately. “Mr. Victor and I have some business matters to discuss, and they’d only bore you anyway.”
“All right.” Ginger shrugged and vanished into the bathroom.
“Where’d you find her?” I asked when we were alone.
“Lying on the sidewalk. She’d been running away when a cop came charging up behind her and slugged her on the run. Pigs!” Austin’s face contorted.
“Law and order,” I reminded him.
“The hell you say! Pigs! If they act like pigs, then that’s what they are. Pigs is pigs!”
“All right. All right. Calm down,” I soothed him.
“Let’s get back to the girl. There are still some questions about her filling the bill, but putting them aside, what about her willingness? Just because she may fit the picture doesn’t mean she’ll go along with the harem bit.”
“I think the chances are good,” Austin told me. “I’ve been talking to her, and from what she says, she’s obsessed with the idea of experiencing new things. She says she wants to taste the full variety of life, and she says it with real fervor, like it was her religion. She wants to try a free fall from thirty thousand feet just so she’ll know what the feeling is. She’s taken a couple of LSD trips for the same reason. She even said she’d like to join a nunnery to get a taste of enforced celibacy.”
“Did you tell her that wasn’t what we had in mind?”
“Not exactly. But I did hint around the topic and she did look interested. I’m pretty sure she’d look at the whole harem thing as just another kick she ought to try.”
“What about that LSD bit,” I wondered. “Is she hooked on any kind of drugs?”
“She said she only did it a couple of times. As to other drugs, I don’t know for sure.”
“Well, she didn’t look like a junkie or anything,” I said.
“But at least we should check her over for needle marks.”
“Okay.”
“That brings us to the most ticklish qualification,” I remembered. “Is she a true blonde’?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Well, there’s one simple way of finding out,” I suggested. “She’s taking a shower. Why don’t we just go take a peek?”
“Why not?” Austin shrugged.
The bathroom door was ajar. From behind it we could hear the shower running. I eased the door open a little more. There was a lot of steam coming from behind the opaque glass door of the stall shower. The outline of Ginger’s figure was barely visible.
With Austin behind me, I went up to the door and tried to peer through the glass for a clearer view. It was no use; between the texture of the plexiglass and the steam, it was impossible to check the detail that interested us. Then I noticed that there was an aperture—about a foot and a half wide and six inches high—-between the top of the door and the frame set in the ceiling.
Silently I pointed it out to Austin, and he nodded. I went through another sign-language bit, and finally he nodded again. Then he knelt on the tile floor and got a firm grip on my feet as I climbed up on his shoulders.
From this perch I had a clear view down into the interior of the stall shower. Ginger’s back was against one wall with her body arched out from it so that her bosom strained almost straight up. The nipples—aureoles large as half-dollars—were distended from the water, maroon, pointy, quivering. She’d narrowed the stream of water and turned it on full force. The way she’d positioned herself, the fount of her womanhood was being pummeled by the stream. Her high, plump behind was bouncing frantically against the wall like a foam-rubber car seat on a very bumpy road. Her head was thrown back, eyes closed, breasts swelling with the gasp of her breathing. Both of her hands were buried at the juncture of her thighs. I couldn’t tell if she was a “true blonde” or not.
Under me, Austin shifted with the pressure of my weight. I motioned him to be patient. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask what was taking so long. After all, he seemed to be saying, one look should be enough; no need to be a voyeur about it. I moved my hand rapidly in a fist and then covered it with the other hand until he nodded that he understood. Then I turned my attention back to Ginger.
Her eyes were open now, rolling backwards, the pupils dilated, unseeing. Her hands were a blur of motion blocking her groin. Her pounding derriere was putting a permanent dent in the tile wall.
Then suddenly her lips curled back and her up-pointed breasts filled with air and held it. Her thigh muscles strained and her hands dug deep and held. A slow moan built from somewhere deep inside her. It grew louder. Small, sharp teeth crushed her lower lip. She stayed that way for a long moment. Then the moan became a loud exclamation—half laughter, half sob—and her body seemed to snap like the release of a taut bowstring. She fell forward with a release, crashing against the door of the stall shower.
The door smacked against Austin and he slipped from his knees, sprawling backwards. One of his arms flailed out and inadvertently grabbed Ginger’s ankle, pulling her forward through the doorway. I toppled from Austin’s shoulders and fell forward, my arms and legs tangling with those of the naked girl. My head butted her midriff and came to rest wedged between those sleek thighs.