He had a nice body. Barrel-chested, with a little more of a gut than she might have preferred, and a lot of chest hair. No hair on his back, though, and she supposed he got it waxed at the same salon that provided his million-dollar haircuts.
Muscular arms, muscular shoulders, and that meant regular gym workouts, because he couldn’t have gotten those muscles simply by throwing his own weight around. An all-over tan, too, that probably came from a tanning bed. You could shake your head at the artifice, or you could go with the result — a fit, good-looking man in his late forties, who, it had to be said, was as impressive in the sack as he’d been at the craps table. And if he owed some of that to Viagra, well, so what? He got her hot and he got her off, and what more could a poor girl desire?
And the best was yet to be.
Optima futura — that was the Latin for it, and she knew it because it had been her high school’s motto. It was, she’d always thought, singularly apt, because anything the future held had to be better than high school.
Somewhere along the way, after high school years were just a blur, she’d come across some lines from Robert Browning, and perhaps it was the high school motto that made her commit them to memory, but it had worked, because she remembered them stilclass="underline"
“Part Indian, huh? I bet I know which part is Indian.”
And he reached out a hand and touched the part he had in mind. She put her hand on top of his, rubbed his fingers against her.
“A third Indian,” she reminded him.
“So you said. You know, I was wondering—”
She put her hand on him, curled her fingers around him. She worked him artfully, and he sighed.
“Lucky,” he said. “Man, I’d say I got Lucky, didn’t I? But I think I’m tapped out for this evening.”
“You think so?”
“You drained me to the dregs, babe. About all I can do right now is sleep.”
“I bet you’re wrong.”
“Oh?”
“What we did so far,” she said, “was just a warm-up.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Have you ever been tied up?”
“Jesus.”
“Just imagine,” she said, her hands still busy. “You’re tied up, you can’t move, and the entire focus is giving you pleasure. I’ll do things to you nobody’s ever done to you before, Hank. You think this has been your lucky night? You just wait.”
“Uh—”
“I’ve got all the gear in my bag,” she said. “Everything we could possibly need. You’re gonna love this.”
Handcuffs, silk scarves, nylon cords. She had everything she needed, and she knew just how to employ them.
The last time she’d done this she’d given her partner a couple of roofies first, and let the pills knock him out before she trussed him up. That had worked fine, but she’d been stuck with a two-hour wait for the son of a bitch to wake up, and who needed that?
This was much simpler. And he cooperated, putting his hands where she told him, spread-eagling himself on the bed. And making little jokes while she did what she had to do.
By the time she was done, he was already semi-erect. She wrapped the base with an elastic band. “Sort of a roach motel,” she said. “The blood gets in and it can’t get out, so you stay firm.”
“Is it safe?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It’s an old Indian trick. Now you can do something for me, and after that everything will be entirely 100 percent for you.” And she sat on his face and he did what he was supposed to do, and he was pretty good at it too. He didn’t have to be, she was so excited right now that great technique on his part was by no means required, but this made it even better.
“Now that was just wonderful,” she said. She went to her bag, got out the duct tape, and cut off an eight-inch length. “I wanted to do that first,” she went on, “because it’s our last chance for that particular activity.”
And she slapped the tape over his mouth.
Oh, the look in his eyes! Worth the price of admission right there. He wasn’t quite sure whether this was going to make it even more exciting for him, or whether it was maybe something he ought to worry about.
But why worry? What good would it do? What good would anything do?
“See, isn’t this neat? You’re harder than ever. And you’re going to stay that way.” She mounted him, felt him swelling impossibly larger inside her. “Mmmm, nice,” she said. “Oh, yes. Very nice.”
She rode him for a long time. Her climaxes came one after the other, and all they did was pitch her excitement higher. At last she fell forward, her breasts crushed against his chest. A smooth chest would have been nice, but a hairy chest was nice too. Everything was nice when you could do whatever you wanted, and when you knew just how it was going to end.
She got up because she wanted to be able to see his eyes now. “I told you some lies,” she said. “My name’s not Lucky. Or Lucretia, or any of that. My last name’s not Eagle, or Eagle Feather, and don’t ask me how I came up with all of that on the spur of the moment. As far as I know, I haven’t got a drop of Indian blood in me. A third Indian! How could anybody be a third anything? I mean, you’ve got two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents — I mean, do the math. You’re the one who knows all the odds on the craps table, so you would have to know that you can only be half or a fourth or an eighth or three-sixteenths or whatever you are of anything.”
She wagged a finger at him.
“You weren’t paying attention, Hank. Little Henry there was doing your thinking for you. And that’s another lie I told you, incidentally. That it’s safe to wrap you up like that. If you don’t loosen it in time, you can do permanent damage.”
She left the bed, reached into her purse, found the knife. She let him see the blade. She let the tip of the blade graze his cheek as she mounted him one more time.
“God, it’s bigger than ever,” she told him. “You’re in pain now, aren’t you? Oh dear, I’m afraid it’s going to get worse. Well, more intense, anyway. Optima futura, you know. That’s Latin. It means the best is yet to be. For me, that is. For you, well, maybe not.”
She left with close to five thousand dollars in cash and chips, and stopped downstairs at the cashier’s cage to turn the chips into currency. Then she got in her car and started driving.
She’d left his one-dollar chips in the room. She’d left his credit cards too, and a gold signet ring that had to be worth a few hundred dollars. She took the slide from his string tie, just because she liked it, and she took her cuffs and cords and scarves, because it would be a nuisance to replace them. But she left the elastic band in place.
And she took the scalp, tucked away in a plastic bag. It was just such good theater to scalp him, what with having been drawn to his hair in the first place, and then the whole Indian motif of their encounter. Before she was halfway done with the process she regretted having begun it in the first place, because even minor scalp cuts bleed like crazy, and when you scalp a person altogether — well, the Indians probably waited to scalp people until they were safely dead, and disinclined to bleed, but she went ahead and finished what she’d started, and it was almost worth it when she shook the scalp in front of him and let him gape at it.
She’d cleaned up her fingerprints, but she knew she’d left plenty of DNA evidence, and people at the casino could furnish a description of her. But she’d been working variations on this theme for a good long while now, and she always got away with it, so she figured all she could do was play out the string. And she’d ditch his scalp where it wouldn’t be found, and the scalping would guarantee a lot of press, along with a manhunt for some unforgiving Indian seeking vengeance for Wounded Knee.