Bobby woke up in one of those terrible fuzzies between sleep and the fully awake stage, head pounding softly with the dull precursor to what could be the front edge of a bad dream, but he forced the thoughts through, replaying a totally real experience from his groggy memory banks.
As he pushed himself up from the carpeting he took stock of his surroundings. Melissa's place. The bedroom white with a surfeit of wicker and bric-a-brac. He got back on his bare feet and went in and urinated, splashing into the center of the bowl, flushing, running water. Melissa said something from the next room, a sleep-muffled comment, which he ignored.
Their coupling had started out as it often did, with an exchange of tender kisses and endearments, the romantic prelude to lovemaking heating up into a wild mating game. Four days of this.
She was dressed in a flimsy camisole top, spike heels, and nothing else. He loved the way the sharp heels felt against his legs and feet. He was ready to be punished.
"Stand up," he said to her, warming inside.
"Huh?" She didn't understand, What was wrong?
"Stand up in the bed. Come on."
"Right now?" She couldn't figure him out. Bobby was so weird.
"Yeah." His voice sounded hoarse. "Come on." She stood up on the bed as he directed.
"I'm going to punch holes in the bed with these heels."
"Turn around. Let me see you. Yeah. Turn—like that."
"You like me like this?"
"Put your foot here." He offered his testicles to her.
"Do which?"
"Yeah. Put your spike heel right on me there."
"I might hurt you, Bobby."
"That's okay—come on. You won't hurt me."
She tried to comply, gingerly placing her shoe in contact with his genitals. "Put your weight on it." She did and he moaned.
She thought she might have hurt him and she dropped down on her knees in the bed.
"Please, honey—let's just make love, okay?" She tried to kiss him and he pushed her roughly away.
"Make me call you Mistress Melissa and squeeze my balls real hard."
"No," she whined. "I don't want to do that. Please? Just hold me."
He held her, but he had grown very cold. She tried kissing him again, then she lowered her face over him, letting her hair sweep along his flat stomach and thighs. It was a trick of hers, and it had enflamed other men. But when she tried to take Bobby in her mouth he merely rolled over away from her. He had lost all interest.
In the bathroom mirror, Bobby Price's reflection was pale, but his face felt suffused with something akin to anger—a combination of embarrassed guilt and rage. He wanted to strike out.
Four times they'd been together and he'd get her so hot she thought she'd go up in flames—then he wouldn't do anything. She'd never been with anybody like Bobby. She knew that she had a body that turned guys on. But he never got—excited. He was so small. She wondered how big it was when it was erect. She'd been with another guy who had a small one when it was soft but it was plenty big when he got a hard-on. He was so uptight. She had to make this new man in her life respond. Maybe if he could relax…
"Bobby?"
"Huh?" He came out of the bathroom with his clothes back on.
"Don't go, honey," she said. "Let's have some wine."
"Um." He grunted, wishing he had an excuse to hit the bitch. She returned with a tray. Two wine goblets and a little plate of snacks. Cheese and crackers and stuff. "Sit on the bed there. No. I'll sit and you be the priestess." She had no idea what he was-saying. He took one of the wine goblets and sat on her bed. "Now…you put a cracker in my mouth." For some reason he started rubbing himself, trying to get turned on.
"Huh?"
"Feed me a fucking cracker. Stand in front of me and act like you're feeding me a cracker." He was a puzzle to her, but she stood in her little see-through camisole and the spike heels and started to comply, holding a cracker in front of his mouth as if he were a parrot or something. A cockatoo.
"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuaam in vitam aeternam," he intoned. She recoiled in shock.
"Don't!" she said. "That's blasphemy."
He'd had enough of her ass. Price stood up and, for no real reason, tossed the wine into her face.
"You dirty—" Wine dripped from Melissa, her camisole, staining bedclothes and white wicker. She came at him, a tough girl and a strong fighter, and he took a couple of punches before he had a chance to clobber her a good one with that weight-lifter's power arm. She went down in a wine-stained heap on the bedroom floor and he turned and walked out, forgetting her the second the door closed.
He unlocked the car, plopped into the seat, keyed the ignition, and then the engine roared to life as he sped away from the apartment house.
He drove north in silent rage and self-pity, finally getting his shit together when a familiar street sign nudged him. He realized he was on busy Linwood Boulevard, and he drove a few blocks and turned. Bobby knew what he was going to do before he did it, and when he saw the field in back of the gas station he turned, taking a service road until he'd reached just the right isolated spot.
He parked on the shoulder and opened the trunk and got the big case out, carefully stepping over a barbed-wire fence after he'd snagged his shirt on the top strand in the darkness. With a small penlight he worked his way to a position where he could look back down the hill on a side road. There was a brightly lit tavern and another business of some kind next to it, and a few cars in the gravel lot. He opened the case.
"The U.S. M-3000.50 SHERFSAVANT Weapon System, is referred to by the abbreviated acronym SAVANT. It is a unique sniper rifle with a maximum effective range of nearly two miles, well over three thousand meters. With Laco 40X sniperscope It weighs 29.5 pounds. The rifle is equipped with a fiberglass transit case with fitted sponge rubber compartment liners. The cased weapon system weighs approximately thirty-one pounds." Bobby said his rosary as he assembled the piece by touch.
"Classification and type: silent, extended range, covert. Operation: bolt-action. Caliber: .50. Capacity single-shot. Length: 48 inches. Barrel length: 27 inches. Scope and Optics: Laco 40X, Lenses are Magni-coat. Reticle: mil dot duplex. Silencer and Flash Suppressor: Ultronics. Eye relief: 3.5 inches. Lands and Grooves: 9. Twist: right hand, I turn in 9 inches. Trigger pulclass="underline" 3.25 pounds. Magnification: 40 power. Ammunition: Red Rock Match Grade (Silent S-type). Main elevation: Ballistic comeups built in. Elevation, fine-tune. adjustable Windage adjustable. Muzzle Veclass="underline" hypervelocity Manufacturer: USARCO Mfg. Division of Quad Cities Tool and Die, Rock Island, Illinois." "Tool and Die." He liked that. He always enjoyed saying that to people who asked him what line he was in. "Tool and die," he'd tell them, meaning it.
The stock and shoulder rest had been custom-molded to fit his face and body, and the finger indentations and palm moldings on the grips in back of the trigger housing and forward of the action had been cast from his hands. Sighting the piece in darkness was as simple as pulling on a pair of comfortable old leather gloves. She fit him perfectly. But the stock hurt him a little when he put his face down close to his main squeeze, and he whispered to her, "Not you, baby. Melissa hurt your daddy." He: fondled her knurled bolt, snicked it, and a big, hard sniper round filled her oily mouth.
"Anti-Personnel APEX(X) rounds consist of a full steel-jacketed shell containing propellant, Anti-Personnel EXploding projectile (extended range), high explosive, and detonator." He looked down through the calm green of her and clearly saw a man step out of the tavern and into the parking lot. There was no one else in sight. "When a round is fired and the bullet strikes the target a detonator causes the high explosive charge to explode the fragmentation material. This material consists of soft, scored penetrators that fragment like miniature bomb shrapnel, and which are designed to tumble at hypervelocities, mushrooming and disintegrating at the point of impact. This round is particularly effective against human beings and other soft targets. "