“I don’t want you or that bitch wife of yours botherin’ me anymore, Coburn,” Frazier said. “You understand me? We speaking the same language here?”
“You... you raped my wife,” Josh managed to say. “I’ll never stop bothering you.”
“You ask her if she enjoyed it, Mr. Advertising Executive? You ask her how many times she came when I was inside her? Huh? You ask her that, you piece of shit?”
He started to move on Josh again.
And that was when the bullet tore through Frazier’s left shoulder and he was turned leftward and slammed against the exterior wall of the warehouse next to him.
Moonlight shone on the ice-glazed tarmac of the warehouse area. Fog was setting in from the nearby Lake. The bullet had come from the fog. And now something else came from the fog, too. A familiar shape. Familiar except for the .45 she was holding.
“You try and hurt my husband again, I’ll kill you right on the spot, Frazier,” Elise said.
Josh was forcing himself past his pain so he could function again. Two of his ribs, his lungs and his head pounded with agony.
“You think you got it, honey?” Elise said.
“I was just afraid,” Josh said, still out of breath, “when he hit me in the stomach he’d feel the wire.”
“The wire?” Frazier said. “What the hell you talking about?”
“It’s all been recorded,” Josh said. “And it’ll be on your commander’s desk tomorrow.”
Elise reached in and took Frazier’s gun from him.
Then she moved a step closer and brought her knee straight up the middle of his crotch. He screamed and doubled over.
“That was for both of us,” she said.
Then she led her hobbled husband away from Frazier and to the gray Saab parked three warehouses back.
Later, in bed, there in the sweet shadows, she said, “I’m sorry I still don’t feel like it, honey. But I’m getting better all the time. If you can just hold out—”
He took her tenderly to him and kissed her. And gave her the answer they both wanted to hear.
Eye of the Beholder
1
All this started one spring when I couldn’t find any women. The weather was so beautiful it just made me crazier. I’d lie on my bed in my little apartment feeling the moonbreezes and would ache, absolutely fucking ache, to be with a woman I cared about. I was in one of those periods when I needed to fall ridiculously in love. It wasn’t just that the sex would be better — everything would be better. Fifty times a day I’d spot women who seemed like likely candidates — they’d be in supermarkets or video stores or walking along the river or getting into their cars. The first thing I did was inspect them quickly for wedding rings. A good number of them were unburdened. But still, meeting them was impossible. If you just walked up to them and introduced yourself, you’d probably look like a rapist. And if you told them how lonely you were, you might not look like a rapist but you’d sure seem pathetic. I tried all the usual places, the bars and the dance clubs and some of the splashier parties, but I didn’t see it in their eyes. They were looking for quick sex or companionship while they tended broken hearts or simply a warm body at their dinner tables when too many lonely Saturday nights became intolerable — but they weren’t looking for the same thing I was, some kind of spiritual redemption. Not that I didn’t settle a few nights for quick sex and companionship, but next morning I felt just as lonely and disconsolate. But I couldn’t settle very often. I wanted my ideal woman, this notion I’ve had in my mind since I was seven or eight years old, this ethereal Madonna I had longed for down the decades.
So of course the night I met Linda I wasn’t even looking for anybody. I just walked into this little coffee shop over by the public library and there she was, sitting alone at the counter drinking coffee.
I wasn’t sure she could rescue me, and I doubt she was sure I could rescue her, but at least the potential was there so two nights later we started going to bed and even though we were sort of awkward with each other, we kept trying until we got it right, and then we became pretty good lovers. The only thing that got me down was she was still pretty hung up on this football coach who’d dumped her recently. She kept telling me how it had only been for sex, and how he was an animal six, seven hours a night, which did not exactly fill me with self-confidence. I wasn’t jealous of the guy but I didn’t necessarily want to attend his testimonial dinner every night either.
The only thing that bothered me was her two teen-aged daughters. They were usually around the house while Linda and I were making love. Linda always laughed when I got uptight. “Hey, what do you think they do in their bedrooms when they bring their boyfriends over here?”
Linda was one of those modern parents. I’m not. My two kids, daughter and son, were raised pretty much the way I was: what your parents don’t know won’t hurt them. One boozy New Year’s Eve I actually heard this teenage girl talking to her mother about how her tenth-grade boyfriend wasn’t any good at oral sex. Linda wasn’t that far gone but she was more liberal with her daughters than I would’ve been. Even when my wife and I split up, we agreed that our kids would be raised properly, at least as we defined properly.
I kept wanting Linda to go to my place to make love but one night she laughed and said, “But your place is such a pit, Dwyer. I’m afraid I’d have cockroaches walking up my thigh.”
Linda was three years divorced from a very prosperous insurance executive. She’d gotten the big house and the big car and the big monthly check. She only had to work part-time at a travel agency to make her monthly nut.
So we made love at her place and even though we both figured out pretty quickly that we weren’t going to rescue each other, the thing we had was better than nothing and so we kept it up, even though I had a sense that she was vaguely ashamed of herself for liking me. Her previous boyfriends had run to doctors and shrinks and business executives. Security guard was a long way down the ladder.
Then one night I came over and she was late getting home from work. And that was the night it happened, with her sixteen-year-old daughter Susan, I mean.
Started out with an argument in the kitchen between Susan and Molly.
I was sitting in the living room watching a boxing rerun on ESPN. Linda had just called and said she was running late.
First I heard screaming. Then I hear cursing. Then I heard a cup or a glass being smashed against a wall. Then screaming again.
I run out there and find sixteen-year-old Susan slapping fifteen-year-old Molly across the face.
You have to understand, they were both extremely good-looking girls. But Molly was even more than extremely good-looking. She was probably the single most beautiful person I had ever seen, a Madonna with just a hint of the erotic in her dark and brooding eyes. Her sister Susan had always been jealous of her and now there was special trouble because Susan’s boyfriend had developed this almost creepy fixation on Molly.
I got between them.
“Get the hell out of this kitchen,” Susan said. “You don’t even belong here.”
“You shouldn’t talk to him like that,” Molly said.
“Why? Because our sweet mommy is fucking him?”
Molly shook her head, looked embarrassed, and left the kitchen. In moments, I heard her on the stairs, going up to the second floor.
Susan pushed past me and opened the refrigerator door. She took out a can of Bud, popped the tab and gunned some down.