Guns

Five

Jeanine was still wearing the blue jeans and the T-shirt, she was still barefooted.

She let him into the apartment, and then she locked the door behind him and listened quietly while he told her what had happened. He was still feeling high after his run from the cops, not the kind of high he experienced when he was smoking dope, nor even the kind of jazzed-up, slowed-down high that was there each and every time he went into a store with a gun in his pocket. This was a combination of nervous energy and fear and excitement — the detective who was still alive had identified him from a mug shot and flyers had been run off, and now every cop in the city had a picture of him and was looking for him. On the way over here, his heart had nearly stopped every time he saw a squad car or even a lone patrolman standing on the comer under a lamppost.

He had read a story in one of those magazines that published true adventure articles, where it showed a bare-chested guy wrestling an alligator on the cover, and where inside it had ads for body-building and condoms and books on how to pick up girls. This particular story was about a guy who’d got lost in the jungle someplace, and it told about how he was in a state of intense excitement the whole time he was in there, listening for every snapping twig and searching the dark for glowing eyes and even learning how to interpret silences. Colley had felt that way coming crosstown to the apartment, and he still felt as though he was on some kind of dangerous mission that would end with him walking out of the jungle into civilization, big shining city in the distance there, music and booze and beautiful women.

He told Jeanine about how he’d been identified, and he thanked her again — even though he’d already thanked her on the phone — for letting him come over here when she knew the cops were on to him. She said that was okay, she hadn’t been asleep anyway. She told him she’d spent some time cleaning up the place after he’d left and then she’d tried to sleep in here on the sofa, but all she did was toss and turn. Colley looked at the rug. She hadn’t been able to get the bloodstains out.

“You should have used cold water,” he said.

“I did.”

“Wouldn’t take them out, huh?”

“No. I washed your clothes, too, by the way. The pants said Dry Clean Only, but I figured it was better to take a chance ruining them than leave blood on them.”

“Yeah, good,” he said. “Did the blood come out?”

“Most of it.”

“They were old pants anyway,” he said.

“Jocko’s still bleeding,” Jeanine said, gesturing with her head toward the corridor and the bedroom. “Soaked through the bandage four times since you left.”

“Looks like we’re all in fine shape, don’t it?” Colley said. “Next thing I expect to hear is Teddy got hit by a bus on the way home.”

Jeanine smiled. “You want a drink?” she said. “There’s only bourbon left, but if that’s okay...”

“Yeah, with a little water,” he said.

“You seem calm,” she said.

“I’m pretty jazzed up, you really want to know.”

“You look calm.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll get the drinks,” she said, and went out into the kitchen.

He sat on the sofa listening to the ticking of the clock. He would have to ask her where the clock was. Could hear the thing all over the apartment, but couldn’t see it anyplace. In the kitchen, he heard her opening the refrigerator. He thought of earlier tonight, of the way she’d showed him her breasts. Well, she was used to that, an ex-stripper. Still, it had been only the two of them in the apartment, Jocko unconscious down the hall. That was different from doing a strip in some joint. He got up off the sofa, started for the kitchen, and stopped. He listened down the hall, could hear nothing.

He went into the kitchen. “Need some help,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I’m doing fine.”

Her back was to him, he studied her figure. He had telephoned her forty minutes ago from a black bar in Scorpion territory, after leaping rooftops and crossing back yards and racing through alleyways. He had called because he’d told himself he would need a gun now that the cops had identified him, and the only place he could get a gun was in Jocko’s apartment. Jocko had guns. But Jocko also had a wife named Jeanine who’d pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts and showed them to him and then asked him if he was afraid of Jocko. Yes, he’d been afraid of Jocko then, and he knew that once he came down from this fantastic high, he would become afraid of Jocko all over again. He knew that if he did not make his move soon, if he did not go over to where she stood at the sink in those tight blue jeans, he would never do it.

She turned from the sink, moved to the counter alongside it, and put ice cubes into two glasses. The seal on the bourbon bottle was broken; she’d been drinking since he left the apartment. She poured whiskey into both glasses, added some water to his, and held it out to him. He went to her, and took the glass from her hand and they stood not three feet apart in the narrow kitchen, Colley against the refrigerator, Jeanine leaning against the counter. Her hands were wet, she wiped them on the thighs of the faded blue jeans, and then left them on her thighs, the fingers widespread. She looked up into his face, and suddenly there were no secrets, his eyes had told her everything she needed to know.

She kept looking into his face as he moved toward her, standing against the counter, her hands resting on her thighs. He could no longer hear the ticking of the clock. He put his glass down on the counter beside her, and then, slowly, lifted the front of the T-shirt the way she had lifted it in the living room earlier tonight, took the bottom of it in both hands and pulled the shirt up over her naked breasts.

She did not move.

She kept her hands on her thighs, the fingers spread. He noticed that she had long, slender hands, that the fingernails were painted a red as bright as the blood that had spurted from the dead cop’s head, he did not want to think about that stupid bastard, he reached up for her breasts. The T-shirt was bunched above them, she stood with her shoulders back, the breasts jutting, a faint smile on her face now, her eyes slitted, a lazy languid look in them. The water tap was dripping. He could hear the water tap, and also the ticking of the clock again as he brought his open hands up to her breasts.

She leaned into his hands.

He touched her breasts lightly, he did not want to hurt her the way Jocko had, he was afraid of causing fresh bruises. There was a sheen to her skin, the flesh was taut, the globes shimmered with secret pinks and lavenders, mother-of-pearl breasts, he touched them gently, his fingers exploring. The skin around the nipples came as a course reminder of sex, blatant and rude, the circles of darker flesh erupting in pinpoint nubs. The hardening nipples were a declaration, he responded to them wildly, tightening his hands on her breasts, cupping them to his mouth, kissing the freckled sloping tops and rounded sides, and then bringing his mouth up to hers, waiting wet and wide, and covering her lips with his.

She threw herself into him, she ground her hips against him, he visualized her on a small stage in a smoke-filled room, I’d go out there, you know, and the drums’d be banging, and the lights’d be on me, and I’d start throwing myself around, and he reached for the front of the blue jeans and found first the button and then the zipper. She was naked under the jeans, her nakedness there came as a surprise, the smooth shock of her belly, the sudden deep navel, the crisp tangled hair. He spread his fingers into her crotch and she pulled her mouth from his and whispered directly into his ear, a cannon shot in his ear, “He’ll kill you.” She was referring to Jocko, he knew she was referring to Jocko, but he could visualize only Kruger the Kraut grabbing him in the shower, Kruger squeezing his cheeks in both hands, squeezing, squeezing, and then stopping just before he fainted, and grinning and walking out, the other cons pretending nothing had happened.

“He’ll kill you,” she said again, but she was stepping out of the blue jeans, she was kicking them away across the kitchen floor, and reaching for him again, opening his fly, pulling him free with one swift tug and then leaning back against the counter, hands coming up behind his neck, mouth open, grinding again even before their bodies touched. He reached behind her and grabbed her naked buttocks in both hands and lifted her up onto the counter. He was spreading her wide when they heard the voice. He was opening her like a melon when they heard it. The first thing he thought was It’s the police; he didn’t know why he thought that.

“Jeanine,” the voice said.

The voice was hoarse, Colley could not recognize it at first. But Jeanine knew the voice immediately and reacted to it at once. She put both hands against Colley’s chest and shoved him away from her, closed her legs and slid off the counter and onto the floor. She was reaching for her blue jeans even before the voice said again, slightly louder this time, “Jeanine.” There was no question mark at the end of that voice, this was not someone used to calling her and not having her come. This was someone who beat her often and brutally, who left her bruised and aching, this was her Kruger, and his name was Jocko.

To Colley, watching her, it seemed as though she came off the counter and moved swiftly to where the jeans were crumpled on the floor and stooped to them and reached for them with one hand and with the other hand tugged at the T-shirt bunched above her breasts, all in a single graceful motion instead of several separate, panicky moves. He saw the swollen breasts for just an instant longer before she pulled the shirt down over them again. The nipples were still erect, they poked through the thin cotton fabric, the nipples were the same but everything else was changing, everything else was on the edge of becoming a nightmare.

She was just beginning to come up out of her crouch, the blue jeans in her left hand. She raised her head, tossed her hair back over her shoulder, and then her lips parted just a trifle, and Colley saw terror come into her eyes as she stood erect and backed a pace deeper into the kitchen. She was naked from the waist down, the T-shirt reaching to just an inch above the tufted blond triangle of her crotch, and she was looking past Colley to a spot somewhere behind his left shoulder. He turned swiftly, and immediately caught his breath. Jocko was in the doorway to the kitchen. He was huge and he was naked and the bandage covering his shoulder was soaked through with blood, and blood was running down his arm the way it had in the liquor store just after he’d been shot, dribbling onto the floor, the clock syncopating its tick-tick-tick against the steady patter of Jocko’s blood.

“What the fuck?” he said, and took a quick step into the kitchen, and what happened next happened so quickly that Colley wasn’t sure it was happening at all. With his good right arm, Jocko flicked Colley aside as though he were a eunuch caught in the sultan’s harem. The motion was only a backward swipe of his arm as he moved past Colley toward where Jeanine stood cowering near the sink. But Jocko’s strength was such that even though he’d been bleeding since shortly after nine o’clock, and was still bleeding, this casual motion of his arm could send Colley smashing violently against the wall, his head banging back against the plaster. Jeanine screamed. Colley, dazed, slid down the wall to the floor. Jocko brought back his right arm, the palm of the hand open, and then uncurled the arm like a pitcher throwing a curve ball. Jeanine’s head snapped to the side with the force of the blow.

Jocko was upon her now. He seized the T-shirt in his big fist, twisted the thin fabric, and holding on to the fabric, his fist literally wrapped in it, he punched out at her, sending her flailing back against the refrigerator. He did not let go of the shirt. He pulled her off the front of the refrigerator, and then punched out at her again and again, still holding the shirt, bouncing her repeatedly against the refrigerator, Jeanine grunting each time his huge fist struck her chest or her breasts or her rib cage. The shirt was tearing. He pulled her off the refrigerator a final time, and swung her around against the counter. Letting go of the shirt, he brought his arm back and pistoned a short hard punch to her shoulder, and then punched her in the left arm, a blow so hard it caused the arm to fall limply to her side.

She was collapsed against the countertop now, her right arm across it, her hand flapping, grasping, the fingers opening and closing spasmodically, reaching, searching for something, anything. Each time Jocko threw a punch, the force of it rumbled through her body, and each blow sent blood specks flying from his wounded arm onto the white T-shirt. Colley was moving toward them to help her now, afraid to help her, feeling it would be useless to try, but knowing he would anyway. He saw Jeanine’s hand blindly strike the handle of a bread knife in the drying rack on the counter. Her hand recognized the knife, her fingers closed on it. The knife blade clinked against a dish that was drying on the rack, and then the knife came around in an arc, high into the air above Jeanine’s head, clenched in her fist just as Jocko drew back his arm to punch her again. Colley saw her eyes and knew she would kill him, and he thought Yes, kill him, kill him! but he shouted, “No, Jeanine,” and then more sharply, “No, don’t!” but he was too late.

The blade came down with tremendous force.

She was a big woman, and she was terrified, and she was angry, and she sank the fourteen-inch blade into his chest clear to the handle, plunging it in just below the right wing of his collarbone, and then pulling it free and plunging it in again in fury. “Jesus,” Jocko said, and she pulled the knife free again, and her hand came up again, and Colley stood unable to move, watching as though paralyzed, and Jocko said “Jesus,” breathing it this time, and Jeanine said “Yes,” and plunged the knife again, and said “Yes,” her voice rising, and “Yes” again and “Yes” and “Yes,” each uttered affirmative coinciding with a plunge of the knife, “Yes” and “Yes” and “Yes,” till Jocko fell, gushing blood, to the kitchen floor, and then she straddled him as though she were fucking him, and she kept plunging the knife into his chest and his throat and his face until finally the blade broke on the hard bone of his forehead, and even then she brought the handle and the broken blade down twice more before she realized the knife was broken, and then she stopped.

“Yes,” she said.

She was breathing heavily. Straddling Jocko, she looked into his face and nodded. Then she got up slowly, and backed away from him a pace, and nodded again. She heard Colley behind her, and she whirled at once, her eyes wide, surprised to see him, surprised that she was not alone in the kitchen with the man she had just killed. She was still holding the broken knife in her hand, and for a moment Colley thought she would strike out at him blindly and in terror. But the surprise left her eyes almost at once, and he realized that she was not frightened, she had only been startled. Neither of them said anything. She took a quick step to the counter and put the broken knife down on its wooden top. She looked down at Jocko again, and then walked around him, and went to where Colley was standing. The broken knife blade had fallen onto Jocko’s chest. It lay half hidden in the red hairs curling there. His tiny cock seemed to have shriveled in death. Only the rounded head peeked from the red pubic hair like a mushroom cap. His blue eyes were open wide and staring up at the ceiling.

“Close his eyes, for Christ’s sake,” Colley said, and moved past her and knelt beside the body, and made one abortive attempt to close the eyes himself, pulling back his hand before he touched the lids. Behind him, he could hear Jeanine’s heavy breathing. He reached out again, and closed one lid with his thumb, the other with his forefinger. Jocko’s face was crisscrossed with cuts. His throat had been opened with one deep slash of the knife, and Colley looked into the wound and saw exposed raw tissue there. He turned away immediately and brought his hand to his mouth, certain he would vomit.

Behind him, Jeanine laughed.

The laughter was dark and chilling, it seemed to rumble up from somewhere deep inside her, rising in her throat to find voice behind tightly compressed lips. Her eyes were mirthless. Looking into her face, he saw something that warned him to get out of this place now, before it was too late. Leave here, go, get away, run.

She held out her hand to him.

It was her right hand, the hand that had wielded the knife. The fingers and the palm were covered with blood. There was blood on the tom T-shirt and on the breast that showed where the fabric was ripped. There were flecks of blood on her thighs. He was not sure why she was extending her hand. He hesitated. When he did not move to her, she came to him, and put her arms around his neck and moved her mouth toward his and he saw — in the instant before they kissed — that there was blood on her lips as well.

They made love on the sofa.

Through the open doorless jamb between kitchen and living room, Colley could see a thin line of blood trickling across the kitchen floor. He was on top of Jeanine, she was spread beneath him when he discovered the thin trickle of Jocko’s blood creeping inexorably across the kitchen floor. And then he noticed for the first time that the springs were jutting through the fabric on the easy chair opposite the sofa, and he saw that the cabinet of the television set was scarred with cigarette burns, and the ceiling plaster was chipped and peeling, and there was a rust mark on the wall from a leaking pipe, and the rug Jeanine could not get the bloodstains out of was worn and faded — the place was a dump. Jocko’d been in this business for more than fifteen years, and his place was a dump. And he was dead on the kitchen floor, his blood trickling toward the doorjamb while a stranger fucked his wife.

Colley watched the blood. He did not know whether the blood was really moving quite that slowly, or whether this was the same phenomenon that took place in the liquor store at nine tonight, or nine yesterday night, whichever. He always thought of the empty hours of the morning as part of the night before; to him, it was still Saturday till the sun came up and then it would be Sunday. On Sundays, every Sunday when he was a boy growing up in Harlem, and later when they’d moved to the Bronx, he’d gone to ten o’clock mass, stopped going when he joined the Orioles and began doing bad things. This was technically Sunday already, though he was still thinking of it as Saturday night, and he was indeed going to church, but the church was wet and dark and the devil was the preacher. He’d seen the devil behind Jeanine’s mirthless eyes, heard the devil’s laughter echoing up out of her bowels, forcing itself onto her mouth, laughter exuberantly evil, reveling in the dark and brutal act that had just been committed. Slowly the stream of blood oozed its way toward the open doorjamb.

You live by the gun, you die by the gun.

That was Albert L. Donato speaking, noted Buick salesman and criminal psychologist. Jocko lived by the gun, yes, but tonight he died by the knife, and now he was on that kitchen floor dribbling out the last few drops of his blood while a stranger entered the cloister, gun in hand. Not a stranger, though. His good buddy, his fall partner, the man who went in with him on each and every job, sharing the danger and the fun, the man who was now sharing the wet and secret places of his wife, who, incidentally, happened to be the person who tore his flesh to dangling ribbons... Christ, those tubes in his throat — was that the jugular, was that the trachea? Was that what the throat of Luis Josafat Albareda looked like after Colley shot him that time so long ago? His first gun. An Astra Firecat, a fucking peashooter, how could it have caused so much damage? Luis Josafat Albareda speaking through a voice box now, his Spanish accent sounding absurdly like the voice of Señor Wences: You want to go back in the box?

From behind countless footlights over the years, strutting in high-heeled, ankle-strapped shoes across hollow noisy stages, blue smoke rising, eyes on the tasseled G-string as she twirled it, blond tangled hair behind it, Jeanine promised sex unequaled, she promised skill and passion, hours and hours of unending excitment — she would take you where you’d never been, you would spend a steamy night with her in the devil’s own chamber. Now she was going to deliver. Now she was going to honor all those markers she’d been handing out since she was sixteen years old, all those I.O.U.’s that were still unpaid. She was going to make them good now on this couch in this apartment where five minutes ago she’d committed bloody murder.

Colley thought of guns. His brother once told him that the pistol was of course a fixed psychological symbol, that whenever a man dreamt of a gun or even thought of a gun he was actually dreaming of or thinking of a penis. Colley wondered if his brother called his own cock a penis, or did he only use that word when he was discussing guns as fixed psychological symbols?

Colley loved guns, there was no question about that. He remembered his various guns now as Jeanine whispered in his ear, urging him to explode inside her. She’d killed one man in the kitchen by stabbing him to death with a fourteen-inch blade, and now he suspected she wanted to kill another one here in the living room by fucking him to death. He sensed it would be dangerous to leave this woman unsatisfied; sooner or later she would remind him of it in ways that might be unpleasant. What had been unconscious ten seconds before she whispered in his ear, commanding him to come — Give it to me, baby, let me have it — now became entirely conscious. Willfully, he thought of guns. Lovingly, he thought of their parts.

He thought of them as engines.

He thought of them as death machines.

He’d disassembled enough of them to know that their design was basically simple. He thought of that design now, concentrating on what caused the explosion in the barrel of a pistol, refusing to obey her whispered urgings, knowing he could not himself explode inside her or he would one day pay for it. She herself was paying all her markers, and perhaps that’s all she wanted or needed to do — please him, satisfy him, leave him basking in the afterglow of her methodical assault. But he felt certain she was testing him somehow, having utterly destroyed a man bigger and stronger than himself and wanting now to reduce him similarly, coaxing and teasing and tormenting from him an orgasm he refused to release. He was afraid of leaking his juices into her vault. He was afraid that would be the same somehow as Jocko leaking his blood onto the kitchen floor. She suddenly rolled him off of her. She sat up.

Her mouth descended.

In the simplest of pistols, like the Colt .22 Derringer, there were only seventeen parts, and you could assemble the gun from scratch for about twenty-five dollars. In a more complicated gun, like the German Luger, there were fifty or more parts. Colley knew the names of the parts, he’d seen them spread on a clean white cloth in front of him, pieces of a deadly jigsaw puzzle. Front sight and breech block, toggle joint and firing pin, trigger bar spring stud...

He was frightened now. His mind frantically grasped for other names, breechblock catch link rivet, he was responding to something as primitive as his grandmother’s fear of the number thirteen, believing that if he allowed himself to succumb to her mouth, she would destroy him more completely than she’d destroyed Jocko. She would devour his parts, she would drain him of his vital juices, she would suck from his cock the manhood he’d protected and preserved for twenty-nine years. There was nothing subtle about her attack now. She no longer wished to tantalize with slow bumps and grinds learned on rickety stages in smoky saloons. Her breathing was labored as she worked him liquidly, he was melting into her mouth, he was losing himself to her, he twisted his head violently...

In any gun, the cartridge sat in a narrow metal shaft. It was composed of case, primer, powder and bullet. When the trigger was squeezed, the spring action caused the firing pin to strike the back of the cartridge case, denting it and simultaneously causing an explosion of fulminate...

She lifted her mouth for just an instant.

“Come, you son of a bitch,” she whispered.

... igniting the powder and propelling the bullet from the shaft.