The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Nineteen

At ten-thirty the next morning he was parked near the entrance to the Cinema Village fourplex at the Chiefland Mall. He didn’t have to wait long before the silver Lexus pulled alongside.

“The screens are dark until noon,” he told her. “We’re better off leaving your car at the other end, over by the Penney’s. Go find a spot and I’ll pick you up.”

She nodded and parked among the mall’s few dozen customers, and when she joined him in the Monte Carlo he must have been staring, because she asked what was wrong.

He said, “I forget how beautiful you are.”

“Oh, please.”

“It’s your eyes, I think. The blue of them. It’s always more intense than I remember.”

“Do we really have a love nest? Or was that just a story?”

In bed she said, “So? Who’d you get? The pregnant lady?” Roberta Ellison, née Bobbie Jondahl.

“The other one,” he said.

“Real Estate Girl. What’s her name?”

“Barbara Hamill.”

“Do I know her? I don’t think so. Is she a Barbie Doll, all tits and a tiny waist?”

“She goes by Barb, and her waist’s a ways from tiny.”

“Is she a fatty? Do you get to wallow around in all that flesh?”

“She’s not fat.”

“Nice tits?”

“They’re okay,” he said. “Her ass is her best feature.”

“Nicer than mine?”

“There’s no part of anybody that’s nicer than any part of you.”

“Yeah, right. But Barbie’s got a great ass? Pardon me, I mean Barb. Does she make the most of it? Does she like it in the ass?”

“She does now.”

“She didn’t but now she does? Thanks to kindly old Doctor Miller?”

He told her about the phone sex, the tranny fantasy. “Yesterday,” he said, “we had some more phone sex. But without the phone.”

“Tell me about the couple.”

“What couple? Oh, those two time-wasters with no idea what they wanted? There’s nothing to tell.”

“Make something up.”

“What do you mean? They weren’t hot enough to have a fantasy about.”

“So make them hotter. Make her beautiful, make him handsome.”

“And?”

“You’re showing this house, and they put the moves on you.”

“Not those two, but okay, I get it. Give me a minute, let me think, and how am I supposed to think with you inside me? Oh, Jesus. Well, you’re right, she’s a beauty, in a sort of unformed girlish kind of way. And he’s not handsome, in fact you’d have to say he was ugly, but like a dangerous bad guy in a movie, you know? Very sexy, you’re scared of him but there’s something about him that makes you want to fuck him.”

“And?”

“And right away I got a little bit of a tingle from the way he looked, and the way he was looking at me. And I got the feeling he wanted to make a move, but how could he with his wife there?

“So I’m showing them this palatial condo, top floor with a storybook view, and I know it’s out of their price range but I take them there anyway, and he goes to use the bathroom, and the wife comes up and slips her arm around my waist, and in the most matter-of-fact way she says, ‘You know, Barb, my husband would totally love to fuck you.’ ”

“So the move came from her.”

“And I swear I never saw it coming! There she is with her hand on my hip, and she moves it so she’s stroking my ass, real gently, yes, like you’re doing now, that’s right—”

“And?”

“And she says, ‘And I’d like to watch him, I’d like to see his big hard cock going in and out of you, and after he fills you full of cum I’ll get down there and clean you up and make you come all over again.’ ”

“You must have been excited.”

“Crazy excited, and scared at the same time, because I never did anything like this, I was never with a woman and certainly never with a couple and — oh, I wish you would fuck me hard, but you’re just going to keep it inside me, aren’t you, and not move at all, and, and—”

“Did they do what she said?”

“He fucked me really hard. Held my legs up over my head so he could get in really deep, and it hurt me some but I was too hot to care. And she was kissing me all over my face and pinching my nipples, pinching them really hard, and I generally don’t like that, but this time it seemed right. And talking to me while she’s kissing me, all this breathy love talk, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty, you’re so sweet.’ And his cock, hammering away at me, and I came so hard I just about blacked out.

“And the next thing I knew, she had her face between my legs and she was licking my pussy and I knew I wasn’t going to respond because I’d just come so hard. But I thought, well, pay attention, because this is a new experience for you and you might as well see what it’s like. And it was different, you know, a woman’s mouth is different, and knowing it’s a woman doing it, that makes it different, too. And before I knew it I was excited all over again, and not just a little excited but really crazy hot, and I started to come, and she kept eating me and I just kept coming.

“And I’m lying there, and he’s holding my head, turning it so my face is right in front of her pussy. And he’s like, ‘Time to return the favor, don’t you think?’ And she’s all, ‘No, Barb, only if you want to,’ and it hits me that I have to taste her, that I’ll die if I don’t get my mouth on her. And it’s not like I don’t know what girls taste like, I’ve touched myself and sucked my finger a million times, but now I’m licking her and it’s amazing, and then I feel him behind me, and he’s fucking me while I’m eating out his beautiful wife, and—”

“And it never happened,” Lisa said. “She just made it up.”

“Right.”

“I’d say Scheherazade gets to live another night. And you were doing her while she was telling you the story.”

“Uh-huh. It’s not word for word, but it’s as close as I could come without taping her.”

“That might be interesting.”

“What, taping her?”

“Be easy enough, right there in your own house. Then we could actually hear her telling the story. Or is it better with you recounting it to me? Hmmm.”

“Hmmm indeed.”

“And you were inside her while she was talking? Like you’re inside me now?”

“Well, I was in her—”

“Ass, right. Barb’s best feature. Do you want to be in my ass? So we can replicate the experience?”

“I don’t want to move from where I am.”

“Then stay right where you are. I could come like this. Could you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I don’t think I want to, not right now. Is that weird?”

“I feel the same way.”

“Like coming is nice, but it’s sort of beside the point. You know what I like about our love nest?”

“The smell of stale cigarette smoke.”

“Which is something you generally miss out on in a non-smoking room. Though right now the smell of sex is doing a good job of canceling it out. No, what I was going to say is that I’m glad the place is tacky.”

“So you can get to feel lowdown and dirty?”

“No,” she said. “I could feel like that in a palace. No, but imagine if we had a really nice place. And we could, you know. There are a million condos for rent, time shares people can’t give away, and how hard could it be to arrange everything through a third party and keep it all nicely anonymous? We could lie on percale sheets while we were grooving on your girlfriend’s naughty stories.”

“Now I’m beginning to regret bringing you to a dump like this.”

“No, that’s the whole point. If we had a place like that we could stay there forever.”

He thought about it. “Oh,” he said.

“Do you see what I mean? It would be comfortable. I don’t want us to be comfortable.”

“I get it,” he said. “And you’re right. And here’s something to keep you from getting too comfortable.”

“Am I gonna like this?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I took a ride over to Court House Square earlier today. I went and had a talk with your husband, George.”

It was something he’d thought of doing, he told her, but it was the conversation with the sheriff that had changed the thought to action. He had to get more of a sense of the man than you could get by stalking him online. And it made sense to establish himself in George’s eyes, so that when he turned up down the line he was already a known factor, that New York cop scraping by doing odd jobs for lawyers and insurance agents. Miller, his name was, a forgettable name with a couple of forgettable initials to keep it company, and he was certainly nobody to take seriously, nobody to worry about.

There might be some money, he’d told the man. If you’re the right Otterbein.

Which, of course, George had proved not to be.

The legend Doak spun was simple enough. A childless widower in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, had died at an advanced age. The old gentleman, one Elmer Otterbein, had never left the family farm, but he’d worked hard and saved himself rich. Well, seven figures worth of rich. He’d died intestate with a few million in savings and government bonds and acreage worth about as much. There was, in short, enough money involved to spend a small fraction of it looking for legitimate heirs, before it disappeared into the coffers of the great state of Nebraska.

And Otterbein, while by no means a common name, was hardly unique. Two Midwestern cities bore the name, as did the college in Ohio and a residential neighborhood in Baltimore. So if George Otterbein could establish any connection to Otterbeins in Nebraska or South Dakota—

“It bothered him that he couldn’t,” he told Lisa. “He really wanted to be the missing heir, but his father was born right here in Florida to a family with all its connection in Maryland and Virginia. Then he managed to recall a sister of his grandfather’s who’d married a man and moved west, and when I pointed out that a sister wouldn’t have been able to pass on the Otterbein name, he decided that it might as easily have been a brother. I took down his information and we agreed that it was unlikely to lead anywhere, but there was no harm in seeing where it went.”

“God, that’s George. If there’s a nickel looking for a home, he’ll be happy to take it in. He told me once he’s not related to any of the Otterbeins, that his father was the only son of an only son. Of course that was when a young man named Otterbein applied for a job, and went so far as to suggest that they might be related. George didn’t encourage the speculation, nor did he hire the fellow, who he thought was looking to con him.”

“He had the same thought about me.”

“Oh?”

“He’d had a drink or two with lunch, and he took down a bottle and poured himself another. Talked me into joining him, either to be sociable or to loosen me up. I think he was waiting for me to offer to work up some credentials to support his claim. A lot of short cons play off that sort of premise, and most of them wind up asking for some kind of expense money, with the real payoff to come when the legacy comes in.”

“Which it never does.”

“The front money is the payoff, for the con man. And you’d think that’d be it, that he’d take it and disappear, but sometimes a good player can string a mark along for months. Getting an extra hundred here and there, a few bucks to underwrite a search of Cree tribal records in Manitoba, a few bucks more to bribe a vital statistics clerk in Mandan, North Dakota.”

“But you didn’t ask him for money.”

“Of course not. I got a few minutes of his time and an ounce or two of his single-malt scotch, and that was really all I wanted. More than I wanted, because I’ve never been much of a scotch drinker, and it was a little early in the day for me anyway. How old is George? I read it online and it didn’t stick. Well up in his sixties, gotta be.”

“Sixty-seven this past March.”

“He still looks vigorous, but I guess there’s no reason a man his age wouldn’t be.”

“Are we talking about sexual potency here? Because he can still get it up, if that was the question.”

“It wasn’t. He’s big and he looks strong. The drink shows in his face a little. Does he get any exercise?”

“He plays golf, but I don’t know if that counts as exercise. They all use carts, and how much exercise is it to swing a club a few dozen times?”

“They really don’t walk?”

“On some courses you’re not allowed to. You have to use a cart, because otherwise it slows things down too much.”

“I never played,” he said, “but I always thought the one good thing about it would be all that walking in the open air. I’ve seen them playing golf on TV, the different tournaments. I don’t remember them zipping around in carts.”

“Maybe it’s different on TV.”

“Maybe. You were going to tell me what made you cut your hair.”

“Right.”

“It doesn’t have to be now. If you’d rather wait—”

“No,” she said. “Now’s a good time for it. Especially now that you went and saw him. And had a drink with him. Speaking of which, you didn’t happen to bring any whiskey along, did you?”

“It never occurred to me. I could go get some, though I don’t know offhand where the nearest package store would be, but—”

“No, don’t go anywhere. If our love nest happened to have a stocked bar, I’d be a customer. But I’m probably better off without it. I’ve never told anybody this story, but then I’ve never told anybody anything, not really. Until I met you.”

He waited.

“I said I’d need you to hold me. Not now. You’ll know when.”