The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

Death on Denial by O’Neil De Noux

The Mississippi. The Father of Waters.

The Nile of North America.

And I found it.

– Hernando de Soto, 1541

The oily smell of diesel fumes wafts through the open window, filling the small room above the Algiers Wharf. Gordon Urquhart, sitting in the only chair in the room, a grey metal folding chair, takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks out the window at a listless tugboat chugging up the dark Mississippi. The river water, like a huge black snake, glitters with the reflection of the New Orleans skyline on the far bank.

Gordon’s cigarette provides the room’s only illumination. It’s so dark he can barely see his hand. He likes it, sitting in the quiet, waiting for the room’s occupant to show up. Not quite six feet tall, Gordon is a rock-solid 200 pounds. His hair turning silver, Gordon still sees himself as the good-looking heartbreaker he was in his twenties.

He wasn’t born Gordon Urquhart those 40 years ago. When he saw the name in a movie, he liked it so much he became Gordon Urquhart. He made a good Gordon Urquhart. Since the name change, he’d gone up in life.

He yawns, then takes off his leather gloves and places them on his leg. He wipes his sweaty hands on his other pants leg.

The room, a ten-by-ten-foot hole-in-the-wall, has a single bed against one wall, a small chest of drawers on the other wall, and a sink in the far corner. Gordon sits facing the only door.

He closes his eyes and daydreams of Stella Dauphine. He’d caught a glimpse of her last night on Bourbon Street. She walked past in that short red dress without even noticing him. As she moved away, bouncing on those spiked high heels, he saw a flash of her white panties when her dress rose in the breeze. He wanted to follow, but had business to take care of.

Sitting in the rancid room, Gordon daydreams of Stella, of those full lips and long brown hair. She’s in the same red dress, only she’s climbing stairs. He moves below and watches her fine ass as she moves up the stairs. Her white panties are sheer enough for him to see the crack of her round ass.

They’re on his ship from his tour in the US Navy. Indian Ocean. Stella stops above him and spreads her legs slightly. He can see her dark pubic hair through her panties. She looks down and asks him directions.

Gordon goes up and shows her to a ladder, which she goes up, her ass swaying above him as he goes up after her, his face inches from her silky panties. Arriving at the landing above, she waits for him atop the ladder. He reaches up and pulls her panties down to her knees, runs his fingers back up her thighs to her bush and works them inside her wet pussy. She gasps in pleasure.

A sound brings Gordon back to the present. He hears footsteps coming up the narrow stairs up to the hall and moving to the doorway. Gordon pulls on his gloves and lifts the 22-calibre Bersa semiautomatic pistol from his lap. He grips the nylon stock, slips his finger into the trigger guard, and flips off the safety as the door opens. He points the gun at the midsection of the heavyset figure standing in the doorway.

Faintly illuminated by the dull, yellowed hall light, Lex Smutt reaches for the light switch. Gordon closes one eye. The light flashes on and Smutt freezes, his wide-set hazel eyes staring at the Bersa.

“Don’t move, fat boy!” Gordon opens his other eye and points his chin at the bed. “Take a seat.”

Smutt moves slowly to his bed and sits. At five-seven and nearly 300 pounds, Smutt knows better than to think of himself as anything but a toad. He runs his hands across his bald head and bites his lower lip. Wearing a tired, powder-blue seersucker suit, white shirt, and mud-brown tie, loosened around his thick neck, Smutt is as rumpled as a crushed paper bag.

“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Gordon rises, his knees creaking, and closes the door. In his black suit, Gordon wears a black shirt and charcoal-grey tie.

Yawning again, Gordon says, “Long time, no see.”

Smutt lets out a nervous laugh.

Gordon’s mouth curls into a cold grin. “Lex Smutt. That’s your real name, ain’t it? It’s a stupid name. You stupid?”

Smutt shakes his head slowly, his gaze fixed on the Bersa.

“You know why I’m here.”

Smutt’s eyes widen as if he hasn’t a clue.

“Give me the 15,000. Or die.”

A shaky smile comes to Smutt’s thin lips. “I don’t have it.”

“Then die.” Gordon cocks the hammer – for effect – and points the Bersa between Smutt’s eyes.

Raising his hands, Smutt stammers, “Come on, now. Gimme a minute.”

“You’ll have the money in a minute?” Gordon’s hand remains steady as he closes his left eye and aims careful at the small, dark mole between Smutt’s eyebrows. The loud blast of a ship’s horn causes Smutt to jump. Gordon is unmoved.

As long seconds tick by, Gordon takes the slack up in the trigger and starts to pull it slowly. Staring eye-to-eye, Smutt blinks.

“I got six grand,” Smutt says.

Gordon’s trigger finger stops moving, but his hand remains steady. He blinks and nods.

“Where?”

“On me.”

“Where?”

Smutt wipes away the sweat rolling down the sides of his face and exhales loudly. “For a minute there I thought -”

“Where?” Gordon interrupts.

Leaning back on his hands, Smutt looks around the room.

Gordon raises his size-eleven shoe and kicks him in the left shin. Smutt shrieks and grabs his leg. He rocks back and forth twice before Gordon presses the muzzle of the Bersa against the man’s forehead.

“Where?” Gordon growls.

“Under the bed.” Smutt rubs his shin with both hands. “Under the floorboard.”

Gordon grabs the seersucker suit collar with his left hand and yanks Smutt off the bed, shoving the man to the floor. Kicking the bed aside, Gordon orders Smutt to pull up the floorboard.

“Come up with anything except money and you’re dead.”

On his hands and knees now, Smutt crawls over to where his bed used to stand. Reaching for the loose board, he looks up at Gordon and says, “We have to come to an understanding.”

Gordon points the Bersa at the floor next to Smutt’s hand and squeezes off a round. A pop is followed by the sound of the shell casing bouncing on the wood floor.

Smutt looks at the neat hole next to his hand, looks back at Gordon, then yanks up the loose board. He reaches inside and pulls out a brown paper bag. He hands it to Gordon without looking up.

Snatching the bag, Gordon takes a couple of steps back. He opens the bag and quickly counts the money. Six grand exactly.

“You’re 9,000 short.”

Smutt rolls over on his butt and sits like a Buddha, hands on his knees. He wipes the sweat away from his face again and says, “Mr Happer will just have to understand. You just came into this but it’s been goin’ on awhile. I need time. Most of the 15 is vig… interest. You know.”

Gordon points the Bersa at the mole again. “You’re certain this is all you have?”

Smutt nods slowly, looking at the floor now. He waves a hand around. “Does it look like I got more?”

“Try yes or no!”

“No!” Smutt’s voice falters and he clears his throat.

“I heard you won more than this at the Fairgrounds.”

“Well, you heard wrong.”

Gordon waits.

Smutt won’t look up.

So Gordon asks, “Why deny it? You cleared over 20,000.”

“I had other bills to pay.”

“Before Mr Happer?” Gordon’s voice is deep and icy.

“I told you this has been going on awhile. I need time.”

“You shoulda thought of that before. Now look at me.” Gordon closes his left eye again.

Smutt looks up and Gordon squeezes off a round that strikes just to the left of the mole. Smutt shudders and bats his eyes. Gordon squeezes off another shot, this one just to the right of the mole. Smutt’s mouth opens and he falls slowly forward, face first, in his lap.

Gordon steps forward and puts two more in the back of the man’s head.

Then he carefully picks up the spent casings, all five of them, and puts them in his coat pocket. The air smells of gunpowder now and faintly of blood. He searches the body and finds another 400 in Smutt’s coat pocket. Still on his haunches, Gordon looks inside the hole in the floor, but there’s nothing else there.

He ransacks the room before leaving.

The night air feels damp on his face as he walks around the corner to where he’d squirrelled away his low-riding Cadillac.

Gordon checks his watch as he ascends the exterior stairs outside the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf. It’s 9.00 a.m., sharp. He looks across the river at the unpainted Algiers Wharf. Shielding his eyes from the morning sun glittering off the river, he can almost make out the window of Smutt’s room.

At the top of the stairs, he enters a narrow hall and moves to the first door. He knocks twice and waits, looking up at the surveillance camera. He straightens his ice-blue tie. This morning Gordon wears his tan suit with a dark blue shirt. Before leaving home, he told himself in his bathroom mirror that he looked “spiffy”.

The door buzzes and he pulls it open.

Mr Happer sits behind his wide desk. Facing the TV at the far edge of his desk, next to the black videocassette recorder, the old man doesn’t look up as Gordon crosses the long office. Happer looks small, hunkered down in the large captain’s chair behind the desk.

The office smells of cigar smoke and old beer. The carpet is so old it’s worn in spots. Gordon takes a chair in front of Mr Happer’s desk and pulls out an envelope, which he places on the desk.

Raising a hand like a traffic cop, Mr Happer leans forward to pay close attention to the scene on his TV. Gordon doesn’t have to look to know what’s on the screen. It’s Peter Ustinov again and that damn movie Mr Happer watches over and over. By the sound of it, Ustinov and David Niven are slowly working their way through the murder on the riverboat. What was the name of that French detective Ustinov plays? Hercules something-or-another.

Mr Happer suddenly turns his deep-set black eyes to Gordon.

Pushing 70, Mr Happer is a skeleton of a man with razor-sharp cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and arms that always remind Gordon of the films of those refugees from Dachau. Mr Happer reaches with his left hand for the envelope on his desk, picks it up with his spider’s fingers, and opens it.

“That’s all Smutt had on him,” Gordon volunteers.

Mr Happer nods and says, “400?” He focuses those black eyes on Gordon and says, “What about the twenty grand from the Fairgrounds.”

Gordon is careful as he looks back into the man’s eyes. He shrugs. “He said he had other bills to pay.”

“Before me?”

“That’s what I said to him.”

“So?”

“So I took care of him. Tossed the room and that’s it.”

Mr Happer shakes his head. Gordon watches him and remembers the man’s name isn’t Happer either. The old bastard was born Sam Gallizzio and tried for most of his life to become a made man, working at the periphery of La Cosa Nostra. Trying to be a goomba, Happer failed. He did, however, manage to remain alive, which isn’t easy for an Italian gangster who’s not LCN, even if he’s only a semi-gangster.

Shoving the envelope into a drawer, Mr Happer pulls out another envelope, which he slides across the desk to Gordon.

Gordon picks it up and slips it into his coat pocket. He doesn’t have to count it. He knows there’s a thousand in there – the old bastard’s cut-rate hit fee.

Mr Happer picks up a stogie from an overflowing ashtray and sticks it in his mouth. He sucks on it and its tip glows red. He shakes his head again.

“It’s worth it,” Mr Happer says, as if he needs convincing. “The word’ll get out. Make it easier later on. That’s what the big boys do.”

Gordon nods.

“He woulda never come up with the fifteen,” Mr Happer says, and Gordon wonders if the old man is baiting him. “He woulda never paid me.”

Fanning away the smoke from between them Mr Happer says, “You sure you tossed the place right, huh? You weren’t in no hurry.”

“No hurry at all.” Gordon feels the old man squeezing him.

Mr Happer raises a hand suddenly, leans to the side to catch something Ustinov says. He nods, as if he’s approving, then props his elbows on the desk. He looks at Gordon.

“You sure?” And there it is. The question.

“I’m sure, Mr Happer.” Gordon likes the way his voice is deep and smooth.

“I gotta ask you straight up, you know that, don’t you?” The old coot’s face is expressionless.

Deny. Deny. Deny. Gordon doesn’t even blink. He feels good.

Finally, the old man blinks and Gordon says, “Mr Happer. I’ve always been straight with you. You know that.”

Mr Happer waves his hand again as he falls back in his chair.

“Son-of-a-bitch dumped the money awfully fast.” Mr Happer looks again at the TV.

Gordon stops himself from reminding the old bastard that their agreement was simple. Find Smutt, get as much as you can from him, then whack him and leave him where he’ll be found. He did his job. A contract is a contract.

Gordon waits. He wants to say, “Well, if that’s all -” but knows better. He waits for Mr Happer to dismiss him.

The old man turns around and looks at the windows that face the river. He takes another puff of his cigar, lets out a long trail of smoke, and then says, “That’s what I get for dealing with bums like Smutt. At least he got his.”

Turning to Gordon, the old man smiles, and it sends a chill up Gordon’s back.

“I was thinking of asking you if you happen to know where Smutt used to hang out. Maybe he had another place. But the money’s long gone.”

When the old man looks back at his TV, Gordon casually looks at the windows. A gunshot rings out and excited voices, including Ustinov’s, rise on the TV. Gordon waits.

Finally, after the commotion on the riverboat calms down, Mr Happer looks at Gordon and says, “I know where to get you.”

Gordon stands and nods at the old man and leaves, Mr Happer’s dismissal echoing in his mind. He knows where to get me. Goodbye and hello at the same time.

Stepping out into the sunlight again, Gordon squints and stretches, then walks down the stairs. He looks at the brown, swirling river water and laughs to himself. Ustinov is still on the riverboat, floating on his own brown water, trying to solve the murder with Mr Happer watching intently. It strikes Gordon as very, very funny.

Before pulling away in his Caddy, he slips on his sunglasses and looks around. He spots the tail two minutes later, a black Chevy.

Gordon Urquhart’s bedroom smells of cheap aftershave and faintly of mildew. Waiting in the darkness, Stella Dauphine sits on Gordon’s double bed, her.22 Beretta next to her hand.

She wears a lightweight, tan trench coat and matching tan high heels, a pair of skin-tight gloves on her hands. A young-looking 30, Stella has curly hair that touches her shoulders. For a thin woman, she’s buxom, which made her popular in high school but proved a hindrance in the mundane office jobs she held throughout her twenties.

Beneath the trench coat, she wears nothing except a pair of “barely there” sheer thigh-high stockings. She runs a hand over her knee and up to the top of her left thigh-high, pulling it up a little as she waits.

Closing her eyes she listens intently.

She didn’t used to be Stella Dauphine. Born Carla Stellos, she changed her name after a year in New Orleans. After seeing a late-night movie on TV – A Streetcar Named Desire - and after parking her car on Dauphine Street, she decided on the change. She felt more like a Stella Dauphine every day.

Her eyes snap open a heartbeat after she hears a distinct metallic click at the back door. The door creaks open. Standing at the foot of the bed, Stella picks up her Beretta, unfastens the trench coat, her gun hidden in the folds of the coat as she waits.

She feels a slight breath of summer air flow into the room and hears a voice sigh and then light footsteps moving toward the bedroom. A figure steps into the doorway.

The light flashes on.

Gordon Urquhart’s there, a neat.22 Bersa in his hand.

Stella opens the trench coat and lets it fall off her shoulders.

As Gordon looks down at her naked body, Stella squeezes off a round, which strikes Gordon on the right side of his chest. He’s stunned, so stunned he drops his gun. Gordon’s mouth opens as he stumbles into the room, falling against the chest of drawers. Blood seeps through the fingers of his right hand, which he’s pressed against his wound.

“You shot me!”

“Kick your gun over here.”

Gordon’s face is ashen. He blinks at her, looks at his chest and stammers, “You shot me!

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you again.” Stella’s mouth is set in a grim, determined slit. “Now kick the gun.”

Gordon swings his foot and the gun slides across the hardwood floor. Stella steps forward and kicks it back under Gordon’s bed.

The big man is breathing hard now. Blood has saturated his shirt.

“I think you hit an artery,” he says weakly.

“Then we don’t have much time, do we?”

“For what?”

Stella points her chin at the bed. “Sit, before you collapse.”

Gordon moves to the bed and sits.

Stella moves to the doorway between the bedroom and kitchen, the Beretta still trained on Gordon.

“So,” she says. “Where is it?”

He looks at her as if he hasn’t the foggiest idea.

“Mr Happer told me to give you ten seconds to come up with the money you took off Smutt.” Stella narrows her eyes. “One. Two. Three -”

“I gave him the 400.”

“Four. Five. Six -”

Gordon raises his head and says, “Go ahead and shoot me. There’s no money.”

“Seven. Eight. Nine -”

“If I had it, you think I’d be dumb enough to have it on me? I spotted your Chevy as soon as I left the Governor Nicholls Wharf.”

Stella squeezes off another round, which knocks the lamp off the end table next to the bed.

“Dammit!” Gordon groans in pain. “I don’t have any more money. Smutt blew it all.”

Stella brushes her hair away from her face with her right hand and tells him, “Mr Happer doesn’t believe you and I don’t believe you.”

Gordon clears his throat and says, “Mr Happer and me go back a long way, lady. He knows better.”

A cold smile crosses Stella’s thin lips. “I’ll just whack you and toss the place. I’ll still get my fee.”

“This is crazy. I tell you, there’s no more money.”

Stella aims the Beretta with both hands again, this time at Gordon’s face. She says, “So you and the old man go back a ways, huh? Well, I’m the one he calls when things go badly. And you’re as bad as they come.”

Gordon nods at her. “I seen you around. I know all about you. And you got me all wrong, lady.”

Stella watches his eyes closely as she says, “When Smutt left the Fairgrounds, he went straight to his parole-officer’s house and paid the man off. Three grand. Stiff payoff, but Smutt figured it was worth it. Then he went to two restaurants, gorged himself. Then dropped some cash at the betting parlour on Rampart.”

She watches Gordon’s pupils. A pinprick of recognition comes to them as soon as she says the words, “Six grand. He had about six grand left. You took it off him.”

“No way.”

Stella fires again, into Gordon’s belly, and he howls.

“That’s it.” Stella’s smile broadens. “Keep denying it.”

“I don’t have it!” Gordon slumps backward.

Stella levels her weapon, aiming at Gordon’s forehead. She pauses, giving him one last chance.

“I don’t!” He screams.

She squeezes off a round that strikes Gordon in the forehead. Stepping forward, she puts two more in his head before he falls back on his bed. For good measure she empties the Beretta’s magazine, putting two more in the side of the man’s head.

She picks up all eight casings and slips them into the pocket of her coat. She leaves his Bersa under the bed. Let the police match it to the Smutt murder. Then, slowly and methodically, she tosses the place.

An hour later, she finds the 6,000 in the flour container on Gordon’s kitchen counter. The giveaway – what man has fresh flour in a container?

Mr Happer, sitting back in his captain’s chair, bats his eyes at the TV as Peter Ustinov taps out an S-O-S on his bathroom wall, a large cobra poised and ready to strike the rotund detective. Stella, standing at the desk’s edge in the trench coat outfit from last night, recognizes the scene and waits for David Niven to rush in with his sword to impale the snake.

When the scene’s tension dies, Mr Happer turns his deep-set eyes to Stella and says, “OK. You got the money?” Stella shakes her head.

Mr Happer’s eyes grow wide. “It wasn’t there?”

“I tore the place apart. If he had it, he stashed it.”

“Dammit!” Mr Happer slaps a skeletonic hand on his desk. He picks up the remote control and pauses his movie. His black eyes leer at Stella’s eyes as if he can get the truth just by staring. She bites her lower lip, reaches down, and unfastens her coat. She opens it slowly as Happer’s gaze moves down her body.

Stella lets the coat fall to the floor and stands there naked except for the thigh-high stockings, which give her long legs the silky look. Rolling her hips, Stella sits on the edge of the desk. Mr Happer stares at her body as if mesmerized. It takes a long minute for his gaze to rise to her eyes.

“You sure you tossed the place right?”

Stella nods.

Mr Happer picks up the remote and looks back at the TV. The riverboat is moored now, against the bank of the wide Nile River.

“Well, the word’ll get out. Make it easier later on,” Happer says. “That’s what the big boys do.”

Stella climbs off the desk and picks up her coat. As she closes it, she looks at the old man. Mr Happer turns those black eyes to her and says, “You sure you tossed the place right?”

She’s ready, her face perfectly posed. “I’m sure.”

“OK.” Mr Happer looks back at the TV and mouths the words as Peter Ustinov speaks. Without looking, he opens his centre desk drawer and withdraws an envelope. He slides it over to Stella, who picks it up and puts it in her purse.

“Good work,” Mr Happer says.

“Thanks.” Stella turns and leaves him with his Ustinov and David Niven and riverboat floating down the Nile.

On her way down the stairs she looks at the dark Mississippi water and whispers a message to the dead Gordon, “So you and Mr Happer go back a long way. Well, we go back a longer way.”

And I have tools, plenty of tools to work against this man, against all these men.

Three minutes later she spots the tail, a dark blue Olds.