Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (3 page)

“It may have been something like that.”

“Then let’s try a little role play, Peter. I’ll take off all my clothes and just lie there. You can pretend I’m in a coma. Or, hey, this is even better—you can pretend I’m dead.”

He stared at her.

“What’s the matter, you don’t think that’s funny? All right, let’s turn it around. You be the one in the coma.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Take off your clothes,” she said, in a tone that clearly expected obedience. “Now lie down. On your back, Peter. Eyes closed. You don’t get to see me, Peter. And you can’t move. You’re paralyzed, you’re unconscious, you’ve barely got a pulse. All you can do is lie there and breathe.”

She got out of her own clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, reached out a hand and took hold of him.

“No, don’t move. And don’t open your eyes.” Her grip tightened. “I’m not kidding. All you do is lie there, or I swear I’ll rip it off.”

She didn’t know what he was doing with his mind, how he was letting it play. She didn’t care. Her own fantasy was demanding all of her attention.

And it kept changing, insistent upon reinventing itself. At first it was pretty close to the reality of the situation: He was lying there, entirely in her power, unable to move because she had forbidden him to move, unable to see because her words were as blinding as a strip of duct tape over his eyes.

And then it changed, and in her mind he was physically immobilized, spreadeagled on the bed with his hands and feet in restraints, his mouth taped shut, a blindfold in place.

And in the third phase he was drugged. Unconscious, comatose, unable even to feel what she was doing with her hands and mouth.

And then—bingo!—he was dead, and that was the best of all. Oh, she’d been with plenty of dead men, but her interest in them had always ended with the sweet delight of their dying. Once they were dead, once she’d absorbed the sense of accomplishment and completion their deaths afforded her, she was ready to move on. They were off the list, out of her life even as they were out of their own, and the last thing she wanted to do was stroke their bodies, or suck their cocks.

But this dead man was different. This corpse was warm, and sentient. And so she touched and stroked the dead flesh, and the dead penis rose up in her mouth like Lazarus, and, well, she really got into it.

There was this line from an old blues song, just a fragment of a line, something about a woman who was so hot she could make a dead man come. The words echoed in her mind,
make a dead man come, make a dead man come, make a dead man come,
and he was rock-hard now, and unable to lie entirely still, unable to keep from moaning, and God she felt strong, God she felt powerful, and yes!
Yes!

And she did indeed make this dead man come, and his orgasm triggered one of her own, not her typical long rolling climax but something very brief but furiously intense, almost masculine in nature. There was a moment when she went away, disappeared somewhere in time and space. Just an instant, and then she was back in the Airstream fuck truck, and she realized with perfect clarity that she’d accomplished something extraordinary, something more remarkable than simply raising the dead. She’d had sex with this inert being, this man who was playing dead at her command, and by so doing she had made the fantasy a reality.

He was dead. She’d fucked him dead, she’d sucked not only the life force but the very life itself out of him, and now she could cross him off her list.

Two.

She’d have some explaining to do. But they’d searched her enough to know she’d brought nothing into the trailer but her own self and the clothes on her back, and if his heart wasn’t up to the stress of sexual activity, well, that was no fault of hers, was it? They’d let her go, they’d have to, and they’d never see her again.

“Audrey?”

Oh, fuck. The son of a bitch was alive.

Shit.
Three.

Conjugal visits, it turned out, were limited in both duration and frequency. You couldn’t stay in the fuck truck for more than two hours—which struck her as reasonable, actually—and you couldn’t go there more than once a week. On reflection, she decided that was probably reasonable, too. If prisoners got to fuck their wives any time they felt like it, they wouldn’t have sufficient energy to plan future crimes, let alone organize a decent riot.

But it certainly didn’t make her life any easier. She could visit him once a day if she wanted, could simply show up at the prison and get ushered into the big room where they’d sit on opposite sides of a window. But if she couldn’t kill him in the fuck truck, how could she kill him in the visitors room? All she could do in there was have a conversation with him, and she’d just as soon talk to herself.

“I’ll be back next week,” she told him in the visitors room, a day after their visit to the Airstream trailer. “That’s if you want me to.”

Oh, he wanted her to.

“Then I’ll come,” she said. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can bring you?”

“If it’s not too much trouble—”

“Just tell me.”

Cigarettes, he said. If she could manage a carton of cigarettes, that would be great. What brand? Well, Marlboro would be ideal.

“I’ll bring you a carton tomorrow or the next day,” she said. “Just as soon as I can.”

Two days later she presented the requested carton of Marlboros to an attendant, and he gave her a receipt for it; it would be delivered as soon as possible to one Peter Fuhrmann. She went back to her motel and wished she could pack up and leave. Did she really have to turn up the next morning? Couldn’t she wait for her gift to work its magic?

She watched TV until she was able to sleep, then slept until she woke up. She turned up during visiting hours and was just slightly disappointed when they ushered her into the room with Fuhrmann on the other side of the window.

“I got the cigarettes,” was the first thing he said to her. “That was really nice of you. Thanks.”

“I guess you’ve been smoking like crazy ever since.”

“Oh, I don’t smoke.”

Her reaction was enough to put a smile on his face. And he went on to explain that cigarettes were the preferred currency inside prison walls, that they were better than money when it came to obtaining favors. “They’re too valuable to smoke,” he said, “and I think if I ever had the habit I’d have to quit while I was here. It’d be like lighting up dollar bills and smoking them.”

“So these packs of Marlboros just pass from hand to hand like money? Doesn’t anybody ever smoke them?”

“Oh, the smokers smoke them,” he said. “They’re addicted, so what choice do they have? But I was never a smoker.”

“And you’ve got an MBA,” she said, “so you know how to game the system.”

Which was more than she could say for herself.

Back to the motel. She packed, and found room in her suitcase for the hypodermic needle and the little vial of colorless liquid. There was still some left. She’d only used a few drops on the Marlboros.

She hadn’t even opened the carton, let alone any of the packs. There’d been no need. The hard part had been getting what she needed from a pharmacist, and she’d worked up an elaborate story which in the end she’d never needed to deliver. Because the guy behind the counter in Glens Falls practically drooled at the sight of her, so the easiest thing was to come back right around closing time and let him coax her into the back room.

He had a couch there, and she rather doubted she was the first woman he’d shared it with. But she knew she’d be the last. He went down on her first, which was promising, but before she could get anything out of it he sprang up and mounted her, and after a few thrusts he was done. That made him the fourth name on her list, but he didn’t stay on it for long; there was a pair of heavy-duty shears at hand, and he was dead before he could catch his breath.

She scooped up close to three hundred dollars from the cash register, plus a pair of fifties and three hundreds in the lower compartment. That was a decent score in the age of credit cards, and she upped it with another two hundred-plus from his wallet. All very welcome, because she could certainly use the money. Cash didn’t seem to last long. She was always on the verge of running out of it.

But the money was beside the point. There was a reason she’d picked Washburn Pharmacy instead of Dell Hardware or Pick’n’Pay Market, and she found what she was looking for in a locked cupboard alongside the couch where Gerald Washburn, RPh, had had the last orgasm of his young life. The lock looked formidable enough, but inches from it a key hung from a nail, and voila!

She took everything that looked interesting, including a syringe. What she didn’t take she scattered, leaving the place as she imagined an impatient junkie might leave it.

On the way out, she helped herself to a carton of Marlboros. Like, why not?

In the end, she decided to keep only a bare minimum of the pharmaceuticals she’d taken. She’d had the impulse to hang on to everything, because you never knew what might come in handy. But you also never knew who would go through your possessions and wonder how you’d happened to turn into a walking drugstore, and a trace of these controlled substances would lead straight to Washburn Pharmacy, and wasn’t that where they found poor Washburn with a pair of scissors in his chest? Say, do you suppose there could be a connection?