Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (6 page)

“Being free.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she said, “if you miss it too much, all you have to do is find some sweet young thing and kill her. They’ll take you back in a hot second.”

The silence was profound. Had she gone too far?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was supposed to be a joke, but I guess it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

“It just came out of the blue,” he said. “Took me by surprise.”

“I can see where it would. Forgive me?”

“Nothing to forgive, Audrey.”

“Well, I intend to make it up to you,” she said. “I got a place for us to be together. I know you have to spend nights at the halfway house, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. It’s a nice modern building, and the apartment’s all furnished and there’s even a view. Plus I went shopping.”

“Oh?”

“I bought us a nice bottle of wine,” she said. “Nuits-Saint-Georges. And I bought some toys for us to play with. You’ll see. We’ll have fun.”

She gave him two days to settle in at the halfway house, then met him around the corner. He was wearing a flannel shirt and well-worn jeans, and she had the feeling he wasn’t the first person to own them, that they’d been picked up at a thrift shop or handed out at the halfway house. Whatever the source, he looked good in them. They were an improvement on the orange jumpsuit, and a better choice than any suit he might have worn.

“That’s some place,” he said.

“Better than where you were? Or worse?”

“Well, all I had to do just now was open the door and walk out. That wasn’t an option upstate, so that makes this a big improvement. But it’s the same people, you know? We’re none of us wearing orange jumpsuits, but outside of that we haven’t changed all that much.”

“Oh?”

“A lot of the guys are drinking,” he said. “That’s a violation of the house rules, but nobody makes you take a Breathalyzer test. Still, if you’re a falling-down drunk they’re gonna throw you out. And there are a few I’m pretty sure are using.”

“Drugs?”

He nodded. “A neighborhood like this, how hard can it be to find somebody to cop from? And that’s not just against the house rules, it’s a parole violation and a quick ticket inside. You said something about a bottle of wine.”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s fine with me if you have some, but I think I’m going to pass. I was never in that much of a rush to get out of there, you know, but then you came along, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to breathe free air again. And drinking was never a problem for me, at least I never thought it was, but if not drinking gives me a better shot at staying out, well, I think I’ll give it a try. At least as long as I’m at the residence.”

“How do they feel about Coca Cola?”

“They’re fine with Coke,” he said, “as long as it’s not the powdered variety.”

“Then screw the wine,” she said. “I’ve got Coke in the fridge and clean sheets on the bed. And there’s a gypsy cab. He’s not allowed to pick up fares on the street, but I bet he will. See? What did I tell you? This is our lucky day.”

The sex was sweet. They started kissing, and things proceeded from there at a dreamy pace, and there was never an opportune time to show him the sex toys. Easier to scrap that script, just as she’d abandoned her plans for the wine. It was a nice bottle, a slightly pricier version of what she’d brought to Rita’s dinner table, but it could remain unopened. She wouldn’t need it, or the toys.

Sweet kisses, sweet stroking and petting. He was quite obviously in love with her—or, perhaps more accurately, he was in what he thought was love with what he thought was her. He’d got it all wrong, but while it lasted she might as well go with the flow.

And maybe, she found herself thinking, just maybe the flow she was going with was there to bring her full circle. Maybe she had done what she had to do, maybe she’d killed enough lovers to wipe the last of her father’s touches from her flesh. Maybe the relentless cycle of couple and kill and couple and kill had finally run its course.

Maybe the love he felt for her was real, and maybe it had somehow given birth to that same emotion within her. Maybe she’d punished him enough, poisoning his playmate and sending him to jail for her murder, saddling him not only with a prison sentence but with a double burden of unwarranted guilt.

And maybe she was even now responding to his love, and what stirred her now was not an itch being scratched, not the excitement of sex wedded to the anticipation of another killing, but, well, love. Her own love for him, and her anticipation—incredibly—of a life free from the need to bring an endless line of men to her bed, and from it to their graves.

Maybe she could have a life, a real life, being lover and, yes,
wife
to this man. A good man, a man who loved her, a man whom she could love.

Maybe—

Her climax was surflike, waves rolling and rolling, tossing her, drowning her, hurling her onto the shore. For a long moment she was somewhere else entirely, lost in space and time.

And then she was in her bed, in her sublet apartment in Riverdale, with the perspiration cooling on her skin and a man lying spent at her side.

She reached out for that last thought, a thought that cried out for violins in the background, and a visual that was all pastoral fantasy out of an Irish Spring commercial.

Maybe—

Then again, she thought, maybe not.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

The thing about Coca Cola was it had a good strong taste. You could add almost anything to it and it would still taste like Coca Cola.

That was the good thing about it. The bad thing was that if you dropped a pill into a glass or can or bottle of Coke, it did its Old Faithful imitation and fizzed like crazy.

She knew this because of a pre-teen experiment. The word at school was that you could get high by dissolving an aspirin tablet in a can of Coke, and she’d tried, and what you got was a geyser that bubbled all the Coke out of the can. After a couple of attempts, she figured out that the carbonation had something to do with the reaction, and that all she had to do was let the Coke get flat, and
then
add the aspirin. So she did, and the tablet dissolved without generating a burst of bubbles, and she drank the resultant mixture, and, of course, nothing happened. You didn’t get high. You didn’t even get sick. A big nothing all around.

But, if she’d gained nothing else from the experience, she’d learned not to drop pills into carbonated beverages. Happily, her pharmaceutical score had included a couple of little bottles of chloral hydrate, and Google had led her to all anybody needed to know about that marvelous substance. It was the active ingredient in the legendary Mickey Finn, invented a century and a half ago in San Francisco. A few drops of chloral hydrate in a beer or a highball, and the next thing you knew you were part of the crew of a clipper ship in the China trade. You’d been shanghaied—that’s where the word came from—and you were stuck there, at least until you got to the next port.

A few drops in a glass of Coke? Well, let’s see.

“Here,” she said. “Coca Cola, with just a little lemon juice for flavoring. Come on, drink up. We’ll toast our future, Peter.”

Perfect.

“It could be a lot worse, Peter. Like, you wake up on the heaving deck of a ship bound for Hong Kong, and the last thing you remember is knocking back a glass of red-eye in a Barbary Coast saloon.” She frowned. “But maybe this is worse. It’s hard to say.”

He didn’t say anything, but how could he? He had a six-inch length of duct tape across his mouth. He was on his back, spreadeagled on the bed, held there by restraints from the Pleasure Chest. (
Gentle! Will leave no marks!
)

And she’d used other toys as well.

“You were sleeping so nicely,” she said, “and I thought I’d just let you sleep forever, you know? Smother you in your sleep, or give you a shot of something lethal. The good thing about that is you’d never know what happened, but that’s the bad thing, too, because, well, you’d never know what happened.”

God, the look in his eyes. He was trying to make sense out of this, and how could he? Nor was she helping, her words wandering all over the place.

“Just to fill you in,” she said, “if you’ll pardon the expression, well, that’s a butt plug you feel in your ass. Just to keep you from feeling lonesome for the hot nights in prison. No, no really, because I know you were too much of a tightass to let yourself go that way. It’s more to set the stage, but we’ll get to that.

“And the constriction at the base of your dick, well, you’re wearing a cock ring. That’s why you’ve got such a raging hardon, even though you came like crazy less than an hour ago. The vein’s constricted, but not the artery, so the blood gets in but can’t get out, and your dick stays stiff as a board even though sex is the last thing you want right now.”

He was trying to say something. He couldn’t, of course, but a certain amount of sound came through his nose. Pathetic, really.

“Okay, cut to the chase,” she said. “I couldn’t let you die without knowing this part. Remember that woman you went to prison for? Maureen McSomething? You didn’t kill her, dumbass. I killed her.”

Wide eyes. Zero comprehension.

“You fed me a Roofie, Peter, way back when. And that wasn’t supposed to happen, because I picked you up intending to fuck you and kill you, and the next thing I knew it was morning. So we had a little party, and on the way out I spiked your vodka so that the next drink you took would be your last. But I guess you weren’t much of a vodka drinker, so Maureen got it instead, and since you told the cops about the Rohypnol, they didn’t run a good enough tox scan to find out what else might have gotten into the little darling’s system. And off you went to prison, sure you deserved whatever they gave you.”

And she explained how she hadn’t even known about it until he was a few years into his sentence, how she’d had to track him down, and how she’d been willing to do this because he was one of only three men she’d slept with who still had a pulse.

And she told him why it was important to her that he die, that she be able to cross his name off the list. She was pretty sure it wasn’t making any sense to him, if indeed it was registering at all. Hearing her own words as she spoke them, she wasn’t sure it made any sense to her, either. Why did she have to do this? What difference did it make if an ex-lover was still alive? Why should she care?