Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

“You aren’t having champagne?”

“Real guys drink Grey Goose,” he said. “From the glass.”

She smiled and they sat down and started to eat. She watched champagne bubbles rise in the flute glass, each one like a long buried corpse popping to the surface.

“You like it out here?” he asked.

“Nah.”

“Why?”

She stood and carried her glass to the railing. She leaned over it and swept her free left hand across the Throgs Neck as she carefully poured her champagne into the bay with her right hand, out of Dr. Sheridan’s view.

“Too beautiful a place to die,” she said, her back to him, lifting her empty glass and pretending to guzzle her champagne. She turned to him and forced a belch into her fist.

He said, “Die?”

“You told me your parents drowned here under the Throgs Neck.”

He ate a bite of pasta, took a sip of his Grey Goose, and leaned back in his deck chair. “You have a very good memory.”

“Yeah.” She waved the empty champagne flute as she took a sideways step across the deck. She knew it took most date-rape drugs about fifteen minutes to kick in. She excused herself and tottered into the luxurious salon that was bigger than some Manhattan apartments. She spent about ten minutes in the bathroom, then staggered out, tripping over the step at the threshold to the deck.

“You okay?” he asked.

She grabbed her head and lurched across the deck. He looped his right arm around her waist.

“Easy,” he said.

“Feel funny.”

“Maybe you should come inside and lie down.”

“Tryin’ to ’memba... something I gotta tell ya...”

He led her inside, slammed the salon door closed, and shoved Nikki onto her back on his couch. He pulled off his shirt in a single flourish. “Now the fucking fun starts, mama.”

Nikki lay motionless on the couch, hands in her jacket pockets. “Whajoo give me?”

“Ketamine,” he said, unbuckling his pants. “Horse tranquilizer. When it wears off you’ll remember nothing. But tonight you’re mine, for any fucking thing I please.” He stripped to his boxer shorts, turned his back to hang up his pants. Then he kneeled before Nikki and slid his two index fingers under the waistband of her Spandex pants. “Now, let’s see what you have here for the ass master.”

Nikki pulled her right hand out of her jacket pocket and rammed a .25 caliber Colt automatic to his left temple. “What I have here is the end of your miserable life, motherfucker,” she said.

Sheridan froze, still kneeling in front of Nikki. “Please... It’s a joke.”

“Real side splitter,” she said. “Let’s see if you remember the same old joke you pulled on a girl named Eileen Lavin.”

His face collapsed into a spasm of tics, coming apart in pieces like a mosaic held together by a lifetime of lies. “Who?”

“Maybe a little champagne will improve your memory.”

Nikki stood up, pointing the gun, grabbed the bottle of champagne, and poured.

“Drink,” she commanded. He looked at the bubbling flute, his eyes skittery. He licked his dry lips. “Drink the fucking champagne, Dr. Sheridan.”

“No, please—”

She shoved the pistol into his left ear again and yanked back the metal slide. “Then I will blow your sick fucking brains across your boat and leave you for the gulls.”

He drank the entire glassful.

She poured another. “Drink, motherfucker.”

He downed it.

She said, “Eileen Lavin was going to be a nun.”

“Her? She was a nut. Everyone called her Sister Psycho.”

“You took her on your father’s boat. Out here where you take all the young girls, because this is the spot where your parents died all right. But they didn’t drown. No, this is the spot where your father discovered your mother screwing his best friend on his boat. The place where he killed them, in a jealous rage. And then shot himself. When you were seventeen. I found all this with a few keyboard strokes. Jilted Hubby Kills Wife, Lover, Self. Nice. And so what was it, doc? When you wanted to get even with Mom, you took poor Eileen Lavin out here to the same spot? On the same boat? Here, under the Throgs Neck Bridge, you drugged and raped her. Over and over and over again. All night.”

“No girl gets on a boat with a man unless she wants to go with the flow.”

“Like your mother? Your father found out she was going with the flow on his boat while he was busting his ass at work to pay for it. He heard talk, slipped out here in a dingy, snuck aboard, and made her pay. And you’re still making her pay, aren’t you, you sick fuck? Every time you take another young girl out on your boat, you’re getting even with Mom. Am I right? But you got careless with Eileen Lavin. You didn’t use protection. Or maybe the rubber broke because she was a virgin. Something went wrong. And you knocked her up. But it was 1982. Before DNA testing was refined. She couldn’t prove it was you.”

“You’re as nuts as Sister Psycho,” he said, yawning.

“She was a fucking virgin! You took her out here, you drugged her, you raped her, you knocked her up. She had to give the baby up for adoption. Then she tried to get her baby back. Everyone abandoned her. You destroyed her life. You destroyed her soul. You destroyed her mind. Until she went up on that bridge and jumped. And died right about here, right where we’re anchored.”

“You can’t blame that on me. And why the hell do you care? What’s it to you?”

“That baby she put in the orphanage? That baby was adopted by a good family, a nice elderly Greek family in Astoria. They called her Nicola. They died when the kid was twelve. Then that baby was bounced around the foster system like a meal ticket. Treated like, well, a bastard. Scroungy orphan. Second-class citizen. She was beaten, abused, neglected. The only time anyone paid any attention to her was when she grew a pair of tits. Then she couldn’t get the filthy bastards off her! Then she became a party favor.”

“Fuck... you... talking ’bout?” His voice was becoming disjointed.

“I’m talking about your own daughter, asshole! The one you made when you raped Eileen Lavin. The rape-baby that caused her to jump off that bridge.” She pulled the diaries out of her jacket pockets and read wrenching portions of Eileen’s words to Dr. George Sheridan.

“She... wush... fucking nuts!” he said, his voice slurry and his jaw slack. “Jush... like... joooo.” His eyes were bloodshot and glazed, like stained glass. He stood and staggered sideways, a straw man, his body devoid of muscle control. Nikki pulled a pair of driving gloves from a jacket pocket, wiggled them on, and led him back onto the rear deck of The Dog’s Life , rocking in the bay under the Throgs Neck.

“You started using the horse drug as a veterinary student. You used it on Eileen Lavin. You literally fucked her out of a life.” Nikki paused and looked up at the bridge, crowded with cars under the crescent moon. “You also fucked me out of a mother. And you gave me a fucking monster for a father. When I was old enough, I went into computers just so I could trace my biological parents. I found out who my real mother was from the old baptismal records. My first adoptive mother told me the name of the church where I was baptized. I was the only girl baptized there the year I was born without a father’s name on the certificate. Once I had my mother’s name, Eileen Lavin’s father — my grandfather, that piece of sanctimonious dogshit — gave me her diaries. From them I found marvelous you. Times change. People don’t. Your hardwiring is the same. Crisscrossed, short-circuited. You’re fucking e-vil , doc. Twenty-five years later, you’re still taking girls my mother’s age out on your boat. Drugging them. Date raping them. Only now you’re more careful. You use a rubber. You shave your body. You pay for meals in cash. You wipe away all fingerprints. You leave no trace of anything. But you are still getting even with your mother, aren’t you? Before you tried to rape me, you even called me mama!”