Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

She wasn’t surprised when his hands gripped her shoulders and eased her downward on the bed. She had been expecting this and welcomed it. She swung her head, letting her long hair brush across his flat abdomen, and then she moved to accept him. He tangled his fingers in her hair, hurting her in a not unpleasant way. She inhaled his musk as her mouth embraced him, and in her own fashion she matched his strength with strength of her own, teasing, taunting, heightening his passion and then cooling it down just short of culmination. His breathing grew ragged and muscles worked in his legs and abdomen.

At length he let go of her hair. She moved upward on the bed to join him and he rolled her over onto her back and covered her, his mouth seeking hers, his flesh burying itself in her flesh. She locked her thighs around his hips. He pounded at her loins, hammering her, hurting her with the brute force of his masculinity.

How strong he was, and how insistent. Once again she thought what a dangerous man he was, and what a dangerous game she was playing. The thought served only to spur her own passion on, to build her fire higher and hotter.

She felt her body preparing itself for orgasm, felt the urge growing to abandon herself, to lose control utterly. But a portion of herself remained remote, aloof, and she let her arm hang over the side of the bed and reached for her purse, groped within it.

And found the knife.

Now she could relax, now she could give up, now she could surrender to what she felt. She opened her eyes, stared upward. His own eyes were closed as he thrust furiously at her. Open your eyes, she urged him silently. Open them, open them, look at me—

And it seemed that his eyes did open to meet hers, even as they climaxed together, even as she centered the knife over his back and plunged it unerringly into his heart.

Afterward, in herown apartment, she put his eyes in the box with the others.

I suppose itreally started for me when I saw the man whipping his horse. He was a hansom cabdriver, dressed up like the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins with a top hat and a cutaway tailcoat, and I saw him on Central Park South, where the horse-drawn rigs queue up waiting for tourists who want a ride in the park. His horse was a swaybacked old gelding with a noble face, and it did something to me to see the way that driver used the whip. He didn’t have to hit the horse like that.

I found a policeman and started to tell him about it, but it was clear he didn’t want to hear it. He explained to me that I would have to go to the station house and file a complaint, and he said it in such a way as to discourage me from bothering. I don’t really blame the cop. With crack dealers on every block and crimes against people and property at an all-time high and climbing, I suppose crimes against animals have to receive low priority.

But I couldn’t forget about it.

I had already had my consciousness raised on the subject of animal rights. There was a campaign a few years ago to stop one of the cosmetic companies from testing their products on rabbits. They were blinding thousands of innocent rabbits every year, not with the goal of curing cancer but just because it was the cheapest way to safety-test their mascara and eyeliner.

I would have liked to sit down with the head of that company. “How would you like it?” I would have asked him. “How would you like having chemicals painted on your eyes to make you blind?”

All I did was sign a petition, like millions of other Americans, and I understand that it worked, that the company has gone out of the business of blinding bunnies. Sometimes, when we all get together, we can make a difference.

Sometimes we can make a difference all by ourselves.

Which brings me back to the subject of the horse and his driver. I found myself returning to Central Park South over the next several days and keeping tabs on that fellow. I thought perhaps I had just caught him on a bad day, but it became clear that it was standard procedure for him to use the whip that way. I went up to him and said something finally, and he turned positively red with anger. I thought for a moment he was going to use the whip on me, and I frankly would have liked to see him try it, but he only turned his anger on the poor horse, whipping him more brutally than ever and looking at me as if daring me to do something about it.

I just walked away.

That afternoon I went to a shop in Greenwich Village where they sell extremely odd paraphernalia to what I can only suppose are extremely odd people. They have handcuffs and studded wrist bands and all sorts of curious leather goods. Sadie Mae’s Leather Goods, they call themselves. You get the picture.

I bought a ten-foot whip of plaited bullhide, and I took it back to Central Park South with me. I waited in the shadows until that driver finished for the day, and I followed him home.

You can kill a man with a whip. Take my word for it.

Well, I haveto tell you that I never expected to do anything like that again. I can’t say I felt bad about what I’d done. The brute only got what he deserved. But I didn’t think of myself as the champion of all the abused animals of New York. I was just someone who had seen his duty and had done it. It wasn’t pleasant, flogging a man to death with a bullwhip, but I have to admit there was something almost shamefully exhilarating about it.

A week later, and just around the corner from my own apartment, I saw a man kicking his dog.

It was a sweet dog, too, a little beagle as cute as Snoopy. You couldn’t imagine he might have done anything to justify such abuse. Some dogs have a mean streak, but there’s never any real meanness in a hound. And this awful man was hauling off and savaging the animal with vicious kicks.

Why do something like that? Why have a dog in the first place if you don’t feel kindly toward it? I said something to that effect, and the man told me to mind my own business.

Well, I tried to put it out of my mind, but it seemed as though I couldn’t go for a walk without running into the fellow, and he always seemed to be walking the little beagle. He didn’t kick him all the time — you’d kill a dog in short order if you did that regularly. But he was always cruel to the animal, yanking hard on the chain, cursing with genuine malice, and making it very clear that he hated it.

And then I saw him kick it again. Actually it wasn’t the kick that did it for me, it was the way the poor dog cringed when the man drew back his foot. It made it so clear that he was used to this sort of treatment, that he knew what to expect.

So I went to a shoe store on Broadway in the teens where they have a good line of work shoes, and I bought a pair of steel-toed boots of the kind construction workers wear. I was wearing them the next time I saw my neighbor walking his dog, and I followed him home and rang his bell.

It would have been quicker and easier, I’m sure, if I’d had some training in karate. But even an untrained kick has a lot of authority to it when you’re wearing steel-toed footwear. A couple of kicks in his legs and he fell down and couldn’t get up, and a couple of kicks in the ribs took the fight out of him, and a couple of kicks in the head made it absolutely certain he would never harm another of God’s helpless creatures.

It’s cruelty that bothers me, cruelty and wanton indifference to another creature’s pain. Some people are thoughtless, but when the inhumanity of their actions is pointed out to them they’re able to understand and are willing to change.

For example, a young woman in my building had a mixed-breed dog that barked all day in her absence. She didn’t know this because the dog never started barking until she’d left for work. When I explained that the poor fellow couldn’t bear to be alone, that it made him horribly anxious, she went to the animal shelter and adopted the cutest little part Sheltie to keep him company. You never hear a peep out of either of those dogs now, and it does me good to see them on the street when she walks them, both of them obviously happy and well cared for.