Макс Коллинз - Spree

“Because once we’ve helped Comfort, he’ll kill her. And me.”

“Don’t say it.”

“And you.”

“I asked you not to say it.” Muzak played “Jingle Bells.” Jingle all the way.

Andy Fieldhaus, forty-five years old, five ten, balding, slightly overweight, wearing a leather bomber jacket under which was a pale pink shirt with a leather tie, co-owner and manager of the Haus of Leather at the Brady Eighty mall, was enjoying the happiest — and most frightening — days of an existence that (save for his glory years as a high school quarterback of some local renown) had largely been a disappointment.

What made his days happy was his girlfriend Heather.

What made them frightening was his wife Caroline.

Heather was twenty-two years old, and his assistant manager at the Haus of Leather. Heather had a lot of frosted brunette hair and large breasts and a small waist and nice hips and a good head on her shoulders, in every sense of the word: a good head containing an above-average brain; a good head on the front of which was a pretty face consisting of big green eyes and a small nose and a small mouth with small very white teeth that made for an enchanting, childlike smile; and, last but not least, a good head capable of giving good head. Very good head.

She had been a cheerleader in high school, and in junior college too, before she had dropped out to get married to a basketball hero. She had divorced her fading-jock husband, who had turned to drinking when he got laid off at John Deere, at which time he began beating her. They’d had one child, before she dumped him, a sweet little girl named Tara, who was now two.

Andy liked the little girl. It reminded him of when his two girls were small; he liked the energy of little kids, how unquestioningly loving they could be. Heather was young enough herself to take him back, to make him feel young again. He hated being forty-five years old, but if he had to be forty-five years old, let him be forty-five years old with a shapely, sexy young girlfriend.

Caroline, who had once been a shapely brunette with large breasts herself, was simply large now. Oh, Andy knew he wasn’t perfect himself — while he still possessed his square-jawed ail- American good looks, he also carried the usual middle-aged spare tire, and his hair was thinning. But ever since her first pregnancy, so many years ago, Caroline had really let herself go; eating was her only hobby — eating and soap operas. Her idea of a good time was an evening in front of the TV with a box of caramel corn in her lap. He no longer loved this woman. He didn’t hate her. He just didn’t feel anything much toward her at all, except repulsion during sex.

He would have left her five years ago if the inheritance from her grandfather hadn’t gone into the Haus of Leather. She was co-owner of the store, though she rarely set foot in the place, and a divorce settlement would be ungodly expensive. She might even end up with the store itself; or so had said the attorney friend he’d quizzed on the q.t.

Once a week, Saturday night usually, they would make love. Making love to this obese woman, who had once been so lovely (though the image of that version of her was fading in his mind), was a nauseating chore. But when she clung to him in the darkness, the voice was the voice that went with the not completely faded image of a lovely shapely twenty-year-old he’d married a lifetime ago, and he felt a pang of something — guilt, remorse, longing, something.

The joy he felt in Heather’s arms, however, overwhelmed such pangs. What they did not overwhelm was his fear — the fear that Caroline would find out that the long hours he put in with the store were frequently not at the store, but at Heather’s apartment, the other employees covering for him if she called; that he was invariably accompanied by his pulchritudinous assistant manager on his various buying trips and, of course, the annual leather convention in Fort Worth; that on those evenings when he was doing inventory and working on the books at the store itself, he spent most of his time in the office in the back room, with Heather, where they were frequently on his couch, which oddly enough was covered in vinyl.

Vinyl was fine with him. Leather meant nothing to him except customers. The smell of leather in the shop, overpowering as it was to the customers, was something he’d long since stopped noticing, his sense of smell dulled to it. And he’d never been into leather, sexually speaking, though he did turn a pretty penny on the side special-ordering bizarre leather goods, for some of the straightest-looking customers.

You never knew about people. Andy figured he was no different than anybody else: he had secrets; he wasn’t as straight as he looked. Heather was his secret, or anyway the reason for all his secrets. She was no dummy, Heather. It had been her idea to keep the money for the sexually oriented leather goods “off the books,” to deal only in cash where that stuff was concerned; and from there he began to play other tricks with the books.

Brady Eighty was a prosperous mall, and the Haus of Leather was the only store of its kind in the entire area — and its goods were top-quality and expensive, leather pants and jackets and boots for men and women both, and every accessory you could imagine. None of that western shit, either; class all the way.

The Haus of Leather was making a killing, in fact — but Andy was watering that fact down in the books. Heather helped him do it. She had accounting in junior college.

The idea was not just to salt money away. The idea was to make the business look less prosperous than it was, so that when the time came, Caroline’s divorce settlement wouldn’t amount to so much. And so that Andy might end up with the business, which could then openly prosper.

It wasn’t stealing. You can’t steal from yourself, and this was his business. What did Caroline do but sit on her fat ass, munchies in her lap, watching daytime soaps till the nighttime soaps came on?

His girls, Tabatha and Tammy, were both in college; sweet-looking girls, who had taken after their mother, but fortunately had not yet shown signs of her tendency to run to fat. Trust funds set up, from the grandfather’s estate, were bankrolling the girls’ schooling, so his responsibility to them, God love them, was met. He hoped they would understand when he started his new life with Heather. He supposed it was too much to ask that they ever accept Heather as their stepmother, when she was only two and three years older than they were, respectively.

He’d had an affair once before — early in the marriage; during Caroline’s first pregnancy. She had found out about the girl — a little blond high school student, a senior (legal age — he was no pervert), who was a frequent customer at the gas station where he was working at the time — and Caroline had been enraged. The memory of the seven months’ pregnant Caroline lumbering after him around the trailer with a carving knife in hand was etched in his mind, like the place on his shoulder where she’d cut him. That’s when he stopped loving her, he thought; the night she made him beg for his life. He’d sworn fidelity (and who wouldn’t, facing an enraged pregnant woman with a carving knife) but it had never been the same after that. They had stopped communicating, and she started eating. Well, no — they had made something of a comeback, resulting in the second girl; the parental experience had drawn them back together. He liked little kids. He was a good dad.

He was a good businessman, too, now that the Haus of Leather had given him a chance to prove it. After high school, it had all been downhill; he’d gone to Augustana on a football scholarship — he couldn’t make it at a bigger school, despite his record, because of his size — and by the second year he’d been dropped from the team and lost his scholarship and flunked out soon after. He’d worked a lot of jobs — blue-collar and white-collar both, and starting fifteen years ago had a little success in real estate till the economy went to shit and the market got glutted with houses; and then finally he got a break: Caroline’s grandfather died.