Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

His finger on the trigger...

He replaced the clip, put the gun in his lap. He uncapped the pint of Georgi, took another pull, a long one this time. The vodka, he realized for the first time, had the same name as the man he was going to murder. Well, almost. The vodka ended in an I, the man in an E. Georgi was George in Russian, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the pronunciation. He’d heard people say Georgie, same as the basic nickname for George, but he’d also heard something along the lines of gay-OR-ghee, with both G’s hard. Which was probably how they said it in Russia, but this cheap crap was distilled in the States by your basic American capitalists, so giving it a fancy Russian pronunciation seemed a little precious, didn’t it?

He’d just pointed at the bottle. “Yeah,” he’d agreed, when the clerk took it off the shelf. “That one.”

He took another pull, capped the bottle.

And thought about Pregnant Girl.

She’d led him upstairs, and on the way he ran a hand under her skirt and touched her, and in the bedroom she arranged herself with a pillow under her bottom and her legs wide apart.

He teased her, bringing her right to the edge, then easing off, and she liked the game and went with it, saying Oh, please, please , and when he finally let her come she bunched up the bedsheet and jammed it in her mouth to muffle her cries.

He rolled her onto her side and took her from the rear, feeling her bottom against his stomach, putting his right arm around her, his hand on her belly, his left hand on her shoulder. He was rock-hard and ready to burst, but at the same time there was no great urgency, and instead of thrusting he held himself in check and savored the feeling of her moist warmth around him.

And she began a rolling motion of her own, getting into it, going for it herself. Greedy little pig , he thought, letting her work, and his eyes centered on the back of her neck.

He moved a hand from her shoulder, let it settle on her neck.

His other hand shifted from her belly, that great round mound of belly, and joined the first hand at her throat.

He thought of Ashley’s bedroom, of waiting behind the door for her. And that voice from long ago:

“Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that? Use both hands, put ’em around my throat, and choke me a little. Not too hard. Oh, that’s nice. A little harder, just a little bit. Oh, yeah.” He could choke her a little. Phyllis had liked it enough to ask for it, and she couldn’t be the only woman in the world who liked it. He could choke Roberta a little, just a little—

No.

No, he didn’t want to choke her a little, he wanted to choke her a lot. Once he started, he wouldn’t stop.

So he didn’t let himself begin.

Instead he made himself take each hand from her throat, and he got his arms around her and his hands on her belly, and he held onto her that way, and matched her movements with his own. His hands could feel it when the baby kicked, but in his mind he still had both hands on her throat, choking the life out of her.

And now he remembered the man he’d killed in the third-floor flat on Suffolk Street, remembered how he’d had only a moment to make his decision, but that moment had been all the time in the world. Time to know he didn’t have to pull the trigger, that the man had surrendered, that it was time to cuff him and call it in.

Time to know all that, and time to say the hell with it.

Time to say it not once but three times, bam-bam-bam.

And the feeling it gave him.

We can tell each other everything , Lisa had said. And he’d even been able to tell her about the man he’d shot, about everything connected to it, including the asexual whole-self orgasm it had provided. And she in turn had told him things she’d never told anyone else.

But how could he tell her this?

He went to take a last swallow of the vodka, but the bottle was empty. The last pull had evidently finished it, and how come he hadn’t noticed as much?

Well, he thought reasonably, the vodka must have had something to do with that. Drink enough of it and it kept you from noticing that it was all gone.

He capped it, but a capped bottle wouldn’t sink. It would float at the surface, and that would be fine if there was a message in it, but he didn’t have any messages for anybody, not even for himself.

He took the cap off, heaved the bottle, heard the splash. And could only assume it filled with water and sank, because he couldn’t see anything out there.

Flipped the cap in after it.

Groped around for the gun. Where the hell was it? Oh, there it was.

Thought about the man on Suffolk Street, thought about Bobbie Jondahl Ellison.

Very different.

Because he’d never regretted the three bullets, bam-bam-bam, grouped so precisely in the center of that bare and nearly hairless chest. The world, he’d thought then and still thought now, was none the worse for no longer having that man in it.

But if his hands had done what they had wanted to do, what they very nearly insisted upon doing, the regret would have been immediate and overpowering. He liked the woman, and had only good feelings for her. A tightass moralist might have been inclined to brand her with a scarlet A for adultery, but only the fucking Taliban would regard that as an offense punishable by death.

His hands hadn’t cared. They’d longed to wring her neck.

Now his hands held the little automatic.

Removed the clip.

Pressed the muzzle to his forehead, where it was very likely making a little O that he couldn’t see, not without a mirror. Awkward, too, holding the gun in that position. Give yourself a sore shoulder if you weren’t careful.

Put it in his mouth, angled up and back. Didn’t care for that, either. Took it out of his mouth, held it to his temple.

Now that felt better. Comfortable, and a whole lot more natural.

So?

Time for a little game of Brooklyn Roulette?

He thought about it. A bunch of voices in his head fought for his attention, and one spoke a little more clearly than the others.

He took the gun from his temple, pointed it out across the water, angled it upward a little.

Bam!

The gunshot didn’t get him sober. That would have been more than you could reasonably ask of any sound, however dramatic. But it did get his attention, and lift him out of that particular drunken reverie.

He was still holding the gun, and he lowered his eyes and stared at it. The barrel was warm, he noted, but the malachite grips remained cool to the touch.

He’d sniffed it before and smelled nothing but steel and gun oil. Now the air was thick with the reek of spent gunpowder, and he waved a hand in front of his face as if to push the smell aside.

It seemed to him as though the sound of the gunshot was still there to be heard, still echoing audibly off the water. But he was just hearing the shot in his memory. The night air was still, silent.

He waited for a response. Lights going on, car engines, a siren.

Nothing.

Well, it was a fact that his house was set off by itself. He had neighbors, but nobody all that close. And a single gunshot wasn’t all that rare in the still of a Florida evening, and this little gun didn’t make that loud a noise, for all that it had sounded to him like a cannon going off. From any kind of distance, it could have been a firecracker, could have been a car backfiring, could have been a door slamming. Could have been a gunshot on TV, where God knows there were a lot of them.

He weighed the clip in his hand. It still held five cartridges. He didn’t expect to need more than that.

He woke up with a headache and a dry mouth, hauled himself out of bed, swallowed a couple of aspirin and drank a lot of water. By the time he got out of the shower, his headache had subsided and he felt almost human.