Robert Moore - Hard guys and hostages

The front bedroom was just off the hall, right behind the screened porch. It had one window on the side of the house. Max pulled the shade down and swore to himself over Pete's carelessness in not pulling it down by now. He half-expected Sally to make a break for the door and the porch while he was at the window. When he turned back to her, she was still standing in the middle of the room with her suitcase in her hand, leaning slightly to the side from the weight of it.

"Why don't you put that down?" Max said with a laugh. "You're going to stay a while, and it might get in the way of things." She put the suitcase down and stood looking at him. Her hands worked at her sides, her fingers rubbing at her palms.

Max sat down on the foot of the three-quarter size bed and lit a cigarette. He had found a carton of them that morning, in a drawer in the kitchen. "You're a little cooler than your friend, aren't you?"

"I guess so." She had a hard time looking at him while she spoke. Her long, light brown hair hung like a halo about her face, setting off the face's beauty. She looked like an angel, or a Madonna.

"It must run in the family. Your sister was as cool as ice last night. Until we got to the fucking, that is. Then she warmed right up." The statement, and the language, drew a shudder from her, but that was all. Max had to hand it to her. "Watching Butch out there giving your friend the works really got me turned on. Isn't that the term you kids use nowadays? Turned on?"

"That's right."

"Well, I don't usually go for stag shows. I prefer doing it to watching it. But I appreciate watching a smartness kid get her comeuppance. And that's what Connie got just now."

She looked surprised, as though it hadn't occurred to her that there might be anything other than ordinary, sexual desire behind his actions. "You don't like young people?"

"I've got nothing against them. Not the boys, anyway. It's you smart little bitches, I don't like. Don't get me wrong. I like you physically. I just don't much like you as people."

There was a shift in her expression. She looked like something had just occurred to her. "There's some reason you wanted me instead of Julie, isn't there? I mean, it isn't just that you think I'm prettier. It's something else."

"You're younger. That's something."

"That's still not all of it."

"Bravo. If you were in a class of mine, I'd give you an A for that little bit of logic. Sure, there's something else. You remind me of someone."

"What did you mean about being in a class of yours? Are you a teacher?"

"Didn't you hear about it on the news? I'd think they'd be giving profiles on all three of us by this time. Sure, I was a teacher. A college professor, in fact."

"Was it one of your students? Whoever it was who made you hate young girls?"

"There's another A. It sure was."

"And I remind you of her?"

"Right. You remind me of her. You're sixteen, aren't you?"

"Yes. I'll be seventeen in six weeks."

"If you're alive in six weeks." That made her blanch, but she recovered in a moment.

"You want me to be scared, don't you? You want me to hurt inside from fear."

"Sure. Does knowing that make it any easier?" He smiled. "You're good at hiding it, but you're scared as hell right now."

"Well, of course I'm scared. Wouldn't you be?"

"You're scared, and you're going to fuck for me, aren't you, Sally?"

She looked away from him. "Do I have a choice?"

"Sure. You can fuck for me, or you can fuck for Butch out there."

"Okay. I'll take you. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Glad to know I'm number one on the hit parade," he said, smiling. "She was a little older than you."

The quick change of subject confused her for a moment. She looked at him with a puzzled expression.

"The student," he explained. "The one you were asking about a moment ago."

"I assumed she was, if she was in college."

"She was nineteen. Are you a virgin?"

The question brought another quiver along her spine. "Yes," she said.

"She wasn't. Not when I knew her. But she was nineteen. If you hadn't run into this situation, I doubt you'd have been a virgin by the time you were nineteen. You're too beautiful, and there are too many guys around who are happy as hell to relieve you of your hymen. And girls nowadays don't place that much importance on virginity. She didn't."

"What did she do to you? It must have been something pretty bad, to make you want to…"

"She's the one who put me in the death house, sweets."

"I see. You mean she testified against you, and you were innocent or something like that?"

"No. I mean I was guilty under the law. And she didn't testify against me. She could hardly do that since she was deader than hell at the time."

"My God, she's the one you killed."

"That's right. As I said, I was guilty under the law. But the law doesn't take as much into consideration as it should. She deserved to die."

"And you had a right to kill her?"

"I sure as fuck did. She ruined my life. She came into one of my classes and decided to have a little fun with the stodgy old prof. Maybe it was a bet with her little friends or something. I don't know. Maybe she just wanted to be sure she got a good grade in the class."

"Maybe she found you attractive."

"Sure. Maybe. Anyway, she put the make on me. I didn't have to do any chasing where she was concerned. All I had to do was stand still and let myself be caught."

"You didn't have to be caught, you know. You could have told her you weren't interested."

"No man would have told her that. She was beautiful. Like you. And she knew it, like you. She liked the things the sight of her body did to men. She liked to feel their eyes on her. She loved it when pricks were standing at attention, and they were yearning for her the way a man in the desert yearns for a drink of water. It amused her." He took another puff on the cigarette, saw that it was burned almost down to the filter. He dropped it on the carpet and crushed it with his toe.

"And she had to die for that? Because she liked being beautiful and attractive to men?"

"It was the way she used that attractiveness. There's no excuse for a bitch like that, I was a happily married man. I had children. She made a little game of breaking up my life. She swayed her hips in my face, and when I was helpless and she knew it, she started to take the candy away from baby. She made up little excuses, little reasons why she couldn't spare the time to bed down with me that day. She liked to hear me beg her for it. And I begged. Jesus, how I begged."

"You don't have to tell me all this," Sally said, looking at the window shade with embarrassment all over her face.

"Sure I do. I want you to know what she did, because you're the one who's going to pick up the tab for her fun. You might as well know what you're paying for."

"Didn't she pay enough?"

"Hardly. When she was dead, I… No, I'm getting ahead of the story. Let me tell you how it happened. She started to play with me, as I said. And she started to get bored with me. I knew she was taking up with someone else. She was too damned sexy to do without it. If she wasn't getting her sex with me, she had to be getting it with someone else."

"And that made you jealous."

"Sure it did. You're damned right it did."

"So you killed her?"

"Her and her fucking partner. I followed them one night. He was another student at the college. I followed them to a place where the students went to fuck when they couldn't afford anything better, and when they were together in the back of the cock-sucker's car, I walked up and shot him, right through the window. That was when she panicked. She scared easily, like you. And she lost her cool. Isn't that the term?"

She didn't give him an answer, but when she saw that he was waiting for one, she nodded mutely.