Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

Karen never excited him either. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sex. He sometimes woke up having powerful orgasms, dreaming of a woman who, while they were in the act of lovemaking, would talk to him about her shopping that day, the smell of tomato leaves and the thunk of ripe melons.

The car came into sight. It wasn’t the Sandlers’ Jeep. It was a tan-colored Chevrolet. Three men in hats sat inside.

The sedan came right up to the front door of the log cabin that Gerin had bought with his life savings.

“Warden Reed?” the gaunt pipe smoker asked.

“Yes?”

The driver was shorter than the pipe smoker but looked bigger owing to his swollen muscles and big gut. The third man wore a wide-brimmed hat that hung down a little like a Mexican sombrero. But Gerin could still make out the red scars on the stranger’s face.

“I’m Inspector Bonhomme from the State Investigations Bureau, sir,” the pipe smoker said. “This is Sergeant Lonnie Briggs and Miles Barber, uh, our assistant.”

“Hello.”

“Your wife has already agreed to come with us, Warden Reed. She claims that you’ve been keeping her and the children against their will up here. The Sandlers contacted us for her.”

“I’m under arrest?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For what? I haven’t done anything.”

“That’s not what your wife says.”

“She could have left. I didn’t stop her from going down to Jason and Bridgette’s. She could have just kept on going.”

Lonnie Briggs shrugged his big shoulders even though the plea had been addressed to his superior.

“She says that you used psychological cruelty to keep her and the kids up here,” Bonhomme said. “She said that she was afraid of you coming after her and killing the whole family.”

Gerin Reed looked at the bluish smoke issuing from the agent’s lips. He wondered whether it was true. Was he crazy? Was he ready to kill Karen and little Jason and Anne-Marie? Was he insane?

He remembered Karen complaining that the money was running out. She’d asked him how they would survive if there was no money.

Was that crazy?

Gerry had thought that he could ask Jason about a job in the logging camp down in the valley. He’d been a cook in the Pacific Theater. He’d killed men in the war. He’d killed children too. But all that was before he’d been wounded and been made a cook.

At that moment Gerin saw Miles Barber assessing him. There was neither sympathy nor accusation in that one hard eye, simply the desire to know.

“Warden Reed?” Christian Bonhomme asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”

“Are you taking me to prison?”

“No, sir, I’m not. But we need to have some questions answered and you’re a hard man to find.”

From all accounts Claudia prepared the sweet oils herself. She used store-bought extracts of cinnamon, almonds, rose petals, and vanilla to scent them. The oils, which came from cottonseed mainly, were heated to body temperature and placed around the room in wooden bowls. The walls and ceiling were draped with deep red cloths. Every corner housed a cluster of a hundred or more lit candles. In the center of the room was a pile of mattresses decorated with silken blankets, sheets, and pillows. Naked, Claudia Heart reclined in the middle of the mattresses and silk. Max the dog stalked the perimeter while her Special Chosen surrounded her. They were also naked and, to a man, erect. Each one had greased himself with the warm oils and now waited, listening to a song that had no words or sound. The music emanating from deep within their love goddess.

She leered with anticipation at their lust.

“Sing to me,” she said loudly. “Sing to me.”

Lonnie Briggs got that on his tape recorder. He and Miles Barber, backed up by eighteen state troopers, watched through an obscure window.

“We gotta wait until they do somethin’ illegal,” Briggs whispered to Barber. “Otherwise, the goddamned lawyers’ll get the arrest and everything we seize thrown outta court.”

But Barber thought that it was the spectacle of all that sexuality that had arrested the SIB sergeant’s attention. After all, the SIB usually went after less flamboyant suspects. The rare case of police corruption, construction scams against the state of California, or some bureaucrat using state resources illegally — these were Briggs and Bonhomme’s staples.

Barber also felt something from the naked woman. Whatever it was felt raspy and unpleasant on his sinuses and eye.

It was Barber who brought them to this abandoned mine. He used her husband’s name to do a tide search on desert properties. William Zimmerman had put a down payment of $175,000 on the played-out Jacobi mine in the eastern Mojave Desert.

Claudia Heart’s Special Chosen let out groans and guttural pleas. They begged and demanded. They stroked themselves and posed.

At first she called forth a small Asian man who sported an exceptionally wide erection. She made him lie beneath her and rode him while Max bit hard into the flesh of his thighs and arms.

The next lover was a tall and virile Mexican man. She was happy simply to swallow his sperm.

The next three men approached at the same time.

Max’s eyes flashed as he moved among the Chosen and howled. Claudia wailed with him.

Lonnie Briggs was breathing heavily. The uniformed state troopers, who couldn’t see what was happening in the room, were beginning to get restless. Miles Barber was wondering why he didn’t seem to care about sex or even if there was a crime being committed.

Then a man skulked into the room. He was different from the rest, inasmuch as he was fully dressed. But Barber could see that he too was greatly aroused by the woman. He avoided Claudia’s line of vision. Barber knew somehow that he was breaking Heart’s command, that he just needed to see her.

“Hey, Briggs,” Barber said.

“What?” the state agent answered in a husky voice.

“Ain’t that one in the pants Halston?”

Lonnie Briggs broke into the room with his uniformed state police force. The prone woman, barely larger than a girl, looked up and shouted, “Stop them!”

Briggs and his men found themselves set upon by twelve naked men.

“I was talking to the police, Inspector,” Claudia Heart-Zimmerman said to Christian Bonhomme.

He had been feeling a little light-headed ever since he’d entered the interrogation room with the suspect.

“You ordered your followers to attack Sergeant Briggs and his men, Mrs. Zimmerman,” the inspector replied.

“No. No, not at all.” The love goddess smiled. “I was yelling for your sergeant to stop them from raping me. They’d been raping me for weeks, you know.”

Claudia peered intently at Bonhomme, and he felt a vague pang of fear.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what you say. But Mr. Briggs calls it murder. He says that you ordered your men to fight to the death. The police officers were forced to respond with deadly force...”

It had been in papers all around the country, STATE POLICE FORCE ASSAILED BY NAKED ZOMBIES OF LOVE. Four of Claudia’s acolytes had been shot to death. Five others fought so hard against arrest that they were killed, or died later, from wounds they received while being subdued. The survivors were now locked up in a medical facility in San Francisco, suffering from some disease or withdrawal and committed to their escape and reunion with their queen. Claudia Heart and Robert Halston were arraigned in absentia because of the wounds they sustained.

Halston was subdued in the cafeteria. Claudia had run out into the desert with a dog. When the police approached her she fell, hitting her head on a stone.

She was captured, but the dog, after biting three policemen — who now were hospitalized with undiagnosed ailments — had been too fast for the law.