Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

His earliest fantasies, before he’d had the wit to accompany them with masturbation, had involved the torture and death of helpless female partners. When he did discover masturbation, violent and murderous fantasies always played a part; when he tried to perform the act without the fantasies, out of moral revulsion for them, either he was not able to climax at all or his orgasm was weak and unsatisfying.

He had never considered acting on his fantasies. As far as he was concerned, they were a perversion forever confined to his inner life, taking place exclusively in the theatre of his mind. No one would ever know the truth about his sexual impulses, and whatever secret shame he suffered would be their only consequence.

He had had fears at one point that he might crave to act them out. While he was not a virgin when he married Marilee, his experience was minimal; oral sex from prostitutes, a brief clothes-pushed-aside coupling with a girl he’d dated a few times, both of them drunk the night it happened. On none of those occasions had he had any urge to injure his partner, and when he met and fell in love with Marilee he found such urges inconceivable. He loved her, he revered her, and the thought of her suffering any injury whatsoever, let alone at his hands, was unendurable.

Making love to Marilee, he found himself using his fantasies almost from the beginning. They were not invariably present, but without them he sometimes had difficulty performing.

But fantasy was fantasy and reality was reality. In his mind, horrible scenarios were acted out; in his bed, he and Marilee expressed their perfect love for one another. It was at the very least ironic that his mind and body should be following two such wholly different scripts, that his, children were conceived in love to the cerebral accompaniment of burnings and dismemberings, stabbings and garrotings. But he loved them none the less for it, and they brought him no less joy.

He worried about his fantasies less as time passed. Once in a while he would try to do without them, but they always returned, and he grew increasingly to take them for granted. They were mental Muzak, sometimes barely noticed on a conscious level, but the business ran less efficiently in their absence.

Of course it was his success with real estate that enabled him to turn fantasy into fact. Not that he woke up one morning and told himself, Hey, I just bought a house, I think I’ll go kill a girl. But his real estate dealings empowered him, transformed him from a man floating through life, working for his father-in-law, barely scraping by, to a confident enterprising self-starter in charge of his own destiny.

He felt alive, he felt successful, he felt strong. But he also felt increasingly restless, and several nights he had left the house while Marilee and the kids were asleep, getting in the car and driving for hours over country roads around Topeka.

Then one night, itching with restlessness, he found himself driving into Kansas City. Downtown, somewhere around Central Avenue, he’d come upon a flock of black streetwalkers in wigs and hot pants, strutting on the pavement and working the cars that cruised the street.

Several times in recent years he’d gone with prostitutes, paying twenty dollars to sit in his car parked on a dark street while a girl’s head bobbed in his lap.

He drove past them, circled the block, drove more slowly this time.

The girl he chose was tall, with long legs and full breasts and an implausible red wig. Skimpy royal blue hot pants were snug on her taut butt, and the tails of her clinging sky-blue blouse were tied in front to create a bare midriff. Her skin was very dark, her nail polish the color of dried blood, and her name, she told him, was Bambi. And her price?

“Twenty dollars,” she said, and sized him up. “Unless you be wanting to spend some money, and then we can go to my room and take our time.”

Her room was the end unit at a hot-sheets motel. She evidently rented it by the night, because there was no charade of going to the office to register. She already had the key, and they went straight to her room.

She set a price of a hundred dollars, and he didn’t bargain. It struck him that he had bought property that same week for no cash down, took title to a sixty-thousand-dollar house without parting with a dime of real money, and here he was shelling out a hundred dollars to rent a girl’s flesh for — what, an hour?

She performed orally, then spread herself on the bed for him and smiled in invitation. He started to mount her and his erection softened. She grabbed and pumped with her hand, impatient, and hurt him, and he slapped her hand away. She looked at him, a measure of irritation showing on her face, and that triggered his rage, an oceanic rage that welled up out of nowhere and turned the world red.

He slapped her, his open hand catching her full force across the face. Her head snapped back. She clawed at him. He caught her wrist with one hand, bending it back, and he doubled his other hand into a fist and buried it in the pit of her stomach.

She opened her mouth to scream. He punched her in the face, hammered at her face with his fists. His cock was rock-hard, a bar of steel.

When he stopped she was unconscious, her nose broken, her mouth bleeding, her face horribly bruised. An orgasm had erupted out of him, as unexpected and unstoppable as his rage, and rivers of semen pooled on her middle.

He stood up, but he had to sit down again. He was shaking so bad he couldn’t stand, scared as he’d never been scared in his life. For all of that, he had never before felt so utterly alive.

But what was he going to do about the girl?

She probably ought to go to the hospital. He couldn’t take her there, but could he just leave her here? Suppose she’d memorized his license plate number. Even if she hadn’t, she could certainly recognize him again. Of course he didn’t come to Kansas City that often, and rarely at night.

Had he told her he was from Topeka? Had he, God help him, told her his name?

“I’m Bambi.”

“My name’s Mark.”

But no last name, and there’d been no card to sign at the desk, no desk at all, no likelihood that he’d been seen or his plate number noted. All she knew was that his name was Mark and he was from Topeka and he drove a Chevy Nova — this was long before the days of the Lincoln. And she might get somebody to come looking for him, because, Christ, he’d really done a job on her, he could have killed her—

Be a lot simpler if he had, he realized. Safer, easier all around. No loose ends.

You could still do it.

His mind didn’t know what to make of the thought. His body, however, responded instantly and unequivocally, his penis springing fully erect, painful in its urgency. Just moments ago he had shuddered in the most powerful climax of his life, and now he was gripped by desire greater than anything in his experience.

She had removed her sky-blue blouse. He got it from the chair where she’d hung it, felt its silky texture in his hands. He got on top of her, spread her legs, thrust into her inert flesh. A low moan bubbled up through her puffy lips.

He wrapped the blouse around her throat, took an end in each hand, and drew his hands apart.

She died. He came, and felt reborn.

After the ecstasy, the horror.

First, though, the urgent need to get away, and to escape safely. He had no idea what he might have touched, but he used a towel to wipe his prints from every likely surface. The five twenty-dollar bills he’d given her were in her purse, and while he didn’t think currency would hold fingerprints well, neither could he think of a compelling reason to leave them behind. He doubted that he’d left many fingerprints; the motel room was soiled and squalid, and his natural inclination had been to avoid unnecessary contact with anything in it.