Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

We could have run around her colonial ranch and up my driveway, but somehow that would have spoiled things. So we leaped over the fence, and I didn’t even tear my trousers, and we skipped into my split-level trap, she with her breasts bouncing and I with my tongue hanging out passionately.

Inside, I grabbed her and kissed her. Her breasts dug into my chest and her arms wound round me, and I very nearly threw her down on the floor. But there was poetry in my soul. I was married to a frigid Bridget if there ever was one, and I was about to bang the wife next door in my iceberg’s security nest in the boondocks, and when you do something like that you have to do it right. So I headed Bonnie up two half-flights of stairs, since split-levels never have anything you can call a real staircase, and I steered her into the master bedroom and plunged her down on the king-size extra-length bed, and I jumped her.

Adultery can be fun. Now there’s a campaign slogan, sweetie — and already I can hear the brain-storming sessions, with all of us sitting around an oaken table and talking up ways to sell adultery to the American public. Give ’em something they don’t need, boyos. But adultery can be fun. Here I was, cheating on a wife I couldn’t stand, and here Bonnie was cheating on a husband I couldn’t stand, and what more could I have asked for?

Well, I’ll tell you. I could have asked for privacy.

We got rid of Bonnie’s shorts, and we got rid of all my clothes, and we pressed flesh against flesh and sighed together.

“Harry’s dull,” she moaned.

“My wife doesn’t understand me,” I grunted passionately.

And, with those rites out of the way, it was time. She let out a luxurious sigh and spread herself out upon her back, breasts rampant and thighs couchant. And, with the facility of an accomplished suburban do-it-yourselfer, I inserted Tenon A into Mortise B and grommeted industriously.

As we toiled together, it became obvious to me that one of two possibilities was true. Either Harry Sheggitts was neglecting this delightful female shamefully, or this delightful female was a card-carrying nymphomaniac. Because Bonnie rolled and swerved and buckled like a ship on the high seas, and moans tore from her red mouth, and she was having a high old time.

Remember an aside earlier? I mentioned, at the time, that I could have asked for privacy. This was true.

Because, just as we finished, just as a final groan tore from that throat and just as I filled her with the final evidence of my love and the last proof that, by George, my wife didn’t understand me, there was a third person in the room.

Helen, natch.

“I just don’t understand,” Helen was saying. And I thought: See, Bonnie? I told you she didn’t understand.

“Listen,” she said. “Just tell me what it’s all about. That’s all.”

I hadn’t had an answer for Helen. We survived that domestic crisis, although the Sheggittses moved to Fairfield County not long afterward, but I had no answer at the time. But now, looking down at the bloody form of the troll, I did have an answer. God knows where it came from. Madison Avenue trains one well — I’d been thinking on my feet for years, and I knew how, by George.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you, you rotten bastard.”

I dipped into my jacket pocket, yanked my wallet free, flipped it open and gave him a very brief peek at a card. The card entitled me to charge gasoline purchases at any Esso station in the world, but I didn’t let him see all that much of it.

“Harvey Burns,” I snapped. “Continental Detective Agency. You’re trapped, buddy boy. You’re coming back to the States and you’re going to be in jail for ages. You’ll die there, you bastard.”

“You’re crazy.” blubbered the troll.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t be extradited. I—”

“You can be snatched.” I told him. “And that’s what’s happening. You can be marched out of here at gunpoint.”

“That’s illegal.”

I gave him a lopsided grin. Not like Kirk Douglas now, but more like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. “So’s larceny,” I drawled, sort of. “And I got a hunch that nobody’s going to care how illegal the snatch is, Dixon boy. Once you’re back in the States, nobody’s going to ask how you got there, and nobody’s going to listen when you try crying to them. You’re going to die in jail, you bastard.”

Ever see a man die inside right before your eyes? The troll did that. His whole face went as red as his bloody nose, and then it turned white, and I thought he was going to do the heart attack bit right before our very eyes. But old Dixon was made of sterner stuff. He swallowed, and he gulped, and he drooled a little, and then his eyes grew crafty.

“Listen.” he said, “we could make a deal.”

“No deal.”

“I’ve got a lot of money,” he said, neatly baiting the trap he had already gotten caught in. “Do you know how much money I took from that corporation?”

“Seven hundred thou.”

“That’s right.”

“So?”

He wet his lips with a nervous tongue. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“I know. That’s why they want to toss you in the tank and throw the key away.”

“A lot of money,” said he, cringing. “I could... I could give you some of that money. You could go away, and I could stay here, and then—”

“No deal,” I said. But I made it sound weak. And bit by bit I let him twist my arm until he had me right where I wanted him. No business crook in creation is ever the match of a larcenous ad man. It’s our forte.

“I could give you twenty thousand dollars,” he said. He was standing up now, albeit shakily, and I replied to his offer with a punch in the nose. When he got up, fresh blood flowing through those nasal passages, he offered fifty thou. Instead of hitting him I told him to double it, and he was too nervous to haggle. He sent a servant for a suitcase full of money. One hundred thousand pretty dollars. A fat round sum.

“We got to take the kid,” I said. “You know — I have to say you skipped and I couldn’t find you, so I can hardly leave the kid. It won’t work.”

“Take the little bastard,” the troll said.

“You don’t mind?”

“Take him and shove him,” the troll said. “I need him like a hole in the head. If it weren’t for that little bastard I wouldn’t be shelling out a hundred thousand dollars. Bury him someplace, the little bastard.”

That almost got him another punch in the nose, but he would never have understood. So we left, with Jodi toting Rhett by the hand and with me toting the suitcase by the handle. I had Rhett’s suitcase, too. And we loaded ourselves and Rhett and the suitcases into a passing hack, and back we went to the hotel.

It had been a lovely morning.

“Harvey,” Jodi was saying, “I think you’re the cleverest and most wonderful man in the world.”

I told her that, in all probability, she was quite correct. We were in the hotel room, and Rhett was making a fist and pummeling me in the stomach. I had shown him how to keep his thumb outside his fingers and how to put all his strength into his punch, but he wasn’t doing much damage.

“Bastard,” he said, belting me. “Bastard.”

He was cuter than a bedbug.

“Harvey?”

“Mmmmm.”

“What do we do now?”

“We don’t go back to the States,” I said.

“Good.”

“Because I’m sick of Helen, and of advertising.”

“I’m sick of Al,” she said. “And of whoring.”

“I’m sick of New York,” I said. “And Rockland.”

“We could stay in Brazil—”

“I think I could learn to get sick of Brazil,” I said. “The troll lives here, and that alone could do it. Besides, all these old Nazis. They get to me.”