Drifter's Blues (Erotic Noir) (10 page)

Kyle lunged for the bust, dropping his head slightly as he did so. In one sweeping motion he gathered it up and hurled it at Thurgood’s head. It was lighter than he’d expected and he threw it too hard, so that it sailed past Blair’s face to smash into the wall. But it surprised the guy.

Kyle dove at him, pressing home his advantage. His head collided with the older man’s chest and drove him into the back of his chair before Blair could bring the gun round to bear. Kyle had played high school football and although it was a few years since he’d been on the field, the moves came back to him. He pistoned his legs, forcing the chair back on its wheels, pinning it and Blair against the wall.

  Blair moved surprisingly quickly, bringing his knee up and almost catching Kyle in the balls, though he managed to close his thighs in time. The move gave Blair a chance to force the gun up between them again. Kyle saw its barrel inches from his face, could smell the metallic aroma of its oil.

Instinctively, blindly, he grabbed Blair’s wrist and twisted it, and that was when the gun went off.

The blast was shockingly loud, louder than anything Kyle had ever experienced, and he was stunned for an instant, dropping away and raising a hand to his ear. The ringing continued after the roar had started to ebb away, but Kyle barely noticed it.

Blair had jerked back in his chair and now slid down it. he’d pulled the trigger just as Kyle had twisted his wrist away, and the barrel had been pointing at a slant at Blair’s own forehead. The slug had smashed through bone and exited from the top of Blair’s head. Gore and blood fanned out across the wall behind him and streaked the chair and the carpet and the desk.

His shoulders caught for a moment and then he slid completely to the floor, the remains of his head banging hard on the ground.

Kyle crawled away from the supine body as if it was likely to reach out and grab him. He squatted in a corner of the room, staring at the thing that had been Blair Thurgood, his employer and his lover’s husband, feeling the man’s blood wet on his own face and hands.

Ohhhh, fuck.

*

Every time Donna thought she had herself under control, she looked at the walls, the speckled desktop, the body on the floor, and she felt a fresh impulse to scream. Each time she crammed a half-fist into her mouth, but that only made her want to vomit.

Kyle had his arm round her shoulders and was pulling her tight. For the first time there was nothing sexual about the way he held her. It was an embrace of comfort. He’d found a bottle of Blair’s Wild Turkey in the drinks cabinet downstairs and poured them each a generous measure. Donna had downed hers in one and held her glass out for another, but he’d shook his head. He was probably right. It was just another way to make her puke. She’d settled for a cigarette, which she’d tried to light with shaking hands until Kyle had to take the Zippo from her fingers and do it for her.

‘Tell me again,’ she said.

So he told her, just as he’d told her a few minutes earlier, almost word-for-word the same. How he’d broken in as planned and found Blair waiting for him in the darkness. How Blair had told him he’d filmed Donna and Kyle screwing, and had worked out that they planned to steal his painting. How Kyle tried to overpower him and Blair had ended up getting shot in the head by accident.

She’d arrived sensing something was wrong, and when she’d checked the garage and found Blair’s Eldorado neatly parked there she knew he was home. He always drove himself at the weekends, never using the services of his driver, Rooker. Donna had hovered by the front door for what seemed like an age, wracked by indecision, before she’d unlocked it and gone in.

And seen Kyle ascending the stairs, dressed not in the black clothes they’d agreed upon but blue jeans and a check shirt, his hair wet as if he’d just washed it.

‘Donna,’ he’d murmured, hurrying back down. She’d stared at him, uncomprehending, too confused to return his hug with anything more than a half-hearted squeeze.

‘Donna, you need to prepare yourself,’ he’d said, gripping her by the shoulders and staring into her eyes. ‘Something bad’s happened.’

And so it had.

Now, as he related the story for a second time, she realized she’d asked him to repeat it because there was something, some detail, that didn’t make sense. She understood that he’d showered and shampooed his hair and found some of Blair’s clothes that more or less fit him, which explained why he wasn’t in black. But there was something else that wasn’t quite right.

As Donna listened to him, she lifted her eyes to the wall above the desk, and it was then that she got it.

‘Where’s the painting?’ she asked.

Kyle stopped in mid-sentence. She turned her head to look at him.

‘I took it away,’ he said.

Donna twisted to face him fully. ‘What? Why?’ Her voice had a tremor to it. She wondered what she looked like; she imagined she was pale.

Kyle glanced aside as if unsure how to start. ‘I... Look. We have to go ahead with the plan, in a modified form. Pretend that a burglar broke in, Blair surprised him, there was a tussle and the gun went off. Which is pretty much how it happened anyway. Okay?’

Donna wasn’t sure where this was heading but she said, carefully, ‘Okay.’

‘Right. But if what Blair told me was true, that he made sure in the event of his death you didn’t get the painting, then we have to steal it for you to get any value from it.’

‘Okay, I get that,’ Donna said. ‘But why have you taken it already? Why not wait till I got here and then we could take it away together?’

Again he seemed to be searching for the right words. ‘Because... because this way, you don’t know where it is.’

‘Hold on. Now just a minute.’ She grabbed his arm. ‘You’re not planning to doublecross me on this, are you, Kyle? Because if -’

‘No. God, no.’ He put his hand to her cheek. ‘I’m trying to protect you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it. The way this has to play out, you come home and find the house burglarized and your husband shot dead. And the painting missing. The police are suspicious by nature. They’re going to consider that you’re involved. Please,’ he held up a hand, ‘hear me out. They’ll suspect an insurance job on your part, or something. So they’re going to question you. Repeatedly, and carefully, trying to catch you out. It’s better that you don’t know where the painting is for now, until all of this calms down. Otherwise, the cops will find out from you where the painting is. They
will
. It’s their job. God knows, it’s going to be hard enough for you to keep to your story that you know nothing about any of this.’

‘Kyle - ’

‘Think about it, Donna. You know I’m right.’

She had to admit, he was. And yet, she didn’t like it. Didn’t like the way the plan, her plan, was turning out. She didn’t feel in control.

‘So you got cleaned up, took the painting away and hid it, and then came back here?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Kyle, that was a hell of a goddam risk. The more often you come and go from here, the more likely it is that someone’s going to see you.’

‘I know.’ He shrugged. ‘I made a judgement call, I guess.’

‘Okay.’ She forced herself to look around, at the already darkening splotches of gore on the walls, at her husband’s sprawled corpse, its sightless eyes mercifully turned away. ‘We need to leave things as they are. But we’d better clean the shower. You used the one in the guest bathroom down the hall, is that right? Okay. We can’t help it if the cops find your DNA here in the study. I’ll say you’re the pool guy who sometimes came into the house. Blair liked to show off his painting, so he brought you up here. I know,’ she nodded at Kyle’s doubtful expression, ‘it sounds like bullshit. I’ll spin it somehow. Make it work. But there’d be no explaining away your DNA in the shower.’

They set to work, both of them scrubbing and scouring the shower using heavy-duty cleaning materials brought up from a storeroom off the kitchen. While she was on her hands and knees, rubbing away, Donna thought about the last time she’d been in a shower cubicle with Kyle. Well, there was a time and a place for everything.

After a half hour they pronounced themselves satisfied with their work. There was something horribly surreal about the situation, Donna thought. They were cleansing the bathroom to an obsessive degree, while a few doors down the body of her husband lay, already starting the slow process of decomposition, surrounded by blood and brain material and fragments of skull bone.

Donna felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to break into peals of laughter. She clapped her palm over her mouth to stifle her giggles but they broke free, spilling between her fingers and coming out as a series of snorts until she had to take her hand away again in order to breathe.

Kyle stared at her as she abandoned herself, doubling over and shrieking hysterically with laughter. After a moment he joined her, his laughs more of a low, subdued chuckle.

Donna knew this was a normal reaction in times of extreme stress, and she knew it would blow over and other, darker responses would take over. But she was growing aware of another urge within her, one that would be considered similarly inappropriate to the situation by polite, rational society.

She stepped over to Kyle, who had his back to her and was washing his hands in the sink. Slipping one arm round across his belly, she slid her other hand between his legs and grabbed the bulge in the front of his jeans.

‘We’re free,’ she whispered, leaning upward to nibble his ear.

Seven

The noises through the wall were getting louder and more frantic, the woman’s cries in counterpoint to the man’s guttural moans.

Donna lowered herself until she was poised with her vulva just touching the swollen head of Kyle’s cock, which she held vertical with her hand around the shaft. Delicately, prolonging the moment, she tilted her pelvis backward and forward, her labia making the minutest contact with the plum-like glans, its eye weeping clear fluid.

Kyle groaned deep in his throat and thrust his hips upward but she moved with him, lifting on her knees a little so that her pussy stayed just clear of his organ. His hands gripped the sides of Donna’s ass to pull her down on him; again, the muscles in her legs were able to resist this.

Through the wall, the woman began to scream and sob.

After Donna had grabbed Kyle’s cock and balls through his jeans back at the house, lust suddenly taking control of her, he’d turned and pulled her hard against him and kissed her, crushing her lips beneath his, clearly inflamed himself. He’d pawed at her breasts through the thin silk of the dress she was wearing, and tried to find the zipper of the garment at the back. Though her every impulse was to tear his own clothes off and drop to the floor with him just where they were, Donna got a grip on herself and pushed him away.

‘No,’ she gasped. ‘Not here. Not with...
him
in the other room. Take me to your place.’

‘My motel?’ Kyle was clearly having difficulty speaking, his face flushed.

‘Yes.’

It was crazy, she knew. What they really needed to do was for Kyle to get the hell out of there and for Donna to call the police in hysterics, and tell them she’d just arrived home and found her husband shot dead. But her craving to fuck Kyle made her feel intensely, wildly reckless.

Looking into Kyle’s fierce, tormented eyes, she knew he too realized how insane it was, and yet how much he wanted it too. After a moment he said, ‘Let’s go,’ grabbed her hand, and pulled her toward the door.

They took her Mercedes, Donna driving. Kyle gave her directions as best he could, sometimes exhorting her to turn right when it was almost too late so that the car’s tires howled on the blacktop as she spun the wheel. Donna was aware she exceeded the speed limit much of the time, and she also knew the bolt of Wild Turkey she’d taken back at the house on top of the wine she’d consumed at the dinner earlier probably put her over the legal blood alcohol limit as well. But those were the least of her sins that night. She felt a delirious, irresponsible appetite for life. She was free of her hated husband, unexpectedly but irreversibly, and the prospect of financial freedom was suddenly a very real one. She wanted to dance, drink and fuck.

Kyle’s motel was on the east side of town, and a real dive it was too. Sputtering pink and blue neon in a sign that clearly hadn’t been maintained in a long while announced its presence. On the way into the parking lot the Mercedes ran over a discarded bottle, the glass exploding with a muffled pop. Outside a bar across the street another neon sign promised topless waitresses and nightly fully nude strip shows.

He led her to his room, walking swiftly, his head down, his demeanor embarrassed, she thought. The room smelled of antiseptic, booze and, she thought, jism. The bed was square and lumpy-looking, the lino on the floor cracked and curling at the edges. And already, through the wall abutting the headboard of the bed, Donna could hear the sounds of sex from next door.

She thought the place’s sleaziness was just perfect.

Moving in behind Kyle, Donna tore at his belt buckle and managed somehow to undo it and wrench the zipper of his jeans down, pulling the jeans and shorts halfway down his thighs. She felt his cock spring up against her hand, fully erect already. While Kyle pushed his jeans the rest of the way down Donna tugged the dress off over her head and peeled off her bra so that when he turned, stripping off his shirt and standing naked and potent before her, she faced him in nothing but her panties. His eyes roved over her tits and he gripped his penis in his hand, stroking it rhythmically.