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“There was a bunch of mail there too, addressed to Harold Southart. Must be his real name. I saw a return address on an envelope that looked like a bill from the MEN'S MEDICAL CLINIC OF VENICE.”

“The place that advertises in the school paper?” Lyman asked.

“Yeah.”

“But maybe he's just there for premature ejaculation. Or erectile dysfunction.”

“Not with that walk,” Dung answered quickly. “And he said he just had surgery.”

_____

“Whose that monkey in there?” Buckskin asked before he started laughing. He was standing next to us on the lawn facing the front window. Then he yelled, “Hey, monkey girl, hey monkey girl!” as he slid the palms of his hands upward on the seams of his jeans, imitating a chimp.

Jackie D was standing in the window looking down in our direction.

Buckskin had a big, smirky grin like he expected applause from his stupid performance. After a few token laughs he said, “You guys are doing a good job here. Keep it up.”

Grossberg got up again. “Back to work, you guys.”

That was fine with me. I wanted to go back inside. I had plans to make that would guarantee Parker wouldn't bother me any more.

“W
HAT'S THE MOST GUYS YOU EVER FUCKED
in one night?” I asked Jackie D at the top of the stairs.

A small smile which got bigger and bigger formed on her lips until both rows of her dirty teeth parted into a giant smile. “Two guys and I ate a girl,” she said with dreamy eyes like she was reliving it. “Great double-date. Why?”

I handed her a joint and she flinched.

“What's this for?”

After my explanation, the happy faces of lottery winners weren't as excited as hers. “No shit?”

I nodded. “Yeah. No shit.”

“Who was that old guy in here a few minutes ago?” she asked. “With those fucking hair plugs.”

“Assistant Dean of Men at school. Why?”

“I offered to show him my clit ring if he'd give me something to get high on.”

“So?”

She snarled. “Said Hitler had the answer for degenerates like me.”

“Don't worry about it. Everybody knows he's an asshole.”

She nodded and walked down the hallway toward the bathroom, closing the door.

As soon as she disappeared, I grabbed the house phone and punched the buttons for the Rolex store. After I identified myself to guy with the tired Third World accent, he was quick to tell me that nobody brought the watch in.

Next I phoned Chesterfield's office. He answered on the second ring.

“This is Kurt Stafford.”

Before I could say another word he screamed into the phone, “I'll get you, you fucking bastard!” and hung up.

Then I called the Men's Medical Clinic of Venice.

“Harold Southart told me to call,” I said to the woman whose English sounded like she got out of the hold of a steamer this morning following a six month voyage from Hong Kong.

“So?”

“I want the same thing he had.”

“Implant. Make appointment.”

“I'll call back.”

_____

About an hour later, the rumble of a motorcycle engine got louder until it stopped in front of the alky-doper house where we were sitting in the living room drinking beer from the cans hidden in small paper bags. A few seconds later, there was a knock on the door.

“It's open,” one of the boozed-up hags called out in a slurred voice.

The door opened and Hector was standing in the doorway wearing a thick, white horse-collar around his neck. He still had his movie-star looks and radiated a big smile as he joined us.

“Thanks a lot, you guys, for the help last night. I did what you said. Scratched my fender on the guy's Honda, then filed a hit and run report with the cops.”

“How'd you find us here?” Grossberg asked.

“Went to the other place, the one from last night. They told me you'd be here.”

“Why you here now?”

“Got another telegram. This time for Stanley Castle.”

All eyeballs shot over to Castle.

His face paled. He gasped, “What is it?”

Hector walked over to Castle and handed him the tan envelope with black printing. “Sign here.”

Castle scratched his name on the clipboard before ripping the envelope open and pulling out a matching sheet of paper. He started choking as he read it. Then he handed the telegram to Adams who read it out loud.

“LAST NIGHT 2AM FATHER HAD HEART ATTACK. CONDITION CRITICAL. CAN'T REACH YOU BY PHONE. FLY HOME IMMEDIATELY. PREPAID TICKET AT AMERICAN AIRLINES COUNTER. LOVE, MOTHER.”

Castle did a poor job of trying not to cry. “Got to call home,” he mumbled before hurrying upstairs to the phone.

Hector was busy scribbling on a note pad the names of witnesses to O'Neill's hit and run. I was happy to give mine too before he left.

Castle walked back into the living room about five minutes later with bloodshot eyes that he kept rubbing. It was obvious that he'd been crying.

“I'm really sorry about your father,” Adams said. “How long you think you'll be gone?”

Castle was shaking a little and his teeth were chattering. He could barely speak. “Don't know,” he babbled in a whisper. “Am I out of the pledge class if I don't get back immediately?”

“Depends on a lot of things. Like how long you're gone, for one. It's up to the actives.”

I hoped for a long, lingering, death-is-always-imminent hospital stay.

“Made a plane reservation,” Castle murmured. “Plane leaves in two hours.”

Maybe I'd get a miracle and Castle's plane would crash in either direction.

“I'll take you to the airport,” Dung offered, his voice slurring a little from the beer.

Maybe a lucky drunk driving arrest would keep him incognito in jail long enough to be voted out for being AWOL.

“OK,” Adams answered. “Both you guys better get going. Oh,” he said almost as an afterthought. “Everybody take back your watches and cell phones. Don't want anybody to miss another emergency.”

Adams looked over at me. “Don't forget the special beer tonight. The ones you prepared.”

_____

We were huddled in the fraternity house dining room in the dark when the phone rang.

Adams punched the button, turning on speaker phone that rested on the table as we gathered around him.

“Them fucks are out here, all right,” Byler blurted out in his distinctive, hick, Georgia accent. “I walked around the corner and saw them both in O'Neill's green Honda. They're taking the bait, planning to follow the truck like we figured.”

“Take them for a ride,” Adams answered, laughing over the rowdy crowd. “The longer the better.”

“Got it,” Byler giggled like a schoolgirl, giving us more reason to think he was a closet gay.

“And nothing evasive,” Adams warned. “Don't drive like you know you're being followed. Let them think that when the truck stops that they're going to catch us hazing the pledges.”

“Got it.”

“And drive slow. You don't want to lose them in traffic.”

“Where should we go?”

“Disneyland maybe. See how the traffic on the I-5 is.”

“OK. We're leaving now.”

Litrick's reedy voice came on the phone a couple of seconds later. “In my rear-view mirror, I can see O'Neill and Buckskin laughing.”

“Got enough gas?” Adams asked.

“Filled it up this afternoon. Probably can go a few hundred miles.”

“Do it.”

“Where are you now?” Adams yelled into the phone.

“Heading towards the Lincoln on-ramp for the I-10.”

Adams hung up the phone and then with a big smile, clapped his hands over his head and yelled to the actives in a circus ringmaster's voice, “From the pledges—especially Kurt Stafford—it's Showtime!”

The mood was jubilant, like you see drunken fans yelling after a long touchdown run that wins the game in overtime. Cheers and screams greeted the four-layer, wooden cake with its plastic, pink and white frosting about three feet high containing this human monstrosity that I wheeled in on a table that was something like an ambulance gurney. The outside streetlight provided the small amount of shadowed light in the room while somebody turned up the strip music on the stereo so people in Europe could hear it too.

“What's in the cake?” Janus' nauseating voice yelled out. “I want to see what's in the cake!”

“A fucking machine,” I yelled back.

Rickshaw Boy grabbed the lid on the top of the cake like a manhole cover, lifted it off, and set it down under the table.

“Jackie D!” me and the other pledges screamed. “Jackie D! Jackie D!” This was her cue to come out.

She slowly took her intoxicated time climbing out of the cake until she was fully visible, proudly modeling her leather dominatrix outfit: black hood, black bra, and thigh-high boots that reached almost to her exposed black, hairy pussy. Sitting on the edge of the table spreading her legs wide open, she held a black whip in one hand and a half-pint bottle of Jack Daniel's in the other.

“Who wants to fuck?” she cried out in a thick, slurred voice.

“Me!” everybody screamed at once.

“Seniority first!” Janus yelled. “Alumni, then seniors, juniors and the others.”

“Fine with me,” Jackie D answered. “Get your cocks ready.”

Suddenly, Lil' Romeo's teeny-bopper voice screeched sex and violence out of the stereo, still at full volume.

Janus, with a big, smug smile on his shit-ass face, was beaming. “Got it made. Getting laid tonight. And tomorrow I'm making
ten thousand bucks!”

“How?” Jimmy Elsner asked. “You're too stupid.”

“Helping my dad close a real estate deal. The place where you guys used the yard last night. Dad sold it for a million-five to a TV evangelist. Meeting him at the house tomorrow at eight to close the deal.”

“It'll fall through,” Mel Lehman answered. “You never closed a deal yet.”

Janus was his cocky self. “Not this one. I'm going to Hawaii for a week to celebrate.”

“Where we going to fuck her?” Artie Duncan yelled. “Not out here.”

“Got a cot in the kitchen,” Adams answered, “and the pledges brought a gross of rubbers. Enough for everybody.”

“A hundred bucks says nobody rides bareback!” Bookie yelled out.

There were no takers.

Jackie D jumped down from the table and walked unsteadily up to Janus. She pointed to the kitchen door.

“Move!” she said gruffly, pushing him in the back while staying in character perfectly. As Janus walked in front of her, she snapped, “Moon these fuckers!”

As Janus happily obliged, right on cue, Jackie D snapped her whip across his bright, pink ass!

“Yeow!” he yelped, grabbing his newly, red-lined ass while the crowd roared with approval; especially the pledges.

At the edge of the table I had a box of Trojans, ready to hand them out to each idiot right before they went in the kitchen to fuck Dracula's daughter. These hard-up guys were so excited that you'd think they were fucking all twelve of last year's
Penthouse
Pets of the Month. It was a good thing it was dark since nobody could see the tiny push-pin that I concealed in my right hand that I used to puncture the tip of each rubber, right through the center of the foil wrapper. Maybe some lucky guy would have a little bastard and can forever brag about Jackie D as his baby-mama.

Vysell and Batman would have the distinction of being the
only guys there who fucked Jackie D with an unpunctured rubber. Both of them smirked along with me each time I handed a pinholed rubber out to some hard-up idiot.

The house phone suddenly rang, its shrill tone piercing the room.

Adams ran to it and put it on speaker again.

Byler's voice came on the line. “Just checking in.”

“Where's O'Neill?”

“Right behind us. On the other side of downtown. Traffic is light.”

“Pretty soon, stop at a gas station that sells beer. Try to park so they see you. Buy three six-packs. Then open the back of the truck and make it look like you're handing out beer to the passengers in there. That'll keep them hot on the trail.”

“Good idea.”

Adams hung up.

“Keep the line moving,” Christianson announced to the straggly, desperate group standing in a crooked line waiting to sample Jackie D. “Five minutes a guy. That's it.”

One delirious idiot after another went in the kitchen to fuck Jackie D not knowing they had no protection from their rubber. I was shocked at how many horny guys were in this fraternity. Cheers, laughter, drunken congratulations greeted each pervert who returned from the kitchen. It was like welcoming a military hero home from the war.

Somehow Byler's twangy voice came to mind. The more I thought about him, the more I thought he was a faggot. Especially the way he smokes; holding the cigarette between two stiff fingers.

I looked from Batman to Vysell. “If most people think Byler's a faggot, why didn't they kick him out when he was a pledge?”

“Maybe he didn't act like a flamer then,” Batman answered.

“Then why don't they kick him out now?”

“Can't,” Vysell answered. “I asked Grossberg that once. He said they can't kick out an active unless he's convicted in court of morals charges. But they can dump a pledge just on suspicion of being a faggot or knowing faggots or doing faggot shit.”

“Makes sense.”

Both guys nodded in agreement.

Over half the guys already fucked Jackie D with about another two dozen waiting anxiously when she suddenly stumbled into the dining room. “Get me another bottle or I quit,” she demanded in a thick, exhausted voice.