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“What's happening now?” Vysell whispered anxiously.

“Jesus!” Batman answered, “One of the guys, some mean-looking motherfucker, jumped out of bed, grabbed his jeans off the floor, and pulled them on over the garter belt. Then he picked up a huge Rambo knife that was on the floor next to his boots!”

“He'll kill us!” Dung cried out.

“Quiet!” Grossberg hissed. “We're trapped in here if he corners us!”

My heart didn't need any more practice pumping three times faster than normal.

“Shit!” Batman whispered frantically. “The guy took the Rambo knife and raced out of the room! Pass it on!”

All the guys, still as statues and spread along the corridor, got the message instantly. Nobody moved. It was like a freeze-frame on a videotape monitor. My familiar-sounding heartbeat
now sounded like the bass adjustment on the stereo that was turned up full blast.

I leaned sideways against the wall and felt the gun in my side pants pocket bang against the wall.

I looked down the hallway again at the rest of the guys. Then I started thinking again about all my problems: I took four months of shit from this fraternity, I almost got killed by a robber at the check cashing place, then a few hours ago I survived Bonnie and Clyde's robbery, and at this very second I was kicked out of the pledge class, to say nothing about probably flunking out of college with my .075 GPA, all resulting in losing the will money. And for what? To have some big fucker carve his autograph on me with a machete? No way Jose´!

I tiptoed down the long silent corridor toward the back door, brushing past everybody, ignoring their demands that I stand still. There's enough time to be still when you're dead.

Facing the back door, with all the pledges behind me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gun, gripping it tightly. My spine tingled, feeling the cold steel. Hair stood up on the nape of my neck with the thought that a tiny squeeze of my finger could kill somebody. The only other time in my life that I ever held a gun was tonight when I lifted it from under Clyde's pillow. But what's there to know about shooting a gun? I doubt if niggers get NRA training before they murder somebody.

“Give me the gun!” Rainey's voice barked in a loud whisper behind me.

“Why?”

“You know how to use a gun? You ever shot one before?”

“No, not exactly. But I've seen a lot of movies with shootings.”

He yanked it out of my right hand. “Well, I do.”

Rainey moved in front of me with the gun pointing downward on his right side.

I strained my ears to pick up any outside sounds. The next few seconds seemed like light years. Then suddenly, without any warning at all, the back door came crashing open like a SWAT team rammed it with a steel phone pole!

The hulk filled the doorway and greeted Rainey with a glazed look, pointing the Rambo knife a couple of feet away from Rainey's guts.

Quickly, Rainey raised the gun and aimed it at this guy's chest before resting the gun butt in his steady left palm. Hell, blindfolded he couldn't miss this fucker who seemed bigger than a grizzly bear.

“Drop the knife and back up!” Rainey ordered in a hoarse whisper.

The giant froze, like he was riveted to the floor while still pointing the knife at Rainey's stomach. What was Rainey supposed to do? Kill him to avoid capture as a Peeping Tom?

“Back up!” Rainey repeated forcefully in a surprisingly steady voice. “And drop the fucking knife or you're dead.”

Thank God King Kong's white brother suddenly flinched and the recognition of danger finally showed in his widened eyes.

“OK, OK,” he said nervously in a nasal voice. “Don't shoot, man. Don't shoot.”

The beautiful sound of the knife hitting the cement sounded like a couple of fast xylophone notes.

I quickly whispered something to Rainey that made him laugh.

“Now pull off your jeans and we'll decide if you're really a Victoria's Secret model,” Rainey demanded, snickering.

“What?”

Rainey slowly cocked the gun's hammer, pulling it back. “You heard me.”

Shaking, the big guy angrily kicked off his boots before slipping off his jeans, letting them fall to the ground. He shivered, standing there in white stockings that were held up by a white garter belt. Matching bikini panties completed this fag's outfit.

“Now backwards, facing me, walk to the back fence,” Rainey ordered, doing a lousy job of trying not to laugh. “We're coming out and we're leaving. Whether you die in the meantime is up to you.”

The big guy's breathing became deep and labored. He rubbed his hands together trying to get warm in the chilly night air.
Still facing us, with his eyes never veering from the gun, he slowly took step after step backwards, only stopping when his back hit the chain-link fence next to the dumpster about fifty feet away.

“Vysell!” Rainey barked out. “Get the truck and take everybody with you! I'll keep him here until you're in front! Honk when you're there!”

Me and everybody else raced past Rainey and around the corner of the building and piled in the truck. Vysell revved up the engine while holding down the horn button making its high-pitched screech sound like a car alarm went off. Seconds later, Rainey came running towards us and leaped into the passenger seat of the cab. Before he could close the door, Vysell screeched away from the curb fishtailing down the damp, deserted street.

_____

“What the hell happened in here?” I asked Vysell who was standing next to me in the hallway of the fraternity house. I was still groggy from the bumpy truck ride back from the motel.

“Looks like a bar scene where Steven Segal beat the shit out of everybody while wrecking the place at the same time,” he answered.

Most of the chairs and tables were knocked over, lamps were lying sideways on their shades, books were scattered everywhere. Nothing looked broken as much as everything was thrown around like burglars ransacked the house looking for something in particular.

Adams looked grim when he came out of the Chapter Room alone.

“There was a little trouble here tonight,” he said somberly, answering our unasked question. He looked around at us but never directly at me. “One active wanted to withdraw his blackball tonight but he was too late.”

The cannonball finally blasted away the last of my stomach lining! I was officially out of here! Fuck! But I'd have the fraternity closed tomorrow morning! That's for goddamn sure! As soon as the Deans got to school.

Adams finally looked at me. I looked away. I was too drained to continue this masquerade and totally unable to speak.

“What's that have to do with the place getting busted up?” Grossberg asked.

“We have a rule,” Adams explained. “When a guy gets blackballed out of here, we take two votes. After that, the vote's final.”

“But what if an error was made?” Batman asked eagerly.

Adams shrugged his shoulders. “Too bad. But there's one exception.”

“What's that?” Vysell asked anxiously.

“That all the guys who blackballed the pledge must agree to withdraw their votes.”

Grossberg asked, “So what happened?”

“One guy wanted to withdraw it but the other guy didn't.”

I finally got my breath back and spoke in a loud whisper while exhaling. “Who won?”

Adams looked directly at me before his eyes scanned the messed-up room again. I thought he was about to smile but he stopped short. “Seems the first guy persuaded the other guy into changing his vote too.”

Right then, a bunch of actives came in from the kitchen and joined us. They must've been in the yard smoking pot. My heart jumped when I saw Parker come through the open kitchen doorway. He didn't even look at me.

My body flinched when I saw Stovepipe. The left corner of his mouth, on both lips, were puffy and swollen. And there were good-sized cuts under each eye. Tomorrow he'd have huge bruises like the girls from the shelter had. He didn't look at me either as he walked past us and out the front door.

Christianson approached us. “The pledge who got voted out tonight got a reprieve,” he blurted out, almost sounding unhappy.

“But,” Adams added quickly, “tomorrow for sure, two pledges will be history.”

Friday, January 24
7:30
A.M
.

I
RACED UPSTAIRS TO
A
PARTMENT
204
and banged on the chipped, brown door of Frizzhead's dumpy apartment that she shared with Headlights. No sounds came from the other side of the door. I knocked again.

“Yes, what is it?” Frizzhead's whiny, irritated voice demanded.

“Federal Express,” I answered in a deep, ethnic voice.

She opened the door about a foot, with the gold chain preventing the door from being pushed open further.

“You?” she snarled, looking at me like I was a worthless piece of shit. “What the hell do you want?”

Barefoot, she was the size of a tall midget, standing there in a wrinkled, orange, terry-cloth bathrobe with her hair doing a great Don King imitation.

My well-rehearsed lines came out smoothly. “I'm here to apologize for insulting you. Sticking your panties on your car aerial was cruel. I'm really sorry.”

“The police said I shouldn't talk to you or any of the other rapists.” Her tone of voice was still antagonistic but not quite as harsh as before.

Inwardly, I took another deep nervous breath, feeling the
tension increase with each sentence either of us spoke while praying like hell that my tiny, digital tape recorder was getting all this.

“Please, look, whoever raped you should go to jail for it. But we both know I didn't do it. You know we never had sex together.”

The only sound in the five seconds of silence was my pounding heartbeat which she probably heard. She looked at me like she was trying to decide if I was really sincere or not before the faintest beginning of a smile appeared in the corners of her mouth.

She looked down at her red, polished toenails. “Not that I'd have minded it,” she answered softly.

“Look. You're a good-looking girl. Tell me when your eighteenth birthday is and I promise to call you that day. I'll take you out for a great dinner. Anywhere you want to go.”

The hostility that flashed in and out of her body surfaced again. “Don't wait. I don't fuck rapists.”

_____

I was waiting for Nuppi on the sidewalk in front of his office for over an hour before he showed up, carrying a battered, brown briefcase in his left hand.

“What is it?” he asked in a tired voice.

“Listen to this,” I said excitedly.

I pulled out the tape recorder and hit the ON switch, activating it. Even with the traffic noise, our voices came out strong and clear: especially after I said, ‘You know we never had sex together,' and she answered, ‘Not that I'd have minded it.'”

Nuppi smiled. “You got a great future as a private investigator. Give me the recorder with the tape in it and I'll have some copies made and give one to the detective.”

I handed it to him. “Will that end this thing?”

“Probably not. Both cunts hate you.”

_____

10:30
A.M
.

More cops came around our fraternity house than there were on
the pickpocket detail in Times Square on New Year's Eve at midnight.

O'Neill's paunchy face looked scared as he sat on the gray, living room couch next to a blue-uniformed traffic officer who had a lower hairline than the Cro-Magnon Man.

I was sitting on an overstuffed, silver chair facing them. Between us was a dented, brown coffee table that had about twenty roaches jammed into the sand-filled ceramic ashtray the shape and color of a pussy.

“Tell him what you told me about the guy on the motorcycle,” O'Neill prodded, giving me a stern look. His loose eyeball bounced around everywhere like it was tracing the shape of a starfish.

“Why?” I asked innocently.

“You don't need to know,” the cop answered. “Just tell us if the motorcycle guy said anything to you about a hit and run accident with a green Honda.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “OK.”

The big, burly cop opened a small notebook, flipped the tan cover over, clicked a white ballpoint pen and grunted, “Begin.”

I leaned back in the big chair, resting my neck in my interlaced fingers behind my head looking lost in thought. “The motorcycle guy that brought my telegram a few days ago, he was pretty mad when he got here.”

“Why?” the cop interrupted.

“Well, because the front of his clothes were all wet.”

“He say how they got wet?”

“Yeah. He said some guy in a green 4-door Honda was talking on a cell phone, not looking where he was driving, and would've hit him head-on if he didn't lay the bike down and skid on a wet lawn.”

The cop's hands were so big that the pen looked as small as a cigarette as he wrote.

“He say anything else?”

“Yeah. That the Honda guy probably never saw him.”

“That's it?”

“No. He also said that he had the Honda's license number and
knew somebody who could find out whose car it was and where the guy lived. For a good reason.”

“Why?”

“So he could drive the motorcycle over to where the Honda guy lived and scratch some motorcycle paint on the Honda. Then he was going to have his brother's girlfriend, some bitch who filed fake lawsuits, sue the Honda guy. I think that's all he said that night.”

As the cop kept scribbling in his notebook I wondered if he and Jackie D had any of the same monkey ancestors.

“The lawyer's a bitch,” the cop muttered. “She calls me all day long.”

“About what?”