The Shaft (16 page)

    He thought again of the tarantula, and shuddered.
Spiders, big spiders, noo thanks
. Ghosts of spiders past, come to haunt him?

    It was, he saw, a cat.

    It peered, golden-eyed, around the boxes, awaiting a decision. Fuck, feed, fight or flight. The intrusion was not that much of a bother. Without Amanda he did not have to be so instantly reactionary. This was not Puff, that obnoxious little orange shithead.

    'Well.'

    The cat was slim, the blades of its hips apparent through thin fur. Except for an unambitious white shield delineating its breastbone, it was entirely black. The front door was still open. The sound of Jonathan's voice did not launch it into escape gear.

    'What're you doing in here, fuzzface?' He crouched down. 'Who do you belong to?'

    Cats don't belong to anybody.

    'Sorry, right - cats don't belong to anybody.' He watched the tail switch idly. No panic moves. This was getting funny. 'I suppose you wouldn't care for a midnight snack? Unlike most pussycats?'

    
Look close. Do I look like Morris or Garfield or one of those overfed numbfuck cartoon cats to you?

    'Right.' Most of Jonathan's food supply was in the last load of boxes, yet to be transported. He did have some luncheon meat and makings for brown-bag specials already in the refrigerator. A sliver of turkey loaf was no biggie. Jonathan moved closer and went down on his haunches to offer it. 'Check this out. Come on

    Trusting enough, the cat ambled across the room and after a perfunctory sniff, ate.

    
I suppose now you want me to rub against you or purr or some lovey-dovey thing to prove you're not such a rotten son of a bitch human being after all, right? Jesus, are you sunk.

    'Welcome Wagon,' Jonathan shrugged. 'I don't suppose you could stand guard over my junk up here while I catch the last load?'

    
No way.

    'Thanks ever so much.' Best not to rile the natives. This quaint hovel was no home base. 'C'mon - in or out.' The doors had to be locked.

    He peeled off his frigid wet socks and soaked each foot alternately in the sink until circulation was agonizingly restored. He changed into two pairs of fresh tube socks, ughhed back into his wet shoes, sealed up his parka and dug for Bash's car keys.

    In the airlock, the cat waited, sitting Egyptian style, tail flicking. When Jonathan opened the outer door it slinked into the hallway.

    'So what do I call you? Do you have a name?' He was abruptly embarrassed by the thought of some other tenant hearing him.

    
Cat is fine.

    'Dawg, maybe. I never did get around to getting another dog.' He was babbling, and deserved the flash of cat anus he got as the animal strolled off.

    By the time Jonathan returned with his final payload of the night, he would find Kenilworth Arms girded by police cars.

    

    

    Her opening line was: 'Bauhaus tells me you're a Chivas man at heart.' She hoisted the bottle for inspection.

    Cruz's eyes lent the jug the millisecond it deserved, and hurried to catalogue the ups and downs and ins and outs of his after-hours visitor.

    His brain replayed the line about how the first fifteen seconds of physical attraction were the most vital. His heart and glands woke up. Adrenaline flushed clear. Her knock on his outer door had catapulted a bolt of panic through his midsection. There was more snow inside his apartment than outside. With such a big taste of coke, a bigger taste of hair trigger xenophobia floods in naturally - like gasoline seeking its own level when you were siphoning it out of some stranger's tank.

    The snowflakes spangling her shoulders and shoetops hung in the phantasmagoric instant between crystalline and droplet. Cruz's eyes busied themselves. He had expected some skittish and sleepless mexicana, hollow-eyed, ready to suck or engorge anything in trade for one more snort of angel dust, or maybe a wink of jobless slumber.

    She was faster than him. 'You're Cruz. I guess that makes me Jamaica. Hi.'

    She had a purple streak job and Isis eye paint speckled with highlighter frost. The aggressive cheekbones and slash brows made Cruz think she might be Italian, maybe second or third generation Brooklyn, lacking the slovenly walk or the baby maker hips. She was wearing a long car coat, black roughout suede, with a lush collar of real mink. She began thumbing loose the glossy ebony buttons.

    'I'm sort of like Count Dracula,' she said. 'You have to invite me in the first time.'

    Cruz cleared the way. She seemed to find the maze of the airlock charming, like a maladroit but unbearably adorable puppy.

    When she opened the coat her special aroma was released into the room. Jasmine, Cruz thought, maybe Objet D'Art with apinch more spice. Chiquitahad always doused herself in Love Crazy. She had left a vapor trail enroute to the concrete. Whatever scent Jamaica had dabbed on made Cruz's erection get serious about embarrassing him. Beneath the car coat was a snug leather skirt, a chromium cartridge belt and a Madonna album's worth of tramped out rock 'n' roll lace. Her spikes had gold heels. She dutifiilly drew a Kleenex from her saddtebag to wipe off her shoes. A hundred fifty bucks, easy, on those slim feet.

    Cruz felt coarse and slovenly. His hand wanted to ensure his zipper was full up. He regretted not casing the bathroom mirror to deter obvious zits from humiliating him. He saw Jamaica's smoothly beveled hipbones declare themselves, molding the leather, and felt something icy leap between his lungs. Her legs were sensational. He found himself thinking that such legs were too upmarket to ever wrap themselves around Bauhaus' piggy torso… then he corrected. Of course they had. She had boned him and blown him and left him gasping. All in the line of duty. The duty of fines.

    As she shucked the coat she handed him the Whitman Sampler box she held crooked beneath one arm. This is for you. Another little forget-me-not from Uncle Bauhaus.'

    The weight was all wrong. It held either a clinker brick or something a lot deadlier than gooey cordials and chocolates. Cruz posted the box on the dresser. No rush.

    'Uncle Bauhaus.' He laughed.

    'Everybody's daddy. 'No prob, kiddo; anything ya want - it's all free and it's all cool.' ' Her imitation was good. 'Kiddo' translated as anyone inferior to Bauhaus. A dogsbody, as they were called in jolly old Great B.

    'But tomorrow,' she said, 'when bill collecting time rolls around, you've gotta watch your ass to make sure you've still got both buns and a hole. Bauhaus is the elephant that never forgets anything he's given you, or loaned you, or done for you.

    Because it's all for him, really.'

    'He seems too eager to give everybody everything they want.'

    'Absolutely - if it's dope or sex or money. Try for position. Try for power. You'll wake up face down in the Chicago sewer with rats gnawing on your eyelids.' The recitation seemed to amuse her, but hardened her features like cast metal being tempered.

    'Is that why you're here tonight?' said Cruz. 'A payback? Red to black in Bauhaus' ledger?'

    'No other reason for a strange woman to visit a strange man after midnight, babe.'

    Cruz nodded. All business. He was going to get what he had asked for. Every passing second of his life put him deeper in Bauhaus' debt, and he wondered what his payback would be. He enjoyed the talk, however. Jamaica was more articulate than any of Emilio's cuinas, and better looking than most of them. When Cruz inventoried Emilio's stable, all he ever thought of were brand names: Physique by Ironworks Body Coaching. Billboard teeth by Ranson Hale DDS (a coke-sniffing maniac who gave his regulars free jolts of nitrous oxide for referring new patients). Tans by Uva-Sun. Tits by NASA. Brains by Looney Tunes.

    Despite the makeup and flash, Jamaica came by her assets naturally. Her teeth were not perfect. Her dark complexion was marred by a Y-shaped scar beneath her lower lip - a charming flaw that affirmed her realness more strongly. Under the dusky polish those nails were her own - tapered and pointed yet businesslike and short. No fakes, no bull. Her snide hinted that she shared Cruz's fine opinion of their illegitimate uncle.

    Maybe a friend lurked here.

    It took them a while to get around to fucking. Cruz liked talking to her, and his fascination made him hesitant and clumsy. She fancied what she took for shyness in the same way he found her scar compelling. At least he didn't whip out the bogus suavity or try to act supertough.

    She told him she wanted to chase the dragon. Cruz set up the fixings.

    One of the things he had done with his overstock from cutting Bauhaus' cocaine was to extract a stash of freebase, using baking soda to filter out the impurities. Pulling pure cocaine hydrochloride out of a cut that was barely stepped on was pretty simple.

    Jamaica said she enjoyed it best when smoked through a bong fall of rum. Cruz had heard of this in Miami but had never tried it personally. He lacked a water pipe, at any rate. Instead, he lit a candle and set about folding a small square of aluminum foil. The trick was to dodge the bad carbon taste that spelled the line between cooking and burning the freebase. He played the foil and flame like a fisherman, drawing out the contest. She sniffed in the milky wisps of smoke that curled upward. He saw her pupils dilate with impact.

    'Whoo!' She sat backward too fast, breathing to break up the concentrated rush with a hit or two of air. Cruz watched the lace bodice of her camisole top whomp away. They would definitely be up through most of the night.

    He put on a Circle Jerks tape and took his turn, going easy on the potent smoke. He was the host.

    About the time 'Love Kills' revved up, he asked her to keep her spikes on while they did it.

    He tore the double stitching in her pantyhose and felt how moist she was already. Freebased into the ionosphere, she subjected him to vigorous use of her extremely motile pelvis. Everything seemed overhot, urgent, just out of reach; fulfillment confounded by the hyperclarity of their mutual high. Internally she must have been distracting herself like a pro. She soon rollicked through an arched-back, toe-curling orgasm, or at least mustered a passable fake for Cruz's benefit. She opened up his back with her fine brown nails, shallow furrows that stopped just short of bleeding. They hurt so good.

    Once Cruz came, matters turned slicker and simpler down below. This excited him so much that he got hard again without withdrawing from the fervid grasp in which she held him. She paced her breathing nasally, like a distance runner, and broke a sweat at last. The room seemed to run short of air. It became a game to see who would be the first to run out of juice.

    She straddled, and began ramming herself onto him, reddening their pubes, baiting him to madness, until he dumped her onto her back and planted his knees wide to deal her lustier, deeper strokes. She clawed at the mattress, came again, and glided down with a dazed satiation glimmering wetly in her gaze. Such depths there, in green, impenetrable.

    The candle had burned down and the tape had run out half an horn-back.

    Cruz's metabolism roared and broke beach. He felt more and more awake, an acceleration that stressed the limits of his envelope and threatened to burst him from internal pressure. It was as though he had missed sex for a year and was venting a hundred per cent in a single glorious overload.

    Her pump now primed, he went to work on her with mouth and tongue. Her pubic hair was immodestly lush, a fragrant triangle that cushioned his face and pointed the One True Path. No bikini depilatory here. It was brazen and unusual. Cruz was reminded of the challenge of uncut dope: Can you hack it without dilution? Small labial folds, almost petite. The blood-flushed randy bud waiting there like a mine ready to explode, touchy and swollen, ripened to the point of near pain. He teased and tested and flicked and then backed off. Then it was a full commit. He laced fingers to hold her hips down, and nibbed and suckled until she was ready to scream.

    Jamaica lost count.

    Cruz hung in there primarily because he did not know if the coke would let him get it up again. She stopped him and took that fear away, too. Her eyes were almost chatoyant in the candlelight, and as the wick drowned in its own wax, they finally called a time-out and clinked rejuvenating bottles of Quietly Beer.

    Still the coke denied them genuine sleep. She mopped her forehead and told him she had really been climaxing. Cruz drank deeply, and, like a fool, believed her.

    When she hit the bathroom to eliminate some of their collaborative effort, Cruz checked out her saddlebag.

    Mixed amid a nightmarish jumble of cosmetics he found a pinky vial barely dusted with lees of coke. He did his gums with the smidgen and found it a weak mix. There was a sample-sized bottle of mouthwash and a plastic case of good old Ortho-Novum, plus an Illinois State ID that assured Cruz had not just made the same error in judgement as his predecessor, the dishonorable Jimmy McBride. Jamaica's name was really Loretta Paxson, and she had turned twenty-two three weeks ago. The ID mugshot made her look green, like one of the living dead. Cruz refilled the amber vial from his own ample stash. He tried not to be a bad guy, generally.

    He broke the tape seal on the candy box and lifted out a matte black Sig Sauer 226 with three clips of Luger ammo. Nasty enough. He replaced the lid when he heard the toilet flush.

    She came out barefoot, shredded hose clinging, unwilling to let go of such sleek legs. The symbolic hymen rent asunder; a good start for them as a team. She poured lukewarm beer on his cock, making him jump and soaking his groin. The tape got changed to Slayer and in moments she had lipped him back to stiflhess. She shoved his shoulders down, pinning him and stepping over in one fluid move. He felt himself part her and slip in to the hilt; she was so damned warm there. She locked him down with her forearms and cut loose more below-the-waist moves than a snake dancer.