The Erection Set

She was still looking at one hand until she decided she wasn’t wet enough, so touched her fingertip to her lips.

“Ten percent of many millions is many millions.”

“Smart, baby, now drop dead because I’m going to get dressed.”

She squirmed around and pointed it right at me. “You said you were going to take me.”

“Sharon...”

“That man in New York ... Vince Tobano. He’s a policeman.”

“Damn it to hell, will you ...”

“All you have to do is tell me. You turned me inside out to make me hate you. Why not just tell me?”

I wished my damn cock would go limp. The thing didn’t have any kind of conscience at all. I picked up my pants, got a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it. Then sat on the end of the bed, my back toward her.

“They recruited me,” I said.

“Who did?”

“The government. My cover was perfect. I was already rich. They made me a black marketeer, I got into the big stuff and when everything went bust it was never my fault but some sloppy operation on the other end. I was always in the rackets. Only the agency and a couple of individuals knew I was on the other side.”

“In New York...”

“Doll, Vince Tobano is the straightest cop you ever met.

The guy I shook the shit out of was Chet Linden who heads up the big D.C. splash. He was all bombed out thinking I’d blow the picture and when I handed them that casket I damn near browned out trying to keep the laugh in. Don’t you know old Vince’ll get a promotion out of the deal and that idiot Chet will get his ass eaten out by the old man in the Pentagon for letting it go that far? Hell, Chet wouldn’t dare let his guys lay a gun on me or Vince’ll take him apart. Or I might get teed off, which could even be worse. The fucking syndicate lost their millions in heroin, the mighty have tumbled, the Establishment is sucking their thumbs waiting to see how they can get back at us, knowing they never can, and ...”

I looked down at my pants on the floor and she followed my eyes. One pocket where I had put the strange metallic ball was hanging up in the air.

“And I’d like to fuck you,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

“You’ve been engaged. Now you said the guy was dead.”

“Did you really have a moral obligation not to fuck me?”

“I prefer to think so.”

“Sucker,” she said.

I turned around and looked at her, one hand resting very lightly on her throat. “Don’t say that.”

“Tod almost told you.”

“What?”

“There was a little girl who was ten years old when you went into the army and the only one who walked you to the railroad station. You said when you came back you’d marry her and you stopped in the dime store and bought her a green ring. She wore it for all the years until she thought the man she was waiting for was dead.” She smiled, dipped down into the pocket of her blouse and took the silly little ring out and put it back on her finger. “It must be awful having to wait for a virgin this long. I hope the going isn’t too tough.”

It was all too fast, too ridiculous and too true. It came back with the effect of a tidal wave, sweeping over me, washing out the old and planting the new. She was all beautiful and slippery and blonde and brunette at once with those crazy curving hills and sloped, wet banks like a rained-on race course that heaved and undulated with tiny muscular spasms aching to be relieved in a gigantic orgasm and I was there in her little room where she slept as a girl, in a room something like where my pop slept with my mother and now it was going to be all right, the factory, the old men, Linton, the coming home ... it was going to be all right because they had given me that little ball of metal that would turn the world upside down.

And as I was rolling onto her I heard the voice say, “How pretty. How pretty.”

But he shouldn’t have said it the second time, enjoying the scene of naked flesh, part soft and part hard, wondering where to put the bullet, because wherever a .45 hits you it tears one hell of a hole and the .45 was right next to my hand and the first shot took his arm off and the second left no memory of Arnold Bell’s face in anybody’s mind because he had no face left to remember. His skin and bones were indented on the wall behind the headless body and tomorrow I’d have to get another crew out here to clean up and patch the hole and if I were lucky, the quarts of blood wouldn’t flow through the cracks in the floor and ruin the ceiling downstairs.

“Now?” I asked her.

The two shots were still reverberating in her ears. She looked at the mess by the door and didn’t get sick at all. She didn’t hear me, but she knew what I said.

Sharon smiled and turned the old brass ring around so it looked like a cheap wedding band. “Shut up and fuck me,” she said, “like a dog.”