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  God, Clare hoped so.

  Wardell slammed down the phone.

  ~ * ~

  The next day Wardell's "big score" came in. They flew to Cancun that evening. A month in paradise. Clare expected to work on her tan but it quickly became apparent she'd be working on her libido instead. She didn't mind. Wardell's cock was a boom that never lowered, his balls a veritable sperm factory that remained in production round the clock.

  The nightmares stopped.

  And so did all thoughts of Roderic. She realized that one night with Wardell's cock stuffed so far down her throat she was wearing his balls like sunglasses. Indeed sex had proved her release. And it was a release she couldn't help but pursue.

  If variety was the spice of life, then each day and each night of their vacation offered Clare another bellyful of ripe red peppers. And, to stretch the metaphor to its absolute limit, Wardell was never reluctant to pour liberal volumes of cream into Clare's coffee. Where does it all come from? She wondered... And best of all, Roderic was gone. Out of her mind.

  Forever!

  Wardell had to leave a week early; a sudden "business deal" had arisen. A "customer" had an interest in his "product." Clare lounged on the beach all day. Each night, in bed, she masturbated well into the night. All she could think about was her lover's interminably stiff cock, the plumy hot balls, her thoughts forever and solely of Wardell and his earthy love for her. Getting fucked by Wardell was akin to dropping a box of Godiva into the lap of a chocolate addict.

  Clare left Cancun four days early.

  On the flight back she was so antsy to see him she could hardly keep her hand out from under her skirt. Once she got into the cab, she didn't try.

  His car was there in its parking space. Bags in hand, she dashed into the apartment.

  "Wardell? Honey?"

  No reply. "Love-muffin's home." She dropped the bags and ran into the bedroom. Stared.

  And shrieked.

  Wardell lay sprawled on the bed, his face a dark shade of scarlet.

  "Parachute cord's the best." Fudd emerged from the corner, leather-capped-and-gloved. "Piano wire's too messy. And nylon's unreliable. Last broad that dumped Roderic, I was doing a job on her with nylon, and the damned thing snapped on me. It got ugly."

  Clare could see the deadly ligature sunk deep into her lover's throat. His face had swollen to a queer balloon, strangely distended.

  "You should listen to your messages," Fudd said. "The old lady's not happy, let me tell you."

  He stepped forward and she screamed. Last broad that dumped Roderic, I was doing a job on her...

  But it wasn't a garrote that Fudd held out to her. It was a chloroform-soaked towel.

  ~ * ~

  Clare awoke in Roderic's room. She knew it instantly. Even though her senses skittered like autumn leaves in the street.

  "Oh, missy," his mother sat erect in a fine cane chair opposite. Fudd was standing behind her. "You were supposed to take care of my boy." Clare's tongue felt thick and sour. "We... we broke up."

  "Broke up? You dumped him, you silly, selfish horse's ass! My boy is a gift to the likes of you! You know, you're not the first to treat him similarly, and Fudd always has been kind enough to give them what they deserve. But you? For some reason, I haven't the heart. Roderic loves you so." She sighed, pigeon breast heaving beneath the frumpy dress. "You should listen to your phone messages, missy."

  Clare trembled. "I—I was on vacation."

  "I know. Cavorting, no doubt, with that detestable narcotics dealer. Unfortunately Fudd and I were on vacation, too. But if you'd phoned in for your messages you might have prevented all of this."

  "All of what?"

  "Poor Roderic. He's a nice boy but admittedly an eccentric one—with some odd ideas about proving his love. Fudd found him...outside."

  Clare's mind swam in muck. Her nightmares all came back to her. Roderick shot. Poisoned. Hanging.

  "He's ...dead?"

  "No," she simpered. "No, thank God, he's not."

  Fudd scowled and plugged a cassette into the tape player on the sideboard and walked off into another room. Hi, this is Clare! I'm not home now so please...

  Then Roderic's voice. "Clare! My love! Why won't you believe me? I'll prove it? I'll prove my love for you, prove that I'd give anything for you! Listen!"

  A pause. A snap. A brief scream.

  "That," the old woman informed her, "was my son cutting off his pinkie with a pair of tin snips."

  The tape continued. Roderick sobbing. "There! Here's my proof. For each day I'm without you I'll cut off another part of myself. Goodbye, Clare." Clare did her math, paling. She'd been away over three weeks. Fudd reappeared with a blanketed bundle in his arms. He set the bundle on the bed. Undraped it and stepped aside.

  Clare gasped. Her eyes bugged. She bent over and vomited. "Clare! You're back! I knew you'd come back to me!"

  Roderic's bright face beamed at her.

  "Ten fingers, ten toes." Roderic grinned proudly. "And the rest, I pre-applied tourniquets and used a hacksaw. The legs and the left arm were easy. But the right arm...I bet you can't guess how I did it!"

  She vomited again onto the plush Persian throw rug.

  "I crawled out to the woodpile, tightened the tourniquet with my teeth—and stuck my arm under the automatic log splitter. It did a nice, clean job."

  She knew that for the rest of her life she would never escape the sight. Roderick swaddled on the bed. No arms and no legs. Just a living, talking torso.

  "Do you believe me now? Do you believe me when I say I'd give anything for you?"

  She could only croak a single word. "Yes."

  "You've got your entire lives to spend together," said the old woman.

  She got up and shuffled toward the door. "In time I'm sure things will work out nicely. For now, of course, Fudd will remain. To see that you comply.”

  “Cuh—comply?"

  Fudd smiled. His gloved hand twirled the garrote idly.

  "Assume your responsibilities," said Roderic's mother. "And without a fuss. It's only fair." Her stern eyes held her fast. "I expect you to take very good care of my boy."

  Fudd locked the door behind her. It took Clare a moment to realize exactly what the old lady was saying.

  "Get your clothes off and get to it," Fudd directed. "You don't want to keep him waiting."

  "Oh, darling," Roderic said. "Till death do us part! We'll have such a splendid time together."

  For there was one part of himself Roderick hadn't cut off, and that part now throbbed erect for her.

  Sort of.

  Love Letters from the Rain Forest

  Dearest Clara,

  This field excursion has really turned out to be wonderful. You'd be astonished—my god! how I wish you could be here with me! This place is so different, so unimaginable! The Rain Forest is a world of its own, teeming with life and filled with the strangest beauty. The Team and I have already made several noteworthy finds, and I've personally isolated a half dozen species of Thallophyta that have never been catalogued. I couldn't be more excited, but...

  You haven't written, Clara.

  Surely you're not still angry with me over our spat. I won't believe that. What I said to you I said out of love—you know I did the purest love. I know I was jealous, childish. Even harsh. But a love like ours is rooted in truth. We must be truthful, Clara, and what in this world can be more important than truth? I know that you still love me. And I also know that once I've returned, our love will bloom again like the beautiful night flowers here, opening gently to each other in the dark.

  Until then, never forget. You own my heart.

  ~ * ~

  "Ready for a gander?"

  Straker turned out of the station and cruised past the administration buildings. The campus shimmered in the high summer sun, a blinding green haze.

  Bilks felt bored. Straker bored him and the campus work bored him and he damn near bored himself.

  White...string.
..bikini, was all he could think.

  Yeah, he was ready.

  He knew he shouldn't complain. That was why he'd quit the city in the first place—he couldn't hack the rough stuff. He'd walked into a project laundry room one day and found two of his crack stools strung upside-down and gutted like deer. The M.E. noted that their genitals had been burned off first with a blowtorch. Another time Bilks and his partner had answered a routine domestic just in time to see some PCP Cowboy pull a tire iron out of his wife's head. The guy's little girl was in the bedroom, sliced up like cold cuts. The baby was in the tub.

  Fuck that shit, man.

  Whereas here, on the campus department, your real tough call was breaking up a frat party or running smoochers off the quad at night. And this time of year was even slower. The campus was in between summer sessions. No students—though most of the profs and TA's stayed on. That's what this babe was—Clara Holmes—a grad student working for the botany department.

  And an eyeful.

  How many times I jacked myself thinking of that rock-hard bod? he articulately asked himself. How many times I jumped Barbara's tired bones pretending she was Clara Holmes?

  "You're a pretty quiet fella today," Straker remarked behind the cruiser's wheel. "What, the wife wear out your tongue last night?"

  "I'm bored," said Bilks. "As in shitless. And you ain't helping any."

  Straker laughed. When he laughed he cackled like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. It was a skinny laugh and Straker was a skinny person. Bilks hated Straker's laugh.

  "Well, you won't be bored long. I got that new pair of binocs I was telling you about. Bushnells, man, with a zoom. We'll be able to count her eyelashes. Zoom right up her crack when she's lying on that tight, killer belly of hers."

  It sounded good to Bilks. While scoping female grad students with binoculars did not exactly equate to conduct becoming of an officer, he saw little harm. He figured god made women beautiful for a reason; therefore, peeping on Clara Holmes was, in some esoteric sense, accommodating the Will of the Creator. Besides, a job like this had damn few perks, and she sure as shit was one of them. A jam-packed, bodacious hunka-hunka red-hot woman.

  Every day at noon she'd lie out on the grassy campus quadrangle, working on her tan. Bilks considered the sexist-cop image: the tight, tan skin shining with oil, the zero body fat, the 36C's with nipples as big as the end of your thumb, all wrapped up in that white string bikini.

  Jesus wept, thought Bilks.

  "I saw her coming out of North Administration the other day," Straker said. "No bra. Just this tight orange halter and cutoffs creepin' so high up her ass her cheeks were showing. I swear it's hard to believe a dish like that was dating Moley. Bet his dick was one happy camper in that pie."

  "Hold on. Back up a minute," said Bilks. "Who?"

  "Moley. Howard Moley. Assistant prof in the botany department. You know. The guy who died."

  Howard Moley. Oh yeah. He remembered the item in the campus paper. Some kind of mushroom scientist or something. Or fungus maybe. The guy got sent down to the Rain Forest on a Smithsonian grant. And died. But...

  "Howard Moley dated Clara Holmes?"

  "S'what I heard. For a couple months at least."

  "But Moley was a fucking creamcake!"

  "You got that right. Egghead wimp to the max. Word is she was only after him for his family's money, but in the end she couldn't keep her hands off other guys, so she dumped him."

  Bilks sighed. Some things just didn't make a whole lot of sense in this life. Moley dating Clara Holmes was like Sharon Stone dating Mr. Rogers. "Jesus. Clara Holmes could be in Penthouse. Moley must have the Loch Ness Monster in his pants."

  "Like I said, he comes from money," reminded Straker.

  "Still."

  "Funniest part is she dumped him a month before he croaked."

  Straker parked in the back lot of the undergrad library which overlooked the vast quadrangle. He reached for the Bushnells in back.

  "Hey, don't look so sad, good buddy. The lady is the biggest, toughest cocktease on campus. Everybody knows that. She was cheating on Moley right and left. Probably goes through box springs like you go through cigarettes."

  It meant something to Bilks. He was a three pack a day man and counting. Still...

  "How do you like that shit?" Straker griped. He was combing the quadrangle with the Bushnells. "First day she's missed all freakin' summer. Figures, don't it? We're all set to viddy that hot sweet tush with my brand new glasses and she ain't even here. Piss!"

  Piss was right. Bilks felt disheartened. "Let's wait a while," he said, trying to be optimistic. "Maybe she'll show. What've we got to do anyway? Fight crime?" He stuck another Marlboro in his mouth, lit the match and then paused over the flame. "By the way," he said. "How did Moley die?"

  ~ * ~

  The first letter came about a week after he'd left. She remembered it clearly even now, a week after he was dead.

  Her memory was about a half-step from photographic. In matters regarding Howard there was reason to wish it were poorer.

  Dearest Clara, the letter had read.

  I feel awful about our spat. I want to forget it ever happened. Can we? You know how much I love you, don't you? And that I always will? Write and tell me you do know. And that you love me too. Make me the happiest man alive.

  I miss you terribly, darling.

  All my love, Howard

  And she'd thought at the time, the man can't take a hint.

  Okay, so she'd been involved with him a couple of months. The guy's parents had millions! What girl in her right mind wouldn't take a crack at it? Maybe the two of them could get along awhile, she thought, enough time for her to get her hands on a little of that green for her old age. Marriages could be short. Real short.

  She'd tried it out, tested the water so to speak.

  And decided it wasn't worth the swim.

  The guy was pathologically dull. Didn't dance. Didn't like the movies. Never even wanted to go to any of the campus parties. Too busy reading about goddamn shelf fungus and mushrooms. Clara was interested in botany, sure (it was the easiest masters the college offered) but she wasn't obsessed with it, for god's sake. Howard pored over botany journals the way most men pored over skin mags. And that was another thing about Howard: he was equipped with neither the zeal nor the architecture to, uh, satisfy a woman's, uh, needs.

  And a woman such as Clara had many such needs. But of course she'd filled that gap—no pun intended—with all the other guys, unbeknownst to poor little Howard.

  No problem.

  But he took too damn much attention. Smothering her with flowers and sticky displays of affection. She got sick of it.

  So they'd had their little "spat." That was what Howard called it, anyway. She'd stood him up for dinner, then ducked his calls for a week, hoping he'd catch the drift.

  No dice.

  Howard was not only dull, he was often perfectly dense. He'd appeared at her dorm, actually curious at first, concerned, thinking that maybe something was wrong with her. And then, understanding, ludicrous in his ninety-pound-weakling rage.

  "What the hell's going on?" he demanded.

  She was cleaning up the room, faking a kind of nervous energy combined with a forlorn expression and, well, maybe a little cocaine. Double-whammy. It pretty much worked every time.

  She picked up a stocking, worried it in her hands a little—though not enough to run the damn thing—and turned to him, sighing. "Oh Howard," she said. "I don't know what I want."

  "After six months? You don't know?"

  "Has it been that long?"

  "Yes. It has."

  "It's just that the things I like to do you seem to hate..."

  "What things? I love being with you."

  "I know you do—if it's dinner and long walks or sitting by the fire over sherry or playing chess. But you know, I like to go places, I like the clubs. I like to go dancing."

  "Dancing!"

  She did not a
ppreciate being yelled at. She yelled back.

  "Yes! Dancing! And you can't dance! You don't even try! You won't dance and you won't even go to a movie unless it's got subtitles and twenty old Frenchmen sitting around drinking wine. Do you even know who the hell Arnold Schwartzenegger is for chrissake?"

  Of course it wasn't the dancing. Howard Moley was just a card-carrying nerd. Polyester slacks. Button-down shirts with a pocket full of pens, an academic scarecrow. Plus, he had long stringy hair which Clara hated on men. And he fucked like he danced—like a puppet on strings.

  Howard was incredulous. "You want to break up with me because of dancing? Isn't love more important than dancing?"

  "Howard, I never said I loved you."

  "Of course you did!"

  Clara remembered. "That was different. I was...drunk."

  "Drunk, great. That's just great!"

  He stomped back and forth across her room, waving his skinny arms. A plucked chicken reciting his litany of grievances.

  "You lead me on, you sleep with me, you say you'll marry me, you tell me you love me..."

  "Oh, Howard, I did not."

  "And now all of a sudden you don't know what you want, you think you'd rather go dancing. That's just great. That's very mature. You'll go really far in life with ideals like that."

  To hell with this, she thought. Enough's enough.

  "Howard."

  He stopped at her tone and looked at her. The tone was a very cold one. It was very, very easy for her to make it that way.

  "Just leave, Howard," she said. "Just go away."

  She watched the color drain out of his face and the thin lower lip start to tremble. And then he was jerking past her toward the door.

  "Fine! I will. Have fun on the dance floor, Clara."

  She opened the door for him as he babbled his way out into the hall. "I know you'll find lots of genuine fulfillment there. Absolutely. You'd rather dance than be in an honest, mature relationship with someone who really loves you. That's great. That's..."

  She slammed the door.

  "Wonderful!" she heard him through the door. "Go ahead. Dance your life away. See if I care!"