Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (2 page)

The clerk, rather than continue to trouble his mind about these mysterious ladies, returned his attention to the soap opera that he had been following for years; he knew the characters in it better than he knew anyone in real life. His absorption in this televized drama was such that he failed to notice when another arrival appeared in the lobby, a gentleman this time.

He was certainly not one of the regulars but he proceeded directly to the stairs, and though he had never been to the Tocador before in his life, he nonetheless knew enough not to wait for the elevator to take him where he wanted to go.

There was nothing special to distinguish him, to cause you to remember him later. He was dressed simply in a raincoat and carried an umbrella, which must have meant that he’d left his home early in the morning when rain still threatened. In his other hand he held a satchel of some kind, one that from the nicks and scars on its surface looked as though it had been used for several years.

With the TV blaring so loudly, and with the clerk so deaf, this newcomer escaped attention altogether. He continued up the two flights of stairs to the third floor. It was now ten minutes before the hour of five.

At the door to Room 358 the man halted. For several moments he contented himself with just staring at the door as if he expected it to open without his having to knock. His eyes darted from one end of the dimly lit corridor to the other. He finally gave a light tap on the door.

It was Mary who answered. Her suede jacket removed, she sported a silk shirt, vermilion in color with ruffled sleeves of white damask. The shirt was tight enough to dramatize the contours of her small breasts where the man’s gaze first fell. He smiled, then raised his eyes to meet her own.

“How are you?” she asked, returning his smile and stepping aside so that he could enter. “We didn’t expect you so soon.”

The man shut the door behind him and carefully placed his umbrella and his satchel in the closet on his immediate right. “I started out as soon as I received your call.” He looked around the room which, like the rest of the hotel, had an air of genteel shabbiness. The curtains and the furniture and most certainly the floral-patterned wallpaper appeared to be bleached by the sun which in this late autumn afternoon still shone brightly through the window. “Where’s our mutual friend?” he asked.

“In the bathroom. She’ll be right out. Say, Teddy, why did you want us to come here? This is such a weird, out-of-the-way place.”

The man smiled again. “I like out-of-the-way places,” he said. “I like different things.” His eyes, concentrated on her body, were slightly bloodshot and inflamed.

“I know,” Mary said, almost resignedly, “I know all about your different things.” Noticing that Teddy had yet to take off his raincoat she now urged him to do so. “That is unless you’re feeling in an especially modest mood this afternoon.”

Not only did Teddy proceed to remove his raincoat but he also went about slipping off his shirt. But there was no haste in his disrobing, no, he was a meticulous, very neat man, compulsive. He made sure every article of clothing was put away in the closet.

“You don’t waste any time,” said Doris emerging from the bathroom.

“Aren’t you going to say hello?” Teddy asked, sitting naked on the double bed. He did nothing to conceal his erection, his legs spread wide. But the expression on his face, far from intimating at excitement, was simply indifferent.

“Hello,” Doris spat the greeting out.

“You don’t sound pleased. And it’s been such a long time, too.”

Doris said nothing to this, but Mary felt compelled to defend her friend and said, “Don’t mind her. She’s had a hard day.”

“Doris, come over here.”

Doris complied, sashaying across the room to the bed.

Teddy reached his hands up and slowly drew the gold chain from around her neck. Then he slipped his hands beneath the sensuous fabric of the magenta shirt, separating it where it had not been buttoned in order to more fully reveal her breasts.

“Careful,” Doris said, “I don’t want you tearing it. I didn’t bring anything else.”

“Aren’t I always?” Teddy was not looking at Doris; his eyes were fixed entirely on Mary who stood there, waiting her turn, neither expectant nor bored. She looked as interested in what he was doing to her friend as she might have been in a moderately amusing movie.

The shirt altogether undone, Doris, with a simple shrug sloughed it off.

“Magnificent!” pronounced Teddy, cradling her ample breasts with his hands. In doing this, he resembled someone testing heads of lettuce for their respective weight.

Surrendering one breast, he slid his free hand down under the bloomers. “Already wet, that’s very nice,” he said.

Although Doris was still determined to maintain a sullen, disinterested expression, her breathing had become more rapid.

“Now I want you to come around in back of me,” he instructed Mary. “You know what to do.”

And Mary did. She had done this, with Doris and with others like Doris, more times than she could count—or cared to.

Almost as an afterthought she shed the leather skirt, dropping it in a heap to the floor, and kicked off her pumps, leaving herself bare below the waist. She then climbed up onto the bed and encircled Teddy with her arms. Then, so as to give her hands the necessary freedom to operate, she disengaged and began to knead the swell of his stomach with the skill of a professional masseuse, gradually working her way down to his groin, practically duplicating what Teddy was doing to Doris. This had the effect of further arousing Teddy; his eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, exposing a generous portion of the whites, his breathing was harsh and rasping, and from time to time he arched when Mary’s touch proved too exquisite, too liable to bring him to climax. Doris remained where she was, the bloomers drawn halfway down her thighs, her pubis hidden from Mary’s view by Teddy’s head. A loud sucking noise, the sound of air popping from the vaginal cavity, was accompanied by a deep moan that Doris released involuntarily. Her head seemed to sway and lurch against her chest as though she were incapable of keeping it upright. Her face was lost in a tangle of hair.

Mary drew both her legs around Teddy’s waist, clasping him stalwartly, so much so that she succeeded in unbalancing him and pulling him down to the bed. Teddy didn’t seem to mind about this, and brought Doris down to join them.

And so as the sun dipped beneath the horizon, unleashing a brilliant spattering of color across the west, the two lovely ladies and their male friend expertly passed the time.

And when, for all his vigor and an energy that was astonishing in a man who was probably past fifty years of age, Teddy had to call it quits, it was not at the expense of Doris or Mary. Spent, Teddy indicated that he wouldn’t mind watching them entertain each other for a while. This was unlike Teddy, who had in the past resisted any sport that he could not take part in.

But Teddy was the boss, the man with the money, and the two young women were certainly willing to provide him with another several minutes of amusement. They were accomplices in a sense, one could play the other’s body with virtuoso technique. Teddy could draw only so much pleasure from them because, for all his experience with them, he hadn’t quite mastered them.

Doris assumed the more active role, maneuvering her smooth, sweat-slickened pale body over Mary’s finely tanned one. Mary lowered her lips to between Doris’ legs, teasing her friend with a tongue that seemed in emerging to have no end. Doris allowed her eyes to close, mingling the ecstatic violence of sensation with fantasies in her dazzled mind.

Teddy, watching this spectacle, seemed alternately amused and mystified as though he couldn’t quite fathom how he had been left out, forgotten completely. When he rose from the bed neither of the two women noticed his movement. Nor did they react at all when he slid open the closet and stooped down to open the satchel he’d brought with him. Nor did they pay any attention as he rummaged about inside this satchel, finally extracting from it exactly what he wanted.

Whether they were both groaning now because of the dizzying heights they had managed to bring each other to or because they were still approaching those heights and needed a bit more stimulation before they actually got there Teddy did not know, did not care.

Instead, simply because it was more convenient since she was now the one on top, Teddy raised the blade, razor-sharp and almost scimitar-like in length, and with one deft motion, brought it directly down on the back of Mary’s exposed neck, grateful that her hair was cut short enough to provide him with such a clear target.

The air made a slight, almost inaudible whooshing sound as the blade progressed down, but the sound it made on impact was, to Teddy’s ears, abrasively loud. The edge of the knife had, for a fraction of a second, met with resistance from the bone. But it was too slight to more than briefly interrupt the passage of the knife straight through so that it severed the jugular vein with something very much like surgical precision. And, because of the force that Teddy had invested in this blow, the knife did not stop when it had decapitated Mary but continued farther to a depth of nearly two inches in Doris’ right thigh, which just happened to be in the way.

Doris had to scream for both of them because Mary never had the opportunity to utter a word. The pain must have been fierce but short-lived; Mary’s eyes were still closed in passion, her ingenious tongue still protruding from her lips, moist with the juices from Doris’ vagina. The blow had not only separated her head from her body but also had propelled it into space, hurtling it like a rocket in the direction of the window. It never quite got there, dropping down on the rug with a steady jet of blood still shooting out of the wound, like a flame from a turboprop engine.

The blood that Mary’s headless body released mingled with the blood that bubbled up from the deep gash Teddy had incidentally carved in the flesh of Doris’ thigh. It was hard to tell whose blood was whose. Teddy himself was soaked in blood, but he scarcely paid heed to it.

Doris was not so badly wounded, however, that she’d become immobilized. But there was no question she was shocked. In her eyes was horror compounded by disbelief. She sought to clamber off the bed, throwing her body onto the floor, whimpering. Her voice was strangled. After that first anguished scream of horror she could not get another out.

Teddy, were he not so fearful of her cries alerting people in neighboring rooms, might have enjoyed pursuing her about for a few minutes longer. But he realized that once begun, this enterprise would have to be completed with speed.

So, by simply placing his bare foot on the swell of her buttocks, pinning her hard against the rug, he prevented her from escaping. “No, no, no, no, don’t,” she mumbled, fitfully sobbing.

Teddy knelt down on her back. She was squirming desperately below him, but she seemed capable of doing nothing more than claw at the threads of the rug. But when Teddy placed the knife against her neck, prepared to saw through rather than duplicate the cleaner strike he’d employed on Mary, Doris half-turned, bucking, almost forcing Teddy off of her.

She managed to free one arm sufficiently so that she could use it against her assailant. With more skill than Teddy had given her credit for, she jabbed him in the left eye with her hand, making best use of her long sharp fingernails.

“Bitch! Fucking bitch!” Teddy said, his eye stinging like crazy, suddenly filled with pain. He reeled back, half-blinded, but still he kept her pinned to the ground.

And, more importantly, he still had control of the knife, which he used, only dimly aware of where it was he was striking. He slashed and slashed until he met with only enfeebled resistance. When he could adequately see what was happening he glimpsed a woman who, while still alive, was crisscrossed by dozens of cuts that yawned open to let out ever more blood from the imprisonment of veins and arteries.

Teddy returned to his original objective: the neck. The problem was that Doris was turning this way and that, moving so often, groaning no longer with pleasure but with the immensity of pain from twenty or thirty locations, that it was difficult for him to cut evenly and true. And by her very movement, she ended up cutting herself, slicing additional skin from under her Adam’s apple as she strained to get out from under the knife’s constant threat.

Teddy decided that enough was enough and by pressing his entire body weight against the knife he forced it far enough down her throat to extinguish her life. Then, mindless of the geyser of blood that sprayed his face, he continued on, cutting, sawing, carving until, with a final tearing of skin, Doris’ head was removed from her splendid body.

The savagery concluded, Teddy still had a final bit of business to attend to. Namely, the hands. These he detached with little problem; there was no one to resist him now. Then scooping up the hands in the bottom sheet from the bed (for the top one was simply too messy to be of any use), he wrapped the four of them and deposited them in his accommodating satchel. Naturally, he would have to take the heads along; he hadn’t cut them off just for the sheer hell of it, though in truth he had rather enjoyed the task. With his blade, he cut substantial parts of the curtains to provide temporary shelter for these heads; then they too were added to the gory contents of the satchel.

Now he had to go about the tedious business of washing up. He was confident enough to take a long shower, whistling a song as he soaped himself and cleaned the blood from his body. And though a great deal of blood had spattered on the closet door, none of it had penetrated, so his clothes were as clean and as fresh as he.

Only one thing remained to be done. From out of his satchel he extracted a can of gasoline. It was a big enough can and the gas inside plentiful enough so that Teddy could sprinkle the entire room and adjoining bathroom with it. He even made sure to douse the torsos of Doris and Mary who had not yet finished bleeding.

Then, just before he left the room, Teddy snapped open his lighter and pressed it close to the gas-saturated rug. A bright yellow flame shot out, touched the fibers of the rug, and instantly a blaze roared into the air, almost singeing Teddy’s hair and eyebrows. But Teddy didn’t mind. On the contrary, he was quite pleased. “Good-bye,” he called, “Good-bye!”