Without Mercy (18 page)

“I want to suck your cock,” she said tremulously to the man in the black leather jockstrap.

“Why you filthy disgusting cunt!”

“Can I suck it?” she begged.

“Can you suck it
what!”

“Can I
s\x±\t please?”

“That’s better. Say it again, goddamn you.”

“Can I suck your cock please?”

“I’ll think about it while I whip your stinking ass.”

“Please don’t!”

“Shut your fucking hole.”

The man took a riding crop from a hook on the wall and commenced whacking the girl, but his strokes lacked authority. They were making believe and not fooling anybody. The camera zoomed in for a close up, and red welts showed on the girl’s flabby ass. Evidently they’d put lipstick on the riding crop and when it hit it left a red mark. What a phony fucking thing, Kowalchuk thought. But he enjoyed seeing the girl get whipped even if it was only acting. He’d love to do something like that, but for real. He’d also like to piss on a woman’s face and watch her spit and throw up. His skin tingled whenever he thought of that.

The guy took off his black leather jockstrap and let the girl go down on him, but he didn’t
even have an erection. Kowalchuk figured it must be difficult to get one with the movie director and his technical staff looking at you. It must be embarrassing as hell. Kowalchuk shuddered as he visualized a lot of people looking at him naked.

The man on the movie screen tied the girl spread-eagled onto a bed, mounted her, and commenced screwing. Another naked man entered the room, walked to the bed, got on his knees beside her, and dropped his penis into her mouth. The camera showed the sex from various angles, then another guy in a black leather jockstrap dragged a blonde into the room, and the guys made the girls sixty-nine each other. Next the girls blew two of the guys while the third guy whipped the girls’ asses. The guys came in the girls’ mouths and on their faces, and the girls rubbed the sticky white juice into their hair.

The film cut to a scene outside of the house. It was night and a group of patrolmen approached the house with their guns out. They broke down the front door, arrested the guys, and freed the girls. The final scene in the movie showed the three girls happily blowing three of the cops.

The curtain closed over the screen and the lights went on. The men in the theater resettled themselves and looked around. They were a bunch of ordinary black and white guys. Some looked like they worked with their hands and others looked like clerks. At the back of the theater were two guys with their arms around their girlfriends. Everybody seemed a little embarrassed to be where they were.

Beneath the movie screen was a raised platform that had a bed on it, with the foot of the bed facing the audience. The men grumbled and rustled around, and Kowalchuk wondered when the stage show was going to start. It should start immediately after the movie ended, like at Radio City Music Hall.

Rock and roll music started up and played loudly for a few minutes. Then a black girl in red tights, carrying a shopping bag, appeared in the corridor to the right of the screen. She climbed the stairs to the stage, put her shopping bag beside the bed, turned around, and danced disco style on the platform. She was on the meaty side and her mouth was too big for her head, but other than that she was fairly attractive. She wore a wig of long straight black hair.

After disco dancing for several minutes, she stopped, faced the audience, and took off her red tights, showing the white bra and underpants she wore underneath. Then she commenced a striptease, slowly removing the bra, wiggling her bare droopy breasts with their flat half dollar nipples. Coyly, she pulled down her underpants, and Kowalchuk stared with fascination at her hairy crotch. She pranced around the stage stark naked, turned her rear end to the audience, bent over, and spread her cheeks.

Finally she lay on the bed, her lower extremities facing the audience. She kicked her legs around in time to the music, squeezed her breasts and fingered her labia. Reaching into her shopping bag, she took out a cosmetic tube. She screwed off the head, squeezed some white stuff into the palm of her hand, and rubbed it into her vagina. Reaching into the shopping bag again, she took out a big handful of swizzle sticks and held them up for the audience to see. Then she pulled one out and slowly inserted it into her hole. She selected another swizzle stick and put it in the same place. Kowalchuk watched in astonishment as the black girl inserted swizzle stick after swizzle stick inside herself. He couldn’t understand how she could fit so many in there. She must have done a lot of fucking in her life, and her cunt was like old elastic. How could she do such a thing in public?

Now she had a bunch of swizzle sticks thick as a man’s wrist in her vagina, and still she stuffed in more. The theater was silent and reminded Kowalchuk of church, except that instead of a priest performing a ritual in front, there was a whore being disgusting. Finally she had all the swizzle sticks planted inside her, and they looked weird between her legs. She raised her arms and legs in the air and the men applauded, except for Kowalchuk. He didn’t believe in clapping his hands for something like that.

A few at a time, she took the swizzle sticks out of her vagina, rubbed herself with white crème again, reached into her shopping bag, and took out a long chromium chain four feet long. Lying on her back, she held the chain in the air for the audience to see, pulled to show it was real, and then proceeded to stuff it, link by link, into herself as the loudspeakers played a disco tune entitled “How Deep is Your Love.”

Kowalchuk did not believe she could fit the whole chain inside. No woman’s cunt possibly could be that big. But link after link slipped in until the entire chain had disappeared. The girl humped her butt around and the audience applauded, Kowalchuk not joining in again. She pulled out the chain, put-it back in her shopping bag, and took out eight brightly colored silk handkerchiefs knotted together. Holding them up, she pulled them through her fingers and whipped them through the air. They must have been ten feet long. She squeezed some white drops of crème onto her black pubic hairs, rubbed them in, then spread her legs and pushed the silk handkerchiefs, knot by knot, inside. Her fingers worked daintily, as though they were kneading dough. Finally the entire length of knotted handkerchiefs were in, except for a short length of yellow silk. The audience applauded less enthusiastically this time, because the act was getting repetitious. The black girl pulled the handkerchiefs out, lifting her fanny as each knot came through. When they were out completely she waved them through the air like a long flag, then dropped them into the shopping bag.

A tall black man walked down the aisle between the rows of seats and climbed onto the stage. ‘He wore blue jeans, a brown tee-shirt, and appeared embarrassed. His hair was short as though he’d shaved his head two weeks ago, and he had the nose and features of an American Indian. He took off his tee-shirt, and his chest wasn’t very big, dotted with little swirls of black hair. He kicked off his sandals and pulled down his pants, showing brown briefs that matched his tee-shirt. Stepping out of his briefs, you could see his big dong. It was considerably bigger than Kowalchuk’s, who squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. And it wasn’t even hard yet.

The black man was unable to look at the audience. He moved to the bed, the black girl making room for him. He lay on his back, his scrotum drooping between his legs, and she took his flaccid penis in hand, bent over him, and sucked it vigorously while the sound system blared “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”.

So this is what a live sex show is like, Kowalchuk thought. The black guy isn’t even horny and the girl is blowing him as if she’s siphoning a gas tank. Kowalchuk crossed his arms and fidgeted in his seat. He was disappointed, for he’d expected attractive young enthusiastic people like in the pictures pasted on the front of the theater.

The girl raised her head, and the man had become half hard. She went to work on him again and the theater was so still you could hear her suck sounds and the occasional beep of a car out on Forty-second Street. The black guy rolled his hips and held one arm over his face to shield his eyes from the overhead floodlights, while his other hand caressed the girl’s breasts. She raised herself up again, and this time he was a little harder. She rolled onto her back and the guy crawled onto her, still not looking at the audience. Kowalchuk felt sorry for him. The poor bastard probably wanted to disappear into the woodwork, but the girl didn’t care at all. In fact, she probably was having fun.

The guy mounted her and she inserted him inside her the same as she’d inserted the swizzle sticks, chain, and silk handkerchiefs. She pointed her toes at the ceiling and wiggled them as the black guy screwed her awkwardly, burying his face in her shoulder as if trying to block out what was going on all around him.

Kowalchuk watched, feeling sick and uneasy. The poor black guy is so nervous he can hardly fuck, but the girl is enjoying it. The guy must be doing it for the money, but she’s having a good time, getting fucked in front of all us men. That’s a woman for you. Sick and depraved. And for that she shall die.

Part Three – Trackdown

Chapter One

It was nine o’clock at night at the Crandon Hotel on the Bowery, On the second floor, the guests were getting ready for bed. They were a raggedy bunch, most hadn’t shaved lately, and many stank of alcohol.

Jackie Doolan sat on his cot, his bare knobby feet on the linoleum. He had on his filthy brown pants and gray tee-shirt, and was looking at the front page of the
Daily News.
“The Slasher Claims Third Victim, Times Square Porno Queen Found in Alley.’’

Two photographs were on the front page. The one on the left showed the victim lying bloody and twisted against a stone wall, and the one on the right was a head shot of a man. Doolan squinted his eyes and read that the man was Frank Kowalchuk of East Ninth Street, and that he was believed to be the Slasher. If anyone spotted him they were to notify the nearest policeman. The photograph was taken of Kowalchuk when he was a cab-driver.

“Well whataya know about that!” said Doolan.

“Whataya know about what?” said the man in the bunk behind Doolan, trying to read over his shoulder.

“They got a picture of the Slasher here,” Doolan said, turning around and pointing at the picture. “Ugly fucker, ain’t he?”

“He ain’t no uglier than you,” replied the man, who had a scar on his right cheek and no teeth in his mouth.

Doolan squared his shoulders and raised his chin a few inches. “I been workin’ with the police on this case, y’know.”

“Yeah sure.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“You’re fuckin’ right I don’t believe you.”

“They probably wouldn’t even know who the guy is if it wasn’t for me.”

“What’d you do?”

“I helped ‘em find out where the guy lived.”

“How’d you do that?” asked the man as others bent their ears toward the conversation.

“I found the Slasher’s jacket in a trashcan. ‘Course I didn’t know it was the Slasher’s jacket at the time, but it had blood on it and the cops must’ve been lookin’ for it because when they saw it on me they picked it up. I told them where I found it, and that’s how they figgered out where he lived.”

An old bum on another bunk pshawed.

“Take that shit on down the line, buddy.”

“It’s the truth!” Doolan insisted. “You just ask any of the detectives workin’ on the case. They’ll tell you.”

“Sure they will.”

“They will!”

“I think you’re fulla shit.”

“Aw, fuck you guys,” Doolan said, turning the page of the
Daily News.

He brought his face close to the page, because his eyes were bad, and read about Barbara Collins, the Slasher’s third victim. Bums streamed back and forth from the communal toilet and shower stall at the end of the room, and the lights would go out in about a half-hour.

In a cot against the wall, a heavyset man in a beard glared ferociously at Jackie Doolan.

Chapter Two

Rackman sat in a chair in his darkened apartment, smoking a Lucky and sipping bourbon. He wore jeans and a tee-shirt and had the television set on, although he wasn’t watching it. It was eight o’clock in the morning and he’d just come off duty. He and Olivero had spent the night rousting people out of their beds in the cheap Times Square hotels, hoping to find Kowalchuk. They hadn’t.

Now Rackman was trying to wind down so he could go to sleep. His insomnia had worsened, and when he found time he intended to see a doctor and get a prescription for some sleeping pills. He was tense and anxious about the Slasher case, because he knew the longer the Slasher was on the loose, the more victims he’d claim.

There was a knock at the door. He got up and looked through the peephole. A man in a sport jacket was standing in the hall. Rackman opened the door.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Daniel Rackman?” the man asked.

“That’s me.”

The man took out a shield. “I’m a New York city detective and I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

Rackman stared at the shield and wondered if he was dreaming.

“Sorry to wake you up,” the detective said apologetically.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Rackman said, “and by the way, I’m a detective too. I’m with Midtown North.” He took out his wallet and showed his shield.

The man looked at it, surprised. “I’m Tommy Randazzo from the Ninth Precinct.”

“Come on in.”

Rackman led Randazzo into the living room and motioned for him to have a seat. He turned off the television set and turned on a light, then sat opposite him.

“What’s the problem?” Rackman asked.

Randazzo reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a folded crumpled piece of paper. “Gee, I feel strange asking you about this because you’re a detective too,” he said with a self-conscious smile.

“Just do your job and don’t worry about me.”