Liam had never heard his wife make this particular sound. It wasn’t a gasp, and it wasn’t a shout. It was unfair to call it a moan, but contained within were the best qualities of each. She went on and on making the noise, modulating her pitch, and punctuating with a nice “OOOooo” at odd times. It was a good noise, and one Liam would have appreciated thoroughly, had it not been yelped as the vocal response to another man’s cock. Liam, himself, was making no sound at all, even though Mr. Nitty had told him, clearly, to simper, and lament - out loud - the ineffective smallness of his penis.
“You gotta sell it, kid. The client for these films is very, uh, specific, in the things he watches. Her dishonesty, her betrayal of you, and your jealousy are the big ideas in play…That and your having a small dick”
He’d simpered a little the first time, less the second time, and last time only once, just at the very beginning of the session. He’d not yet made any sound during this, supposedly final, session. He gave some thought to possible consequences of the move, but not enough.
***
Fantasies Gentlemen’s Club was the full name of the place. It was the last place Liam had been before prison, and now it was the first place he visited afterward. He’d walked to a bus stop from the ACI, within fifteen minutes of getting out, he was looking at multiple and creative clit-piercings. He wasn’t entirely surprised when Exx told him to wait at the bar for Mr. Nitty, after all, six months is hardly a lifetime. Still, was it too much to ask for some tiny token of appreciation? Perhaps a manila envelope of “getting started” cash, maybe ten minutes with a girl who would…Would Ani mind that? Maybe Ani wants to reward him by taking one of the girl’s home. Perhaps the long-promised, never-delivered threesome would finally have its day. A suitable gift, thought Liam, for a man who’d stood as tall as he.
None of L’s hoped-for appreciation ever came to light. Instead, he had the boss’s chief muscle up his ass from the second he walked in the place. Exx was what they called him, unless he wasn’t around, in which case he was usually referred to as some variant of stupid followed by a main-stream curse-word. “Dumb Fuck”…“Stupid Shit”…Things like that. One thing everybody called him was “big”. Easily the biggest human being Liam had ever seen live or on film, over seven feet tall was the Exx-man, with a good side as rare and unpredictable as a yeti. L hated him.
Where you been fuckhead? He expected this morning…
It takes a long time gettin’ out Exx. Six months for me.
Six months…
Exx said it like he was embarrassed to even think it. Liam waited but the big man didn’t expand on “six months”. Instead he kept L in the stink eye for a moment longer, and then bent over the intercom at the turnstyle saying:
I’ll let ‘em know you’re here.
***
An hour after he walked in, the 87 dollars he’d had on him when he was arrested had been slipped into the assorted holes and fabrics of the Fantasies lunch shift. It seemed wrong to Liam. He spoke out loud to himself on the way outside. His mind was telling him that he would get in his car, check in at home, fuck his wife, and go to bed. His body, however, wasn’t prepared for such risk-taking. Nitty had kept him waiting, and if he found him not waiting, well, that could make for complications. Exx, manning the door on the first level, seemed to agree:
You’re not fuckin’ leaving?
Exx practically yelling in the deserted main stage area. Exx always spoke way louder than he needed to:
Dude…He’ll flip. He’s been asking about you all morning!
L tried to stop them, but the words came rampaging from his mouth before his brain had time to perform the required editing:
Dude, I’m goin’ outside. I’m free, it’s nice out, I’m goin’ outside and takin’ a walk, smoking as a free man.
Then, moving in close to the giant bouncer, he added:
I just did a BID for that fuckin’ guy, so I think he’s used enough of my time…Tell him to call my cell when he’s ready.
He didn’t wait for a reply, just walked into the empty lot. He’d fully intended to take the threatened walk. McDonalds, Bus station… Anywhere, so long as he was away from the boss. His body though – looking, as always, to it’s own interests - refused orders. Instead of walking, he sat in the bus stop vestibule and smoked, unwittingly turning his angry lies to Exx into a regrettable truth. It was another four cigarettes before the goon poked an enormous brown head out the blacked-out entrance to Fantasies. He made no sound, but pointed right at Liam, and then jerked one Budweiser 12 0z-sized thumb back towards indoors.
“Almost”… thought the hapless convict, and hop-stepped back towards the club.
***
So that’s where we’re at OK buddy. No trouble, no mess right? Good?
Liam was staring right past Mr. Nitty, at an invisible spot on the wood-paneling wall. Nitty had been speaking for almost five whole minutes, but Liam had heard only the first few words. He heard them once, then replayed them – over and over again – as Nitty continued with his lecture. They were simple words, easy to understand and process, yet Liam sat there pondering them in his mind for what seemed like hundreds of times over as Nitty went banging on.
“Here’s the thing kid: I know you can’t afford this. 30 g’s for Christ sake, who could? Am I right? Now, you did stand tall for us, knocked out six months. I don’t forget. I don’t forget, my father doesn’t forget. I spoke with him about you, and about the situation. We came up with a way to make good doesn’t involve you goin’ in the river.”
The boss used a soft voice to counter the mortal urgency of his words, then he cracked up laughing, head thrown back, big, breathy cackle echoing in the high ceilings of the club’s top floor. Liam laughed as well, tentatively at first, because he wasn’t sure Mr. Nitty wanted him to.
***
Later that evening, Anicee Lawrell watched the Exx-man bend over to hear the tiny intercom speaker. When the giant bent that way, it meant somebody was going upstairs. Even the new girls knew that, and Ani had been at Fantasies for almost three years. The club had made her a legend in Rhode Island, and her paid appearances throughout the Northeast were booked solid for six months in advance. She’d have been on the road earning for herself had it not been for Liam’s knocking her up. She’d planned to have the pregnancy taken care of. She had planned to skip town for the other coast while L knocked out six months federal time. Then April Rain Lawrell was born, and with her a great rearrangement of Ani's priorities, all of which included stability in her daughter’s life. She would stay in Providence and make it work with L.
The girls all stared in hard at Exx, trying hard for a glimpse of the big bouncer’s eyes after bending to the speaker. The giant had a tell: his post-intercom eyes always moved first to the girl who’d been summoned. He would first attempt to grab eye contact before leaving his post, walking into the main stage area to fetch them. Today was no different. Exx was still bent at the waste, speaking towards the ground, when his eyes flashed up and peered out, coming to rest – just a few seconds later – on Ani herself.
What the fuck is this about now?
She said it out loud to the squad of lunch dancers hiding at the service bar, but none of them answered back. Ani was curious, and more than a little freaked out starting her long walk upstairs. It was 5:30, and the stock-brokers were beginning to stack up at the main stage, the volume and bass jacked to late-night intensity. She was having trouble thinking about anything besides Motely Crue, blasting at deafening levels from the 200 speakers, repeaters, amps and subwoofers of the Fantasies system. Ani met Exx man halfway and he didn’t even bother explaining. She followed him upstairs, covering her tits as she went with a black silk scarf. Exx shot her an exaggerated bow and opened the bosses door, watching her tiny ass sway and bump as she entered Nitty’s office alone.
***
You fucker. You fucker. You fuck.
L’s homecoming was continuing to suck. As awful and gut-ripping as he’d expected the conversation to be, within ten minutes of beginning it had already devolved into something much worse. Ani was having none of it. To make matters worse, she didn’t understand the events that had led to the conversation in the first place, mostly because El had lied to her about almost everything he’d done to cause it. By the time it was all on the table there were waterfalls of tears running both sides of his wife’s face and her color went ghost white. For a horrible few seconds, Liam thought she might be having a stroke. They sat there in silence for a few minutes, Anicee never bothering to wipe at her face. Eventually, L had to leave her there, silent in the dark, her tears darkening the grey t-shirt she always wore to bed.
Liam slept on the couch that night, and when he woke up, his wife and child were gone. There was a new text on his cell, and it read:
“Took the baby, don’t call me. I’ll be at the Seagull Saturday at 11:00. If nobody’s there I’m leaving."
***
Turned out to be wasted worry on Ani’s part, about the film guys. To L, it seemed as if they’d been there for a few days at least. There were three of them. Two of them, Liam didn’t recognize. They both seemed about an inch taller than L’s 5’8”. They were also very dark, but looking more Indian that black. The two of them were eating pizza, and shouting at a soccer match on the Seagull’s Cable TV. L saw Pizza boxes, pizza crusts, and crinkled up cans of Budweiser and Narragansett. L saw no camera equipment.
Then he realized the room was actually two rooms adjoining. The door was open wide and walking through it, Liam found the “set”. He’d been around one of the bosse’s sets only once before, but he remembered that one looked pretty much like this one: a two giant lights were trained on a king size bed. There were reflectors mounted between the cameras themselves. All that light, deflected and reflected back on itself, made the very air around the bed glow and sparkle. This room was overloaded and flooding with equipment, and the big lights were heating the room like a sauna. Liam, after wandering a few times in between the rooms, suddenly didn’t know what to do with himself. Just then, a third guy stepped out of the bathroom with a hail of snorts and snarfs. He was talking, but it sounded like yelling:
Ahmed. Ahmed. You gotta hold this shit f’me while I’m doin’ these…Hey L.
Exx was standing in front of him in a tiny, white terry cloth robe that looked like a tight T-shirt on his massive bulk. His giant nose was white powder-encrusted, giving him an absurd 1980’s lifeguard appearance. His head was bent slightly, because the super low 1950’s ceilings at the seagull didn’t allow for humans who were almost seven feet tall. The two men just stood there regarding each other, with the soccer match echoing from the other room. After a few minutes, the bouncer finally spoke:
Dude, this is…I got a choice? L? You think the boss calls me, asks me would I like to fuck L’s ‘ol lady?
Liam said nothing.
That afternoon, Liam watched Exx fuck Anicee four times. Five times if the count includes the fierce anal penetration of the last four minutes of the shoot. Liam was including the anal. At the end of the day, one of the filmmakers yelled, with a straight face:
Same time tomorrow my friends. Now go home and soak yer privates in warm water.
***
Liam spent the entire night in the car, parked behind a nearby Stop and Shop, staring off into space while trying hard not to think about tomorrow. It was eight o’clock in the morning by the time his addled body finally succumbed to sleep. In his exhaustion, L’s internal clock failed, made him late to the set. The brown men in the crew communicated their displeasure by refusing to speak to him for almost two hours. Instead, they ignored him aggressively, hurrying around, lighting the room and testing their shots while L watched in silence. Something felt different in the room today, and it was making everybody nervous. The film crew was jabbering amongst themselves and exchanging worried glances, when The Exx man came storming from the bathroom in an exact duplicate of his entrance yesterday: His nose was powder white at the tip, and he held a bright white cellophane package in his left hand. He was talking way to loud:
L! L! Last time bub. After today, no more sucky fucky. Boss said so. Just sit back, relax, get a bump…
At this he flicked the white biggie over to Liam and moved in close like to speak to L in secret:
Take it in the bathroom though, these ragheads tell the boss everything. Fuckin’ ragheads. I went to Saudi. I went to fuckin Saudi. Desert Storm beeyotch. GHWB motherfucker. Clean up, and make sure you leave don’t leave nothin’. Last day buddy. Last day last day last day.
***
Liam went to the bathroom, inspecting the eight-ball minus three hours that Ex had passed him. He pulled the top knot opened and used the edge of a matchbook to shovel three healthy scoops of white powder onto the rotted looking formica around the sink.
Liam left the bathroom with way more confidence than when he’d gone in. The coke was dancing a steady tango up his legs and spine. His head began to tingle and he had a sense of total, perfect completion that he knew would only last twenty-odd minutes. He took his place by the bed and waited for his wife and to fuck the giant Exx for the cameras.
Liam’s cocaine-eyes saw the room in great detail. He began to notice things. There was a bottle of Grey Goose on the night table that hadn’t been there yesterday. He saw a Plastic Tarpaulin covering the floor around the bed, and the white backdrop from yesterday was pulled down to cover the bed itself. In the room opposite the set, He’d noticed a cardboard Royal Crown case filled with labled white bottles that were definitely not whiskey. L went to pull one out for a better look, but one of the ragheads yelled at him and came rushing over:
Bahtee Bahtee. Not for you my bro. Go sit bahtee.
Liam, emboldened by the fish-scale freight-training through his system, answered back:
What the fuck dude? What is that? Why the different set up?
The brown man shook his head and muttered in his weird tongue. His eyes met L’s:
Bahtee, you’re girlfriend today make a big mess bahtee. Don’t worry bro don’t worry. Last day. Last day.
***
Neccas heard the doorbell, but he did not move to answer the door. Not right away. He’d been in the middle of something very important, and needed to see it finished. He removed a ten spot from his wallet and rolled it into a small-bore tube which he then used to snarf up the two lines of white and brown powder he’d been sculpting. His boss watched him with a bemused smirk, using a gaudy gold and silver letter opener to get inside the envelope.
Ok Spicoli. Let’s do this.
Neccas lit a cigarette and got on his way. Seven minutes later (the house was very very big) he returned holding a plain manila envelope. It had been seven weeks since his master had taken him into his confidence. In the seven weeks, Mr. Neccas had seen every demon and bad habit he’d ever had to turn away from come smashing back into his life like a cannon shot. The drugs, the violence, the secrecy…All of them now back in play and hungry, hot to make up for lost time.
Neccas had seen seven movies, all delivered in the same way, all involving at least one spectacular death. In addition, the master had provided him the back catalog. Neccas had been presented with a set of keys and instructions. There was a mini-vault, hidden in the wine cellar behind a false wall. There, the butler Neccas found eleven big CD wallets, each filled to capacity with unmarked DVDs. The only other thing in the vault were the drugs.
Neccas had come to this job fleeing habits. The Plaza job had paid well and paid in cash, which could then be converted – with ease – into narcotics. The central park dealers would line up at the 77th St. entrance, serving great droves of intoxicants to the monied hotel staff. It had taken Mr. Neccas almost three weeks to get bright after kicking, but he’d come to the big house a sober man and remained so for eleven years.
Now the Master had brought him into this new, brutal fold, and habits he’d spent so much time abandoning were his once again. The Master liked all the classics: cocaine, Heroin, strong marijuana, narcotic pain pills. All of these and more had been laid by in heavy quantity by his strange employer. Within days of his first visit to the wine cellar vault, the poor butler was as strung out as he’d ever been.
The Master told him not to worry:
"Drugs are only a problem if they cost you your job or your financial well-being."
He lectured Neccas like a patient father.
"Neither of those things are at risk for you. Do what you like."
And so he had. His days usually began at seven am with a speedball breakfast chased with Xanax. By noon he’d usually been into the coke, and would need a fat lunch line of diesel heroin for appetite stimulation. He spent every afternoon drinking expensive scotch from crystal and watching the Fine Mess (enger) people kill on camera.
Even with all the partying, it was the videos that shamed the butler most. Since that first day, he’d seen the man in black kill in what seemed like a hundred different ways. He’d seen them sliced at the neck, and the wrists. He’d seen heads cut off, once with what appeared to be a samurai sword and once with a table saw. He’d seen a giant metal spike shoved up the ass of a woman who’d had all her limbs axed off. He’d seen a man forced to blow-torch his wife’s face until her eyes exploded and melted down her skull. There had been one video that featured a young child forced to shoot his mother in the stomach. In another, Neccas had watched a mother and her young daughter handcuffed to a wall and machine-gunned into red and black paste.
Are we ready?
The Master was in his usual station and Neccas was fiddling with the system. He’d pressed pause after he got everything going, and joined the Master in the main room.
Awright boss. Away we go…
He hit a button and the room darkened. He hit another and the video came on.
***
The boss showed up after lunch. Exx was fucking his wife’s ass over a circular card table in the far corner of the room. The raghead camera crew was documenting every squishy noise. One of them was using what looked like a digital camera and the other, an iphone 4. The iphone raghead caught him looking and held up the phone saying:
This thing Bahtee. A revolution my friend. Change the entire industry.
Liam heard the door open and close in the adjoining room. A moment later the boss was standing in front of him.
You doin what I told you? Talkin about a small cock?
The boss didn’t give him time to answer. His cold gaze was still locked on Liam but he shouted:
Mahj. This guy talked about his cock? Enough?
This time the man kept both his iphone and his eyes on Exx and his wife, who were – by this time – both grunting and emoting in almost full throat.
He’s Ok Ok boss. He’s OK right bahtee?
Liam was surprised to see another man enter the room now. The boss finally broke his eyes away from L and oozed across the room towards the stranger. The new man was dressed in black, black t-shirt, black jeans, black hat. The boss exchanged only a few quick words with the man in black, before stepping back an turning his attention to Exx and Ani. L remained silent, reclining in a love seat at the foot of the bed.
***
The letter opener had been on the bed behind Neccas chair, but by the time the girl in the video had begun making the crazy noise, the butler had already snatched it up and gathered it in close. The Master was sitting three feet to the left, and just forward of the butler. His attention was – as usual – laser sighted on the screen. The girl’s ecstasy had only just begun boiling over when Neccas pressed the pause
button.
The Master did exactly as expected, saying
Woah, woah!
Waiting a beat for results, then wielding around to face his butler. One instant found Neccas sitting perfectly still in an office chair with the letter opener tucked into a sleeve, the next he’d moved three feet to his left swinging his right arm up hard, cocking his right hand across his chest and throwing all his weight forward. The Master had hardly registered movement at all when Neccas buried the letter opener to the hilt in the Master’s left eye. The stricken man huffed in and out, three desperate breaths, and rolled off his chair, dead. Neccas watched him twitch gently for a while, then pressed “play”, and sat down to watch the end of the video.
***
Liam never fully understood the danger he was in until it was far too late. He found it a little odd, Nitty showing up, but not really out of character. The boss made a habit of just showing up places. Besides, after watching his old lady get plowed time and time again had made a mess of poor Liam’s head. He kept thinking that the whole thing was going to be over soon, and that he and Annicee would soon coarse and retreat back to their lives to make amends, do the proper healing. Then he’d remember where he was and what his wife was doing, and he knew nothing could ever be the same again. If he’d had any lingering hope leftover, it had been erased that second day. The first time his wife was reticent and passive, hardly registering any physical sensation of any kind in either her face or her body. Today, a different Ani showed up and this one was loud. It seemed to L that every few minutes of Sunday’s performance was marked by Anicee yelling out
I’m cumming, oh fuck I’m cumming…
twisting and contorting to best-experience the Exx man’s lovemaking.
The whole thing was overwhelming and intense and Liam really just wanted to leave. Instead, he fixed his eyes just beyond the lovers at the red LED read out on the digital hotel alarm clock, started counting off minutes. He’d seen four of them tick off the clock when his wife started making the noise. It started out as a squeak, or a series of rhythmic squeaks. They sounded alien, and they were unlike every noise he’d ever heard his wife make. Before long, though, the squeaks became something different. There was more sustain, and the tones were lower. The series of sounds became one sound, high and coarse, squealing and gaining in volume. Ani threw her head back then, her whole body wracked by spasms and her eyes rolling backwards, showing white. The Squeals began to oscillate, pulsing in time with her thrusting.AyyeeeeeeeAhhhyyeeeeeeaaahyeeeeeeeahhhyeeeeee!!!!!!!!!...
Then the man in black stepped forward. For a split second, it looked to Liam as if he was offering Anicee a tissue, or a cigarette, but Ani was still cumming and it was obvious she didn’t see the man.
Liam’s earliest memory was of a thunder storm. He’d been three years old, although his parents were never in agreement as to when the storm happened. His dad insisted August, “it was hot”, he’d say, as if extreme heat could only manifest in August. his mother maintained September, because – she said whistfully – we were making pies. About the storm’s intensity, however, they were in perfect agreement.
“It was the loudest thing any of us had ever heard” His father used to say, wonder and confusion blooming in his eyes as he remembered, “and when it happened, I thought – for just a second – that I’d been killed, or that we all had been killed. I couldn’t hear anything until well into the next day.”
L‘s own recollection of the storms was a bit different. He only remembered the noise, and thinking that God was shouting down at him, enraged behind reasons that would remain his alone. He felt almost exactly that same way when the man in black shot his wife through the right eye. Persecuted, blamed and victimized for something beyond his understanding.
The shot sucked all the room from the air, and for a few smokey seconds, all was quiet. Liam’s eyes had squeezed shut from instinct, and the first thing he saw upon opening them was Exx. The big man looked as if he’d been dipped – head first - in dark red paint and gelatinous black slime. His eyes were wild, glassy beneath the layers of blood and tissue, and there was a stench like burning hair. The giant was emoting almost under his breath:
Oooooh…Ooooohh…oh…Oooooh
He was still fucking his wife, but Ani wasn’t making anymore noise. Liam’s gaze fell upon the ruin of what was once his wife’s head just as Exx sloughed her corpse off. The disengaging made a squishy “thonk”, as the leaking cadaver hit the floor. The Exx-man continued to jabber:
Ooooohhh…Ooooooohhh…
Liam looked down at the contents of his wife’s head for a few minutes before a voice yell his name from far far away:
Hey. Buddy.
He looked up and saw the man in black. In one hand he was holding an iphone, in the other, a silver .45 Colt Anaconda. His face was a blank, his eyes were dead. He spoke:
Smile.
L smiled.
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