A Time of Predators

In the kitchen he poured out orange juice from the old refrigerator into two glasses, then added vodka from the bottle his old man kept under the sink. He saw his hands were shirking. Goddamn her! Then he told himself to take it easy. She was a goddamn virgin, had to remember that. Big deal for her. Mustn’t blow it by coming on too hard, scaring her so she froze up. He’d never gotten a virgin, and he wanted to, real bad. Like one of those old kings or something in history class, take any one in the kingdom they wanted. Always a virgin.

He went back in with their drinks, and made his voice cheerful. “Screwdrivers, they call them, kid. Just orange juice and vodka. You won’t even taste it, but it’ll make you relax.”

“I’m sorry,” she said humbly. “I tried, I really did, I—”

“That’s okay, baby.” His eyes gleamed. “Just relax...”

And with three screwdrivers warming her stomach, revolving in her head, she did, letting her body take over, make its own responses to his mouth and hands. She kissed the back of his neck a little dizzily as he unsnapped her halter, and clung to his brown, muscular back as his mouth sought her bared breasts.

Then they were in the bedroom, and for the first time in her life she was gripped by that ancient urgency far older than the brief human species of which she was but a momentary spark. Her legs parted; when he entered her she cried out once, sharply, then moaned, and whispered his name again and again, fiercely, a talisman to carry her beyond the pain to the pleasure that sex education courses had promised her.

As she clung to him, whispering her love to him, Rick, above her, grunted and thrust and finally pumped, careless of her stifled outcries, the biggest man in the world, making it, balling a virgin, getting his.

When it was over they lay side by side, Debbie crying proudly into the hollow of his neck, by some miracle knowing that the strange urgency would grip her again in a few minutes’ time, and Rick, staring up into the darkness, complacent at having made his first virgin. Old Deb, she hadn’t been much this first time, but he dug being the first one, dug knowing he had hurt her and had made her like it. A whole different thing than with Mary, who you couldn’t get to even by hurting because she dug every sort of weird scene you could dream up.

But it had been sort of like getting Paula Halstead, all over again. Goddamn her! He wished that it was her next to him, not Debbie. He’d show her some things that would take that pitiless contempt from her eyes — that look he’d never been able to change or forget.

Thinking of Paula got him going again, and he turned toward Debbie as the chipmunk, that she’d seen outside the window earlier, scrabbled getting those silly damned walnuts or whatever the hell it was that she’d left out for him. Debbie heard it, too, but didn’t react. There was nothing in the world for her just then but Ricky.

Outside, Julio slipped off through the darkened woods, unaware of the city-bred noises he was making. Not that he would have cared even if he had been aware of his clumsiness in the undergrowth. He was half-blind with frustration and desire and hatred.

Dirty goddamn whorish bitch. Oh, she’d get hers. When the time came, and it wasn’t far off, she’d get plenty.

CHAPTER 22

It was 2:03 on Monday afternoon when Debbie rang Curt’s doorbell. Waiting, she straightened to draw in her already flat stomach and thus thrust her breasts a little more noticeably forward. I’m a woman now, she thought a little complacently. Ricky has made me a woman. As a woman, she knew, with a woman’s weapons, she had nothing to fear from Professor Curtis Halstead, even if it would be something about his wife.

The door opened, and Curt was looking at her.

“Miss Marsden? Come in, please.” He shut the door behind her; she was totally unlike anything he might have imagined. “Would you like some tea, or coffee?”

“I... tea would be fine.”

She’s nervous as a cat, Curt thought. He said, “I’ll just be a moment, Miss Marsden. Or may I call you Debbie?”

“Debbie is fine, sir.”

She sat primly on the couch, feet in their flat shoes flat on the floor, knees held tightly together. She watched him disappear through the double doors into the dark-paneled dining room. He was nothing at all like her vague remembrance from the faculty tea; he must be as old as her dad, maybe, but he moved the way that Ricky moved. She felt a momentary stab of uneasiness; he looked like a man who might be proof against the woman’s weapons she had thought to rely on.

Curt returned with the tea service on a tray, and was reminded vividly of that first morning with Monty Worden. But this girl was so young, so pathetically young. But he had to gel those names from her. The names of the predators.

“The water will boil in a moment.” Then he added, in the same conversational voice, “What time did you leave the phone booth that night? The night that Paula killed herself?”

“I... what do you mean, I... don’t understand...”