Grimoire Diabolique

Frankie stalled momentarily. It wasn’t a pretty story. Indeed, then, he began to cool down.

A grateful impasse ensued. Frankie gained his composure. “All right, all right,” he conceded. He stood feet apart, closed his eyes, and began to masturbate again. Spooky sighed, asked Nick, “Hey, load a pipe and light me up first, will you? I’m motherfuckin’ feenin’, like, really fuckin’ bad.” This was but one inconvenience of being armless: Spooky, a clinical drug addict, couldn’t smoke drugs without assistance. Nor could she wipe her ass, effectively wash herself, clip her toenails, etc. “I’ve gotta have a hit. I got the motherfuckin’ meth bugs crawling all over me. How about it, Nick?”

“No,” Nick put his foot down. “When we’re done.”

“Fuck that motherfuckin’ shit, man! I need some ice! Now!”

“When we’re done,” Nick repeated, half-blitzed himself.

“Come on, Nick. I’ll stick my tongue up your asshole.”

Nick frowned. Such favors he couldn’t have been less interested in. All he wanted to do was ride his meth-buzz, get his cum-shot, and catch the Yankees. Clemens was pitching tonight, thank God.

“I need some batu, man! I need some fuckin’ cristy! I’m not kidding.”

“You’ll have to wait. Maybe if you gotta wait, you won’t fuck with Frankie’s head anymore.”

“Yeah,” Frankie growled; the grin on his face denoted great pride. He turned around, displaying quite an achievement: twelve inches of very erect genitals. His eyes thinned ruefully at Spooky. “How’s that for some dead dick, hose-bag?”

Spooky tossed a shoulder. “Hey, Frankie, when you were a baby, did you swallow your dad’s nut, or spit?”

Frankie’s grand twelve-incher went limp in an instant. “I’m gonna kill her!” he re-exploded, and this time Nick was off balance when he lunged to push Frankie away. “My guess is you swallowed,” Spooky conjectured, not even flinching as her ogre-sized nemesis struggled to reach her. “You look like a swallower. Bet your parents didn’t even need to buy any baby food because of all that nut you were eating every day.”

“Frankie—no!” Nick shouted, but—

SMACK!

Too late.

Frankie’s primordial rage propelled his fist over Nick’s shoulder where it connected with Spooky’s chin effectively as a Tyson right-cross. Spooky’s head snapped back, then her upper-body snapped back, all so fast she could only be seen as a chalk-white blur.

She lay perfectly still on the cheap coffee table.

Nick and Frankie gaped down, bug-eyed. They knew at a glance. Spooky’s head hung over the table edge, her eyes crossed and wide open, her tongue hanging out. The silence was absolute.

“Man. Oh, man,” Nick whispered. Beads of sweat wrung out of his pores. “Frankie, you better pray she ain’t…” He couldn’t even say the rest.

He knelt down, put an ear to her chest.

And gulped.

He felt around her neck for a pulse.

Gulped again.

Then he raged up at Frankie: “You big dumb cement-head motherfucker! You killed her!”

“I-I-I—” Frankie gaped. “No, she—”

“Fuckbrain! You broke her neck against the edge of the table!”

“No, I-I-I…” Frankie was remiss for locution. “No. She fell, and her neck… It got broke.”

“You KILLED THE BITCH! And now Vinchetti’s gonna have one of his crew KILL US! They’ll hang us upside down by meat hooks through our assholes and blowtorch us! He’ll have that crazy-ass doctor cut all our skin off!”

Frankie started to blubber he was so shit-scared. Nick sat dejected on the floor, head bowed.

“Let’s-let’s-let’s just…leave town!” Frankie suggested. “Go somewhere. Hide.”

“We could go to Mars and it wouldn’t matter—Vinchetti would find us. We could go to fuckin’ Egypt and bury ourselves a thousand feet under one of the pyramids and he would find us. We killed his best scat girl—Vinchetti loves scat. He’ll be more pissed off about this than when the Yankees lost the series to Arizona.”

“We’re dead,” Frankie blubbered.

Nick just nodded.

“Let’s just-let’s just-let’s just—leave her here,” came Frankie’s next brilliant idea. “Just say she croaked, say she OD’d or somethin’. Yeah. Leave her here.”

“It’s a fuckin’ Howard Johnsons! We can’t leave a dead meth-head whore with no arms in a Howard Johnsons! You murdered her! Our prints are all over the room! The clerk saw us come in. This is a homicide scene, Einstein.”

Frankie maintained his frantic blubbering. “Well-well-well—let’s dump her body. Dump her body in the canal. Then we can say some of Peroni’s boys muscled her away from us. Peroni’s been trying to horn in on Vinch’s scat and nek market for years, and he’s dumped a lot of bodies in the canal. The cops’d think it was Peroni.”

Nick opened his mouth to voice further objection but—

“Hmm,” he said.

“Vinch might believe it, Nick.”

“He might. He just might.” Nick glanced around, brain ticking. It was a bad plan but it was all they had. “Frankie, put your clothes back on. Then take the camera, lights, and tripods back out to the Caddy and put it all in the trunk.” Now he was looking at the long suitcase they’d carried the equipment in. “We’ll carry Spooky out in that.”