Grimoire Diabolique

Mr. Torso, Tipps thought. I’m going to get you, buddy, and I’m going to find out. Not only was Tipps a conclusionary-didactic nihilist, he was also a proficient investigator. A records check dropped the prostitute’s life into his lap. Twenty-five years old, Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes, 5’5”, 121 pounds. Tipps wondered how much she weighed without her arms and legs. Since she had been run off the red-light block in town, she worked a truck stop near the county line called The Bonfire. Truck stops were the first places banished prostitutes fled to, and there was only one in all of south county…

He parked between two Peterbilt semi’s at the end of the lot. The little dive of a restaurant glowed beyond, peppered with minute movement in its plate-glass windows. Tipps sung a tune in his mind, with a slight lyrical modification—“Eighteen Wheels And A Dozen Torsos”—scanning the Bonfire with a small pair of Bushnell 7x50’s. In the binocular’s infinity-shaped field, he could see them in there: Unkept, nutritionally depleted, desperate. Most, he knew, were clinical drug addicts, their only human purpose in the universe being to cater to the axiomatic and primordial male sex-drive in exchange for crack money. They fluttered about the restaurant interior, fussing with corpulent truck drivers whose stout arms provided tattoo-tapestries. Some of the girls dawdled outside, hidden within the gulf of shadows.

Tipps wondered about them, these sex-specters. Did they even realize their place in the ethereal universe? Did they ever ponder such considerations as existential verity, psycho-societal atomism, tripartite eudaemonistic thesis? Do they ever wonder what their purpose is? Tipps wondered to himself. Do they even have a purpose?

At once, Tipps sat up. The Bushnell’s fine German optics easily revealed the dilapidated red pickup truck that pulled into the lot, as well as the long fresh scratch along the right-rear fender.

««—»»

Lud loped outa the Bonfire, wearin’ the usual overalls an’ size-11 steel toes, totin’ a bag of mags. See, the Bonfire up ’fore the register had thereselfs a rack of the girlie mags and a lotta the September issues’d just come out. Lud never quite reckoned why, for instance, the September mags always come out third week of August, not that he much cared. Next week’d be time ta start gettin’ his peter up inta that lil’ blondie with the hairlip sittin’ cozy an’ limbless in the September trough. She had a nice set of milk wagons on her but a joyhole big enough ta take a ham hock. What’d fellas been stickin up this gal ta get her so stretched out—their blammed heads? Or was she just born that way? Acorse bein’ real big likes that’d make it easier for her ta drop critters-Jiminy, big as she was she could problee drop a whole kindergarten at once! An’ the lips ’round her snatch looked like a bunch of hangin’ lunchmeat er somethin’. ’Least she didn’t make a ruckus like the gal in the August trough who Lud was gettin’ a might sick of by now. See, that’s why Lud buyed hisself new mags each month, ta open the centerfolds onta their bellies so’s he could get his peter up proper an’ come. An’ on account of the June gal up an’ dyin’ on him an’ his havin’ ta dump her last night, Lud needed hisself a new gal ta take her place. These hookers always hanged out at the Bonfire ’cos the truckers was ferever tryin’ ta get their peters off in some splittail ’tween their long hauls, and ways it was set up, that big tookus-lot with all them semirigs parked alls over, Lud could propersition a gal right quick and have her outa there without no one bein’ the wiser.