Burn 2 (6 page)

“Even the doorman,” he says wryly.

“Yes, even Horsch.” She waves her hand dismissively.
“Still, I’m sure the police are looking into it . . . fingerprints and stuff.”

“You mean on the vase?”

“And everywhere else. You don’t have to worry your pretty head about it, Devon.”

This stung him.

“Excuse me if I do, because it’s my life at stake. Not yours.” His voice has a slight acidic edge. But he is tired of everyone treating him like a pretty sex doll, as if his opinions and intellect do not matter.

That’s what you get when you are a rent boy, darling
.

Claire is taken aback. And he supposes it’s his fault. He has been pliant and
agreeable, just like a sex doll, to his clients all this while. Now they are catching him on a particularly grumpy phase, and they are seeing his claws for the first time. Yay for them and him.

“Devon?” She puts her hand on his,
which is resting on the table beside his three-quarter full cappuccino cup. “I know you are testy because of the situation. But you have to relax. There is nothing you can do. It’s a matter for the police. If you haven’t done anything wrong, they will find that out soon enough.”

He doesn’t reply, but he knows there is something he can do to help his case.

He can damned well find the killer himself.

She pauses expectantly. Her hand is still on his. She casually strokes his knuckles.

“Are you free now?” she says in a low seductive voice.

He knows what is coming.

“What do you have in mind?” he says.

“Want to earn some money? We can go back to my place.”

“Your best friend . . . oh, I’m sorry, your casual gym
buddy
is dead, and you want to fuck?”

“Isn’t that the best remedy?
Isn’t that the best way to celebrate being alive?”

He sits back, but doesn’t withdraw his hand. She does have a point.
There is nothing like a comfort fuck. Besides, she is paying him. And with Abby gone, he’d best find a way to pay his own legal bills after he has borrowed a chunk of money from Billy Dee.

“OK,” he concedes.

“Good.” She gets up abruptly. “Let’s go to my place.”

“I don’t want to talk,” Abby says to her father. She is on her feet and all her senses are on alert. Her fists are clenched and she is ready to fight for her life if she has to.

Her father suddenly looks lined and old. His shoulders slump and his huge body takes on a weary cast.

“I don’t want to fight, Abby. I don’t want to hurt you. I have never hurt you intentionally, and I never will.”

Her whole body is shaking.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.”

“Abby . . . what you saw . . . ”

“I saw enough! I don’t want to be your daughter anymore! I want it in legal writing.”

“Your grandfather – ”

“Left me my own money, so I don’t need yours.”

Maybe she doesn’t
even need the money. It’s blood money. She will make her own way without their damned, blood-tainted money, thank you very much.

Then she thinks of Devon and she knows it isn’
t that easy to just walk away from all that money.

“That money was made the old-fashioned way,” her father
insists. “Through your grandfather’s sweat and tears, and with mine.”

“Yes, but he had a head start, and so did you.”

“It was necessary. When we left the old country, we had nowhere to go.”

Abby shakes her head vehemently. “It isn’t where you chose to go, Dad. It’s what you chose to do
after
you came here. You and Granddad both – for goodness knows how long.”

Can one divorce their own family? She will have to ask Pat Chalmers about that.

“Abby.” Her father’s tone is sad.

But she cannot forget what she saw. What she found out. That was the day she made up her mind to run away.

That was the day
she tried to burn the house down.

*

Abigail Holt was an eighteen-year-old in a family that was anything but normal.

The Holts were extremely rich, for one.
In their sprawling Lousiana lands which surrounded and infringed upon the bayou, they planted sugarcane and owned the sugar refining factories to package them for import to other states. Sugar was a government controlled item by both price and production, and the Holts were one of the privileged families to be in the sugar consortium, which comprises of only a handful of companies.

Abby grew up on the bayou, where the weather can get so warm and sultry that she is reduced to wearing only shorts and flip-flops in the summer.
Living in and around the swamps, she learned to avoid waters that looked like they have alligators in them, to always look out for snakes which liked to sun themselves on warm decks, and to always put on a mosquito screen before going outdoors.

The Holts lived in a big plantation-style home outside New Orleans in one of the little towns that dot the low-lying landscape. Abby’s particular town was called
Cat’s Creek. Her family gave jobs to most of the people in Cat’s Creek. Their sugar refineries provided employment, and the entire town of Cat’s Creek grew around these refineries – eateries, boarding houses, grocery stores, launderettes.

The Holts owned so many properties in Cat’s Creek and New Orleans that Abby
didn’t even know the half of them.

But she knew this one.

It was a snug little log cabin built on stilts by the bayou. The bayou’s water was murky, and the cabin had a dock which extended out into the shallows of it. The humidity was as thick as the molasses Hattie, her housekeeper, used to flavor their Cajun-style dishes.

Abby liked to visit this unoccupied house now and again. It belonged to her grandfather, who sometimes kept his guests up here for a ‘bayou experience’.
Sometimes, Abby came here to push the boat out onto the bayou, where she would engage in a little spot of fishing and being by herself.

She li
ked to be by herself more and more lately, after her breakup with Ari.

She thought about Ari from time to time. Thought about how his hands opened wide as they slid down her stomach and then lower, between her parted thighs. She thought about how
his fingers would tease her clit – rubbing and flipping it from side to side.

Ari was one year younger than she was, but he was far more skilled than she in the erotic arts. She was still on a discovery phase, but he was already
on Intermediate, or whatever level they gave out for such things.

Ari was the one she lost her virginity to.

She remembered her first time with him. How she was so afraid it would hurt.

“It’ll hurt,” he said.

“That’s reassuring,” she said.

He laughed. His dark eyes were flashy and his curly hair a
mussed-up mess every time they made out on the couch or whatever surface they could make out on. And there were plenty of flat surfaces in bayou country, as well as plenty of secluded spots. You just had to watch out for mosquitoes, alligators and snakes, in that order.

Abby went to school in New Orleans, as did Ari. But it was summer and he came
down for a visit. He had a sole purpose for that visit, and it was to take her virginity.

He picked her up at her plantation house. He whistled when he saw how large the place was.

“You never told me you were rich,” he said.

She blushed. “I’m not rich. My father is rich.”

“Same thing.”

“Not quite.” Though she knew that was not technically true. She would come into part of the inheritance her grandfather left her when she was eighteen, as did her father before her.

Ari drove a twenty-year-old Chevy.

“My Dad gave it to me,” he said proudly as she hopped in. “Where’s your Dad?”

“At the factory.”

“Your father works in a factory.”

“Yeah. He has a job like everyone else.”

He shot her a quizzical look and stepped on the gas.
They were off, and she had never felt so happy.

After a while, he said, “Let me guess. He
owns
the factory, right?”

She didn’t like his line of questioning. It had too much to do with her family finances, and she was trying to play down that fact. In school, she never let anyone know she was rich, though there were rumors that she was moneyed. She lived a normal life like everyone else, living with her
aunt in New Orleans during the months she went to school and going back to Cat’s Creek during the weekends to visit her Dad.

She said, “Yeah, but really, it’s a job like anyone else’s.”

He said, “My Dad has a real job. He’s a stockbroker.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

He glanced at her and grinned. “OK.”

A pause.

Then he said: “I can think of a lot of things I’d rather talk about. Then again, I’d rather not be talking . . . if you know what I mean?”

She blushed again. Oh yeah, they had ‘talked’ about this many times. About her going the final step.

“Do you know any place we can shag up in without raising suspicion?” he said.

She had thought about it. She had thought about it all week when she knew he would be coming to visit.

She nodded. “Yeah. I know a place.”

*

She brought him to the log cabin. He loved it from his first sight of it.

“Neat,” he said, alighting from the car and looking all around.

She smiled. She knew he would like it.

“And this place is, what . . . ten thousand miles away from civilization?” he teased.

“Sort of. Come in and take a look.”

She had the key to the front door.
She inserted in and the charming wooden door opened with a creak.

Inside, the central air-conditioning was kept on eve
n when the house was unoccupied – to battle rot and damp. The sudden cool made the humidity-inspired sweat on her body turn clammy. The mission-styled furnishings were rustic and charming, with coated log walls, a high-beamed ceiling and a huge brick fireplace. The floors were polished flagstone, and there was a large Indian blanket on one wall.

Abby headed for the kitchen.

“You want a beer?” she called to Ari, who was still admiring the lounge.

“
I want to see the bedroom.”

One-
tracked mind, as always. Her cheeks dimpled. Boys were so predictable.

She got him a can of Stella Artois anyway. They were both seventeen, but this was a place away from civilization, as he put it, and they could both
drink to their hearts’ content.

Ari plopped himself down on the comfortable sofa.
He patted the space beside him. “Come here and sit by me.”

He took the beer she handed to him and tore off the
cap. He took a long, foamy drink. She watched him swallow the draught, his Adam’s apple undulating in his long throat. A spasm of desire twitched between her legs as she saw herself sucking on that graceful neck.

He set down the beer. His
upper lip wore a foam moustache.

“Come here and kiss this off me,” he growled.

Laughing, she threw herself on his lap. He grabbed her waist and pushed her down on the couch. She gasped at his sudden strength and passion.

“I want you, Abby,” he whispered. His breath was hot against her cheek.

He kissed her. Their tongues met savagely and then entwined. He cupped one of her breasts firmly, and then reached down to yank her top off. She helped him by holding up her arms. She didn’t wear a brassiere underneath. Didn’t like to in this heat.

His crotch was bulging in his jeans as his fingers lazily moved down to flicker one of her hard, hard nipples.
Something in her groin turned to mush.

“Oooh, look at these,” he murmured.

He bent down to bite her nipple gently, and she thought she would come just by the sheer bliss of that wet sensation. His fingertips traced the top of her jeans waistline.

“Off,” he ordered.

She helped him unbutton her jeans and slide them off her legs. Then off came her panties. And off came his T-shirt and jeans. They were both naked when he clambered all over her again, his knees sinking into the sofa, encapsulating her hips in between them.

His cock was hard.
Very hard. She had never seen it before in its full glory, and now she couldn’t take her eyes off it. His dick was medium-length and red at the tip. It was circumcised, of course, given his race. The layer of trimmed flesh allowed his naked crown to bulge out larger than she thought possible.