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Better than you think,
he thought. She wandered over, stood next to him and looked at the TV. Dare put Venom in the Figure-Four, and that was it.

“They rerun tapes all the time,” she said. “This looks like last month’s Bone-Breaker Blast.” Then she sputtered. “Goddamn Dare. He’s such a pompous ass. You should’ve seen the guy tonight back at the room.”

“I’m glad that I didn’t.”

“The motherfucker didn’t even come. Fucked me steady for a solid hour and couldn’t shoot his load. What a waste of hard dick.”

Straker gulped. Her slow-but-sure reversion to profanity shocked him, but what shocked him even more was the information. What normal man wouldn’t be able to achieve orgasm with such a woman? The idea seemed preposterous.

“But at least I found out that the rumor is true.”

“What rumor?” he asked, unable to take his eyes off her terry-covered rump as she stood aside from the set.

“He’s hung like a horse. Nine and a half inches.”

Straker gulped again.
That’s a third more than I got, the son of a bitch!

“But don’t feel insecure,” she went on. “What good is a gun that doesn’t shoot?”

“I don’t have anything to feel insecure about,” he insisted, now hating Dare even more for his endowment.

“I wasn’t implying that you do. It’s just real funny how men get all uptight about guys with bigger penises.”

“Hey, I may not have the Loch Ness Monster in my pants, but at least mine works.”

“Oh, I’m quite convinced of that. The toilet and wastebasket back at my other motel are convinced too.”

Straker reddened like a beet.
She’ll never let me forget that one.
She giggled again, then traipsed back and forth, sipping her drink, then coming back to watch the TV. Now Dare was doing one of his rants to the microphone. Woo this and woo that. Stylin’ and profilin’
Jesus,
Straker thought, totally enshrouded in despair.

“Do me a favor, will you? And don’t take this the wrong way.” Quite suddenly, she sat on the floor before the couch. Right between Straker’s knees. “Would you rub my shoulders?”

Straker nearly spat out his beer. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

He had to catch his breath; suddenly here she was, so calmly sitting between his legs, sipping her spiked Coke and watching the tv. Almost like…
Like boyfriend and girlfriend. Like husband and wife,
he thought. But that was nonsense, another errant fantasy, a 13-year-old musing about the girl next door who dated jocks. His fingers trembled like delirium tremens when he reached forward and touched her shoulders. He was oblivious now, he was elsewhere. He gently squeezed her shoulder muscles and nearly ejaculated when she moaned.

“God, that feels good,” she breathed.

Touching her warm skin sent Straker to another plane of existence. He wanted to cry, she was so beautiful. Her skin like damp silk, the soap-scent lifting off her, the devastating cleavage he could see as the towel stretched across her bosom.

I would do anything for you,
he mused.

He knew that if he even so much as brushed his crotch, he’d come. No doubt about it. He was so hard now it hurt. So hard he thought his dick might bust out of his jeans and start to dance. His mind struggled for discourse…

“So what was the big revelation? What principle evidence did the Wonder Boy give you?”

“We know they go to a You-Store-It in Big Stone gap,” she said.

He didn’t argue this time—he was too pent up rubbing her shoulders. Her dry hair shined over his hands.

“I—” She propped her arms up on his thighs, laxed back till her head nearly lay in his crotch. “That feels sooooo good.” Was it his imagination or could he actually see her nipples distending beneath the bath towel?
Don’t be an asshole,
he told himself.
She no more attracted to me than than to a pile of bricks. I ain’t got the muscles. I ain’t got the bleach-blond hair and the nine and a half inch dick. I don’t style and I don’t profile.
Here was the closest he’d ever get to his dream: rubbing her shoulders. Straker doubted that he’d ever been more depressed in his life. Yet he considered it a privilege just to be able to touch her, just to knead her shoulders and have contact.

Beggars can’t be choosers,
he reasoned.

She took another sip of her drink. “All this shit I’ve said about wrestlers being hot? Sure, they’re good looking guys but when you get right down to it, they’re all a bunch of assholes.”

Straker tensed. It was almost as if she’d read his mood like a psychic.

“They’re all the biggest losers you could ever meet. Selfish, pretentious, arrogant. They think they’re hot shit because they can dive off the ropes and pile-drive and suplex and bodyslam. They think that their big pecs and big dicks make them men. They’re not
real
men. They’re carnival freaks of the new age. Most of them can barely sign their names on their paychecks. There’s more to a man than a big cock.”

Straker kneaded on. Yeah, that Everclear was loosening her up, all right. “But you’re attracted to them. Admit it.”

“Sure. And are you gonna tell me that you’re not attracted to the average silicone-filled porn star or Playboy bunny? It’s the same thing only in reverse. All body, no brains. Most of these grapplers’d be cleaning the grease pit at McDonald’s if it weren’t for wrestling. It gets to the point where you…despise them, for wasting their lives on this charade. True, in a real fight, most of them could kick ass. Most of them could take on a pro boxer on the street and win—but what does that mean?”

Straker didn’t care. His balls felt big as cueballs; his cock was about to spurt, bust, and die.

“So you’re telling me that…” He paused, reflecting. “You’ve never had an orgasm with any of these guys?”

“Nope.” Her eyes closed against the attentions of his fingers. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” she went on. “If we weren’t both professionals…I’d want to—”

Straker froze. He knew what she was about to say, and in spite of his disbelief he even supposed he knew what was coming. “Oh, fuck it,” she dismissed. She stood up, dropped her towel, and straddled him on the couch. “What the hell, right?”

“Uh. Right.”

Straker came in his pants. He shivered beneath her as she pressed her breasts to his face. Her mouth opened over his, her tongue plunging. This was too much, too soon, but Straker wasn’t going to complain. She was an angel of flesh come to absolve him. Her arms girded him, squeezing, and she torqued him out flat on the couch, then indecorously grabbed his hand and planted it on her sex.
Yep,
he thought.
She uses that hair remover for more than her legs.
Her pubis was bald as a baby’s proverbial backside, flawlessly so. Not even a nub. It was fascinatingly erotic.

“You’re really turning me on,” her hot breath gusted into his mouth. “Put your finger right…right—”

Straker’s beeper went off in his back pocket.
Oh for shit sake! What is this—Hill Street Fuckin’ Blues?
She giggled in his mouth. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“Hell no!” he replied, roaming his hands over her. Then the beeping stopped. “See. Wrong number.”

“Do like you were—” She squeezed tighter against him, opened her legs. Just as his finger touched her clitoris—

“God damn!”

—the beeper went off again.

“I swear to God my clitoris isn’t connected to your beeper,” she laughed. She lounged back. “Go answer it. It’s probably someone from your office.”

Straker ground his teeth together and got up from the couch. “Collier, I should’ve known,” he said when he saw the number on the Motorola pager. He had to walk funny to the phone, and the recent deposit of semen only intensified the discomfort. He nearly punched holes in the phone when he dialed.

“What do you want?” he sniped when Deputy Chief Sidney Collier answered. “Do you have any idea what you—”

Collier didn’t lolligag on the other end. “Shut up and listen. Luntville police—rube department, backwoods town clowns, just wired the VCU with a doozy—those crackers found about two dozen dead bodies near the county line. Like a mass grave, they said it was; somebody’s been throwing these bodies in it for months. It took the Hazmat Team two hours just to get a body count.”

“Luntville?” Straker blinked. “A mass grave.”
What the fuck’s he talking about?

“Jan Beck inspected the scene,” Collier went on with no explanation. “The 64s on the bottom had congealed into a mass of, and I quote, ‘putrefactive effluvium.’ We’re talking a trench full of dead bodies, maggots, and slime.”

Straker could not dissimulate. Thirty seconds ago he’d been about to make love to the woman of his dreams, and now his boss was telling him about…putrefactive effluvium? This did not relate.

“You blow your brain out your nose the last time you sneezed?” Collier inquired. “I just told you we found a mass grave in Luntville, and you’re not saying anything.”

 
Straker shook his head. To hell with protect and serve—he wanted to get laid. “All right, boss, that’s a terrible human tragedy, but what in the living
fuck
has it got to do with me? I’m on a totally different case.”

“Think again, nitz. All the victims were male, late 20s, early 30s, and according to Beck and the TSD team, they’d all been, and I qoute, ‘divorced of their reproductive organs via a mode of expeditious dentation.’ To put it more bluntly, all these guys they found in the hole had their cocks bitten off.”

Straker’s eyes opened at the grotesqurie, yet his sentience remained fully disassociated, musing of Melinda: drunk and horny, and eager for him. “DC, I still don’t see what this has to do with my case—”

“It has plenty to do with it, nibblenuts, because after we ran down IDs on the victims we discovered they all had one thing in common. They were all wrestling groupies—
male
wrestling groupies. Sound familiar?”

Straker’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “So you’re saying that our primary suspect—”

“Yeah, this Goon motherfucker—looks like he’s swinging both ways, doing the job on the chicks
and
these guys.”

Yes, yes, but—
A stalling thought, then Straker proposed, “It doesn’t make much sense, does it, I mean from an evidence perspective? The m.o.s are totally different, not to mention that he’s disposing of the women in a totally different manner from the way he’s disposing of the men.”

“You think I give a shit?” Collier spat back. “This case just doubled in the headache department, and there’s something else.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you with Melinda Pierce?”

“Uh, yeah, DC. We were just going over, uh, critical points regarding the Bilks murder.”

“Right. At four in the morning.”

“We’re dedicated.”

“Well put your pants back on and get ready for another bombshell.”

I didn’t have time to get them off, thanks to you, you weasel, you schmuck, you—

“Melinda Pierce ain’t no reporter,” Collier returned. “I just got a call from my buddy at the paper and he said he’s never heard of her. She’s faking her credentials, must be some kind of wacko police buff or something, but get her the hell out of there. We don’t need some civilian nutcase screwing up the investigation.”

Straker’s jaw fell open. “There’s—” He glanced at her. She lay back oblivious on the couch, casually naked, her ankles crossed and her hair spilling over her shoulders. She was waiting for him, waiting for him to come back to her.

“It’s no joke, lover boy,” Collier went on. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. Just kick her ass out of there. We don’t even have time to fool around with an obstruction charge.”

“But-but-but—”

“Do it. That’s an order. Then get your swinging dick back to HQ for the new prelims and division of record files.”

Straker turned again to glance at her but she wasn’t there.

All he heard after that was a loud
clunk!
He saw a lamp fall to the floor, and then realized what the clunk had been: the lamp impacting his head. Then his mind winked out.

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