He played chess and darts in an Irish bar he went to now and then. People knew his name and liked him and called him up sometimes to cry on his shoulder or ask him over to watch a heavyweight fight or a play-off game on the tube. He could go anywhere and not be noticed. He was comfortable and secure in nearly any environment.
He didn’t have a creepy bone in his body. Not one.
He watched the traffic go by on Biscayne Boulevard and sipped his coffee. He hated newspapers and he hated television even more. He hated journalists. Their superior, cynical attitude, assuming the worst of everyone. Like they’d seen it all, crime and grime, and nothing surprised them. Calling him ‘the Bloody Rapist,’ making a joke out of it.
He shifted around on the bench seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. He was exhausted and his joints ached like he might be coming down with the flu. The bitch probably gave him some germ, all that kissing on the couch, her tongue down his throat like she was starved for something he had inside him and was trying to scoop it out.
He was drained and vaguely depressed. These things took a lot out of him, more all the time. The recovery could take a full week. That long before he even started thinking about it again, looking for another woman, starting to get the prickling in his blood. He wasn’t a horny guy by nature – ready to go all the time, like some men his age. He’d never been that way. Slow to rouse, actually.
He hated those television experts with their sound-bite explanations of rape. The so-called authorities claimed rape was about violence, not sex. Saying the act sprang from a man’s need to dominate a woman, or his hatred of her, or some other bullshit. But it wasn’t like that. If it was about hate and violence, then the guy wouldn’t rape the woman; he’d beat the shit out of her, strangle her, and leave her lying on the floor.
No, it was about sex. Sex, sex, sex. It was about the prickle in his blood, that tingle deep in the axons of his cortex. It was about neurons and dopamine and dendrites, all the thousand itchy creatures in his brain. It was about Pavlov and his dog. It was about chemicals that had been stewing for a million years, ever since one of his ancestors, something white and slippery, wriggled ashore and took cover under a rock. Rape was about crinkly folds of skin and the smell of flesh, and it was about hardness and softness, squirming and biting, prying inside the hot, tight sphincter of female tissue, deep inside her blood.
He drank the rest of his coffee and raised his cup high in the air without looking for the waitress. And even after his arm began to hurt, he kept it up in the air until she returned with the pot.
‘It’s terrible,’ he said, smiling at her, winning her back. ‘That young woman. Gruesome and sad.’
‘Yeah,’ said the waitress, pouring him another cup. ‘Myself, I’m getting the heck out of Miami. It’s not worth all you have to put up with just for some good weather. I was telling Doris –’
‘You’re a very good waitress,’ he said, turning his head to stare out the window. ‘You’re excellent at what you do.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘I’m happy and privileged to be served by you.’
‘Well, thanks.’
She stood there a few seconds more, then swiveled on her squeaky tennis shoes and marched away.
Rape was about wanting a woman you couldn’t have. One woman. An image in your mind that was bright and clear and never wavered or varied. Her face, her body, her voice, the way she swayed and stood. One woman above all others. The craving gnawed at you, a longing, a pang, a slow burn hidden so deep inside your body, there wasn’t a name for the place where it resided.
Rape was about having to settle for another woman, a lesser version of the one you truly wanted. Rape was about walking up the steps of that woman’s Coconut Grove apartment, a woman smiling in her doorway, her hip cocked, making herself available to you, letting you inside, letting you come into her intimate quarters. It was about walking up those steps, legs weak, the blood leaving them, the twist in the stomach, the heart scudding. Walking up those steps, watching her open the door and stand aside, admitting you to the intimate place that was hers, that dark, small space where she lived, and it was about what happened next, the next hour, those thousand little winks and wiggles and obscene softenings in the voice and flutters of lashes and come-hither gestures and smiles and how she was dressed, her face made up, all of it planned for your benefit, to create the seductive effect, to transmit her sexual willingness. To lure you.
It was about sex. It was about the need to pour yourself out of yourself. It was about the urge to replicate, duplicate, repeat and repeat and repeat until everything got quiet. Until there was relief. Sweet satiation. Everything was still and empty and perfect. The gong in the heart no longer ringing. The shimmer gone. Everything flat and quiet and serene.
That’s when he killed them – when the static was silent. He looked down at them and he could see it in their eyes: they hated him because he was stronger and took what he wanted, and that hate was so ferocious that he knew if he didn’t kill them, they would kill him. So he did it to save himself, so he could go on. So he could live.
Murdering them wasn’t crazy; it wasn’t sick or illogical or sociopathic or any of that psychoanalytical bullshit. It was simple baseline self-preservation. It was one animal looking at another animal and seeing that the other animal would kill him if it got the chance, so he did what he had to do. Instinct. Survival of the fittest. Oldest law there was. Buried in the blood a million years. Kill or be killed.
They didn’t know shit about rape.
By three o’clock, they were carrying somewhere near $4 million. Five sacks of cash, two smaller satchels of coins. A bag of food stamps. Typical day. Savings and Loan, Publix supermarket, NationsBank, a check-cashing joint, another supermarket. Stan driving, Benito riding shotgun. The Winchester in the rack beside him. Following procedure, same shuffle at every stop.
Benito, the courier, wearing his Kevlar vest, carrying a .38, hauled the empty canvas bags from the truck at every stop, brought them back full, while Stan stayed in the truck with the doors locked. Benito got seventy-five cents more an hour for taking that risk. Which brought him up to eight bucks per. Stan could’ve had the job if he’d wanted it, and, God knows, he needed the money. But he passed. He had something better in mind. Something that required him to stay behind the wheel.
Usually, they made a little chitchat between stops, though today Stan wasn’t feeling conversational. His Kevlar vest was tight, lungs unable to expand. Felt like a hot wire was wriggling in his left armpit.
‘Your father-in-law driving you crazy again? Talking his bullshit?’
Stan said no, the old man was fine.
‘Then it’s your wife,’ Benito said. ‘What happened, she find out about your little sugar on the side? Jennifer what’s-her-name?’
‘Shut up about that.’
‘Hey, I got no problem with adultery. Just because I’m faithful to my wife, it don’t mean I can’t appreciate a man chasing pussy. Wife like yours, I understand completely. Pretty, but no interest in sex. Hey, I’ll take an ugly one any day. Ugly and horny, those are the best. That’s the mistake you made, Stan – you married a pretty one. She looked hot, but she’s dry where it counts. Ham
