she’s pushing her tight little pussy down on my cock. She’s no virgin, and as I go inside she’s screaming to fuck her hard, cause that’s the way she likes it. Man, believe me I tried to stop! I tell you, I really tried. All the time, I’m telling myself she’s my best friend’s daughter. But Christ, she’s gagging for it and pumping me like crazy.
‘I stayed away from Anna after that, tried to avoid her, but she kept coming on to me. Until one night she warns me if I don’t fuck her she’s going to tell her father I raped her, took her virginity. I call her bluff. I knew it was a risk, but I’d no choice.’
At that point Jay had glimpsed a chink in Al’s armour of arrogance as he said, ‘One fuck, one simple fuck loused up everything. Mario didn’t believe me. I was lucky to hang on to my cock, and to this day he still thinks his fucking daughter is Mother Theresa.’
After this confession Al and Jay had struck up a rapport, and a friendship began to grow. Jay knew it was an incongruous pairing and one that would never have existed on the outside. Theirs was a meeting of opposites, but nevertheless he felt at ease in Al’s company as he knew Al did in his. Day after day, week after week, Al had poured his dark and innermost secrets into Jay’s greedy ears. He had kept diaries of his time with Mario, detailed and comprehensive memoirs of their twelve-year partnership. And night after night, while his cell-mate slept, Jay had stayed awake scribbling in his notebook, recording Al’s life – a life of organized crime, littered with dead bodies. It had fascinated Jay, gripped him from the first telling, and he’d listened avidly to how Al had met Mario Petroni when they were twenty-year-olds, young hell raisers with the smell of fresh blood on their hands. From the tenement basements of Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s Westside they hatched ambitious schemes of how they were to become big Mafia dons, bigger and better than any before.
And during the three years he’d shared a cell with Al, Jay had also quietly observed his gradual decline into insanity. The end came when Teach was found dead in a pool of his own vomit, his face the same colour as the concrete floor of the prison cell. Al Colacello the invincible, the teacher, had done something really stupid – shot up on smack from a supplier who was known to cut his drugs with baking powder when he could get it, rat poison when he couldn’t.
In a strange way Jay had missed Teach; missed his crude street humour, his outrageous arrogance. Above all he’d missed the protection Al’s friendship had afforded him. The gangster’s life and death had inspired Killing Time, and he would always be grateful to him – killing machine or not – for that at least.
Jay finally stopped pacing. He stood perfectly still for several minutes as he bottled his memories, then moved back to the bed. He lit a cigarette and filled his lungs with smoke. Why go back? he asked himself. Let it be, leave it alone, let go.
But then the nagging sense of injustice returned, and with it the need for revenge, as it had countless times before. An eye for an eye. Get the motherfuckers who framed you and tell the world about it. Anyway, he concluded, it wasn’t about going back, it was about going forward. Because then and only then could he begin to live again. Exhaling, he watched the smoke rise into the air and evaporate. He was feeling better already.
It was Todd Prescott’s persistent erection pressing between her buttocks that finally woke his wife Kelly. With her head buried deep in linen-covered duck down she stifled a groan. Then lifting a blonde tousled head, she whispered, ‘I’ve got to pee.’
Gently Todd grabbed her hips, his fingers pressing into hard flesh. ‘You’re not getting away with that old line … Come on, honey, be nice to your baby. You know how horny I get before congress.’
Kelly pushed her ass into her husband’s groin, biting the corner of her lip as she felt his hot hands ease her buttocks open. If there was one thing she detested about Todd, it was his hands. It wasn’t the only thing, but they were high on the hate list. Hairless soft hands, the small fingers capped with tiny white nails. ‘Your husband’s got a politician’s hands – like pumping wet fish,’ her brother had commented on more than one occasion. She was forced to agree.
Kelly loathed watching Todd’s limp fingers stroke her body; clamped her eyes shut when they slid into her pubic hair; and usually thought about a new Donna Karan dress, or the big beefy hands of her yoga teacher and occasional lover, when the baby fingers probed inside her.
But this morning she was thinking about something she’d read late last night in the Boston Globe. The headline had been running through her brain like tickertape ever since. ‘Kaminsky Released from Cedar State Pen.’ A grainy photograph of Jay as a nineteen-year-old Harvard freshman had accompanied the article. Lantern-jawed, with heavy-lidded chestnut eyes that could look dark brown depending on his mood. Thick hair, shining like ebony, slicked back above a high tanned brow. Her prom date, her first ‘let him go all the way’ date; her sweet, considerate, innocent teenage love.
As Todd pumped, she thought about Jay. She wondered if prison had destroyed his good looks. Would all that bitterness and anger have warped not only the inside, but also the outside?
Todd’s shouting intruded just then. ‘Baby! My sweet baby.’
Wiggling her bottom, Kelly contracted her internal muscles at the same time to hurry her husband along on his final lap. Two more thrusts and it would all be over. Kelly was counting. It took four. Until the next time, she thought, and there always was a next time.
It was the story of her life. Ever since her father’s death when she was nineteen, then losing Jay, she had been filling in the gaps in a desperate quest for the one thing that constantly eluded her. Love. The word rang in her head, bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball.
She felt Todd’s hands on her shoulders, and suppressed the urge to recoil. His voice was whispering in her ear, but it was her father’s words she could hear. Kelly, you are a beautiful princess, and there will always be men who want you. But you were one of the lucky ones. God was generous; he gave you a brain as well. And so there’s nothing you can’t have, no place you can’t go. Don’t waste a minute.
Paul Tyler had been right. At forty-three, there were few places she hadn’t been and there had always been a man. Her first husband, Maynard Fraser Jnr, a wealthy Wasp businessman, had showered her with gifts. Jewels were his thing, and Kelly wore his success. The purchase of a new tower block would be followed by Kelly’s glittering appearance in an antique diamond choker. But three years into the marriage, when Maynard was fifty-two and Kelly a few days off her twenty-ninth birthday, he was killed in a light aircraft somewhere in British Honduras. His body was never found. Kelly had never loved Maynard; she’d been fond of him which was a totally different thing. Yet she was genuinely sorry to lose him, and in the first few months of bereavement she missed his ebullient presence in their vast apartment on Manhattan’s Eastside, and their sprawling beach house in East Hampton. To ease the loss, Kelly threw herself into Maynard’s electronics business, doubling the profits in the next two years as the technological age began to grip the entire world. A merger with the giant multi-national Cirax diluted her stake, and the much-publicized battles between its megalomaniacal head and Kelly Fraser made ‘Beauty and the Beast’ headlines more than once in the Wall Street Journal.
In 1986 Kelly had sold out and bought a house in the Caribbean, where six months later she met the man who was to become her second husband. Tim Reynolds, two years younger than herself, was a budding film producer, overflowing with creative angst and poetic romanticism. They met on the beach: she was searching for shells, and he was pretending to read whilst watching her over the top of his book, catching her off guard. This time, with Tim, she had told herself, it’s for real, like in all the schmaltzy movies and love songs. And for two years Kelly believed in the myth, convinced herself that she was loved and in love. Whenever yet another bizarre film
