Jesse Gerstner dug his fingernails into the bony buttocks of the woman under him and pumped hard, stabbing his smallish penis into her again and again.
“Take it honey, take it honey, take it honey!”
Pauline Stebbins lay passively on the bed, her slip hiked up under her small breasts, her panties on the floor. She gazed idly around the room, not wanting to look at Jesse. Her jaws worked without enthusiasm on the wad of Juicy Fruit.
Jesse pulled one hand away from Pauline’s ass and slapped her hard across the face. “Come on, you slut, put something into it. Move your ass.”
Pauline’s face reddened and her pale eyes grew watery, but the rhythm of her gum chewing did not change. It was not the first time she had been hit by a man. And it surely would not be the last.
She let her mind wander while Jesse huffed his way toward orgasm. He wasn’t nearly the athlete in bed he thought he was. Most men weren’t. Pauline’s recent husband had been better than any of them. Teague Stebbins was another man who liked to hit. Only he used his closed fist. Bruised her up so bad sometimes she had to cake on the makeup so she’d look halfway presentable at work.
Aside from the hitting, Teague wasn’t a bad man. He let her keep the tips she made at the Elkhorn Steak House and paid the rent out of his own earnings at the sawmill. But he was gone now, run off three months ago to Milwaukee. Maybe he’d come back one day. Maybe not. Pauline had been on her own before. One way or another, she’d make it.
Reluctantly, she returned her attention to the present. Jesse Gerstner was not her idea of a Prince Charming, not by a long shot. But he was always good for a few bucks, and he never hung around her trailer afterward. Pauline liked to be left alone to clean up as soon as she could. To speed things along now she jerked her pelvis up to meet Jesse’s thrusts and made little whimpering sounds she hoped he would take for pleasure.
“Aah, that’s more like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do it, honey!”
Jesse’s climax came suddenly, and was over in seconds. Disappointing, as always. Dumb bitch didn’t know how to fuck. None of them did. He rolled off of her and wiped his cock on the sheet.
“You ought to learn to give head,” he said.
“I can’t do that, Jesse. It makes me throw up.”
“You’re a fuckin’ prude.”
“No, I’m not. I just don’t like to suck that thing.”
He pulled on his red nylon briefs, his tight black pants, and the Packers T-shirt. He shoved his feet into a new pair of Adidas and knotted the laces.
“At least you got your jollies tonight,” he said.
“I didn’t think I’d be seein’ you for a while, what with your brother gettin’ killed and all.”
“Yeah, well, life goes on,” he said. From a pants pocket he pulled a wad of crumpled bills, separated two of them, and tossed them onto the bed. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
He went out without looking back at her. The trailer Pauline lived in was cleaner and larger than the Gerstners’, but not good enough to be parked with the mobile homes at the front of the lot.
She wasn’t much good in the sack, Jesse reflected, but she was handy.
He trudged back toward the yellow trailer he had shared with his younger brother, and which was now his alone. At least that much good had come from Fabian’s death. Then there was the Kawasaki. Jesse would get that too, providing Lloyd didn’t give him an argument. That wasn’t likely. The eldest Gerstner brother didn’t like motorcycles. Jesse didn’t care much about them either, but he figured he could sell it for a nice piece of change.
It was time he got something out of life, Jesse figured. As the middle brother, he was always the one nobody noticed. Lloyd was eight years older, and had beat the shit out of him since he was big enough to stand up. And Fabian, ugly as he became in his teens, was one of those cute little kids everybody fussed over. All Jesse ever got was shit.
One thing he knew, he was the smartest of the three brothers. Lloyd was 30 years old, working as a grease monkey at Zale’s Auto Repair. Fabian could barely write his own name, and would never have amounted to cow-flop. Jesse was the only one of the three who had finished high school. Now, with the money he would get from selling the trailer and the cycle he could get the hell out of Elkhorn City. No opportunities here for somebody with Jesse’s smarts. He had plans. He would go to Milwaukee, Chicago. Down to Florida, maybe. There were a lot of ways a smart dude could score there. He whistled merrily as he walked along the back fence of the lot.
He paused to frown at the ugly yellow trailer. He wouldn’t have to live like this much longer. Get the cash and haul ass. Elkhorn City would soon see the last of Jesse Gerstner.
He pulled open the door to the trailer and stepped inside.
What the fuck was that smell?
His first thought was: Fabian’s back. But that was crazy. All the same, it sure as hell smelled like something dead in here. With an overlay of cheap perfume.
Jesse reached for the light switch. His peripheral vision barely registered a shadow of movement behind him, then something scraped down over his face and cinched tight around his neck.
“What the fu — ” His words were squeezed back down into his chest. He raked at the thing around his neck and recognized by the feel it was a thin leather belt. His own. The one with the fake alligator grain.
The belt tightened a notch, and a horrible thought blazed into Jesse’s mind: Somebody’s trying to kill me!
He reached back behind his head, clawing the air, searching for something solid to fight. He found hands and pulled at them, but the grip was too strong for him to budge. He raked the clenched fists with his fingernails and felt little gobbets of flesh come loose. The stench in his nostrils was like a physical blow.
Jesse’s lungs heaved, fighting for the tiny hiss of air he managed to pull in. Slowly, very slowly, the belt tightened. To yell for help was impossible. With every heartbeat the blood pounded like a pair of rocks hitting him in the temples. In the darkness of the trailer bright lights flashed on and off behind his eyes. A blacker darkness began to close in from the edges of his vision.
His bowels let go. He could feel the watery feces sliding down his legs, and he could smell his own stink over the other. The trailer floor slammed painfully into his knees, then his face. A pressure in the middle of his back kept him prone. Notch by notch the strangling belt tightened.
There was a rushing in his ears like he was standing under the Menomonee Falls. Then everything started to drift away. He was going now, and he didn’t care. At least there would be no more pain.
The belt loosened a fraction.
Air whistled through the bruised throat into his lungs. He tasted the gritty floor of the trailer on his lolling tongue. He tasted blood. He dragged in another labored breath and all the pain returned — his neck, his head, his back. Each heartbeat slammed him like a hammer blow. He tried to move, but whoever, whatever, held him down was much too strong. He fought for another tiny breath. Then another.
And the belt tightened again.
Once more the red flashes, the encroaching blackness, the roaring rushing noise in his ears. Sinking again into soft oblivion.
The belt loosened.
Jesse Gerstner’s poor blasted brain was incapable of counting the times he was choked to the brink of death, then brought back. He was only dimly aware that it happened again, and again, and again. In the stink of his assailant and of his own excrement, his mouth filled with blood and vomit, his head feeling swollen to bursting, Jesse would have prayed for death if he knew how to pray. With a last explosion as blood vessels burst in his brain, death finally came.
• • •
The residents of the Zenith Mobile Home Park were not one big happy family. The fifty or so people who lived there were divided rigidly into their own groups. There were the older retired people who lived in the large, comfortable mobile homes near the front. Then the young couples just starting out together who were only here until they could afford a real house. Finally the riffraff who occupied the shabby travel trailers set well in the back to screen them from the road. There were also a few like Pauline Stebbins and her departed husband who fit no category. They were considered transients. Not troublemakers, but loners who came and went with no one taking much notice.
Thus, when sudden violence befell one of the residents, as it did Fabian Gerstner, the act was viewed from quite different perspectives. The backlotters professed no great surprise at the murder of one of the odious Gerstner brothers. They had no known friends outside, and an excess of enemies. No one cared to name names when the police came around, and the investigation languished.
The young strivers preferred not to talk about it, renewing their resolve to get out of Zenith at the earliest opportunity.
The retired people, being more aware of their own mortality, began locking their trailers at night and spending less time sitting outside after sundown. None of them was personally acquainted with the Gerstner brothers, but they knew vaguely that it was an unsavory family. They sought to shut out that aspect of life in Zenith by staying inside at night with the windows blinded.
So it was that after the second Gerstner died soaked in his own body wastes, no one in the park was watching as the female figure left the rusting trailer and walked with an uneven gait out to the road. No one caught the foul odor that was carried from the girl on the evening breeze.
• • •
Driving back from Appleton, where he had failed to get into the pants of his girlfriend, Harry Muhlbach muttered darkly to himself, figuring he must be the last 20-year-old virgin in Marathon County, if not in the entire state of Wisconsin. His friends in Elderon would, of course, never hear the real story. For them he was already concocting a scenario where he flings Laurie Imhoff on the bed and “turns her every way but loose.”
It was while these imaginings brought back the ache in his scrotum that Harry’s headlights picked up the trim, unmistakably female figure thumbing at the side of the road.
Hoo-eee, maybe he was about to get lucky for once in his life. As he stomped the brakes his mind was already racing ahead with visions of wild sexy happenings in the back seat of his Taurus.
The visions vanished like smoke the instant the girl climbed in beside him. Her face was puffed and unhealthy looking. There was a pussy wound on one arm and furrows of skin gouged from the backs of her hands. Her head was cocked to one side, and where her eyes should have reflected the safety light when he opened the door, there were only shadows.
And she stank.
When she slumped into the passenger seat Harry leaned as far to the left as possible and drove like something was after him. Thank God she was only going as far as Bischoff. When the girl climbed out he peeled rubber getting out of there.