Leaning forward, putting a gentle fingertip on his hairy bare chest, she said, “Welcome to our world, Special Agent Rousch.”
Beneath the duct-tape gag, he roared with rage, so pitiful a sound she might have laughed, if she’d been truly heartless.
She ran fingers through the FBI agent’s chest hair. She found hair on a man’s body strangely compelling if somewhat gross; she had come to prefer her own hairless body. And her brother’s.
She said, “You’ve been looking for us — well, here we are.”
Now he was silent beneath the duct-tape strip. His eyes were wide — unblinking now.
“My brother and I — we’re brother and sister, you know... but you didn’t know, did you? My brother and I are a team — like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Or more, Fred and Adele. Anyway, my brother and I have been very disappointed in you. You’ve been in town for weeks now and haven’t done any better than the LAPD or those TV fools. Or have you been keeping secrets?”
She clutched his chest hair and yanked out a clump. He bucked on the bed and yelled under the tape. When he came to rest, a bald patch in the jungle of curlies was pink and pearled with blood droplets.
“Perhaps we should torture you, my brother and I — and find out what you people really know. How close you really are? You figured out I was B-i-l-l-i-e, not l-y. But you don’t seem to’ve known Don Juan and Billie Shears are partners. The media almost guessed it, with their stupid, insulting ‘Odd Couple’ thing. That pisses me off!”
He lay very still. His expression had changed. Not angry now. Scared, but... something else, something she’d never seen in a victim, because both Billie and Don Juan had in the past struck mercifully quick, and this was a new stage to her: pleading.
Eyes begging for mercy.
It was somewhat unsettling.
She patted his nest of chest hair, and moved a few steps from the bed.
“You’re probably wondering about the camera,” she said. “That’s usually a Don Juan specialty, and Billie isn’t known for making performance-art videos. But you’re a special case. A special catch. A special guest star...”
Rousch lay limp now. She’d seen him go through a lot of changes, a lot of stages, in a short time. What were the stages of the grieving process, anyway? He was grieving his own death, after all.
She’d studied them in an acting class — shock and guilt and anger and denial and depression were in there. Was this acceptance? And what was the other one? Hope?
Not tonight, Josephine.
She dropped her pose. She didn’t feel like acting.
“I could tell you our whole story, about what our father did to us and so on, but it’s very unpleasant. It’s not the kind of thing somebody in your position would want to hear.”
The FBI agent came alive, suddenly — he was trying to get something across. What? He wanted to talk! He wanted to exchange views and ideas and try to talk them into freeing him, because he understood they couldn’t help themselves, and he could help them, and...
That was it! Bargaining! The other stage...
Ironic, because she had just been about to bargain with him.
“I will give you a chance, Agent Rousch. To save yourself. All you have to do is love me. Just love me.”
His eyes tensed, his forehead beaded with sweat, bulging with veins.
“If you love me... your love will set you free. If you love me. But you have to love me. Understand?”
She slipped the spaghetti straps off, let the silky top fall to her waist, revealing firm milky white breasts with bright pink tips (a little lip rouge had made them even pinker).
Rousch was wide-eyed, and against all odds — naked, tied spread-eagled, facing two serial killers — he proved her point about the big and little head: that flaccid thing of his twitched.
Stirred.
“Do you love me, Agent Rousch? But that’s so impersonal... your name is Mark. Mark — do you love me? If I believe you love me, I will let you go.”
She did not look at the camera or over where her brother stood behind it; she was too professional, but she felt him with her, his presence, his love for her.
“Love is important, Mark. Do you love me?”
She pulled down the skirt, taking the blouse with it; she stepped from the puddle of clothes, wearing nothing beneath — just her sleekly naked, hairless form. A blonde vision. She would leave the wig on. He might not like her really naked...
She said, “You wouldn’t want me to feel unwanted, would you?”
She cupped her breasts, stepped near the bed, and watched as his thing slowly rose. Like when the Frankenstein monster roused himself from that slab.
She got on the bed and knelt between his spread legs and began to stroke his half-hard member.
Even not fully erect, it was bigger than the old man’s. She watched, impressed, as it grew and grew the more she touched it.
It was very hard now. Throbbing in her hand.
She let it go, slapped it away, and stormed off the bed.
“That’s not love,” she said.
She watched as the thing wilted, almost comically; she could hear the slide-whistle sound effect in her head: WHEEEE-ooooop.
He was begging with his eyes again. Before, it had touched her somewhere deep, distant within. Now she felt merely disgust.
“Agent Rousch, just as a courtesy, since you must have many questions, I will brief you on the rest of our method of operation. Why not? It’s not like you’re going to share it with anybody.”
Now he strained manfully at his bindings and his chest filled as he screamed behind the duct tape, yelled bloody murder, but for all that effort, the result was more annoying than likely to attract attention or help. Kind of like when a guest in the hotel room adjacent is playing the TV too loud, and you’re trying to sleep.
“When they get as excited as you were? Up to a minute or so ago? I tell them I’m going into the bathroom... to get ready for them. You do know we drug them? Roofies? Sure. Anyway, a couple of minutes alone in the dark and the guy is so stoned and horny, he doesn’t even know whether the person who comes back, in the dark, is me or not... Allow us to demonstrate.”
She rose and walked over to her brother at the camera, the FBI man’s bugged eyes following. She pulled off the blond wig and covered her brother’s bald head with it. Arranged it, getting it just right.
Don Juan stepped forward, arcs of the woman’s wig swinging like scythes. He was naked, too, which their special guest had not realized before, the camera and its position making that tough.
When her brother approached a victim’s bed, he had his naughty bits tucked back between his legs, as if he didn’t have any.
He would say, “In the dark, it makes me look like a girl. I can’t fool them that I’m you, if I’m swinging my meat.”
That always made her laugh. Always just killed her...
Billie Shears stepped behind the camera and assumed its operation. Her brother stooped, then rose — re-entering the FBI agent’s range of vision — with the garden shears gripped in two hands.
What a pleasure to finally be able to do a little camera movement, she thought, as she zoomed in on Rousch’s face.