“You taste good. Did you just brush your teeth?"
“Hmmm,” she told him. They kissed with the unashamed abandon and sense of fun that marked all of their lovemaking. “You taste good, mmmmmf,” she said, and he shut her up.
Then she began kissing him more gently. Little kisses. Hot, quick, wet smooches around his lips and in the hollow above his chin, and he kissed her softly on the cheeks. Her cheeks always felt so surprisingly smooth to him, so satiny and feminine. He could never get used to the surprise of her wonderfully smooth skin. And he kissed her eyes closed, barely touching the silky lashes, and a hand touched her. The hard point of a breast shot an electrified current through the palm of his hand and his kisses slid off of her face and onto the pulse at the side of her throat and soon clothing was on the floor and he was seeking the source of that strong pulse with his lips and tongue.
He kissed her heartbeat where it throbbed beneath her beautiful chest and worked eastward over to the side of one of her large and ripe breasts, where he mashed his face into a lovely expanse of white skin and told her everything she need know about them in an eloquent statement of adoring, hot kisses. He spent a lot of time right there on the side of the mountain and then he climbed to the top, moving around to the nipple, then back to the other, moving back across the heartland, then climbing the other, just because it was there. He let it excite him the way it invariably did, sucking both breasts then, tonguing nibbling chewing hungrily devouring then going south down through tummyland, south of the border, traveling down with those inflamed kisses and a tongue that was starting to set her on fire. But he didn't make the trip this time because his hardening desire was pulling him back up, and then both of them were back on the sofa, and she was opening up for him and they were coming together like two halves of a puzzle built in separate rooms, assembled independently; then the pieces joined together in a mating that never failed to delight each of them with the perfection of the fit. “I want you,” she said in a hot whisper. “Yes, honey,” he agreed, “I want you too. So much.” But the reality was that he was somewhere else in that part of him where the deepest desire was kindled. He suddenly realized that he had crawled inside himself and was watching his own performance. GRADING himself or something. And the ludicrous discovery softened his ardor just as she heard him say, So much, and she wondered what she had done. She had been accused once of coming on too strong by a previous lover and it had stayed with her, as the fiercest critiques so often will.
He said nothing. He only kept kissing her, but now in a different way, and after a bit he rolled over, wondering what it was that had passed through his subconscious, like a cold, dark shadow. Donna wondered what she'd done this time to attack the fragile male ego bastion. Both of them thinking these things but said nothing. Donna wanted to say, “It's okay, my sweet. No big deal.” But she thought it inappropriate and dangerous and silly anyway. Saying it was no big deal was saying that it might have been a big deal, having all this go on inside her head. Jack wanted to put his face in that pillow of luxuriantly dark hair and just breathe her in till the bad jazz blew away. But neither of them did anything.
CHICAGO
He spotted her on Randolph, walking slowly, looking straight ahead, and his eyes targeted first on the thin fabric of the white dress that reminded him for some reason of an actress in the movies. His computer showed him a mental image and he pulled the car over to the curb, lowering the window as he forced a huge, crinkly smile onto his face. She was thin, ordinary-looking, anywhere from nineteen to twenty-three years old, alone, and she met all the requisite minimums.
One may have trouble understanding how this 460-pound killer with the bandaged face could work his magic. The fact that this was not an unattractive young woman makes it all the more incomprehensible to some, but age, sex, personality, they have very little to do with the phenomenon that a man like Daniel Bunkowski exploits.
His eyes saw a female form alone and zeroed in on the legs, which were silhouetted through the thin material of the dress by the sunlight. The fact that she wore a dress—that alone triggered a whole battery of responses in him. Then there was her vulnerability. Who can say why some individuals project this quality and others do not? Vulnerability runs the full range of a wide and complicated spectrum of auras—from projected vulnerability, a far different thing, to true vulnerability, the brand of the profile one so often sees among life's casualties. This young woman had that thing. It was a quality the star-maker machinery looks for in females. When you find it in concert with overt sexuality, the package is dynamite. But in this one it simply said to Daniel, I am vulnerable to the taking.
Even as he pulled to the curb, hitting the electric window controls and reminding himself not to turn his face too far to the right while he was speaking to her, he was sizing up his pitch by her appearance, the clothing, the shoes, the degree of cleanliness, the gait of her walk, the purposefulness or lack of purpose in her physical movements, the tilt of her head now and the way it changed when his voice drew her eyes, the eyes themselves—which so often will give it all away even in the most practiced liar—the hair, the hands and what she was carrying, everything about her told him a quick story. It said, VICTIM.
“Hi.” There was no response as she turned. “Excuse me,” and a mumble of words followed, calculated to pull her over by the side of the newly stolen wheels.
“What?” She moved a little, warily.
“Do you have any idea why I can't get across the [something] to the other side of [something else]?” The inflection was that of a sincere question, his eyes cast downward as if in a map, his Pillsbury-Doughboy-meets-FrankenKong face a pleasant, beaming, lost, wrinkled, jowly, and deceptively cherubic mask of fat and friendly exasperation.
“Huh?” She had moved closer and looking into the front seat of the car she saw a huge man of indeterminate age staring and shaking his head at a street map.
“Can you help me?” he asked, pointing at the map. She moved closer, right by the window and he had her then. He knew if he could get them within touching distance he had them. Always. That was the reality of the track record.
If they were reluctant to get within arm's length, it usually meant that they were too wary to con into the vehicle. But if they got that close to him, he always had them. They'd get in a car with Daniel Bunkowski no matter if he was bleeding, drenched in sweat, covered in sewer filth, or immaculate and in a rented summer tux. The ease with which a victim went with Daniel seemed to be in almost inverse proportion to the social acceptability of his appearance. It was as if anybody who looked like THAT couldn't possibly be a bad guy too. It was too much of a cliché, perhaps.
The trust factor. He began working on it now with the girl. His eyes never looked at anything but the map, and at her eyes. He let himself blink a lot, squint, shake his head, and put more movement into his normally static and inert facial features, sniffing, grimacing, scowling, licking his ups, shaking his head, all the while the torrent of words flooded out of his mouth, a river of busy verbiage lapping against her resistance.
“When I tried to cut through there it was a one way street, see?"
“Yeah. They got the town all screwed up now with the one-ways."
“Yeah. They got the town all fucked up now.” He said the word to her naturally, really bummed out by the crazy street system. “You can't find your way around for shit.” The big head moved, the words testing her probing getting the lay of the land and the temperature of the water.