She asked them what they would like to drink. She licked her lips as she looked at each of them in turn. Her lips were ripe, red, pulpy, her upper lip as full and pouty as her lower lip. And when they gave her their drink orders, she walked quietly away, but even walking was an erotic act as her smooth baby-skin butt swayed lasciviously from side to side.
"Maybe if it was a real big stick," Bondini said. "So I could do it with one big smack."
Hubble was talking to himself, still staring at the door through which the redhead had reentered the house. "Some animals are really cute," he mumbled. "Being prejudiced against animals just because they're animals isn't really worthy of me. A cute animal. What's wrong with that?"
Franko wasn't listening. He was thinking, even though he did not say it, that there certainly were a lot of attractive corpses. Beautiful women who died from overdoses, for instance. You couldn't see anything wrong with them no matter how hard you looked. And if you got them right away, why, hell, they might even still be warm. So they wouldn't give much back, but who said the man always had to be rewarded in lovemaking by a woman's responses? If you wanted noise, later, with the money turned back on, you could hire a woman who was good at making noise. Sometimes you just had to do what's right. A warm pretty corpse sounded okay to him. He certainly liked that idea a lot better than he liked the thought of suffering from corpse-a-phobia.
"I don't have corpse-a-phobia," Franko said. "I never had anything wrong with me in my whole life. Don't go trying to saddle me with diseases I don't have." He looked around accusingly.
Their drinks never came. Instead, Abner Buell walked onto the deck, wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt which were too khaki to be called a leisure suit. He had on heavy woolen socks, puffed out over the top of cheap sneakers without laces. But his hair was still immaculately plasticked into place.
He stood in front of the three men, looking down at a clipboard he held.
Finally, he looked up and snapped at Bondini. "You. I want you to beat your mother to death."
"One hit with a big stick," Bondini said firmly.
"A small stick. And slowly," Buell said. Without waiting for a response, he looked at Hubble. "You're going to be the star of a sex film. Making It with Mountain Goats. You'll have to screw three sheep." Again he waited for no comment but fixed his hard eyes on Stash Franko. "I want you to have intercourse with a headless corpse, dead three weeks."
He let the clipboard lower to his side and looked slowly at each of the men in turn. "I want you to know that I have turned over to the three of you a total of $612,000 in the last twelve months. That's money that technically you took from the bank by fraud. Now you will do what I ask or not only will the money stay cut off but the police will be on your doorstep by nightfall. You have sixty seconds to consider your course of action."
He walked back into the house and when the door closed behind him, Bondini said, "What do you think?" It was more of a plea than a question.
"I don't know," Hubble said. "What do you think?"
"I think I don't love my mother a whole lot. I grew up eating liver. How you supposed to love somebody who feeds you liver? A small stick's not so bad."
Hubble said, "I always liked sheep. They're friendly, kind of."
"I can keep my eyes closed," Franko said. "And hold my breath. Corpses. They're all the same in the dark, I always say."
Buell returned in exactly one minute. He stood in front of them, silently waiting. Finally Bondini blurted out, "We'll do it."
"All of you?" Buell asked.
"Yes," Bondini said. "We'll do it. All of us."
"Good," said Buell. "That's ten thousand points each. And now you don't have to."
"What?" asked Hubble.
"You don't have to. I was just testing you," Buell said.
"Oh," said Hubble.
"I want you all to kill a man instead," Buell said.
"Which one?" Franko asked.
"Does it matter?" Buell said.
"No," Franko said. "It doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter at all," said Bondini.
"Not at all," said Hubble.
All three were relieved that they only had to kill a man. It didn't matter who.
The car was wheezing and the temperature gauge was solidly in the red zone as it came down the snaky road that sliced through the hills and led to the coast at Malibu, so Remo turned off the motor, put the car in neutral, and let it coast.
"What are you doing?" Pamela Thrushwell asked.
"Trying to get there," Remo said. "Be quiet unless you want to walk."
The car picked up speed as it free-wheeled down the canyon's roadside, roaring past little shops that sold pots and hole-in-the-wall markets that featured fourteen varieties of bean sprouts, and past long-in-the-tooth hippies with steel-rimmed glasses and women in their forties who still wore fringed buckskin skirts and soft-soled moccasins. It took one corner on two wheels.
"You're going too fast," Pamela said.
"How do you figure that?" Remo said.
She raised her voice to compete with the whine of the tires and the whistle of wind past the open windows.
"Because the damned auto's going to tip over," she shouted.
"Not if you lean to the left," Remo said.
She forced her body toward the center of the front seat and Remo careened the car through a left-hand turn. For a moment, the car lifted up onto its two right wheels and teetered there precariously. Remo grabbed Pamela's shoulders and pulled her closer to him and the car thumped back down onto all four wheels.
"The next one I can do with my eyes closed," Remo said.
"Please slow down," she said.
"All right," Remo said agreeably. He thumped on the brake. "I don't care if we get there in time to save the world from nuclear destruction."
"What?" she said.
"Nothing," he said.
"You said something about nuclear destruction."
"I was thinking about this car," he said.
"No, you weren't. You were talking about something else."
"I forget," Remo said.
"No, you didn't forget." Pamela folded her arms across her chest. "You just won't tell me. You haven't told me anything since we left New York. You've barely said three words to me the whole trip. I don't even know how you figured out where to go in Malibu."
"Hey, look, I work for the phone company. What do I know from nuclear destruction?" Remo said. "And my office told me where to go and when Mother says go, I go."
"That's another thing. Why is the New York phone company sending you to California to find an obscene caller? Huh? Why is that?"
"It's not really the New York phone company doing it," Remo said.
"No? What is it?"
"It's part of our new phone system. If your phone is broken, you call somebody and if your telephone lines fall down and electrocute the neighbors in their swimming pool, you call somebody else. That's the way we've got it set up now. Well, I'm part of another company. It's part of Alexander Graham Ding-a-Ling. Obscene Callers Patrol Inc. A new corporate setup. You give us enough time, we'll fix it so that America's phone system is as good as Iran's."
"I still don't believe you work for the phone company," she said.
"And I don't believe you came all this way to get revenge on somebody for heavy breathing and copping a feel, so why don't we just drop it?"
"I want to talk," she said.
Remo took his hands off the wheel, put them behind his head, and leaned back in the seat.
"Go ahead then. Talk," he said. "Talk fast. There's a guardrail up there."
She grabbed his hands and put them back on the steering wheel.
"All right," she said. "Drive. Don't talk."