A Mutual Friend Read online

  “This is my prize, bitch,” he said evenly, taking me by the arm. Yes, he fucking took me by the arm and steered me to a corner of the backyard. A canopy of red hibiscus draped the bench, and Mayo pressed me back into the flowers. I clutched my whiskey glass, empty once again. I wasn’t used to this one-on-one with another man. I glimpsed Anton, under a sun umbrella being lauded by Ormond, Harte, and some guys I didn’t recognize. Anton was practically tossing his glossy black hair over his shoulder, although it barely came below his ear. Typical priest haircut.

  Mayo took my chin in his fingers and forced me to stop looking. “I set my sights on you, truck driver.”

  I was disoriented. Mayo’s cinematic face was so close he was out of focus. “What?”

  “You’re mine, for however long you stay here.”

  “Wait,” I muttered. “Don’t I get any say in this?”

  “No,” he said, serene. “Everyone around here knows. This is my decision. Just ask Kenna.”

  Then I noticed Kenna sitting behind Mayo on the bench. She must’ve been listening to every word, though the Allman Brothers was blasting from a device.

  I knew, because she nodded and said, “He tells the truth, King. If you don’t want him, you’d better get your ass out of here.”

  “But I barely know you—”

  Mayo’s kiss shut me up.

  Maybe the aborted kiss with Anton had left a craving in me. But I responded to Mayo. Yes, I did. My hands shot around his waist, and I lifted a knee to dovetail with his. It was kind of heavenly, actually. The tip of his tongue tickled my lower lip, and I parted them obligingly. Kenna’s panting practically steamed up my eyeballs, and I knew she was looming over Mayo’s shoulder.

  I didn’t mind. I withdrew just a bit to pepper little sucking kisses to Mayo’s mouth, even the tip of his nose. “Ah,” he said, and grabbed my skull again to slide his tongue down my throat.

  I don’t know what changed—but it was around the time Mayo slithered a hand lower and pinched my nipple. It made my cock twitch and forced some kind of awkward awareness of where I was, what I was doing. How I really wasn’t that cool with it after all.

  I mean, I wanted Anton. If I couldn’t have him, would I just take the next best thing? What a sleazebag!

  I yanked myself away with a pop and a gasp. Whipping my head around, I searched for Anton. I was just in time to see his jeans-clad leg disappear inside the back sliding glass door.

  “I have to go!” I declared.

  For the first time, Mayo wasn’t so sunny. His brow was knitted. “Yeah, I’ll say you do. Better get your kneepads ready for the priest.”

  A couple other Bent Zealots glared at me as I rushed past them. I was really making quite the impression on this crowd.

  G

  I

  was cold and gruff with King, especially after bending him to my will.

  I rode down the mountain with a black cloud over my head. That wasn’t really like me, to shove someone around in the shower, to slap his balls, to control his orgasm. That was what Noel had usually done to me.

  I don’t know what came over me. Suddenly I needed to be in command. Was I rebelling against Noel and the power he’d exerted over me? Proving to some unseen world that I could be like that, too? I didn’t even think before the words came from my mouth. “No kissing, King. We’re not lovers.” Did only lovers kiss? The few men I’d followed through with in jackoff clubs had not, but maybe because I’d acted like such a sub in my spanking fresh jeans and bleached T-shirt.

  I thought I’d wanted a Dom. But Dios mío, it was refreshing as hell being the one in control for once! I felt bad about how I’d treated King, but I imagined that was part of the game. Didn’t he know? Didn’t he understand I was being surly and boorish because that was part of the game?

  Apparently not, or he wouldn’t have taken off with that fucking race car driver. Was he upping the game another level, playing it cool? King definitely took it too far at the party when he blatantly made out with the stupid driver. They slobbered all over each other on that bench. A girl was even looking on approvingly.

  That was the limit for me. I carved it hard out of there on my Harley with several Zealots asking me where I was going. I didn’t reply. It wasn’t until I was halfway down the mountain road that I really realized I had nowhere to go but the Nichols Building.

  I needed to focus on my job, not some jacked truck driver who was a momentary hobby at best. I knew I needed to prove to Noel that I could get me some after being debased by the most glorious lover in the world—Father Noel of St. John’s in the Desert. Okay, so I’d proven myself, if only to myself. King had been putty in my hands, moaning and gasping and even sighing when I’d nudged the soap bar up his ass.

  And Dios, that long, thick, juicy penis. How I fucking longed to drop to my knees and take it in my mouth, to love the velvety length of it with my tongue, to ream his hole until I felt precum spurt from the bulbous tip. I could only imagine what his ejaculate tasted like—salty and hot.

  My mouth was dry. Wanting to be patriotic like the Zealots were by buying American, I stopped off to get a six-pack of Samuel Adams,

  I had had to jump from the shower with my back to King so he couldn’t see my own enormous erection. He probably could’ve seen it in the bathroom mirror as I shaved, but I wasn’t embarrassed. Of course I’d get turned on jacking a rough man like that to completion. Noel didn’t often let me do it, because he didn’t want to appear submissive. Now I knew the joys of switching it up. Next jackoff club I visited, I’d try being a Dom on for size. Maybe that was my true role, my One True Way.

  Or maybe I was meant to switch.

  The London Bridge’s granite blocks radiated warmly in the setting sun. I no longer took this as an omen that something merry or peaceful was about to happen.

  Being a demonologist sure was the crap, sometimes literally. I’d taken on this additional burden because I knew I was tough. An orphan, I’d been scrappy and picked fights with other boys. Until that one time I’d beaten up a kid who wound up to be dying of cancer. Of course I hadn’t known, but Dios, when that priest had laid it on me, you better know I rushed to make acts of penance. I was honestly repentant for quite probably the first time in my life. Prior to that, I’d been faking it, not fully contrite, just afraid of punishment. Now, I was sorry because I’d wounded God’s sacred heart. I had no money to give the boy, so I spent two months as his servant.

  For the first time, I felt joy in service. And for the first time, there was no need to brag about it. God could see what I did. Just as now, casting demons from the homes of innocently deserving congregants, there was no need to advertise my wares. Word got around. The priest who’d taken my spot in New York had already called me three times to give me leads about potential haunted homes. I’d mapped them on my phone. I could hit up one after the other on a route back east once I finished up here.

  I’d barely gone through the double doors that led to the former law offices of Slattery & Dibert when Twinkletoes came toward me in the lobby with fingers curled into claws. “Father, Father!” he cried, although he must’ve known I had renounced my vows. “Thank God you’re here.”

  “Barclay?” I asked, putting my helmet and beer onto a coffee table.

  He wrapped his claws around my bicep. “This is the creepiest thing, Father. It just started fifteen minutes ago. I went into Barclay’s room—he’s not here, by the way—to snoop around, and well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.”

  Lily Silverberry waited at the entrance to Barclay’s room, her mouth set in a thin line as if she’d seen it all now. I allowed Twinkletoes to lead me, and by the light of one of Barclay’s black candles was an array of dog collars.

  Only, these were used. Not for bondage play.

  Worn leather collars with metal tags, some dog licenses and some rabies vaccinations, were lined up on a square table as though for display. Barclay clearly wanted us to see these. Was this his cry for help? For the im
plication was evident. Barclay had killed the dogs for what he believed were their life-giving properties—their blood. Who knew where the carcasses were? Who wanted to know? Sometimes I felt I loved animals more than people, a flaw of mine.

  Twinkletoes speared his fingers through his greasy hair. “This is the fucking limit—the limit, Father. I know, I know. We turn him into the cops, which isn’t our style anyway, and he’s back on the streets in two days.”

  “Or,” shouted Lily. She was unnecessarily loud seeing as how she stood right there, but rage colored her tone. “We track down these poor dog owners and turn them on him.”

  I held out calming hands. “Okay, okay. This is our fucking problem.” Maybe if I said “fucking,” Twinkletoes would stop calling me Father. “Has anyone actually told Barclay it isn’t the best idea to kill animals?”

  “Or people, right?” yelled Lily. “Because you know this is how it starts. People murder usually starts with the psycho trying it out on animals first.”

  “We don’t fucking know that.” I liked saying “fucking.” It was part of the new, non-secular me. In my accent, it came out more like “focking.”

  The front door to the lawyer’s office opened and slammed. We all looked wide-eyed at each other, as though Barclay Samples was storming down the hallway holding two bunny rabbits by their ears.

  “I’m getting the fuck out of here.” True to his word, Twinkletoes slipped out of the rotten egg-smelling room in time to meet King Statesboro striding like a puffy Hulk toward us. Twinkletoes tried to get in between King and me, to hold him back from going inside the room.

  “You don’t want to go there, buddy.”

  I waved my arm. “Let him see. He needs to see this.”

  Apparently King only wanted to talk to me. He gripped me by both shoulders and looked me in the eye. “Anton. I didn’t mean that at the party. The guy was all over me like shells on peanuts. I didn’t want to offend him, but I didn’t want him doing that, either.”

  “I understand,” I said. I really did. I’d rejected him. Any normal guy would’ve done the same thing he did. “Your behavior is totally understandable, King. I didn’t have to act like such a giant asshole. I’ve got a lot to learn about this BDSM business.”

  King’s smile could have melted rocks and my knees weakened. It was perhaps lucky that at that second, Lily shouted from inside Barclay’s room. “Oh, boy! The plot sickens! Antonio, you’re going to want to see this.”

  We stepped back into the putrid hole. “Oh, gross,” King whispered at the sight of the dog collars. But Lily gestured at something even worse.

  My red silicone dildo had once again levitated out of my locked cubicle and into Barclay’s.

  Only this time it was destroyed beyond repair.

  The batteries had been removed and the hollow silicone tube had been inserted over a prong in a freestanding coatrack. Not only that—the plastic had been shredded to smithereens as though a cat had used it for a scratching post. The pathetic strawberry ribbons hung down like a peeled banana, turning it into a ragtag palm tree.

  “Oh,” breathed King, doom making his voice heavy. “This is not good.” He seemed afraid to go near it.

  I wasn’t. I slid it off the prong, wondering what the hell I’d do with it—certainly didn’t want to leave it in Barclay’s smelly cell—when heavy boots came stomping down the hallway. The hall was carpeted but one could tell a mile off it was the crusade of the Death Squadders, come to complicate things even further. They guffawed with back-slapping jocosity. I puffed with pride when King stepped into the doorway, blocking them.

  “What’s up?” he tried to say casually, but the alt-righters were on the warpath.

  The guy with the bird’s beak, Thalhammer, poked a finger at King’s chest. “Hey, we’d like to know what’s up with your pal, ol’ Barclay? The harbormaster just came up to us while we were enjoying a beer at the Pour House and asked us if we were starting a kennel in this building. She said dogs have been disappearing all over this area and someone found a couple of collars near the dumpster. What’s that half-assed idiot doing?”

  I felt it starting. That dark, malevolent mass was forming behind me, near the coatrack. I got the feeling it was feeding off the anger of the white supremacists. I knew they weren’t necessarily steamed about dead dogs but about the harbormaster looking on them suspiciously, possibly kicking them out of their squatter’s lair. I peeked over my shoulder, and sure enough, the blob was there, shuddering and forming next to the coatrack, as if irked that I’d taken my own dildo back.

  Wind picked up outside. The third-floor office windows were permanently sealed, but a California pepper tree swished its lacey leaves against the glass. The metallic scent of blood crept into my nostrils. The entity was oozing. Yes, it did occur to me for a split second to leave the racists at the mercy of the demon. Then professional propriety took over, and I knew I should try to contain it first. I needed to get everyone out of there.

  “Hey,” I said cheerily, sticking the dildo into my back pocket and moving King aside so I could greet the men. Flannery was with them, sharing concerned looks with Lily that I couldn’t pinpoint. “I left some beer out and it’s getting warm. Why don’t we go crack a few in the kitchen and figure this thing out?”

  Flannery nodded, but Thalhammer’s pinched expression never melted. “You. You’re some kind of shrink from the loony bin. Why can’t you take this whackamole back? He’s putting everyone else in jeopardy.”

  Shutting Barclay’s door behind me, I steered the men down the hallway. Twinkletoes trailed us reluctantly. No doubt this was the worst job he’d ever been on.

  “I think that’s what we’re going to have to do,” I said. Mencken was a private facility, probably paid for by Barclay’s mother, and it had occurred to me to get ahold of her next. With Barclay gone, the infestation might still continue in the building, but at least there would be no more dead animals. “Tomorrow I’ll check with them, see if they’ve got room for him. I agree, this situation is out of control.”

  And just like that, as I said “out of control” an enormous crash came from the kitchen. Instantly I knew it was the demon, angry at having been enclosed inside the stinky cubicle, everyone ignoring it. The phenomenon had now moved to the kitchen, and the crash sounded like an appliance falling over or even a wall caving in. An aftermath of dull thuds reverberated through the flooring, and King, Lily, Flannery, and I were the first to break into a run.

  “Fuck!” cried Lily. “I have a feeling I know what that is.”

  Apparently Flannery did too. “How did the fridge tip over? We had it all wedged perfectly.”

  Their knowing gave them extra energy, and Lily and Flannery were the first in the kitchen. I ran to a stop against Thalhammer’s back, practically knocking him on his face. He’d stopped at the doorway and clung to it, speechless. Next to me, Twinkletoes smeared his hair out of his face, his jaw slung low. King was the only one to shove on past and take a stroll around the animated refrigerator—something I should’ve taken point in.

  I’d seen plenty of appliances upended. Couches flung upside-down on staircases. Tables overturned with chairs stacked atop them. Even heavy oak roll top desks flung on their sides, contents spilling out. But never, ever had I seen a fridge with a body stuffed in it fall over.

  I nudged my way past Thalhammer and Twinkletoes. Judging from the Gaelic runes on exposed body parts that were still legible, this was the infamous Crusty, shot down in the prime of life at The Happy Hour. His stupid snapback was still on his head, but apparently his shiny yellow-orange, marbled torso had bloated so heavily it had rent the fabric of his t-shirt. He lay crumbled on the linoleum, leathery hips and elbows pointing every which way.

  The worst was his chest, his eye sockets, his gaping mouth. Everything was covered in crawling maggots. Where his skin had split down the middle of his torso, maggots partied. In his open mouth, in his rapidly decaying eye sockets, maggots swarmed. Apparently when his body
had hit the floor it had released some noxious gases, sulfur almost as bad as the stench in Barclay’s room. Dark fluid pooled around the mangled Crusty. All in all, in my career it was one of the most gag-inducing sights and stenches ever.

  I was surprised that King squatted next to the thing. Did truck drivers see lots of dead bodies? I’d guess that a priest saw more dead flesh.

  “Eyew, Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé !” cried Lily, calling on the name of a Diné god. “Who the hell forgot to plug the fridge back in?”

  King looked up to Flannery, the obvious guilty party. “You guys should’ve buried him in the desert. Or you can get a bargain basement cremation for about $3,000. Comes with an ugly box, but it’s sturdy cardboard. Then you could scatter the ashes somewhere he liked to go.”

  Thalhammer paced around the body, his cowboy boots pointy, his nose hooked. He looked thoroughly disgusted. “I fucking never. I just fucking never. I’ve been eating out of that fridge, you fucking he/she!”

  Finn took up his boss’ cry. “This is the last fucking straw, Flannery! We’re out of here. Come with us to that empty sporting goods shop. We can play table tennis all day.” And he vanished down the hall.

  Thalhammer continued, “Have to say I agree with him. I mean, look, has he been dead long enough to do this damage? Look at his fucking chest cavity, right there, where all those worms are.”

  King got to his feet long enough to grab a wooden spoon from the counter. I was compelled to squat down next to King as he made a wall of the spoon handle and bulldozed a city of larvae away from the center of the chest.

  “Oo, God,” King whispered. “This is definitely a knife wound.”

  Lily squatted down too. “He didn’t have that when we stuffed him in the fridge.” Taking a switchblade from her cut pocket, with the tip she peeled back the edge of the cut flap. The autopsy-type wound went from poor Crusty’s clavicle down to his navel, the skin taut, purple-lemon and leathery.