Lucinda woke first in the morning. The men still lay cuddled against her, their hands on her breasts. She lifted them off gently and slid down to the foot of the bed. She got up and looked at where she had lain. A yellow crust of semen had hardened on the sheet. She went into the bathroom, looked for a clean towel, but saw only a used one hanging on a rack on the wall. She smelled it. It was a little musky, but not too b...
Saturday morning, Lucinda woke to sunlight slicing into the bedroom around the slats in the blinds. It looked like rays from a film projector, and for a moment she thought she was dreaming, in a movie being projected onto the bedroom walls. She heard the shower running and looked over to Bob’s side of the bed. He was gone. Good. She didn’t want to see him first thing this morning. She put on gray fleece pants and a white...
Clue number one: Furtive, whispered conversations on his cell phone over the past three weeks, some of them very late at night. Clue number two: A box of six pink French-tickler condoms she’d found buried in his underwear drawer, beneath his novelty boxers, two days ago. Lucinda hadn’t been snooping. She just couldn’t remember if she’d bought Bob Fourth of July boxer shorts before. With Independence Day coming up in a few...
It sounded easy, but wait till I tell you. Me and Jake O’Leary had just finished up a short-time bid for a bad-check beef at Warm Springs, a min-security bucket in Carson City, and through some scams we’d scraped together close to three thousand bucks, but we needed seven thou to buy into a major credit-card grift. We brainstormed and cogitated, trying to think of a way to top up our funds, and then Jake mentioned Benny L...
“Oh please, sir, not tonight.” James Abernathy had raised the girl’s skirts and petticoats to her waist and was about to push her onto the bed she had just folded down at the House of the Seven Gables. “Why not?” he said. “It’s the hanging, sir, up on Gallows Hill. It’s got me upset.” Until that day Abernathy hadn’t given much thought to the accusations being hurled about by the Reverend Samuel Parris and other of the res...
“So, Mr. and Mrs. Flatberry…” Darnell Holmes eyed the mismatched white couple sitting across the desk from him. “How may I help you?” The gaunt fiftyish-looking man to his right, dressed in a red plaid blazer and wearing thick bifocals, said, “Well, Dr. Holmes…” He paused and blinked at Darnell through half-inch glass. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?” “That is correct,” Darnell said. “I hold a Ph.D. in psychology from USC....
