Posted by critmk on January 09, 2002 at 07:28:20:
The Scamming Stewardess
A Story by critmk
Chapter 3: Suspicion in Chicago, Death in L.A.
Bettina noted the room – 827 – that Leona had entered. Then she settled on a sofa near the elevator to wait for her to come out.
Her friend and colleague was up to something. Maybe it was a love affair. More likely, it was some sort of scam. Bettina had flown with Leona for four years. She knew how the senior stew loved to take chances and play angles – smuggling, information trading, sexual blackmail.
She’d always played by the rules and welcomed the rest of her Lissair luxury charter crew into her games. But in the last month, Leona had become distant and secretive.
She often crept off without a word, and had little to do with her coworkers and friends. Bettina was worried. She was also curious, miffed, and greedy. If a scam was going on, she wanted in. Beyond that, scamming was part of the job at Lissair; Lissa’s charter line had a cut coming. If Bettina caught Leona at a grift off the books and told Lissa about it, she’d be in for a bonus and special treatment. She might even replace Leona as crew leader.
That’s why she followed Leona to the hotel in Chicago, and that’s why she would soon bring another colleague, Sandi, in to help keep tabs on Leona.
What could be happening behind the door to 827? Leona had been in there for almost two hours. And that schoolgirl who was pulled into the room? What the hell was that about?
When the door opened, at last, Bettina ducked into the ice machine closet. She was even more confused and intrigued when Leona passed the doorway in ill-fitting sandals and an outfit that just wasn’t her style. She thought about rushing her right there and insisting on an explanation, but Leona was in the elevator and on the way down before Bettina made up her mind to act.
Instead, she crept up to 827. With her heart pounding, she put her ear to the door; noises, but no voices.
Within, Dominic was dragging the bodies of Carolyn and Bitsy into the bathroom and dumping them into the tub. He covered them with water and poured in a vial of crystals. The water immediately began to bubble and flesh and bone to dissolve. It would take the cops days to determine what – and months after that to determine who -- was in the tub. It took Dominic 15 minutes to sweep prints, spray a chemical to render the blood on the sofa and carpet forensically useless, and bag up all identifying traces of the two women and their killers.
Bettina had screwed up her courage and was about to knock on the door when she heard the deadbolt turn. She lost her nerve and hustled down to 832. She pretended to fumble for a key card as Dominic walked by.
He got halfway to the elevator, stopped abruptly, and turned. He stared at Bettina for a long moment. She continued to fumble, more and more self-consciously. She avoided meeting the eyes of the powerfully built, bearded man. She was grateful when both elevators opened at once and a noisy troupe of girl scouts and their exasperated handlers burst into the corridor.
Dominic walked slowly to the elevator. The door began to close, and Bettina relaxed and let her guard down. But a strong hand stopped the door a foot short of closing. Dominic’s eyes drilled into Bettina; this time, Bettina couldn’t resist his gaze. Her knees went weak when he made a finger gun, smiled and pulled the trigger. Then the door closed and he was gone.
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At 7 p.m. the next day, Dominic parked his nondescript white rental van half a block from a three-story warehouse in L.A. He cased the place, especially noting the exits. He walked around back, to a small, broken-up asphalt parking lot between the building and a double set of railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks was the barely moist cement ditch known as the Los Angeles River.
He rolled an empty 55-gallon drum to the building and pulled himself onto the fire escape. Dominic picked the lock on a third-floor door and eased into the semidarkness.
He’d hoped to have the place to himself, so he could get to know the layout and set up a good perch from which to assassinate anyone who showed up for the meeting with the deceased Bitsy.
No such luck.
Light shone through an open door to his right. He could hear the click of high heels on the cement floor and three female voices.
Racks of feminine clothing hid the women from his view. As he got closer, he took in the gist of the conversation. Two were freelance models; the other was PR for Asian Couture, Inc. They were selecting and trying on outfits for a charity fashion show at the Japan America Center a week later.
“We have a dressing room over there, in the far corner,” said the PR woman, in a mature voice.
“It’s just us,” a younger voice answered. “It’ll be faster if we change right here.”
A moment later, he heard the older woman exclaim about one of the models’ lack of underwear. A burst of giggling from the three of them followed.
Dominic fingered the silenced automatic strapped to his chest. A larger, heavier machine pistol was at his right hip. The stainless steel dagger he’d used on Carolyn the day before was in a sheath at his left hip, and a pair of switchblades were in his inside jacket pocket.
He was just one row of clothing racks from the women, now, crouched low and moving without a sound on his soft soles. Through the gap beneath the hanging dresses, he saw clothing strewn about the floor. He also saw white, strappy platform high heels stepping into a white tube dress, which was then pulled up and out of his vision. Black two-strap high-heeled sandals were on the otherwise naked feet of the other model. The brown-and-white spectator pumps of the PR woman clicked toward Dominic. He drew the automatic and rose into firing position. She moved down the rack, separating identical cocktail dresses to check sizes.
“This red number will look sensational on you… Let’s see, you’re a three, aren’t you?”
Without a sound, Dominic sidestepped left, to the center of a section of rack marked 3. Hangers slid noisily on the steel rod. The dresses separated, revealing a plump golden blonde in her late 30s. A thin gold chain enhanced her neck. Her tight white blouse was open to her cleavage; a bit of leopard-print bra was in view. Her hair was up, but for bangs and hanks that fell fetchingly to her cheeks. Her eyes were large and blue-green, her make-up sunny-bright. Imagine a Barbie doll 15 years older and 20 pounds heavier.
The last thing she expected to find when she pushed those dresses apart was a black silencer inches from her cute nose. She gasped, then froze. She was vaguely aware of a voice behind her (“Delia – is something wrong?”).
She felt a burning in the hollow of her throat and hot liquid coursing down between her breasts. The room was spinning and she felt herself fall backwards, into blackness. Delia landed hard on her fleshy butt on the cement floor. She knew that her black leather skirt and come up, to show her garters and bare thighs above her tan, office-girl stockings. She got her hands on the floor and somehow stayed in a sitting position, with her knees up. Delia didn’t want to fall into the black pit she imagined to be behind her.
The model was about 25, with long black hair and delicate features. Her 34C breasts hung heavily on her long, slender frame. She had just enough muscle definition; she looked sensual and supple.
She stood in shock for a moment as her white dress turned crimson around the knife stuck in her gut. The girl dropped precipitously onto her right side; blood streamed from the right corner of her small mouth when she hit the floor. The point of the steel blade protruded an inch from her lower back. She struggled to crawl forward. She went no place, but her skirt rose prettily as she writhed.
The first model had a sweet, innocent look. The second, with her disorderly brown hair falling over her bare shoulders, was saucier. She was thinner, and bigger on top and bottom. Her skintight white mini-dress gathered her tits and showed a slit of cleavage. A white choker, in the same stretch cotton as the dress, was taut around her throat. An SEV logo was emblazoned across her chest and neck. It was a “race-girl” outfit, something that Asian Couture was test-marketing in California.
She spun-jerked violently when Dominic’s first shot caught her just beneath the left nipple. With each subsequent shot – through the choker, inside the left hip, in the center of the belly, in the right thigh and in the cleavage – the 20-year-old model let out an “unh.” She set the clothes on the rack behind her to rocking as she fell into and bounced off them with each bullet. After two shots, only the force of the bullets kept her upright. When Dominic knew she was dead on her feet, he stopped firing and let her fall to her knees and flop forward, revealing the exit wounds in her back. A good deal of blood pooled beneath her.
The first model, the one he’d stabbed, still stirred. Delia, the PR woman, was still sitting, blowing blood bubbles in a pointless and unintelligible effort to plead for her life.
Dominic pulled the slip dress off the stabbed model, who wore nothing underneath. He knelt next to her and fondled her naked tits. Though they were flattened some because she was on her back, they still looked and felt substantial. He gently licked and bit her nipples; her areole puffed up, as some women’s do.
He yanked the knife from her belly, causing a spasm and releasing a surge of blood, which spread quickly on the floor around her ass and lower back. He straddled her face and brought the needle-sharp point of the heavy knife to rest on the center of her left nipple. She moaned when it first cut in, then bucked violently as Dominic drove it in hard and through with two hands. His crotch pinned down her head. The convulsive energy of her dying moment concentrated in an extreme arching of the back and in quaking that went on for a full 15 seconds.
Dominic pulled out his penis and began to masturbate on the dead girl’s exquisitely soft face. When he was close to coming, he slipped it into her mouth and drew his automatic. He shot Delia, who was six feet away, in the dark brown top of her right stocking, in the bare flesh above it, and in the side, through her snug white blouse. He came as a final, fatal wound opened on the outer bulge of Delia’s right breast. He sighed deeply, wiped his penis on the dead Japanese girl’s face, and zipped up.
He pulled the dagger from her tit, cleaned it on her discarded dress and returned it to its sheath. As he reloaded the automatic, he took pleasure in the scene; nothing like a triple-honey murder to make his day. He gave each girl in turn a gentle nudge with his foot, just to see their tits jiggle. He felt good. He hoped that a few more women were working late this night at Asian Couture. They would keep him amused until his real targets arrived at 11 p.m.
It was 8:30. The night was young.