Posted by Barbanne on September 25, 2001 at 16:00:17:
GUNSHOT WOUND
I was just getting into the shower when the doorbell rang.
Softly.
Melodic chimes.
Who could it be?
My last "client" had left twenty minutes ago. I wasn't expecting anyone else. Not tonight.
Damn!
I had had two Vice Squad guys on my case earlier that day. Trying to make me roll over and help them nail the outcall sex game honchos. My bosses.
Maybe it was them.
I was naked.
Slipped into a satin robe and loosely belted it and went to the door.
Peered through the eyepiece.
Couldn't see anyone even though the outside bug light was on.
I know. It was probably a private client. Not through the bosses. One I wouldn't have to share with anyone else.
I slipped the chain and popped the door.
"Oh no," I thought.
It was the last thing I ever thought.
The bullet hit me just under the left breast and missed ribs, backbone and every other hard thing. Just mushed my vitals and went straight out my back.
Hit by a silenced forty five, steel capped, my body jerked back violently and my robe flew open and slid down until it snagged on my elbows.
Dead from the second the gun went pphhtt my body crashed onto the floor with a resounding thump.
Robe spread around and under me, eyes wide and shocked, glazing to unfocussed, mouth gaping, I lay semi nude and slain, bleeding onto my own living room carpet. My legs blocked the door swing. He pushed it open rucking them aside and came in. He grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me clear of the door.
He moved through my apartment oblivious of my corpse lying beside the front door. He took nothing, touched little and showed no interest in my almost fully revealed, barely clad body.
And then he was gone.
Silence.
The lights shone down on my naked deadness.
A snake of thick red blood slid down inside my ribcage and around my tummy and pooled in the valley of my groin where my thigh met my hip. It spilled over and stained the thatch of brown pubic hair and the lips of the pussy nestling within. A parody of a woman's own menstrual bleeding.
The neighbour two doors away had heard a thump when I fell down dead and now came tentatively, nervously and with trepidation to investigate. She called my name but I was beyond hearing, beyond responding. She found the door ajar and pushed it open and saw my naked legs. She pushed in a little more and saw the blood. Terrified she ran back to her own apartment and called triple zero.
*
Strobing red and blue lights lit the car park.
Two cruisers stood there as the patrolmen searched my apartment. Satisfied that there was no one else inside and convinced that I was well beyond needing medics they summoned the mob.
Detectives, crime scene investigators and medical examiner's people crowded into my tiny living room and went about the business of determining how I came to be lying there naked and dead.
It was the death of my dreams.
I lay posed on my back with only my lower arms covered by the ruched sleeves of my robe, with my breasts upthrust, splayed cheekily across my chest, nipples pointy, looking aroused and my pussy wet, glistening and open, gaping for all the world to see while a room full of men and women went about their tasks.
I was a model for death.
A dead "model."
My body was photographed from every possible angle.
Never in the cheap cheesy world in which I had lived had I had so much film exposed in one session, capturing my flesh. And I held only one pose throughout.
Down and dead!
At the time of my death I was calling myself Larraine. That's Larraine with an "a".
That's the name by which my neighbour knew me.
That's the name by which the cops referred to me.
Of course they found my other documents, my cards, my passports my many aliases and they knew they would have to work hard to find out who truly lay dead at their feet.
Some spent time with me.
The photographer, the medical examiners and the detectives. Others fingerprinted my whole apartment, others examined the hole in the plasterboard where the slug that ended it all for me had finally lodged.
A roomful of busy people.
And I was the focus. The centrepiece of all attention. I was measured, outlined, touched and palpated and suffered the indignity of havin a thermometer stuck into my ass.
When they were finally satisfied that they knew all of the secrets I held I was bagged and removed from the scene.
But my dream death was not yet finished with.
*
Buck naked on the cold steel tray of the mortuary table I was photographed and then x-rayed, and then other evidentiary work was recorded. Turned on my side with a thin dowel inserted through my body from entry wound to exit wound showing the trajectory of the fatal shot I looked like some skewered warrior woman from a bygone age. One of the mortuary photographic assistants had a sideline going and within a week coloured images of my nude corpse would appear all over the internet.
The pathologists recorded his report.
A one and a half centimetre entry tear and a one and three quarter centimetre exit tear. Ventricles pulped as it ripped through. Death was instantaneous resulting in very little edema. The projectile shock was enormous. The impact was prodigious enough to burst capilliaries in my eyes. He found evidence of pre mortem sex and could tell the detectives that I had eaten a garden salad with pine nuts only hours before dying.
He found no evidence of strangulation or blunt force trauma nor maiming or torture. He did find light abrasions on my shoulders where I had been dragged backward to clear the door.
He carved open my body and removed my organs and weighed and sliced them and sent specimens for tox screening. He folded down my face and sawed off the top of my skull and inspected my brain and removed that too.
With his assistant's help they reassembled what was left of me, crudely stitched my rent flesh together again and slid me inside a refrigerated cabinet to await what came next.
All of this intense study of my body at the scene and then under harshly bright lights laid out on stainless steel and then inside me established only one thing.
A gunshot wound finished it all for me.
*
Who fired it and why was the mystery they had now to unravel.