Posted by critmk on February 27, 2002 at 08:48:08:
The Scamming Stewardess
Chapter 23: Night, Fire and Smoke (conclusion)
“What? No frantic ‘What have you done with my Leona?’ Don’t you want to know what I’ve done with her?”
“Well, Linda, I’m sure that you’ll want to tell me all about it,” Dominic said coolly, despite the steel at his throat and the boiling anger in his gut.
“Drop those cute little toy guns and get into the office.” She pulled off the luxuriant wig of shoulder-length hair that made her look so much like Leona and waved him through the door. He had to step over Nina’s legs. Linda roughly threw Paola’s body out of the desk chair to the floor and commanded Dominic to sit down. She perched on the desk in front of him – close, but not close enough for him to strike. Linda’s legs were brazenly open, giving Dominic an upskirt look at her naked pussy. With effort, he kept his eyes locked onto hers.
Linda was bent on psychological torture. Dominic was determined not so much to resist as to let it pass with grace, as a matador lets a raging bull pass.
“Maybe I’ve already killed Leona,” she needled. “Maybe I shoved this 9mm up her ass and pulled the trigger.”
He stayed calm. “I don’t think so. I’m alive right now because you’re so angry that you want me to watch the woman I love die. And I believe you want to tell us about all you’ve been through since that day in the resort in Thailand.”
Dominic was dead-on right. His accuracy disarmed Linda for a moment. She wasn’t sure what to say next; a low moan from the next room filled the conversational gap.
“That would be your lover, now, the one who tried to shoot me in the back in Thailand. GET IN HERE, YOU BITCH!”
It took a while for Leona to get to her feet. Her head hurt terribly from the knockout blow that Linda had laid across the left side of her forehead. A trickle of blood made its way over her cheekbone.
She finally staggered in. For all the gravity of the situation, Dominic couldn’t help being turned on by the sight of her in high black pumps, sheer crotchless pantyhose that laid bare her bikini-shaved pussy and a black push-up bra.
“Nice outfit, slut,” Linda said, as she rose and approached Leona entered the room slowly, using walls and furniture for support. Dominic caught her when Linda shoved her hard his way, then rose and gently put her in his chair.
“Dominic, I’m sorry, the alarms didn’t go off, I never knew she was here until the girls were dead and a gun was in my face,” Leona whimpered.
“Shut up!” Linda smacked her hard. Dominic could not suppress a flash of anger in his eyes, but he did nothing. The time wasn’t right.
“It’s time for me to talk and you two to listen,” Linda said, quivering with anger. “First, I want you to know how I outsmarted you back in Thailand.”
Linda’s Story
She was manic in her delivery. Sometimes she went into a honeyed, Southern mock innocence. Sometimes she paced haughtily about the room, reveling in the revenge she was about to take. Sometimes, she seemed hurt – even brokenhearted. Dominic almost laughed when he realized that she was in love with him. Advantage lay in that.
“I was on the balcony, on the second floor, killing some little twat in a white dress -- Kelly, I think she was -- when I saw you. ‘Why whatever could they be up to? Why ever would they need a sniper rifle?’ Then I saw you pointing toward the pool – where I was supposed to go after I finished with the girls in the rooms.
“I didn’t want to believe that you’d kill me, Dominic, not after all I’d done for you – after I’d become a murderer for you. I’m younger than Leona, I have a better body and bigger tits, I love killing as much as she does and I’m as good at it as she is. And Dominic, I love you as much as she does.”
She leaned forward as if to kiss him, and Dominic brightened inside: Here was an opening! But she pulled back; she knew that if she got too close or let her guard down, he’d kill her. She got a grip on her emotions and went on.
“It hurt so much to think that you would let her kill me. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to trust you, to walk out to that pool with my chest out, according to plan, and go on to a new life. Maybe there would be three of us at first, but eventually you’d see that I was better for you, and Leona would die. I guess it will turn out that way.” She put the gun against the bulge of left tit above Leona’s bra – and laughed when Dominic gave a start. “But not yet,” she said. “Not just yet.
“I was smart and I was lucky. After I saw Leona set up with the rifle on the balcony, I went downstairs to kill the last three girls. One of them happened to be a brunet about the right height. She was a little too young, maybe, and her tits weren’t as big as mine, but dressed in Leona’s uniform and being where I was supposed to be and at a distance from you, I thought she might fool you. I made her strip off her red swimsuit and put on the stew uniform you’d given to me. I told her that I didn’t really want to murder her friends, I had to because I was a hostage and being forced to. I told her that her only chance to come out of it alive was to pretend to be me and try, later, to grab some car keys and get out of there. She bought it.”
“It was Jane,” Leona said, vacantly. “I shot Jane in the back and she fell into the pool. When I thought I was killing Linda.”
“I don’t give a fuck what her name was,” Linda said. “It tore my heart out, almost like I was being shot myself, when she took those slugs in the back and fell into the pool. When she died, there was no way to doubt that you loved Leona and not me, and that you’d sent her to kill me.”
Sudden tears rolled down Linda’s cheeks. She wiped them away roughly and shook off her disgust at her own weakness.
“I shot a few holes in this woman’s – Jane’s -- swimsuit. Two other dead girls were in the room – a black girl in a gold bikini and some stupid bleached-blonde teen. I dipped the bullet holes in the swimsuit into their wounds to make them bloody, and then I put it on. I squeezed a pool of blood from their bodies onto the floor near the bathroom and lay down in it, with my head in the bathroom so my face couldn’t be seen. I lay there, in a pool of blood with two dead bitches draped over me, for hours. It was horrible, but I knew that you’d be making the rounds, making sure that everyone was dead.
“Can you imagine, Leona, what it was like when, after all that waiting, I heard you walk into the room? When I heard the soft pop of the silencer, and felt that black girl’s body and then the blonde’s jump and jerk against me? Think about what it was like to lie there, knowing you were going to put a bullet in me, wondering where it would hit, if it would kill me. The worst thing was that I couldn’t move, that I had to play dead no matter how scared I was or how much it hurt.
“That bullet ripped through my calf – it was like a red-hot poker going through me! I wanted to scream, I wanted to writhe, and most of all I wanted to murder you. But I couldn’t and I didn’t. I just lay there, as if I were dead. For a long, long time.”
She pointed her 9mm to a round white scar, the size of a quarter, on her leg.
“I could have had plastic surgery on that – it could be gone completely. I kept that scar to remind me of your betrayal.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“Hours later, I crawled into the tub and showered off the blood, my own and the other girls. The bullet hurt like hell, but it turned out that it didn’t do much damage. I bandaged it and limped around the resort, taking all the cash I could find, almost $40,000. It was enough to get me out of the country and into my new career.”
“Let me guess – you’re a social worker now.”
“Ha ha, Dom. You have such a great sense of humor.
“I’m a killer. A murderer and a thief. I befriend women, I kill them and I take their money. The men I fuck, well, I keep these little vials of sperm. I kill some bitch, I take what I want, I rip her clothes and smear a little cum on her ass, on her mouth, in her pussy. Some guy gets arrested, and I’m long gone.
“But I think of that as my second job. My main one has been hunting for you two. And here we all are, together again. Isn’t it lovely? Come on, Leona – ISN’T IT LOVELY! SAY IT’S LOVELY!”
Instead, Leona spit in Linda’s face, which was very near to hers.
“OK…ok… have it that way.
“Dominic, I still think that somewhere inside you know I’m better for you than she is. I’ll give you one last chance to show it. Take off your clothes.”
Dominic didn’t like the drift of this, but had no choice.
“I want you to make love to me from behind while she watches. I’ll keep my gun on her while you do. If you try anything, I’ll kill her. Leona, if you try to run, I’ll kill you before you’ve gone a step.”
She smiled seductively at Dominic and then slowly began to strip. The five-minute show ended with the woman completely naked. She was 45, tough, muscular and, he had to admit, sexy.
She rubbed her already moist labia with her left hand and then with the barrel of her gun, until the metal glistened with her juices. She raised the dripping weapon and aimed at Dominic’s penis.
“Now. I want you to fuck me now.”
He thought for a long moment. He thought tactically; lovemaking would bring him close to Linda, and he might overpower her. But she’d have a gun on Leona, and probably could get off a shot before he could finish her. He had a hunch that Linda planned to murder Leona while he was fucking her. In the end, he went with his instincts and emotions. No way he was going to give this bitch the satisfaction. He’d rather die.
“No.”
“Dominic!” Leona gasped. “Think, Dom! Stay alive!”
Linda’s face reddened and contorted with a new level of rage. “You bastard! You prick!” she shrieked. “Then I’ll kill you first and make that slut of yours watch.”
She whipped the gun into firing position straight at his heart. He looked at Leona and said, quietly, “Goodbye. I love you.”
This stoked Linda’s anger even further and she let out an insane howl. Dominic closed his eyes and was ready to accept death. The 9mm roared once, twice.
He felt no impact. He opened his eyes, to see Leona between him and Linda’s gun, grasping his assailant’s shooting arm. Blood streamed from exit wounds the size of half-dollars in her back. One was just below the clasp of her bra strap; the other was inside her left shoulder blade.
Leona was sagging – her knees were buckling and her face had fallen forward onto Linda’s left breast – but she maintained her grip on her killer’s forearm long enough for Dominic to spring forward and put a neat right cross onto Linda’s jaw. He twisted the gun from her hand as she fell, semi-conscious, to the floor.
Leona was on her knees, clinging to Dominic’s waist. When he leveled the gun at Linda with the intention of emptying it into her, Leona looked up with big brown eyes at once loving and pleading.
“Wait,” she said, with effort. “Make love to me… kill her while you make love to me… one last time.”
He looked at the bullet holes in her left breast and solar plexus and knew that she would die within minutes. He picked her up and cradled her tenderly in his arms, then sat down in the desk chair. He could feel her encroaching weakness as he arranged her in his lap, so that they both faced Linda, who was groggily trying to raise her head from the floor.
Dominic gently pressed his erect penis into Leona from behind. Despite her pain and injury, she let out a little moan of pleasure, which turned into a purr as he massaged her clitoris with his right hand. His left would be sufficient, at this close range, for shooting Linda.
Their last victim together lay opposite them with her legs open. “Put the first one up her pussy,” Leona said, through the thin stream of blood issuing over the center of her lower lip. Dominic did so, and he felt his lover shudder with combined sexual delight and death throes as Linda screamed and went into violent spasm.
The next shot blew off her right nipple, the third ripped open her navel, and the final four shattered her heart after ripping through the undersides of each breast, two and two.
Leona died a few seconds after Linda, with a long sigh that coincided with her last mortal sensation, that of filling with the warm liquid of the man she loved.
Dominic, still naked, stood at the end of the pier. The night was soft, warm, clear and moonlit. The calm, black sea glittered with reflected starlight.
He felt no grief. No love. Nothing.
He stood for hours, without moving or even thinking. Just before 3 a.m., history and habit took over. He dressed and unlocked the secret room in the boathouse and withdrew the chemicals he would need. He blended them in memorized proportion. He brought five pounds of the compound and five gallons of kerosene to the office. He toured the house, gathering all relevant papers and both computers; it took about 20 minutes to pile everything in the office.
He casually threw the bodies of Nina, Paola, Mariette and Linda onto the pile. He hesitated when he came to Leona, but refused to allow emotion to overtake him. He did not, however, fight it off. He released it, without effort, as if it were a bird caught in an attic. There was no sense holding onto it. Leona was just another dead woman. He dragged her roughly by one arm across the floor and threw her atop the rest.
He emptied the kerosene over the pile and spread his chemical mix over that. The burn would be so hot that not even bones or teeth would remain. Ashes to ashes.
He set a 10-minute fuse and walked calmly to his fast, trim cruiser -- the one he always kept fueled and laden with water, food, arms and money – and cast off.
He was two miles offshore when the fire started. The purifying, all-consuming white fire burned with no explosion. A column of smoke, ghostly gray in the moonlight, rose like a lonely sentinel in the black sky.
Dominic never saw it. He never looked back. – his gaze was ahead, to the open Atlantic.
After a time, he punched a string of numbers into his special phone.
“Ian,” he said. “I’ll take that office hit job. Things have changed. Everything’s changed.”
The END