Savage Sins: The Handyman, Episode III by Vincent Zandri (1)

“Fuck me hard,” she insisted, her voice simultaneously a whisper and a scream. “Fuck me like you want to kill me, Vic.”

We stood upright in the back storeroom of a New York City bookstore surrounded by boxes of my new novel along with stacks of other hard and soft cover editions from the bigshot writers like Stephen King, Lee Child, and James Patterson. We had both managed to be alone just minutes before the official signing started under the guise of having to use the toilet which was located on the opposite end of the storeroom.

Her words sent a chill up my backbone and caused me to stop. When I did, she begged me to keep going.

“Why would I want to kill you, Stel? Why would you say that?”

“Just make it hurt,” she ordered.

My mind was spinning with sensations and images. Stella’s perfect ass, the smell of her sex, the feel of my cock inside her, the sheen of sweat forming on my skin. But then, there were the boxes of my first novel set on the floor, the cacophony of voices outside this hollow wood door reminding me why we were there.

We had quite the turnout waiting for us in the other room, especially for a writer who, just a few months ago, couldn’t even afford to pay the phone bill. People had even lined up outside on the street. The weather had been getting cold now that late Fall had arrived. It was rainy and nasty out, and the wind blew off the river and the water that surrounded the Battery like an icy blue devil.

But still, they came, and for what? To see me, the new overnight literary sensation.

Twenty years of overnights that is.

The fans. The serial readers. The men, women, and even kids who had no business reading the graphic words and images I filled my first novel, Savage Sins, with. Overly descriptive words about murder, about blood and savage lust. About sex and booze and torment. Words that cut like a knife.

My editor, Jake—a stocky, balding, forty-something man who loved his jazz—said he’d never before worked up a sweat like he had when he first read Savage Sins. It was raw, it was fiery, it was incendiary, it was pornographic, it was over the top. It was even off the rails. But most of all, Savage Sins was filled with more than just words on a page. It was art in motion. But it was also reality. It was a fresh alternative to the usual white bread, snowflake, politically correct mass market shit that had been forced down the throats of readers who spent their weekend in Barnes and Nobles bookstores from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon and everywhere in between. In other words, the publisher took a gamble on its publication, and the gamble was paying off.

“You’ve managed to do something extremely rare, Vic,” he’d said to me from across his desk inside his fifteenth-floor publishing office in the Times Square’s Bertelsmann Building.  “You’ve managed to make the reader feel like he has committed murder himself . . . violent murder. Like he has bedded those women. Like he has personally stalked his prey in the dark of night.” He breathed in, lit a cigarette, exhaled a puff of blue smoke. “Don’t you see, Vic? You’ve done something remarkable. Something not seen since Hemingway’s early work. Or even Bukowski. You’re not entertaining people. You’re injecting memories into their brains. Memories of acts they never committed.” He shook his head, and against building regulations, smoked the shit out of his cigarette. “I’m having nightmares because of Savage Sins. Re-fucking-markable.”

So, here’s the really re-fucking-markable thing: they offered me an advance of one million dollars for three books. I had the material for two of them. It meant, of course, I would have to hunt down what I needed for a third. But then, I was still The Handyman, and I knew in my heart that an opportunity would come along. If not, I would hunt for one myself. I’d killed twice already, and truth be told, I was beginning to develop an appetite for it. That last bit is between you and me.

Again, there was the question of God and salvation when the time came for my own demise. But that didn’t seem to enter into the equation anymore. What mattered was that I was doing what I felt I’d been put on this earth to do. Accomplish what I was meant to accomplish, no matter what it took. No matter who died in the process. Wait, allow me to rephrase . . . no matter who deserved to die.

“Fuck me, Vic,” Stella begged, pulling me back from the thoughts that rattled around inside my skull like pebbles inside a jar. “Now. I need it. Fuck me like you want to punish me.”

I hiked her skirt all the way up, pulled her panties further down around her knees. I slapped her ass, hard. She winced and moaned. Then I pulled out my hard as steel cock and slipped it into her wetness. She was balancing herself with her left arm extended, her hand planted on a stack of boxes filled with Savage Sins. It felt appropriate somehow. Like there was more than just one man in the room fucking her. Stella used her other hand to massage her clit. Even though I couldn’t see it from my position planted behind her, I knew it had to be swelled and wet and pink. I knew she was rubbing and pinching it while I fucked her, and I knew she wanted to cum when I did and that we had to do it quick.

There was an entire bookstore filled with people waiting for me. Not just my new fans, but my publisher, my editor, my agent, the press. Jesus, the fucking press. I’d even heard a rumor that actor Mark Ruffalo might show up since his production company had snatched up the movie rights to The Handyman’s story for a cool half a million—in addition to my book advance. According to my agent, Jimmy, he wanted to play the role of Vance McKenna, the antagonist of “Sins.” He saw himself in the pages of the book like it had been written entirely with him in mind. He’d even said it had scared him when he read it.Made him feel like he was capable of murder in the first degree. It had been both unnerving and exciting at the same time. The film had to be made.

It was all a writer’s dream come true.

“Fuck me harder, you bastard,” Stella pleaded, once more forcing me to focus on the task at hand. “I’m going to cum.” Anyone who says your mind can’t be in two or three places at once is a fucking liar.

A knock sounded on the door. Someone was trying to turn the knob.

“Hello?” a man barked from the other side of the door. My agent. “Vic, bro. We got a room full of adoring fans wanting to catch of glimpse of their hero, man. Come on out.”

I went to speak, but I couldn’t seem to find my voice.

Another knock.

“Don’t stop,” Stella whispered forcefully.

“Be right there, Jim,” I said as casually as possible. “Just finishing up.”

Which of course, was the truth.

Stella let loose with a small scream, and I immediately slapped my hand over her mouth. She was climaxing, and so was I. It was like two titanic ships colliding in the middle of a choppy sea, and there was no way to stop it.

“Everything okay in there?” Jimmy pressed. “Sounded like a scream.”

“All good, Jim, bro,” I said, forcing the words from my mouth. “Be there in a New York sec.”

Slowly, carefully, I removed my hand from Stella’s mouth. Her hot breath spilled against my palm. I felt my heart beating. Pounding. She pulled her panties up, pushed down her skirt, stood. Turning, she ran her hands through her hair. She breathed in and out slowly a few times, trying her best to calm herself.

“We’d better go,” she whispered.

I couldn’t help but smile at her. “Was it good for you, baby?”

She gazed around the room.

“A bookstore storeroom,” she said. “Let’s just say it was a first.”

I tucked in my shirt, buckled my belt. “My public awaits,” I said, unlocking the door.

“Spare me,” she said. “Just remember, Vic, fame is a fickle mistress. And we both know it’s not you who’s famous. It’s The Handyman.”

Her words hit me in the stomach like a short, sharp jab. I knew what she meant by The Handyman being the one who deserved all the attention. After all, it was The Handyman who conducted all the research for Savage Sins. Research, as in murder.

“Thanks for the reminder,” I said.

I opened the door, walked out onto the bookstore floor like I owned the joint.

An hour into the signing and all the books were gone. The fans hadn’t gone anywhere, however, since I was scheduled to read aloud from Savage Sins. My agent made his way to the podium that was set before a long couch and table where I had signed copies of the novel. He tapped the microphone and smiled for the two or three members of the press in attendance, snapping photos and taking notes.

Jimmy wasn’t a tall guy, but he was thin, if not wiry, and sporting a full head of thick black hair. A Manhattan metrosexual, he was dressed in expensive charcoal slacks, purple button down, black patent leather shoes, red socks, and a green blazer with pink hanky stuffed in the breast pocket. He originally hailed from Alabama, but there wasn’t a hint of Southern good ole’ boy in his voice as if he’d somehow had it surgically removed. At the very least, he’d taken private lessons to do away with any evidence of his red neck past.

In the few years he’d resided in Manhattan’s West Village, not to mention his fourth-floor office on lower Broadway, he’d become a real New Yorker. He was a shark who would sell his own mother if she could bring him a hefty advance. He referred to me as “bro” like he was my best pal.

But I knew the score.

I knew how quickly he’d dump me on the side of the street like a pile of trash once I stopped selling. And trust me, I might be the toast of the town now, but in the not too distant future, all that would change. Someone else would take my place. Someone younger, someone fresh, someone trendier. Like Stella said, fame is fickle. Even if that fame truly belonged to The Handyman and not me. She didn’t have to tell me twice. But for now, I was going to enjoy the ride. I was also going to sock away the cash. Between the advances and my cuts of both Tara’s and Allison’s life insurance payouts, I’d never have to worry about making another cent for the rest of my life if I managed it right.

The Handyman was a Godsend.

Jimmy tapped the mic. Coming from the speakers set up on either side of the wide room, the taps sounded like short bursts from a .22 caliber automatic.

He smiled like only a New York literary agent can smile.

“Your attention please,” he said in a sort of falsetto sing-song voice. “When I first received the manuscript for Savage Sins, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I’d never heard of the author before, which was a good thing I suppose since it left me with few, if any, preconceived notions over what I was about to read. Sitting there behind the desk in my Broadway office, the only descriptor I could go with was the title. Savage Sins. A title I immediately fell in love with. Then, I started reading.” He shivered, rolled his eyes, glanced up at heaven as if attempting to convey a religious conversion experience to a group of born-again Christians. “To say this novel transfixed me is putting it ever so lightly. I was at once taken aback by its naked brutality, its realism, its dark humor, and its sadness. I also fell in love with the heroin and rooted for the anti-hero, even if he was a murderer. Not an easy task to pull off in a novel. Am I right, Jake?”

He shot a glance at my editor who was standing a few feet away from me in his baggy blue jeans and blue crewneck sweater. He was sporting a three-day growth and I could tell he was jonesin’ for a cigarette and maybe even a joint.

“Spot on, Jim,” he said, not without a smile. “Best first novel I’ve read since Mackey three years ago.”

Mackey, the name smacked me upside the head. In the span of three years, Mackey had come and gone from the New York literary scene when it was discovered that he couldn’t write anymore. Not without Stella by his side, that is. But that wasn’t for the here and now. I needed to push his memory from my head if I was going to get through this reading. 

“Few authors have gotten it right over the many decades of modern publishing,” my agent went on. “Hemingway comes to mind. So do Capote and Mailer. And yes, even Mackey. But now we have Victor Casey.” He held up the hardcover edition of Savage Sins, its glossy, mostly black cover adorned with a bare-chested man whose body looked Photoshopped, and a scantily clad long brunette-haired woman who bore a striking resemblance to Stella. “Here’s to many, many, sexy, violent, downright murderous, Casey novels to come. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my friend, and number one client, Victor Casey.”

The room exploded in cheers and hand claps. Stella set her hand on my leg, leaned into me.

“This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, Vic. I’m so proud of you.”

Her voice was quiet, barely a whisper. But it cut through the cacophony of clapping and even a few whistles. She kissed me on the cheek. In that quick kiss, I felt something from her that I’d never felt before. She was truly pulling for me. Despite everything she’d lived through for the past three years, the lack of money, the drinking, the inattention, the misery, she was truly pushing for me and my moment of fame. Didn’t matter that she knew exactly how I’d derived the material for my novel, or the material for the one I was working on now. Didn’t matter that it made her complicit in the crime, the expression on her face was one of confidence and love.

In the end, I guess Stella indeed was my muse. No wonder Mackey didn’t want her back so much as he needed her back if he was ever going to write anything that would sell again.

I got up from the couch, made my way across the floor to the podium. Jimmy held out his hand. I took it in mine, held it tightly. He took me by surprise when he pulled me into him, hugged me like I was his long-lost brother. Of course, I knew he would just assume dump his long-lost brother out on the street should he stop selling units. But that didn’t spoil the moment for me. Not by a long shot. This was my day, my moment, and I was going to enjoy every minute of it.

The bookstore went silent.

So silent you could make out the sound of the book’s spine cracking when I opened it to page one. Clearing my throat, I began to read.

“Sex,” I read, “it was always on my mind then . . . ”

Sex was also on my mind four months ago. But it wasn’t the only thing. When I emerged from Andrew Craig’s office, knowing the police and the EMTs were on their way, I didn’t come upon a solitary Allison in the kitchen. I came upon Stella sitting there with her.

The shock must have been plainly apparent on my face. Stella had smiled.

“Surprise, Vic,” she said.

My focus went from Stella to Allison and back to Stella again. Allison was wearing a similar, half smile, half smirk.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “What is this?”

My mind began spinning with the possibilities. Was Stella there to make sure the police arrested me not only for killing Andrew but also Tara’s husband? Had she known all along about my work as The Handyman? Was that the reason for her having met up with Tara the night before? Was Tara going to suddenly appear from somewhere? Were they all planning on testifying against me to put me away for the rest of my life? Or hell, maybe they were all conspiring so that I received the worst penalty possible.

The death penalty.

After all, Tara’s husband and Andrew Craig hadn’t died quite by accident. There was no manslaughter involved. Even murder in the second degree would be out. Their murders were planned and premeditated by a skilled killer. The Handyman.

“What’s going through that brilliant mind of yours, Vic?” Stella said as she stood from the table, revealing a short, tight, tan skirt, and gladiator sandals on her feet. She wore a low cut V-neck t-shirt and several silver necklaces that dangled over her cleavage. Her thick black hair was parted over her left eye, and it rested on her shoulders.

“Are you afraid we’re here to tattle on you to the cops?” she went on.

I swallowed something hard, dry, and bitter. There was a dead body lying on the floor in a puddle of his own crimson blood only a few doors down. Echoing in the distance, the distinct sound of police and EMT sirens. What it all meant was this: I had maybe a minute or less to get the hell out of that house, down to the main road where my car was parked.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“I’ve always known,” Stella said, leaning into me, so close I could feel her thick lips brushing against my ear. “I’ve always known everything.”

For the first time since I became The Handyman for Tara and for Allison, I was afraid. By keeping my ulterior life separate from Stella, I could not only control the outcomes of my actions, I could protect her. But now she knew everything. Or at least, she claimed to know everything. Certainly, she knew that I had a hand in killing Allison’s husband.

But then, why was she smiling? Why wasn’t she screaming at me, kicking me, clawing at me? Why wasn’t she calling me an animal? Accusing me of being a cold-blooded killer? A murderer? Why was she calmly standing there, her smooth face against my face, her thick lips pressed against my earlobe? It didn’t make sense to me.

Unless what she was telling me was the truth. She’d known about everything all along. Maybe she’d even helped get the ball rolling, so to speak. Maybe she’d arranged for Tara to knock on my front door all those months ago. Maybe she’d even supplied the big black spider with the orange belly. All things were possible.

She kissed my cheek, took a step back. The sirens grew louder. The police weren’t far. I had to move.

Stella’s wry grin matured into a wide smile. A beautiful smile.

“Stella,” I said, “what’s going on here?”

“You know perfectly well what’s going on,” she replied. “You kill for your art. Is there nothing more glamorous, Vic? Nothing more romantic?”

My eyes shifted to Allison. She was also smiling, seated at her kitchen table with all the calm coolness of a woman waiting for the tea kettle to boil. She gave me a slow wink with her exotic Asian eye. I didn’t know what was coming over me at that very moment. That very distressed moment. But I wanted them both right there, right then. The images sped through my overheated brain. I imagined Allison lying naked on the table, legs spread, trimmed pussy exposed, her pert breasts defying gravity. I pictured Stella bent over the table, her mouth on Allison’s pussy, my cock entering her from behind. It was all too much. I was growing dizzy with both lust and fear. I had to get the hell out of there. Do it now.

Sirens blared.

The police were making their way into the wooded neighborhood. They were behind the hill that Allison’s house rested upon.

“Downstairs,” Allison said, suddenly. “There’s a door that leads out back into the woods. Andrew used to go out there to smoke his pot. A path cuts through the brush and leads down to the road. I assume you parked there. If you’re careful, you can avoid the police and be on your way.”

“But you have to go . . . now, Vic,” Stella interjected. “Or bye bye book deal. Bye bye writing career. Bye bye life.”

I wanted them so badly. But on the other hand, Stella didn’t have to explain the situation to me twice. Every second I spent in that kitchen was one second too long. I turned, but I had no idea where the door to the basement was located.

“Second door on the left,” Allison offered. “The one between the bathroom and Andrew’s office.”

I went to it, opened it. It was dark.

“Light switch is on the wall to your right,” Allison added.

I flicked it on. Heart pumping in my sternum, I descended the wood staircase not knowing if I was walking into a trap or if the door that Allison promised me would be on the other side of this basement would, in fact, appear. When I came to the bottom of the stairs, I gazed across the concrete floor, past the many boxes, chairs, and junk stored down there. I saw the door—a set of double doors to be more precise. Doors that, when opened, could accommodate something as large as a small lawn tractor if need be.

Sirens were directly outside the house now, accompanied by the sound of cruisers making their way up the winding gravel drive. I went for the door, opened it. I faced a thick patch of woods. I saw a narrow footpath hewn out of its center. Closing the door behind me, I sprinted through the tall grass for the path. When I got there, I stopped and turned toward the top of the Craig driveway.

Cop cars pulled up. Allison Craig came running out of the house. She was screaming, hysterically. Stella was behind her, as though playing the part of the best friend trying her damnedest to console a grieving and shocked widow. They were doing such a convincing job, even I was having trouble believing the act wasn’t genuine. I didn’t know Allison very well, but I thought I knew everything there was to know about Stella. Looks like I was wrong.

Dead fucking wrong.

Turning, I made my way into the woods and down the hill to my car. The Handyman was free as a bird.

When the reading was completed, the bookstore erupted in applause. My eyes locked onto Stella. She offered me a wink. Then she brought her hand to her lips and blew me a kiss. While there was real affection in that kiss, I knew deep in my gut that something else was present too. The look in her eyes gave it all away. In my having read the first chapter in a fictional story about a woman who arranges for her husband to be killed in his own home while making it all look like an accident, Stella was reminding me that I wasn’t reading fiction at all.

Sure, the names and the people in Savage Sins were different. So was the fictional suburban neighborhood. But the events were almost identical. The writer who dies by falling from a basement stair tread that had been purposely loosened by a man who was sleeping with the writer’s wife wasn’t entirely fictional. The cheating man was me. He was The Handyman.

Stella was reminding me of that fact.

The bookstore may have been filled with people, but Stella seemed to take up all the oxygen. Up until that moment, I was aware that she knew every bit of truth behind Tara’s and Allison’s husband’s tragic deaths, but it never really hit me until the bookstore launch, that she might one day use her power over me to get something she desperately wanted. Naturally, I had no idea what that something would be, or when it would happen. But I knew it was going to come. I also knew if I didn’t manage to give her what she wanted, she could make life pretty damned difficult for me.

So, did Stella truly love me? Or did she want to hurt me?

Sure, she loved me. And I didn’t believe she wanted to hurt me all that much. She was my partner, after all. We hadn’t exchanged vows to love one another till death did us in. Not yet, anyway. But I’d given her no reason to hurt me. That is, no reason up until now. For the first time, we had money in the bank. I wasn’t using one hundred dollar bills for toilet paper yet or using Dom for bath water. But like I already pointed out, between my book advances, movie rights options, plus Tara’s and Allison’s life insurance payouts, we were well off for a long, long time. Maybe forever.

So, while my eyes locked on Stella, and while I somehow felt the weight of the kiss she was blowing in my direction, I couldn’t help but believe that no matter what she had in store for me—no matter what she might use against me—my life was looking pretty damned good. It was all easy street from this point out. The Handyman was driving, and all I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride.

Then the door to the bookstore opened and in walked a man with crazy in his eyes.

Mackey.

As soon as he came through the door, the place fell quiet, like it would at a public execution. All eyes shifted to the washed-up writer as he slowly began making his way through the crowd and stopping in front of where I was standing at the podium. The madness on his tight face was so apparent that people took a step or two back to make way for him without his having to ask them to.

He wore his usual ratty blazer over a stained white shirt and equally stained trousers. His thick black hair was unruly and sticking up on one side like he’d just rolled out of bed, or the local sewer. A set of eyeglasses were balanced on the tip of his nose, his face unshaven, his teeth grinding. I could smell the booze on his breath from five feet away.

He made a fist as he approached me. It felt and sounded like a sledgehammer when he slammed it against the podium. Correction. When he slammed it against my copy of Savage Sins.

He lifted the same hand, pointed his index finger at me. In my face.

“You son of a bitch,” he spat. “Wasn’t it enough that you stole my woman?”

“Good to see you too, Mackey,” I said. “I can see you’ve been taking care of yourself these days.”

My gaze shifted to Jake and Jimmy. Both of them had worked with Mackey and launched his own million-dollar book deal. Until the sales, the word count, and the author all went south faster than ISIS can bomb an airliner out of the sky. Word on the street has been that he only received a portion of the one million and he’d burned right through it without having paid his share to the IRS, essentially making him bankrupt. Each of them stared at their former client the same way a person might look at a bad car wreck along the side of the road. You don’t want to look at the bloody mess trapped inside the tangled metal, but then you can’t help it either. Human nature takes over. You just can’t look away.

Mackey’s bitter frown morphed into a sly smile.

“Don’t think I don’t know the truth about your new novel, and the follow up to come. Don’t think I don’t know how you came up with the stories. You didn’t make those plots up. You stole them. You murdered for them you son of a bitch. You muse stealing son of a bitch.”

I felt an ice-cold chill run up and down my spine. His eyes were wet, bloodshot, and wild like a rabid dog about to bite a chunk of flesh out of my leg. That he was out of his mind, there was no doubt. That he sincerely believed what he was telling me, I also had no doubt. And it scared the living hell out me.

“Go home, Mackey,” I said. “Sleep it off. You’re delusional.”

It was then I realized the podium mic was live. Everyone in the store could hear mine and Mackey’s voice. I shook my head as though to clear it, and I gazed at all the people in the room who were staring at us. Their faces were painted with confusion and shock. I could see the look in the eyes of the press. They all had their smartphones out, and they were videoing the encounter between Mackey and me. Recording our every word. They knew they were onto something. A story that could go viral, if only they could get to the bottom of it.

In my head, I saw the headline: “Washed Up Author Accuses Rival Author of Murder.” It would be a scandal that would rock the literary community at its very foundations. It would also ruin me. It could potentially send me to death row.

My eyes avert back to Stella. One side of her mouth was turned up in a smirk, the other half, expressionless. She reminded me of the Mona Lisa. She was that complicated yet that beautiful and alluring. She knew something I didn’t. Standing there at that fishbowl of a podium, I got the feeling that she’d fully expected Mackey to show up and make a scene. It was almost like he’d messaged her on Facebook and told her he was going to do just that. It all suddenly made sense to me, because if there was one thing I’d learned in the time since I’d arranged Andrew Craig’s murder, it was this: Stella had not only been communicating with Mackey again, she’d been fucking him too.

I’d made it home from the Craig’s hilltop home without the cops being the wiser that night. Allison hadn’t steered me wrong. The set of basement doors that led out into the woods were the perfect getaway. Her play acting had helped also. The cops bought her story of Andrew’s suicide hook, line, and fucking sinker. She told them he’d been depressed. He wasn’t being careful with his guns. She tried to get him to seek help, to lock his guns up, even if only for a little while, until he felt better about himself again. But he wouldn’t listen. It was inevitable that he would do something bad. He just didn’t want to live anymore.

At least, these were the very words Stella relayed to me when she arrived back home that night. We sat at the dining room table, my typewriter and the manuscript of Savage Sins separating us, sipping on double shots of Jameson.         

“You knew,” I said. “I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that you knew all along what Allison was using me for.”

“And that you fucked her, Vic,” Stella pointed out.

She said this with such calmness, such coolness, it was like a blow to the head with a sledgehammer. My mouth immediately went dry, and I felt my pulse beating in my temples. I stole a sip of whiskey to calm myself down. But the alcohol wasn’t working.

“What else do you know, Stel?” I asked, after a long beat.

She smiled.

“Everything,” she said. “There isn’t a single blessed thing I don’t know about The Handyman.”

She knew all about Tara, about my work for her as The Handyman. She knew about her husband’s so-called accidental death. That it was a murder. And that’s not all. She knew how often I’d slept with Tara. She knew the time of day, the locations inside Tara’s house. She even knew the positions we’d tried out.

“I also know that you were a special guest of the Sex Club,” she added. “At Allison’s house. You must have loved that. It’s always been your fantasy, Vic. Two beauties at once.”

My head was buzzing with adrenaline. At the same time, I found myself growing rock hard. Stella knew everything, but she wasn’t angry. It didn’t make an ounce of sense. She wasn’t screaming at me or freaking out. It was the strangest sensation knowing that she was well aware of everything and that she seemed okay with it all.

I drank more whiskey.

“How is it possible you know everything?” I pressed. “I’ve been so careful.”

She laughed aloud. “Who do you think began the neighborhood Sex Club in the first place?” she said.

She set her hand on my leg under the table. I put down my glass, took hold of her hand, pulled her in me. Our mouths joined, and I kissed her hard and long. I stood, and so did she. She turned around and pulled her skirt up for me. She wasn’t wearing panties. I pulled down my trousers and immediately entered her hot wet sex. I wanted to go slow, to make it last as long as I could. But with one hand up her shirt, caressing her left breast, pinching her nipple, and the fingers on the other hand massaging her swelled clit and Stella moaning, “Faster, faster, faster,” I pumped away at her ferociously.

When she came, she shouted. Her entire body trembled while her heart-shaped ass pressed against my thighs and pelvis. She knew I was about to release, so she spun around quick, dropped to her knees, took hold of my hardness. She opened her mouth and pumped me until I exploded, and she took care of me with her lips and tongue. It seemed to take forever, but that was fine by me. I was living in ecstasy, and so was Stella. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe.

When it was all over, and we sat back down at the dining room table—the pages of my new manuscript now disheveled, the typewriter pushed aside at an odd angle—I felt exhausted. I poured us more drinks, and I smiled. Not because I was able to make love to Stella, which always made me happy, but because it somehow came as a relief that she knew everything. That she knew all about my affairs and now, the murders.

She knew that I was The Handyman.

Sipping some whiskey, I said, “You understand that it wasn’t my idea to . . . how shall I put this . . . take care of Tara’s and Allison’s husbands. Both women claimed to be in abusive situations. They came to me. Begged me—”

She threw up her hand as if to say, Enough.

“I know,” she said. “The girls came to me first. I’ve known everything about their husbands for a long, long time. We’re all in the Sex Club together, remember? You were available. You needed something for your work. Some kind of radical spark. Their husbands had to go, one way or another. Using you was the perfect solution. You become their Handyman, and in turn, you not only collected on the insurance payout, you got the material you so desperately needed for a new novel. It was a sweet deal all around.” She set the same hand down on the disheveled manuscript. “Thus, Savage Sins is born.”

My head spun even more. Stella wasn’t my muse. She was more than my muse. More like a fixer. An arranger. A very dangerous arranger.

“I could go to prison for a very long time if anyone were to find out, Stel,” I said, stating the obvious. “You know that, right?”

“If you’re suggesting I might one day go to the police with what I know, remember, I’m as much to blame as you. I put it all together . . . put the plans in place. You could say The Handyman was my creation, my brainchild.”

There, I thought. She said it. The Handyman was her creation.

“I could have said no to it all, Stel. I had a choice.”

She smiled again, drank some whiskey. “Let’s not dwell on this, Vic,” she said calmly. “Let’s concentrate on getting Savage Sins published for a million bucks. That’s all we need to focus on.”

We sat in a silence that wasn’t really silence. The wind blowing outside and the chimes that hung from the eaves were making music. You could make out the cicadas in the trees and the occasional dog barking in the near distance. Cars were speeding past on the main road that ran perpendicular to our neighborhood street.

Stella got up, went around the table and into the kitchen. She drank whatever was left in her glass and washed it out in the sink, setting it upside down on the drying rack.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “You coming, Vic?”

I looked up at her. “Stel,” I said. “You’re not mad at me for what I’ve done with Allison and Tara?” 

She folded her arms over her chest. “You’re not the only one, Vic.”

“The Sex Club,” I said. “Do you three—you, Allison and Tara—do you do things all on your own?”

“Sometimes,” she said. Then, giggling, “We’re not lesbians or anything like that. But we do enjoy one another. Truth be told, it’s not all that often we can arrange it. But three women alone can get pretty boring believe it or not.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked. “Like I said, I’m trying to wrap my head around it all.”

“Sometimes other people join us,” she said. “Men.”

“What . . . men?” I questioned, feeling my mouth go dry, my sternum tighten. 

She looked me in the eye.

“Mackey,” she said.

It was all I could think about as I watched Mackey turn away from the podium, face the front of the bookstore. I knew he was staring down Stella because I could see her locking eyes on him.

“Just give me an excuse,” he said to her. “Just give me the excuse I need, and you’re done. Vic is done. More than done. You understand me, Stella?”

The stunned bookstore crowd didn’t make a sound.

“Go home, Mackey,” Jimmy said. “Sober up, and we’ll talk.”

Jake looked Mackey up and down, then turned his back on him. The members of the press continued to record the scene with their smartphones. The fans who had come to buy my book, many of whom had likely bought Mackey’s books, had a confused look on their faces. Hadn’t Mackey achieved the very rare status of rich and famous writer? Why then, did he look so pathetic? Why did he smell like booze? Why does he look like he hasn’t showered in days, or had a good meal? Why did he look broken, strung out, and down on his luck?

“He’s right, Mackey,” Stella said. “Go home. Sleep it off.”

He nodded, as though her word was still golden with him. If she told him to go outside and jump in front of a speeding cab, I’m sure he would have done it. He exhaled a breath so deep and so toxic it seemed to invade the interior of the bookstore like an explosion of mustard gas. He began making his way to the door, the crowd stepping back to create a narrow path for him to leave just as they had when he arrived. When he got to the door, he placed a limp hand on the opener, then turned to face the crowd once more.

“I’ll be waiting for your call, Jimmy,” he said in a defeated tone. “I’m even happy to call you. Just like I’ve called you a dozen times over the past month. But you’re lying to me. You won’t return my calls. Same goes for you, Jake. You won’t return my calls either. The Hollywood producers don’t know my name anymore. The options on my books have all disappeared.” He paused for a beat until he worked up just a hint of a smirk. “But I know what you did, Vic. I know what you did to those men so you could write about them. You murdered them for your career. Plain and simple.”

The ground beneath me felt like it was dropping away. If I hadn’t held onto the podium, I would have dropped into a black, never-ending hole.

“Hell’s Mackey talking about,” Jake said under his breath. He ran his hand through his short, cropped hair and reached out for Jimmy. He pulled Jimmy to him. “What the fuck is Mackey talking about, Jim?”

Jimmy’s eyes went wide. He straightened up like a soldier at attention. He painted a false, anxiety-filled smile on his face.

“Obviously, these are the ramblings of a crazy man, Jake,” he assured him. But I could see the worry in his big, unblinking eyes. It was almost like he suspected I knew just a little too much about murder all along but made the decision not to bring it up. He was an agent, after all. He wanted the money. Money spoke to him more than the Holy Spirit. Money was what Jimmy had in place of religion. If he could sell his own mother in a million-dollar gross point film deal, he would do it. That’s the way guys like Jimmy rolled. It was also the reason he no longer took Mackey’s calls once it became obvious he could no longer string two sentences together. At least, not without Stella sharing his bed night in and night out. It was the reason why Jake and Hollywood would no longer return his calls. He’d become a liability to them, and a liability in show business was death. Pure and fucking simple.

“Go home, Mackey,” I repeated. “You’re scaring me. Scaring the good people who came out for a signing and reading.”

“Savage Sins,” he said through his smile. “Who is the real savage? Who is the real sinner?”

He turned, walked out of the bookshop, slamming the door behind him like an angry, begotten son.

That night, after a sumptuous dinner at the 21 that was only half-clouded over by Mackey’s surprise appearance, Stella and I retired to our room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Since the book signing, she’d changed into a black skirt and black thigh high stockings supported by a black garter belt. Without a word, I sat her down on the edge of the bed where she could see herself in the large gold framed mirror mounted to the opposing wall.

“Dessert, Vic,” she said. “I want you to have your just dessert.”

She parted her thighs for me while I knelt down, fully clothed, and pulled her soaking silk black panties aside. As I began to work my lips and tongue over her pink wetness, she unbuttoned her blouse revealing a black lace pushup bra. She pulled it down so that her breasts were exposed, the nipples hard and erect from the elastic pressure. She pinched her nipples with her long red fingernails so that they swelled even larger. Her thick black hair was parted over her left eyes, and it bobbed and moved with the thrusting of her hips.

She did something then that caught me by surprise. She took hold of her smartphone and tapped a number that was stored on her speed dial. I heard a groggy “Hello” from a voice I recognized. A wave of cold ran up and down my spine when the voice was suddenly matched with a face. It was Mackey.

I stopped, gazed up at Stella. But she shushed me, then placed her free hand around the back of my head, pulled me back into her pussy.

“Don’t stop, Vic,” she said. “Don’t stop ‘till my juices cover your face.”

“What do you want, Stella?” Mackey said, his voice coming over the speaker. “Do you want me to watch you?”

I moved my tongue slowly over her throbbing clitoris, and it dawned on me that Mackey wasn’t only on speaker. He was on a live video call.

“Yes,” Stella said, her voice lower than normal, stressed, excited, impassioned. “I want you to rub your cock. Your eight-inch cock.”

Once more, I was able to gaze up at her while I was working, and I could see the picture on the video phone. Mackey was filming his sex for her. It was long, hard, and thick, and I knew that if she could, Stella would have wrapped her lips around it. She would have taken it into her mouth and swallowed it whole, swallowed everything that was about to explode from it.

Part of me—a big part of me—wanted to run away from this scene. Wanted to slap the phone out of her hand and smash the screen with my boot heel. Only a few hours before, Mackey had made a scene at my signing. A terrible scene. He accused me of murder. I knew he’d slept with Stella behind my back. Slept with the Sex Club. That was bad enough. It was, in essence, payback for my having slept behind Stella’s back with Allison and Tara. But this was going too far.

Or was it?

I’d never seen Stella so excited. Never felt her thighs tremble like they were, her entire body on fire.

“I’m going to explode,” she said.

She set the phone down while I stood up, freed my sex, and slipped it inside her. She raised her legs up over my shoulders, and I fucked her as hard as I could. She shouted with each thrust until I came inside her with everything I had, my teeth biting into her shoulder.

When I was emptied, I slowly pulled myself off her and breathed. I glanced at the phone, and the image of Mackey was gone. He’d hung up. I couldn’t have been happier that he was gone. I also couldn’t have been more weirded out.

Moments later, I poured two glasses of ice cold champagne. We stood by the open floor-to-ceiling French doors and felt the cool city air circulate around us. Stella was wearing the white bedsheet like a robe, and I was buck naked, exposing myself to all of Manhattan.

“Cheers,” I said, holding up my glass for a small toast.

She clinked my glass, sipped.

“You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?” I said, addressing the white elephant in the room. The same white elephant that had been plaguing us almost all day. She drank some more and flicked the hair out of her eyes. I didn’t have to spell it out for her to know I was talking about Mackey. 

“You’re not asking the right questions, Vic,” she informed me.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, maybe you should be asking me why Mackey knows you killed those two men so that you could write your novels?”

A sharp start in my heart.

“And you know the answer, Stel? Or did you provide him with the answer?”

She shook her head, pursed her lips.

She said, “He told me, with his own lips, that he deduced it.”

“How? There was never a police inquiry. Nor will there ever be a police inquiry.”

I was getting angry. No, that’s not right. I was getting hot. She was baiting me, testing me. That whole thing with Mackey showing up on a video feed . . . It was beyond strange. In fact, it wasn’t strange at all. It was all carefully planned. Stella was demonstrating the absolute power she had over me now. It was a web I had allowed myself to become tangled in one step at a time.

I had to watch out.

I was dealing with something very dangerous here. How the hell did I get here? Stella was controlling everybody, including me. She’d been controlling us all along. Me, Mackey, Tara, and Allison. Maybe there were more out there like us. Maybe she was operating in different neighborhoods, slipping inside the lives of unhappy women, forming Sex Clubs with them, then plotting to kill their husbands. Maybe she’d had Mackey kill for her in the past, and then when she took away the opportunity from him, he could no longer write. Maybe that’s exactly what she was doing with me.

“Mackey is smart,” she said after a time. “He read the newspaper accounts of Tara’s husband’s accident along with the account of Andrew Craig’s suicide. Then he read Savage Sins, and he figured it out. He couldn’t be entirely sure, but he was right on.”

I could almost feel the blood boil inside me. How much time had she been spending with Mackey? How often had she been fucking him again? Couldn’t have been all that long if he was still stricken with writer’s block. Writers need their muses, but not on a part-time basis.

“How the hell did he get a copy of Sins?” I questioned. “It only just came out today. Besides a handful of newspapers and trade magazines, I’m the only one who had a pre-publication proof.”

She drank her champagne and smiled.

“I gave him a copy of the typed manuscript, Vic,” she said. “I had it photocopied. I was only too happy to let him read it before anyone else did.”

I’m not sure how many seconds went by. How long the situation went from relative peace with Stella and I simply talking things out, to my having grabbed hold of her, and shoving her against the wall. Maybe no time had transpired at all. She’d dropped the bedsheet, but she was still dressed in her underwear and stockings, her breasts now pushed back inside the bra cups.

She smiled devilishly.

“What are you going to do to me, Vic?” she said. “Are you going to hurt me? Are you going to strangle me? Are you going to murder me like you did the others?”

I made a fist with my right hand. I cocked back my arm, my free hand wrapped around her neck, holding the back of her head against the wall. I felt the sweat dripping off my brow, into my eyes. The noise of the traffic outside was filling the room, but I could hear only the pulse of my elevated heartbeat inside my brain. This was more than baiting. She was setting me up.

Don’t swallow the bait, Vic. Don’t fucking do it . . .

Slowly, I lowered my hand, relaxed my fist. I felt something happening behind my back. I wasn’t sure what. But my gut was speaking to me. So was Stella’s face. I felt this urge to turn around, and Stella knew it. I could see her eyes shifting from my face to over my shoulder and back again.

“That’s right, Vic,” she said. “Turn around.”

I did. I turned around. That’s when I saw her iPhone set up straight against a pillow. I saw the red RECORD indicator flashing on and off inside the device’s digital screen. Stella was filming our every move, our every word.

I went to grab the phone, but then stopped myself. What the hell was the use?

“That’s right, Vic,” she said. “It won’t do you any good to turn the phone off, or to even toss it out the window onto the concrete sidewalk below. And you understand why that is, don’t you?”

“You’re sending the video to a mainframe somewhere. Or maybe one of your friends or lovers is looking at us now, in real time.”

“The latter is more correct. It’s not just a video I’m making. It’s a Facebook video, and Tara and Allison can see your cute pale naked ass right now. Would you like to wave to them?”

My world was burning around me. I didn’t know where to turn. How to stop this from happening. I was powerless.

“What about your boyfriend, Mackey?” I said, swallowing something that felt and tasted like a brick. “Is he watching too?”

She laughed aloud. “Oh god, no,” she said. “I put Mackey back in his cage after our little . . . well, you know what we did just moments ago.”

Raising her hand, placing it gently on my face. She leaned in and kissed me on the lips. I hated her in that moment, but the feel of her mouth against my own was enough to make me want to melt into the carpet. She had this insane power over me, and she reveled in it. It must have been the same power she had over Mackey, but I’d been too blind to see it.

“I can taste my pussy on your lips, Vic,” she said. “It tastes wonderful.”

“Please turn that camera off,” I said.

“I will when I’m ready.”

“What do you want from me, Stel?”

She leaned into me again, her lips gently brushing up against my ear lobe.

“I want you to write another book,” she said.

Without my having to ask her, I knew precisely what she meant. I could hear her words, but I felt them in my gut, as though she were stabbing me with a fork.

“About what?” I asked.

“About a man very close to your heart. For better or for worse.”

“The Handyman.”

“We need to put him back to work,” she said, her lips tickling my ear, her breath warm.

“What is it you’d like him to do for you, Stella?”

“I want him to kill Mackey,” she said.

The next morning, we packed our bags and left the city by train out of Penn Station. We never spoke another word about Mackey or the Sex Club or Savage Sins after she’d told me her plans for The Handyman. I wasn’t sure I could handle anything more as I stared out the window onto the winding Hudson River. For a previous day and evening that had been filled with more drama than one man could swallow, the night had ended not with a bang, but with a kiss. Stella had simply approached the iPhone, picked it up off the bed, stared into the screen, and blew a kiss.

“Goodnight my lovelies,” she said before stopping the live video feed.

She then went into the bathroom, undressed, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and slipped into a black silk nightgown. Before she went to sleep, she smiled and blew me a kiss.

“You know, I really am proud of you, Vic,” she said. “I want you to know that.”

I stood by the window, drinking the last of the champagne.

“Thank you,” I said. “That means a lot.”

But what would really have meant a lot to me then, was tossing her out the window. But I could never do it. I didn’t have the balls or the strength. I didn’t have the courage. As much as I hated her, I loved her, needed her like I needed the blood that flowed through my veins. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to a man. To become a slave to his desires.

Stella turned out the light. I drank my drink and stared out the window onto the city under cover of darkness. After a while, I slipped into bed and listened to her gentle breaths as she slept soundly . . . and without guilt. I lay there on my back, staring up at the ceiling until daybreak. 

We arrived back to our home on Orchard Grove a little past two in the afternoon. As the taxi pulled up to the house, I couldn’t help but notice the For Sale sign that occupied the front lawn.

“Am I missing something?” I said to Stella as the cab came to a stop at the top of the drive. “We never discussed selling the house.”

She opened the door. “It’s my house, remember, Vic?” she said. “I can do what I want with it.”

She got out, but instead of going around to the trunk to retrieve her overnight case, she poked her head back inside.

“You’re made of money now, honey,” she added. “You’re going to buy us a big ginormous house. It’s the least you can do for your muse.”

She smiled and closed the door.

Minutes later I was standing in the kitchen, sifting through the mail which didn’t amount to a hell of a lot. For a change, I was caught up on my bills. Rather, for the first time in my adult life, I was caught up on my bills. Stella went immediately into the bedroom, and three minutes later came back out wearing a short skirt, black tights, tall brown leather boots, and a black turtleneck sweater. Her hair had been combed, and she’d applied some lipstick.

“Got a date?” I asked.

“At least you didn’t ask me if I was going to see Mackey,” she said, not without a giggle.

But there was nothing funny in her words. The pit that lodged itself in my stomach was proof of that.

“Well,” I said, setting down the mail. “Are you going to see Mackey?”

“He’s in Albany. Came in on an earlier train. And yes, I need to see him. Or, should I say, he needs to see me. He needs his muse back, Vic. I feel an obligation to help him out.”

My head began spinning, burning.

“Are you going to get him to kill for you, Stel?” I said. “Is he also a Handyman?”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s only one Handyman, Vic,” she said along with one of her winks. “Mackey has different needs.”

“Then why do you want him dead, if you also want to help him?”

“Look at it like this, Vic,” she said, exhaling a breath. “Isn’t it better that I keep him happy until the time is right for his accident to happen? What good does it do anyone to put him on the defensive?”

She had a point. This was her game. I was just the hired help. The Handyman.

“And when exactly will this accident take place?”

“You’ll know when I tell you,” she said. “And not before.” She grinned, her eyes wide. “The Handyman is about to kill for his art again. This time, it’s going to be really something. Glorious even. You just wait to see what I’ve got planned for you both.”  

I picked up the mail, but I set it back down again. Anxiety filled my throat and sternum like heavy, wet cement. In my mind, the events of last night. Me going down on Stella while she sat on the edge of the bed in her black garters and silk black panties, her video feed of Mackey in her hand while I worked on her. A digital threesome that felt all too real because it was real. Now standing in the kitchen, knowing she was about to meet up with him alone, I felt more than anxious. I also felt out of balance and more than a little nauseous. There wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

She leaned into me, took hold of a piece of mail. It was from a real estate agent, and it was personally addressed to Stella in stylish handwriting. Handwriting in black Sharpie that just oozed of money. Money that would inevitably come from my accounts. But there was one glimmer of hope. We weren’t married, Stella and I. Legally she couldn’t get at my money.   

She opened the envelope, pulled out a stack of full-color glossy sheets that contained photos of homes for sale along with their vital stats, including price, square footage, number of bedrooms and baths. Stuff like that. I’d never owned a home in my life, so it was all foreign to me. Not to mention, frightening somehow.

“See if there’s something in there that strikes your fancy, darling,” she said, grabbing hold of her car keys. Then, heading for the back door off the garage. “This is Albany. We can afford just about anything we wish.”

She opened the door.

“Stella,” I said, feeling the blood burning in my veins, “what if I don’t want to buy a house? What if I choose to stay here? You can’t just take my money and buy a house.”

She pursed her lips, shook her head slowly.

“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong, Vic,” she said. “I’m legally entitled to it, you see.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a happy sort of laugh. It was more of fuck you laugh.

“No, baby,” I said. “You’re not.”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh my,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you, Vic?”

“Tell me what?”

“We’re getting married this evening. Once that happens, I will be legally entitled to half your money. You know, that money I arranged for you to earn. I think that’s a fair deal, don’t you?”

The burn was so bad, I could hardly open my mouth, much less say anything in response. Until, finally, I uttered. “I . . . am not . . . getting married. You got that?”

“Oh but, Vic,” she said. “Yes, you are. You can’t afford to disobey me. You know that now, don’t you?”

She pressed her hand against her mouth, blew me a kiss.

“And don’t forget to put on a suit,” she said. “After it’s done, we will enjoy a lovely dinner with Allison and Tara. Who knows, you might even get lucky.”

She winked, opened the door, and entered the garage, closing the door behind her.

I slammed my fist down on the counter. The noise and the concussion shocked even me. There was a time I would have cut off my left leg to be published. I thought, if only I can seal a major book deal in New York, I would be the happiest man alive. All my dreams would come true.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

I’ve got the deal, the money, the movie options, the fans . . . I’m the toast of New York. But at what cost? I’m a slave to Stella, and a criminal just waiting for an arrest and a one-way ticket to the lethal injection chamber. I’d sold my soul for something that isn’t real. The books, the money, the contracts . . . they are fleeting. Mackey was evidence of that. That is, it will all be fleeting once Stella decides to leave me. And she will leave me just like she left Mackey. When it happens, she will have emptied my accounts and left me to rot on the side of the road like roadkill. Maybe she won’t even bother to leave me. Maybe she’ll make sure I have an accident that I don’t recover from. 

Or, I could handle things another way.

I could bide my time, and when the opportunity presented itself, make sure it was Stella who suffered a horrible accident she couldn’t possibly recover from. I would have to swallow my obsession for her. But then, what a book it would make in the end. Her death would provide me with the material for my very best work. Wouldn’t matter what I wrote after that because it would be the novel that would plant my permanent mark on the industry.

But not yet.

There were other deeds to tend to first. Like Mackey’s accident. Maybe Stella was demanding that The Handyman take care of him, but I was not entirely opposed to the idea. Fact was, knowing he was about to meet up with her, and that the meeting might very well include sexual favors, I would be only too happy to see him die.

It was not only a dangerous world I was living in right now, it was also a complicated world. At the very least, Mackey’s death would simplify things.

Pouring myself a stiff drink, I sat down at my typewriter, filled the spool with a sheet of clean paper. I was already into my second book. This one based on Allison and Andrew Craig. It was almost finished. I was calling it Savage Skin. It was the story of a man who becomes his wife’s sex slave. The plot would revolve around the same antagonist as Savage Sins, Vance McKenna, the man who would eventually be called upon to murder Andrew while making it look like a suicide.

Like Savage Sins, I was playing it close to the truth, if not recounting the story as it happened, scene for scene. I even wrote the bit about the fight they had in the house the night I watched them from the driveway and how it led to an S & M session inside the living room with Andrew being hung by the rafter with a remote control operated harness. Like they say, you can’t make this shit up. Or could you? In this case, Allison and Andrew Craig had already made it up for me. I wasn’t a writer, so much as a transcriptionist, writing it all down as it happened.

I wanted to get a few more pages in before the afternoon was out. But it wasn’t happening for me. The muse wasn’t singing to me. It had walked out the door with Stella and her hold over me. My mind was clouded with too many distractions—Mackey invading my book signing and my sex life; Stella insisting on my buying her a house . . . insisting we get married, this very afternoon; Stella insisting I kill Mackey, knowing that one day she would kill me.

I sat there staring at the blank paper.

“Maybe I should just pack a bag, empty out the bank account, and split town,” I whispered aloud. “Maybe I should just hop out the back Jack, make a new plan Stan.”

I couldn’t help but smile at my choice of words. But then, I knew running wasn’t the answer. Stella would find a way to implicate me in the two murders. Mackey would back her up. I had to stick around. Long enough to do away with Mackey and Stella. It was the only answer. But there was something I could do to clear my mind and my soul before I said “I do” to Stella later on in the day.

I could go meet my maker.

Driving north toward the church where I once served mass as a boy, the memories flooded my brain—me as a bespectacled boy standing in the back sacristy of the red brick house of God. I was wearing a roomy white altar boy server over blue jeans, sneakers, and a black T-shirt with Paul McCartney and Wings stenciled on the front. The square room was four-sided with shelves and cabinets filled with church junk—gold chalices, gold plates, staffs, crosses, and cups. There were racks of black and white cassocks and robes for the priests along with strange looking headgear. As often as I had been exposed to the stuff, it never ceased to seem so foreign to me.

I remember a small refrigerator where the mass wine was stored. If I timed it right, I could sneak a drink or two from straight out of the bottle before the priest came in and dressed for the mass. He was usually drunk himself, so I never worried about him smelling anything on my breath. Several priests came and went during the few years I was an altar boy, and none of them were bad people. I don’t recall any abuses like people bitch about now.

One priest in particular, an older guy named Walsh, he was good to me. He’d invite me in back to his apartment, and we’d make sandwiches and eat bowls of potato chips. He drank beer with whiskey chasers, and he always had a cold root beer for me. He’d get me talking about my home life. Were things good with my parents? Were they fighting too much? Did it make me nervous? Was I happy? Did I miss my brother? You see, my oldest brother died in a motorcycle accident when I was only eleven. As for my folks, I was surprised they hadn’t killed each other by then. Our house wasn’t a refuge, it was more like a battleground with my mother drinking and smoking herself to death and my father, a musician, always arriving home in the middle of the night, his liver pickled and his fists flying.

I guess I didn’t know it then, but Father Walsh was acting as my shrink and doing a pretty damn good job of it. He never made me get down on my knees and pray. He never forced me to get down on my knees for anything else either. He never made a pass at me. He never touched me with anything other than a friendly pat on the back or maybe a jab to the arm if I wasn’t paying enough attention to what he was saying.

I think all that stuff about priests abusing kids is bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, it happens, and when it does, it’s not good. Not good by a long shot. But too many people—screwed up adults—like to invent bad childhood memories to make up for bad decisions they made as adults. Most priests have gotten a bad rap, and that’s too bad.

I pulled into the parking lot of the St. Ambrose Church.

It was empty, so I was able to pull up front. I killed the engine and got out. For a moment, I gazed at the old school attached to the church. I saw myself dressed in my little blue uniform and tie, seated in a classroom, bored out of my skull, staring out the window while a nun, clad from head to toe in a navy-blue habit, tried in vain to teach me math. I never was much of a student, even when it came to the subject of English. I was too much of a daydreamer for that.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, I made my way to the front doors of the church, and for the first time in nearly four decades, I stepped inside.

Nothing much had changed. It was just the way I remembered it, only smaller. It wasn’t like I’d grown up since I last occupied this spot. More like the place had somehow shrunk over the years. It smelled vaguely of burning incense, and not a single person occupied its cold stone walls. But somehow it felt like a thousand dead souls were walking all around me, the largest and most unstained of which belonged to the bloodied and battered body that hung on the cross at the opposite side of the building.

Once more, I saw myself, the altar boy, seated on the altar in a brown wood chair, a little boy whose feet barely touched the floor, big brown eyes glued to the crucified Jesus. It held such fascination for me. How is it that one man could live through the torture of the scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails pounded into his hands and feet? I still shivered at the thought of a man’s bodyweight hanging by nails. The excruciating pain that he must have endured. I’d always admired Jesus for what he willingly did to himself for the good of all mankind. Despite my work as The Handyman, I still believed in Him. Still believed I would see Him one day. One grave reality I had to accept was this: Jesus might not like what he sees when that time comes.

A tap on my shoulder.

I turned quickly.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The voice belonged to a priest. A young priest. Slim build, thick black hair parted neatly on the side. He was clean-shaven, and his black suit was impeccably pressed, the white tab attached to his collarbone white.

He smiled, held out his hand.

“I’m Father Bill Duffy,” he said. “I’m the pastor at St. Ambrose.”

In my brain, I saw Father Walsh, my pastor, the man I served for countless masses, the beer-gutted man who always smelled like booze and who fed me dozens of lunches and gave of me his time and advice. Walsh was long dead, my memory of him as old as the stone floor beneath my feet. This guy, Duffy, he was the new man.

“Irish,” I said, taking his hand in mine, squeezing it. “Bit of a cliché isn’t it? An Irish priest?”

He laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t say anything to my mother about that,” he said. “But there’s been more than one Duffy who’s given his life over to the Lord if that’s what you mean.”

I shook my head. “It was a stupid thing to say, Father.”

“So, what brings you to St. Ambrose, Mr. . . .?”

“Smith,” I said automatically, instinctually. I’m not sure why I used the name. It just felt like the right thing to do.

“Mr. Smith,” he repeated, a sly grin forming.

“I used to belong to this church many years ago,” I said, looking out on the sea of empty wooden pews and the empty altar. “I was an altar boy, probably before you were even born.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Did you attend school as well, Mr. Smith?”

I nodded.

I’m not sure what came over me then, but my eyes filled with tears. Maybe going there turned out to be more overwhelming than I thought. The memories stabbed at me like nine-inch nails. I saw my family seated in the pew, my parents seated on either side of my brothers and me. Now they were all gone, my mother, father, and two big brothers. I was the only one still alive, but somehow, I didn’t feel very alive. Rather, I felt alive all right. I just wasn’t sure that the life I was living was worth the air that passed in and out of my lungs. It was a life of mortal sin, I guess. My blackened soul was proof of that. If I even had a soul left at all.

“Would you like to tour the school?” Father Duffy asked. “There’s no school on a Saturday, obviously.”

A chill ran up and down my spine. Somehow, the thought of going back to those sterile halls and lonely classrooms still scared the shit out of me all these years later. I felt a tear roll down my cheek.

“Maybe another time,” I said.

I started to turn. I even took a step in the direction of the door. But then I turned back around.

“There is something you can do for me, Father,” I said.

“What is it, Mr. Smith?”

“Could you listen to my confession?” I said, wiping the tear from my face.

His expression went south. Suddenly, he didn’t seem like such a jovial young man of God anymore. He seemed to be a man who possessed the all the power of judgment.

“Give me a minute to gather my Bible and my cassock,” he said. “Stay here.”

I watched him make his way along the aisle toward the altar where he genuflected and made the sign of the cross before disappearing into the back sacristy. The sacristy I knew so well. I heard him in the back, opening and closing a closet, then his footsteps on the linoleum tile as he was making his way back out to the altar.

Another tear fell from my eye. Making an about-face, I made my way to the front doors and walked out.

For a while, I just drove around the old neighborhood, past the old two-story raised ranch which I grew up in. Like the church, it seemed so much smaller than I remembered it. So much rattier. Looking out onto the place from where I parked by the curb, I saw myself and my brothers mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges. But then I also heard voices. The old man and the old lady battling it out. It all took a terrible toll on my brother, Ted, who was the middle child. He wouldn’t make it out of high school.

It was my mother who’d found him hanging by a leather belt in the closet of his upstairs bedroom. Wracked with guilt and lungs filled with tumors, my mother wouldn’t last another five years after that. Not long after that, the oldest, Terry, died in a motorcycle accident, my father just took off. I never heard from him again. I spent six months living with friends until I somehow managed to get myself into a state college, then into writing school. It all seemed like a big blur to me now, my childhood. But the fact is, we are all gifted with a past whether we like it or not. We are all connected to a family. Unfortunately, my family was tragic.

I needed to get back in the car.

It was time to run away again.

This time for good.

Knowing Stella would be home soon and expecting me to be dressed for our wedding, I drove back toward north Albany. But instead of heading straight home, I stopped at Lanies Bar for a quick drink. I needed one badly after an afternoon of reminiscing with my past, with a God who surely hated me by now. A God who had forsaken me. Or was it me who had forsaken him.

As luck would have it, the bar was mostly empty, occupied with just a few stragglers who crawled in after working double-time for a weekend work crew. Possibly linemen. More likely a road crew, judging from the black asphalt stains on their t-shirts. I took a stool in the corner, and the girl behind the bar smiled at me. She was young, maybe a year out of college, and tall. She wore a short flowery dress and tall leather boots. The dress was so short, I could practically make out her mound of bush that pressed against the bottom of her panties. Or maybe that was just my imagination. One thing for sure was that her creamy thighs were exposed and that alone was enough to brighten my day.

She brushed back her shoulder length dirty blonde hair, looked into my eyes, asked me what I was drinking.

“Jameson,” I said. “Double. Neat.”

“Sure thing,” she said and went about retrieving the drink.

I watched her grab the bottle off the top shelf, and I couldn’t help noticing how her dress hiked up along her pelvis, exposing just a hint of red panties. The sight of them stole my breath away.

The two workers gathered on the opposite side of the horseshoe-shaped bar were laughing, and pounding bottles of beer. One was big and bald, not by choice of having taken a razor to the scalp to make him look bad ass, but naturally. The other guy was shorter but stocky and muscular. Like a fireplug and just as iron hard. Their eyes shifted from the bartender to me and back again. It’s possible they might have recognized me, but I didn’t take them for the literary types.

There was a wide high def television mounted on the wall behind the two workers. A NASCAR race of some sort was going on. You know, like the Indie 500 or something. I didn’t watch car races because they bored me so it could have been anything. Still, for a second or two, I was mesmerized by the cars speeding around the ovular track. Problem was, by aiming my gaze at the TV, the two workers thought I was staring at them. Almost on cue, their faces went rock hard and serious.

“You looking at something, pal?” the short, stocky one asked.

A start in my heart. Mouth dry.

“The car race,” I said. “Just watching the car race . . . behind you.”

Big Bald Man turned to his friend.

“He’s watching the car race,” he said. “He must like car races.” He laughed like something was funny.

“Mark, be nice,” the bartender insisted, setting my drink down in front of me. “You too, Randy.”

“They’re okay,” I said a bit under my breath.

She shook her head.

“They come in on Saturdays after work,” she said. “They’re a pain in my ass.”

“Come on, Candy-sweet-Candy,” the one I took for Mark said. The bald one. “We’re just having fun with the guy. Isn’t that right, Mister?”

I smiled, lifted my drink, then downed it lightning fast. Setting the glass back down.

“I’ll take another,” I said. “And two beers for my new friends.”

Short Stocky Randy’s eyes lit up.

“Now you’re talking, pal,” he said, pulling down on the brim of his baseball cap. “I mean, you look like an asshole to me, but we’ll take your beer.”

Candy turned fast.

“That’s enough,” she barked. “I’m not paid to be a babysitter.”

Mark looked her in the eye. “Just joking is all,” he said. “All in good fun.”

She retrieved the two beers for them, poured me another shot, set it down before me.

“Can I ask you a quick question, Mister?”

She blushed when she said it like it took a lot for her to work up the courage to ask what she wanted to ask. And I guess I knew exactly what was coming.

Nervously combing back her hair, she said, “You’re the writer? The famous one who lives in town? The author of Savage Sins?”

My eyes shifted to the two clowns. They were trying their hardest to overhear the conversation.

I nodded. “You’ve read it already?”

She reached under the bar, came out with a hardcover edition.

“Preordered on Amazon. Arrived this morning, and I’ve already finished it. I can’t believe you just walked in here. It’s like you were meant to walk in here.”

“It’s like you were meant to walk in here,” Randy mimicked in a mock girl voice.

She turned quickly. “Randy, I swear I will call the cops and have your ass pulled right out of here.”

“No, you won’t,” Mark said. “You need the tips.”

She turned back to me, turned her frown upside down.

“Would you do me the hugest favor and sign my copy . . . Mr. Casey?”

She set the book on the bar before I had a chance to answer.

“Sure,” I said. Then, looking around, “But I need a pen.”

Once more she reached under the bar, came back out with a food order pad to which a pen was attached. She freed up the pen and handed it to me. I opened the cover and pressed the tip of the pen to the mostly blank title page.

“It’s Candy, right?” I said.

She nodded again. She was so excited she seemed to be trembling. I started writing something. I wasn’t even sure what I was writing, I’d signed so many books the previous evening. My eyes were concentrated more on her body, her naked thighs and her leather boots, and the way her breasts filled out her flowery dress. She was years younger than me, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was old enough for anything.

In the end, I wrote, “For Candy, all my affection.” Then I signed my name.

When I handed it back to her, her hand brushed against mine. Rather, it didn’t brush so much as she made sure her hand touched mine. It sent a warm sort of shock through my system. A welcomed shock. It made me hard.

Turns out, she was one of those fans who insist on reading what I scribbled inside the book right away. Her face turned red again.

“All your affection?” she said. “You must have lots of girlfriends, Mr. Casey. At least, judging from the, ummm, sex scenes. Sooooo reallll.” Once again, she reached out, set her hand on mine and ran her purple manicured fingernails gently over my skin. “They really worked for me, if you know what I mean.”

Maybe I was even blushing now.

“Glad I could help,” I said.

She hugged the book and eyed me like she wanted to hug me the same way. I couldn’t believe how hard she was making me. I felt strange about it on one hand, but on the other, all I wanted to do was go around the bar, pull up her dress, and fuck her on the spot.

“Oh, can you sign a book for me, Mr. Casey?” Short Stocky Randy said in that same girl voice. “You make me sooo wet.”

I drank down my shot, and Candy immediately poured me another.

“That’s on the house,” she said, “because of those two assholes. And because you’re such a wonderful writer.” Then, stepping around the bar. “I’m the only one working today, so can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Casey?”

She left me alone with the two clowns and the road race going on behind them. The whiskey had given me some muscles, so I figured I’d have a little fun. Sliding off my stool, I made my way around the horseshoe until I came within a foot or so of Randy. Both of them were a little shocked that I’d approached them like that, and they immediately assumed a defensive posture, their elbows on the bar, both their hands wrapped around their mostly empty beer bottles.

“Hey fellas,” I said, “you guys hear about Planet X? You know, the rogue planet that’s supposed to enter into our orbit this year, and destroy the earth?”

I’m not sure why I was asking them this question, but it was the first thing that popped into my head.

“So what?” Mark said, his eyes not on me but his beer bottle.

“So, you see, Mark . . . can I call you Mark? You see, Mark, you might not see this on CNN or MSNBC and maybe not even on Fox News, but the government is currently rounding up citizens who are eligible to hop a series of flights off Earth to a special moon colony that was started in 1969 after the first moon landing.”

Mark gazed at Randy as if I was fucking with him, which of course I was. But he smiled nervously like he wasn’t quite sure if I was fucking with him.

Randy looked me up and down. “This is all bullshit,” he said.

“Believe what will, Randy, my good man,” I said. “But surely you’ve seen all the fuss about a reusable rocket being developed by the Branson Virgin Airline outfit. You know what I’m talking about: a rocket that can land back on its base, and be reused again and again and again. What you don’t know is that it has been developed in association with NASA to ship one hundred thousand people off the earth starting later this year.”

“How do you know this bullshit?” Mark begs. “I mean, I never heard nothing about it.”

I nodded, pressed my lips together, inched closer to the big bald man’s face.

“You see what you just did there, Mark? You made a double negative.”

“A double what?” he said. “The only double I want right now is Jack Daniels.” He laughed like he was the wittiest man on earth.

“Well, double negatives cancel each other out, reversing your intended meaning entirely.”

Randy poked me in the chest. “You’re some kind of a real asshole, man,” he said. “I’d watch it I was you.”

“Well, you won’t be seeing me for long, because I’m one of those lucky souls who know better than to make a double negative.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Mark pressed.

“I’m saying, transportation to the moon colony is based entirely on IQ. Morons like yourself will be left here to die a miserable death when Planet X enters our atmosphere. That way, the population that survives on the moon colony will be far smarter than the idiots left behind to die on earth. The race will be culled if you will, and piece of shit bullies will be eradicated from the lineage. Darwinism at is best, I should say. Don’t you agree, Mark? Or don’t you know nothin’ about Darwin?”

Randy reached out with his fisted hand like he was about to grab hold of my shirt, but I was quicker than him. Using the base of my palm like a battering ram I nailed him in the sternum proceeding immediately to the chin so that his head reared back against his spine. He dropped back onto the bar on the spot.

I cocked my arm back and gazed into Mark’s eyes. He held up both his hands like he was surrendering.

“Don’t want no trouble mister,” he said.

I shifted Randy around so that it looked like he was simply taking a quick nap.

“Enjoy your final days on earth, boys,” I said.

As I came back around the bar and resumed drinking my drink, Mark picked up Randy, and dragged his now groggy partner out the door to their pickup. That’s when Candy came back in.

“Where are those two assholes going?” she asked.

“I think they’d finally had enough to drink,” I said.

She smiled, set her hand gently on my shoulder.

“That just leaves you and me,” she said before going to the door, locking the deadbolt. “How lucky is that?”

By the time she made it back to me, she’d already pulled off her dress revealing hard, round titties, and those red panties. I separated my legs on the stool and she settled into me, pressing herself against my hard-on and kissing me with her tender lips and playful tongue.

“What about the door?” I said. “People will see in.”

“I know just the right place,” she offered, grabbing hold of my hand.

Candy led me into the lady’s bathroom, which contained a sort of vestibule with a couch and wall of mirrors for women who wished to get not only a good look at their made-up faces but their entire outfit. 

“This won’t take long,” she said, sitting down on the very edge of the couch and unbuckling my belt.

She pulled me out, took me in her mouth, and began to work on me, not fast but slowly. She took me in all the way, as though impervious to any kind of gag reflex. A true deep throat. She worked me with her hands and her mouth, and despite the whiskeys, I knew that she was right when she said it wouldn’t take long. But I didn’t want to finish yet. Not without giving her something in return.

I eased her mouth off my cock, stood her up, pulled down her panties. Lifting her off the floor by her legs, she mounted me where I stood. She fucked me like she was riding a pony, her young pussy tight and hot around my cock. It wasn’t taking her long to cum. I could feel her tightening up like a heavy-duty spring, her fingertips clawing at my back. For a second or two, I was convinced she was going to tear right through my leather coat and shirt. She was that strong, that young, that determined.

“It’s just like your book,” she said, her voice strange and breathless. “It’s like Savage Sins.”

Then she came, trembling in my arms, her thighs squeezing my body with all their strength. I shot everything I had into her, and I knew she could feel it going up inside her. It was hot, and it was alive, and if I could have given her more, I would have.

I let her down, and she kissed me for a long minute before we made out someone knocking on the front door.

“My dress,” she said, as she stepped back into her panties, pulling them back up onto her hips. “I can’t just go out there, Mr. Casey.”

“I’ll get it,” I said. “And under the circumstances, you should call me Vic.”

She smiled. I kissed her again and made my way out of the bathroom and into the bar to retrieve her dress.

Candy was already tending bar to the small gang of college-age kids who’d been knocking on the door by the time I made it back out into the parking lot and my car. Slipping behind the wheel, I suddenly saw the faces of Mark and Randy. I wondered if I’d seen the last of them. Something told me I hadn’t. One thing was for certain, I didn’t see any sign of them in the lot. But that didn’t mean they weren’t out there somewhere, looking at me. Watching me.

I started the car, threw it in drive and pulled out of the lot. In just an hour’s time, I would be married to Stella and hating it.

When I arrived home, Stella was already there waiting for me. She was wearing one of her long sleek black dresses with a pair of sexy black pumps. Her hair was freshly washed and parted over her left eye. Numerous silver necklaces rested against her exposed cleavage, including a cross that looked like it had to weigh a full pound. She also sported some matching bracelets that jangled musically whenever she made even the slightest of moves.

Like always, she smelled good. Like rose petals. She looked at me with her big eyes . . . eyes that cut into me, not like lasers but daggers . . . and I could only wonder what had happened between her and Mackey today. But then, knowing what I had done at the bar with Candy, it just didn’t seem right to pry, even if we were about to get married.

“You’re late, Vic,” she said while inserting an earring into her pierced earlobe. “We’re supposed to be at Allison’s in ten minutes to meet the Justice of the Peace.”

“Justice of the Peace. You mean, as in a judge?” A question, for which I already knew the answer.

“That’s right, Vic. He will make things nice and tidy for us.”

I had nothing to say. She knew too much about me, knew too much about what I had done to those two married men. There was nothing I could possibly do other than kill her on the spot, and that didn’t seem like a very good idea at the moment considering people were waiting on us, including a judge.

She reached out, set her hand on my arm.

“Oh, don’t look so sad, Vic,” she said. “It’s just a silly piece of paper. When it’s all done, and your money is ours, we’ll buy a big house and we’ll make you a big study where you can write a hundred more novels.”

“I guess that means I’ll have to kill a hundred more souls,” I said. “Correction. The Handyman will need to kill one hundred more souls.”

Her eyes rolled in their sockets. “Whatever it takes, Vic. Whatever it takes to make art.”

“I guess the devil exists after all.”

I pushed past her into the bedroom and got dressed.

Less than a half hour later, I was standing shoulder to shoulder with Stella in the middle of Allison’s living room floor. A judge stood before us. He was a small man, with receding white hair, a smoothly shaven face, and wet eyes. He wore a suit that was too big for him like he had recently shrunk two or three sizes. He didn’t seem like a judge at all. Like the kind of man who wouldn’t kill a fly just for being inside the house, but instead, he would gather it up in his cupped hands so he could set it free outdoors.

Behind us stood Allison and Tara, both of them looking lovely and in long black dresses that were very similar to Stella’s, which told me they’d planned it that way. The aromas wafting around the place were terrific since there was a roast cooking in the oven. Dozens of lit scented candles were positioned all around the open spaces, and bottles of champagne chilled in large silver buckets of ice.

The judge held an old, black leather-bound Bible in his hands. He turned to me, and he said, “Victor Casey, do you solemnly take Stella La Chance to be your lawfully wedded wife? Do you promise to have and to hold her from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until you are both parted by death?”

The words wife and death were like bullets to the brain. But what the hell could I do about it? It was either say yes to it all or face my own destruction by lethal injection. That’s what all this came down to. My wife, or my life.

“I do.” The words came out as brittle and dry as dead leaves.

He turned to Stella. “Do you, Stella La Chance, solemnly take Victor Casey to be your lawfully wedded husband? Do you promise to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until you are both parted by death?” 

She shifted her focus from the judge to me. I didn’t want to look her in the eyes. They held a power over me that I could barely comprehend. But again, I had no choice. In her four-inch stiletto high heels, she was taller than me, and she didn’t look at me or into me, so much as down on me. Her eyes were beautiful and moist, and a big part of me wanted to jump into them, swim around for a while. But they were like Sirens, singing mermaids who lead the helpless ships of stranded sailors onto the rocks and their own horrible destruction.

“I so very much do,” she answered.

The flame from the candles flickered then, as though a stiff, cold wind had somehow just breached the house walls and circulated throughout the interior. Even the judge was taken by surprise. He peered over one shoulder, then the other, as if he sensed another presence in the house altogether. He wasn’t a religious man in that he didn’t wear the collar of the priest, but the Bible in his hands proved he was a believer nonetheless. As far as I could tell, that breeze had unsettled him. This was an unholy place, and he knew it. He gripped his Bible with white knuckles like it was his only lifeline out of there.

“By all the power vested in me by the State of New York, I now pronounce you man and wife. Mr. Casey, you may kiss your bride.”

I stared into Stella’s dark eyes, and I saw my future. It was darker than her eyes. That darkness would last forever and ever. I would become the tortured soul who’d played the worst trick a man can possibly play on himself. A man who had traded in his soul for riches and wealth that had managed only to sink him further into the cesspool of despair. I wasn’t a man who was on his way to hell. I had already arrived, married into it. Now, the devil presided over me. He was as much my partner as Stella had become. He was the warm pussy that I would invade with my hard-on. I would live forever, but it would be a tortured existence devoid of peace or God, and I trembled at the thought of the suffering to come.

I made out sniffles and happy exhalations coming from Tara and Allison behind me. For them, this was a sentimental occasion. They were both crucial figures in my newfound fame and wealth. It wouldn’t be right to disappoint them. I leaned into Stella, pressed my lips against hers, kissed her like I meant it. Her fire engine red lipstick was smooth and sweet tasting. It wasn’t the time or place for it, but our tongues collided like two angry serpents and for the life of me, I wanted to pull her dress off and enter her right on the spot. How horrified the judge would have been. Instead, I pulled away to the cheers and claps of not only Allison and Tara but one more person too.

A man who, for the second day in a row, had shown up in my life entirely unannounced.

Mackey.

Stella asked the judge to stay, but he’d grown pale and sickly looking.

“We have champagne and a feast,” she added.

He tried pathetically to work up a smile, but he shook his head while droplets of sweat poured off his brow. He couldn’t wait to get the hell out.

“I really must be going. I wish you the best of luck in your marriage.”

He held his Bible to his chest like it was body armor, as he made his way to the front door, opened it and exited the premises. But then, that’s not exactly right. It was more like he escaped the premises.

Mackey approached me. He was unsteady and reeked of liquor.

“Now you have everything you’ve always wanted, Vic. Book contracts, movies, money, fame. And now you’ve landed the biggest prize of all. The muse of muses. Stella. You’re in, and I’m out on all fronts. Oh, how I envy you.”

He was wearing his usual uniform of black jeans, loafers, gray button down under his ratty brown blazer. His hair was thick and black and disheveled, while his thick eyeglasses were balanced precariously on the crown of his nose. I could only guess that Stella had invited him. Knowing what she had in store for him, I decided to be as pleasant as possible.

“Grab yourself a drink, Mackey,” I said. “Looks like you’ve already had a couple.”

He made his way into the kitchen, pulled a bottle of champagne from the bucket, poured himself a glass. He poured a second glass too. He carried the glasses, one in each hand, handed me one.

“What shall we drink to, Vic?”

“How about to a long life?” My eyes shifted from him to Stella. She was standing on the other side of the room with the two girls. They were drinking champagne and taking selfies which they would post on social media.

Mackey laughed.

“Mine or yours?” he posed.

Did Mackey know something about Stella’s plan? Was his intuition speaking to him? His gut? The cold wind blew through the house again, and once more the candles flickered, their black shadows dancing against the walls like dark spirits awoken from the dead. The shadows mesmerized me, paralyzed me for a moment. It was almost as if they were entering into me. I felt my body go cold. My body trembled, and I ground my teeth. I felt like I was levitating off the wood floor. I looked up and saw not the ceiling, but the entire universe. It had all opened up for me like I was no longer just a mere mortal but had instead become something supernatural.

I was excited but scared out of my wits at the same time. What the hell was happening to me? Who had control of me, because I damn well didn’t. Gazing once more over my shoulders at the girls, I saw they had gone from taking selfies, to something entirely different. Stella was seated on the long sectional couch. Allison was between her legs, licking her pussy, while Tara had positioned herself over Stella’s face by kneeling on the couch back. Stella was licking Tara’s pussy. They were still dressed, but they had pulled up their dresses and discarded their panties.

For a split second, Stella came up for air. She smiled and waved me over. Waved us over. Meaning me and Mackey. Without a word, I went to them. That’s when Allison slowly made her way onto the couch like a cat, her naked ass before me.

“Fuck me, Vic,” she said. “It’s my gift to you.”

I unzipped my pants and entered into her, my eyes not on her perfect heart-shaped ass, but instead Stella. She was undoing Mackey’s pants, pulling him out. For a time she sucked on his hard cock while Tara slipped back down onto the couch and joined her. I’m not sure why I didn’t feel an ounce of anger or jealousy. Maybe it had something to do with whatever had entered me moments before. The dark shadows that had seeped into my blood stream and become a part of me. My essence.

I worked on Allison, feeling her tight, hot pussy surrounding my cock, feeling her thrusting against me, hearing her subtle moans. Then, I saw Mackey enter into Stella, pulling her legs over his shoulders.

“Harder,” she begged. “Harder, Mackey.”

Tara was fondling Stella’s titties while Mackey fucked her with a particular desperation. I saw a tear fall from his eye and then another and another. I swear to God, that’s when the cold realization entered into me, and I knew that Mackey was not going to leave this house alive. That it was going to be my job not only to see to it that he didn’t leave the place alive, but that I take special note of every detail, of every sound, taste, and smell. I was going to write about this night, and I was going to do so with terrifying accuracy. So much so, the reader would question if what they were reading was not made up in the author’s imagination, but instead, had actually happened to them.

I felt myself fill up to the point of no return and I released into Allison with everything I had. When I was finished, Stella looked into my eyes.

“Mackey,” she said, lowering her legs. “I want you to save it. I have something planned for you.”

He took on a confused expression, and he pulled out. Stella took Allison’s hand and together they got up off the couch. Their long black gowns fell back down past their knees, while Allison took hold of a remote control from the glass coffee table. She aimed the device at the roof rafter, pressed a button that initiated the descent of a harness from the rafter. Stella helped Mackey undress entirely. She and Allison then fitted the complicated harness to Mackey’s ankles, wrists, and neck. They also fitted a thin leather extension to his cock.

“Auto erotica,” I whispered to myself. “That’s what she has planned.”

“The Handyman is about to kill for his art again. This time, it’s going to be really something. Glorious even. You just wait to see what I’ve got planned for you both.”  

“Raise him,” Stella ordered.

Allison pressed another button, and the cable went taut as it began to raise, pulling Mackey up with it not only by his wrists and ankles, but by his neck and cock. It was painful to look at, but I also knew the oxygen deprivation would cause him to experience an orgasm that would be both extended and deeper than anything he might realize under more natural circumstances. Circumstances God intended, you might say.

He wasn’t saying anything, but he was making moaning sounds. Groaning. I couldn’t be sure if he was in pain or euphoria.

Stella glanced at both women. “Let’s set the dinner table,” she said.

Allison handed me the remote control before heading into the kitchen with Tara.

Stella placed her lips against my ear. “You know what to do, Handyman. Make this your best one yet.”

Then she left me. Left me alone with Mackey.

He was looking directly at me and struggling like he was losing too much oxygen. Like he wasn’t having fun anymore. Like this should have been over by now. Like he was choking.

He began to get agitated. Then agitation turned into panic. He was struggling to get free of the cross-like harness. His face was turning blue, his mouth opening and closing, gasping desperately for breath like a fish out of water. He was choking to death.

I stared up at him, his arms outstretched and straining on the cross beam, his bulging eyes locked on mine. In my hand, I held the device that could either save his life or take it. I didn’t have to do a thing to murder him. All I had to do was stand by and do nothing. I could forsake him . . . or I could save his life.

I wasn’t playing God. I was God.

My heart beat rapidly in my sternum, my temples pounded, my brain buzzed with adrenalin. I shifted my focus to the girls in the kitchen. They seemed oblivious to what was happening in the living room despite the fact that no walls separated the two spaces. Except for the bedrooms, bathrooms, and closets, the entire floorplan was wide open. How could they not hear Mackey’s struggles? How could they not seem him squirming and thrusting himself against the leather and wood harness? How could they not know he was dying?

Instead, they happily chatted away while they set the table with fine china, cloth napkins, and expensive silverware all while they carved large slices of bloody roast beef, setting them on a big silver platter. Stella poured red wine into crystal goblets before making her way to the stereo system console where she chose an old vinyl album for what used to be Andrew’s prized turntable.

I recognized the record as Nat King Cole with George Shearing on the piano. The music was soft but as smooth as silk. Shearing’s fingers caressing the keys with all the tenderness of Stella’s lips on my earlobe.

“Oh, it’s a long, long while, from May to December,” Nat’s smoky voice sang. “But the days grow short when you reach September.”

Hanging from the rafter, the now yellow and blue-faced Mackey struggled and struggled, his body trembling and thrusting, his fingers and toes blue from lack of circulation.

“Oh, the days dwindle down, to a precious few.”

I soaked up every detail of the scene. The tongue protruding from the gaping mouth, the wide, bulging eyes, the snot running out of the nostrils, the urine dripping from his purple cock, the veins popping out of his forehead, the artery protruding from his elastic-like neck.

“September . . . Novemberrrrrrrr.”

The song reached a crescendo then came to a stop for a single, but extended, beat. A beat long enough for Mackey to lose the battle. Lose the war.

“And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you. These precious days . . . I’ll spend with you.”

I glanced at the kitchen. Stella was holding up her glass of red wine as if saying, Cheers. But instead, she was asking me to come to dinner. I took one more look at Mackey. He peered down at me with wide-open eyes that cried for mercy, longed for peace. And now he had it for all eternity.

“Coming, baby,” I said.

Setting the remote back down on the table, I made my way into the kitchen area to enjoy my first meal as a married man.

THE END

If you enjoyed this third and final episode of season one of The Handyman, then please view the first two episodes: and .