Chapter Twenty-Three
Even in the glow of initial conquest and exploration, Armando was increasingly fantasizing about Dancy’s death. He kept imagining killing her during sex, alternating between killing her at her orgasm or his own, of the position they would be in when he did it. He played with many variations, but never altered the weapon–his knife.
I will have her stuffed, her thought while watching her prance above him as he lay across the big bed straining himself not to reach up and grab her. Mounted like a trophy deer. Just exactly like this: golden, naked, on her knees, with hair flying and breasts bounding. Keep her in a glass cage in the living room. The ultimate trophy. But the obsession deepened and widened. When he wasn’t fucking her, he was immersed in sex fantasies, when he was, he wallowed in fantasies of bloody death. He was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t strayed just a little far from the psychosexual mainstream.
At one point he went so far as to sound out Ramos on the question. They were alone in the Hummer, driving out to inspect some new horses, when he suddenly blurted out, “So, Jaime. Have you ever killed a woman while you were fucking her?” Ramos turned toward him and gave a tight, chilly smile that seemed indicate a complete understanding of the situation. “Jefe,” he said, “It kills them every fucking time.”
Armando dropped the subject but after that he always felt as if he’d made some unilateral confession to sly assassin, who now shared a secret that he could read in the man’s eyes whenever he and Dancy were together with him. He felt that Ramos was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He also felt that he was living in a vacuum, cut off from other men. Dancy was so exquisite in the bed that he sometimes felt incomplete while having her, as if he wanted witnesses to the act, photographs to show. Just having her was not enough. And the idea that his affair with her was her last, that he would be the man who would actually take her all the way, was too burning and sweltering to keep secret. But with whom could he share it?
He made an oblique mention of his concerns to Martillo, who was apparently less than impressed with his new woman; he avoided her presence and if he had to be around her, would have nothing to do with her. This a man who’d given up the career of his unique talent by killing a man for a woman’s favors. What had that felt like? Could it be compared to killing a woman as part of a career move? To fucking her to the very death. There was a symmetry there that he toyed with, and would have liked to discuss. But his overtures to the discussion went nowhere. He’d probed, he’d hinted, he’d gotten no response.
“Sex and death–they’re so close, aren’t they?”
“Well it seems like they’re opposites, really.”
“Can you imagine a woman so beautiful that you’d want her to die after you fucked her? So nothing lesser could ever befall her? So you could freeze that moment forever, never see her get older and uglier?”
“If she was that beautiful, wouldn’t you want to have her again?”
“Wouldn’t it be great to die right at the climax, though? Just take off from the very peak and never come down?”
“Me, I’d want to keep living. The next time might be even better, you know?”
Of course he didn’t know that the hints weren’t lost on his young lieutenant, but cut into his soul like hot whips. In fact, Martillo was starting to live in a constant state of alarm. Was he really talking about killing her? Could he possibly do such a thing? What could he do about it? Or was he just crazy to even imagine it? Armando, even wrapped up his own kinky consciousness, noted Martillo’s tension and attributed it to worries about the progress of the coke deals. You run around the big boys and there was some small danger. But he could handle it, and Martillo should know that. It was probably just opening night jitters because the whole thing, so big and intricate, was essentially his baby. The kid needed some strokes.
They were sitting together in what Dancy called his “throne room”, a sort of official reception office with an impressive desk and looming chair, in which he was leaning back, watching Martillo with pride and affection.
Martillo was responding with shame and an inexplicable irritation. “I don’t need any more reward than working for you.”
“That’s what I’d expect you to say, mi hijo. But understand that I mean something very special here. Listen to what I say very seriously. If there is anything, anything I have or can get, that you want, it’s yours. Right now. Today. Forever.”
Martillo stared at him, a small breeze of hope stirring in him, and a rising chubasco of another feeling, one that said, Let’s get this over with. He felt his stomach muscles girdle up, his jaw clench, his mind go cold, his eyes widen. He stepped out, took the leap, heard the bell.
“The woman.”
“What?” Armando was confused a moment, but smiled, “Which woman do you have in mind?”
“The blonde woman that’s living here now. I know you don’t intend to keep her. She’s the only thing I want, all I’ve ever wanted. If you want to reward me, that’s the only thing that would mean anything.”
Armando was too shocked to think straight. The impropriety of the request, the way he’d trapped himself into a promise he’d have to back down on, the impudence…then he realized what it was that was actually firing the fury he felt building up in himself, turning his feelings towards Martillo into a rage. The very idea of it had repulsed him so powerfully that he suddenly knew that he would never be able to kill her when the time came, that she had won the game in which he held all the cards. And the knowledge of that was like sticking his face into a furnace.
“You forget yourself,” he snapped. “You go too far. Do you really think my offer extended to my own woman, that you can give people away?” The irony of that one hit him as he said it, making him even more furious. “The subject is closed. I still offer you anything I own. Any thing that I own. I will forget what you’ve said. And I hope you won’t ever remind me, by word or action. You must never be alone with her, never touch her. You understand why?”
“Yeah, but it’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Dancy had heard much of the conversation, and had slipped into the room unnoticed during the intensity of the plea and dismissal. She hadn’t liked the tension she’d felt between the two men, the way Martillo had acted in her presence, the fact that Armando was humiliating him this way over her. She walked right up to the desk, where both men stared at her, surprised into silence.
“Listen, Armando. I’m not that big a deal around here that you should break the kid’s chops over me. He’s got a crush on me, is all. He’s young. We had a little thing, kind of by mistake, and he took it too hard. Can’t you cut him some slack here? He’s your main man, believe me.” She wasn’t at all prepared for the reaction. She was a gringa, she didn’t know any better.
Armando went rigid. He spun around on Martillo and saw the truth of it on his face. Raging, livid, he vaulted the desk and slapped his face hard enough to flop his head back against the chair. Martillo turned back to face him, but without standing up, and Armando had a sudden chill, recalled who he was dealing with–and a sudden premonition that he had just gone too far. Then he glanced at Dancy, who was looking at him with one eyebrow raised, encouraging him to lighten up, but plain to him as a question of his control, and he snapped completely. He strode to her and slapped her face, then again, then again. She stood there and took it, but he could see in her eyes that he had lost her, had lost to her, whatever he did. Meanwhile Martillo was out of the chair and standing between him and Dancy. He knew he couldn’t hit her again. One look at his stormy young face and Armando lost it, driving a hail of blows into that face. Martillo did nothing to defend himself, just stood in front of Dancy and let the blows fall.
Which was the ultimate trigger for Armando, a shot right in his gut. He was punishing this kid, this boy, really, for succumbing to irresistible force. He took one look at Dancy, who felt concern for both men, but had in her eyes the scorn of a proud woman struck by a larger man, and everything fell into place. The knife was in his hand, the blade chunked into place, and he was reaching for her, before he even had a thought on the matter. She fell back into a defensive position, obviously scared. But at that point Martillo knew the hints were true, knew that for some reason his patron was capable of killing the most magnificent woman in the universe. He grabbed Armando by the hair and jerked him away from her, causing his feet to tangle, and his whole body to fall to the carpet.
Armando had an instantaneous reaction to that. He had been spurned to the floor, was looking up at the hired man he’d built from street trash and his gringa whore standing over him in the complicity that had put horns on his head. The perception shot through him like a load of buckshot. He tossed the knife at her in a spitting rage, then jumped to his feet and snatched a pistol from the desk drawer. He swung the pistol toward Dancy, but Martillo moved in on him so fast that Dancy didn’t even get a clear image of what happened. But she heard two shots and saw the spray of blood.