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  “I’m keeping her,” Queenie insisted.

  “No you ain’t,” said Jesse. “I don’t allow no pets in my car.”

  “I wonder what she eats,” Queenie said. “Melvin, go down to the kitchen and get some sugar.”

  “I ain’t your errand boy,” he said, turning sullenly to the whore in the doorway. “Zelda? Get some sugar for this damn critter.”

  Zelda headed for the stairs without hesitation.

  Queenie said, “See if there’s a key to her collar on that ring.”

  “You can’t turn her loose,” Melvin said. “There’s a reason they keep her chained up.”

  “She ain’t coming with us,” Jesse said. “I’m putting my foot down.”

  “What if she was to get car sick? Or piss on the upholstery?” Melvin said, bolstering the case against adopting the wild girl.

  “The flivver’s just as much mine as it is yours,” Queenie told Jesse. “And I say she can ride in it, by God.”

  Another big boom of thunder shook the house. Wolf Girl’s eyes darted about the room as she cringed a little.

  “Aw,” Queenie crooned, “the poor thing’s afraid of thunder. It’s all right, sweetie. It’s just a lot of big noise. Like what comes out of these two apes I’m burdened with.”

  Jesse put the key-ring in Melvin’s hand. “Try the little key,” said Jesse, grudgingly acquiescing to Queenie’s wishes.

  “I wish we’d never set foot in this damn house,” said Melvin. He went to the edge of the bed and gave the keys to Queenie. “You do it,” he said. “I ain’t getting my hand bit off.”

  “She can’t be that dangerous if men pay to lie with her,” Queenie said. She tried the key. It unlocked the collar. “There now. You’re free, sweetheart. Would you like to come with Aunt Queenie? I’ll buy you lots of nice play-pretties. Would you like that? Hmm?”

  Queenie tried to put her arm around the girl, but the girl had other ideas. She jerked away, hopped off the bed, and hit the floor with a thump. She balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to run in any direction. A strap slid off her shoulder and the silk slip slipped, revealing a furry nipple-tipped nubbin.

  “Grab her!” shouted Queenie.

  “Fuck that,” said Melvin. But Wolf Girl made her move and darted toward him, obviously intending to make a break past him, for the doorway. He yelled: “Heeyah!” and stretched both arms out to box her in.

  Wolf Girl bounced on her feet, then suddenly turned, reached down and picked up the slop bucket from the floor by the side of the bed and flung the bucket’s stinking stew of urine and shit in Melvin’s face. Melvin sputtered and gasped, wiping at his eyes and nose.

  Queenie broke into boisterous laughter. Not so easily amused, Jesse fired a shot into the ceiling in an attempt to get control of the situation. Whenever things were slipping out of his control, he found that shooting off his gun was the quickest way to get a handle on things and turn them back his way, but this time all he got for his effort was a shower of ceiling plaster on his head and a swift slap on the shoulder from Queenie.

  The wild girl darted through the doorway and out of the room.

  “You goddamn idjit!” she yelled in Jesse’s ear. And ran after the girl.

  Melvin grabbed a pillow off the bed and wiped his face with it. Then he bent over and puked up the pork chops, collards and corn-bread he’d wolfed downed at a Little Rock roadhouse a few hours ago. Jesse clog-danced down the stairs, trailing after Queenie and Wolf Girl.

  Melvin got out of the shit-and-vomit-stinking room as quick as he could, but his befouled shirt carried the stench with him. He bumped into Zelda on the staircase. She had a forgotten cup of sugar in her hand and a worried look on her face. “If Wolf Girl sees what you did to Mama Rose, she’ll go wild sure enough,” she told him, pinching her nose against his stench and sounding like a snooty telephone operator. “She loved Rose.”

  Melvin brushed by her and stormed down the steps. Black rage settled in his heart. He was set like hardened cement on shooting the wild child. In a way, he was glad she’d dumped the slop bucket on him. It gave him a good excuse for killing the half-human wolf cub. Nobody could fault him for it after having human waste thrown in his face. Jesse and Queenie both had killed people for lesser offenses.

  Above the sound of the storm came an awful throaty lamentation. It was more of a wail than a howl, and he knew by its mournful tone that Wolf Girl had found her beloved madam dead on the parlor floor. He turned left at the bottom of the stairs and went straight to the parlor to kill the hairy little hellion.

  She was crouched over the fat madam, the ice pick in her hand, tears streaking down her furry cheeks. Jesse and Queenie were arguing in front of the cold fireplace, Jesse’s hatchet-face chopping the air with his angry jawing and Queenie just standing there with her hands on her slim hips, a mask of impatience on her face.

  Wolf Girl stopped howling and sniffed the ice pick’s handle. Then she looked up at Melvin.

  “That’s right,” he said with his wickedest grin, “I killed the old bitch.” He raised his pistol and drew a bead on her head.

  Guilt bubbled up into his boiling rage to cloud his thinking. He hadn’t wanted to kill the madam in the first place, but Queenie had told him with such ferocity to do it that he’d been afraid not to. Had he balked, Queenie surely would’ve turned her rage on him, and Jesse wouldn’t have lifted a hand to stop her. For all his tough-guy bluster, Jesse James Pike was a pushover for his long-legged moll. And now Melvin’s remorse for killing Mama Rose caused him to hesitate when he should’ve been about the business of shooting the mad little cubby instead of feeling sorry for her. And to make matters worse, Queenie looked up and saw him aiming at the girl and shouted: “No! Don’t you dare!” She pulled her pistol from the small of her back and pointed it at Melvin.

  Jesse saw what was happening, threw up his hands and said, “Jesus-barking-Christ, what next?”

  As if in answer to his question, the front door of the brothel banged open and a man’s voice boomed: “What in hell’s going on here, Zelda?”

  Zelda answered with nervous urgency: “Robbers! They killed Rose! They’re in there, Sheriff Dan. They got guns!”

  Sheriff Dan? “Shit,” Melvin said, turning toward the parlor’s archway and wishing his Tommy gun was in his hands instead of in the boot of the car. After their Main Street shootout with the law in Bumfuck, Oklahoma, Melvin had resolved never to engage John Law without the benefit of his Thompson submachine gun. But here he was again, armed with nothing bigger than a Colt revolver notorious for missing targets more than ten paces away.

  “They killed Rose?” Sheriff Dan blurted. “Son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Didn’t you cut the phone line?” Jesse whispered behind him.

  Melvin nodded, suddenly understanding why the sheriff was at the whorehouse door in the middle of a stormy night. The man had come for some after-hours pussy, and judging by his reaction to the news that Rose was killed, the late madam had been the sheriff ’s squeeze. “Well, let’s go shoot the sumbitch,” Melvin said with irritated resignation.

  “Honey, no!” shouted Queenie.

  Before he had time to wonder why she might be so vociferously against shooting the sheriff, Melvin felt a sharp stab of pain in the middle of his spine and realized in an excruciating flash that Wolf Girl had just planted the ice pick in his back. He thought to turn around and put a .45 slug in her head, but his body seemed to be ignoring that most fervent wish. His legs refused to move. Worse than that, they felt like they were made out of Jell-O that hadn’t quite jelled.

  Behind him, Melvin heard the familiar thock! of gun barrel meeting skull and he knew Jesse had put down the little whore. He teetered on his feet. His backbone felt like it was encased in ice. All it took to knock him down was the next crashing thunderclap that shook the house and rattled the windows. He fell facedown, breaking his fall with his arms. The gun was still in his hand, so he braced his elbow on the floor, pointed the pistol at the arch
way and waited for the sheriff to show himself. He might be paralyzed from the waist down, but he could shoot just fine from his prone position. At least he would be below the line of fire, whenever firing commenced.

  “Come on in, Sheriff Dan!” he shouted. “Your whore’s dead on the floor.”

  Jesse and Queenie were still somewhere behind him but Melvin was no longer concerned with them. He had an ice pick in his spine, and he might have to crawl on his elbows out of the whorehouse to the car, but he was not going to be shot down by a whore-fucking lawman. If he was destined to die tonight—and the old fortuneteller’s prediction that he would die in a thunderstorm did not now seem at all farfetched—it would not be by the hand of some backwoods sheriff.

  But so far, Sheriff Dan wasn’t taking the bait. Melvin had hoped the man’s anger would bring him on in for the lead-slinging hooraw, but the sheriff, to his credit, wasn’t that dumb.

  “Go see what he’s doing,” Melvin said over his shoulder.

  “He’s probably gone out to his car to radio for deputies,” Queenie said.

  “Hell, we better go get him,” said Jesse with irritated resignation.

  “And then drag his ass in here so I can put one in him too,” Melvin said. It was a foolish thing to say, and it drove home the fact that he might be crippled for the rest of his life—if he managed to outlive the prophesied storm, that was.

  Brandishing their pistols, Jesse and Queenie went side-by-side through the archway and into the foyer.

  Melvin twisted at the waist and looked over his shoulder to get a fix on Wolf Girl. She was on her hands and knees, a trickle of blood on her forehead, and she was licking the dead madam’s face. He wanted very badly to shoot her but he would have to do a lot of elbow-crawling to reposition himself for a clean shot, and that would leave his back to the archway the sheriff would be coming through if he got past Jesse and Queenie, so Melvin held his position to see how things were going to shake out. He would shoot the wooly little bitch later. When he looked back around, his two companions were out of sight.

  At the tail-end of a long rumble of thunder, two booming shotgun blasts filled the foyer, and Jesse flew backward across the tall archway that framed Melvin’s view from the floor.

  He heard Queenie say in a queer voice: “Jesse? I can’t see. Jess . . .?”

  After two pops of a pistol, Queenie said no more.

  Melvin heard the sheriff and Zelda whisper back and forth, and then shotgun-wielding Sheriff Dan strolled right into Melvin’s gun-sights and fired a blast at the room. Melvin shot him twice in the chest and once in belly, and the big man keeled over dead. Zelda started shrieking from the staircase.

  “Zelda baby, shut up and come in here,” Melvin said. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars to drive me out of here.” He didn’t have that kind of money but she didn’t know it. She was his ticket out of this whorehouse hellhole.

  He crawled toward the foyer so Zelda would see the sorry state he was in and take pity on him.

  But Wolf Girl wasn’t done with him.

  She pounced on his hips, pulled the ice pick out of his back and commenced to stabbing him repeatedly, working that sharp steel up and down his backbone until his spine went as cold as a block of ice.

  The more holes she punched in him, the harder Melvin howled.

  Zelda and the rest of the whores watched impassively from the archway as the tireless girl stabbed the life out of him. Then she stopped stabbing and bent down to sink her teeth into the soft flesh of his neck, gnawing and grinding and then ripping off a chunk of dripping flesh. She spat it out and dived down for more.

  But Melvin Locust was already elsewhere. He was rumbling down a dark road in a spanking new blue Studebaker with white leather seats and white sidewalls. A pack of howling she-wolves chased him, but he knew they could never catch him now.

  He honked his horn, laughed, and howled back at them.

  He didn’t know where this muddy road went, but he reckoned it couldn’t be any worse than the hell house he’d just left.

  All he had to do was outrun this howling storm.

  Part Two

  Call me Wolf Girl. When you want something wild. Me, I would never call somebody like me. No matter how hot to trot I got. Because I know how I am. Because I know you might end up dead. Maybe I should wear a Don’t Feed The Animal sign around my hairy neck. If I like you I’ll let you live. If your luck’s running right. But if you’re an evil son of a bitch, you’re as good as dead. And I’m not easy to fool—I know most men are evil. About most women, let’s say the jury’s still out.

  Men liked me because I was just a kid. And hairy like a cute cuddly bunny or sweet little dog you love to pet. Men liked to fuck me. I was little and tight and they were sick fucks so they liked me.

  And I never talked. That’s why the dog is Man’s Best Friend, you know. Because dogs don’t talk back. They just wag their cute little tails, lick their master’s balls or whatever and fetch or roll over when told to. And beg. They liked me to beg for it, to tell them how great they were. That’s what they expected out of me. That and getting their ashes hauled fast and cheap. That was me, back then. Fast and cheap. Unless I made them pay.

  That’s why they looked so surprised when I gutted them with my knife or sliced them with my razor. Because I was so cute. Once I killed a guy with nail file. Hand to God. I did. I could write a book. How To Kill Johns Six Ways To Sunday.

  Maybe this I’m writing now will be a book. Publish it in Paris. On account of it’s so evil and nasty. In Gay Paree they don’t give a shit. Anything goes there. French tickle, French kiss, French inhale, French fuck. Not that I’ve been there.

  That fuck Melvin Locust was my first. He had it coming. He murdered Mama Rose. Fancied himself a big-time outlaw. The big boys don’t stick ice picks in madams just to shut em up so they can knock over the house. I worked him over with that same ice pick. Put fifty fucking holes in his backbone. At least. Nifty fifty.

  Then Zelda and me hightailed it outta there in the dead outlaws’ roadster. With a dead cop in the whorehouse, we weren’t about to stay there for the party. Zelda took me under her wing. She knew I was never as wild as I’d put on. She missed Mama Rose as much as I did. We cried about her for hours. Days. I was only ever as bad as I had to be. Don’t think I was a crazed killer. I wasn’t.

  We had a little money between us but not enough to last long. What’d we do? We turned tricks out of motor court rooms and made enough jack to tide us over, then we signed on the next spring with a carnival in Oklahoma City. Me as the Wolf Girl and Zelda the hootchie cootchie dancer. Where else was a hairy freak like me going to get a job? Two out-of-work whores can’t be too choosy. And I already had freak show experience. Hell, I was born to it.

  Back when we first found the Tommy gun in the car I thought we should try our hand at being bank robbers but Zelda said no. Whoring was bad enough, she said. She’d already thought of joining up with a carnival and said we just had to get through winter and we’d be fine.

  Meanwhile Zelda started teaching me to read and write.

  Look, look, see Spot run. See Dick and Jane get some poontang.

  Like that. But without the poontang.

  Zelda had watched me ice pick Melvin Locust. Saw me stab him full of neat little holes and thought I needed that sin washed away. So she stole a Bible and started reading it to me every day and night. I didn’t understand much of that thee and thou stuff at first and got things confused. But after about the third week of it I began to sort of enjoy the stories. There is some wild shit in there. Nasty shit too. For a holy book, I mean. Zelda hit me hard with the Jesus stuff. She thought I needed forgiveness for my awful deed. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t want forgiveness, not from Jesus Christ Himself or anybody else either. Melvin Locust had it coming and my hand was the one God chose to do the smiting. I didn’t have the right words to tell her that then but now I do: It was divine retribution. And I was the one dishing it out, chipping away with
the ice pick at the murdering son of a bitch. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. And mine. Yours truly, Wolf Girl.

  Truth be told, it was much more than vengeance or retribution. I enjoyed killing him. I killed him over and over in my imagination. Instead of saying my prayers at bedtime, I killed Locust every night before I fell asleep. It gave me comfort. Sometimes I used the ice pick, other times I used my teeth, my hands, my feet, or anything handy. I killed him every way I could imagine. And as it turns out, I have a big imagination. Sometimes I fingered myself while I killed him and came hard as his slimy soul shot out of his bloody body. It was powerful when that happened. I never felt that way with a john. It only happened when I was killing Melvin Locust again. Sex and violent death went hand in hand down there on my hoohah. My hands were better than anything a man had. I had grown to pretty much hate pricks because of the way they hurt me. Made me bleed. Jesus had nothing on me. I could bleed with the worst of them, ripped and torn inside, crucified by cock.

  You think I wasn’t going to get some sweet payback for that? Think again, chump. I knew in my gut, in my hoohah, that Melvin Locust was not my last. Put another way, there were a lot of Melvins out there—a plague of Locusts—and I was going to have my fair share.

  There was no shortage of wicked sinners waiting for me. God would lead me to em and leave it to me to take care of the dirty work. Wolf Girl the Avenging Angel.

  The Lord would deal with their souls. I would deal death like a card shark at the Lord’s Poker Table. Satan might sweeten the pot, bluffing or not. The Devil didn’t worry me. I was doing the Lord’s work. The Devil could kiss my hairy ass. That’s how I was back then. I’ve softened up since.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s not good, unless you like running up your own bum. I don’t. So here we go, back to when Zelda and me joined the Americana Carnival and became nomad whores on the hustle.

  With my hereditary curse of profuse hair, I was a natural for the sideshow. I was, after all, a true freak of nature. Zelda had the face, the big tits and wide hips of a first-class cooch dancer. The local hymn hustlers and sky pilots might complain that the carnie strippers were corrupting the morals of the youth, but juice to the law, whether a double sawbuck or a half a yard, usually kept the heat off until it was time to break down and road up for the next two-bit town. We hit it off and fitted right in from the jump.