Gadarene

Had he heard her wrong?

There was nothing to do but sit and listen to the footsteps fade, faint enough now that the stirring wind blew patches of silence through its cadence. In those lengthening moments, the stench of the alley seeped into his mouth, a stew thick with spilled beer, turned mayonnaise, and sodden tobacco. How it hadn't bothered him when he first rolled in, he hadn't a clue. Probably the industrial strength hard-on he'd been sporting had helped with that. But with his lust fading, the darkness and the stench and the cold rushed in to fill the amorous void.

And hovering over this dismal whirlpool, like fading smoke from departed lungs, floated the dense cloud of his own stupidity, the horndog lust that had played him out and left him freezing in an alley, a mother-fucking alley, at 3:10 in the morning.

The phone in his pocket began to vibrate.

"Just passed Gas City. Where the fuck do they get these names?"

Jack slid down on the seat, settling his back against the padded leather. It took a cold and miserable night to make welcome Taggert's bitching. "Hurry the fuck up. It's gotten real cold over here."

Taggert's voice lost bass as he pulled the phone from his mouth. "Jack says to floor this fucker, Jimbo."

"I did not," Jack said.

"How we going to outrun the county mounties if we don't step on it?" In the background, Jimbo howled like a wolf.

"You bring mounties, you just keep going."

Taggert laughed. "Where you gonna be, boss?"

"The alley one block north of Donovan's bar."

"Alley? What the fuck?"

"Long, long story," Jack said. The smell of the alley was starting to get to him. "Just back in and kill the lights. I'll be waiting." He thumbed off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket.

"How much time that give us?"

Jack was rolling off the bike, hand fumbling for his boot knife, feet slipping through half-frozen muck. A punk gangbanger could have laid him out with a whiffle bat.

Smokey laughter swept over him.

"Did I forget to mention the back way in?"

#

His knees were ice cold and lanced by something sharp. Pam stood over him, a dark shadow in the alley.

"Yeah, you kind of left that part out."

From his vantage point on his knees, he couldn't tell if she were smiling, but he thought she might be. And he didn't mind. Not being alone in a frigid alley at 3:15 in the morning was salve enough for any bruising of his ego.

She walked closer, and he had to crane his head back to get a better look at her. Close, her hair was a black curtain falling around her face. She wore one of those heavy corduroy coats that he remembered mothers wearing from his childhood, the sort with big pockets filled with Kleenexes for kids' runny noses. As she stopped in front of him, the edges of the coat closed around him like the corded wings of a bird.

"You look so cold down there." Her voice purred out at him from the darkness of her face.

For an answer, he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her hips, pulling her against him. The smell of perfume, cigarettes, and something darker wrapped around him. The coat became a cave, throwing his breath back into his face, warming him.

He slid his hands up beneath her shirt.

"You're ice," she whispered, and shivered against him, the soft flesh of her back rippling beneath his fingers.

"I'm warm where it counts." He straightened from the muck, the length of her sweeping past his face in a blur of blue jean, shirt, and hair. He gazed down into her face. From somewhere higher up the alley, a red liquor sign was still flashing, strobing her upturned face scarlet. Her eyes glinted like rubies.

"I thought you'd bailed on me."

She smiled up at him.

"That would be one hell of a way to welcome a stranger to town, wouldn't it?" She chuckled, deep in the back of her throat. "And besides, we have unfinished business."

"I don't suppose you have a key to the bar, do you?"

"Nope," she said, and leaned her body into his.

"Somehow, I didn't think so."

"You're not afraid of a little cold, are you?"

He slid his hands beneath her ass and lifted her up so that her face drew level with his, the corded muscles of his back scissoring beneath his shirt. Her legs swept round him, cinching her pelvis against him.

"I'm not afraid of anything," he said.

She opened her mouth and sighed into his face. "Then what are you waiting for?"

And her mouth was on him, her tongue slipping between his lips. She had a long, lean tongue that twirled and twisted in his mouth. His own tongue fell limp as she slithered beneath him, licking the length of it, her tobacco-tainted saliva painting the inside of his mouth. Her lips sucked against him and his tongue followed her own past her sharp teeth and into the warmth of her mouth. Her tongue was frantic -- dancing, sliding, rolling over his.

He moaned.

Pam pulled back, laughter bubbling from her throat. "You should see what I can do with a cock."

"Yes, I should."

He looked over her shoulder, past the swell of her dark hair and into the depths of the alley, saw a stack of pallets tossed up against the wall. Across from these, a green EXIT sign glowed from the rear door of a merchant's shop. As he carried her to the pallets, the green light glinted off her silver earrings as she bent her head forward and licked the exposed flesh of his throat.

He dropped her onto the pallets. With a heavy creak of wood, she settled back onto her elbows and looked up at him. In the EXIT light, her breath ghosted out in green clouds as she panted up at him. She reached up and performed magic with her fingers, the buttons of her blouse flying open. Her black bra glowed with verdigris.

"Show them to me," he said.

Propped on one elbow, she used her free hand to slide up her bra, spilling heavy breasts into the November night. Large round nipples hardened as soon as the air hit them. Dropping back on both elbows, she slid her hands up and cupped them, pushing them together, rolling them beneath her palms.

"So cold," she said, and arched her back. Her skin rippled with goose flesh.

Jack leaned over her, the sharp edge of the pallet digging against the cock straining inside his jeans. He pushed aside one of her hands and pressed his face to her breast, his sharp, whiskered chin digging into her mounded flesh as his mouth settled around the teat. As the nipple unfolded beneath his tongue, the smell of garbage and talcum mingled in his nostrils.

The location was incongruous, ludicrous, but the juxtaposition of her pale flesh against the filth of the alley loosed a rutting spirit upon him. She writhed on the pallet, heavy breasts wobbling on her ribs, a beast on her back, serene in her surroundings, goblin green eyes glinting up at him. He filled his lungs with the icy air of the alley, let his senses meld the filth and the decay with the pale wonder of her flesh, wed them together in an amalgam of lust.

He sank his weight onto her, burrowed his face between her breasts. He lost himself, then, ego drowning beneath a wave of lust that dampened his mind and swept through his body. His lips and tongue savored her, licking, sucking, tasting.

From some far distance, he felt the tingle of electronics against his leg. And again. A persistent, droning vibration that slowly re-assembled his reasoning brain.

He staggered up from her, landed against the cold bricks of the far wall. As his numb fingers fumbled out the phone, he felt the crackle of frost on his cheeks, his skin frosting over from the sheen of saliva that had smeared back from her breasts and onto his face. As the screen of the phone splashed color against his cheek, Pam stared across at him, her face hardening in the chill.

"Which alley?"

"What?" he tried to shake his head clear.

Taggert spoke slowly. "The one north of the tavern or the one south?" In that instant, a panel van rolled past the mouth of the alley, Jimbo's blond bulk crammed behind the steering wheel.

Pam slipped down from the pallets, the front flaps of her blouse fluttering out from her corduroy jacket as she padded across the alley. She stopped before him, cocked her head. Her eyes were thoughtful, withdrawn, calculating.

"South," he whispered, as Pam's hands began to knead the front of his jeans, squeeze the bulge of his cock. "But give me a minute."

"What?" And with a glare of white backup lights, the van swept back into view, swung ass-end into the alley.

"Fuck." Jack slapped the phone off.

With a hiss of corduroy, Pam slid down his torso, her fingers snagging down his zipper. As the van stopped and its lights died, her hand reached through the moist flap of his underwear and pulled him out in the icy air. He felt the head of his cock enter into the blazing circle of her lips, her tongue cupping his glans.

"Baby, my ride," he protested, weakly. His arms fell to his side, palms scraping against the ridged brick behind him. As he felt the length of his cock slip into Pam's mouth, heard the wet vinyl sound of his flesh between her lips, the panel van's doors opened and closed. Footsteps crunched towards them.

"Jimbo, Tag, I'd like to introduce you to Pam." He lifted his hands to her head, buried his fingers in her hair as she sank her mouth to the base of his cock. "The best fucking bartender in Acacia, Indiana."

#

Taggert and Jimbo stood there, frozen in the green periphery of the EXIT sign. Jack was having a hard time reading their faces -- having his cock sucked didn't help his powers of observation. As Pam slowly pulled her mouth from him, his cock grew a sheath of ice. She turned her head and pressed it against the side of his leg, facing away from the van and its two strangers. His cock pawed the air, twining through her hair.

In the silence of the alley, he heard her pant.

"Boss?" Taggert was looking at his feet. "Maybe Jimbo and me should head back in the van for a little bit?"

Jimbo was staring forward. If anyone fit the stereotype of an outlaw biker, it was Jimbo. Well over six feet tall, and built like a steer, he was strong enough to solo-lift a bike onto a mechanic's table. And if the women that clung to his back weren't all damn liars, his strength wasn't the only attribute he shared with a bull.

"I don't want to go in the van," Jimbo said heavily. His eyes, hot and beady, were locked on Pam.

Jack had to play this right. Jimbo had always been . . . different. He let his hand fall from Pam's hair and onto her shoulder, a nearly paternal gesture. "Why don't you two roll the bike into the back." His voice was soft, reasonable. "I can give you a hand in a second."

Taggert clucked Jimbo on the shoulder and Jimbo shook his head, like he was coming up out of deep water.

"Sure, Jack. Sure." The big man lumbered towards the bike, his broad back turning to them. Taggert scowled a silent warning at Jack, then followed, opening the rear doors.

During this exchange, Pam had knelt in the garbage at Jack's feet. What he had first taken as shivering, had deepened into a sustained trembling. Jack realized that he knew almost nothing of this woman, where her limits and proclivities lay. But he was relatively sure that they didn't extend to situations like this.

Gently, he raised her to her feet.

"Listen, we can give you a ride--"

And she was on him. As her lips smashed against him, tongue spearing against his teeth, he fell back against the wall, starring his head. For a second, he felt dizzy, and the alley spun around him, the white oval of Pam's face weaving in front of him as her lips feasted on him.

Her body shook, and what he had assumed to be fear revealed itself as a body worked past the limits of tension, a red-lined engine shaking itself to pieces. She draped herself over him, hand grabbing his half-softened cock, pumping it against her abdomen.

He heard the van's shocks settle under the weight of his bike and turned his head sideways, away from the furnace of her lips. Taggert and Jimbo were gazing into the rear of the van, ignoring whatever was going on behind them.

Fuck it, he decided. He reached out and put his hands on Pam's shoulders, urging her to her knees. If his ride didn't mind and Pam didn't mind, he'd roll right along with it.

"No," she whispered.

He looked into her face. The dome light of the van cross-hatched her features, white and green. Her hair was matted across her forehead, lipstick and saliva smeared across her lower lip and chin. Her eyes were sharp green embers.

She stepped back from him and reached down, past the flapping tails of her blouse. Her fingers bunched at the front of her jeans, unbuttoning, then pushed jeans and panties down her legs. She kicked her feet free, then stood in the alley across from him, naked from the waist down. Thick-soled white shoes, the type favored by nurses perambulating through long midnight shifts, rebuffed the bare flesh above them.

In the moonless darkness, her vulva, shaven and pale, flashed its crescent at him. Her lunar thighs quivered, whether from cold or from lust, he didn't have time to say because Pam turned and walked the three paces it took to reach Jimbo's broad, carefully turned back. Like a den mother snatching hold of a rambunctious scout, she grabbed his arm and swung him around. Jack caught a look of dull shock on his enforcer's face, then Pam reached up and grabbed his full beard in her hands, pulling his face down to her's. As she kissed him, Jack watched her mounded buttocks clench, screw her mound forward against Jimbo's grease-stained jeans.

Taggert looked at Pam, looked at Jimbo, then looked back at Jack.

"Boss--", but then Pam's hand shot forward and grabbed the front of his jeans, clutching, squeezing. Taggert fell back against the opened door of the van, rocking it forward. Taggert was faster on his feet and with his wits than Jimbo, who swayed in front of Pam like a cobra before a snake-charmer. With sharp, measured efficiency, Taggert batted her hand away, shoved her backwards.

She fell from Jimbo, staggered into the middle of the alley, surrounded by Jack and his men. Taggert leaned forward, as though ready to follow up with further violence, if needed. Jimbo simply stood, eyes dulled, face clouded.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Taggert was loud, and growing louder. Jack couldn't tell if the anger were genuine or summoned for his benefit. None of them knew how to read either the situation or the woman in front of them. Jack had heard the old timers' war stories about pulling trains, but it was a vanished rite among the club.

And never had it been described like this.

Pam turned and looked at Jack, hair whipping around her face. "Jack, you promised me a ride." Where Taggert boomed, she whispered. Her thin voice was as sharp as the wind. Jack felt the hair rise along his neck.

He pushed off from the wall, uncomfortably aware of the semi-erect cock dangling from his zipper. He held his hands in front of him, as though placating a cornered stray. "Listen, I"m not sure what you thought was going on here. But this ain't going to happen."

Pam barked out laughter.

"I thought we were going to have some fun. Isn't that what you wanted?" She reached down and ran her hand between her legs. "Isn't this what you wanted?"

"Whoa, whoa." He edged closer to her, trying to think of some way to defuse the situation. His mind was on the felony tucked in the gas tank and the out-of-state van sitting in the alley. Fun time was over. "Look, we had our fun. But I've got to go now."

"Our fun." She spat the phrase, the vehemence stopping his approach. "Your big night in hick-ville is over now, right? And I'm supposed to just trot my little ass home because the big man has 'got to go now.' You're done with me."

Taggert was edging the rear door closed, Jimbo only moving as the door closed in on him. The big man seemed to be in a trance. Jack was circling around her now, getting between her and the rear of the van. A few more steps and he'd be on the good side of her, ready to duck into the van.

"That's not how I see it, Pam." The cold had shrank him now, and he felt the underside of his glans rubbing against the cold metal mouth of his zipper. Pam was watching him, hands swinging loosely at her side, fingers curled like talons. As the van door clicked shut, the green EXIT light reclaimed her, shading her a bilious green.

"Boss," Taggert said, rapping the side of the van. Jimbo stood as Pam had left him, mouth hanging open like he'd fallen victim to a stroke. His eyes were locked on the woman in the alley before him, his breath steaming up over his face, a bull paralyzed in mid-charge.

"Pam, listen, we're just going to get into the van, okay? We can take you wherever you need to go. Not a problem." But Pam paid him no attention. Done with words, done with Jack, she was slinking towards Jimbo with small, slow steps that quivered the dimpled flesh of her thighs. Between steps, her shaven mound winked at them.

"Jimbo." Jack leaned close, pitching his voice low. "You need to get into the van. Now."

"But you don't want to go into the van, do you?" Pam purred. Her left hand arabesqued down her leg and then up, her fingers cupping herself, slipping inside. She was close enough now that her breath mingled with Jimbo's.

"I don't wanna go in the van, Jack." Jimbo parroted back. "Not right now."

"Dammit Jack, what the hell's up with this cunt? Can't take no for an answer?" Taggert moved to step between her and Jimbo. "Take a hint, honey, and piss off."

Taggert flew across the alley, smashed into the side of the dumpster. An avalanche of frost-stiffened garbage bags crunched down over him as he fell to the ground. Jimbo hadn't even broken eyes with Pam, just pistoned out a arm and batted Tag like a fly.

Some of the bags had split open, and Taggert was coming up covered with rotten lettuce, damp cigarette butts peppering his hair. Jack didn't have to read the man's face to know what was going through his mind. He stepped in front of Tag, reached out and stopped him from pulling the knife from behind his back.

From behind him, he heard a huff of air as Pam was plucked off her feet, then the watermelon-slurp of lips against skin.

"What the fuck is going on?" Instead of anger, Taggert's eyes swam in confusion. And that put Jack back on his heels. "We've got to get out of this damn alley. That bitch is trouble." Taggert ran a hand over his scalp, looked as though he were about to vomit.

Jack put a restraining hand on Taggert's chest, waited til he got a nod back. Ok. When he turned back to Jimbo, the giant had carried the bartender back to the pallets. She lay on the splintered wood, bra hiked above her breasts, while Jimbo mauled them with his over-sized hands. She looked over at Jack with a lazy turn of her head, a bitter smile etched across her face.

"You came into the alley to fuck me." She reached out and unzipped Jimbo's fly. His meat smacked into her palm. She stroked her hand over its length, fingers barely able to encompass it. "Turns out, I'm the one fucking you."

From behind him, he heard Taggert stumbling forward, moving towards the mocking bitch sprawled on her wooden dais. He could have held up his hand, could have just shook his head, and Taggert would have stopped.

But he didn't. And as Taggert swept around him and moved towards her, Jack began to smile.

He was tired of being fucked.

#

"Tag, grab her legs."

The older man looked over the wedge of pallets at Jimbo, inclined his head at the over-sized biker. Jimbo was standing, head thrown back, breath thundering through his throat as the woman beneath him squeezed and stroked his cock. Jack nodded his head back at Pam. He didn't think they had to worry about Jimbo -- he was preoccupied.

When Taggert's hands touched her ankles, Pam groaned and tried to spread her legs wider. Taggert's shoulders bunched, and her feet slowly scissored together. Jimbo grunted as the hand gripping his cock tightened in response to the struggle of wills.