Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

to OfficeMax with the flash-drives,” she informs the balding supervisor, who sits behind a massive desk, staring at a computer screen. “Probably just go home from there.”

“Fine, whatever,” the supervisor mumbles without moving his gaze from the screen.

Cathy hurries down the hallway, her pale, slender face flushed with desire. She can’t help marveling at how easy the lies have been coming lately. Practice makes perfect, and she’s been lying so frequently at home, lying to her hideous train wreck of a husband, that the act just comes naturally. She should be a car dealer, or a politician.

They meet in the parking lot, and they take Trout’s Ford Focus over to the Sheik’s Harum Pool Suites on Milwaukee. En route they talk about the goodies in Trout’s duffel bag, and what a grand time they are going to have playing with them. They also grope each other and brush fingertips across nipples and suck on earlobes and nearly get in at least three major traffic accidents.

They are certainly in no condition to notice the fact that they are being followed.

“They’re weaving all over the road!” Gerbil Goldstein has a death grip on the S-10’s steering wheel. She can see Trout’s Ford Focus—three car lengths ahead of her—making an abrupt, sloppy right-turn onto Milwaukee Road. She has to swerve around a school bus and then drive up onto the shoulder to stay with him.

“He’s probably getting a blow-job,” Oswald speculates from the passenger seat, slamming an ammo magazine up into a filed-down Beretta. He can hear a clock ticking in his ears—the sound of the moon waxing—and it’s driving him crazy. Five down and three to go. Hopefully this next pair will be fairly easy. Just get them out of town before the husband can drop another dime on them.

Earlier that afternoon Oswald had relished the opportunity to play along with the slime-ball husband, commiserating with him about his nymphomaniac wife and her dalliances. Oswald had all the right answers—“Leave it to me, sir. For 7,500 I’ll give you a divorce that’ll stick.”—and now, tonight, over the next few minutes, all Oswald has to do is catch the lovebirds in the act, together, and use their shame and fear to get them out of town. Which will bring Oswald’s tally up to seven.

But how much time does he really have left? The phases of the moon are inexact. Are there five days left? Or is it four? He’s lost track.

The fact is, he’s not thinking straight tonight. He feels sick. His skin is clammy with flop-sweat, and he wonders if he’s running a temperature. Every few minutes, a rush of chills crawls down his back. His joints ache. Could he be nursing an infection?

“Where is this place anyway?” Gerbil is craning her neck to see the Ford fish-tailing across the traffic lanes in the distance.

“Not far,” Oswald assures her, sliding the gun down the inside of his belt. He wears a black stocking cap over his huge mane of hair, and a black leather jacket, and black jeans—black, black, black—he’s the man in black, he’s Johnny Cash, he’s the Prince of Fucking Darkness. He’s Batman. Actually he’s Batman’s fatter, older brother. Maybe he should get a cape and some tights or something. “Did you remember to print the tickets?”

“Yes, for Chrissake, yes, I remembered the tickets,” she says with a roll of her eyes.

“Did I already ask you that?”

“Only about three times.”

“Shit—I’m sorry.” Click! Oswald injects a round into the Beretta’s breach, and it sends a wave of feverish dizziness washing over him. Something has come loose inside his brain. His vision is blurring, speckling with tiny luminous dots, and every few moments he glimpses the ghost of that old Ho-Chunk Chief with his billowing train of raven feathers and his sunken, black, judgmental eyes, lurking in the shadows, behind bus-stop benches, on rooftops, in the depths of alleys.

The old guy doesn’t seem pleased.

“Wait a minute.” Gerbil punches the breaks. “They’re taking a right, heading into that condo village or whatever the fuck that is.”

Oswald smirks as he sees the wooded lot, and the strange little community of buildings nestled in the trees. “That ain’t no condo village.”

If viewed from the air—perhaps through the spy-scope of a reconnaissance plane flying at a high altitude—the Sheik’s Harum Pool Suites and Adult Resort might resemble a top-secret military compound. The thirty-three individual guest buildings have no windows, no markings, no outdoor patios or barbeques or any outwardly visible amenity other than a narrow drive and single parking space next to each unmarked entrance. But drop a bomb on the place and you’ll get coitus interruptus on a massive scale.

At a quarter to 4:45 p.m., Central Standard Time, Kevin Trout checks in at the front desk—which is situated in a little clapboard shack near the entrance gate. Then he drives his mistress around the winding blacktop to the last windowless Quonset hut on the east edge of the complex.

He grabs his little bag of tricks from his trunk, and then escorts a giggling Cathy O’Dell up the landscaped walk to the door.

“Home sweet home,” Cathy purrs, after Kevin ushers her inside Building 12-A and locks the door.

Scanning the room, she takes in the purple shag on the floor, the mirrors on the ceiling above the circular bed, the glass-encased Swedish sauna, the boxcar-shaped lap pool, and the Jacuzzi happily bubbling away in the corner. Above the pool, a thin tendril of water trickles down from a fountain embedded in the ceiling. The soft murmur of Chi-Lites music plays through recessed speakers in the bed’s pedestal.

Trout drops the duffel bag, which clunks noisily with metal and fabric. “C’mere, you.”

Cathy goes to him, and they tangle up in a heated embrace, already breathing hard. Their tongues come out and probe each other’s mouths. He pulls her blouse up and cups her tiny breasts. He whispers in her ear: “You really gonna do the thing tonight?”

“What the hell, right?” she whispers. “You only live once.”

“Oh my God, I’m