AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 64

WOW!  WOW!  WOW!  WOW!  WOW!  Liz was the queen of crack, smoking nonstop.  The sharp INTENSE high was brief as lightning, but Liz had an avalanche of brown crack rocks.  Sleep?  Blow it out your ass!  Who needs it!  Eats?  Go share spit with the AIDS-boys!  Don’t waste my time with food!  I got me my own Cloud-99!  I got me kick-back La La Land!

Back in her cushy pad near Courty’s apartment, Liz took a sweet shower, augmented with crack, and then had a wild seventeen hour crack orgy with her glass water pipe and BJ’s rocks.  It was a roller coaster, a rocket, Zoooooooooooooming her up into outer space, and then plummeting her Doooooooown.  She skipped a night’s sleep and didn’t miss it, roared right around through the next day; she was charged, tingling, raring to go!  She could do this FOREVER!

Fuck!  The torch is dead!

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“You owe me a pair of panties,” Peach called out, primly, as soon as she saw Byron Reed walk through Lauren’s open front door.  Then she bubbled over with girlish laughter, while Lauren frowned disapproval.  “Oh, lighten up, Lauren.”

“Hi, Reed!”

Reed walked straight over to the area of the living room where Peach and Lauren were seated, and stopped in front of Lauren.  The duration of the walk was approximately five seconds, but it was hypnotic; the two girls were silenced and riveted by his manner: it was frighteningly reminiscent of The Terminator.

“Talk to me about Courty,” Reed demanded, the tone of his voice jarring them both, scratching their souls.  Lauren actually jumped a fraction of an inch off her seat!  Her whole body snapped, just at the sound of his voice.

Peach nervously giggled a single giglet, and her hand hurried to cover her mouth.

“Who needs talk?” Lauren said.  “Look!”  She pointed to where her living room TV & VCR used to be, and sneaked off the sofa to back away and put some distance between herself and Byron Reed’s tell-me-everything laser-beam eyes.  “Starving Studs Movers.  Are you ready for that?  The gals tell me four guys came in and just carted everything off.”  She quick-stepped to Courty’s bedroom door and opened it.  “I mean, everything.  They even took the draperies.  And my living room TV and video recorder.  I almost called the police, except I got to thinking, after I talked to you: maybe Courty moved out.  And maybe they just made a mistake and grabbed my 2nd TV and VCR by mistake.”

Reed followed her, looked into the vacated bedroom.  “You don’t know where Courty is?”

“I thought you knew!  Of course I don’t know!”

“Nobody knows,” Peach said, indulging in the horizontal softness of the sofa, and pitching her silken voice like a love forwarding address.  “The gal ran out just when things were getting interesting.  You too, Lauren.  You should have been there.”  Her double-fresh legs were doubling their pleasure, flipping back and forth, high heels in the air, tummy down, a giggle in her womb, as she flickered into bright flame memory.  “This guy gets Griff to get his banker out of bed at four in the morning and get down there at the Mansion with a Cashier’s Check for THREE MILLION, TWO HUNDRED, THOUSAND, DOLLARS!  In The Middle Of The Night!  You had to have been there.  It was great!  And Griff was so grumpy, he fired about half the staff.”  The giggles, twins, tried to arrive prematurely.  “Actually, just three of the servants, but . . .”  The stork, with giggles.

Lauren was mortified by Peach’s awful behavior.  Sure, she always and automatically flirted a smidgen or two, even maybe a dollop of vamp fuel on a cold shoulder morning to get male interest started, but now here she was slopping it about by the buckets!  Sure, she was jealous of Courty, but REALLY!  Lauren wanted to vanish into her bedroom and hide, just from embarrassment.  These two!  Oh, they were TERRIBLE!  They were just terrible.  Knowing Peach, the two of them had probably been cheating on Courty for months.  They were probably still cheating on Courty!  Reed was paying scant attention to Peach, but Lauren pushed it right in his face: “Courty was raped that night at the Sportsman Mansion . . . Byron.”  Lauren knew that Reed hated his first name.  Peach was a background giggle, that tried to ungiggle itself at the rape news.  Lauren watched Terminator-Reed swing his cold-machine eyes over to look at her.  But she wasn’t afraid.  “Then she was stabbed by a crazy!”

Reed blinked.  “What?”

Lauren, angry, righteous: “Raped!  Byron.  And then stabbed by scissors in her shoulder!  Byron.”

“What?”

Lauren, point blank: “Then Courty goes to you for help.  She goes to you to have you take her home and take care of her.  And there you are.  Both of you.”  Her mouth squinched up and her eyes did gymnastics trying to figure how to say it.  “Copulating!  In Front Of All Those Animals!”  Her voice reeked with disgust.

Peach was shocked.  “Courty was raped?  When?  Where?  HOW?”

Lauren was frosted at Byron Reed, but impatiently she said, “At one of the swimming pools.  There was sort of an underwater cave.  She was raped in there.  In the water.”  She started to say that she had been there for a few moments, had mistakenly thought that Courty had been with Byron, but her words quashed themselves, and Lauren closed her mouth, angry with both of them and upset with herself.

Reed was cut by the acid pain of guilt, so strong it seared his flesh with the scorching burn of self-hatred.  He was unworthy.  Courty in her time of need . . . he had failed her.  An image flashed across his mind of explosive beauty: a gun thrust up against his head, a finger pulling the trigger.

Two girls walked by, in the hallway outside; Peach and Lauren and Reed were silent, listening to the girl-talk moving down the hallway outside the open front door, past the Mao chair and People’s couch out there.

Peach was sitting up straight on the sofa now, her mind nearly emptied, her eyes moist.  She said, in a soft, strange voice, “You know, it’s hard to do it underwater . . .”

The idiot remark brought Reed back to the real world.  His anger rescued him; it burned bright in the center of a block of ice.  “Who?” he asked Lauren.  A cold question, dark-side-of-the-moon cold.  “Do you know who raped her?”

“That sleaze from New York.”

“Eric Des Barres,” Reed said.

Lauren nodded.  “She didn’t want to report it.”

“Oh, my God!” Peach said.  “He must have been the one who hurt her, remember when she was all beat up and said she was mugged?  We wondered about that, remember.  Eric Des Barres was with her that night.  He must have . . . oh, my God!”

Byron Reed moved toward the telephone.  Big guns.  Heavy artillery.

Peach, still shocked by the rape news, scampered off the sofa and into the kitchen in search of a snack.

Lauren silently watched Reed.  He yanked up the phone like a survivalist grabbing a hand grenade.

Byron Reed punched the telephone number that had been on the bottom of the Swarovski crystal flower holder that had appeared like evil magic in this living room, one day while he and Courtney were making awesome love in her bedroom.

COURTNEY, Chapter 65
 

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