Feral

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Sometimes the scariest things are also funny. Not funny like George Carlin is funny, but funny like watching your neighbor step on a rake and catch the handle with his face. Like the shock on the face of a woman who has been discovered in the most personal and embarrassing of positions, or the look on the face of a man who has just been caught by his wife with his pants around his ankles and his c**k in another woman’s mouth.

Jared Cruse managed to stay faithful to his wife for four years, a fact that inspired an amount of awe in his friends considering his habitually wandering eyes and his pre-marital habit of straying. That a dog like Jared Cruse could stay faithful to any one woman for four consecutive years was something worth noting. Watching him try to resist the urge of his supercharged libido whenever he caught the slightest whiff of estrogen was downright hilarious, at least to his friends.

What wasn’t funny was the thoughtlessness with which he finally broke his marriage vows, and how his wife, Anna, knew almost instantly that something was wrong. The dense cloud of denial that she lived in for the last several months of their marriage was not funny either.

The circumstances of his first indiscretion and the person with which it happened were funny, like the X-rated version of a tacky sitcom. It was his station’s dispatcher, and ironically, one of Anna’s oldest friends.

It was an unexpected liaison, but one he had fantasized about before. He’d first met her, Lillian, the week of his wedding. She was Anna’s maid of honor, and he had been admiring her as discreetly as he knew how ever since. It was obvious that he was attracted to her. There were those long and lusty sideways glances when he thought no one was looking. There was his inability to look her directly in the eye whenever they spoke. He had fantasies too. Nasty things that sometimes left him unable to think straight. They say that the average man spends eight hours out of the day thinking about s*x, and not with their wives, Jared assumed, so he never felt guilty about his fantasies, but he did guard them. He and Lillian had carried on like friends, he had even helped her get the dispatch job when it opened up.

He never suspected that Lillian had ever once felt the same attraction toward him, at least not until he found himself alone with her one afternoon in the station’s deserted evidence room.

Their thing, as people called it, was sudden and explosive, and when it was over he spent the next two weeks hiding the rug burns and scratches from his wife.

They continued to meet secretly, in hotels, at her home, and at his home when Anna was away on business, for almost a year, and some people thought it was funny that they weren’t caught earlier considering how sloppy they had become.

What wasn’t funny was how Anna had finally broken down and confronted them.

She had fired a single shot outside the hotel room, destroying the locked doorknob, and kicked the door in. She stood outside, the windy autumn afternoon framing her like a bad Van Gogh, screaming, crying, laughing hysterically. She was shouting something at them, but her words were impossible to decipher. She held Jared’s personal revolver in her right hand. His service pistol was hidden under his jacket on the nightstand. She gripped the gun loosely, let it sway crazily from side to side, sighting in first on Jared, then Lillian, then on Jared again.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants pooled around the tops of his bare feet. Lillian knelt before him, still fully dressed, her face buried in his crotch. The gunshot had startled her, and she had bitten down, not hard enough to bite it off, but she did draw blood. She spit his withering c**k out with a gurgled scream, her lips wet and red. In her horror, she had transformed from beauty to beast.

Jared had enough time to raise a hand in protest, then four more shots drowned out Anna’s shrieks. A pillow to his left exploded in a cloud of old gray feathers. Glass shattered behind him.

Lillian screamed again and scurried around the other side of the bed on her hands and knees. Tufts of brown shag carpet flew up behind her as a slug tore into the floor with an ugly crack.

There was an explosive pain in his shoulder, like a red-hot poker pushed through flesh, and he was staring at the ceiling, shrieking in pain.

Anna screamed the whole time, words giving way to nonsense.

Behind the bed Lillian had gone silent. Jared hadn’t known if she was hiding or dying.

Another shot flew harmlessly into the ceiling, showering him with plaster.

Then Anna was gone.

Without so much as a sidelong glance to see if her lover still lived, Lillian rushed from the room, her hysterical sobs fading almost instantly in the growing chatter from the parking lot.

Jared had risen slowly and managed to get his pants back up before the first wave of rubberneckers arrived. Then he lay back down, tuning the barrage of questions and shouts to a background drone. Holding his left hand firmly over the leaking hole in his shoulder, he had waited for the paramedics. Inside his pants, his d**k throbbed like a rotting tooth.

He waited for what seemed an unimaginable length of time, all the while thinking the same thought over and over again.

Crazy b***h shot me with my own gun.

By the time help finally arrived, his mantra had changed to, I f*****g deserved it.

That afternoon, post-surgery and still half stoned from the morphine, he lay in the hospital remembering the time he had played truth or dare with his cousin and her friends. He was eight years old, and they in their early and preteens. His cousin, Terry, was spending the summer with them at Normal Hills and had been stuck with baby-sitting duty that day.

About halfway through the game he had singled out the oldest and best developed of the group, challenging her with the most embarrassing question he could think of. The alternative dare was his most desperate desire, the thing he wanted more than anything else in the world. She would have to remove her training bra and lift her shirt over her head for exactly five seconds, enough time for all of them to get a really good look at her t**s. The question, just as he had hoped, had been too much, and instead of ducking out of the game, as he had feared, she took the dare.

Red-faced with embarrassment she unhooked the bra and hoisted her faded Doors T-shirt. A few of the girls there, the ones who were jealous, Jared supposed, thought it was funny as hell. Shannon, who had refused to play the game, did not.

To Jared it was serious business, and he tuned out the laughter as he studied her gentle curves and soft brown n*****s.

He spent the rest of the game terrified they would pull some equally embarrassing trick on him, but they didn’t. If they had, it would have been worth it to him.

Even back then, before he had sprouted his first pubic hair, he had been fascinated with s*x.

Jared knew he was a bad person, and worse yet he was also a cop, which made him a bad cop. He wasn’t the sort of cop who would entrap young hotties and give them a choice between s*x and jail, but he had entertained the idea a few times with some amusement.

A bad person, a bad cop, and a bad husband.

When his superior arrived that afternoon to question him, the lies came easily enough, just as they always had when he needed to get himself out of trouble. This time it wasn’t his own ass he was saving.

“Exactly what the hell happened back there, Cruse?”

“Who did this to you?”

They were simple questions, simple and direct as the bull-faced man who asked them. Jared’s answers were also simple, as the best lies often are.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Just some b***h I met outside the liquor store. When I pick up a hump I don’t bother checking identification.”

“Who shot me? f****d if I know. A jealous bull dyke maybe. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Maybe Sergeant Winter had seen right through that lie. Cops spent a lot of their time being lied to and jerked around by John Q. Public, and usually developed a good nose for bullshit. Either way it didn’t matter. Winter never seriously investigated the incident, a drawn-out investigation would have embarrassed the entire department, and Jared was terminated.

At least he didn’t have to worry about being a bad cop anymore.

When Jared returned home from the hospital Anna was gone, and barely a week later their mail-order divorce ensued. He didn’t contest it, they had no children, and she wanted nothing from him. Even before Winter fired him she was the big breadwinner of the two. He never had to face her in court, he filed the paperwork and it was over. He hadn’t heard from her since.

He never heard back from Lillian either. The only lasting legacy from his fling with her, ironically enough, was the inability to f**k.

Lucky, Anna’s pet name for it once upon a time, had unlearned all its best tricks. No more stand up, roll over, or shake hands. All Lucky did now was play dead. Nerve damage, mechanical failure, or good old-fashioned psychological scarring, it could have been any or all. Either way, it came to the same thing. No more roaming. Jared was one well-neutered dog.

Still, after almost a year of no boom-boom, his libido had not diminished.

As he returned home from the night shift at Aljo Security, he considered his evening plans. Start that paperback he’d been eyeballing for the past few weeks, one of Shannon’s detective novels, or watch a skin flick. By the time he walked through the front door of the house he now shared with his sister instead of his wife, he had settled on the skin flick.

All amorous thoughts vanished when he saw Shannon sitting, eyes wide and staring, in a chair in the middle of the living room. Laid out on the old sofa before her was a girl of about nine, haggard and sleeping badly. For a second Jared thought it was his missing niece, Alicia.