Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [55]
He went into the kitchen and dropped a hamburger patty into a dirty frying pan. Tired as he was, he found himself looking forward to the feeding. What was this one’s name again? He liked to call them by name occasionally, but in order to remember, he’d have to check in his most recent notebook. He kept a record of each girl’s name there, along with a set of her photos.
Down in the basement, this one would smell the meat frying. She’d be expecting the food and dreading it at the same time, but today she had nothing to fear. Physically Larry wasn’t up for anything more than watching her eat. He’d often let the girls go hungry for a while—twenty-four hours was just about right. When they were that famished, watching them eat was a real turn-on. He particularly liked the greedy way this one tore into her food. Even though he knew she didn’t want it and would have preferred to starve herself to death, but when she was hungry enough, she couldn’t help herself, either.
It intrigued him that all the girls seemed to have one thing in common: they were terribly self-conscious about eating in front of him. It was almost as though having him observe them eat made them forget how to perform the simple mechanical functions of chewing and swallowing. He wondered sometimes if their shyness was due to the fact that he was watching, or if it was because they were always naked when they ate—they were naked and he wasn’t.
Once, before he began relying on the premade hamburger patties, one of them had choked on a chunk of gristle in the piece of meat he had given her. She had choked and gagged and finally spit it out, but he had forced her to eat it anyway. She had chewed and chewed and chewed for what seemed forever before she was finally able to choke it down. That was the ultimate power over someone—to know you could, if you wanted, force them to eat their own vomit.
That was actually what Larry liked most—having them fear him. The more his girls tried not to submit, the better he liked it. When he was with Gayle, she was the one who called the shots, but that was about her needs, not his. In the basement, he was the one in control, but even there Gayle held the ultimate veto power. She would arbitrarily change girls on him. Just when he had one trained the way he wanted, Gayle would take her away. Then he’d have to do without until she came up with a replacement. Fortunately there was always a new girl available. Gayle would make a few inquiries, and within days or weeks, a new one would appear, drawn from the plentiful stock to be found at one of the many detention centers served by Medicos for Mexico.
Larry wondered sometimes about that first girl in Mazatlán—the one Gayle had served to him with her limbs bound by Gayle’s own brightly colored scarves. After her “session,” the girl had been given money and food and sent on her way, but all that had happened while Larry was in the shower. Gayle told him she had helped the girl dress and had taken her home, but now, given what had happened to the ones who had followed in her footsteps, Larry doubted that was true. The way Daniella was starting out—Larry had no difficulty remembering her name—she most likely would have turned into a two-bit whore. Gayle had probably done the little slut an enormous favor by putting her out of her misery before she had a chance to grow up. As for the girls since then? For them, too, growing up had never been in the cards.
Carrying the plate of food—the hamburger patty, a spoonful of cold refried beans, and a chunk of stale tortilla—Larry went to the basement door and unlocked it with the key he always carried on his belt. As soon as the door opened, he knew something was different. The emptiness of the place blew up around him—along with a coppery telltale odor he recognized