Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [26]
The cold starts seeping into me and I get up and walk. I walk all the way to Brighton Beach, burying my hands in my pockets and mentally running through images of the last few days. Attila. My friend Big Sal. Suddenly, Ed Burke intrudes. I find myself wondering what he’s up to in Florida. Wondering if he’s met a girl down there. I find the thought disturbing and I go back to thinking about Attila. Not that this is particularly soothing. I don’t know what I feel for him, but I certainly don’t want anything bad happening to him and somehow I doubt that Big Sal’s ministrations will do him much good. I start feeling panicked and I quicken my pace as I head home.
I get back into my apartment, remove my coat, and look at the answering machine. Six messages have come in over the last hour and that can’t possibly be good.
BIG SAL
9.
Women’s Studies
I got in the truck and peeled out of the parking lot. Didn’t make it real far though. I should have realized they’d jack up security after what happened on the track. But I wasn’t thinking. I was pissed off. The lady security guard who had waved Attila and me through earlier was so uptight now that she had a damned weapon drawn.
“Sir, could you step out of the vehicle, please,” she said.
She was a chubby little thing, her green uniform clinging to her for dear life. Her flat brown eyes looked like a snake’s.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting out of the truck.
She fired off a series of questions about why didn’t I have the proper stickers for my vehicle and what was I doing there. I explained how she’d waved me and Attila in just a couple hours earlier, but she wasn’t buying it. She made radio contact with other security people and pretty soon there was a big to-do and they had to summon Henry Meyer to vouch for me.
At first, the trainer looked at me blankly. Then recognition dawned.
“Oh, Attila’s friend. Right. What were you doing with him anyway?”
“Just hanging around,” I said, wanting very much to tell him the truth, but not doing it. “Attila was showing me what’s what. I’m thinking of getting into a syndicate, buy into a horse or two.”
“Huh,” Henry grunted, like this was one of the worst ideas he’d heard all day. “Yeah,” he said, turning to the three security officers now collected there, “he’s one of my riders’ friends. It’s okay.”
The chubby brunette officer looked resentful. This was probably as close as she’d ever come to having a reason to shoot someone and I’d rained on her parade. My kind of girl.
I got back in the truck and drove off through the bowels of Queens and home to my other kind of girl. My wife. She was actually home. And, I have to say, she nearly gave me a heart attack.
“Baby, where you been all morning?” she purred, surprising the hell out of me for even noticing I hadn’t been around—and compounding that surprise by seeming glad to see me.
She was wearing her spandex workout pants and a little tank top distended by her glorious tits. I guess I stared at her with my jaw hanging open.
“What’s the matter, Sal?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” I said.
And then, she started fumbling with my pants, right there in the living room.
“Where’s Jake?” I said, not wanting to emotionally scar the kid with the vision of his mom blowing his dad in the living room.
“Play date. All afternoon, baby.” She’d undone my belt and pulled my jeans over my ass and I already had a hard-on that could have drilled a hole in the ceiling.
And then my wife blew me. I came in about thirty seconds.
“Hair-trigger response,” she said, touching me with pride. “How long I gotta wait?” she asked, pulling her spandex leggings down just below her large pale ass.
“Apparently not very long,” I said, entering her first with my fingers, then with my quickly rejuvenated hard-on.
“I want another baby,” she said then, bucking her hips into me.
This was something of a shock. A few months earlier, she hadn’t wanted me inside her. Now she really wanted me inside her. Women. Go figure. Another fucking kid though? Jake was my life and that seemed like enough.