Chapter 23: Swing Batter Swing
I was still in the kitchen, still tied up and thanking a higher power that I didn't hear any screams or gunfire or high speed car chases in the iced driveway. But then that's when Catalina returned sneakily through the swinging door. She stopped, watching me writhe for a few seconds more, and just smiled, as if she had nothing better to do with her day, or her life than all of this.
"You kept me here to fucking stare at me?"
With a coy wink she moved inside the kitchen and towards me, the pistol dancing around in one hand as her other, free right palm came to rest on my shoulder.
"I could do that, couldn't I? Since, I'm quite obviously in control today."
"Aren't you special?" I jeered, tugging at the metal that was drilling into my wrists. "Will you get these things off of me already?"
She pressed the gun barrel to my temple, letting it slide against my jaw bone.
"How do I know you'll still cooperate if I do that? How do I know," she paused with a throaty sigh, swung her leg over both of mine, and again, sat down on the spot where she knew she had already consistently derived unwarranted attention. "How do I know you'll participate with me, Mr. Rainey?"
She tried to kiss me and I grunted, throwing my face away out of instinct, rather than intelligence. Catalina didn't like that I wasn't playing her game and I was most likely taking baby steps towards things getting worse for everyone else in my life.
"Why won't you kiss me? I thought you liked my kisses. You said you did."
"That was six years ago, before I had a wife. Before, I was TAKEN, Catalina."
"But your wife's gone now."
She pouted with purposeful scheme in her eyes, and then slowly, brought her lips back to mine. Her breath was roaring with heat, the kind that makes spinal columns wobble of their own accord, even if a man's properly sitting down and tied against the jolt. I didn't want to kiss her, I didn't want her anywhere near me, but all I could see when she looked at me, when her mouth pressed solidly, wetly to mine, were all the things her single phone call could do to my kids, to Roxanne.
And as much as I hated myself for it, that's what made me consent.
Catalina's lips were deliberate but sensual, as though she'd waited every second of every day for the last six years to kiss me like that. Her thighs gripped my legs tighter, her fingers roved through my hair without restraint, without concern, and she consistently made use of the hardened middle she'd created by grinding against me until I felt like I couldn't breathe, until I felt so guilty that I wished she would just finish the job and kill me afterwards.
She moaned at my lips and pulled away carefully to look down richly into my eyes.
"Tell me you missed it. Tell me you missed me, Mort."
I wrinkled my brow nervously, angrily at her.
"Say it," she began again, bringing her tongue to slide over my lips, taunting an entrance that I couldn't let myself give willingly. "Say you want me. Say I'm all you ever wanted."
I groaned against her activity, her nails digging into my shoulders for animalistic leverage, and her tongue forcing its way through my lips without a care to if I really wanted it or not.
It didn't matter. She had already decided for me years ago.
Oh what? You have a high school crush on my husband? You want to threaten my family and me to get to him? You want to pretend to be some Italian, lip smacking bimbo, because you're too scared we might remember you as the nerd you really are?
Of course your life is in danger.
I drove away from the house, but I didn't leave the lake. Hell, I didn't even leave the square mile of property between our house and Mort's old cabin. I ditched the truck in the woods and immediately dialed Jane.
She answered on the first ring.
"Roxanne?"
"Jane. Are you still back in town?
"Yeah, we were just brining the kids back for--"
"No. Don't. You need to listen to me, okay?"
She agreed, hesitantly. I didn't blame her.
"There's a situation at the house. You and Todd have to drive out of town with the kids. I need you to get on the highway and head back to Manhattan. The directions to my sister's house are saved in the GPS. Go there and wait until I call again. Okay?"
"Roxanne, what's going on?"
I could hear the sudden angst in her voice and I hated having to do it, but I simply replied, "Just get to Sydney's. I'll let her know you're on your way. I love you guys." And then I hung up. I didn't need the emotional distraction. Not now. Not when I knew they would all four be perfectly fine if they went and I stayed.
From there, I immediately texted Sydney as I leapt from the Explorer (freezing my ass off I might add) and began trampling through the snowy woods back in the direction of the house. I wasn't going through the front door, not when I knew there was a perfectly good place to do 'one stop shopping' in the backyard, my grandfather's old shed.
It was a fast run to the property again, in nothing but Mort's underwear and my boots. I made it to the old shed, threw back the heavy wooden door with a squeak and trudged inside after what I knew was still there. In the corner, next to the garden shears and rake, it had never left that spot.
Knew it.
I lifted it by the handle, running my hand down against its worn and chipped curve, loving the simple power of it in my hands already. My grandpa's old Louisville Slugger, 1954. The one I learned to hit with in this same backyard. The one that I knew could easily serve a new purpose, a desperate one.
I ran out of the shed, stomped though the heavy snow bank across the backyard, past the pool, until I made it around the angled turn of the house. My back hit the frozen, creaking exterior wall and my eyes darted up to the second, then the third story window.
To our room.
I had a feeling Catalina wouldn't have wasted that much time, forcing him to walk three flights of stairs just to take advantage of what didn't belong to her. I moved down the side of the house to where my grandmother's old rose vines grew tangled and lifeless into their ancient trelice. I wasn't sure if it could hold my weight, and I wasn't sure I should have been climbing when I was four weeks pregnant either. But I also knew I didn't go through everything with Ethan and the Klein mob and raising two kids with Mort, to lose him to this bitch.
Instead, I pulled my cell phone back out of my coat pocket and dialed three little numbers. It rang only once and just like Jane, they answered my plea.
"NYPD dispatcher 1796, what is your emergency?"
"Hi. I need to report a murder."
"A murder of who, ma'am? And what is your location?"
I was about to answer her, 'the crazy whore who's ruining my life,' when my view of dead vines was cleared for a single detail. The vision of a shining red Mercedes came back to me and I smiled wickedly as I trudged through the snow towards the front drive of the house. I hadn't wanted to go anywhere near the front, but it was too fair a start to this rampage of mine to not adjust the ploy a little and throw a diversion into the mix.
And just like I imagined, there it was, waiting for Roxy Love's own finishing touch.
"Ma'am, your location. Please?"
I twirled the bat in my free hand and headed for the glinting car with a readied, icy sigh.
"Tashmore Lake."
Before I could hear the woman's response clearly, I hung up and stepped to the driver's side of the Mercedes, shivering, but not with the cold. With anticipation, excitement, deviant thrill. Then I heard my grandfather somewhere in my mind, preparing me at seven years old.
"Here's comes the pitch. You ready Roxy Doll?"
"Ready."
"Up and swing! Swing Roxanne!"
So I did.
Catalina's tongue was lost somewhere in my mouth, somewhere I was trying to ignore, somewhere that also met the sensation of her fingernails scratching my skin as she carefully cut through my shirt, ripping it from me.
In my head I was nowhere near Catalina. Way up there where all my thoughts and ideas and brilliant plots came from was where I was hiding. It was where I was dancing around in my underwear with an air guitar and Aerosmith blasting out of the speakers, pretending I was God's gift to the world. It was where Roxanne was naked beneath me, begging, pleading for more of me. I gave myself to Catalina, only because she could never know that I was really giving myself to Roxanne, over and over again, the entire time.
She laughed wickedly as her lips left my mouth, for the open, sweating skin of my neck, where she bit down heartily.
"Christ," I growled at her as she descended even further, falling to the tile on her knees.
I was trying desperately to hold back all of my inhibitions, hold back all of my words and thoughts and developed insults for her. Her fingers were quick with the button and zipper of my jeans, as if she'd practiced the timing of this event, of this fantasy of hers, a million or more times that morning alone. She wasted no second in reaching within, with her warm, tantalizing hands, and squeezing what she knew was there.
She rocked on her high heels between my legs, smiling up at me with a wink, watching my own eyes roll back and forth inside of my head. "Don't worry," she whispered, her face slowly dropping down to the one place that I wished in that moment didn't even exist anymore. "I'll make it all better."
And believe me…I have no doubts that she would have. At least, she would have made better the situation of being teased for an hour with a hard on you can't shake, for a woman you want to chop into little pieces and hide in the walls of your house.
Hmm, that's a good one actually. Mental writing note taken.
But the very second I even felt her breath come remotely close to where my body already burned and tingled and hated her presence, there was a startling sound from somewhere else, outside. It sounded like it was a mile away at first. But when the noise came again, louder, a cracking, crashing, tormented sort of racket, I realized it was closer than I thought.
Catalina was startled away from my lap, pushing herself up with a growl of annoyance, as she ignored my once so desired cock, for the sound of breaking glass. She lifted the pistol from the table and readied the trigger right in front of me, "That better not be your stupid, bitch wife."
I gulped for the simple fear of the possibility. And before I could demand through conspiracy that Catalina ignore it for me, for what she'd started, to occupy her time instead, she was gone through the swinging door.
What can I say? I have an affinity for drama. I am a writer after all.
The car was totaled, by little more than the disheveled heart of a married woman and the wrong end of a baseball bat that she had first learned to swing with in that same front yard.
Poetic, huh? Talk about a full circle. Maybe I should write the book…
The thought was tossed aside when I heard stomping high heels inside the otherwise quiet house, then the click of the front door's lock. I darted from the scene of the crime, like any good criminal, leaving nothing but mock evidence of my ever being there at all.
Luckily, I'd already found my escape route and I ran to the rose trelice on the side of the house again. My hands were quick, the bat still in one, and the other maneuvering around frozen thorns and broken pieces of wood. I climbed that thing like an expert, and wondered the whole time with a smile on my face, why I had never attempted it as a kid.
My grandmother would have murdered me herself, that's why.
There were screams and hollering from the front drive, and even though I knew what she was saying and what she was threatening of the perpetrator, namely me, I didn't pay Catalina any attention. I was focused, driven, and determined to get into the house and get my husband out.
At the top of the trelice, I had to fight with the second story window for a few seconds, which felt like hours, until it finally budged open with a shatter of ice around its seal. I forced it higher, climbed the extra thatch or two of the ancient ladder and slid inside to the warmth of a roaring fire and the carpet of the guest bedroom where Jane and Todd had been staying.
I could hear Catalina outside for only a second more, before there was a slam of the front door, a stomping of heels again across wood floors, and then the shove of the swinging door to the kitchen. I grinned knowingly, having always loved this detail about my grandparents' house most: when it was quiet, you could hear every existing leaky faucet, or frozen pipe, or creaky stair. It was going to make this a lot easier for me.
I jumped to my feet, bat in hand, kicked off my wet boots and ripped away my coat. I was back to my proper devices, right where I began this morning, in nothing but men's boxers and a slept in, sexed in dress shirt.
Who says I need to wear Prada heels to kill like her? Ha.
The upstairs office was across the hall from the guest room, so I moved quickly, fluidly, like a ghost, through the door and into the next room. I ran bare foot for the drawer of the desk, the one with the false bottom that we'd forgotten to 'take out' when we moved and sold the house years before. Now that we were back though, and now that I needed what was inside, it was a good thing we hadn't.
I laughed under my breath as I ripped the wood bottom from the drawer and pulled out the semi automatic from within. It glinted in the sunlight of the room, asking to be used all over again. This was the gun, Mort's gun, the one that very nearly took care of his cheating ex-wife in his first go round with the law. The one that he used to kill Ethan with, in the lone, fearful cabin of that yacht where I had laid silently begging to be rescued.
I know, I know. We murdering writers are a rather romantic, ironic sort of bunch. Aren't we?
Needless to say, I wasn't half done romancing the pants of this chick yet. On my way back out of the office, at the exact moment that I heard the slamming of another door downstairs, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, something rather attention worthy in my life. Settled neatly, on the top of a pile of CD's next to the office stereo, was an old friend, an old 'borrowed' friend, rather. I stepped back and lifted the bright red album, with its slithering white wing dancing off the cover, as if in some sort of preternatural flight. As if it was calling me to it.
I shook my head with a short laugh, opened the case, and threw the CD into the stereo. I knew exactly what would happen when I pressed the small black button next to 'play'. I knew exactly who would hear this, where, anywhere in fact that they happened to wander through the house.
I knew exactly what I was doing, long before I began to further piss Satan herself off.
I was seconds away from watching the world end.
Seconds away, from watching Catalina dial her cell phone and place the call that she'd warned of, delivering the green light that would dash any and all hope of my ever seeing Roxanne's red light, again. She was going to take the only things that had ever mattered to me at all, off this planet and out of my life for good.
Her finger hit the talk button, just as she grabbed a fistful of my hair and whispered darkly in my ear, "She had her chance. Now you can live with knowing she wasted it, for the rest of your life."
She didn't let go when the voice of a gruff man answered on the other end. She didn't let go when I heard her say, 'She didn't leave. They're still in town. Take care of it.' But when there was the force of a thousand needles seething out of the kitchen intercom box near the door, draining demonic-like from the speaker and into our ears, that's when she let go of my hair and threw her phone down.
And that's when I also knew, merely by the pricking, underlying message of a lyric or two, that Catalina's plan had already been compromised, whether she liked it or not.
"I was 19 years old. I had just gotten out of high school practically. And there I was, following around Steven Tyler and Joey Kramer. It was insane."
I remembered how her eyes lit up that first night in my cabin, how she'd gushed over the topic of that tattoo. The one I simply couldn't get enough of, even at that point.
"We were on Sunset Strip at four in the morning. They had all drank way too much, me included, and there was a tattoo parlor, right there across the street. Steven was like, 'You need to get yourself branded, Roxy. My little Roxy Love.'"
I remembered being so amused at the goofy grin on her face. She was something else.
"And that was that. I got the tattoo. I officially became theirs."
"I'm guessing that's where 'Roxy Love' originated then?"
She giggled like a little girl and nodded helplessly.
"It was Steven Tyler. I had an obligation to use that name then. A groupie's debt."
And now, sitting there under Catalina's wiry, angered eyes, I had to bite and choke on my tongue just to keep from laughing at the sound, the pressure of the beat, of the drums and electric guitars and lady-like screeching I knew so well.
Sweet Emotion, 1975. The year she was born. My little Aerosmith girl.
The thought of which alone, made it impossible for me not to be humored.
"What the hell are you laughing at?" Catalina snapped, pressing the pistol to my cheek again. "She might be entertaining now, but she won't be half that when she's DEAD."
Her growl was met with seriousness for a moment, as I saw the blood boiling up in her eyes with the pounding bass and the rattling of the house's walls around us. That's when she shoved my face with the gun, turning it in a separate direction, thinking she was testing me, thinking she was making a threat.
But she only did one thing. She lent me hope.
"Roxanne thinks she's so smart, she thinks she's saving you I'm sure…"
The hissing of Catalina's voice was ignored completely. The pin barrel of the gun, ignored. Nothing else mattered in that moment, except for the shadow of a face behind a pane of glass in the French parlor doors. The ones Catalina couldn't see in her anger, with her back turned and her intimidation over me.
"…she's got another thing coming if she thinks she's just going to come back in this house and pull the rug right from under me…"
My eyes bulged as I saw Roxanne carefully step from around the doorway, into the kitchen, barefoot, in my shirt, my boxers, gently swinging a baseball bat through the air overhead and above all else, smiling like a pure fool. Tiny details unraveled before me then, all in slow motion.
I noticed the song change, Rag Doll, 1987. How appropriate this was about to be…
I noticed Catalina's voice soften one more time, as she pressed her mouth to my ear with a whisper dripping in disdain, "I'm sorry it had to come to this, but we still have each other."
Then, the last thing I saw was a flicker of sea green from across the room. And that's when I knew, long before Catalina, long before Roxanne, that all of this was for something. If only to prove everlastingly, that I couldn't live, literally, without her in my life and on my side.
"Oh coffee girl?"
Catalina spun around in front of me, staring Roxanne down wildly, the pistol trembling in her hand, and I had to remind myself not to laugh and ruin it.
"Can you get me an iced venti, with a double expresso shot? Thanks."
There was a tired little grunt to follow Roxanne's snide tease and the gun was raised.
"You whore. I told you to get lost. I warned you."
"Guess I failed the test."
Catalina had the gun aimed and cocked in Roxanne's direction when I noticed the baseball bat come swooping down thickly, readily. I hadn't known it before, shamefully I must admit, but my girl has an arm like Sammy Sosa, like the Great Bambino, like John Wayne on home base. The pistol flew out of Catalina's hand as the bat cracked a half a dozen bones in her hand and she screamed like mad, heaving for air, for control of the situation again. But it was long gone.
"You really don't know either of us at all, do you Kitty Cat?"
The tease was undoing me at the seams, the pure vile in Roxanne's voice, aimed not at me, the copyrighter of such a name, but at the woman who had lived upon its lack of meaning for too many years already.
"It's like you walked into the lion's den disguised as a tiger. And look at your pretty little stripes."
Catalina sucked in air and shook the pain in her hand away as she stood straight again.
"Don't touch me with that thing."
Roxanne ignored the plea.
"I've killed another woman over this same pitiful sort of thing before, you know. She landed herself in the Hudson River after sleeping with my fiancé." There was a twisted smirk on her face as she came closer to Catalina with the bat swaying in the air over her shoulder. "You're trying to steal my husband. Where the hell do you think you'll end up?"
There was laugh that came from between Catalina's lips as my eyes moved from the chipped edge of Roxanne's bat to her humored victim again, who was slowly moving towards my lap.
"I don't know," she teased, relaxing on my legs, stretched across my bare chest. "But this is where I want to be."
"Get up."
Roxanne twirled the bat with continued threat.
"Or what? You'll hit me with that thing? And risk damaging your husband's lovely face too?"
Catalina stroked my cheeks and I forced my face from her touch.
"Go on, boss. Let's see how good your aim is on a moving object. Instead of just a $100,000 car."
I glanced back to the bat in Roxanne's hand then, noticing only at that moment, the chalked smear of red paint along the cracked wood. I smiled at her when she caught my eye and she just fiercely turned her attention down to Catalina again.
"Give me the keys to the handcuffs. That's all I want. There's no reason to kill you. I already called the police."
"Well you are just full of surprises today, aren't you Miss Love?"
Catalina got up from me then, slowly stepping towards Roxanne as she tugged a chain out from her shirt and between her heaving breasts and let it dangle on her neck in the kitchen light.
"Do you mean these keys? The ones to unlock that poor, miserably erect man over there?"
"Give them to me, Catalina."
"Ask nicely," she taunted back.
My eyes focused on Roxanne's one last time, and that was all it took, that was the last straw. I knew her so well that I had timed perfectly when to look for the roll of her eyes, the deep, agitated sigh that was a preamble to her fury, and lastly, the swing of that menacing bat.
There was half a second between the sound of it cutting through air and the haunting echo of it smacking into a delicate jaw bone. Then I counted another second, which brought Catalina's dizzying and abused body tumbling to the tile at my feet. Her skull was the last thing I heard crack.
Just like a rag dolls'.
'Give it all you got until you're put out of your misery…'
…by my girl.
