San Diego Noir

Fenderson couldn’t believe it. This had to be fate, the Big Break he’d been waiting all his life to get. There was no other explanation for how easily it was all falling into place. He would have felt better if the fog lifted and he could remember something, anything, about this frumpy broad from her time as a student in his classroom, just so he’d have a frame of reference as he continued to play her for the fool he was counting on her to be. But what he knew about her now was enough, at least for the moment: she was talented, hungry, and willing to work with him at any cost.

“Cheers,” Fenderson said, lifting his beer mug.

“Cheers,” Alcott replied, tapping it with her water glass. And now the smile that stretched across her face seemed to hold no hidden meaning at all; it was just the smile of a lady on the brink of having her greatest dream come true.

“Ken Fenderson. Wow,” she said. “Do you know how long I’ve been hoping to run into you again?”

Fenderson couldn’t remember much of anything after that. He ordered another beer, went to the bathroom, they finished their meals and asked for the check.

Then, boom, the next thing he knew, he was in Alcott’s apartment, or what he assumed was her apartment. Between the dim lighting and the excruciating pain he was in, it was hard to be sure where he was.

As near as he could tell, he was sprawled facedown across her bed, naked, hands and feet hog-tied to the frame like somebody about to be drawn and quartered. His mouth had a sock or something stuffed into it and his head was pounding so hard every blink of his eyes came at a price. He tried to scream, yanking at his bonds with the fury of a rodeo steer trapped in the gate, but the gag swallowed up his voice like a sponge. All his muffled cries managed to do was draw Alcott over from another room.

“Ah. Finally awake,” she said, peering down at him.

She was wearing nothing but a bra and panties, both simple and white, without a hint of decorative lace. The sight should have disgusted Fenderson, even in the relative dark, but to his utter amazement, he found himself aroused by it. Rather than the shapeless blob her dowdy clothes had promised, Alcott’s body was full and curvaceous, a balanced blend of generous bosom and wide hips.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “This isn’t the body you were expecting. I don’t dress to impress the way I once did, do I? Or do you still not really remember me, even without my clothes?”

She was crazy. Fenderson had no idea what she was talking about. Why the hell should he remember what Alcott looked like without—

Oh, Jesus.

Jennifer Alcott. That Jennifer Alcott. One of several female students he’d had the hots for during his teaching days, and one of the few he’d taken to his bed. Some willingly, some not so willingly. Every woman was different. Alcott had been one of those who needed a little chemical push.

As the memory of that night finally came into focus, the mystery of how Alcott had managed to get him here today, in this place and in this unenviable position, without any conscious cooperation on his part that he could recall, was all too easily solved. No wonder he had a splitting headache. She must have slipped the drug into his beer while he’d been in the bathroom.

Now Fenderson was afraid. Really afraid.

He tried screaming again.

“Screaming’s good,” Alcott said. “I screamed a lot after you did what you did to me. I know. I hated myself almost as much as I did you, so I let my appearance go to shit and screamed when I needed to scream. Screaming makes you feel better.” She leaned in close to whisper in his ear: “But it doesn’t really change anything.”

Blinking back tears, Fenderson became vaguely aware that the room around them was awash in black-and-white comic book art, taped to a huge drawing board and pinned in overlapping layers to the surface of every wall. With flickering candlelight his only guide, straining his neck as he was to see anything beyond the mattress to which he was tied, it was hard for Fenderson to be sure, but none of the drawings in the room looked anything like the one Alcott had shown him earlier. This artwork was crude and listless, devoid of all the power the page he’d seen at the café exhibited.

Alcott followed his gaze. “Angry, isn’t it? That’s what everyone always says about my stuff. Aside from that it’s not very good. I’m a better inker than an illustrator. They say I’ve got a real talent for inking.” She pulled some rubber gloves onto her hands and rolled a tea cart over to the bed near Fenderson’s head where he could get a good look at the macabre collection of sex toys—oversized, heavily studded dildos, mostly—that was arranged upon it.

“The page I showed you at the El Cortez, by the way? That really was Jack Kirby,” Alcott said. “I bought it at the Con just before I ran into you.”