"Some animals are cute," Bondini said.
"No. No way," said Hubble. "No porno film with no animal. What about you, Stash?"
Franko looked up as if surprised that someone would talk to him. Then he looked back out at the ocean and said softly, "I wouldn't screw a dead person."
"Why not?" Bondini said. He sounded honestly surprised at such a modest qualm.
"You never met my wife," Franko said. "It'd be like screwing her again. I couldn't do it."
"Well, you know your wife better than we do," Hubble said. "But I don't think that's all so bad. There are some good-looking dead people. Maybe you'd get a nice one."
Franko shook his head again. "No, that's where I draw the line. No screwing the dead. What do you call that? There's a word for it."
"Yeah," Bondini said, but he couldn't think of it.
"It comes from a word that means dead," Hubble said. "That much I remember."
"What word?" Bondini asked.
"I don't know. It just means dead," Hubble said.
"Corpse," said Bondini. "Maybe it's like corpse-a-phobia."
"That sounds about right," said Franko. "I think that's it. Corpse-a-phobia. I heard that word once."
The beautiful redheaded woman who had let them into the house reappeared on the balcony. She was now naked. Her breasts were full and the nipples uplifted. She wore only high-heeled shoes and they displayed her long dancer's limbs. Her skin was oiled and her suntan flawless, without even bikini lines to mar it.
She asked them what they would like to drink. She licked her lips as she looked at each of them in turn. Her lips were ripe, red, pulpy, her upper lip as full and pouty as her lower lip. And when they gave her their drink orders, she walked quietly away, but even walking was an erotic act as her smooth baby-skin butt swayed lasciviously from side to side.
"Maybe if it was a real big stick," Bondini said. "So I could do it with one big smack."
Hubble was talking to himself, still staring at the door through which the redhead had reentered the house. "Some animals are really cute," he mumbled. "Being prejudiced against animals just because they're animals isn't really worthy of me. A cute animal. What's wrong with that?"
Franko wasn't listening. He was thinking, even though he did not say it, that there certainly were a lot of attractive corpses. Beautiful women who died from overdoses, for instance. You couldn't see anything wrong with them no matter how hard you looked. And if you got them right away, why, hell, they might even still be warm. So they wouldn't give much back, but who said the man always had to be rewarded in lovemaking by a woman's responses? If you wanted noise, later, with the money turned back on, you could hire a woman who was good at making noise. Sometimes you just had to do what's right. A warm pretty corpse sounded okay to him. He certainly liked that idea a lot better than he liked the thought of suffering from corpse-a-phobia.
"I don't have corpse-a-phobia," Franko said. "I never had anything wrong with me in my whole life. Don't go trying to saddle me with diseases I don't have." He looked around accusingly.
Their drinks never came. Instead, Abner Buell walked onto the deck, wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt which were too khaki to be called a leisure suit. He had on heavy woolen socks, puffed out over the top of cheap sneakers without laces. But his hair was still immaculately plasticked into place.
He stood in front of the three men, looking down at a clipboard he held.
Finally, he looked up and snapped at Bondini. "You. I want you to beat your mother to death."
"One hit with a big stick," Bondini said firmly.
"A small stick. And slowly," Buell said. Without waiting for a response, he looked at Hubble. "You're going to be the star of a sex film. Making It with Mountain Goats. You'll have to screw three sheep." Again he waited for no comment but fixed his hard eyes on Stash Franko. "I want you to have intercourse with a headless corpse, dead three weeks."
He let the clipboard lower to his side and looked slowly at each of the men in turn. "I want you to know that I have turned over to the three of you a total of $612,000 in the last twelve months. That's money that technically you took from the bank by fraud. Now you will do what I ask or not only will the money stay cut off but the police will be on your doorstep by nightfall. You have sixty seconds to consider your course of action."
He walked back into the house and when the door closed behind him, Bondini said, "What do you think?" It was more of a plea than a question.
"I don't know," Hubble said. "What do you think?"
"I think I don't love my mother a whole lot. I grew up eating liver. How you supposed to love somebody who feeds you liver? A small stick's not so bad."
Hubble said, "I always liked sheep. They're friendly, kind of."
"I can keep my eyes closed," Franko said. "And hold my breath. Corpses. They're all the same in the dark, I always say."
Buell returned in exactly one minute. He stood in front of them, silently waiting. Finally Bondini blurted out, "We'll do it."
"All of you?" Buell asked.
"Yes," Bondini said. "We'll do it. All of us."
"Good," said Buell. "That's ten thousand points each. And now you don't have to."
"What?" asked Hubble.
"You don't have to. I was just testing you," Buell said.
"Oh," said Hubble.
"I want you all to kill a man instead," Buell said.
"Which one?" Franko asked.
"Does it matter?" Buell said.
"No," Franko said. "It doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter at all," said Bondini.
"Not at all," said Hubble.
All three were relieved that they only had to kill a man. It didn't matter who.
The car was wheezing and the temperature gauge was solidly in the red zone as it came down the snaky road that sliced through the hills and led to the coast at Malibu, so Remo turned off the motor, put the car in neutral, and let it coast.
"What are you doing?" Pamela Thrushwell asked.
"Trying to get there," Remo said. "Be quiet unless you want to walk."
The car picked up speed as it free-wheeled down the canyon's roadside, roaring past little shops that sold pots and hole-in-the-wall markets that featured fourteen varieties of bean sprouts, and past long-in-the-tooth hippies with steel-rimmed glasses and women in their forties who still wore fringed buckskin skirts and soft-soled moccasins. It took one corner on two wheels.
"You're going too fast," Pamela said.