This was something Rosser didn't need. But he still kept his cool. If I sneak out without seeing her, that could definitely raise suspicion. It was probably nothing, though. She probably just wants to ask about next week's rent, wants to know how long I intend to stay. I 'II pay next week s rent now. Then no one' ll know I 'm gone.

He walked stolidly downstairs, through the day room to the office. The office door was open.

Rosser cleared his throat and entered.

"Oh, Mr. Rosser! There you are!" the landlady greeted from behind her desk. "I was just about to go to bed."

Mrs. Doberman had what could be described as a "hatchet-lace." Mid-fifties, paunchy, graying hair pulled back in a bun. Through her tacky blouse, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s seemed to hang down to her stomach in tubes. Not a becoming woman, in other words, and-now that he thought of it...

She s almost as ugly as Maxine. Jesus. Must be something in the water.

"One of the other tenants said you wanted to talk to me."

"Why, yes." A big bright smile. "I just wanted to let you know that I didn't call the police."

Rosser's heart nearly stopped. He stared.

The ungainly woman stood up, came around the desk, and traced a crabbed, veiny hand across his s.h.i.+rt. "I couldn't do that. Selfish, call it."

Rosser croaked: "Puh-police."

"Of course. See, I know what you did. Molestin' that poor baby. Shame on you, Mr.

Rosser!"

Rosser's throat felt like it was sealing shut. "I-I-l was set-up. I didn't do it, I swear to G.o.d.

This-this woman I met on the bus... She made the whole story up."

She walked around, closed the office door, and locked it. Then she returned and sat up on the desk.

"Woman like me, gettin' on in her years, not much to look at no more? Then you walk in, the handsome stranger, so different. And on the run."

Rosser could not fathom this. "What... are you . . . talking about?'

The big stiff smile seemed to hover in the air. "Oh. I know that stuff about you messin'

with the baby is all malarkya"

Rosser's eyes went wide. "You do?"

"Oh, sh.o.r.e, hon! Maxine told me all about it. She's always pullin' stunts like that What a character! But don't you worry none. You take care'a me, and I'll take care'a you."

G.o.d Almighty! Rosser thought Now Mrs. Doberman had hoisted her skirt, revealing a panty-less pubis. She was masturbating right there on the desk, her finger roving a v.a.g.i.n.a that was as much of a repulsive mess as Maxine's.

"You give me a some lovin' when I need it, and everything'll be fine," she said. "Oh, and just so ya know, what I like best is ta have my p.u.s.s.y et"

Rosser's mind spun. Nightmare, he thought but he knew he was awake. Then he remembered what she'd just said: Maxine told me all about it.

Rosser's voice grated like millstones. "You know Maxine?'

"A'course! She's my daughter, and she just moved in here with cute li'l Shots. Hey, Maxine?'

A door behind him clicked open, and in flopped Maxine, all smiles, all hanging fat and bulbous face and mole-studded neck. Now that he considered it, he easily saw the resemblance between the two women.

"Hi, there, Mr. Nice Man!" she celebrated. "Bet'cha thought ya'd never seen me again!"

The atrocious baby remained wrapped around her side. It glared at him. blowing spit bubbles.

"Ga! Ga-ga!"

"Git down on them knees, Mr. Rosser," the landlady instructed, "and give me some proper p.u.s.s.y-eating. Once or twice a day's all Til need. And each time yer done with me, ya kin have some fun with Maxine, too. Way I understand the law, there ain't no expiration'a the time Maxine can press charges against ya fer child-molestation."

Rosser was growing dizzy in nauseousness. Mrs. Dobennan spread her legs, dividing her sloppy v.u.l.v.a with her finger.

"So come on, you silly man. Let's git on with it!"

Rosser fell to his knees.

"And when you're done with Momma," Maxine added, "I'll be in the bedroom, waitin' on ya"

Shots flapped some feces on Rosser's back.

"Ga! Ga-ga!" the baby said.

The McCrath Model.

SS40-C, Series S.

"Sh.e.l.l have to eat it," Prouty said, "otherwise, she'll drown."

Vinchetti appraised the situation, a dark, if not bewildering, scrutiny. "You're one sick motherf.u.c.ker, Doca"to think of something like this."

Hey, you 're the one who insists on these link revenge skits, you stromboli-eating whack-job, thought Doc a.k.a. Dr. Winston F, Prouty. Fifty-seven years old, tall, lean, gray-templed. Dr. Prouty looked liked his former self in his clean white lab-coat and perfect posture. Deloreanesque, distinguished. Not too long ago, he'd been earning over a million a year as one of Beverly Hills' most prominent reconstructive plastic surgeons. t.i.t-jobs for the stars. Brad Pitt noses for every Brad Pitt wannabe in La-La Land. Doc had liposucked Nicholson five times, and had created enough Hollywood cleavage to rival the East African Rift. Posh office on Wils.h.i.+re Boulevard, waterfront Malibu beach house, Lamborghini in the drive. It had only taken a year to lose it alla"thanks to a high gambling marker with the mob... oh, and the demerol habit. Now Dr. Prouty worked for Vinchetti.

"It will, in the least provide a captivating demonstration of the extremities of the human survival instinct" the doctor appended.

"Doc, I love the way you talk!" Vinchetti replied and smacked his hands together.

That's because I have an education, unlike you and your goomhah psychopaths. He tightened the straps on the lab table, checked the angle of the lights for the video camera.

Vinchetti always wanted these little vignettes preserved on tape, for sale to his sickest clients, and to serve as reminders to his own people: This Is What Happens If You f.u.c.k With Paul Vinchetti.

Indeed. It was.

Paul Vinchetti II was the supreme boss in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as the Vmchetti/Lonna/Stello Crime Pyramid, an armature of that mythical human machinery known as the Mafia. When his father had died of a coronary while eating calamari and white pizza, Paul had taken over the entire ball of mob wax by waging war with the rest of the families. He had the muscle. Now he controlled all of the white heroin distribution on the east coast, as well as underground p.o.r.n distribution, and, of all things, magazine distribution. Slowly but surely he was working his way west with gambling and black-market import interests. The gamblinga"that's how Dr. Prouty had gotten involved.

He'd run up a couple of hundred grand at the black-jack tables, and shortly thereafter had lost his license. (Two botched blepharoplastys in a row had left a corporate attorney's wife and a DreamWorks exec with insufficient blood-supply to the eyelids. Eventually, the eyelids had rotted off.) The lawsuits had taken everything, but that wasn't Prouty's biggest worry, and neither were the impending criminal charges for performing critical oro-facial surgery while under the influence of a pharmaceutical morphine derivative.

Unable to make his payments, Prouty knew Vinchetti's district boys would come a'callin', and when they did, they made him an offer he couldn't refuse. "We can hang you upside-down by a meat-hook through your a.s.shole," they'd been kind enough to explain, "and then blow-torch you to death, or..."

"So how long's it take, Doc?' Vinchetti asked.

"Oh, twenty more minutes perhaps, before the copper sulphate adequately saturates the duodenal blood vessels."

"And where the h.e.l.l's Tony?"

"I believe he's trying to locate a camera, sir."

"The f.u.c.k?" Vinchetti complained. "What's taking him so long? We got more cameras in this joint than Paramount Jesus Christ."

"They were making some snuff tapes in the bas.e.m.e.nt last night. Remember? The deputy police commissioner's children?'

The memory rekindled on Vinchetti's expression. "Aw, yeah, that's righta"the baby triplets. I'll bet that's gonna be some sweet work."

Dr. Prouty frowned to himself. He remembered seeing the crew bring in the pit bulls.

A chuckle, then: "Teach that f.u.c.k cop to bust my guys," Vinchetti continued. "f.u.c.kin'

guy's been on our pad for five f.u.c.kin' years, and now he wants to break bad?" Another chuckle. "He'll know what bad is when he sees that tape."

Prouty felt a twinge in his belly, in spite of his now-well-honed clinical detachment But getting back to his own predicament, when given the choice of hanging upside-down from a meat-hook in his r.e.c.t.u.m or working for Vinchetti, the doctor had unsurprisingly picked the latter. This involved an expeditious relocation to one of Vinchetti's compounds on the outskirts of Pennellville, New York. The facility was part safe-house, part recovery ward, and part full-tilt mother-f.u.c.kin' chamber of horrors. Its remote location made it perfect for all of the above, especially the video end. All manner of illegal and homicidal p.o.r.nography was made on the premise: snuff flicks, nek flicks, "wet" S&M, and various other types of productions the likes of which could make even the lowest demon queasy.

But Dr. Prouty had little to do with the videos; his chief purpose at the compound entailed changing appearances. Two weeks of cold-turkey withdrawal had cured him of his demerol addiction, after which he'd begun to utilize his clinical expertise in order to pay back his gambling debts. Whenever it was looking like the feds were going to grab one of Vinchetti's men cold, said man would come to the compound and, thanks to Prouty's skills, leave several weeks later with a new face. Simple. And Prouty didn't really mind at all. They gave him a little room to live in, three meals a day plus all the satellite channels, and it sure as h.e.l.l beat hanging from that hook. Escape was impossible; the compound was constantly locked full of guards, and close to a fifty miles from any other dwellings.

It was this or the hook.

This worked.

These little side jobs were another matter, though. Not only was the compound used as a production stage for the most unimaginable endeavors in visual p.o.r.nography, it was a stage, too, for Vinchetti's own personal desires for vengeance. Whenever somebody stole from Vinchetti, or lied to him, insulted him, slighted him in any way, it was Dr. Prouty's job to initiate a creative revenge which Vinchetti would personally witness and have video-taped for posterity. The deeds definitely tested Prouty's intestinal fort.i.tude but then ,.. there was always the hook ... so he simply did what he was told and didn't morally question himself about the victims. h.e.l.l, they were all probably bad people anyway.

Quite often, Prouty kept them alive for as long as possible. Non-anesthetic lobotomies were another Vinchetti favorite, as were full body flensings, acid catheters, and 'Irunk jobs." Genital mutilation comprised so much activity in this place that it had actually grown blase; you could only dissect some many p.e.n.i.ses. remove so many s.c.r.o.t.u.ms, poach so many testes, and gun-brush so many urethras before it lost its thrill. Hence, Vinchetti kept pressing the doctor for new and original spectacles.

Like this one.

The woman's name was Darcy, one of Vinchetti's part-time paramours. Vinchetti liked them skinny and trashy (such women reminded him of his New Jersey childhood) and Darcy definitely fit the bill. Ninety-five pounds, tiny-breasted, and with a mouth more foul than the bottom of a slaughter house dumpster, Darcy had made the faux pax of telling one of the other girls: "Vinch has a little d.i.c.k. It's teeny, like my pinkie."

Big mistake.

The other girl had ratted and now here Darcy lay, side-strapped nude to Prouty's work table. It was an odd sight, to say the least: Prouty thought of conjoined twins connected at the mouth. See, Darcy shared the lab table with another of Vinchetti's employees, one Hymie Levy. Hymie was a young mathematics whizz-kid who'd graduated with honors from Georgetown Business School, and nowa"or it should be said, until very recentlya"

he'd served as one of Vinchetti's accountants. Standing at a ftiU five-foot four, Hymie weigheda"easilya"three hundred pounds, and the reason he occupied s.p.a.ce on the torture table was simple: he'd been skimming money from Vinchetti's trough. Hence, the mandate. If you stole even a nickel from the boss, you got the table. It was the principle of the thing.

Vinchetti was wincing at the site of Hymie strapped naked to the table. "Christ, Doc, that's a lot of matzah b.a.l.l.s; he looks even worse with his clothes off. The kid's got enough blubber on him to keep an Eskimo family eating for ten years. No wonder there's people starvin' in the world. This fat f.u.c.k ate all the food."

"I wouldn't be too hasty in accusing the obese of a lack of will-power," Dr. Prouty pointed out. "Recent research from John's Hopkins indicates that perhaps as much as forty percent of obesity in America can be attributed to a previously unidentified icosahedral virus.

Nonstructural protomers in the viral sh.e.l.l allow it to roam undetected by immune responses and directly attack the mitochondrion mechanisms in human fat cells. The result is a cell that cannot effectively turn glucose into energya"hence, an excess storage of adipose matter, Obesity is a tragic disease, not an instance of willful over-indulgence."

"Aw, put a lid on that liberal bulls.h.i.+t, will ya, Doc? The fat motherf.u.c.ker's fat lcos he can't keep his fat f.u.c.kin' hands out of the f.u.c.kin' refrigerator. He eats six frickin' meals a f.u.c.kin' day. He stuffs his fat motherf.u.c.kin' face every frickin' chance he gets. It ain't no f.u.c.kin' virus. Doc. It ain't no f.u.c.kin' disease. The only problem this fat f.u.c.k has is a f.u.c.kin' fork-to-mouth problem."

Prouty knew the futility of taking exception. "Of course, you're quite correct, sir. Pardon my oversight."

Vinchetti smiled subtly. "d.a.m.n straight. And this fat f.u.c.k's defhitely had his last f.u.c.kin'

meal."

"Actually, sir," the doctor reminded, "if you give the matter some abstract consideration, they'll both be spending their final moments of life... eating with quite a bit of gusto."

Vinchetti's eyes dimmed for a second, then, "Oh, yeah! I get'cha, Doc! Man, is this gonna be sweet!"

Indeed Prouty commiserated. Medium doses of Phenolax had rendered both subjects unconscious, after which Dr. Prouty had stripped them and strapped them, face to face, on the table.

Then he'd... connected them... at the lips.

Vinchetti was leaning over, peering at their faces. "So how'd you do their lips. Doc?

What, you st.i.tched 'em together? That looks like some pretty tough work."

It was actually the simplest ch.o.r.e of all; the only "tough" work was suitably arranging Hymie's incredible bulk on the table. "With this," Prouty said, and held the instrument up.

At first glance, one might think the doctor had raised a chrome-plated curling iron, or even an electric steak knife. A power cord led to a s.h.i.+ny oval-shaped housing which fit comfortably in Prouty's hand. From the front end protruded two very narrow steel tubules, whose gap could be adjusted by a k.n.o.b at the base. "It's a McCrath Model SS40-C, Series S, top of the line."

"The f.u.c.k's that?' Vinchetti queried.

"It's a surgical stapler."

And a fine one at that. It functioned similarly to an ordinary office stapler, though its feed mechanism was much more intricate. The impact tubule, containing the foot-end, ran parallel to the loading tubule. The two objects to be coupled were merely fitted into the gap at the end of the device, anda" CLACK! a"the power b.u.t.ton was applied. The ends were joined while a curvicular one-millimeter surgical-grade staple was fired and shunted to the foot-end-and anything between it. The instrument was mainly used for long lacerations over deep wounds and re-attaching mesenterial tissue during primary abdominal operations. In this case, however, it was providing a very new and creative utility.

"You stapled their lips together?' Vinchetti deduced.

"That's correct sir. The entire procedure took less than a minute, I'd say."

Vmchetti stepped back, astonished. "That's really neat-o! "

Dr. Prouty rolled his eyes. Yes. Neat-o.

At the same moment, the door opened, and in walked Vinchetti's most trusted lieutenant a weasel-faced little man with hair like steel wool and more pock-marks than Tommy Lee Jones. Tony Guerini had worked his way up from the bowels of Trenton. As a kid, he'd bagged for the numbers racket in all the worst neighborhoods, and as a teenager he was working enforcement When a hooker gypped her pimp, it was Tony who uglied her up, cutting off her c.l.i.toris for the first offense, her nose for the second, then the head for the third. When a numbers collector came up short, it was Tony who shattered his spine, and when a distro guy stepped on the smack a little too hard, it was Tony who cranked the tourniquet around his neck till his eyeb.a.l.l.s popped half out and his lace hemorrhaged.

Tony was an industrious young man. And by the age that most young men were graduating college, Tony was proving himself as a most reliable "b.u.t.ton" for the Vinchetti Family. He deemed no job too abhorrent no hit contract too deplorable. Be it a hardened crew-boss from a rival family or an eighty-year-old lady who was a crooked cop's mom, Tony would tear out the heart of the crew-boss with a claw hammer and rape the old lady to death without so much as a blink. He'd once machine-gunned an entire busload of first graders simply because one of the kids was a judge's grandson, and when the Catholic diocese had threatened to not pay back their loan, it was Tony who kidnapped those three nuns from St. Christopher's and...

Well...