~ Methuselah's Legacy ~

by

Paul Musgrove

In the heart of Vancouver’s glittering downtown, Marylee Scott lay on a king-sized bed in the Colonial Arms on Hornby, a cold towel on her face, nose tingling and running from the last line of coke. Despite the nose candy, she had a pounding headache and was expecting police at the door any minute. But her mind was not in the Colonial Arms. Instead it was a half block from Pioneer Square in Seattle, in a fifth floor, high-ceilinged room of a tawdry barn-red brick hotel called the Tara Sands Inn and known locally as the Tarsands. In that fifth floor room, hanging naked in an S & M harness, was the body of a skinny young man she had enticed to his death a couple of nights before.

That poor man.

Marylee snuffled and wiped at her eyes. God, the rain had been so heavy when she persuaded him to leave the cab and go into the Tara Sands with her. Just to dry off a bit. She remembered a drunkenly snoring desk clerk with a stream of spittle running down his frayed vest. A creaking elevator with a puddle of something that looked like canned corn and smelled like puke. Going into that cheap, tacky room to change from the shimmering red sheath dress she’d worn for the pickup to jeans and a sweatshirt. Slipping back out and spotting the sallow young man standing in the front room, holding his soaking wet shirt and gazing out the window at a crowd streaming towards Seahawks Stadium for a Seahawks-Forty Niners game.

Such apprehension as she’d eased the heavy bolt back on the massive old door, allowing it to open just a crack. The lithe, dark form of Lennie slipping in, to the gloom of the hallway.

What was it the poor man had said? Something about this couldn’t happen between them because he had someone waiting for him?

Oh, God.

Marylee, her head absolutely throbbing, went in search of another line of coke. "Lightning" Lennie Lennox had not left her any additional supplies. There were a few grains in a large glass ashtray and she desperately snorted them. There was no rush, just another throb from her head, and she tottered back to the bed where she collapsed again, whimpering, feeling her stomach doing flip-flops. She couldn’t decide if she was hungry or going to be sick.

He had said he couldn’t stay. That was it. The poor man had a girlfriend and he couldn’t stay. He had been going to pull his sodden shirt back on and go to meet his girlfriend.

Then Lennie had stepped from shadows, a horrid, slack-mouthed, heavy-lipped grin splitting his face, feral brown eyes restlessly darting about the room before settling on his prey.

She remembered the horror on the man’s face as he caught sight of Lennie, and started to fumble his way into his wet shirt. Stopping only when he saw the nickel-plated Saturday night special in Lennie’s long-fingered, effeminate hand.

Marylee tossed restlessly, sweat breaking out on her forehead and trickling down her ribs. God, where was Lennie? Couldn’t he find that fucking guy so they could get out of there? Go back to the States and get out of this place where everyone had such fucking good manners and the money was funny colors?

Why had she agreed to do that terrible thing?

Why?

Well, there was Lennie’s cattle prod, for one thing. She didn’t want to feel that again. Or the coat hanger. And, for another, she had trusted the bastard. It was just going to be a shakedown. All she had to do was pick up a man at the Outriggers. She had waited with Lennie in his Cadillac for more than an hour in that musty parking garage until he got a call on his cell phone. Then he’d leapt out, raced over to a Mercedes and slammed a switchblade into the tires. Hopping madly around the car, he got all four, then ran back to the Cadillac and pushed Marylee out with a hissed "you do it right, girl." In a few minutes, the elevator had opened and the young man, whose name she later learned was Rodney Moorhen, came face to face with the four flat tires. The rest had been childishly simple.

Once they had arrived at the Tara Sands it had not been at all difficult to persuade him to put off his quest for a wrecker and accompany her to the room to dry out a bit. Getting off the elevator, she had caught sight of the tips of Lennie’s pointy-toed pimp boots sticking around a corner of the ice alcove. God, if she could just have that time back again. She’d cheerfully call out "Hi, Lennie, been waiting long, babe?" and the poor man would have been saved.

No, she wouldn’t.

That would have meant the cattle prod or far worse. She had caught sight of the men who had arranged the "shakedown" when they had come to the club to talk to Lennie one night a week before. Well-dressed, immaculately-groomed young stud muffins with easy, charming smiles, clouds of Faberge Brut and cold, chitinous eyes that missed absolutely nothing.

No, she’d do what she had, in fact, done. She’d take Moorhen to the room, making sure nobody but Lennie saw her slip him inside.

There was the sound of the elevator and some muffled voices. Marylee raced to the door, fumbling it open and sticking her sweating, yellow-eyed face around the corner. She got out the word "Len--" before she realized it was a man and woman she’d never seen before. Tottering back to the bed, she resumed her tossing and turning on a sweat-soaked comforter.

Her headache was worse and she could hear Moorhen’s voice again, pleading with Lennie. Telling him to tell someone named Van Peebles that he would think about the sale. No, that he would actually sell… what was it? Mor-something. That he would sell out Mor-something.

That was it, she had realized. That was the shakedown. The dark man and the cute blond had wanted this man to sell them something and he didn’t want to do it.

She remembered the horror on Moorhen’s face and his voice saying "Beth?" while never taking his eyes from the weapon.

"Sorry, Rod, the name isn’t Beth, but it’ll have to do," she said, adding "and you’ll just have to forget all about me, honey."

In her fevered mind she could hear Lennie saying "Shut up, girl," his voice silky and loaded with menace and the floppy smile slipping not one iota.

That had been her first inkling that this was not just a simple shakedown. God, she should have run screaming from the room. Pulled the ancient fire alarm in the evil-smelling hallway outside. Maybe it would actually have worked.

But she had just stood there, feeling the scratchiness of her threadbare old Snoopy sweatshirt on her goose-pimpled breasts and the quivering of her stomach.

Lennie, loose-jointed and in total command of the bizarre scene, had stood for a moment regarding Rodney with an arched eyebrow, then, chuckling and waving the gun negligently, had told the man to strip naked.

"Lennie... " Beth had said, her voice quivering with nerves.

"I thought I tol’ you to shut up, girl. You want a little lightnin’?" Lennie’s voice cut at her like a whip.

"No, honey." She heard her own voice as though it were coming from somewhere outside of her. "No. Please."

This was the point at which, on the most beloved TV show of her protected adolescence, the door would suddenly crash in and big Steve would shout "Five Oh, freeze!" or something like that.

It had almost seemed as though Moorhen were expecting the same thing. He had gazed into the gloomy shadows of the hallway with such an expression of entreaty that her heart had gone out to him. But there had been no big Steve or Danno.

Moorhen dropped his sodden shirt and Marylee could still hear the squishy thud as it landed like a drowned dog on the threadbare, puke-yellow Tara Sands carpet.

"Nekkid ain’t just bare-chested, sucker, it’s bare assed, too," Lennie said, again waving the gun at Rodney.

"That’s a good idea, honey," she heard her own voice, "to get rid of his clothes. He can’t follow us then, right?"

God, how she had hoped that was what this was all about.

"I tol’ you shut yo’ mouth, Marylee," the black man had said, his eyes never leaving Rodney.

"Marylee?" Rodney stared at her, betrayal etched on a face she now saw as handsome in an elfin way, lower lip quivering.

"Jesus, Lennie, now he knows my real name," Marylee said, sinking horror turning her stomach to water.

"Shit, girl, mine, too," Lennie replied, backhanding her across the face.

Marylee probed the ruptured membranes inside her right cheek. What little coke she’d had was quickly being eliminated from her system and the sharp sting brought tears to her eyes.

Staggering backwards to the wall, half-stunned, holding her hand to her rapidly swelling cheek and pawing absently at a trickle of blood on her chin, she’d watched the macabre scene unfold through a shimmering curtain of heavy mascara-laden tears.

Moorhen, thoroughly cowed by the blow, stripped the rest of the way in silence and stood naked and shivering, hands covering shriveled testicles, clothes in a saturated heap at his feet.

Then Lennie pulled on a pair of leather driving gloves and picked up a large brown shopping bag, upending it on a chipped coffee table, spilling a pile of glossy magazines. She and Moorhen had stared at the magazines, uncomprehending, as Lennie dumped a second bag. The studded leather harness with the huge brass buckle that had joined the magazines on the table had been as bewildering to them as the publications. But Lennie, she’d realized, was following a carefully conceived plan.

What was it Moorhen had squeaked out then? Something about "This is where it ends, okay?" and "Tell Dan and Mr. Setterly I’ll consider it, okay? I’ll consider signing, okay?" Yes, that was it. He had said "Mr. Setterly." That, she realized, had been one of the two men who had spoken in furtive tones to Lennie in the back booth of Hobby’s Sports Grille on Seneca. Probably the gorgeous, curly-haired blond with the preternatural green eyes and deep dimple.

Lennie, however, had not been interested in whatever it was that Moorhen would now consider selling. In the same tight, flat tones, he ordered the terrified man to pick up the magazines and go through them, "page by fucking page or you’re gonna be singing soprano in the fucking Vienna Boy’s Choir." He cocked the revolver and leveled it at Rodney’s testicles, a move that sent the man diving for the pile of magazines.

And hadn’t those been horrible?

Outside, the elevator hissed to a stop again and the door rumbled open. This time Marylee stayed on the bed, staring at the door, eyes mirroring a hope that crumbled as voices moved down the hall. Her feverish gaze ran over a hairline crack in the ceiling that ran like a jagged fork of lightning from the corner to the ornate, cheap chandelier in the center. Jesus, this was supposed to be a fucking four-star hotel. Couldn’t these Canadian assholes do something about that? Despite their condescending, smarmy holier-than-thou attitude towards Americans, they weren’t so fucking hot.

She tried to work up an outrage to take her mind off that terrible night, but she kept seeing the magazines, like some awful tape loop that wouldn’t quit running. She could see, too, Moorhen’s stunned expression as he took in the cover of the first magazine. The picture of a young and muscular man in a studded leather harness, hands bound securely behind his back. He was wearing a heavy leather hood that looked like a death mask, save for an eye slit. There was a rope around the man’s neck and he was standing on his tiptoes, head held slightly to the left because of the heavy hangman’s knot in the hemp.

"Right, bro’, it’s a snuffer," Lennie said, breathing fast and shallow and eyes gleaming. "Now you start lookin’ through it and you make sure you get your little fingers on every fuckin’ page."

Then the final horror began. Lennie, seeming to enjoy the performance, handed Marylee the harness and ordered her to put it on Moorhen.

It had been a fumbling comedy of errors as a terrified Marylee worked an equally terrified Moorhen into the harness, buckling the waist strap at the rear and snapping the handcuffs on his wrists. Then Lennie beamed at them and said "right on" before producing, from behind his back, a long and supple riding switch.

That was when Moorhen had lost it.

"Jesus Christ!" he had shrieked as the implications sank in. "Oh, come on, this is too damn much! Tell Dan I’m gonna do it, okay? Tell--"

"Shut the fuck up, dude."

"I’ll sell. Tell him I’ll sell? Please?"

For an answer Lennie slipped the revolver into his hip pocket and walked over to a ghetto blaster in a corner of the room, quickly filling the air with M.C. Hammer.

"Buenos," he had said after a moment. "Get over there under that exercise bar, dude."

He used the revolver to point to the high, vaulted arch separating living room from hallway. There Marylee saw a chinning bar mounted at about the seven-foot level. God, when had that gotten there? She stared at it in stunned disbelief as Lennie dragged a cheap chair under it and ushered the pinioned Moorhen over.

"Okay, bro’, on the chair," he said, helping the terrified man on to the rickety piece of furniture.

By this time Marylee had been in such a state of panic she barely noticed when Lennie climbed on the chair with his victim and, teetering awkwardly, slipped a noose over Moorhen’s head, tying it off on the bar.

"Oh, Christ, Lennie, you said nobody’d get hurt, you promised, babe!" she heard her own voice wailing.

Her anguished wail was the last thing the poor man probably heard as Lennie hopped down, reached out with one glossy pointed shoe and, ever so casually, hooked the chair out. With a well-practiced flick of his foot, he sent it flying across the room where it struck the wall so hard it snapped off a leg and gouged a hole in ancient plaster.

Marylee had crumpled to the floor, vomiting helplessly, as Lennie repeatedly slashed at the hanging man with the riding crop.

Lying and sweating on the bed, she tossed and moaned as her mind was filled once again with the sounds of the whip as the body, looking like a huge white slug in a monster spider’s web, slowly twisted.