Fallen Too Far Read online

  He opened the bar fridge and retrieved two mineral waters. Annik took the water and then suggested he take a cool shower.

  “I want you sober and I want to cool your arousal,” she directed.

  She freshened her lipstick and turned on soft music while she waited. He emerged from the bathroom, hair dripping, wearing the hotel bathrobe. She kissed his lips and led him to the bed. She told him to sit, propped pillows between his back and the headboard. From her purse, she retrieved two lengths of silk fabric and returned. She tied the first around his wrist in a bow and fastened it to the headboard post. Repeating this action, she fastened his other hand.

  “You can untie yourself at any time. Just bring your hand to your mouth and grasp this end,” she said demonstrating with a slight tug how this could be done. He smiled when she retied the knot.

  She dimmed the lights slightly and turned up the music. She danced slowly and sensuously, undulating her hips, leaning forward to show cleavage. Running her hands over her body and her thighs, she slowly moved, at one with the music. She slipped the strap of her dress off her shoulder, pushing it down over her arm. When her breasts were just about bared she turned around, her back facing him. Continuing she lifted the hem of her skirt to expose her thighs and the bottom half of her ass above the dark stockings. The hem dropped back to the floor and her hands now pushed the dress down slowly revealing her hips. It fell to the floor and she turned to face him, stepping out of it. Her firm breasts topped with dark brown, hard nipples swayed slightly with her movements. She slipped her fingers into the sides of her panties pulling them down and leaning over, jiggling her breasts a little. Stepping out of them, she tossed them at him.

  She moved closer, still dancing. She touched her pussy with her hands holding the lips apart giving him a full view of her vulva. He groaned.

  She stepped closer, and he strained his hand to touch her. But she stepped back just out of reach. She reached down and with one finger stroked his hard cock, from the purple head to the base. Her fingers played on its tip rubbing his pre-come over the head. From the night table she picked up and opened a foil packet. She slipped the condom on him before she knelt down to take him into her mouth. He breathed heavily and pumped himself upward. She withdrew, stood up and walked to the other side of the bed to lie next to him. She straddled his thighs and eased forward so that her pussy pressed against his cock. With her hands she tossed her hair upward and rubbed herself against him. He looked with longing at her high full breasts, narrow waist and parted pussy lips caressing his cock. She reached down with one hand and touched her clit, sliding her finger into her vagina. She withdrew her finger and slid it along Bill’s upper lip. She continued rubbing herself against him.

  Bill lifted his head from the pillows, and with his teeth unfastened his hand. He freed his other hand and reached for her. He pulled her to him and shifting himself, he rolled on top while She spread her legs, opening herself to receive him. He thrust roughly into her, pumping fast and furious. She squeezed her muscles tight onto him.

  With a final hard thrust he orgasmed, his body stiffening, moaning his pleasure. She held him as his body collapsed on top of her.

  “Bill, that was good,” she sighed.

  “You’re telling me. I haven’t had an orgasm that intense since I was in my twenties. God, you’re good.”

  She raised herself up onto her knees, and slipped the condom off. “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she said, “but I'm not finished with you yet.” With a twinkle in her eye, she demonstrated to him that his money was well spent, coaxing a second, even more powerful orgasm out of him.

  They lay together in bed until he began to nod off. She kissed him on the forehead and got out of bed, dressing while he watched her with sleepy eyes. As she let herself out, she blew him a kiss that he returned.

  Emerging from the elevator she kept her eyes on the lobby door. She wouldn’t glance at the desk clerk, they usually smirked.

  The newspapers for the next day were being delivered at the front desk.

  ****

  The desk clerk’s eyes lifted and looked past Paul.

  He turned to see what had caught the clerk’s attention. It was early in the morning and not many people were around. He did a double take when he saw the woman wearing a coral evening gown push the revolving door.

  It had been but a fleeting glance, but long enough for him to recognize her. Paul dumped the bundle of newspapers and strode across the hotel foyer. He saw the flash of her leg before the door of the car closed and the cab pulled away.

  Chapter 4

  Most people go through life via a series of accidents. They’re born into a certain family by chance, go to the closest schools, get a job or choose a career or trade, meet someone randomly, settle down and put the same random wheels in motion for their offspring.

  Not many people actually design their lives. Those who do are the fortunate ones. They have an experience at a young age which they enjoy and follow up on it. Some become doctors, some become schoolteachers, some become pastors.

  All of these people have one thing in common. If they were asked why they chose their particular occupation, they would answer that it was the only thing they wanted to do as long as they could remember. For them, there was no alternative. Some would name this a vocation, a calling. They didn’t choose their field, they have a sense that they were chosen by it.

  These chosen ones always excel. Their work is much more than what they do, it’s what they are. Their work is as much a part of them as the color of their eyes, the sort of food they enjoy, their intelligence level. Their vocation is as much a part of them as their racial heritage. It’s not just in their blood, it’s in their genes.

  All the other elements of a life well lived are secondary. Of course they love their family. Of course they enjoy the company of their friends. They may dabble in a hobby, but not very much. They’d rather spend that time and effort at their calling. Often they forego permanent relationships. Their lives of solitude are not lonely; their work is their companion.

  Paul was such a person. He found his calling early in life. Of the thirty-four years he had been alive, he had no memory of ever not being drawn to his work. Perhaps it was an unusual occupation; but he knew there were others like himself in the world. He’d never met them, but he knew of many of them. The ones he knew of were not the best, though. They had been caught. The best ones were out there, following their calling, like him, year in and out.

  As a child, he was a good boy. Gram told him that. Gram was the only mother he’d ever known. She had raised him from infancy. Her daughter gave birth to him, and six months later went out for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread and never came back. He had no memory of her, only of Gram, so he knew he had no ‘abandonment issues’.

  It was probably for the best anyway. Gram had told him that when he was a teenager. She was worried that he would try drugs and enjoy them as his mother did. His mother was an addict, and it was only through the grace of God he was born healthy. Gram never said it outright, but Paul was smart enough to conclude that his mother paid for her drugs through the sex trade. First as a stripper, then as a prostitute. Gram made him promise that he would never try any drugs or alcohol until he was twenty-one.

  He kept that promise all through high school and after wards. On his twenty first birthday he tried alcohol and found it useless. It burned his throat and made him feel disoriented. His life of sobriety was not a choice; he wasn’t missing out on anything. He was more baffled by people who couldn’t get enough of it. He never tried drugs; if simple stuff like booze was so disagreeable, the stronger substances could only be more so.

  Not having friends took away peer pressure. Gram had been a little concerned over his solitary life when he was in elementary school. Her concern stopped though when he entered high school and she was diagnosed. His lack of a social circle became a blessing for her then. As her illness progressed, he became her caretaker.

  Which was
fine with him. It had given him time to pursue what he thought was his hobby, which became his vocation.

  Gram lived in the home she grew up in. It was a farmhouse about an hour outside of Toronto. When her husband died she leased out the acreage at first and kept her job at the bank. Living simply, she was able to provide for Paul. When she became ill, she began to sell off the outlying acreage. As Toronto continued to sprawl in the 80’s and 90’s the land increased in value exponentially.

  It was a decent sized farm with a barn behind the house. The barn was Gramp’s workshop before he died. Like many barns it had cats living in it. When Paul was eight he was in the barn exploring and came upon a nest of kittens.

  They were only about a week old or so and their mother must have been away hunting mice or chipmunks to feed on. They were the first kittens Paul had ever seen. He was curious about them and poked each one with his finger. They responded with mewling and tried to snuggle into it.

  They were adorable. And helpless. He picked one up by the scruff of the neck and held it to his face. It hung limply from his hand. Without a conscious thought or decision he reared back and threw it as hard as he could against a nearby wall. It crunched against the wood, fell to the ground completely still.

  He picked up a second kitten, and cradling it in his hands wrung its neck, hearing the bones crackle. He laid it back down with its litter mates, retrieved the first one and placed it back with the others.

  He ended the lives of the remaining three kittens in different ways, replacing their bodies when he was done. The last kitten he stabbed with a pointy screwdriver he retrieved from the workbench.

  Squatting over the carcasses, he felt he had done good work. He didn’t feel any emotion other than satisfaction. He did a good job. He wondered where their mother was.

  Over the course of the next several days he returned to the barn, but never saw their mother. When the carcasses started to smell and become fly covered he took a shovel and dug a hole behind the barn, where the wooded area started. He buried the kittens in a group. He cleaned the dirt off the shovel before replacing it in the barn. Again he felt satisfaction. He felt a little puzzled over why he didn’t feel bad. He knew he shouldn’t tell Gram.

  He felt good about it, and went back to doing the things little boys do.

  A few months later he missed that feeling. He went back to the workshop and prowled around. He was looking for the live trap cage that Gram had used one autumn to catch a raccoon that was setting up winter’s quarters in their cellar. When she caught it, she took Paul with her in the car. They drove to a provincial park that was twenty minutes away and released it.

  Paul had thought that the raccoon looked like a person. It was very angry being trapped in the cage, hissing and grabbing the bars with its hands like a prisoner. Its eyes were angry. When Gram attached a cord to the cage door and opened it, it sauntered out, gave her a dirty look and then loped into the undergrowth.

  When he found the cage he spent some time figuring out how it worked. He carried it into the woods and baited it.

  The next day he had a squirrel in the cage. It had hands sort of like the raccoon, but not the expressive eyes. Squatting outside the cage with some tools, Paul did some more good work. He buried the squirrel next to the kittens. He hosed off the cage in the backyard and returned it to the workshop.

  He had a hobby.

  A secret hobby.

  He got some bird books and binoculars. He kept them in a shoulder bag. On the bottom were his toolkit he assembled by trial and error to find out which ones did the best job. Gram thought that he was an avid birdwatcher. He changed bird watching for insects after a year or so, and in high school studied the plants in the woods. Or so Gram thought.

  As each animal died, he felt something akin to love. They gave their life for his good work. As he filled his little cemetery, he did it with increasing reverence. First he wrapped them in a rag, and over time he laid them in small coffins with a cross etched on the cover. He planted wildflowers over each grave.

  In high school he would go out of the house at night. Gram’s bedroom was at the top of the stairs, so he used a rope from his bedroom window to climb down. He would take his bicycle across the fields to the nearest subdivision. He would stay in the woods behind the houses and peer with his binoculars into lighted bedrooms. That was good work too, especially when he was able to watch women. Being in the woods was good, he could climb a tree for a better view. He watched girls, teenagers and women undress for bed. Sometimes he watched couples have sex. When they turned their lights out he would return home and masturbate.

  Over time he had a bunch of favorite homes to watch.

  He developed patience and discipline in his hobby. He never rushed things. Whether it was waiting for night to fall, or for his subject to retire, it came naturally to him to become still as he perched in the tree. He never felt frustrated when his prowling was unfruitful. It was his hobby.

  A week before graduation from high school, Gram took her last breath in a hospital. He was eighteen. She had made all of her arrangements, and left him everything in her will. There was a healthy bank account with several hundred thousand dollars in it, some stocks, and still fifty acres of land.

  He had her cremated and scattered her ashes in the front yard of the farmhouse. She had spent her entire life there and would spend eternity at that farm in one fashion or another.

  He neither grieved nor cried. She had done good work. The money gave him the freedom to pursue his own life’s work. He was ready to move to the next stage.

  Through his high school years he became an aficionado of murder mysteries and true crime stories to augment his forays into the woods. He studied online as well.

  He learned enough from the mistakes of others. Bundy was a fool. As was The Son of Sam. They killed people others cared about. That pig farmer in British Columbia was smart in his work, but by staying local, he managed to get caught as well.

  Paul realized he had much to do to prepare for the next stage in development.

  He joined a school of self defense and worked hard at becoming adept at street fighting and law enforcement subduing techniques. It took him two years before he felt he was ready. The discipline of the classes appealed to him. He realized that expertise came from practicing the fundamentals.

  He began to keep a diary of his goals and progress towards them.

  He purchased a pickup truck. A reliable used one with a cap on the back. Gram had taught him how to drive when he was in high school. Her own health was failing and for the last several years of her life she was either housebound or at doctors’ appointments.

  He got a job delivering the daily newspaper to subscribers. The era of paperboys was drawing to a close, and there were plenty of routes to be had. He would fill his truck with several hundred papers, covering two or three routes. He built a platform out of wood in the back of his truck, and cut out a hatch into the divider between the cab and bed.

  He would pick up his papers at the printing plant, toss them into his truck and cruise the neighborhoods where he knew the street walking whores would be. He was invisible to the police once they saw who he was. The magnetic sign with the logo of the newspaper he delivered, attached to the doors of the pickup helped.

  His first project went smooth as silk. He knew that the corners where the girls would be, were free of surveillance cameras. Otherwise the Johns wouldn’t come by. He went for a girl that was alone. He pulled up, and rolled the passenger window down and asked the price for a blowjob. When she gave it he nodded and she jumped in.

  They pulled into an alley nearby. He shut off the engine, hiked up the steering wheel, unbuttoned his pants, and pulled them down. When she bent over to go to work on him he struck her behind the ear with a lead truncheon. It was like flipping a switch.

  He was afraid he’d hit her too hard. She was breathing however. His hours of practice with the instrument and a bathroom scale had paid off. He hit her exactly right w
ith exactly the proper force.

  He wrapped her arms and legs with layers of reinforced shipping tape—the kind with nylon cords running through it. He secured a thick leather hood over her head and scooped her under the seat and into the bay in the rear of the truck. He had the foresight to line the floor with satin so her body would slide easily.

  He took her home and secured her to the place he prepared in the cellar. He returned to work and completed his routes.

  It took him three days to finish with her. It was wonderful work, his best ever.

  The night she died he buried her with full reverence in the provincial park. There was no chance that she’d be uncovered by some developers in the future.

  He did four projects a year. He wanted to do more, but knew that it was discipline that would ensure his freedom.

  After three years, he knew he needed to move on to a new location.

  He moved to British Columbia for two years, then Edmonton. It was simple to move to the U.S. Gram was an American, so he qualified for dual citizenship. He stayed away from major cities, too much urban sprawl, and he needed countryside and isolation nearby.

  As his skills and confidence grew, he did more projects. He went from one project every four months to one every two months, then one a week for the last month before moving on.

  From his research and reading he guesstimated there were at least twenty five other colleagues like himself out there doing projects. He wondered if they passed each other in the night as they went about their business.

  Like building a series of houses, each project had the same fundamentals. Once the basics were attended to, each job took on its own unique cachet. Their gags never came off. He didn’t want to hear their mewling pleas. He always watched their eyes as they died.

  It never got old. It was beautiful.

  He had been working his vocation for ten years when he returned to Toronto. He rented a house and property that was further away from the city than Gram’s had been. He got another job delivering papers and waited six months to become familiar with the tenor of the area. If he had curious neighbors, or nearby exploring children, he wanted to know about it before resuming his work. He was grateful that he was as isolated as before.