The Ricochet by Matthew Quinn Martin

She opened the front door, her smiling welcome knocked to the flagstones by my very presence. The look on her botoxed face practically broadcast––this wasn’t supposed to follow me home. But here I stood, the junior gigolo from the Four Aces Lounge. The one this forty-something trophy wife fucked on the scratchy sheets of an around the back room of the Triple Pines Motor Court for the price of a rare porterhouse and a bottle of Lafite slapped on her husband’s black AmEx. The one she thought she was going to just pump and dump.

“What…what…” she stammered.


“Shh...Is your husband home?”

She shook her head and I pushed past, into the parlor. “Good,” I whispered, as I grabbed her by the back of the neck. “I want to fuck you in his bed. I want you to still be feeling me inside you the next time you watch him climb into his pajamas.”

She scanned the room, calling after me as I started to mount the curved staircase. “My son…he’s upstairs.”


I stopped midway, letting her catch up. “Tell him I’m here to work on the plumbing,” I said, sliding a hand between her legs. I could feel her quiver, her legs beginning to buckle.

“Make it quick,” she said.


She laid a finger across my lips as we passed the boy’s room. Video game noise roared through the gap between door and frame. I caught the barest glimpse of a mop-topped head backlit by the pixillated picture of a flame-engulfed Ferrari flipping end for exploding end. This kid wasn’t going to hear a thing.

Pity.


She clicked shut the door, twisted the privacy lock, and had most of her clothes off by the time I
asked, “You got a DVD player up here?”

“Yeah,” she answered in a half-questioning tone, pointing to the flat panel LCD screen sitting on top of her mahogany dresser. “Built it. On the side.”


I pulled the unmarked sliver disk from my jacket pocket and slid it in. Then I dropped trou and hopped into bed.

“What’s this?” she asked, eyes on the screen as she stroked my length.


“Just a little something to get us in the mood,” I answered, massaging her cleft.

“Cheeky,” she said as she watched the on-screen couple grunt their way through some grainy low-rez sex. A look of mildly mystified amusement flickered across her face for a moment before she realized who she was looking at.


Us.

“What’s this about?” She sat bolt upright, gathering the covers around her naked frame.


“You know what it’s about, baby,” I said with a pinch to her left nipple.

She slapped my hand away, reaching for the remote. “Look, I don’t find this funny. I don’t know what you think––”


I raised a back-hand but didn’t follow through. I didn’t have to. She got the message. “OK, sweetie,” I told her. “This can go one of two ways. We can hop in your Lexus, cruise on over to the bank and get me a fat stack of cash. Or, I can hand that disk to your husband.”

“But I––”

“We can still fuck if you want.”

She hopped from the bed, scooping up her clothes. “But that’s black mail,” she said.


“So that’s a ‘no’ on the fucking, I guess.” I pulled up my pants. Stepping over, I ran a hand through her hair; she didn’t move. “I’m going to take a leak while you get dressed and decide.”
On my way into the bathroom, I added, “and don’t think you’re calling the cops. That disc goes straight to your hubby if you do.”

I could hear her sobs bubbling through the door as I whipped it out to piss. I kept it mostly to the floor, but I hit the toothbrushes too. Then I yanked open the medicine cabinet. It was like a prescription candy store in there. I started stuffing my pockets––Paxil, Xanax, Ambien, Zoloft, Percocets––anything that looked helpful. That’s when I spotted a bottle of eye drops next to a contact lens case.


I called to her. “You wear contacts?”

A soft and confused, “no” wafted from the master bedroom suite.


Her husband’s then. Good. I pried open the eye drop bottle and drained it. Then I reached into the cabinet beneath the sink for some bleach so I could fill the bottle back up. He wouldn’t be blind when it was over––not in both eyes. He couldn’t be so dumb as to keep going after that first alkaline drop started to burn through his cornea. Not unless he was in a real hurry.

“Ready to go?” I asked, clipping through the door.


“The disk?”

I pressed eject and handed it to her. She held it for a moment, looking at herself in its mirrored surface. With a quick snap, she broke it in two––her reflection now splintered and cracked. A drop of blood trickled across from where the jagged edge had pierced her hand.


“And the other one?” she asked. “Once I get you the money…the other one?”

“Gone,” I answered as I patted her on the tush, herding her out. “All gone.”


And that wasn’t exactly a lie. That disk was long gone. Dropped in the post this morning, priority mail to her husband’s office. With copies also sent to all of his coworkers, and one to her parents as well. It’s amazing the things you can look up on a woman’s unlocked Blackberry while she’s busy vacuuming up blow in a cheap motel bathroom.

Good thing her husband would probably still have that one good eye. I’d hate to think of him missing the show.


“Come on, kitten,” I said to her. “Chop chop.”

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Bio: Matthew Quinn Martin is an MFA candidate in Popular Fiction writing at the Stonecoast Program, University of Southern Maine. He is also the writer of the crime drama Slingshot, a feature film starring Julianna Margulies, David Arquette, Thora Birch, Balthazar Getty and Joely Fisher. Available on DVD from the Weinstein Co. His fiction has been published (or is forthcoming) in Transition Magazine, Twist of Noir, The Oddville Press, Eastern Standard Crime, MFA/MFYou, and the Quantum Genre on the Planet of Arts anthology, among others. www.matthewquinnmartin.com