Excerpt from
Kill Whitey
by Brian Keene
Her name was Sondra, and when she asked me to kill Whitey, I said yes.
What else could I say? If you could have seen her, if you could have watched the way her pouting, glossy lips formed the words, or if you looked deep into her sad eyes, or heard that sorrow in her sweet, pleading voice-you would have said the same thing.
Yes.
Sondra was beautiful. Her dark hair was so black that sunlight got lost inside it. Her eyes were the same color. Her long fingernails were red, matching her lipstick. She had Russian facial features; a Slavic forehead, chin, nose and cheekbones. She was slim, but had a heart-shaped ass and perfect tits. No boob job for her. No way. Sondra’s breasts were one-hundred percent real. You could tell it by the way they moved when she walked. Or arched her back. Or just breathed.
Damn. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I hate to make her sound like a piece of meat. She wasn’t. Sondra was much more than that. And I’m not one of those guys, in any case. I respect women. Like the great comedian Sam Kinison used to say-what are you gonna do without women? Give sheep the vote? You’ve got to respect women. And I did. But put that aside for a moment. Sondra was what she was-a surefire cure for erectile dysfunction. She put Viagra to shame. You know those women that you see-the exotic ones that you could never ever get? Not in a million years? She was one of those women. And I got her.
She was the type of woman that men would kill or die just to be with one time. She inspired the imagination. She was who you closed your eyes and fantasized about when you made love to your wife for the five hundredth time. Straight guys wanted to fuck her. Gay guys wanted to be her friend. And women… some women wanted to do both. Well, except for those that instantly hated her-and maybe even some of them wanted to be with her, too.
Sondra was her real name, too. A lot of those girls-especially the Russians-use stage names. But not Sondra. She didn’t have to. Her presence was more powerful than any name she could have taken.
Shit. I’m not a poet. I’m a fucking dockworker. I don’t know how to make it any more palatable for you. I don’t have the words or the ability. What you need to know is this-Sondra was sex, plain and simple. She exuded it. It was in her aura, in her pheromones. It dripped from her pores and followed in her wake like a vapor trail. Sondra was desire and lust, and I wanted her from the moment I saw her.
Was it love? I don’t know. Maybe I thought so for a little while, but even now, after all this time and everything that happened, I just don’t know for sure. I’d been in love before. More than once. I knew what it was like. How it felt. What it did to a man. In the short time I was with Sondra, it certainly felt like that. But it also felt like something more-or maybe, something else.
I don’t know if I loved her, but I was damn sure crazy about her.
And that’s why I said yes when she asked me to kill Whitey.
Saying it, making the promise, was easy. Doing it was harder.
Much harder…
