Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor Read Free Book Online

Perhaps.
    â€œWill you take me home?” he asked Jay. “I wanna be your pet. I don’t eat much and I’m very affectionate.”
    Jay sipped his coffee, cocked an eyebrow. “What if you urinate or defecate on the floor? I might have to put you to sleep.”
    â€œI’m housebroken,” the boy assured him earnestly.
    There was hunger in his face, plain and sharp; but it was unaccustomed hunger, the hunger of a kid spending his first weeks on the street, missing his parents’ well-stocked kitchen. That was the kind of hunger Jay liked; strong enough to make them incautious, but not so strong that their muscles were wasted. He ordered the boy a café au lait and a plate of beignets.
    â€œNow seriously,” said Jay, watching the boy pour an endless stream of sugar into his coffee. “What about this pet business? Are you going to let me put a leash and collar on you? Do I get to chain you up?”
    â€œSure.” The boy grinned through a mouthful of beignet. Powdered sugar spangled his lips, his chin, the front of hisblack T-shirt. “Anything you want. Just let me curl up at the foot of your bed.”
    Jay wondered why such an exotic pup was begging for scraps at his back door. He looked rich, he supposed, but not
that
rich. Nowhere near as rich as he really was. In New Orleans, where robbery and murder were as common as afternoon rainstorms, only the tourists wore wealth like a sign plastered across their foreheads.
    â€œYou might even get your own pillow,” he said. “Been traveling long?”
    â€œJust a couple of months.”
    â€œWhere you from?”
    â€œMaryland.”
    â€œWhat’s it like there?”
    A diffident shrug; might as well ask what it’s like on the moon. “Sucks. You know—boring.” The last of the beignets disappeared down that hungry pink gullet. “So, uh, you wanna take me home?”
    Jay leaned forward and put his face close to the boy’s. “Let’s get a few things straight. If you want to be my pet, then
be
my pet. Sit until I’m ready to go. Heel when I walk. Roll over when I say so. And when I pet you,
lick my hand.”
    He reached out and smoothed the boy’s hair, slid his fingers down the side of the boy’s face, over the soft hairs at the ridge of the jawbone. Just as he was about to pull away, the boy turned his head and took Jay’s first two fingers into his mouth, lipped them softly, rolled them over his tongue. The inside of his mouth was as soft as velvet, as warm as fresh blood.
    From the corner of his eye, Jay saw an elderly tourist couple at the next table staring as if hypnotized. He could not make himself care, could scarcely move or breathe while that wet heat caressed him.
    â€œJust call me Fido,” said the boy.

3
    T he sky over Chef Menteur Highway was tinged lavender with the first traces of dawn. Tran drove past the crumbling architecture of half-vacant strip malls and bottom-end motels, past the awesome neon planet that was the beacon of the Orbit Bowling Alley, past a sleazy rainbow of cocktail lounges and dirty bookstores still gamely angling for the night’s last human dregs. Soon Tran’s little Escort was speeding through green country, lush expanses of water, reeds, and grass dotted with occasional small houses. East New Orleans was an odd mix of the tranquil, the trashy, and the wholly exotic.
    Tran was twenty-one, born in Hanoi to parents who escaped the country three years later, during the mass exodus of 1975. Somewhere in his ancestry was a dash of French blood that lent his shoulder-length black hair a crisp wave, underlaid his smooth complexion like almondflesh tinged with peach, and lent a faint golden cast to his dark eyes. His only memories of Vietnam were of hushed voices late at night, someone hurrying him down a street illuminated with tiny colored lights that shimmered and blurred in the humid air, the raw sap smell of