Richie is offered a deal he can't refuse.

Girl-Next-Door #1: The Rooster

Richie Gallo caressed the pale thighs of his girlfriend with one hand while he ran the thumb of the other along her soft rounded chin. Her blondeness spilled across his wrist, her slim body pressed against him. The blonde breathed in his ear, cooing, "Oh, Richie." Her Nordic face contrasted with his olive-skinned hand, her soft body with his hard muscularity.

The scarred knuckles and black hair on the back of his hand also seemed at odds with his soft gray business suit. The gleam in his deep brown eyes, the twist of the smile on his full Mediterranean lips contradicted the carefully shined shoes and precisely combed hair. Richie Gallo projected aa barely controlled violence even in the tender movements of what he might have thought of as foreplay if he had ever heard of foreplay.

The hotel room was clean if not luxurious. The air, almost cool inside, still hinted at the lingering heat of a long Midwestern summer outside. Heat from the windows seemed to press against exposed skin, all the warmer for the erratic drafts from the air conditioning. The cheap perfume he had given her added to the heat, and he liked her to wear a lot. His male-animal scent reminded her of other quick assignations, making love in the back seat of limos, in the offices of liquor warehouses, in a storeroom in Comiskey Park.

The blonde shuddered in frustrated anticipation. When her lover had asked for a downtown rendezvous in a State Street hotel, she had naturally assumed there would be more in it for her this time. "Ain't'cha got time for more than a blowjob, honey?" The pout in her voice made the delectably carmine lips tremble. Her blue eyes swam with unshed tears. She felt his one hand lifting the hem of her simple white sundress while the other tilted her head up for a surprisingly savage kiss. Sometimes he bruised her mouth that way, but he never apologized unless you thought of Ulysses S Grant as a sort of apology.

"Nah," He grunted after the kiss. "Got to leave for a meeting with a fixer in ten minutes. No time to get naked." His accent proclaimed his origins in Chicago's slums, his education in the back alleys and warehouses of the Southside. Richie smiled, pulling her dress to her waist with both hands now. "No time for me to get naked."

"Oooh!" She squealed, stepping back as he snatched the white dress off over her head. She felt a little relieved, last time he had ripped it off her. She wore no bra, he didn't like her to wear a bra. He said she didn't have enough up there to need a bra. Her B-cup boobies bounced from the sudden movement. Her nipples crinkled in the cool of the sudden draft and her face flushed in the heat of embarrassment. Staggering slightly from the violence of her disrobing, she could not resist as he pushed her into a kneeling position. Her long, smooth, white stockinged legs folded under her and her lacy, nude, bikini panties rested on her high heels.

"Get busy, doll," he ordered. His strong blunt fingers tangled in her stylishly tousled blond locks and pulled her head close to his crotch, forcefully enough that her teeth made a small clicking noise when he stopped her head at the desired distance.

She had learned not to protest. Besides, Richie paid for torn dresses and generously compensated her for bruises as well. She had quit her job on his orders and over her mother's protests. She still lived at home, though, and spent most of the money he gave her on clothing and jewelry and beauty shops.

She shook back the bracelets she wore on each arm, jingle-jangle. Then Zzzp! as her French manicured nails lowered his zipper and deftly freed his cock from the pale blue boxers. She brought his already stiffening manhood out to the big round O she had made with her mouth. She moistened her True Red lips and then worked her tongue to lick his prick as she took him all the way back into her throat. She hummed as she worked. She used her swallowing muscles to pull him into her, suppressing the urge to gag. She held her breath, and she pumped her face, six, seven, a dozen times. He came into her hugely, salty and tasting of bleach. She swallowed again, hating this part, certain that Richie insisted on her swallowing because he knew that she hated it.

"That's good," he murmured. "So good." He handed her a tissue from the box on the hotel dresser. "Wipe me off, doll," he ordered. A bit of cum escaped the corner of her mouth, but she did not use the tissue to dab at it. A pink tongue made the cum disappear then she shrugged and cleaned him off, finishing by zipping him back up. He smiled at her pouting face as she retrieved her dress. "You mad at me, baby?"

"Whadda you think?" She tried not to whimper but her frustration at being treated so crunched her vocal cards, squeezing out into her voice. This was part of the routine also, the frustration, the humiliation then the taunts, the threats, the tease. Even knowing what was coming she could not stop herself. When Richie did hold her and make love to her, with his cock inside her and his mouth on her breasts, her lips.... When he took the time to do it right and again and again, holding off his own orgasm until she screamed for him to cum into her.... When he wanted to be, Richie Gallo was the best lover she had ever had.

"Hey! -- Hey!" he snarled suddenly. "You mad at me?" His hands gestured, expressively, explosively. "Are you mad at me!?"

Flinching, she backpedaled, "No, Richie! No, honey!" The flimsy white cotton held in front of her made her nakedness more revealing. "You know I ain't mad at'cha." She spoke in the careless accent of the high school dropout, Richie liked her voice, the way she talked. Usually.

"Yeah? I know that?" He might have been mollified; she couldn't tell. Pulling a pair of fifties from his pocket, he tossed them carelessly toward the floor. Her eyes followed the fluttering paper involuntarily, and Richie smiled, knowingly. "Give me the dress," he ordered.

"What, baby?" she started. But he had already acted to snatch the scrap of fabric from her hands. Taking a white trash bag up from the trash can beside the hotel room desk, he stuffed the dress inside. "Whatcha gonna do with the dress, honey?" She wanted to cover herself suddenly, somehow realizing that her nakedness had taken another quantum jump. The nude panties, white stockings, white high-heeled sandals, the bracelets, the rings and the hoops in her ears and the cultured pearl necklace might as well have been gone also.

"Shaddap." He turned to the door, gesturing with the bag in his left hand. "You stay here till I come back -- understand?"

"You don't gotta take my dress, Richie. I'll stay, you know I'll stay. I'll wait for you." She bit her lip, hoping to avoid this new humiliation but hoping she would not provoke him to something more physically threatening.

"Yeah, you'll wait. You'll wait for me here, and I'll know that you're here, waiting, naked." He smiled, white teeth and twinkling eyes showing a flash of the charm that had first attracted him to her. Her heart leaped. Oh, it was a game, a lovers' charade! He would be back, having thought of her all the time he was gone, thought of her waiting for him, thought of her nakedness. Her nipples crinkled again, and she smiled back at him, open, whole-hearted, vulnerable as a virgin.

"Gimme your panties, too," he ordered. She complied, eagerly, her upset forgotten, her mood turned willing. Her blonde twat had been depilated to a small heart-shaped patch of bush above her clit. He stuffed the panties in the bag then took her purse also, placing it on top. "Get on the bed and stay there." She did, waving the roundness of her pink ass at him deliberately. He was obviously enjoying setting up the second half of their tryst, and she wanted him to know that she was too. "Don't use the telephone, they charge for even local calls here, I'll know. And if that damn TV is on when I get back, I won't come in. You'd better be laying right there, your legs spread." He still smiled, but his eyes no longer twinkled.

She maintained the illusion of a complicated love game as long as she could, while he strained it to shattering. "Don't touch the money, bitch. It better still be laying there when I get back. You ain't earned it yet. And no room service, you just ate, and I want you hungry later." He left, taking the bag with him. She lay on the bed, naked and afraid to start crying.

Thinking about her nakedness waiting for his return gave him a swagger in his step and a chuckle in the back of his throat. Unfinished business, he'd come back in an hour or so and nail her to the mattress. She'd be so grateful she'd forget again that she was nothing but his whore. Or maybe he'd sell the bag of clothes to the black fixer his "Uncle" Carmine had asked him to see. Or just throw it in one of Mayor Daley's slogan-covered trash cans.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, Richard Gallo sat in the deliberately dimmed office of August Maxim, Attorney at Law. "You know my appetites," said Richie. His dark features, sharpened in the light from the desk lamp, made his smile seem more than wolflike. "I wouldn't want to get -- lonely." He placed the knuckles of his right hand on the polished oak of the attorney's nine-foot monument to status in a gesture not so much aggressive as proprietary.

"I assure you, Mr. Gallo. My clients have no intention of causing you any sort of distress. Your comfort and satisfaction are part of the bargain." He eyed the invading appendage with some offense but took no counter-action. A slender, Afro-American man in his middle fifties, August Maxim did not pick fights with thugs twenty years younger than himself. Inwardly sighing, he looked not at the hairy knuckles but at the wide-set brown eyes in the darkly handsome face. A face marred slightly by a nose just a trifle too hooked and a jawline that showed signs of incipient jowls. He smiled, being careful to keep any hint of patronization from touching his own lips or eyes.

"Ah, but prison," Gallo went on. "You know, there aren't any women in prison and I ain't bent the other way." He rapped the deeply polished desktop once, sharply. The sound seemed louder than it might have in another room. The quiet taste of the woods and natural fibers, the authentic African textiles and carvings, seemed to demand reasoned discussion without pathos or comedy.

His suit is off the rack, thought Maxim. He drinks mass-produced American beer. He smokes cheap, generic cigarettes and sleeps with prostitutes. Maxim kept such an imaginary running catalog on everyone he disliked to remind him of how deserving they were of his disdain. But the inward mantra only strengthened the steely gentility of his voice and manner. "Really, Mr. Gallo, no one said anything about prison."

"Yeah, well, no one said anything about gambling, fencing, loan-sharking, prostitution or drugs either but I think we both know just what we're talking about, here." Gallo waved a florid hand and lifted the trespassing knuckles to spread them as further punctuation. He knew he looked like a Joe Pesci character when he did that but it's only because we're both Italian, he told himself. Richie Gallo had used the cheap hood act as disarming camaraderie and subtle threat for so long now that he wasn't sure if he had invented it or borrowed it from some Quentin Tarantino movie. But Richard Gallo needed to upgrade his act. That is, if he decided to sign on to the deal August Maxim was offering.

"I would prefer that we kept the discussion centered on the items actually under consideration," Maxim steepled his fingers in front of him, symbolically reclaiming his desk.

The smile that accompanied this gesture and the mild rebuke could have offended no one. Diplomacy Augie Maxim had learned as a skinny black kid in an otherwise all-white Catholic school nearly forty years ago. His skill he had refined through law school, the public defender's office, the district attorney's office and as a one-term appointee to the state assembly.

Now he had a lucrative private practice, crossing legal t's and dotting regulatory i's for wealthy, if sometimes unsavory, citizens. His contacts, going back to that private religious school in the Indianapolis suburbs included many whom August Maxim regarded as his social inferiors. His private conceit did not prevent him from maintaining valuable relationships with goons, bigots and hypocrites with a precisely titrated respect for their own self-perceived worth.

When Mr. Daniel Lord had asked for a stalking horse and had specified that he would prefer an Italian one, Augie knew which schoolground chum to call. Personally, Maxim thought the ethnic touch the inspiration of a bigot who believes that everyone is just as bigoted as himself. But he said his mantra, Mr. Lord is forty pounds overweight and half-a-foot undertall. He has varicose veins and liver spots. He voted against FDR twice and for him once. He has three bored mistresses, two rich ex-wives and the current Mrs. Lord sleeps undisturbed all night long. Then he called Carmine Sciaparelli, and Richie Gallo arrived gift-wrapped.

"A full partnership in Lord's rackets," Gallo worked his jaw back and forth on that one.

"A managing partnership in Lord Enterprises and Entertainments," Maxim corrected and amplified.

"For nothing," said Gallo.

"For one dollar and other valuable considerations," said Maxim.

"It's got to be he wants someone to go to jail for him. The feds're after him for racketeering. Right?" Richie eyed Maxim to gauge his reaction. Gallo admired the black man's imperturbable finesse but felt compelled to try to rattle the smaller man with his own bluntness. Richie's concept of manliness demanded that he rise to the challenge. It had to be the sweetest deal he had ever hoped to be offered though, from soldier to gang-boss in one move, like the promotion of a chess or checker piece. "How long we talking about here, five years, ten?"

Maxim managed to look baffled by the question while conceding the relevance and importance of his answer. "The district attorney would certainly seek a longer term if any indictments were to arise out of Mr. Lord's activities. However, we believe that a -- pre-arrangement -- with well-placed friends of business will result in lesser charges and lighter punishments. For one thing, we will choose when to bring things to a head, and we will keep proceedings in the state courts. If someone were willing to accept full responsibility, Mr. Lord would use everything in his considerable legal armory to protect his friends from undue and overlong confinement."

Richie spent a moment untangling that. He nodded, it smelled legit, a straight offer from a man with a rep for straight dealing. Lord had been smart to make the offer through a guy like Maxim. "Uncle" Carmine had assured Richie that Maxim could be trusted. Still, no one respected someone who simply rolled over and did as he was told. Gallo felt like being terse, he pretended to an anger he did not feel, "Money? I take a fall and come out to find my partnership is worthless, hah?" He bristled convincingly.

It did not matter to the lawyer if Richie's anger were real or faked. "I assure you that were Mr. Lord contemplating such treachery I would know and would not be a party to it." Maxim projected cool, mild offense. "Carmine can enforce my guarantee for you."

Impressed all over again, Richie could almost admire the black attorney's macho, volunteering to face Carmine for any failure. Richie needed to counter with his own claim to extreme masculinity. "What about my needs, there still ain't no women in prison, and I can't wait for no conjugal visits, once a month or whatever? I need a woman when I need her, sometimes two, three times. An hour," Gallo smiled, enjoying the bragging.

"A suitable substitute can be found..." Maxim began. Richie interrupted. "I told you I don't bend that way. You talking about some fairy thinks he's a woman, right? I don't fuck fruits. If it has a dick and balls, it's a man."

August shuddered invisibly at the vulgarity, but he recognized a bargaining opening when he heard one. "No, Mr. Gallo, we wouldn't expect you to. But what would you say to a lovely young lady with only a very small phallus, enough to qualify her for incarceration in a men's prison in the eyes of a well-paid doctor and no testes at all, but a functioning vagina between her legs?"

"Hanh? Pussy and a dick?" Richie felt intrigued in spite of the mild revulsion he the idea inspired. He'd had a woman with an enormous clit; once, in New Mexico, it had been a memorable experience because she went absolutely wild in bed.

Maxim moved in for the close. "What else do you want in a womanly companion? Blonde, brunette, redhead?" August felt real distaste for his own skill in making that offer, but he knew Richie's tastes, a profile that had come from Carmine with the package.

"Blonde," said Richie, "natural blonde." He licked his lips.

"Of course," agreed August. "How tall? What sort of build? Slender? Buxom?"

Richie looked at him curiously; the dark little man seemed positively clerkish. "Which one are you, Sears or Roebuck?"

"Hardly. This is custom far beyond their ability to supply," Maxim replied dryly. Not unaware of the savage incongruity of a black man dealing in human flesh, he also knew how commonplace the irony had become in most big cities.

"Cute. You can take a joke," Richie smiled, appreciatively. He licked his lips again; his mouth seemed dry. Somehow, he knew that he had already decided to do this thing, to go to jail for the fat, aging, gang boss and spend his nights fucking some ersatz woman. On one level he disgusted himself, on another he felt charged. The heaviness in his pants did not surprise him; he had not exaggerated his sexual appetite much, just talking or thinking about sexual encounters made him horny. But how to get out of this with his self-respect?

"What would your ideal woman look like, Mr. Gallo?" Maxim asked again.

Richie sighed. He considered the woman waiting nakedly in the hotel room for his return. He numbered her shortcomings, too tall when wearing the heels he liked to see on women, too flat-chested, too whiney. He really would nail anything in skirts, but one particular look satisfied him most. "Three, four inches shorter than me when she's wearing heels, slender waist but she's got to have tits and an ass." He outlined a coke-bottle shape with his hands. "I mean, built like one of them exotic dancers at Lord's Ladies, y'know?" He gestured again, holding imaginary milk jugs in front of him. "But not fake looking, no scars on the titties and soft ones, not hard like plastic. Long blonde hair past her waist, a real blonde, blue or green eyes, fair skin." He decided to be overly complete in his description, describing a fantasy woman that it might be impossible to deliver. "Full lips, big eyes, a turned-up nose, and a soft chin. Young, a teenager if you got one, with a high, sweet, little-girl voice." He smiled.

August nodded. He had known all that, but he had to get it right from Richie, himself. Maxim felt appalled at how parallel their tastes were and how common. August felt ashamed that his own fantasies involved busty white women but blamed it on the over-developed young Polish girl who had initiated him into the mysteries back in their senior year in high school. Little Augie's Slavic Madonna had forever set his erotic preferences, with his ambitions, on the same road as many of his white classmates when she had cornered him in the hallway between the music room and the gymnasium. She had wanted to satisfy her curiosity about him, about black men and the differences she had heard about.

In the quiet of the unused music room, on a piano bench, seventeen-year-old Augie had lost his virginity to the eager twat of the bad girl from Bloomington. His hands still remembered the vanilla sweetness of her lips, the imagined milk filling the softball-sized white globes on the chest of his first lust. The excited, guilty, hurry, hurry, hurry lovemaking. The fumbling on his part and the practiced, deft, assurance on her part. They had come together in darkness and in youth, where color should not have made a difference. But it did, it still did, it always did.

Augie, now past fifty, brought himself back to the present problem. "I think we can meet your requirements," he said, blandly. His wife, Cuban-born, a shade lighter than himself and more slender than most models, had no idea what fantasies he indulged in on those nights when he sensed the need to rouse a passion he did not always feel for his delicate, cinnamon-skinned, dark-eyed, Afro-Latin spouse.

"Another thing," Richie added, warming to his own fantasy. "She's got to be a virgin, she can't ever have had a man before, okay? I'll be her first." He smiled, "I'll make a woman out of her myself."

Maxim smiled, "Difficult but not impossible." When the client asked for more and received it, the deal had been set. He pushed papers at Mr. Gallo, "If you'll just sign here."

"One more thing," asked Richie, before signing. He knew he had to push it, somehow. He had to get more, not out of greed but out of pride, pride that sprang from his street origins and the fear a young boy could feel, the fear of those more powerful than he. Signing now left him on the weak end of the deal. What "one more thing" could he ask for, he had spoken before he had thought. "Can I have two? Two women?" Women? The question in the single word reverberated in his mind.

"Almost certainly, Mr. Gallo," responded August, still smiling. "I think that can be arranged, also."

"Yeah?" Richie signed quickly then sat back, wondering. "How you going to do this?" He gestured, an open-handed self-parody.

"We have a source," said Maxim, inspecting the paperwork. The hoodlum had surprisingly beautiful penmanship whereas Mr. Lord's signatures were illegible scrawls.

"What about access, I mean, when I want a fuck, I want it now. I heard about prison; they keep the flamers locked up separate. These girls ain't going to do me no good I can't get at them." Richie's hands drew bars and grasped them and shook them.

Maxim nodded benignly. "You'll be in high-security lock-up, yourself. The girls will be right next door."

"Yeah? Um. When can I expect delivery on my partnership-- and the charges?" Gallo asked, fidgeting. Richie felt threatened, wondering if he had made a bad deal. Something, he had to do something to prove to himself that he still had more balls than anyone even though he had just made a deal to sleep with fairies for five or ten years. He spread his fingers in front of his own indecisive frown in unconscious imitation of Marlon Brando.

"You become Vice President of L.E.E. when you leave this room. The other, one day soon, perhaps within the year...." Maxim gestured vaguely himself.

"Oh," said Richie. Then inspiration striking, "That second girl, could you make her black? I mean, one blonde, one black. For variety." Richie smiled, a cunning winner's smile, as the civilized black man before him stared. "A guy in prison might get bored."

Maxim felt himself struggling not to stare, let alone glare. He felt a wave of unexpected loathing rise up in his soul. Hatred poured over him, not just for Richie Gallo but for the sordidness of the deal, for Richie's lifestyle, Lord's history, and his own connivance in making their mutual satisfaction possible. Richie's request was not the act of an unthinking bigot but a deliberate attempt to use Maxim's color to wound him.

In an instant, Little Augie Maxim remembered his childhood on the streets of Indianapolis before the nuns took him in. His intellect had won for him a reward his skin color would have denied him in that time and place. He remembered his mother speaking of how white men had treated her, used her. She had confessed before she died that his father had been a white man, one who had first beaten her, then paid her and used her. Not that his mother had been a prostitute, just a poor black woman who did what she must.

Suddenly seething, his teeth on edge, Maxim hated Richie Gallo and Daniel Lord and hated himself for being the sort of black man who hated white men because he served their interests above his own. Lord would preserve the comfort of his old age, Gallo would spend a few pleasant years behind bars to emerge the heir apparent to Lord's gang holdings. Maxim would be paid money, enough money to buy a fancy car or put a down payment on a big home. He had fancy cars and beautiful homes, more than enough of each already.

He calmed himself with his mantra. Daniel Lord is an impotent old man who will die soon, his comfort will not extend his life and may shorten it. His women, his money, his power are useless to him. He has no children, no family and no one who loves him for being a parasitic toad. Richie Gallo is a cheap thug who will never be able to hold on to Lord's empire. After discovering a taste for fairies, he will never again regard himself with the same macho he once had. Maxim, on the other hand, had a loving wife and two children in college. He had the respect of both the legitimate and illegitimate rulers of four states. All bastards on both sides of the law, true, but he had the respect of powerful men.

Slowly, he nodded. Gallo was providing deliberate offense for the purpose of scoring points in some inane schoolyard bully's game. "Black? Yes, I believe we could make the second girl black," he managed to say with his usual urbanity. Richie could have done nothing to deepen Maxim's contempt for the two-bit criminal's lifestyle or mores, but August had surprised himself by taking this last request personally. Still, he would never give a thug like Gallo the satisfaction of seeing him snarl.

Richie smiled, knowing that on some level he had won. He nodded once, turning the corners of his mouth down like Sylvester Stallone. "Then we've got a deal." He stuck out his hand to the smaller, older man. If Maxim hesitated a fraction of an instant, Gallo showed no awareness of it. Both smiling, their business concluded, they shook hands.

* * * * *

Outside, Richie retrieved his car from the valet parking and took Lakeshore Drive north. Driving helped him think, and he had a lot to think about. Midnight found him near Madison, Wisconsin before he remembered the naked girl waiting for him in the hotel room. He laughed. Rolling down the window electrically, he tossed the white plastic bag out into the night. Then he turned back toward Chicago, his stiffening dick still proving his manhood.