"That's bullshit, babe," I said. "You know how much I have invested in you? Icould buy two good whores for what that dress cost." She refused to meet myeyes. In a whine that set my teeth on edge, she said, "Danny, can't you see thatit's over between us?"
"Look babe, let's not argue in the parking lot, okay?" I was trying hard to bereasonable. "Not with people walking by and listening. We'll go someplaceprivate where we can talk this over calmly, like two civilized human beings."She shifted slightly in the seat and adjusted her skirt with a little tug.Drawing attention to her long legs and fine ass. Making it hard for me to thinkstraight. The bitch really knew how to twist the knife. Even now, crying andbegging, she was aware of how it turned me on. And even though I hated beingaroused by her little act, I was. The sex was always best after an argument; itmade her sluttish.
I clenched my anger in one hand and fisted my pocket with it. Thinking how muchI'd like to up and give her a shot. She was begging for it. Secretly, maybe, itwas what she wanted; I'd often suspected she'd enjoy being hit. It was too lateto act on the impulse, though. The memory was playing out like a tape,immutable, unstoppable.
All the while, like a hallucination or the screen of a television set receivingconflicting signals, I could see the Widow, frozen with fear half in and halfout of the ground. She quivered like an acetylene flame. In the memory she wassaying something, but with the shift in my emotions came a correspondingwarping-away of perception. The train station, car, the windshield wipers andmusic, all faded to a murmur in my consciousness.
Tentacles whipped around the Widow. She was caught. She struggled helplessly,deliciously. The Corpseg-rinder's emotions pulsed through me and to my remote