Free Hard Cash by Max Allan Collins Page A

minute. I’ll be in in a while. Now scoot.”
    She drew a hot bath. So hot her skin turned lobster red as soon as she dipped into it. She liked a hot bath. She liked to burn away the dirt, burn away the thoughts. Just settle into a steaming-hot tub. Hot bubble bath—millions of bubbles; she liked the smell of the soap, the bubble bath smell, the slickness and smell of the perfumy bath oil. It was a peaceful experience, the way sleep was supposed to be.
    She luxuriated in the tub, sliding her hands over her oil-sleek body, the globes of her full breasts bobbing above the surface of the bubbly water, nipples erect. And she stroked them, soaped them, her breasts, nipples, pussy, thick soapy-silky triangle of hair, sliding hands over firm, muscular oil-slippery thighs. She leaned back and enjoyed herself.
    She honestly got more pleasure, more sexual, sensual pleasure out of a good hot bath than the act of sex. Fucking had never been much more to her than a way of pleasing and controlling a man. And she’d gotten even less pleasure from her experimental couple of flings with other women.
    But this was pleasurable. Soaking and soaping herself. Indulging that fine body of hers. And it was a fine body; she knew it was. She didn’t really blame men (or anyone) for wanting her.
    Conceit? No, not really—at least she didn’t think so. She had an ability, she felt, to assess herself in a detached, realistic manner. She saw her body, for example, as a tool, even a weapon. Nice tits, nice ass, but like all tools (weapons), meaningless without the brains to put them to use.
    Take her high school years, for instance. She’d blossomed rather late, well into her teens, and consequently had that muted contempt for her admirers that all former wallflowers feel. She used her good looks to be popular, to date the cutest guys from the wealthiest families, to be a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate and generally overcome a somewhat poverty-stricken background. (Her father had worked for the railroad and earned a decent wage, but not decent enough to properly feed, house and clothe six kids, a wife, and mother-in-law. As the oldest, Julie had all but raised her two sisters and three brothers, as her mother had had enough to do just to cook, keep house, and look after her own ailing mother.) The highlight of her climb out of the lower middle class muck came shortly after graduation, when she won the home-town beauty pageant that could have led to Atlantic City and beyond, if it hadn’t come out about her and the one judge.
    They let her keep her scholarship money (held in trust for use in educational pursuits only), and she eventually used it, to go to beauty school, but first she got knocked up by one of the few nonwealthy guys she’d ever gone out with, a sandy-haired football hero who she figured would probably go on to make a fortune playing pro ball someday. She began to think she’d figured wrong when he flunked out of school the first year, trying to study, play football, hold a job, and be a husband/father simultaneously. He got drafted. Sent to Vietnam.
    She divorced him while he was still overseas. It was a gamble, because he still might come back and be a pro ball player and get rich, but then again he might also get his leg blown off over there, so she’d dumped him, left her kid (a girl) with her mother, who had the time to look after a kid now that most of her own were grown and gone and with Grandma dead and gone, and enrolled in beauty school.
    That was where she had latched onto Claire. Claire was a rich man’s daughter and hadn’t been smart enough to make it in a real college or university and had ended up at the beauty school in Iowa City. Nobody at the school liked Claire because she was stupid and spoiled and a closet lez. But Julie liked Claire. Or anyway Julie liked Claire’s money, and soon they were roommates; she even gave Claire a free feel now and then. And when they got their diplomas and passed their