The Lost by Jack Ketchum

some guy’s latest healthy turd. But as usual on Sundays his father was down at the Sparta Lanes bowling with the boys. His father was in a league. He bowled every Sunday. His mother allowed him that much, anyway.
    Bowling , for god’s sake. How lame.
    He cradled the phone and pulled on his jeans and a denim workshirt and slipped his feet into a second pair of socks and then pulled them into his boots. The extra pair of socks were necessary to cushion and protect his feet from the crushed beer cans and newspapers stuffed into the bottoms which, combined with the two-inch-high heels, gave him the four more inches in height than his actual five-three.
    He never took the boots off until he was in bed with a chick and never got out of bed until they were on again. So none of them ever caught on. Jennifer was the only exception to that but Jennifer could give a damn and knew well enough to keep that particular piece of information all to herself. She was not even about to tell Tim about it and she and Tim were pretty tight.
    She was lying on the bed in her white bra and panties, eating Fritos out of a bag and watching Huntz Hall.
    “Your mom again?”
    “Big fucking emergency in nineteen. Toilet duty. You want to go on over for me?”
    “Oh yeah, sure. Swell.”
    “Like my mother’s a goddamn cripple. Like she couldn’t go over there herself.”
    “Hell, Ray. You think of it, why should she? She owns the place. You’re the assistant manager. She pays you, gives you this apartment. I wouldn’t go plumb out a toilet bowl if I was her either.”
    She was right of course though he didn’t have to like it. His mother paid him pretty well in fact, enough so that with his paycheck along with the dope money his pad looked like something out of Playboy only smaller, complete with state-of-the-art Magnavox turntable and speakers, twenty-one-inch TV, a small mahogany wet bar, black satin sheets and a brand-new waterbed.
    Originally the room had been a storage space behind the management office, but they’d added sixteen units in ’63 and a bigger storage space behind them in order to maintain the whole thing. When Ray agreed to come on as assistant manager his father, who was pretty good with his hands if not for much else in Ray’s opinion, had converted the old space into a two-room apartment with cherry-paneled walls and a kitchenette and added the requisite plumbing.
    Ray having his own apartment was part of the deal. It got him out of his parents’ house up on the hill above the complex. The house that had made him laugh like hell when he saw Psycho . He now had a pad you could bring any babe to and feel good about yourself.
    When it was clean and tidy. Right now it wasn’t too clean and tidy but that was because hell, it was only Jennifer.
    “Okay. Be back in a flash. Don’t eat all the goddamn Fritos on me.”
    “I won’t.”
    He meant it. Jennifer was turning soft on him. Slack in the belly, a little puffy in the thighs. She was still a damn good fuck though and she knew that thing he liked which most of his other girls didn’t know, not unless they found it out for themselves because he didn’t really like to tell them. That thing about slipping a finger or two up his asshole right before he was going to come. It drove him fucking crazy.
    But you couldn’t just up and tell them.
    He got the plunger out from under the sink because who the hell wanted to bother with the storage space just for that and walked out into a blast of warm humid air and crossed the macadam lot around the side of the pool to number nineteen. He glanced over his shoulder and through the plateglass window saw his mother at the front desk registering a middle-aged couple. Their van was parked out front.
    Sundays were the only days his mother would consent to sit desk duty. The rest of the time he split with his father and Willie, their old part-timer, supposedly about fifty-fifty but it didn’t work out that way because his father had no