of him, ham muscles bunching
in the damp white Spandex like sins waiting to be committed.
Her thigh muscles rippled as she passed fishermen in rubber
suits standing hip deep in the tame bay where swans and geese and mallards and ducks looped around the sailboats. A spotted hawk circled and a pair of fat black crows exploded from
the wild reeds into the high trees of Crocheron.
A lone whooping crane stood on one leg on a sand spit,
bleating like a traffic cop. Nikki watched a pair of young lovers, a pretty Asian girl and a skinny white boy with moussespiked hair, sharing the two earplugs of an iPod and strolling
hand-in-hand as if never wanting this song, this walk, this
morning to end. The girl gave her companion a gentle bump
of her left hip in the first movement of their ephemeral dance
of spring. Love him till it hurts, Nikki thought. She knew Dr.
Sheridan was behind her undressing her with his eyes.
Up ahead she saw the sun gilding across the long steel
bones of the Throgs Neck Bridge. A cabin cruiser grumped
beneath it. Nausea rose in Nikki like a dirty tide. She contained it with her sense of mission. She was gonna make a bad
thing right.
Nikki knew Dr. Sheridan would shower and change in the
luxury salon of his boat before hopping in his two-door silver BMW Z4, with the MEOWI vanity plate that he kept in
one of his two rented parking spots by the marina-the second spot was for babes who spent the night on his boat. Then
he'd drive the five minutes to work at his Menagerie Animal
Clinic across the street from the Bay Terrace Shopping Mall.
There, even on Mother's Day, he would give comfort to the
daily parade of heartsick pet owners, most of them womendivorcees, young and single, widows, unhappily married and
happy to cheat-who came whenever Fido or Fluffy so much
as sneezed, just to hear the soothing timbre of Dr. Sheridan's
deep voice. Observing him over four months, from winter until spring, Nikki had deduced that Dr. Sheridan didn't mix
business with pleasure. He mixed pleasure with more plea sure, she thought. Never with friends or clients. Only with
strangers.
With his handsome and gray-only-at-the-temples good
looks, a multimillion-dollar bay-front home, his own luxury
boat, a Beemer and a Benz in his driveway, a lucrative veterinarian clinic, and membership in the local community board,
Dr. George Sheridan possessed one of the most sought after
naked left ring fingers in eastern Queens.
Fat chance, girls, she thought. For on Thursday night, Ladies'
Nite, when Cosmopolitans were free for babes in most of the
crowded bars along Bell Boulevard, Dr. Sheridan could usually
be found at the three-deep mahogany bar in the ambient bordello lighting of Uncle Jack's Steakhouse, dressed in an Armani
or Hugo Boss, with open-necked shirt, Botticelli loafers, no
socks, sipping Grey Goose and tonic through a swizzle straw.
When he met the right hot chick, never older than the
French formula of half-his-age-plus-seven, he'd buy her drinks.
After two rounds he'd ask if she was hungry and then treat her
to the famous crab cakes, shrimp the size of mandolins, and
the porterhouse steak that he insisted was as good if not better
than the ones served at Peter Luger's over in Brooklyn. "Meal
whores," Nikki had overheard Dr. Sheridan call his prey to
other middle-aged men on the prowl on Ladies' Nites.
Dr. Sheridan always paid with cash when he left and usually had one of the Cosmo'd babes plopping her bubble butt
in the leather bucket passenger seat of his Beemer on his way
home to Douglaston. But Nikki knew-as did he-that those
consenting adults in high heels were as much on the make
as Dr. Sheridan. He wanted to get in their pants; the ladies
wanted to get on his left ring finger. It was a game, though he
was the one who stacked the deck.
In the mornings after, through her all-revealing telescope,
Nikki had seen many of those young women stagger out of
Sheridan's house, or the