Too Close to Die

TOO CLOSE TO DIE 
(Leonardo Lamborghini, LPI)

(a work in progress, started January 5th)

Chapter I

My name is Leonardo Lamborghini. I part my hair on the side, and I shave my face once a week. I drive a Ford Fusion. That’s just who I am. That’s me. You probably don’t like it. That’s fine, I don’t always like it either. I don’t go by Leonardo Lamborghini, anymore. It’s still my legal name, but I shortened my professional name to Leonard Lamb not long ago because I got tired of people laughing at me. I guess it wasn’t the laughter that was so bad, it was just this one shit-mouthed asshole who ruined it for me. I’m going to tell the story that involves my meeting him. His part in the story is minor, but I’ll tell it because it’s a good story.

It was June, a few years back. I was a private investigator working in Chicago after a six year stint as a detective. I’d been a real detective – a goddamn detective with a badge and a gun. I lost that job because I make enemies everywhere I go and in everything I do. I like to think it’s because I’m really good at what I do. The police department, in so many words, said I was too innovative and skilled for being a simple detective. Since there’s no higher rank than detective, they fired me. That’s the story I believe, and the story I tell.

Anyway, like I said, it was June. Chicago’s hot in June, and the wind from the lake and the shadows of the skyscrapers don’t help. I was on my way to the private investigation firm I worked for, Dick Street Inquiry Agents. It was called that because it was located on the corner of Dick Street and Vince Gill Avenue. Vince Gill wouldn’t let us use his name for the agency for free, because, as we all came to believe, he’s a cunt. I don’t know for sure, I haven’t met him. Don’t care to. He wanted $100,000 for the use of his name, and we said no fucking way.

It was morning, and I was cutting through the filthy alley I always cut through, from Hand Street to Dick Street, as a short cut to the agency’s side entrance. I walked past a dog fucking another dog. I stopped to watch them for a second and lit a cigarette. It was hard to tell if either dog was enjoying it. Certainly the one on the back was having fun. He had determination in his face. It was about the time I exhaled the first puff of smoke that I realized these dogs fucking in a dirty alley reminded me of my wife. She was at home, probably doing the same thing. I nodded, took a nice long hit on the cigarette, and continued walking. Took only about five more steps before I saw a dog fucking a trashcan. A lone dog, a lone trashcan, together. A metal trashcan. The dog was fucking it. He was going wild on that inanimate piece of aluminum, shaking like a machine gun. He looked to be having more fun than the other two dogs. As I blew more smoke, this dog fucking the trashcan reminded me that I didn’t even have a wife. Like every other private investigator I’ve ever known, I was divorced. Four times. I was this dog. Every night I went home and fucked a metaphorical trashcan.

“Hmph,” I said to the dog fucking the trashcan, and continued walking.

I entered the agency through the side entrance since my office was just inside the door. I also came in this way so my boss wouldn’t notice me getting to work at 11:30. As a private eye, the hours are pretty flexible. But work is work, and bosses are bosses. I hate both.

I walked into my office and, had I been wearing a coat, I’d have hung it on the coat rack next to the door like the detectives and private eyes do in the movies. I’d also have put my hat somewhere on this rack because it doubles as a hat rack if you know what you’re doing. But it was summer. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jean shorts. I usually dressed nicer than this, replacing my jean shorts with khaki shorts, but I pretty much check out for most of June and treat my job like some bullshit vacation.

My desk was inviting, as it always is. A nice big wooden shield to separate me from the people I worked for. I sat down and looked at the family portraits I had facing me. There was a picture of my mother on one side, and a picture of my father on the other. Goddamn you, Dad. He died before he ever taught me to be as handsome as he was. He always said he’d teach me everything he knew, but he mostly only taught me about police work. He taught me how to drink heavy, smoke hard, and talk tough. Dad wasn’t a cop, but he watched more cop movies than anyone I’ve ever known. And I know cops. I had been a cop. Cops watch more cop movies than almost anyone, this is a fact. But Dad watched more. It was the smoking and love of alcohol that finally did Dad in, though. He was killed in a liquor store with a cigarette in his mouth while he was robbing the place. Owner shot him point blank in the head with a shotgun. Prints were the only things that could be used to identify him. Before his face was all in pieces, he’d been a handsome guy.

Mom was a pretty lady, and that’s how she went through seven husbands in her lifetime. She knew how to love, and some say this is what killed her. Love killed her. Really, it was her seventh husband who killed her, using a knife that wasn’t even made for killing. But she loved him, so we always like to say love killed her. It sounds poetic.

A newspaper from the day before was still spread open on my desk. Not the whole newspaper, only the crime stories. I threw away the rest. A botched bank robbery at Fifth Third bank on 53^rd street. A rape suspect arrested in Andersonville. A gang related killing in Kilbourn Park, thought to be committed by a member of the Chicago Gaylords. A man killed by a car bomb found to have a stash of dead bodies in his basement. Fantastic stories that I would put on a city brochure if I worked for the city. Not to scare away potential Chicagoans, but to give them a taste of the city’s flavor.

From a filing cabinet behind me I pulled out my small TV set and placed it on the desk, next to a DVD player. I popped in a DVD of Magnum P.I., season 3 and kept the volume low. I turned on the fan on my desk and leaned back in my chair, propped my feet on the smooth top next to some papers, and put on my I’ve-been-here-for-hours look. It worked, and when the boss walked in there was probably a second or two that he thought I hadn’t just arrived.

“Lamborghini,” said the white-haired blob of a man, with white powdered sugar on his top lip, chocolate on his bottom lip. He’d just finished second breakfast, or pre-lunch, I wasn’t sure. His name was Benjy Punchman, and he was my boss. He was from New York City and had an accent to show for it. You know the accent. The Brooklyn one, maybe. Don’t know if there are different dialects in that city, it all sounds the same to me. He sounded like a dick, is my point. “I see you’re late again – that’s nice. You’ve got a visitor. She’s been waiting since 9. For almost three hours I’ve been telling her you’ll be here any minute.”

“She?” I inquired. I liked the sound of that.

“What do you mean, “she”? Of course it’s a she. She’s the only client you’ve had in a month. Vivian Black.”

“Shit.” I remembered Vivian. I couldn’t forget her if I tried, which was just a guess, because I’d never tried.  She was a gorgeous, brunette cougar of a woman, a long-legged beast of primal urges, I’m sure. She’d hired me to investigate the activity of her husband, Mr. Jebediah Black, on suspicion that he was having an affair. While it was usually good news to hear a woman of her caliber was waiting on me, it was bad news at the time.

“Stall her for me,” I told Benjy. This was turning out to be a bad day to wear a Hawaiian shirt and jean shorts to the office. “Tell her to come see me in, oh, I don’t know, five minutes? Six minutes, give me six.”

Benjy looked at the watch on his fat little cherub arm. “I’ve given you a hundred and fifty-five minutes, already. You’ll get no more.” He left my office.

I jumped from my chair, knocking the fan to the ground in the hustle, and ran over to the closet where I kept the clothes that made me look professional and distinguished. I ripped off my Hawaiian shirt and dropped my jean shorts to the ground.

Vivian walked into my office just about the time I finished tying my tie. By “just about”, I mean about two minutes before I even managed to grab the tie. She walked in as I finished buttoning the dress shirt I was putting on, before I had even slipped on my slacks. I nodded a quick hello, and finished getting dressed, pretending she wasn’t watching me with her mouth hanging open. When I finished, and while I tied my tie, I turned around to see her still standing in the office, with a shriveled, catatonic looking old woman by her side.

“Please, take a seat,” I said, not out of breath, nor embarrassed. I returned to my desk and sat down. “Who is this lovely old thing?” I asked Vivian, while staring at the decrepit, barely upright human-skin rug standing next to her.

Vivian grabbed two of my lawn chairs from next to the door and opened them in front of my desk, so she and the old bag of bones she was with could sit down.

“Don’t play stupid, Leo,” Vivian said, sitting. “You know who this is. She’s my grandmother.”

“Incredible!” I said, extending a hand for an introductory shake. Vivian pushed my hand away, even as her grandmother slowly reached out to  shake it.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” Vivian said. Her voice was a little sharper than usual.

I shook my head and furrowed my brow like I knew what she was talking about. “I can’t, either,” I said. It was true. I had trouble believing myself most days.

Vivian snarled at me. “I hire you to do something that, really, I think is probably a very simple task. Follow my husband, watch him all day, all night, every minute he’s not at home. Find evidence of an affair. I give you everything you could possibly need to accomplish this, including his work schedule, his gym schedule, his favorite restaurants, his friends’ addresses, even his fucking cell phone number, like you requested – which I see no point in.”

I nodded. “For text messages.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s part of the investigation. I send him texts, sometimes. Like, I’ll say, “hey Big Jeb,” or “sup Big J,” or even, “Hollah, BJ,” and stuff like this. I pretend to be a woman who’s interested in opening her legs for his Black sausage.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“That’s private investigation, Vivian.” I pointed to the name plaque on my desk, which had my name and the letters LPI after it – Licensed Private Investigator. I was licensed, and I made sure my clients knew it. After I tapped the name plaque for a few more seconds, making sure Vivian’s attention was directed to it, I reminded her that it was no simple thing to do my job.

“Vivian,” I said, “I’ve found a lot of things. I have them in this folder, mostly,” I pulled out a manila folder filled with papers, photographs, and probably other things. I didn’t know who it belonged to or what it was doing in my office, but it looked important. “These investigations take time, as I’m sure you’re aware. It isn’t easy work.”

“How much time does it take? I hired you five weeks ago and I haven’t been brought up to speed on anything! What are you doing? Over those five weeks, I’m almost positive he’s been out with her, probably a couple times a week! Is this always how you operate?”

“I operate professionally, and discreetly.”

“OK. Whatever, that’s not even the reason I’m here. We’ll talk about this later.” She looked at the old woman next to her, presumably her grandmother, and continued. “I’m  here because… well, you know why I’m here, Mr. Lamborghini.”

“Are you here to make a payment? Payments are due once a week, right? Is that the agreement we came to?” I reached into my desk to fiddle around with some papers, like I was going to pull out something relating to her payment plan, but I wasn’t going to.

“Jesus! No! I paid you on Monday, like I have for the past 5 Mondays.”

I quit fiddling with the papers in my desk.

“ Mr. Lamborghini,” Vivian said, with that same god-awful sharpness in her voice,  “I’m here because you fucked my grandmother.”

The TV on my desk was still playing Mangum P.I., and I tried to divert my attention to it, like I hadn’t heard Vivian’s disgusting accusation. You get him, Magnum, I thought. Tom Selleck, you’ll fucking get the guy. You always do. I haven’t seen an episode yet where you don’t.

“Mr. Lamborghini!” Vivian shouted across my desk, her words hitting my face like a brick to the nose. “You fucked my grandmother! I hired you to watch my husband, not fuck my grandmother!”

“Shh!” I murmured, putting my finger over my mouth like it was going to be the magic signal that got her to shut her hawk’s mouth. “Everyone’s gonna hear you!”

“Grandma,” Vivian said, looking at the rotted carcass of a woman who sat in my lawn chair beside her, “tell me again what happened.” Then she  looked at me with her harsh and indignant eyes of judgment, and said, “and you’d better fucking listen.” With that, she knocked my TV off my desk. It didn’t break the little thing, but it caused it to come unplugged from the DVD player, which was pretty much the same fucking thing. Magnum was gone.

I had no way out. I put my hands under my chin and did my best I’m-fucking-listening-to-your-grandmother face.

The old woman cleared her throat, sending a smell of sewage and radishes my way, which I fought off in an effort not to choke on death’s cruel foot. “So this young man,” she said, her voice crackling like a witch’s cackle, “came to Quiet Acres Retirement Village last Friday, snooping around for, what did you call it?”

“Clues,” I said. She was making it sound stupid.

“Yes, for clues. He requested to speak to me, noting my relation to you, dear,”  she looked at Vivian with a grandmother’s twinkle in her eye. “We meet, and he’s a charming gentleman, like the kind we had back in the old country.”

“You mean Germany?” Vivian asked. “Nazi Germany, grandma?”

“Yes! He was so charming, this one!”

“So, you’re saying that Mr. Lamborghini was charming like a, what, a Nazi soldier?”

“Oh honey, those boys were the pick of the litter! They were so dashing, and brave, and handsome, and charming! And strong! You would have been in love!”

I noticed the old woman said the word handsome, and I couldn’t help but smile a little as she told her story to her sexually magnetic granddaughter.

“So he asks me how long I’ve known you, honey,” the old lady goes on, “and I tell him that I’ve known you as long as you’ve been alive.”

Again, she was making it sound stupid.

“After he finished questioning me and writing things down, he asked if he could tuck me in for bed time. It was 7 o’clock by the time we finished, so my bedtime was long overdue. Being smitten by his charm and good looks, I couldn’t help but say yes!”

“No,” I shook my head. “No, no. No way. That’s not how it happened.”

“Quiet!” Vivian squawked, like a bird yelling at its deaf children.

“As he tucked me into bed his hands drifted to some quiet acres of my own that hadn’t been touched by a man since your grandfather passed twelve years ago.”

“This isn’t true,” I said, still shaking my head. I hadn’t stopped shaking it. I wasn’t going to.

“Mr. Lamborghini, please!” shouted Vivian, again with the loudness.

“At first I thought he was trying to tickle me, as that’s what the boys would do in the old country.”

“Just to be clear, grandma, we’re talking about the Nazis, right? The Nazi boys would tickle you?”

“Oh yes, dear. All the time.” The old woman’s voice was piercing my eardrums. “But he wasn’t tickling. He was massaging. Which is fine, because these old nerves can’t sense the tickles anymore. But deep muscle tissue massages – I can feel those. He asked me how I liked it, and I told him I liked it hard.”

My gag reflex tried to initiate at least a dry heave, but I got nothing. My face, though, probably betrayed the gurgling pit of horror I had inside.

“I told him to take off my covers, and he did just that. I invited him into the bed with me and we got savage with our bodies. He showed me what it was to be young, once more, and I showed him what it was like to be elderly.” The old thing smiled at me, and gave me the eyes of a walrus, uncommunicative and black.

“That’s not how it happened,” I said. “Here, this is the story.” I put on my best storyteller’s voice and began. “I was at Quiet Acres Retirement Village looking for clues, yes, that much is true.”

“Leo,” Vivian said, this time a little quieter, “I don’t need to hear your side.”

“Oh, right. Of course not. You don’t want the truth.”

“I have the truth,” she said. “I heard it from my grandma. I don’t care how it happened, I just care that it happened, period. What are you thinking, fucking my grandmother? That’s not why I’m paying you, you perverted sack of shit! Now, I can’t tell either of you who to fuck, but I’d like it if the only meddling you did in my life, or my family, was directly related to finding out who my husband is fucking!”

It’s true that most of the cases I take are women who want to catch their husbands or boyfriends cheating on them. Sure, I take other cases, like insurance related cases, stuff dealing with big business scandals, and I do some work for lawyers when they need someone to put together the pieces. Hell, sometimes I do dangerous things that put me a few inches away from death. But the cases I take most are these infidelity cases. I do it for the ladies. If I can catch a fellow being unfaithful, I can negotiate a nice little deal with my beautiful clients and try to work some sex out of the private investigator relationship.

Sadly, this never works. Most of these female clients are large women who would destroy me in a bedroom environment. Nine times out of ten, I end up fucking their moms, their grand-moms, their much uglier sisters, or being assaulted by their husbands. I was hoping Vivian’s case would work out for the best. So far, it had turned out like the others – I fucked her grandmother and had to hear the story recited back to me in my own office. This isn’t the best part about being a private investigator. Not even close.

“Mrs. Black,” I said, “you’re right. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I won’t touch your  grandmother, and I won’t waste anymore of your time or money. I can get you information on your husband’s extra-sexual activity, soon – how does next Monday sound? What’s today?”

“Today’s Friday.”

“Shit.”

“So, by Monday you’ll tell me who he’s fucking?”

“Goddammit.” I thought it was Tuesday.

“If you have nothing by Monday, I’m dropping you and hiring someone else. Then I’m talking to your boss about being reimbursed for five wasted weeks.”

“That’ll get me fired, Vivian!”

“You should have thought of that five weeks ago, you motherfucker.”

Vivian’s old grandmother laughed when Vivian said motherfucker, and, although it was gross, so did I. Vivian did not. Not at all.

“Grandmother-fucker,” I said, offering her an alternative.

“Fuck you. By Monday I want some information.”

“Very well. You’ll have it. Do you have any leads you can give me?”

“Are you kidding me?” Vivian asked, seeming perplexed. “Leads? You’re supposed to know more than me! But as a matter of fact, yes. I do have a lead.” She fumbled through her purse. “He’s away on business, he left this morning. You should probably find him and shadow him until you’ve got what you need. Here’s the address of his hotel.” She handed me a slip of paper.

“Where did he go?” I said.

“New York City.”

“Fuck! Fucking fuck. New York City?”

“Is there a problem, Mr. Lamborghini?”

“Other than that I hate New York City?”

“Yes, other than that, is there a problem?”

“No.”

“Then I expect you to find something you can show me by Monday. Better hurry, I guess.”

“Gonna be hard to get there and back by Monday, don’t you think?”

“I’ve paid you well over three thousand dollars by now, Mr. Lamborghini. You can afford the trip.”

I looked at my wrist where a watch would have been if I’d ever cared about being on time in my life, and then looked around the office for a moment to see if anything in there told time.

Vivian and her wrinkly ancestor stood from their chairs and smiled their goodbyes at me. Vivian folded up the chairs and set them by the wall while I continued looking around the room for a timepiece of some sort.

“Jesus, it’s 12 o’clock, Mr. Lamborghini. OK?”

“Alright. Take care!”

As they walked out the door I rummaged through my drawers to find any items I might need for the last minute road trip I was about to take. Taking a plane was out of the question. Time-wise it may have been a good idea, but flying is bullshit, I say. Gravity exists so we don’t have to fly. Man’s ambition had gotten out of control in the last hundred years, and now there were airplanes, and people were fucking flying. I wasn’t having it.

I found my trusty .45 in the top desk drawer, the gun I always carried on me. Illinois doesn’t allow its citizens to carry guns legally, but as an ex-cop, I considered myself above the law, and knew that somewhere there was a loophole I could exploit if need be. That gun hardly ever left my side. I had two clips of bullets, and shoved those into  my pockets as I holstered the gun. I made sure my wallet and keys were in my pants, and put my sunglasses on my head so I wouldn’t forget them. I stuffed my laptop and some odds and ends into a bag, and left the office.

“I’m going to New York City,” I said to Benjy, as I ran past his office door.

He ran to the door to yell at me that I hadn’t earned any vacation time, and I yelled back that it wasn’t a vacation – it had to do with my case, and he yelled back that he didn’t believe me, and I yelled back that he could go fuck himself, and he yelled something else, but by that time I was outside and on my way to the parking garage a few blocks away.

I climbed into my purple Ford Focus and revved the engine. It sounded fine. I kicked into a speedy, tire-squealing reverse, and high-tailed it out of that fucking garage, firing myself toward my least favorite city on the planet.

Fourteen hours later the lights of New York City surrounded me. I was cruising the night time streets, blasting from my speakers a piece of classical music with techno beats layered lightly over it. Some kid I’d arrested years earlier had shown me this stuff. He was into all kinds of cool shit, like neon lights, smoke machines, dreadlocks, short sleeved plaid shirts, non-prescription glasses, green hair, and ecstasy. As a cop, I hated his fucking guts, but as just a guy, we got along well enough. The kid died of a heroin overdose a couple years back. That’s another thing he was into – heroin.

I arrived at  the Pickety Stix Hotel, where Jebediah Black was staying. After paying $68 to park my car overnight in the hotel’s fucking parking garage, and threatening to crush the skull of the kid with the nose ring in front of the hotel who reminded me of the kid who introduced me to techno-laced classical music, simply because he looked like the kind of kid who would break into a nice Ford Focus to steal someone’s unfinished McDonald’s chicken nuggets, I checked into the hotel and got a room. I was in room 102, the first floor. The hotel had 15 floors, so after some quick math in my head, which failed, followed by a more complete treatment on the back of the hotel receipt with a pencil, I calculated that the odds were against me being on the same floor as Jebediah Black. Finding him wouldn’t be easy.

My hotel room had a nice, long table in the middle, awkwardly jutting out into the walk way of the room, if were there to be any walking going on over the course of my stay. I used this table for my laptop, and prepared my room to be the base of operations – my investigation station. It was a little past 3 a.m., and I was sure Jebediah Black was asleep. But LPIs don’t sleep until we get the job done. Not entirely true, but true in some way, probably. The investigation was beginning.

A grating form of modern pop-country music was audible from outside my window, so I walked outside to find the source. The hotel was the source. The hotel greeted guests at the front with music to show them this was a place they could trust. I wasn’t going to tolerate it.

“Excuse me,” I said to the guy at the front desk. He looked kind of rough, like he ought to be working as a custodian in a bowling alley. “That music. That awful music, is there any way you can turn it off?”

“Man, I wish,” he said. He sounded nicer than he looked. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn that shit off my whole shift.”

“I see. Is this a new thing, then? New York City just got Muzak?”

“Beats me. But it’s my first day on the job, so I don’t know anything.”

“Gotcha. Could I disassemble the speakers, maybe? I’m exhausted, but I can tell this is gonna keep me up.”

The automatic glass doors at the front of the hotel opened and an angry looking woman walked in. She was wearing the same shirt my new friend at the front desk was wearing.

“Anita!” the guy shouted. “Just the person I want to see.”

“Hmm?” she said.

“How the fuck do I turn off that music outside?”

“No need for language, Ed!”

“I think there is. See, if I’d said, ‘How do I turn off that music?’ it’d probably give you the impression I was just curious about how things worked here at the hotel. That’d be the wrong impression. That wouldn’t give you the impression that for the last six hours I’ve been busting my head open trying to figure out how to turn the goddamn stuff off. That sentence wouldn’t give you the impression that this awful garbage has infiltrated my brain and turned me stupider than shit. The right impression, see, can be conveyed by adding two simple words to that sentence. I think I’ve made my point.”

It looked like my pal Ed was something of a grammar enthusiast. Maybe a language enthusiast. He was enthusiastic about something, but it wasn’t country music.

“Ed…” the woman said, sounding tired and already ready to leave, “hold on.” She walked around into a hallway beside the desk and entered. A minute later she came out behind Ed and pulled him into the back. I heard her scold him and scream and, I think, yawn. She walked back to me to tell me there was nothing she could do.

I returned to my room, sat on the bed, pulled out my cell phone, and clicked on the name Jebediah Black.

Sup, JB. Wut you wanna do 2nite? I typed. I’m wet, n ready 4 ur tongue. Wanna give u head.

I waited for his reply.

Chapter II

I woke up in the room’s queen size bed, on top of the covers, still wearing my professional and distinguished clothing from the office. My shoes were on the floor, but everything else was looking ace. The curtains were wide open, letting all kinds of fucking sunlight into the room. That’s what woke me up.       My phone was next to me, and I checked for messages. Nothing. Jebediah hadn’t responded. This job was going to be harder than I’d hoped. Weeks earlier, I was able to get him to respond by offering up a variety of flavors of sexual misconduct. His responses were always the same: I’m not interested; I don’t know who you are; Who are you?; Stop texting me; I will call the police; This is harassment; What you are doing is illegal. After the first few days he stopped replying. It was starting to look like the text message game was a dead end.

I rolled out of bed and walked to the window to gaze out upon the city I loathed, and lit a cigarette. Cars were congested in the street, bumper to bumper. A homeless man was sharing a French kiss with a dog not far from my window. I heard some shouting, some honking of horns, and when I cracked the window to blow smoke into New York’s veins, I smelled sewer juice. It was just as I remembered.

The lock to my hotel room door clicked, but I thought nothing of it as I stood fixated on the mass of New York horror outside the window. The door flew open, and I turned quickly, covered my body with my hands, and shouted, “don’t you people fucking knock?”

The maid looked at me with her Mexican eyes that said she was already tired of my New York attitude. Her mouth drooped in a way that said she was tired of her life, and her cheeks swelled in a way that said she hated her job.

I stopped covering myself with my hands –  it was a basic reflex I’d developed in my years as a detective, always having my hotel room doors thrown open unexpectedly, while standing naked at the window, gazing into the windows of the hotels across the street – for stakeouts, and such.

“Housekeeping,” the woman finally announced, in a Mexican accent that would have turned me red hot if she’d been 30 years younger and 80 pounds thinner.

“No thanks,” I said. It was the only Spanish I knew.

“You cannot smoke in here.” She pointed to the tiny Thank You For Not Smoking sign sitting on the dresser across from the bed.

“So I’m just supposed to waste this cigarette?” I asked, looking at her like she was telling me to kill my pet. “This is the last one I’ve got.” I showed her the empty box. I’d smoked them all on the drive from Chicago. Forgot to buy more.

“Yes! You need to put it out or go outside!” Her Latina attitude was fierce, fiery, indeed, even spicy, as they sometimes are.

Her commands were too much for me that early in the morning. I put my shoes on and walked to the door. “I don’t really need anything cleaned,” I said to her, as I walked past. “Maybe just dust off the TV, because I’ll be using it later.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I hoped it was. I left the room and headed outside to finish my cigarette.

Before I walked out the front door of the hotel I went to the front desk with the cigarette dangling from my lips.  I don't usually do my investigating so early in the morning, before breakfast, but the opportunity presented itself, so, like a slut with a cheek-length skirt, I took it.

“Sir, you need to put out your cigarette or take it outside,” said the attitude-soaked woman at the desk. Anita. She looked ready to go home. “This lobby is a non-smoking zone.” She pointed to the Thank You For Not Smoking sign on the wall.

“I get it,” I replied. “Sure thing. But before I go, I need to ask about a guest of yours. He’s staying at this hotel, and I wonder if you can tell me his room number. His name is Jebediah Black.”

“I can’t give out guests’ information. If you need to give him a message, you can leave it here and I will have it delivered. Please put out your cigarette.”

I took the cigarette out of my mouth and held it at my side. “This information would sure make ol’ Benjamin Franklin happy,” I said, as I pulled out my wallet with my free hand. I pulled out the largest bill I had, a twenty spot, and laid it on the table.

“Your cigarette is still smoking,” said the wild eyed misanthropic bitch. “Bribery isn’t going to change my mind about the rules of the hotel. Take your cigarette outside.”

I put away my money and put the cigarette back in my mouth. “I can’t believe your attitude,” I said. I walked outside. Country music was still playing over the speakers.

It wasn’t even 10 a.m.. The world felt different. Part of that was Staten Island’s raw stench that wouldn’t quit. As I took the final few sucks of deadly chemical smoke from my cigarette, I saw the boy with the nose ring from last night, standing just about where I’d last seen him. He was talking to a girl who looked like she listened to heavy metal and probably had a lot of diseases in her pants, and he was eating something. I threw the cigarette butt to the ground so it could join its hundreds of thousands of friends and extended family in a reunion of litter and filth, and walked closer to the nose-ringed boy and his disease-having girlfriend who probably used heroin. From the new angle at which I stood, I saw that the boy was eating chicken nuggets. They looked real fucking familiar.

I shoved my way through the two-person talk-party and ran into the overpriced parking garage where my Ford Focus was parked. Broken glass was on the ground by my car, on the passenger side. The front passenger window had been smashed. Fuck. I opened the door and wasn’t surprised to see my bag of unfinished McDonald’s food missing from the back seat. Scorpions of rage danced in my brain and I ran out of the garage.

My fist hit the nose-ringed boy right in his temple, sending him straight down onto the sidewalk, and sending the chicken nuggets in his hands into the air above his lady friend. No one would be eating them, now.

“Chicken nuggets?” I shouted into the girl’s face. She had the face of a girl who sat at home most nights, getting all dolled up in shitty makeup, really overdoing the bright red lipstick, who kissed all kinds of shit in her room to give it character. “What do you think about them nuggets?” I could tell I was getting the old saying about apples all mixed up, but my adrenaline and anger were racing through me –  I didn’t have time for words.

“What the fuck!” she shouted, and rushed to the boy’s side like there was anything she’d be able to do in the wake of my fist. She grabbed his hand and asked him if he was alright.

The guy nodded and stood up, seemed to shake it off, and looked at me with a cocktail of fear and humiliation in his eyes. “Dude! What the fuck!” He put up his fists like he was going to fight me, but backed away about the time he could see the scorpions dancing in my head. They were real. He knew it.

“Those were my chicken nuggets,” I said, a little bit scorpion-tongued. “I knew you’d do it. I knew you’d see a Ford Focus as your meal ticket, and take the easy way out instead of getting a job. You make me sick.”

“Bro,” he said, “I didn’t do shit.” He called me bro. That made me sicker than him breaking into my car and stealing my food. I was about to deliver an uppercut to his jaw, the kind I’d learned in my days as a detective, until his “I didn’t do shit” rang into my head.

“Come again,” I demanded.

“Man, I work here. At the hotel. I’m fuckin’ hotel security.” He pulled open the blue sports coat I’d neglected to notice he was wearing, and showed me a security badge. “I was doing my rounds this morning, doin’ a little stroll through the parking garage, and heard some glass break. I ran around the corner, and saw some little faggot inside your shit, fuckin’ it all up.”

“In my shit, you say?”

“Motherfucker was in your car, stealing your shit. I chased him down, and tackled the little dick-ass. He dropped a bag of chicken nuggets and I picked them up. I retained the motherfucker ‘til the cops picked him up. I got the fuckin’ security incident report inside to prove it. Bitch is gone, but I got his nuggets.”

The boy had spirit, or spunk. I didn’t care for his voice, or the way he strung words together into a rap song every time he opened his mouth, but he seemed genuine. Street genuine. He was like me. Except he was filthy and juvenile, still climbing the ranks of law enforcement. I’d reached the top. Master and disciple, staring each other down on a New York City sidewalk. Incredible.

“You wear the uniform of a security man,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t notice that earlier. You’ve done a good job today, lad.” I put my arm out to offer him a handshake, an offer he refused.

“Whatever, man. You just lucky my girl’s here.” He hugged the diseased looking female and pulled her close. “Otherwise I’d have whooped your ass and shit you into next week.”

“I’m sure, son,” I said, reassuringly. “You said you work here, at the hotel?”

“Fuckin’ right.”

“Think you can do me a… what is it you guys call it? A solid? Think you can do me a solid?” I almost called him bro, but my gag reflex caught me. “I need to know some information about a guest in your hotel. More information than your front desk man will share.”

“After you tried to knock me out for some motherfuckin’ chicken nuggets? Nah, man. You lucky I don’t call the cops on you right now.”

“Chicken nuggets and a broken car window, actually. But that’s all water under my bridges, now. Listen, son, I’ll give you a free punch to my face. Then I’ll buy you and your girl a 20 piece chicken nugget meal from McDonald’s if you help me out. If you grant me a solid.”

The girl of disease and probable severe genital sicknesses, looked at the boy – the security guard – and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – with her eyes. Her offer seemed to say, get me chicken nuggets, and tonight I’ll blow you like the wind. I’ll wear the red lipstick. There may have been a bargaining for heroin or meth that was present in their ocular exchange, but that’s up in the air. The chicken nuggets were clearly part of the negotiation.

“Got yourself a deal,” the boy said. He pulled his fist back and slammed it into my jaw before I had time to flinch or brace myself, two things I always try to do in a bout of fisticuffs. “Now get them chicken nuggets and I’ll help you out.”

~

A giant brick-wall of a human being held the door open for me at the McDonald’s down the block. “After you, sir,” he said, in a voice so deep it shook me at the knees. What a horrid person.

I walked inside, rubbing my aching jaw, and noticed that the jizz-faced assholes behind the counter still had the breakfast menu up. Fuck. I checked my phone and it was just turning 10 o’clock. I'd have to wait for them to serve lunch before I could get those motherfucking nuggets of fat and shit and death. My hotel homie would have to wait. I sat down at a table and watched the ugly, odorous people squawk and talk and holler and sing to each other. They mucked about without coordination, with the haze of sleep forever in their eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was New York or McDonald’s that was causing this clusterfuck of human oblivion to present itself before me, but it was happening regardless. I  wanted to bulldoze the place to the ground.

When 10:30 rolled its face around I left the table to get in line. As I made my way to the front, a breathtaking girl at least two thirds my age walked in front of me, gifting me the sweetest, most luscious smell of perfume and body that my nose had ever known. It’s like her choice in perfume was influenced by the already ambrosial aroma of her natural self, serving only to complement her erotic beauty. My olfactory senses immediately communicated with my penis, a path of communication that is not a common one. These senses told my penis to salute the woman who had bestowed upon us such treasures of smell, such enticing and suggestive fragrances. My mind overrode the command sent by my olfactory traitors, and successfully subverted a plot to publicly ruin me.

The smells alone of the woman were strong, but would not have packed the punch they did if it were not for her purely goddess-like physical beauty, a thing which I witnessed firsthand as I stood behind her  in line for chicken nuggets. She wore a tight shirt with black and white stripes that might call to mind a zebra, though the patterns were more wild, more sexual, like a tiger’s stripes. I knew that tigers were wild, sexual beasts after spending a winter at my grandfather’s house in Alaska, in which he showed me all of his decorative afghans with wild cats knitted into them. His prized afghan was one of a lion and a tiger, standing proud together, as friends. He explained to me the power with which lions, and tigers especially, make love to their women felines, throwing himself into the air as illustration for my young eyes. I was five at the time, and this was how I found out about sex.

The girl had pheromones as dense as Mongolian skull bone, severe in their effectiveness, and unrelenting in the provocation they weaved. When it was her turn to order, she made small talk with the guy at the register. I didn’t listen to a word she said, but her voice was mystical and sexual, light and delicate, but with the tight steel vocal cords to give her strength. It was like listening to a guitarist’s lamenting strings bend in emotional climax. What a girl she was.

The girl stepped to the side and it was my turn to order.

“Twenty chicken nuggets, please,” I said to the boy at the register. I glanced at the girl. “Not for me, of course. I don’t eat meat. Vegetarian for ten years.” I held up my fist in triumph, like I’d defeated cancer.

The girl said nothing. But her face, like a wordless poem, spoke to me. Her eyebrows lifted and her lips parted in a smile. She wanted me inside of her. Was this an invitation? It might have been. But as soon as her food appeared, she was gone, out the door, with the bag in her hand. As much as I wanted to follow her, I had to wait. There would be time for chasing women later. I had less than two days to finish my investigation, so it was safe to say there wouldn’t be much time left for investigating, later.

~

         

The nose-ringed boy smiled as I handed him the big white McDonald’s bag.

“Count ‘em, baby,” said his plague-infected girlfriend, like I’d just handed him a bag of diamonds or gold bars.

The dipshit opened the bag and quietly counted them, bobbing his head with each chunk of meat he saw. When he made it to twenty, what seemed like an hour later, he looked up, handed the bag to his leprous contagion-spreading lady, and nodded approval at me like people from the streets will do from time to time. “Thanks, bro,” he said. “My name’s Ratfish, this is my girl, Chocolate.”

“Why do you go by Ratfish?” I asked. I hushed my voice, whisper-speaking in muted tones, softened textures, and asked, “What gang are you in?” I looked around, hoping none of his gang, or worse, his rival gangs, were in the vicinity. “Bloods? Crips? MS 13? Triads? Hell’s Angels? Yakuza? Spider Cats? Aryan Brotherhood? Mexican Mafia? America Online? Sex Pistols? Russian mob? Tell me, I’ve got connections all over. I won’t rat you out, Ratfish.”

“Nah, man. None of that. It’s the name my mom gave me.” Ratfish pulled out his wallet and showed me his driver’s license. Ratfish Stingray-Papercut Turner. A lyrical name.

“Your mother was an artist of words,” I said truthfully. “I’m Leonardo Lamborghini. I’m a private investigator from Chicago.”

Chocolate started laughing a sickly, drugged out laugh that made the veins in her neck pop out, and exposed her blood-red gums to sunlight, a feat which seemed to taint the already noxious New York air with a more poisonous toxin. “Like the Ninja Turtle and the car!” she said.

“Not like either one of those at all,” I said. “Both are Italian names. My dad’s grandfather was from Italy. It’s in my blood, see.”

“Your name is whack, yo,” Ratfish said, his nose-ring begging me to pull it out of his face.

“Your face is about to get smashed again, yo,” I shared with him. It shut him up. “Now, about that deal…”

“Right, right,” Ratfish said. “Whattaya need?” He reached into the bag and pulled out a couple chicken nuggets and stuffed them into his mouth.

“A man named Jebediah Black is staying at this hotel. I need to find his room number, and, if possible, his reason for being here. I was told he was here on business. That might or might not be true. If it is true, I need to know where he’s going for business, what he’s doing, when he’s doing it.” I was pretty much trying to get Ratfish to do my entire investigation for me, at this point.

“Whoa, hold it, dawg. That’s a lot of shit. That all ain’t worth some chicken nuggets. I’ll find his room number and, like, if his check-in sheet says what company he’s with. But the rest of that shit… nah, man. Come on.”

“You’re right. Too much. If you get me his room number and his affiliation, that will suffice.”

“Right on.” Ratfish put his fist out like he wanted me to bump it, so I bumped it. That was like our blood oath. It was almost the same as us cutting open our hands and mixing our blood together in a painful handshake. We were working together. I had made my first ally in years, however fleeting it may have been.

“I clock out in two minutes,” Ratfish said. “Go inside with me, and wait in the lobby.”

Ratfish and Chocolate finished stuffing their faces full of chicken nuggets, and kissed each other a disgusting goodbye kiss. “I’ll be back out in a minute, babe,” Ratfish told Chocolate. She nodded.

I sat down in the lobby while Ratfish went into a door in the hallway, behind the front desk. I watched him spit out rap-like conversation with the woman I’d spoken to earlier. She didn’t seem to like him, and he seemed to enjoy making her uncomfortable.

My phone rang, so I pulled it out to see who it was. It was Vivian.

“Hello, Vivian,” I answered, my voice still a little deep from not being fully awake. It was a sound that suited me and gave me enhanced sex appeal that my below average looks did not. “Mrs. Black, I mean. Miss Black. How are you?”

“Hello, Mr. Lamborghini. Are you in New York? Have you found my husband?”

“I am, and I have… not. Not yet. I’m working on that. I’m in the hotel right now.”

“What are you doing? Are you just sitting there waiting for something to happen?”

“Nope,” I said, looking around, half worried that she was in the lobby, watching me. “I’m in the process of finding your husband’s room number, and the business he listed as his affiliation. To see if I can track him down.”

“Really? A simple phone call to me could have found you his company’s name. He works for the William Carlos Williams Publishing Company. He’s in the marketing division. There’s a workshop, I think in that very same hotel.”

“This information might be useful, Ms. Black,” I said.

“Might be? It’s just about the best fucking place you can start, Leonardo.”

“I say “might” because it’s really too soon to say. My guess is if this information was really all that important, you’d have told me yesterday, right about the time you were in my office, yelling at me for who-even-knows-what, before I left for New York.”

“I’m sorry that I forgot. If you were half the private investigator your business card says you are, you’d have known to ask for that information ahead of time.”

“I’m actually twice the private investigator my business card says I am, as I like to sell myself short, and as such, I didn’t need to you tell me any of this. I’d have found it on my own. But thank you, anyway.”

Vivian was quiet for a few seconds, and it sounded like she was biting her tongue, trying not to yell at me. I couldn’t really be sure, though. “Fine. But if you have any more questions about him that you think his wife might know, please call me. As much as I think it’s a long shot, I really want you to accomplish something while you’re out there. I’d like some facts and proof by Monday.”

“Not going to be a problem, Vivian. Are we done?”

“Goodbye, Leonardo.”

Right as I stuck my phone back in my pocket, Ratfish walked up to me, with his blazer already removed, his pants already pulled low to the sagging position, and his shirt un-tucked.

“He’s in room 512,” Ratfish said, with street tough in his voice, “and his business affiliation is WCW Publishing.”

“Thank you,” I said, standing up.

“Mr. Lamborghini, this guy works for World Championship Wrestling! He a wrestler, or somethin’?”

“No, Ratfish. He’s not a wrestler.”

“Can you get me his autograph? I fuckin’ love wrestlin’. Got action figures of everyone in the WCW and WWE, tape all pay-per-views, and go to fights when I can.”

“He’s not a wrestler,” I repeated. “He’s in marketing for a publishing company. They publish books.”

“Aw, fuck a bunch of books,” Ratfish said, with another one of his Ratfish-isms. “Later.” He left through the front door.

Feeling like I was hot on a trail, snooping on a real rich case, I jumped from the chair I was in and galloped an investigator’s gallop to the front desk. “Excuse me, madam,” I said to the woman, addressing her with a formality I was positive she’d never heard in her life. “Is the William Carlos Williams Publishing Company workshop taking place in this hotel?”

“Yessir, it is.”

“Might you tell me where I can find it?”

“I might.” She pointed behind me, to double doors approximately four feet to the left of the chair I’d been sitting in. “Go through those doors. You’ll see the sign.”

I nodded at the woman as a detective in the 20’s would have done, but without a hat, and said nothing. Made my way through the double doors and saw a large banner hanging from the ceiling.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS PUBLISHING COMPANY
WORKSHOP FOR POETS & ARTISTS

This was it. I was close. I walked down the hall and through the doors beneath the banner. The room I came into was massive, like a ballroom made for whales who had brought barges with them for their dates. But there weren’t any whales or barges as far as the private eye could see. I only saw people, hundreds of them. Swarming masses of humanoids, like a sea of life, where the life was just humans, who also somehow were the water. There may have been a thousand of them or more, I couldn’t tell. For a moment I considered counting, but lost count as the people continued to move and dart in different directions, oblivious to my wants of number-knowing. And the colors! They wore shirts and pants, like all people, and covered the full spectrum of color with their styles and their fresh takes on fashion. What an incredible place this was. The chatter of their voice-boxes carried through the room, creating a roar of sound that was neither deafening nor abrasive. It was polite, sociable, and even tempered. I liked it. And their faces! So many hundreds of faces! Some were women, some were men. Some were old, some were young. Some were brutally hideous, others were blood-freezingly attractive.

After a minute of observation, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through a few pictures until I got to an image of the chiseled face of a man more handsome than myself. It was Jebediah Black. Vivian had given me countless photos of him when we first met. Being a man of efficiency and a master of the technology of the day, I took photos of her photos with my phone. Then I burned the physical copies. Now I had Jebediah Black in my phone, and, in a way, it made me feel like he was my prisoner. I needed that feeling, for some reason.

I studied the pictures in my phone briefly and, for the first time since I’d had them, committed them to memory. When I felt I’d gotten his Hollywood smile carved into the wall of my brain, I walked deeper into the room, allowing myself to become absorbed into the human mass. Jebediah Black was in here somewhere, and I was going to find him.

Chapter III

The biggest difference between a sea of people and a sea of water is that the sea of people will pull you in every direction at the same time while the sea of water usually just pulls you under. That’s what my mind tells me based on no actual experience in an ocean or a sea. I spent my whole life in Chicago, and the closest I came to a sea or an ocean was Lake Michigan, when my dad would take my mom and me out on his tugboat he’d bought at a police auction. That lake is where I learned to swim after my dad threw me in the water and told me to get back to the boat or he’d eat all the lunch meat without me. Mom threw me a floatation device of some kind and pulled me back to the boat. My dad tossed me right back in. This cycle repeated until Dad grew tired of Mom throwing me the floatation device, and threw her into the water with me. That’s where Mom taught me to swim, simply out of desperation for my survival in those cold winter waters. I have many fond memories in that lake.

          The second biggest difference between a sea of people and a sea of water is that people are only about 70 percent water, and water is about 100 percent water. The sea of people at the William Carlos Williams Publishing Company workshop wasn’t as cold or as wet as Lake Michigan, and for that I was thankful. It was a generally warm atmosphere, dry as could be expected, and I counted somewhere around ten different races of people. It was far more multicultural than any sea of water I’ve ever been in.

 Booths were set up on the outer parameter of the room by different artists showing off their artwork and talking shop with other masters of the trade, and long tables sat at the center of the room where poets read and critiqued one another’s work, rewrote their whimsical pieces, and shared them eagerly with anyone who would listen. I overheard the lines of up to fifteen poems at a time, and my mind was afire with imagery that sung to me, regurgitating thoughts and ideas like they were worms from mother eagle’s beak. I couldn’t digest these thoughts, though. Most were too deep for me, or so complicated my gray matter went black. I kept the poets’ imagery out of my mind for as long as I could. I was looking for Jebediah and needed to keep his face as my focus.

Vivian said Jebediah worked in marketing. There wasn’t a table or a booth labeled Marketing, so that information was proving to be useless. I scoured the area, maneuvered through the crowd, and kept my eyes peeled for the elusive Mr. Black. When I saw a large man the size of Canada wearing a nice suit, and sporting a name tag that said Daniel Dubs - WCW Lit Agent, I was struck with inspiration. I approached the massive man, my brain tingling at the brilliance of my quick thinking.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said to the behemoth.

His ears seemed to perk up, and he pulled a fork out of his mouth that I hadn’t noticed earlier, and dug it into some cake on a plate he was holding. “Yes?”

“You work for WCW, is that right?” I asked.

“You’re correct.”

“Can you tell me where I can find Jebediah Black? He works in marketing, I believe.”

“Oh, sure,” he stuck the fork back in his mouth and pointed to a table by the poets. “He’ll be around that table, most likely,” his words smelled of cake and plastic. “Probably pretty busy, so it might be a while before you get his attention.”

“Thanks,” I said, offering my hand for a shake. He didn’t take it, his hands preoccupied by his feeding process. I left the big man to his cake and went to the table. I was still tingling with pride at my terrific idea. I’d pulled it off so expertly. Just ask questions. Like an investigator. It’s easy.

Jebediah Black was nowhere to be seen when I started circling the table in a slow wade. The only thing that grabbed my attention was an obviously Russian man reading Russian news on his laptop. His devotion to current events in his home country amazed me. Even though I lived in my home country, I had no idea what was going on. This man knew what was happening in his fatherland, such was his love for mother Russia. This scene almost brought my own patriotism into question, but I didn’t let it get to that. Patriotism was a dead bird, to me. I shrugged, admired the man’s thirst for knowledge, and left it at that. I looked up and down the table and saw rows of laptops, but not the man I was looking for.

Then I saw a group coming my way. There, at the center of the group, was Jebediah. He was like a magnet moving through a field where the only thing growing was steel shavings, and they were all being pulled to him. His charisma was visibly radiating from him, and my tongue still believes it was able to taste it, even with my mouth closed. He was walking toward the table, creating waves in the human sea, with people on each side of him vying for his attention, asking him to read something, asking him to look at something, asking him to buy something. It was no surprise Jebediah Black was able to reel in as hot a catch as Vivian. He was a man’s man, from the look of it, yet, also a woman’s man. His features were even more striking than they had seemed in the photos, and his Hollywood smile did not disappoint, except in a sort of residual way that I knew would only pop up the next time I looked in the mirror at my own abject face. This man was most assuredly cheating on his wife. He could fuck anything he wanted to.

When he sat down at the table, in front of his laptop, I reconsidered my approach to the matter. Simply talking to him was out of the question. A proper investigation would be made quite difficult if he recognized me, and noticed me following him, watching his every move. That’s not how one investigates in a professional capacity. My plan to become his best friend at the hotel so he’d invite me to his hotel room to watch him fuck some bitchin’ babe, which was what I called Plan A, had to be dropped. It was time for Plan B, a plan in which I would slowly and methodically study Jebediah, painstakingly spy on his public and private goings on, and would collect not only information, but evidence to uncover some routine case of infidelity to show to Vivian so I wouldn’t lose my job. I didn’t care for Plan B, aesthetically, but it would work.

I pulled out my cell phone and snapped pictures of Jebediah from strategic angles as I walked around the room, and caught him doing some very regular things that a man of business and responsibilities might do. Each woman who spoke to him became a suspect. A sexual suspect. A red-head in a blue dress came to the table, spoke to him shortly, and walked away. Was that his mistress? A blond girl in black pants and an appropriately designed cougar-pattern blouse sat down at the table, only four seats away from him. She said something to him and they both laughed. Was that her?

~

          It was a little past four o’clock and I’d been watching Jebediah sit at the table for almost five hours. He must have talked to every person in the room at least twice. I’d stopped counting each woman who spoke to him as a sexual suspect because that would have made almost every woman in the room a sexual suspect. That’d kill my investigation. Whenever he got up to go to the bathroom or to walk around, I’d follow close behind. He’d shake his dick eight times before zipping up, and he never washed his hands. He liked to flirt with the poets and artists, but nothing dangerous or overtly sexual, just like their poetry and their art. I was getting bored. For a man whose looks alone could impregnate a nation, he wasn’t using them very wisely.

The large banner outside of the room had the workshop’s daily session ending at 5 o’clock. I quit watching Jebediah’s boring existence and ran out to the lobby. I was happy to see a different face working at the front desk. The bitchy misanthrope from before would have been cold water on my plan.

“Hello,” I said to the Indian man sitting at the desk. “I’ve lost my room key.”

“What’s your room number?” he asked, with helpful lips and questioning eyes.

“Five-twelve. Name’s Jeb Black.”

The man did what might have been Hindu magic, and, without asking for my identification, handed me a key card in seconds. He smiled with his helpful lips, and his questioning eyes seemed to have turned to content eyes that no longer had questions – but answers. “Here you are. Anything else for you, Mr. Black?”

“That should do it, captain,” I said. Jebediah had seemed to me like a man who might call another man captain in an informal setting like the one I was in. I was going to throw myself fully into the role I had assumed. I got on the elevator and took a trip upward.

The doors on the 5^th floor seemed to be spaced farther apart, indicating the rooms were probably bigger, for people who made big bucks and might be able to throw an orgy or two. I stood in front of room 512, looked up and down the hall, and stuck the card in the handle and walked in. The room was clean as a whistle, supposing whistles are known for their immaculate cleanliness. The air in Jebediah’s room smelled sweet, inviting, more alive and sexual than the air in my own room. Of this fact I was jealous, but I had expected it when walking in, and accepted it like I accept a movie star’s superior bone structure. I crept slowly through the room that – I was right – was much larger than my own. The main room wasn’t even a bed room, it was a living room. It looked like there were two other rooms, probably bedrooms, off to the side. I didn’t see any evidence of an orgy, but then, I’d only just arrived. The door clicked shut behind me, and then I heard a voice.

“In here, Jeb!” said a woman’s voice. Shit. A fucking woman. Here in Jebediah Black’s room.

“Fuck,” I whisper-shouted to myself, and stood still. If I wasn’t moving, she couldn’t find me. I was going to treat the situation like a Tyrannosaurus Rex encounter as depicted by Jurassic Park, the favorite movie of one of my ex-wives, and would use my skills in stillness to my advantage. When I heard the woman shuffling about in her room, however, my skills in stillness suddenly weakened. I debated between hiding in a closet, running from the room, and attempting a James Bond style chop to the neck that would knock the woman unconscious. Then I couldn’t remember if it was James Bond I was thinking of, or someone else. This broke my focus. The woman sounded as if she was leaving the room she was in, coming my way. I turned and threw the hotel room door open, and jumped out of the room like I was escaping an explosion that would have disfigured me for life.

Fuck. Real smooth.

I pulled the door shut behind me and adjusted my clothes. I tightened my tie, and cleared my throat. Still facing the door, I considered possible subsets of Plan B. I racked my brain for an idea that would at least temporarily remove the woman from Mr. Black’s room so I could get in there, find a nice hiding spot, and record some obscene sexual action on my phone –  for Vivian.

But all considerations stopped when the door flew open, and standing in front of me was a familiar, beautiful face. The familiar smells of attraction hit me about the same time my eyes scanned her lovely form. I looked at the door to be sure it was 512. It was. The woman in the white and black striped shirt I’d spoken to at McDonald’s was staring me in the face. The smell of her aura could have put me into a pleasure coma.

“Oh, why, hello,” she said. “I recognize you.”

“Yes, oh, right. From McDonald’s.”

“The vegetarian who ordered chicken nuggets?” She remembered. I wasn’t yet sure if this meant she was inviting me into her body, or into the room, but this wasn’t the time to try to figure it out.

“I believe your husband just stepped out. I passed him on my way here. I’m room service.” I hoped my tie wouldn’t betray my story.

“Room service? My husband?”

“Yes, the man with the Hollywood smile…”

          She laughed, sharing with me a glimpse into Heaven’s gates, the world within her mouth. “Oh, that’s not my husband. We just – we work together. Did he order room service? I thought he was at the workshop.”

          “No, ma’am. I was told you had ordered room service. You ordered some wine, is that right?”

          She laughed again, and my eyes took a quick bath in the light bouncing off her teeth, and the radiant ruby tones of her glossy lips. “I’m sure I did not order any wine. I drink only socially, only sometimes. Not in my hotel room, not by myself!”

          Of course she didn’t. She had a beautiful face. With a face like that, this woman had never known an evening of loneliness or solitude, never had to resort to drinking alone, deep into the night, for perhaps many nights in a row, nurturing a swelling tolerance of alcohol over the years. She would not be needing any wine tonight, or ever. People loved her without drinks, and the people she attracted were clearly of such a high quality that she didn’t require intoxication to tolerate their embraces. It was fine, because I didn’t have any wine with me. I’d come unprepared for my plot, as always.

          “Do you even… I don’t see any wine,” she said. “Are you sure you’re room service?”

          “I wanted to check first,” I said. Perfect cover. “We like to visit our guests when they order alcohol. You know, to make sure they’re really sure they want it. It’s hotel policy.”

          The woman’s face was a wordless poem once more, and she raised an eyebrow and smiled. She shook her head, said thanks, and closed the door on me. Her heavenly smell lingered in the hallway, enveloping me in a cloud of holy scents that sent my heart into dangerous territory.

I was short of breath. My chest was about to explode and I was sweating. I composed myself and walked to the elevator, returned to the first floor, descending back to earthly ground from the dream-world above. I exited the elevator into the lobby, just in time to see a crowd of people leaving the double doors. The clock on the wall behind the front desk said it was a few minutes after 5. The workshop was over. My mind was in a shambles, suddenly diverted from the mission to thoughts of a distracting sexual nature. I couldn’t focus on the task at hand – on the investigation.

Jebediah Black emerged from the double doors, his hands searching his pockets. He went to the front desk.

“Hello, there,” he said to the Indian man. “I seem to have misplaced my key. Can I get a new one? Room number’s 512.”

The Indian man looked at Jebediah suspiciously, a suspicion that deserved to be directed at me. “And your name, sir?”

          “Jebediah Black,” said Jebediah.

          “Sir,” the Indian man said. “Do you have ID? I need to see a driver’s license.”

          “Sure.” Jebediah pulled out his wallet and laid his ID on the table.

          I was standing no more than twenty feet away as this exchange went down, and I hoped the sudden flux of people through the double doors would prevent the Indian man from spotting me. But it didn’t. As Jebediah laid his ID out before him, the man made eye contact with me, giving me a so-you-think-you-can-pull-a-fast-one-on-me-you-sonofabitch? look. A thought came into my head that I was, perhaps, fucked.

          I backed up quickly, to get lost in the gushing torrent of people, and made my way down the far hallway, toward my room. My heart was skipping beats left and right, up and down, back and forth. The one-way sexual tension I’d found boiling up inside of me on the 5^th floor was now coupled with something just slightly more troublesome from the first floor. If the front desk Indian told old Jeb about me, it’d compromise the entire investigation. I needed to think. I retreated into my room, latched the door lock, turned on my laptop, and closed the blinds. It was time to deal with this growing stress.

~

         

Around 7 o’clock I left my room, wearing my light brown sports coat. I only wore it because it concealed the .45 I now kept holstered to my side. Packing heat was the only way I could be sure some shit wouldn’t go down. Shit only went down when I wasn’t prepared. It never goes down when you’re ready for it, or expecting it. I expected it.

          I was invigorated, refreshed, focused, ready for anything. I’d showered, too. The hair on my face was itchy, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a problem for the rest of the night. There was no time to go back and shave it now. Things needed to be investigated, real bad.

         Avoiding the Indian at the front desk was going to be necessary, at least until his shift ended. When that would be was anyone’s guess. But I wasn’t about to go knocking on doors asking people to guess. My first intuition was that upon seeing me, he’d grab me, ask if I was a guest at the hotel, ask for my identification, and then call the cops on me. This would all go down in a matter of seconds, as Indians are known to be quick with their actions, and swift in their judgments.

It was possible he told Jebediah that someone was walking around pretending to be him to get a key to his room, and that he should be careful. It was also possible that Jebediah went back to his room and told the lovely vixen in there what the Indian told him. Then, I realized it was possible the Indian gave Jebediah a perfect description of my face and my attire, something he would be equipped to do after tapping into the powers of his third eye. Jebediah would then tell his lovely mistress about it, and she would reply, “I knew he wasn’t room service!”, followed by a quick recounting of our brief but invigorating encounter outside of her room. My trail of lies and trickery would soon be unwound. This wasn’t part of Plan B. Avoiding being seen by not only the Indian, but by Jebediah and his mistress were new modifiers I added to the plan. It was time to up the stealth.

I slipped out the door at the end of the hall, which led outside. I walked around the building to the front entrance, and peaked through the glass doors to see if the Indian was still at his post. He was, and he was eating what looked like meat loaf. Goddammit, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the night before. Glancing around, observing the establishments lined up and down the street, I saw almost nothing but food vendors. A hot dog stand was down the street, so I went that way.

As I crossed the street, my cell phone rang. I checked the caller ID: Benjy Punchman.

“Fuck,” I said into to the foul New York air, and answered. “Hi, boss.”

“Lamborghini, I need you to give me a ride to the docks, tomorrow. My car’s got a bad case of the oil-shits, and Gilda wants me to take her on the lake so she can look for seahorses. I told her seahorses don’t live in fresh water but she said she saw it on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel last night and is convinced we’ll find a whole bunch of them. Who knows? I got these new fishing nets and figured we could put them to good use. We’d like to leave my house around 9.”

“I’d love to help you, Benjy, but like I told you, I’m in New York.”

“You are? You weren’t fucking with me? You’re working.”

“Yeah, I’m here for the Black case. Tracked the subject to the Pickety Stix hotel, and have observed the subject to have what I believe to be a mistress.”

“Just talk normal,” Benjy said.

“It looks like he’s got a mistress. I met her. Twice.”

“You what? Leo, you’re endangering the investigation! You can’t mingle or interact, you know that. Keep a great gaping distance. Third rule of private investigation. Does she know who you are? Who does she think you are? Are you going by Edwin MacGuyver again? Does she think you’re a MacGuyver? Did you tell her you’re the one the show’s based on? No one ever buys that shit, Leo. No one.”

“The first time was a chance encounter at McDonald’s. The second time was during the investigation, but I told her I was room service. I forgot to use the MacGuyver cover. Fuck.”

“Room service? You were in the room?”

“Not for long. I’ll explain later. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. The woman was in Mr. Black’s room. She’s one thousand levels of sexual beauty, Benjy. And Jeb, he can pull that in – no problem. He’s got the face of tomorrow, and the body of a legend. If those two aren’t fucking, then it’s a sin, a crime against nature’s perfect design.”

“You’ve told Vivian, I suppose.”

“Not yet. Wanted to get more evidence, first.”

“Talk to her. Let her know what you’ve found. I’ve got to get off of here, Gilda’s asking me if I’ve found us a ride to the lake tomorrow. I’ve got no fucking idea. When do you come back?”

“Monday.”

“See you then.” Benjy hung up.

I called Vivian, but it went to her voicemail.

“It’s Lamborghini. I’ve discovered a woman carved from the most alluring of elements, perfect in symmetry and in fragrance, and she’s sharing a hotel room with your husband. Call me back.”

I put the phone in my pocket, and ordered from the hotdog stand.

“Two with everything,” I said to the chunky vendor, whose eyebrows looked like double mustaches, giving him a total of three bushy black mustaches on his face, a New York exclusive.

As soon as I bit into the first fat and smothered hotdog, my phone rang. It was Vivian.

“Hello,” I answered, with meat falling out of my mouth.

“Sorry, I was making dinner,” she said. “The kids wanted pizza, I wanted spaghetti; it was just a mess.”

“You have kids?” I was suspicious, because her body was a temple that I couldn’t picture flushing out life, nor did the image of afterbirth spilling from her openings seem plausible, considering her figure.

“Yes, two. Rebecca and Jack, my angels.”

I was intrigued. Vivian’s status had been promoted from simple cougar to cougar-milf. She was a two-fisted samurai, a double-edged sword, a jack of at least two trades, a prodigy of intangibles.

After saying some kind things to her about the glory of motherhood, and speaking of my respect for childbirth, I brought Vivian up to speed. I told her everything, up to and excluding the point at which I returned to my room to masturbate and take a shower.

“Everyone’s seen you but Jebediah, then?” she asked.

“Well, the Indian and the girl. So I’m avoiding them.” I stuffed some more loaded hotdog into my mouth.

“Why don’t you disguise yourself? If the Indian works at the hotel, that’s going to make your comings and goings a lot harder, right?”

“I disguised myself as the room service guy already,” I said, with my mouth full.

“That wasn’t a disguise, that was you saying you were room service. Don’t you have a change of clothes?”

“I’m wearing a sports coat, now.” My chewing was getting louder. “But my  tie and shirt will surely give me away to the Indian.”

“Buy new clothes, get a hat, and if you haven’t already, for the love of God, shave your fucking face. Your beard is horrible. You should shave every day, your facial hair is disgusting.”

“I noticed Jeb has a little manly stubble on his face.” More hotdog entered my mouth.

“Jebediah can pull it off, you can’t. I think a disguise is your best option right now.”

“I thought so too, which is why I’m one step ahead of you. I’m at a clothing store right now, looking for some cool slacks, a nice shirt, sweet shoes, a killer tie, new jacket, and yes, even a fedora.”

“So, you’re eating in the clothing store? They’re alright with that?”

“I’m not eating, I’m shopping for clothes. Oh my God, that tie looks stellar, I can’t wait to try it on.”

“Mr. Lamborghini, I know you’re eating. I suggest you do something about your appearance. Please call me back when you have something to report.” Vivian hung up.

The second hotdog was almost gone when I noticed something unusual inside my mouth. I reached in and pulled out some bushy black hairs. It wasn’t clear if they were mustache hairs or eyebrow hairs, but it was disgusting. Dinner was over. I dropped the hotdog, covered in relish, pickles, mustard, and ketchup, onto the sidewalk, where the other forgotten foods and waste of the day was resting. It was in good company.

I checked the time on my cell phone, and headed off in the direction of the nearest high-end clothing store. Plan B was getting a makeover.

~

When I walked out of Don Wager’s Clothing For Men, the best thing I could find within a few blocks, I was decked out in hot new apparel: dark grey slacks, black leather shoes, dark grey sports coat, blue shirt, green tie, and a grey fedora that completed the set. I put a brand new pair of sunglasses on – a sleek pair of oval rims and black glass. Sure, it was 8:30, and the sun was setting, but I once heard a song about a guy who wore his sunglasses at night, and the way he spoke told me he was a pretty alright man who knew what he wanted and where he was going in life, and it seemed he could handle women with ease. Night-glasses, as I was now calling them, seemed to be the wave of the future, and I was onboard. My next stop was a drug store, where I bought a razor and shaving cream, and went into the bathroom to shave. I smelled like mint, and left the razor and the rest of the shaving cream on the sink, for the next private eye who might need it. I bought a pack of cigarettes and stuffed it in my jacket, next to my holstered .45. The night was a puddle of gasoline, and I was the spark to light it on fire.

The glass doors of the Pickety Stix Hotel slid open to make way for the hotel’s coolest guest: me. I strutted in with suave dripping from my dick, and cool resonating from each step. The Indian at the front desk smiled at me and said, “good evening, sir,” unable to recognize me as the identity plagiarist. I nodded at him, and kept walking. I was heading for the elevators, but something in the hotel restaurant caught my eye as I walked past. That something was Jebediah Black.

Old Jeb was sitting at the bar, talking to a woman.

I made my way into the restaurant and took a seat in the bar area, at a small table for one. My angle allowed me to see the woman Jebediah was with. It wasn’t the goddess from his room. It was someone else, someone new. This was juicy, and I loved juice.

A waitress asked me what I wanted to drink, or if I’d like a menu.

“No food,” I answered. “Just whiskey. Straight.”

Jebediah and the girl had empty glasses in front of them, though I couldn’t see how many. He’d been buying her plenty, it seemed. If I’d taken off my night-glasses, I might have been better able to see for sure what they were drinking, or how many they’d had, but the night-glasses had to stay on. I took out my cell phone and snapped some pictures, took some videos, even zoomed in until the image became blurry and pixilated, to give it a rough and sensationalist appearance. The investigation was moving right along.

They were flirting without shame, giggling words of praise and adoration back and forth in a show for the bartender that he didn’t seem to mind. He was getting paid, after all.

I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I watched their hands move and touch and feel and play. Things were going on. Blood in both of these bodies was flowing to sexual organs. The night was young, and indecency still had time to make an appearance.

The waitress arrived with my whiskey, and I downed it in one gulp, before her eyes, and handed her a ten dollar bill, told her I required another one, and to make it fast. She hurried off.

My night-glasses shielded my wondering eyes from the awareness of strangers, as I looked around the bar and the restaurant, wondering if I would see the luscious piece of incomprehensible beauty from Jebediah’s room. If she walked into the bar and witnessed the public display of affection I was watching, there would be shit hitting fans in every corner of the room.

My second whiskey arrived, and I poured it down my throat. The waitress asked if I’d like another, but I saw Jebediah taking his credit card from the top of the bar. He was signing his check.

          “No thanks.” I kissed my hand and then tapped it on the waitress’s cheek, like it was my new thing. Maybe it would be.

          She left, muttering something about personal space and harassment, but I wasn’t listening.

Jebediah and the girl stood from the bar, locked their arms, and walked out of the restaurant. I followed.

They laughed and spoke loudly as they walked, and the girl stumbled a few times, each time being caught by a laughing Jebediah who teased her. Oh, how I wanted to be him. From my vantage point I could see the girl had an outstanding ass. Knowing that Jebediah would be all up inside of it tonight made me happy for him, but, in a way, sad. I’d be all up inside my computer, later.

They waited for the elevator and I waited a few feet behind them. Other guests leaving the restaurant the same time as us waited for the elevator, a fact I was glad for. Jebediah wouldn’t pay any special attention to me. Wearing a fedora and sunglasses inside at night was probably not something that would draw any extra attention, but I wanted to be safe.

Six of us climbed on the elevator, and I stood  in the back, waiting to get off where Jebediah and his lady did. I guessed they’d be going back to her place, for obvious reasons.

They got off on the 5^th floor.

Shit, Jeb. Dangerous move. You really don’t give a fuck, do you?

I followed, but from a distance. They were too tipsy to notice me. I saw them turn down the hallway that Jebediah’s room was in. No fucking way.

          I ran to catch up, and as I turned the corner I saw them enter a room, the door closing fast behind them. It couldn’t be the room I thought it was. As I got closer, my suspicions were confirmed. They’d gone into 512.

“You’re a dead man, Jeb,” I muttered to myself. Cheating on your mistress! Now that takes guts. The kind of guts I don’t have. I turned and went back to wait for the elevator. Plan B now involved me contacting Vivian and laying out the further twists of the story. She wouldn’t love it, but maybe learning that even her nemesis was being fucked over would bring a little joy to her cougar-milf heart.

The elevator bell rang, and the doors slid open to two bombshell babes whose combined good looks almost killed me on the spot. They couldn’t have been more than 40 years old, in combined age. One of them probably wasn’t even in college yet, but then, they didn’t look like college material. I didn’t care.

“Hello, ladies,” I said, attempting a MacGuyver voice.

They smiled, and ran out of the elevator, down the hall.

My curiosity as well as my sex organ pressed me to see where they went. They turned down the hall where 512 would be. If Jebediah knew about these beauties just down the hall, he’d be in heaven.

I ran to the adjacent hallway in time to see the girls knocking on the door to 512.

“Oh fuck,” I said. I stopped, and put myself in reverse. Shit and fan were about to meet.

The door opened, and Jebediah’s voice sounded surprisingly chipper.

“Brittany! Ruby! You made it!”

“Sorry, we were doing a little pre-gaming!” the blond one said.

“Come on in, you’re just in time!” Jeb was inviting them in. Inviting them into his fucking room. The room with the other girl. “Help yourselves to some drinks,” I heard him say, as the door shut behind him.

Then it hit me. Jebediah Black is having an orgy.

I wanted to knock on the door, pretend I was invited, and participate in my life’s first orgy of probably many, and partake in the joys of multi-sexual relations. If Jebediah’s handsome hands found their way onto me, I probably wouldn’t have complained. The next day I’d feel a little upset, maybe violated, but in the heat of the moment I’d go with it, because it would feel right in the circumstances. But I didn’t knock on the door. I walked past the room, listened for a moment to try to detect the sounds of group sex, but heard nothing. I went into the stairwell at the end of the hall and waited by the door, listening for the door to 512 to open again. I'd snap a few more pictures with my phone to show to Vivian, pictures of babes leaving, and Jebediah being a master of the game.

          My phone was in my hand, ready to go. I waited. While I waited, I sent Vivian a few text messages. Minutes later, she called.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she hissed. “I can’t accept picture texts, stop sending them to me!”

“Vivian,” I said, “I don’t know what your data plan is like, and frankly, it’s none of my business. But I really think you need to see these. I snapped a few shots of Jebediah with a girl. A new girl! Not the same girl from before. He’s cheating on his mistress!”

“Not surprising, that fucking scumbag. Once a scumbag, always a scumbag. What do you know about her?”

“I know nothing except what she looks like and that she has an ass to kill for. But, listen, get this. He took her back to the same room the other girl was staying in. So I thought, she’s gonna come back and find you, Jeb, and you’ll be toast. But as I’m leaving, two girls get off the elevator and go to the same room. And he brings them inside! I think your husband is having an orgy.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m waiting to get evidence, right now. If you’d accept my picture texts I could show you.”

“Just email them. I can’t believe this. This is just fucking unreal.”

          “Sure, I’ll send them tonight.”

          Vivian hung up, and I hung out. I waited in the stairwell with the door cracked, listening for the sounds of activity. Finally, investigation had become interesting again.

~

          The sound of an opening door an hour later sent my heart aflutter, and I prepared my phone for pictures. I looked out the cracked door of the stairwell and saw the door to 512 standing wide open. Jebediah was holding it, smiling, and talking quietly. A woman walked out of the room and stood next to him while he carefully closed the door.

          It was the holy goddess herself, the girl in the white and black tiger striped shirt. And she was smiling, happy, maybe even giggling. And that was it. It was the two of them. The girls from earlier were nowhere to be seen.

I snapped some photos anyway, as Jebediah and the girl walked away from me, capturing a glorious few shots of the girl’s prime ass in motion, a dazzling prize of photographic magic that I would save forever.

They turned toward the elevators and were out of sight. What in the world was happening? Where were the other girls? Had they jumped out the windows? Vaporized?  Spontaneously combusted? I didn’t know if Vivian was going to like this or hate this. I didn’t even know how I felt about it. Then I remembered I had a key to room 512. The girls would probably be passed out on whatever concoctions Jebediah had fed them, and as such, would be unlikely to notice me as I investigated the space around them. Maybe they’d be naked. God, I hoped they were naked. I was very good at being quiet, and so far my stealth had been flawless. I’d try my luck.

I opened the door to 512 and slowly crept inside. The lights were off, and I didn’t dare turn them on. The far wall was lined with windows, curtains open, letting the light of the moon illuminate the room. The doors to the two side rooms coming off the main room were closed. It didn’t appear anyone was in the main room, though the floor was spacious, and furniture had been moved, clearly the ideal spot for an orgy.

The room was as clean as I remembered from before, with no luggage or clothes lying around. Everything was in its place. The couches were nice, the tables were arranged with an obvious eye for art and design. I opened the door to a side room and saw nothing out of the ordinary. A suitcase was on the floor, opened, and a laptop was on the bed, its monitor glowing.

I went to the door on the other side of the main room, opened it, and checked out the bedroom. Nothing appeared unusual. Two suitcases were on the floor, and a bag of toiletries was sitting on a table. I opened the door to the bathroom, but it was pitch black. No moonlight reached it. I turned on the light. Everything seemed fine.

I pulled back the shower curtain, and that’s when I saw three dead women stacked on top of each other, lying face down in the tub, cruel lacerations in their sides. Blood soaked the wall and the porcelain beneath them. And they were naked.

Chapter IV

“Vivian, it’s Lamborghini. Check your email, I’m sending you some earth-shattering shit.” I left a message, hung up, kicked the shoes off my feet, set my gun on the dresser, threw my hat and sunglasses onto the bed, and sat down at the desk in the center of my hotel room with my phone plugged up to my laptop. The pictures of Jebediah with the woman at the bar, as well as the mystery woman in the striped shirt, were transferring. The dead body pictures would be next. While I waited, I drummed on the table in rhythm to the jackhammer beats of my heart. The night had been lit on fire, but it was Jebediah, not me, who was the spark that set the blaze. I felt a little cheated.

My phone rang. It was Vivian.

          “Vivian,” I said, pulling the phone fast to my face, “I’m about to fill your box, so open up wide.”

          “The fuck are you talking about, Lamborghini?” she asked.

“Mailbox, I mean. Email box.”

“You found proof? For a phone call this late I’m expecting something pretty outstanding. What’d you find at 11 o’clock that couldn’t wait til morning?” I didn’t appreciate her inquisitive tone, but I wasn’t going to say anything about it. I didn’t appreciate most of her tones.

          “This is too late? It’s Saturday night. I thought you’d be up late with a vodka tonic jamming some Patsy Cline mp3s. What happened to the wild animal inside you, Viv? The wild cat. The cougar?”

          “I was in bed, Leonardo. The kids and I have church in the morning.”

          I laughed, but she said she wasn’t joking, and she started on a rant about my lack of respect for her private life and how all I cared about  was myself and that it seemed to her that I didn’t even really care about the integrity of the investigation, but that the only reason I was out here in the first place was because I was just looking out for my own ass.  She said a lot of things that may or may not have been true, but I didn’t listen very closely, as I was distracted by her comment about taking her kids to church. I still couldn’t picture those kids breaking out of her smooth, cougar’s body, her delicate looking pelvic area. I imagined two babies, fully grown to the size of adult gymnasts or ice skaters, punching their way out of Vivian’s lower parts, with insurance agent smiles and stock broker eyes. They had their mother’s tenacity. It wasn’t pretty, but Vivian was smirking her signature smirk the entire time, not really happy about the whole ordeal, but not visibly in any pain. I suspected my imagination had the details right, and if I had asked Vivian to relive her childbirth moments, she’d have described them exactly as I saw them.

          “And why am I awake right now?” she asked, finishing her rant. “What do you have for me that’s so urgent?”

“I’ll be sending you an email shortly with the evidence I’ve found, but it’ll take a while for the pictures to upload. Let me say this – our case of adultery has turned into something far more sinister.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jeb’s unfaithfulness is probably the least of your concerns, right now. Turns out he’s uh… got a bit of a criminal side.”

Vivian sighed, and I heard her shuffling on the other end of the phone like one might shuffle when one is trying to move one’s feet out from under their ass so they don’t fall asleep, or like one might shuffle when they know something I don’t know and telling me is going to be the sort of thing that requires one to find a new way to sit. To be blunt, she sounded like she was adjusting herself for a tall tale and I kind of imagined she was removing her pants in the process. But her pants were probably already off.

“I know,” she said.

“You know. Wait. What?”

“Yes.” She sighed again. “I hoped you wouldn’t find out. I didn’t see how you would, since you wouldn’t be looking for that type of thing. But I guess you’re a better investigator than I thought.”

“I get that a lot, and thanks. But if you knew about this then what the hell are you doing? Sending me on some bullshit investigation into possible adultery? Like that even matters, now. How did you find out? Adultery pales in comparison! You want him to stop cheating on you? Easy! Call the police, put him in jail.”

          “It wasn’t a big deal to me! He did it for us. He did it for the family, for me and the kids. That’s not something a wife reports her husband for.”

“Yes it is. It totally fucking is. How long have you known?”

“As long as we’ve been married.”

“How long has that been?”

“Twelve years. He was doing it before we met. Yes, I was worried he’d get caught, and I let him know I was afraid for what it would mean for the family. How would we go on with him in jail?”

“I guess you’d have to get a job. Maybe put the kids to work. That’s not going to hold up in court, I’m afraid. You’re not going to get off so easily, you know that, right? You’ll be an accessory.”

“Huh? I’d be an accessory to tax evasion? Really? I don’t think it works like that. How can an ex-cop even think this way?”

“Tax evasion? You’re talking about tax evasion?”

“Yeah. You’re not?”

“No. Fuck taxes. You think I pay mine? I couldn’t give less of a shit about Jebediah paying his taxes. His criminal side is that he’s a murderer, Vivian. A fucking killer.”

“What?” she sounded like she didn’t believe me, like I’d just accused her husband of being a murderer. I had.

“Wait til you see this email, Vivian. Suddenly his little affair won’t seem like such a big problem. Might even seem kind of nice, and make him seem a little bit more human in light of his monstrous dark side.”

“What makes you think he’s a killer? You’ve got to be making a mistake.”

“Remember the girls I told you about who went to his room? I said he was having an orgy, but when I went in there to investigate, they were dead. All three of them, lying naked in the bath tub. Kind of hard to mistake anything else for three dead girls. I’ve seen death, Vivian. I know what it feels like. I touched them to be sure. They’re dead, alright. Skin’s still kind of nice but, man, kind of cold.”

Vivan got quiet, which was nice because it gave me some time to lay it all out for her.

“Found the bodies about twenty minutes ago, took a few pictures and got out of there as fast as possible. The good news is, if you want to look at it that way, those three girls probably aren’t New York’s freshest kills. I’m sure there’s been more murder since twenty minutes ago. Not by your husband, just, you know, in general.”

“I don’t think that’s accurate, Leonardo. New York isn’t that bad.”

“Yeah it is, there’s a murder like every three seconds in New York City, Vivian.”

“No there’s not.”

“There fucking is.”

“There fucking is not. Don’t change the subject. What are you going to do? What do we do about this? How do you know it was him who killed them? What if he was… murdered, too?”

“He wasn’t murdered. I saw him walking out of the hotel room with the sexy lady I told you about earlier. The first one. They were leaving, chuckling, laughing up a storm, and beaming their radiative sexuality all over the 5^th floor.”

“So they’re killing together? Or maybe she’s the only killer, and he has no idea.”

“I put that together, already. Of course they’re killing together. The bodies were in his room – how in the fuck isn’t he going to notice three dead ladies in his tub? They were naked. That’s the kind of shit you notice. He’s not like, “oh hey, girls, you drunk? You wanna move, please? I gotta take a bath. Hey, Babe! Your friends are in my bathtub and won’t get out! Can we go get some corndogs?””

“Isn’t it possible you’re wrong? This is insanity. Fucking another girl I could believe. Not murder. I really don’t believe it.”

“It’s not possible I’m wrong because I’m a fucking ace detective.”

“You’re a private investigator. That’s not the same thing. And you’re not that good.”

“A licensed private investigator who was once an ace detective. Once a detective, always a detective, Vivian.”

“Cut this shit out. Are you going to call the police?”

“Yes, but not from here. Not with my cell phone or my room’s phone. I don’t want them questioning me. I went into his room. That’s probably illegal.”

“Can’t you wait til you’re sure? If you call the police now, he might go to prison.”

“That’s sort of the idea. I’m sorry. But at least there’s some good news.”

“What good news? How is any of this good news?”

“It’s possible he’s not cheating on you with Ms. Tiger Stripes. They may just be murder partners. She did say she only works with him. That’s something, right?”

“That’s not anything. I need to go back to bed. But I won’t be sleeping, so thanks for that. I can’t tell you what not to do, but I don’t want my husband to go jail for something he didn’t do.”

“He’ll only go to jail for something he did. You’ll see the pictures. Goodnight, Vivian.”

She hung up on me in classic Vivian form just as the pictures finished uploading to my computer. I emailed them. She wouldn’t like what she saw, but that wasn’t my fault. She could blame her husband.

I grabbed my room key, put on my shoes, and walked into the hall. It was a little bit after 11 o’clock, and I was going to call the police.

“Hi,” I said to the fat toad of a woman sitting at the front desk, her glasses the size of a  bicycle, and her uncharacteristically thick woman’s mustache looking like it had been meticulously pruned to draw the eyes of night time wanderers by moonlight. “You know where I can find a pay phone?”

“You can use this phone right here,” she said, pointing to the phone on the desk. “It’s free. You need to hit 9 to dial out, but you can make long distance calls, if you like.”

“Thanks, but I need a pay phone. You know what a pay phone is?”

“What year is it? Don’t you have a, what’s it called, a pocket phone?”

“A pocket phone?”

“Sorry, cell phone. You don’t have a cell phone?”

“I do. I don’t want to use it, nor do I want to use your goddamn landline phone. I want a pay phone. Now where can I find one? A phone booth, that’s what I need. Do you know what a phone booth is?”

“Don’t be having this tone with me tonight, sir. I’m sorry if you’re in a hurry, but that isn’t my fault. I’ll find you a pay phone, just sit tight.”

“Thanks. I’ll put the attitude out with the trash, if you catch my drift.” I tapped my fingers on the desk to a tropical rhythm, a hot beat that would not have been out of place in Jamaica, or perhaps even the Bermuda triangle.

The sound of the front doors opening interrupted my beat parade, and in walked Jebediah and his lady-friend, eating corndogs and increasing the average sex appeal in the lobby by 300%. I hid my face by looking deep into my palms like they were a book I was having trouble reading. From between my fingers I observed Jebediah and the goddess beside him as they waited for the elevator.

The way Jebediah’s companion put the corndog in her mouth made my own mouth salivate, and sent tingles into other parts of my body. I felt the way I imagined the  fat toad of a woman at the hotel’s front desk might feel when she sees Tom Selleck eating a whip cream pie. It was a mixture of lust and hunger, a common pairing of emotions.

They stepped onto the elevator and out of sight. I needed a pay phone like the fat toad woman needed a Gillette Mach 5 razor.

“Found one, yet?” I asked. She shook her head.

“Let me ask someone.” She stood and went to the back office. I heard her speaking to someone about pay phones and phone booths, and cracking a joke or two about the year being 1985 – a joke I wasn’t going to laugh at. When she came back to the desk she brought with her the Indian man from earlier.

“Fuck,” I said aloud. “How are you?” I wasn’t wearing my hat or my sunglasses. My $800 disguise was now worthless. But the clothes were still ace as shit.

His eyes got wide as the eyes of an eagle who’s spotted its prey, and he let his massive black eyebrows dance the dance of anger. “You! Sir, I need to see your identification!”

I backed away from the desk, and he almost lunged over it, but got caught in his own missile defense system of words and shouts.

“I will call the police! Give me your identification!”

“Listen, I can explain everything,” I did the usual whoa-cool-your-jets-and-listen-to-my-great-excuse thing with my hands, like I was trying to stop a bus. It  cooled his jets for just a second.

“What are you doing in my hotel?”

“I’m here on business, I just, I drank a whole hell of a lot today, at  the workshop. Had too much, thought I was someone else, you know the rest. This happens all the time.”

“Give me your identification, now.”

I pulled the keycard to room 512 out of my pocket and threw it on the desk. “Here, take it. I don’t need it anymore. Wrong room. I’m sober now, so I’ll just be leaving.”

The man picked up a walkie-talkie from the desk, said something quickly into it, and set it back down. “You don’t go anywhere. Tell me what you’re doing.”

I continued backing away, bumped into the elevator doors, and pushed the button. “I’ll just go back to my room. You won’t hear another peep out of me. Promise.” The plan was to get to any other floor, take the stairs down until I got outside, and run around the city until I found a pay phone. It seemed easier than what I was doing at the time.

The elevator door opened to a familiar face.

“Hi, Ratfish,” I said.

“Sup, bro?” he said, as cheerfully as a fake thug playing the part of security guard can say anything. Then he looked past me, to the Indian man. “This the guy?”

I turned to see the Indian man nodding, a Hitlerian grin cut across his face.

Ratfish stepped off the elevator and grabbed me by the arm. “Security!” he shouted. “Sorry, Mr. L. You know.”

“No, I don’t know. Unhand me, Ratfish. What’s going on?”

“Police will be here soon,” said the Indian man. His goddamn Hitler smile wasn’t going anywhere.

Fight or flight, I remembered hearing those words in a classroom. They had something to do with situations of stress, or trouble. I didn’t know why they were presented as an either-or deal. Fight and flight sounded better. Why pick only one?

With my free arm, I threw a dynamite punch I could be proud of right into Ratfish’s face, knocking him to the ground. “Sorry, Ratfish! You know!” I ran from the lobby as the Indian man yelled behind me, through the sliding glass front doors of the hotel, and right into the bulging stomachs of a couple angry looking New York City cops. All three of us fell to the ground.

“That’s the man!” the Indian man yelled from inside, just before the doors closed.

“I’m a man,” I said jovially to the cops. “I don’t know that I’d call myself the man.”

They dragged me back into the hotel, and spoke with the Indian man and Ratfish for a second. After a short discussion I didn’t listen to, one of the cops, the one who looked like he’d eaten a few fewer donuts than the other one, frisked me, touched all of my important and unimportant parts, and asked for my ID. I handed over my driver’s license, as well as my private investigator’s license. They were less impressed than I’d expected.

“Mr. Lamborghini,” said the smaller cop, “we hear you’re causing some trouble for the management. Using a false identity to trespass on private property.”

“I’m not causing any trouble, officers. I’m fighting the good fight, like both of you. Ex cop, here. Ex detective. I’m from Chicago.”

“I can see that,” the larger, more bulbous officer said, eyeing my driver’s license. “What brings you to New York?”

“Business. Investigation.”

“Chicken nuggets,” said Ratfish, laughing at his own unnecessary joke, and rubbing his jaw. I was glad I’d punched him.

“Not now, Ratfish,” I said. “Adults are talking.”

“I’m 25, dick,” Ratfish said.

“Sir,” the larger cop said, turning to Ratfish, “would you like to press charges on Mr. Lamborghini? Assault charges, of course. You have two witnesses who testify that Mr. Lamborghini hit you in the face.”

“It’s fight or flight,” I said. “I did both.”

“Nah, don’t need to press charges,” Ratfish said. “He’ll let me hit ‘em back. I know him.”

My eyes beamed anger at Ratfish, but I knew he was right. Once this ordeal was over I would to have to let him assault me to get him back on my side. Negotiation was part of the job, and I was a master at it.

“I don’t think I’m the one you want to arrest, tonight,” I told the cops. “See, I’m investigating a crime, right now. I was about to call you. Ask the woman with the mustache, she’ll tell you I was asking for a pay phone.”

The smaller cop eyed the fat toad of a woman, fixed his collar, pulled up his belt, and waddled over to her with a gentleman’s smile plastered on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was going to interrogate her or ask her out for midnight dinner.

“What kind of crime are you investigating?” asked the larger cop. “Your investigation taking place at this hotel?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I heard the sounds of murder coming from room 512 not long ago. I was on my way to call 911 when you guys showed up. You need to check it out.” I spoke dry and to the point, something I’d picked up from watching two seasons of Dragnet. My authority was unquestionable.

“Room 512? You’re being serious? You heard something?”

“I did.  if you search the room you’ll find something devastating and horrific.”

“Glanton,” he said to the smaller cop, who was by now flirting with the fat toad of a woman, “restrain Mr. Lamborghini for a minute. I’m looking into a suspicious behavior report on the 5^th floor.”

“Sure thing,” said the smaller cop. “Come here, Mr. Lamborghini.”

“I’ll help restrain him,” Ratfish said,  his words bent by the mad flow of his inner gangster. I could see he was enjoying this feeling of power over me. The dick. It wouldn’t last.

The larger officer climbed on the elevator while Ratfish and the smaller guy, Glanton, restrained me in the lobby. They restrained me by standing around, the cop only glancing at me momentarily, between breaths, as he threw some game down on what he mistook for a fine piece of ass.

“You almost done with your shift tonight?” Glanton asked the fat toad of a woman, who was sending her tongue frequently to the bottom ridge of her mustache as he spoke to her.

“Aw, nope. Just came on shift an hour ago.” She looked at the Indian man, standing quietly with his arms crossed, like he was waiting to watch the cops haul me away. “I work through the night. Wish I could get off right about now…” She winked, and I caught a glimpse of the woman and the cop picturing one another naked, an event that was manifested in the cop’s eyes growing large as he sized her up from head to toe, and the woman’s neck bulging out in wanting as she stared deep into his beefy torso. True romance was blossoming in front of us, and it didn’t seem that Ratfish noticed.

“You and me both,” Glanton said. “You ever been in a police cruiser? We go real fast, like lightning.” He pulled at his collar in the way a nervous fat man will, presumably to increase air flow into his tight fit shirt, to cool his sweaty flesh. He was probably shitting in his pants at the sound of this woman’s hyena voice.

The woman giggled and snorted, prompting the cop to continue.

“When can I hit you?” Ratfish asked, knowing that our rapport had already gotten to the level where he could go blow-for-blow with me like a real man, and it wouldn’t matter who got hurt. I hated to think that we had any rapport at all, but I guess if I had it with anyone in New York, it was him.

“Soon,” I muttered, waiting for the night to come crashing to a close, with the large cop bulldozing his way off the elevator, with Jebediah and the goddess in handcuffs, their heads hung in shame. I kept my eyes fixated on the elevator doors.

What instead happened was the dump-truck sized officer stepped off the elevator, smiling a playboy’s smile, by himself. Jebediah and the goddess weren’t there. It looked like he was zipping up his pants. He’d either been taking a piss down the elevator shaft, or something queer was afoot.

He chuckled to himself while he walked toward the rest of us. “Glanton,” he shouted, “what’s the verdict? We hauling this guy off or what?”

“Did you find any death, perchance?” I asked. “Women, I think. Sounded like women, I remember. Kind of thought they were in 512, getting slaughtered.”

“Sure didn’t,” said the bulldozer of a cop. “Did meet a very nice couple of people, though. Real, real hospitable and cordial folks. Mighty friendly. Really knew how to make me feel welcome. The room was clean as a whistle, spotless as a stripper’s tongue. Real tidy people, these two. This ain’t a half bad hotel you got here, Rajeev.”

The Indian man nodded.

“Whistles aren’t all clean,” I said. “You blow into them and your spit gets in there. Sits in there and the bacteria grows. Whistles are filled with germs, officer.  Keep that in mind.”

“You want us to take this sucker away or what?” asked the cop. “His stories sure are some bullshit, I’ll tell ya that right now. You can’t trust this guy.”

 “Let him stay,” the Indian sighed. “He’s too stupid to be anything but harmless.”

“Don’t appreciate that,” I said.

“Let’s go, Glanton,” said the big cop. The look in his eyes said he was ready to get back to the streets with his pistol in his hand and his dick in the wind. It was a feeling I shared, as a part of my heart yearned for the old days of patrolling the streets in my cruiser, humming a new melody every night into a tape recorder so I could try to play it on my second wife’s clarinet when I got home, and soaking up the Chicago night while I counted down the hours to clocking out.

“…I’d make sure your lips were wet enough,” Glanton said to the woman, “and slip ol Steely Dan in there for a look-around, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Oh, piggly wiggly! My, my, my!” she squealed.

“You boys alright?” the bulging big cop asked Ratfish. “Still don’t wanna press charges?”

“Hell nah,” Ratfish said. “Mr. Lamborghini’s gonna taste the skin of my knuckle, ain’t that right, Mr. Lamborghini? We got a thing, you know?”

The cop nodded, and grabbed Glanton on the shoulder. “Time to go, Glands. We can come back for your tongue push-ups in the morning.”

Glanton nodded. “Keep your entrance hungry for a hand or two,” he said to the grotesque, toad-like woman. “Maybe I’ll see you later.” He blew her a kiss and held up a fist.

“Goodnight, officers,” I said, extending my hand for a friendly shake. “Sorry you had to come all the way out here for nothing. I remember what that’s like. Good luck on those mean streets.”

The cops walked out the door without so much as a nod or a handshake, and Ratfish punched me in the face. I fell through a small table beside the front desk with a flower pot on it, and smashed my head into the wall.

~

“Sorry, bro,” Ratfish said as I opened my eyes. “Practiced my fist moves today before I came into work because I kinda knew you and I’d go at it again. How’s your face?”

“Shaken but not stirred,” I said. He didn’t get the James Bond reference, so I told him not to call me bro ever again, and slowly stood up with as little struggle against gravity as I could manage.

“You went down like a Filipino whore, dawg,” he said. Dawg was an even worse word and I was going to have to remember to say something to him about it. But at the time, I was worried about where to go from this point.

“Right. Well, so it goes.” I saw that the Indian man was gone, and the toad of a woman was sitting at the desk, wasting away in front of a computer. “Let’s go outside, Ratfish. I need some air.”

“Right on, man.” He followed me out.

The cigarette hit my mouth as soon as I was out the door, and smoke came out my nose soon thereafter. Wretched country music wafted through the air with the smoke, though it was hard to say who was carrying who.

“You wanna get high in the parking garage?” Ratfish asked. “I ain’t got another round for an hour.”

“No, Ratfish. Weed gives you Asperger’s. I need to talk to you about why I’m here and what I’m doing. Might need more help from you.”

“Man, I don’t give a fuck why you’re here. I’m gonna burn one, anyway.”

“Go for it. I’m investigating an adultery case. That guy—Jebediah Black—his wife hired me to follow him and collect evidence of him cheating on her. Pictures, recordings, catching them in the act. Standard affair fair.”

Ratfish lit a joint and smirked a weedman’s smirk while I spoke.

“Haven’t exactly found proof he’s cheating on her, but he could if he wanted to. He’s not one of those guys who thinks he’s handsome and pretends he’s an alpha male because he rides a bike and knows a foreign language and wears v-necks and can make girls with the maturity levels of 13 year olds giggle. He’s the real deal. A hunk and a stud, balled up into one.”

“Ballin’,” Ratfish shared with me. “Real sick. You know when my boss, Rajeev, called me down to the lobby earlier, to take care of you – remember that? Get this, I was in an empty hotel room, in the bathroom, jacking off in front of the mirror. Called me just in time, because when I’m walkin’ out of the room, there’s this family walkin’ to the door, and they all like, ‘yo, that’s our room, what you doin’ in there?” So I’m all like, “check it, security, yo. Bathroom checks. Just makin’ sure your shit’s safe. It’s all good. Don’t worry.’ I didn’t have time to wash my hands, so when I grabbed you in the lobby, sorry if I got anything on you.”

“What? I don’t even – anyway, he may or may not be cheating on her. I don’t know.”

“Not very good at your job, are you?” Ratfish said. The smoke from his joint mixed with the smoke from my cigarette and I got visibly upset about it.

“I’m great at my job, you little shit. As a peon in the hierarchy of law enforcement, you wouldn’t know anything about that. But since I am the master and you are the apprentice, I’m willing to give you an opportunity to learn a lot and be a team player in a major investigation.”

“Man, fuck some apprentice shit. I ain’t your apprentice. I don’t give a fuck about law enforcement. I ain’t out to be no cop.”

“I respect your rebel attitude, Ratfish, I really do. So how about I give you two hundred dollars to help me?”

His bloodshot eyes said all they needed to, which was: “I’m listening to your proposal.”

“You’ve got a key to every room in the hotel, is that correct?”

“Fucking right it is,” he said.

“Good. Now here’s the thing. The investigation into Jebediah Black has sort of become an investigation into murder. Clearly, he’s an experienced killer, as the fat bulldozer cop wasn’t able to find anything in the guy’s room. He’s got this lady with him, a real foxy bitch of a goddess. A holy woman whose legs tell a story, whose ass controls the weather, whose skin is like an orchestra, and whose face is a poet’s wet dream. I believe they’re working together in this, each masterminding some aspect of the gruesome practice.” I pulled out my cell phone and opened a picture of the three dead ladies in Jebediah’s bathtub.

“And in case you require evidence,” I said, handing the phone to Ratfish.

He blew smoke on the screen at first, then squinted to see what he was looking at. He dropped the phone and dropped his joint, blowing out the last of his smoke that battled my cigarette smoke for control of the air around us. “The fuck!?” he shouted. “That’s real? No fucking way.”

“As real as my first wife’s tits,” I said, picking up my phone. “They were the only real ones. I learned real quick I need them fake and large as an ostrich egg. You wanna get in on this or what?”

“Fuck. I ain’t getting’ killed tonight, yo. Chocolate’s got a kid on the way. I’m gonna be a dad. Can’t be getting’ fucked up like that shit!”

“You won’t get fucked up like that. I just need your help.”

“The fuckin’ cops, dawg! Get them out here.”

“How high are you, already? They were just here. They found nothing. Amateurs. I’m the real fucking deal. I’m a seasoned pro, and I’m breaking this shit wide open. You with me or not? There’s two hundred big ones in it for you.”

“Make it four hundred.”

“Two fifty.”

“Five hundred.”

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“Six hundred.”

“That’s the wrong direction.”

“Six fifty.”

“One hundred.”

“Seven.”

“Ratfish, go drink some water and jack off in a bathroom until you come down. I’m gonna need you straight for this. Then come find me and we’ll negotiate again.”

“Eight hundred,” he said. “That’s it. My final offer, dawg.”

“Listen, fine. Here’s my cell phone number. Call me when you’re ready to talk. I need to get a drink or six.” I handed him my card with my name, address, phone number (office and cell), and a nice poem on the back about my history as a law enforcement professional.

“Nine hundred,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

 I put out my cigarette, threw it in the trash, and walked inside. I looked back to see Ratfish still standing in the hot June night, probably negotiating with street lights.

Chapter V

“Not necessary,” said the lovely French girl behind the counter. “I remember you.”

I put my driver’s license back in my wallet. I knew she wouldn’t need it. I'd been in the same liquor store only two hours earlier to buy a fifth of Johnny Walker Black Label. Now I was buying a fifth of Wild Turkey, my breath still fresh with the scent of Johnny Walker’s musk. Where was the night taking me? It didn’t matter, because I knew I wouldn’t remember. The only thing I could remember at the time was being in the store earlier in the night. I didn’t know why. I handed the girl my debit card and she slid it through her machine. After she wished me a nice night, I was whisked away, out the door, back into the dark night of mysterious happenings and strange goings on.

It  was still hot as the devil’s fingers outside, a hot made only more intolerable by the burn of whiskey in my stomach. I was three sheets to the wind, and disoriented and confused by the island’s lack of symmetry. I couldn’t remember how to get back to the hotel. My left hand ached, and was covered in red bruises.

“Shit,” I said to myself. I’d  have said it to someone else, but there weren’t very many people on the sidewalk at two in the morning. I stood for a moment to try to remember why I was there, and, more importantly at the time, how I’d gotten there. The place smelled the same as the rest of Staten Island, in that it tricked me into thinking I needed to puke at the same time as shitting into a bathtub. But part of that was the whiskey.

“Mister!” I heard someone shout.

I flipped my head around in every direction I could manage in such a state, and saw nothing.

“Over here!” the voice came again. It was a man’s voice, with standard New York City texture.

Then I saw him. He was standing by a dirty yellow taxi.

“You ready to go?” he asked.

“Am I?”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know.” Then I vaguely remembered sitting in the back seat of a taxi just a little while earlier. I must have taken a taxi to the liquor store. Didn’t remember why. “Yeah. Yes. Sure.” I stumbled over to the taxi and climbed in the back seat. It smelled like a sewer.

“The Pickety Stix?” asked the driver, as he climbed into his seat.

“No, fuck that,” I said in my best drunken detective impersonation. “Take me to the hotel.”

He started driving.

“Remember, don’t drink back there,” he said, looking into my eyes through the rear view mirror. Our eye contact made me feel safe.

“I’ll do what I want,” I muttered, and opened the bottle.

The taxi came to a halt. The driver turned to look at me with more menace than he’d probably intended. “I fuckin’ told you last time, you drink in my taxi again I’ll smash up your other hand.” He held up a wooden cane that his spastic motions suggested he used for delivering blows rather than staying on his toes.

I looked at my left hand and noted the pain and bruises. I looked at my right hand, which was fine, and decided to put the top back on the bottle.

“Sorry,” I said.

We started moving again, and I relaxed into a Sean Connery slouch for the rest of the ride.

“Say,” I said. “Sir Taximan. I’ve a query.”

“Shoot,” he said, looking into my eyes through the mirror again. It was like my face was the road and he was checking in on me to make sure we were still on course.

“How did I end up here? I mean, why am I… what’s happening?”

He laughed. “We’re all askin’ ourselves the same thing. Every day, everyone. But no one knows. That’s what some would say is the beauty of life. The beauty of just bein’ alive. There is no ‘why’.”

 “Goddammit, no. Not what I mean. All I remember is buying whiskey. Twice. I don’t even know you.” I’m sure my words were slurred and my sentences were like race horses tripping over one another at the starting line, but it sounded fine to me.

“You don’t remember nothin’?”

“Nope. Just the hotel, a little drinking. Almost got arrested earlier tonight.”

“You called for a taxi around midnight. I picked you up and you wouldn’t stop talkin’, like I was your best friend.” He looked me in the eyes again, and I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. “I ain’t your best friend. But I don’t think you cared.”

I laughed. Classic me.

“You was blabberin’ on about your day, said you couldn’t trust no one, wouldn’t shut your mouth about the smell of the city. Sounds like your fuckin’ day wasn’t so bad, to me. You spent all day in a classy hotel. You know what a long day is? Try drivin’ this motherfuckin’ car all over this island for fourteen hours straight and dealin’ with sons of bitches who got party fever and can’t keep their dicks in their pants when they ridin’ in a motherfuckin’ taxi, or Puerto Ricans with no money but plenty of things to yell and plenty of shit in their asses to unleash on my seats, and on-the-rag sluts who don’t wear tampons and have lips too big for my dick. And my dick’s fuckin’ Italian, so it takes some big ass blimp-lips for that.”

“I bet. Hey – did I say anything about my job?”

“Said you hadn’t had a drink all day, and that it wasn’t a Saturday til you had a drink. Didn’t seem to matter to you it was technically Sunday by this point. No, you just told me to take you someplace you could buy somethin’ to get you hammered because the hotel bar was full of shithead artists and poets and authors. You didn’t like the bars so you stopped at Mel’s Liquor to get somethin’. You drank all the way back to the hotel even though I told you there’s no drinkin’ in my taxi, so I smashed up your fuckin’ hand when we got back.”

“Sounds like a good time.” I looked at my bruised hand and admired the damage the driver had done. He knew how to hit.

“I get called back to the hotel not two hours later, and you’re standin’ there fuckin’ blasted, on the sidewalk, waitin’ for another ride. So I ask you what you need another ride for. You pull out an empty bottle of somethin’, my guess was your last drink, and your fuckin’ gun and start talkin’ about how you know you can’t walk to the liquor store ‘cause you’ll just start firin’ off rounds into stop signs and shop windows, and tryin’ to shoot your bottle in the air til you hit it, like you some kinda cowboy. We agreed you’d pay me double for the ride. Then we agreed you ain’t a cowboy.”

Again, his eyes locked on mine. I wanted to look away but it didn’t feel right. He was New York and I was Chicago, and our staring contest was like some kind of peace treaty between the two cities – being signed in the back seat of a Staten Island taxi. A break in the gaze could mean war. I didn’t want that. No one wanted that. But with intoxication running in my blood I couldn’t tell if he had two eyes or four, so I stared where I could and hoped for the best.

I stuck my hand in my jacket to feel for my gun. It was still there. This normally would have relieved me of any stress, but I was beyond the point of stress or worry.

“Sorry if I’ve been un-charming,” I said. “I’m usually… great.”

“You ain’t been so bad. You got nothin’ on this city, Chicago boy. Just keep your gun hidden and your voice quiet. Here’s your place.”

We pulled up to the Pickety Stix, and I stumbled out of the taxi. “How much I owe?”

“We said double. Sixty even.”

I paid the man and started to walk away.

“One more thing,” he said.

I moved close to him, probably too close for his comfort, but close enough for my impaired-by-alcohol ability to understand speech.

“Them dead bodies can’t be far. People on the island get used to the smells, you know. Garbage has a way of makin’ a man quit usin’ his nose. Don’t be surprised if them bodies are stinkin’ up close by where the smell ain’t gonna be paid much attention.” He winked the wink of a man who knew a thing or two about body disposal, or at the very least, about smell management.

“Thanks…” I said. I ended the ‘thanks’ in a way to suggest I wanted to know his name, like I was going to just throw his name on the end but didn’t know what it was.

“Name’s Vincent,” he said. “Good luck.”

We shook hands for reasons I couldn’t figure out, unless it signified the peace treaty between Chicago and New York City had been signed, and I made my way into the hotel.

Ed was sitting behind the front desk.

“Music’s still playin’,” I said, stumbling through the lobby.

He looked up. “Yeah. Still can’t figure that out.”

“It’s alright, pal. I got bigger fish to fry than music.”

“Have a good night, sir,” said Ed.

“Where’s ol’ Toad lady?” I asked.

Ed didn’t seem to know who I was talking about.

“The lady who was back there.”

“Ah. Right. I’m covering for her. Just for now.”

I tried to nod, but it almost knocked me over. “Later, Ed.”

As I battled gravity down the hallway toward my room, sipping lightly on the bottle of Wild Turkey, I thought about Vincent’s advice and made a mental note to let this be the last time I got drunk while investigating a murder. I never could keep my mouth shut when I hung out with Johnny Walker.

~

Finding myself shipwrecked the next morning on the floor instead of the bed was no surprise. Finding dried vomit on my legs as I sat up was no surprise, either. Finding two empty bottles of whiskey on the table wasn’t a surprise. Being naked certainly wasn’t a surprise. Finding someone lying in my bed, snoring deep and tactless snores – that was a surprise.

By the size of the bulge under the covers, I feared the worst. I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. As if the alcohol rotting in my guts wasn’t enough to make me nauseated and anxious, the mass of humanity in my bed gave me additional stress to pack on for the day. Why did these things have to happen? Why couldn’t smaller creatures share my bed?

I walked with languished steps to the person in the bed and pulled the covers slowly from the face. It was the fat toad of a woman from the front desk. Her mustache glistened in the early morning sun creeping through the curtains. My body reacted in the only conceivable way, with dry heaving and chaotic spasms of panic that dropped me to my hands and knees. I crawled away from the bed, all too aware of the morning’s heaviness, and repeated to myself, “mother of shit, mother of shit, mother of shit…” as I looked for solace in something familiar and safe. Nothing was offering solace at the time.

The only thing that seemed like a good idea was rushing into the bathroom to pour water on myself to wash away the vomit from my skin, and the vomit from my memory, in hopes the fat toad of a woman would awaken in those few minutes and let herself out. It was the only thing that made any sense, so I did it. I flew into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and drank water from the sink’s faucet desperately hoping to wash any toad-woman tastes from my tongue, should they have somehow been inflicted after the alcohol had already passed through my mouth.

Then a sound came from the shower. The shower curtain was closed, and I looked up to see a hand pulling it open. I whispered, “mother of shit,” again, with brief flashbacks to the bathtub in Jebediah Black’s room, and half expected to see an avalanche of dead, mutilated, naked bodies spilling out of the tub, all over the bathroom floor. When the curtain opened all the way I did see a naked body, but it wasn’t dead. It was kind of fat, and it was a man.

“Morning,” he said, eyes squinting. It was Glanton the cop. He was in my bathtub and I didn’t know why.

“What are you doing?” I stopped drinking from the sink and instead faced the naked man in my bathtub, equally naked myself, except for the dried vomit which partially covered me. “Why are you… in here?”

He rubbed his eyes and laughed, then started to stand up. He gave me an eyeful I didn't much care for.

“Guess you don’t remember?” he said.

“Do I look like I remember anything?” I asked, pointing to the vomit covering my genitals and legs. At that moment, I realized Glanton being in my bathroom was probably a good thing. I backed up out of the bathroom, glanced back to the bed to see the toad-like beast of a woman, and then back at Glanton. I pointed at the bed. “Did you… and her… in here?”

Glanton smiled a playboy’s smile and nodded a cowboy’s nod.

“You really don’t remember, huh?” he asked.

“Like I said,” I pointed again to the vomit covering half my body. “I don’t remember shit.”

Glanton climbed out of the tub and walked his fat naked body toward mine, and drank some water from the sink.

“I need to get dressed,” he said. “Let me get dressed and I’ll fill you in. What time is it?”

“Around 9:30, at the latest. Probably 9, really. No earlier than 8:30.”

Glanton looked at me with a puzzled expression. “You’re just guessing.”

“No. When I drink I always wake up at 9 o’clock without fail. Every single fucking time. Doesn’t matter when I fall asleep. Right now it’s probably shortly after 9. I’m sure I’m right.”

I left the bathroom and checked the clock by the bed. 9:12. I was right. Glanton saw it and didn’t seem impressed, but I secretly hoped he would eat shit or go fuck himself.

He found his clothes in a pile on the floor by the bed and started getting dressed.

“So what happened?” I asked, as I tied a towel around myself and sat down at the desk where the bottles of Johnny Walker and Wild Turkey lied empty on their sides.

“My shift ended around two in the morning, so I came back here to meet with Erilynne.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Erilynne.” Glanton pointed to toad girl.

I understood.

“You came out of your room right about the time I showed up, looking for a swimming pool. You kept saying there was a pool party and you were missing it, and were pretty upset about it. We could see you’d had a lot to drink, so we laughed it off and got back to flirting. You challenged me to a swimming contest and said you could swim more laps than I could. We laughed at you again but you kept at it.”

“Did I ever find the pool?” I asked.

“No. Fortunately for us, the security guard came inside and saw you and started talking to you about negotiations or something.”

“Oh. Shit. Any idea what he said?”

“Not a clue. You laughed, said something, handed him some money, and then kept on about the pool. The security guy and you went outside, so Erilynne and I got to making out. When we were ready for sex, we tried doing it in the back office but nothing felt quite right. She said normally for this kind of thing she just goes into an unoccupied room, but all the rooms were booked last night. So we went into yours, figuring you’d be gone for a while, getting lost in a drunken stupor and not finding your way back til morning.”

I was thinking about Ratfish and what I’d last said to him. Or what I last remembered saying to him. As Glanton talked, I looked for my wallet. I found it in my pants. All three hundred dollars I’d had in cash was gone.

“But you came back only a couple minutes after I started plowing the Erilynne fields,” Glanton explained. “Caught me mid-plow. You just sat down at your computer over there and started watching something, didn’t even notice us. We went on for a bit, until you asked us to keep it down. We couldn’t finish with your prying eyes on us, so we took a break. You kept drinking, and said something about a case you were working on. You kept saying you were a private investigator and were on some big hot-shit case.”

“That was true.”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m serious. And what did I say about the case?”

“You said a lot about a sexy tiger, that’s all I remember. I informed you that being an out-of-state investigator didn’t give you no rights to investigate in New York. You’re not licensed in New York, so you aren’t authorized to do a criminal investigation here. You said it wasn’t a criminal investigation, just an adultery thing. Didn’t really care, to be honest. Her and I got busy.”

“You guys didn’t drink?”

“Nope.”

“And I didn’t fuck her?”

“Hell no.”

“Thank God. OK. Great.” I felt a little better. A very little. “Why’d you end up…” I looked at the bathroom.

“This bitch snores like a fucking camel.”

“Ah, she does,” I said. “Do camels snore?”

“I don’t know. She and I fucked, then she fell asleep. Right away it got loud so I went to sleep in the bathtub. Nothing wrong with that. I told you to sleep with Erilynne to keep her warm, but you’d pretty much secured your spot on the ground by that point, in a pool of puke.”

“Why didn’t you just go home?” I asked.

“Told my wife I was working an extra shift. Gotta cover your ass when you’re getting ass.”

“Nice. I pulled the same shit on my third wife when I was a detective. Didn’t last long.”

Glanton finished dressing, and tied his shoes.

“Tell Erilynne I said goodbye,” he said, as he headed for the door.

“Whoa. Take her with you. I’m not keeping her.”

“She’s all yours, now. Oh, and uh… about your “case”. I’ve got some advice.”

“It’s a real case, OK? I’m not making it up.”

“Right. A case. That sexy tiger. I think you’re trying to stalk a tiger-looking girl. Hey man, I’m off duty. I’m not here to judge you. But take it from a pro, if you wanna stalk her, you gotta just blend in. Keep your eye on her ‘til you decide to make your move. Like a tiger on the prowl. Hide in the tall grass until the moment is right.” Glanton winked and opened the door.

“I’m not stalking anyone.” I said. “It’s a real case.”

“Got it!” Glanton said, winking again, giving me a shit-eating grin that I hoped someone would wreck later in the day. He left.

“Erilynne!” I shouted.

She shook awake, startled, and looked around confused for a moment.

“Oh, good morning,” she said.

“No. Not a good morning. Time to get out.”

“Where’s Glands?”

“Gone. So are you. Get out.”

She frowned a frown that was highlighted by her mustache, a grotesque frown, indeed. I closed my eyes while she collected her clothes and attached them to her bloated, toad-like body, as I held my arm out, pointing to the door the entire time.

She asked me not to tell her boss where she’d been, but I said nothing and kept my finger aimed at the door.

As soon as she left I jumped in the shower and covered every inch of my body with soap, including my eyes. Everything needed a deep cleansing.

The lobby was packed with writers and artists and those I assumed to be employees of the WCW publishing company that morning. I strolled through the crowd in the clothes I’d bought the day before, with my hat and sunglasses on and my .45 holstered inside my jacket. I looked just like one of the artsy types. My eyes were peeled for Jebediah Black, his tigress, and Ratfish. It was a little after 10 and I knew Ratfish would be on the clock for another hour, and Jebediah would be in the vicinity doing whatever it was he did at the workshop.

The closer I got to the conference room the denser the crowds became. By the time I found myself immersed  in the sea of people, I was walking slowly toward the same table I’d seen Jebediah at the day before. Then I caught myself.

Glanton’s words rang into my head like a nagging parent telling me to keep my shirt tucked in. Like a tiger on the prowl, hide in the tall grass until the moment is right. Metaphors, being some of my favorite things on the planet, were at play here. The people would be my grass. It was time to blend in.

I sat at a table where a group of fifteen writers sporting either turtle necks, thick glasses, wavy hair, goatees, ponytails, or all of these argued with emphatic rage about the use of semicolons in literature. The two men obviously vying for the position of alpha male at the table spoke the loudest, one screaming in favor of the semicolon, the other dismissing it as a tool of the pseudo-intellectual hack. Everyone else was taking sides.

“Conjunctive adverbs between two related independent clauses benefit from the use of a semicolon,” said the pedantic cunt with glasses too small for his face and a goatee too big for his chin. “But more often the semicolon is required when one desires joining two independent clauses without the assistance of conjunctions. They are absolutely vital in these circumstances.”

“And let’s not forget,” said a skinny girl with bangs and an otter’s nose, “lists wherein items may contain commas should always use semicolons to separate the items.” 

About half the nerds at the table nodded and snorted, guffawed, or wheezed in agreement and confirmation. The other half shook their heads.

“Kurt Vonnegut said the semicolon is pointless,” said the challenger for the title of alpha male. His eyes were like the inside of an outhouse at a four day long jam band festival, in that by looking into them I immediately wanted to be somewhere else. “Transvestite hermaphrodites, he called them.”

The other half of the nerds snorted, guffawed, and wheezed in congratulatory celebration.

“How about the colon?”  I said. “Nothing semi about it.”

All the nerds looked at me like I’d just shit in their stacks of Magic cards.

“What?” asked the pedantic cunt.

“We’re talking about semicolons,” said toilet eyes.

It quickly became evident I wasn’t welcome in the discussion if I couldn’t take sides. I left the table to find another place to blend.

Not a minute passed before I was lured to another group of young writers throwing back and forth a proverbial football of literary knowledge.

“Cut all the adverbs out of your fucking draft!” yelled a tall totem pole of a man, who I guessed was concealing seven more heads below his clothes. “They’re indicative of weak writing – it’s bad prose. The words alone – the verbs, the nouns, the articles, everything else – should convey the idea well enough that you don’t need adverbs. Adverbs are a crutch.”

“But load up on adjectives and metaphor,” said a man with a shaved head and bifocals. “Make the prose thick and your exposition meaningful. Colorful writing is juicy writing. And juicy writing is writing worth reading.”

“You must remember, though,” chimed in a woman whose head transcended the spatial dimensions of the room, “to show and not to tell. Let the detail of your work be revealed through action, not through mere exposition.” She pushed her fat glasses up her nose as she spoke.

When I followed the stream of their collective shit river of advice, I saw they were directing their words to a young girl typing frantically on her laptop. They were each holding in their hands a few pieces of paper covered in text, eyeballing them closely. Since the girl had no papers, it appeared it was something she had written.

“There’s a difference between literature, and regular fiction,” said a bald man with a scarf around his neck. He was wearing a scarf in June, and I considered strangling him with it. But I wasn’t surprised. I already hated him because he looked like the type of person who wore shorts in the winter. Wearing a scarf in June was consistent with his rebellion against the seasons. “Some people say any kind of writing can be literature.”

“But that’s bullshit,” said transcendental head woman.

“Yeah,” the bald scarf-man said. “Not all fiction can fairly be called literature. A distinction has to be made. The works of Hemingway, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Kafka… these are staples of literature. They change the way we look at our world, and even at writing itself. Science fiction like Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov or H.G. Wells, or horror like Clive Barker or Stephen King – this is not literature. This is cheap fiction designed to amuse and entertain. It is forgettable. It is trash. It is not to be admired.”

“Stu’s right,” said the man wearing bifocals. “Literature is concerned, first and foremost, with the human condition. It explores the trials and tribulations of existence, what it means to be human on the most fundamental level.”

Deciding this was not the place for me to stop, lest I get into a fist fight about the human condition, and choke a man to death, I kept walking, and came across a group of poets discussing their poetry with one another, not at a table, but lounging in couches around a small rug.

“See, the problem with that piece you wrote,” said a smug looking twenty-something coprophagist dickhole with a lip ring, an Italian accent, and hair that swooped like a hurricane over his forehead, “is that it rhymes.”

Sitting on a couch across from this guy was a red headed teenager with a dumbfounded look on his face. It was evident his poem was the subject of criticism. Five other young but equally dressed-for-the-part poets sat around to nod their knowing, wise nods of agreement at whatever Hurricane-Hair was saying.

“Rhyming poetry is juvenile,” said the coprophagist twat. “It takes a lack of creativity and artistic expressionism to seek out rhymes and unimaginative meter.  The message of your poem shouldn’t rely on a rhyme scheme or clever tricks to lull the reader in. You should captivate by the power of your words, your imagery, your emotional delivery.”

The nods were in agreement – unanimous agreement. A shocker.

I pulled one of my business cards from my jacket pocket and flipped it over to look at the back. There was a poem printed that I’d written about my career in law enforcement up to and including my job as a private investigator. I was proud of the poem. It took me days to write. It rhymed really well, and had terrific rhythm. It was lyrical, almost musical. It was a goddamn masterful poem. This poem was on all my business cards. And this shit eating plague-wielder had the nerve to say rhyming poems were garbage.

“Look to someone like William Carlos Williams for the right idea,” said the storm-haired son of a bitch. “He didn’t rhyme. Didn’t even have a lyrical quality to his work. It was simple, sentimental, emotional. It was evocative and visual.”

More nods and murmurs of agreement broke out around him. The lone poet whose poem was being torn to shreds, and even worse, who was being told to emulate William Carlos Williams, didn’t look happy. I knew the look on his face. It was the look I’d probably had on my own face when my mom told me my dad was dead because he decided to rob a liquor store. I could see this young poet wasn’t having a good time.

“Fuck you, hurricane kid,” I said, sitting down on a loveseat facing their couch party. “Poetry ain’t shit without rhymes and meter. You want that long winded free-verse shit, you go to Williamsburg and get on your knees and open your mouth to the closest homeless man you can find. He’ll free-verse all over your lips.”

“I’m sorry,” the hurricane-haired poetry critic said, “do I know you?”

“Nope. The last thing you need to do is tell someone to abandon rhymes and rhythm in their work – the very attributes that characterize it as a poem – and to eradicate any musical quality from it, in favor of shabby, shitty, overly wordy descriptors and pompous imagery that reads like a goddamn middle aged woman’s journal entry description of what she sees in her kitchen, by the window, in the afternoon. That’s not evocative. That’s bullshit. Fuck you. Writing a poem without rhymes or meter or rhythm is like playing tennis without a net. You can thank Robert Frost for that one.”

“You need to watch your tone,” said one of the young girl poets sitting next to Hurricane-Hair. The others murmured with dissatisfaction.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” asked another mouthy poet.

“Who the fuck’s this guy?” I asked, pointing to Hurricane-Hair, the obvious leader of the William Carlos Williams Fan Club.

He pushed his fingers through his hair and smirked the smirk of a young Italian writer who had enough ego to clash with my own.

“The name’s Michelangelo Maserati,” he said, extending his arm for a handshake.

Ratfish’s horrible girlfriend Chocolate’s agonizing, diseased voice chirped in my head. Like the Ninja Turtle and the car. Michelangelo Maserati. What a ridiculous fucking name.

 “My book of poetry is coming out this month, through the WCW Publishing Company,” he said. “I have other work published in the Yale Literary Magazine, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gettysburg Review, The New York Quarterly, and many others. It wasn’t so hard to get published in the Yale Literary Magazine, as most say it is. But maybe I’m biased because I graduated from Yale.”

His hand was still extended for a handshake so I shook it.

“You’ve just touched my penis,” I said, smiling. I now had the upper hand in the conversation.

Michelangelo pulled his hand away in disgust and wiped it on a napkin on a small table beside the couch.

“I’m…” I paused for a moment. A ninja turtle and a car. It hit me how stupid it was. “My name is Leonard Lamb. I’m a freelance poet and comic book writer.”

The group snickered.

“Comic books, eh?” asked a guy with a mole on his lip. I mean directly on his lip. Not off to the side, not close to the lip. On the lip. “What kind of money -”

“Not important,” I interrupted him. “Only reason I’m here is to school you fucks on poetry.” My phone rang, playing Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor over me. It was a special ring, a ring I had assigned to Vivian after our last phone call.

“And that schooling will have to wait,” I said. “I have to take this.”

I excused myself from the poetry club.

“Hello,” I answered, “and good morning.”

“Holy shit, Leonardo,” was Vivian’s response. “Those pictures. Are those real?”

“Very real.”

“You’re serious? What happened? Did you call the police? Why haven’t you called me?”

“I’m serious. And you told me not to call you back, if you remember. You were very angry last night. I tried to call the police but they were called on me first.”

“What? Why?”

“Not important right now. But it’s all fine. I told them to check Jebediah’s room because of some suspicions I had. I didn’t come out and say, “I saw dead bodies in there,” because that would raise the whole issue of illegal entry and probable cause. But I said I heard something funny going on, and told them to check it out.”

“And?”

“And they found nothing.”

“Did you show them those pictures?” Vivian asked. “Oh my God, Leo. I had a nervous breakdown this morning when I got your email. I cried in the corner of my room for probably an hour before I could compose myself to go downstairs just to tell Rebecca and Jack we weren’t going to church.”

“The pictures won’t do any good. There’s nothing in them to prove it’s in Jebediah’s room, or that he has anything to do with it.”

“Well, what if he doesn’t have anything to do with it? What if it’s all that woman? What if she’s doing it without Jebediah’s knowledge?”

“I find that impossible, considering it was done while both of them were in the room. And they left together, without the girls. The cop said there was nothing in there when he went up. Said he didn’t see any bodies. What I find strange, though, is that last night, Jebediah and his tigress returned from their outing only a few minutes before the officer went to speak to them. That’s not enough time to cut up and dispose of three bodies, let alone clean up an entire bathroom of blood and guts.”

“So you don’t think he checked?”

“Probably not. He was zipping his pants when he came back to the lobby. My guess is Jebediah’s tiger friend gave him a quick something-something to get him to forget about the whole thing. And she could do it, believe me. She’s that beautiful. I mean, I’ve considered more than a couple times while I’ve been up here just forgetting about the case and getting lost in this woman’s sweet, sexual embraces. If I were fucking her, nothing else on this planet would matter.”

“Very professional, Mr. Lamborghini.”

“The point is,” I said, “there’s a good chance the bodies are still there. But if they’re not…”

“If they’re not? Then what?”

“Well, by now they’ve had an entire night to dispose of the bodies. That’s more than enough time. So they could be gone. But if they’re not, it’s possible they’re just hiding them somewhere. Holding them until they have a chance to get rid of them.”

“So they’d have disposed of them last night? You’re supposed to be watching him and keeping tabs on his every move. If he left with body parts, you should have seen that.”

“I didn’t do that last night. Instead, I drank more than I should have and blacked out. I did meet a nice cab driver, though, who I had a really nice talk with.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to know the money I’ve been giving you is going to good use, Leo.  Really, very professional of you. Where’s Jeb today? I assume you’re working now, and not just lounging around at the pool all morning.”

“Haven’t seen him. I’m at the workshop, but he hasn’t shown up. I’m undercover and on the prowl. Like a tiger.”

 “What about the woman? Have you seen her?”

“The tiger woman? No, I haven’t. I’m keeping my eyes peeled.”

“So what’s your plan?” Vivian asked. “What’s the next step in this great investigation?”

“I’ve been in the process of recruiting a sidekick. He’s a security guard, here at the hotel. His name is Ratfish and he knows this hotel like nobody’s business. I figure if anyone can be a good sidekick, it’s this guy.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Ratfish brings a lot to the table, Vivian. He’s street smart, or at least he seems like it by the way he talks.”

“Leonardo, all I’m worried about now is… I don’t even know. I just wanted to know if he was cheating so I could ask for a divorce. Now I’m afraid he might be a serial killer. If he is, what do I do? I don’t want the kids around him, I don’t want to be around him! I don’t want him back here. Something has to be done. And you, the worst possible person I can possibly imagine doing the job, are somehow going to take care of it? And now you’re working with someone named Ratfish? Fuck. If this isn’t all a very bad dream, I’m going to have another nervous breakdown, like right now.”

“Vivian, just relax. I can’t tell you how it’s gonna go, right now. It’s all in the air and it’s my job to bring it down to the fucking earth. I’ll find out more as I play it by ear, and I’ll be back in Chicago tomorrow. We can proceed from there.”

“Don’t get yourself hurt, Mr. Lamborghini. And though I know you think he’s guilty of murder, please, don’t let Jebediah get hurt.”

“I make no promises,” I said. “Goodbye.”

When I hung up, I saw the time on the phone. It was 10:50. Almost time for Ratfish to clock out.  I headed to the lobby.

Erilynne was at the desk, talking to guests and typing on a computer. I sat and waited for Ratfish to come by to clock out.

11 o’clock passed and there was no sign of Ratfish. Judging by his thuggish demeanor and overall adolescent attitude, he seemed to be the kind of guy who might show up to work late, up to an hour late, even, but not the kind of guy who would stay late. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d be eager to leave so he could go home to get high and lay down beats with his neighborhood rap troop.

I waited until 11:30 before asking Erilynne if she knew where Ratfish was. She said she hadn’t seen him since I’d walked outside with him in my drunken haze earlier that morning. She went to the far side of the front desk where a black book sat. She flipped it open and said it was the security log. It was where the security guards signed in, signed out, and detailed their shifts, including every round they made around the hotel’s property, and at what time they made it. She showed it to me. Ratfish had signed in for his shift at 10:55 pm, the night before. He’d finished a round at 11:20 pm, another one at 12:31 am, a third one at 1:44 am, and after that there was nothing.

“They do one shift an hour,” Erilynne said. “Guess he didn’t do anymore after that.”

“He’s usually good about his shifts?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. One every hour, really. Never misses them. Always comes and goes on time. I wonder where he is.”

He had three hundred dollars of mine, but that wasn’t enough to make him split. He could be fired for this and he knew it. Three hundred bucks wasn’t worth losing a job over.

“Earlier, your boss used a walkie-talkie to call Ratfish,” I said. “Can you call him?”

“What do you need him so bad for?” Erilynne asked. “He your boyfriend?” She laughed a  fat person’s tortured, wheezing laugh.

“Yes, he’s my boyfriend. Call him.”

Erilynne returned to the computer and pulled a black walkie-talkie from under the desk. She spoke into as she typed, requesting Ratfish to respond or to come to the lobby for security reasons. There was only silence for a minute.

Then Ratfish’s voice answered.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m… indisposed.” His voice sounded dull and weak, a little unsure, without the Flava Flav articulation that he seemed to be fond of. “I’ll be out… for a little while.”

A click came from the walkie-talkie.

“Sounds like he turned it off,” Erilynne said. “Nothing I can do now.” She got back to typing whatever highly important piece of shit it was she was writing.

“Guess this is a job for Leonard Lamb,” I muttered.

“What’s that?” Erilynne asked, like she couldn’t hear me.

“Leonard Lamb will take care of this,” I said.

“I can’t hear you. Forget it. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“I’d ask you to call me some back-up,” I said. “But I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

I walked to the elevator, entered, and waited for the doors to close. I pulled out my .45, chambered a bullet, and put it back in my holster. I hit the button for the 5^th floor. 

Chapter VI

Walking off the elevator, I thought back to my days on the force, before I was a detective, when I was just a Chicago beat cop with a firm dick for justice.  I worked the streets of Englewood for a short stint in the late 90’s. Saw some real shit, there. I soon realized this was because the entirety of Englewood was a deep abyss of shit and I merely acted as a lion tamer for a whole circus of shit lions who loved murder, robbery, and watching the world burn.  The unspoken rule in the police department in those days was, “Whatever happens in Englewood doesn’t really matter.” It’s like the neighborhood was quarantined away from the rest of the city, and the rest of the world. Sometimes you were convinced it was for a good reason until you found the occasional kid murdered for not obeying his prospective gang during initiation, or saw a family’s house burned to the ground for gang related reasons. You came to see that the innocent were frequent casualties in the abyss, and you wanted to get them out so you could nuke those shit lions who controlled the place. The reason gangs and scum thrived is because they had the innocent to feed on and to prevent their community from being firebombed to ashes. In a way, they kind of owed their lives to their victims.

It was while in Englewood I became known for something called Lamborghini roulette. A small variation on Russian roulette, Lamborghini roulette involves a fully loaded revolver. But it doesn’t involve suicide, it’s entirely homicidal in nature. A single armed man carries his loaded revolver into battle against a group of thugs who outnumber his bullets.

My partner at the time, William McKinley, Jr, no relation to the dead president, and I had just gotten off duty, one night, and stopped at a gas station to get some Pepsi or Coke. He was going to mix it with his whiskey that night, a technique I advised him against. But he never listened.  He didn’t bring his gun in with him because he had the idea that once you’re off duty you shouldn’t be carrying your gun around. I had a different opinion, and carried my gun everywhere I went, on duty or off.

It’s not unheard of for a gang to hit a gas station as a group, overpowering the cashier, ransacking the entire place, and running off with thousands of dollars in their hands, and hundreds more dollars worth in goods. They don’t even take guns most of the time, they don’t need them. Brute strength tends to do the job. I don’t know what they called it, but I called it gas station gangbang. This is what happened while I was waiting for Will to decide if Diet Pepsi would be a better choice than normal Pepsi, since he didn’t want to add  needless calories to his whiskey intake. The doors flew open and red-shirted thugs swarmed the store, as the cashier looked on in disbelief, but with a bit of silent resignation as he realized there was nothing he could do.

It’s also not unheard of for a gang, when comprised of a large number of rabid youths, to be unafraid of the police when they so greatly outnumber them, even when unarmed. Such was the case on that night. As they pulled their sweet and salty treasures from the aisles, hooting and hollering a storm of celebration and criminal triumph, I pulled my gun out and shouted over the roaring of twelve shit-lions that every motherfucker in the place had five seconds to drop everything and leave the store. If they ran out of the store without dropping their items, I added, I’d follow them and end their lives right on the sidewalk.

The thug parade boasted loudly that I'd be unable to do much to them, as there were far more of them than there were shots in my six-shot revolver.

“You outnumber my bullets greatly,” I said, with a loudness, letting my gun sway as I pointed it around the store. “This is true. Six bullets and twelve of you. But who of you wants to die, tonight? I can end six lives before you know what’s happened. Half of you will fall, the other half may reach me to kill me and my partner.”

Will voiced his displeasure at this with a what the fuck?, as the gang became quiet.

“It’s a game of chance, see,” I continued, with less loudness but still the impetuous grace of a madman. “You’ve got a 50/50 chance of life or death, friends. And trust me, these rounds will end your life the way I shoot them. I don’t miss. As a gang you can win. As individuals, half of you will lose.”

No one said a word. They had, by now, stopped stuffing their pockets with treats, and had pulled their hands away from the cash register. All eyes and ears were on me.

“Who will attack first?” I shouted. “Will it be you?” I pointed the gun at the thug closest to me, a kid no older than seventeen or eighteen, with a red dew rag on his head, and a gold chain dangling from his neck. His eyes got big and he said nothing.

“Or maybe you, up there, by the cash register!” I said, pointing the gun toward the front of the store.

All were frozen, and I could see the consideration in their eyes as each of them glanced around the store, at one another. They silently questioned who should take bullets so that the two cops could be killed. Everyone knew it should be someone else, not them. They knew if they attacked us they had a fifty percent chance of getting shot. And that was only if everyone attacked. The odds of being shot increased if some of their comrades fled. The looks on their faces seemed to say they questioned the allegiance of their fellow gangsters, and perhaps, even, doubted their own allegiance when it came time to die for the others.

Under heavy moans of failure and defeat, the thugs waddled out of the store and into the parking lot, with empty hands and broken spirits.

We didn’t make any arrests that night. By the time back-up had arrived the Bloods were gone. But Will told the story of my gas station face-off to everyone back at the station, and it became a tale of legendary triumph. The tactic, if it could be called that, was henceforth known as Lamborghini roulette. I’d use it a number of times throughout my career, only once having to actually fire my gun after the cards were on the table. Calling it roulette really didn’t make sense, but we didn’t care. Any game of odds  to us was a game of roulette.

I didn’t imagine I’d have to resort to Lamborghini roulette in the Pickety Stix Hotel, since my .45 held twelve rounds, and I carried another clip in my jacket pocket. That should have been enough for Jebediah and his mistress and any surprises they could have pulled. But as I walked toward room 512 my blood boiled the same way it did every time I found myself throwing down the odds in the gamble of my namesake, and I was hyper-aware of my gun’s presence, tight against my ribs.

The door to 512 was in front of me. I stalled for a moment to decide if I should have my gun drawn or let it remain in its holster. It’d been a while since I’d been in a firefight, but I felt my reflexes were sharp enough to pull the fire from my jacket if need be.          

Toccata & Fugue in D Minor rang out at full volume as I was about to knock on the door, blaring from inside my pants, vibrating my thigh, and ruining my perfectly crafted stealth approach. I ducked my head below the peep hole on the door, and rushed to the stairwell to hide. I pulled out my phone, silenced it, and answered it quietly.

“Vivian, can’t talk now. Trying to rescue Robin.”

“What? Who’s that?”

“Ratfish, I mean. Not a good time.” I nudged open the stairwell door to peek out, and saw the door to 512 open. The tiger mistress stepped out and looked down the hall, then in my direction.

“Mother of shit!” I whisper-yelled, ducking back into the stairwell. “Bye, Vivian.” I hung up, and stood up. I could hear the tiger mistress’s footsteps coming toward me.

 The stairwell door opened and the sexiest woman in all of New York City stood there, wearing a dress with the patterns of nonexistent animals on it, like a leopard’s spots, but black on red instead of black on yellow.

“Hi,” I said, straightening my tie. “I’m looking for a daughter. Looking for my daughter. You seen her? She’s a girl. ‘Bout this high.” I held my hand out, lower to the ground than I meant to, unintentionally indicating my daughter was a midget or three years old.

“You just can’t stay away, huh?” she said, grinning, her voice like an orchestra of flutes.

“Your dress looks like a bloody leopard, you know.”

“Your suit looks like a comic book drawing.”

My feelings were hurt but I didn’t let it show. “Well, I should get going. Nice running into you again.” I walked forward but she didn’t budge. I was ready to let our bodies touch.

She looked down the hall, then back to me, and pushed me into the stairwell wall.

“Let’s stay in here for a moment,” she said. Then she grabbed me and pulled herself to me. And our lips locked in the most unexpected and most desired French kiss of my life. Tongues wrestled in oceans of spit, lips hugged like Eskimos grappling loved ones in a blizzard to keep warm, and on occasion our teeth clicked and our noses collided. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever made mouth-love with.

She pulled her head away, giggling, and then dove in for seconds. The phone in my pocket began vibrating, and she rubbed herself against it, moaning into my mouth as we shared the mechanical quaking of my loins. My tigress, now a leopardess, didn’t know it was the wife of the man she was staying with who provided her these sensual vibrations below the belt. But I knew, and I smiled on the inside. Vivian’s banter could wait.

She put her arms on my shoulders, but soon she was letting them wander down my sides. The gun in my jacket, like the gun in my pants, was large and bulging, and ran the risk of ruining the entire stairwell French kiss experience. My arms were wrapped around her, and my hands found themselves drifting to the bottom of her skirt, which wasn’t much lower than her butt cheeks. It caused her to pull her hands quickly to mine, grab them, and shake her head slowly, with a Succubus’s smile.

“Let’s take this elsewhere,” she whispered.

“Guide me, vixen of the wild hands,” I said.

“Come,” she grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the stairwell, toward her room.

This was it. The only thing I’d cared about doing since I saw this untamed beauty at McDonald’s was on the verge of becoming a reality. I wanted to spray breath freshener into my mouth. I wanted to wax my chest, for fear she was a modern woman unimpressed by manliness. I wanted to put on deodorant. There were things I wanted to do, or have already done, but it was too late. The dam of lust had burst, and the river of passion was flowing hard and free with no time for enhanced hygiene.

The interior of the room was just as I remembered it. The music in my head was a steady, pulsating beat of electronic kick drums, with moody Moog synthesizer riffs sprinkled on top. A funky bass line played with prodigious string plucking like only a mind’s ear can fathom was the tune’s real focus, and played me to readiness.

She told me to make myself comfortable, then walked into her bedroom. I took the opportunity to check out the bathroom in the other room. Turned on the light, pulled the shower curtains back, and nothing was there. The bathtub was empty and spotless. If I hadn’t known any better, I wouldn’t have guessed three dead women had lied bloody and mutilated in the immaculate porcelain tub just a day earlier. How do two people of non-phenomenal size get three full-sized dead women out of a hotel in secrecy? While my brain played through a list of questions to the funky jams that still drifted through my head, I searched the bathroom for chemicals. Lye, hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, or sulfuric acid, anything that could dissolve a human body. Nothing. I left the bathroom and did a quick search of the bedroom. In the closet, nothing. In the dresser, nothing. Two suitcases sat by the bed. The amount of chemical needed to dissolve a body wouldn’t fit in a container small enough to fit in a suitcase. I didn’t have time to check. The beauty of animal-printed clothing was calling for me.

“Hi,” I said, walking out of the bedroom. “Sorry. Had to freshen up.”

She looked me over with starving eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was the way a sexually deprived lust machine looks over a pleasure granter, or the way a hungry lioness looks over a wounded animal. I didn’t feel wounded, so I hoped for the former. But I was in the lion’s den, so my guess was it was some combination of the two. The door to her room was closed. Were the bodies in there? Was Ratfish in there?

“Let me make you a drink,” she said, walking to the refrigerator that didn’t adorn the lower class rooms like mine. “What’s your name?”

“Lamb,” I blurted. “Leonard Lamb. Shaken, not stirred.”

She looked at me like the idiot I was.

“Ice, I mean. I’ll have ice. On the rocks, I mean. What are you making?”

“What do you want?” She opened the freezer to a myriad of liquors, brown, clear, blue, green, and yellow. It was the refrigerator of Motley Crue.

I wanted to find Ratfish. I wanted to find three dead girls, or evidence thereof. I wanted to send Jebediah Black to hell and get lost in sexual exploration with this woman. “I’ll have a whiskey,” I answered.

She handed me a short glass of whiskey, my eyes never straying from her hands as she prepared the drink. I took a sip. Nice. It chilled my tongue and warmed my throat. The bottle went back in the freezer and she went to sit on the couch.

“You’re not having one?” I said.

“I don’t drink.”

I took another sip. “That’s right. So all that alcohol is for your man friend.”

She nodded.

“What’s he do, anyway? He’s working at the workshop, right?”

She nodded. “He’s very busy down there, all day. He works with writers and artists to make their work shine. He markets them.”

I nodded. I took another drink. “And you? You said you work with him. Why are you always up here?”

“I work from the room,” she said. She put out her hand and signaled for me to join her on the couch. I was helpless to resist.

“It’s a nice room,” I said, sitting beside her, my charisma flexing its muscles soaked in fresh whiskey. “I bet it gets lonely all day.” My words were sexual venom.

“It’s true. So,” she began to pull a strap of her dress down over her shoulder, “very,” with her other hand she began undoing my tie, “lonely.”

I took another drink. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Odette,” she said, lust dripping from her tongue.

I set my empty glass down on the table beside the couch, stood up, and in a move perfected by years of practice, I removed my jacket, removing with it my gun and holster in the process, unseen by Odette’s eyes. I threw them into a chair and sat back down next to Odette.

“That name’s French,” I said, pulling her into me for a kiss named in honor of her people. They weren’t her people, I could tell by her flawless American dialect. But some part of her, even if only in spirit, was French. And we were going to act like it.

Her dress slid down her legs until it was a small red leopard pile on the floor, and the rest of my threads found themselves in similar piles.

Outside it was only noon, but in that hotel room it was the middle of the night, where a storm of passion created thunder and lightning between our exposed flesh. Volcanoes erupted lava into the sky to heat swirling clouds, and rain fell to drench us while our erogenous zones took on lives of their own. Messages from distant galaxies tackled our neural pathways in a cosmic play of sensation and wonder, and our hands were pilgrims on the other’s holy body. Things got wet very fast and they stayed that way, because that dampness, that moist, sexual energy was a glue that kept us attached like two choreographed dancers in the performance of a lifetime.

“Choke me!” she screamed. I choked her, and her body tensed. We tensed together.

“Harder!” she screamed. I did it harder. “Again!”

Gods of Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian mythology looked down on us in adoration, inspecting our primordial lust. Eros, god of love, entwined us together as Uranus and Gaia, sky and earth, to create the world. We united fire and ice in the great chasm of Ginnungagap to create Ymir. We emerged the pyramid mound Benben from Nu, the lifeless waters of chaos, to give the world life. Ra came from the mound to give the world light. Things were going exactly as I thought they would.

We lied sprawled on the floor after our engagement came to an end in dual carnival climax. Furniture was knocked over, and our bodies wore the burns of carpet.

“You’re sure he’s not your husband? Boyfriend?” I asked, standing up.

“Quite sure,” Odette said. Her neck was red where I squeezed her, and her peach body was glistening in the sun that came through the window. I wondered if mine was doing the same. I didn’t bother to look.

“I need to use the bathroom,” I said. I walked toward the closed door of her room.

“Wait,” she sprung up, breasts bouncing like gifts to my eyes, and rushed toward me. “Use the other bathroom.” She pointed to the room at the other end.

 “That bathroom’s disgusting,” I said. “Your friend must have had too much to drink last night.”

Odette gave me a puzzled look. “It should be fine. You can’t use my bathroom.” Her voice had gone from sexual goddess to angry witch in seconds.

I didn’t like her sudden inhospitality, but I knew what it meant. I continued on my path and tried to open the door. It was locked. A look of relief came to Odette’s face.

“I’ll get you another drink,” she said, running to the fridge.

“I think I’ll get going,” I said, looking at my wrist where a watch would have been. “Plenty of work to do around here.”

“Oh no, you can’t do that. Stay a while. Have another drink.” She pulled another glass out and filled it with whiskey. Her eyes shot back to me as she prepared it. The look of feigned lust was gone. Now there was anxiety.

“No, I really should be going.” I picked through my clothes on the floor by the couch. As I slipped on my first sock, something wrapped around my neck from behind and pulled tight, choking me. It dug into my skin, I could feel it beginning to penetrate the flesh. I fought  at it, pulled at the hands that held it tight. There was no sound. I couldn’t gasp out, I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t get a hold of the hands behind my neck. I reached behind me and felt a sweaty scalp of long hair, a familiar scalp I’d known with intimate touches just minutes before. She wanted another go? I wasn’t in the mood. I pulled the hair and arched my back. The device around my neck dug further into my skin, my heart raced, and the body behind me struggled in tense violence to maintain a grip. As I battled against the sweaty body I dragged us toward a wall. Arching my back once more, I pulled at the long hair and crushed the sweaty body behind me into the wall. The noose around my neck didn’t loosen. Again, I slammed the body into the wall. I ripped hair from her head. I  slammed it into the wall again and again and again. Then I could breathe. A thin wire fell from my neck and landed by my feet.

I turned to see Odette jump to her feet and run toward the kitchen. I chased her, grabbed her again by the hair and threw her to the floor. She dug her fingernails into my face as I threw a fist into hers, then another. She screamed, cursed, and spit on me. I pinned her arms down, and she brought her legs into the air, wrapped them around my neck and pulled me to the ground. She sat up  with my neck in a stranglehold. She brushed the hair out of her eyes and tightened her legs around me. She reached for the wire, but a kick to her jaw sent her toppling from her balance, and I took in another much needed breath. Odette crawled quickly toward the wire and I kicked her in the ribs. She cried out and collapsed. I picked up the wire, felt my neck. Blood was trickling down my  body. My neck had been sliced but it wasn’t severe. We liked sex rough, but something told me this wasn’t leading to sex.

Odette stood quickly and ran into the unlocked bedroom. I chased her. She threw open a suitcase on the bed, pulling out a small revolver. I elbowed her in the back of the head, sending her face first onto the mattress. The gun flew from her hands, and I climbed on her back and wrapped the wire around her neck. She struggled, but I pulled it tight, holding her body down with my weight, and pinning her arms down with my knees.

After less than a minute of struggling Odette was unconscious. I fell off her body and let go of the wire. Her neck was cut like mine. Both of our bodies were red with my blood, and drenched in enough sweat to hydrate a cheerleading squad. I felt sorry for the hypothetical cheerleaders who would drink our sweat.

I took the revolver from the floor and walked out of the room, into the miniature kitchen where a glass of whiskey was waiting for me. I drank it in one tilt of my head and slammed the glass on the counter. I wouldn’t have much time before Odette woke up. I returned to my pile of clothes and put on my second sock. A slight commotion came from behind me. I turned my head to the open room, and Odette stumbled out, knife in hand. It was a long blade and would easily pierce every organ in my body if given the chance.

No words were exchanged, and Odette ran at me with the knife in the air, ready to bring it down onto my head or my heart. As she flew in close, I dropped to the ground, kicked her in the knee and sent her falling into a chair, knife still in hand. I jumped on her from behind, grabbed the back of her head with one hand, her jaw with the other, and in one fluid motion broke her neck. I let go of her head and she fell limp to the floor. I stood up, wiped her blood off of my hands onto my stomach. She was dead.

I’d never killed a woman. I’d never killed someone with my bare hands. I’d never killed a naked person. I’d never killed someone while I was naked. This was a day of firsts. These weren’t the experiences I expected during my stay in New York, but I’ve found that New York doesn’t respect one’s expectations.

Wearing only socks, my body covered in my and Odette’s blood, my neck and face bleeding rather freely, I dragged the dead woman’s body through the hotel, to the open room, and dumped her in a closet. Already I was tampering with a crime scene, a major offense. But it wasn’t the first time. This was the kind of thing that got one discharged from the police force. I justified it to myself. I wasn’t hiding a murder, I was hiding a case of self defense that would make my job as a private investigator a great deal more difficult if it were to be discovered.

I rinsed myself as well as I could in the bathroom and got dressed. Then I broke into the locked bedroom.

Ratfish’s head jolted up to greet me, but since he was bound to a chair and gagged, he didn’t say anything.

“My God, man,” I said. “Thought I might find you here.” As I stepped closer, I saw his face was bruised, and his shirt was gone. He’d been cut up all over his chest and arms, and judging by the blood on the floor, he’d undergone some unpleasant hours at the hands of Odette and Jebediah.

I removed a ball gag from his mouth.

“Lamborghini,” he muttered.

I untied the binds that held him to the chair. “The fuck happened, Ratfish?”

He didn’t answer. I removed all of his bindings and helped him slowly stand.

“We need to leave,” he said, his voice indicating how drained and abused he’d been.

I looked around the room and saw a table covered in knives, clamps, saws, and other tools of torture and murder, some covered in blood, some still clean.

“Let’s not leave anything behind,” I said. “You need to get anything out of here?”

Ratfish pointed to the corner of the room where a tripod with a camera sat, aimed at his chair.

“Right,” I said. I grabbed the camera. “Did you have a shirt when you came in here?”

He nodded.  “Gone now. Let’s go.”

We came off the elevator, Ratfish’s arm slung around my shoulder, and I helped him limp to the front desk. The anti-smoking misanthropic bitch was working.

“Ratfish,” she said without worry, more an air of I-care-because-I-guess-I-have-to, “what happened?” She gave me eyes like I was the one responsible.

“Call the police,” I said. “That’s 911.”

She didn’t move, and stared at Ratfish.

“No,” Ratfish said. “No police.” He looked at me with a fire behind his pupils. I knew the look. I could have predicted the next words he’d say, but I didn’t need to. There was no time. “It’s between us. We gonna end these motherfuckers. Right?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You could be my son for saying that.”

Ratfish signed away on the security logbook. He wrote the summation of his night as, “nothing out of the ordinary.” He time stamped it as 11 o’clock.

We went to my room.

“Here’s a shirt,” I said. I threw him my Hawaiian shirt. “Keep it. Now’s as good a time as any to let you know. Odette, the girl with Jebediah, she’s dead.”

“That’s what  all that noise was?” he said. “Cunt. Rotten, fucking cunt.”

“Jebediah’s the only one left. Not sure what we’ll do about that.”

“Kill him,” Ratfish said, without pause. “Mercilessly.”

“ I don’t know. This is complicated. I’m only supposed to be watching him. Now I’ve killed his ladyfriend. And what the fuck happened to you? How’d you end up in there?”

“Ya don’t remember, man? That’s fine. Knew ya wouldn’t. Last night I talked to you about your offer. I said I was gonna help you with your investigation. You were drunk as fuck, but gave me everything you had and told me the plan.”

“I figured this was on me.”

“It is.” Ratfish glared at me. “Ya said I needed to be your eyes on the inside. You wanted me to find out where those dead girls were, so you said to go to their room frequently to bring them room service. I ain’t even room service, and I told you that, and you said I could play the part. You said solving crime was all about acting.”

“It is.”

“You said I oughtta try to get into their room any way I could. Like, if I had to bring some food in or some shit, then I should do that. Every time I went up there they told me to get lost. I brought wine, mashed potatoes, Coke, all sorts of shit. I went to your room but you weren’t there. I saw you walking around the hotel looking for a swimming pool. Told you I had no luck so you demanded I give the money back, and I was like, wait, wait, I’ll try one more thing. So I used my key to get into their room after I was sure they were asleep. That motherfucker, that Jebediah guy, comes storming out of his bedroom with a police baton or something like that and starts beating me in the head. When I wake up I’m tied to that chair. Him and that bitch start cutting me, hitting me, asking me questions. Watch the fuckin’ video. They recorded that shit.”

I’d set the video camera next to my computer and empty bottles of whiskey. I picked it up to examine it, to see if I could plug it into the TV.

“They know about you, man,” he said. “I’m sorry, bro. I told them everything. They know you’re a private investigator from Chicago. They know you’re working for his wife.”

“He knows,” I corrected him. “The girl’s dead. Please don’t call me ‘bro.’”

“Jebediah and her ain’t the only ones. Someone else is in on this. And you were right. They’re killing people. I saw the bodies. I was up next.”

“Who’s working with them? Someone from the workshop?”

“Don’t know, I never saw the other person. I heard them talking to someone else, though. Out in the main room of their suite. Jebediah left right before you came in. They had a trap set for you. I told him you liked whiskey. I’m sorry. I just wanted to get out of there. I thought if I told them enough they’d let me go and I’d come tell you everything. So they poisoned the whiskey.”

“They what?”

“They knew you liked whiskey. The girl said she’d have no trouble getting’ you in the room and givin’ you a drink. The plan was to kill you.”

I didn’t feel poisoned. I felt a little tipsy, nothing serious.

“Good thing you didn’t drink.”

“I had two drinks,” I said. “And I feel fine.”

“Maybe we shoulda called 911, after all.”

I pulled the revolver out of my pocket. I opened the cylinder to see it was loaded, and handed it to Ratfish.

“Well, if I die anytime soon, I want you to take this and shoot Jebediah Black in his face. Hold onto it. I’ve got my own.” I pulled open my jacket to show Ratfish my .45. He grinned his Ratfish grin.

“Alcohol’s already poison,” I said. “Maybe that’s what he-“ then I puked on the floor, without warning. Then again. The stream of vomit didn’t cease until my insides were empty. And even then, a couple muscle spasms pushed for more outpouring of my stomach’s contents. It felt like my stomach was on fire, my guts were melting with horror, ripped open by a sour venom’s punch. I stood bent over the puddle of puke.

“You think maybe that’s the poison?” Ratfish asked. “Seems kinda like it could be.”

I glared at him, and spit once more on the ground. “You said they videotaped your torture? Let’s put that on. Kind of interested it seeing it.”

The video was almost an hour long, and started with Ratfish being tied to the chair. Jebediah walked away from the camera as Odette finished fastening Ratfish in. She walked in circles around him while Jebediah stood in front of him, speaking to him. Ratfish would nod in response to a few questions, shake his head in response to others. The gag was taken out of his mouth from time to time so he could speak, but the video was too quiet to hear what he said. Odette showed the tools of torture to Ratfish through the beginning of the video, before finally putting them to use about twenty minutes in. She cut his arms and legs, stabbed him with small knives on the ears and the cheeks. Jebediah delivered powerful blows to Ratfish’s head on occasion, and a number of times kicked him so hard that the entire chair fell over and he had to be picked back up.

The video cut out in  the middle, and when it started again, sunlight poked in through the windows. Ratfish was still in the chair, and Odette and Jebediah continued to question him and hit him. At one point, Jebediah held a  knife to Ratfish’s throat while Odette whispered into his ears. Toward the end of the video, Jebediah picked up his cell phone and walked out of view of the camera. The video ended with Odette turning off the camera.

“The girls they killed,” Ratfish said, “they’re in bags. They cut them up. They cut one girl to pieces right in front of me.”

“Looks like we’re about to become the thing I’ve always wanted to be, Ratfish.”

“What’s that?”

“Vigilantes. I just need to figure out how to break it to Jebediah’s wife that her husband won’t be coming home. And that reminds me.” I pulled out my phone. A message was waiting from Vivian. “She left me a message.”

 I played the message.

“Leonardo, pick up your phone.” Panic was in her voice, but this was nothing new.  “Jebediah knows you’re following him, he knows your name, and  he’s going to kill you. He knows everything. When he gets to Chicago he’ll be looking for me. I’ve taken the kids to my mother’s. Answer your phone, Lamborghini. Call me back”.

“Hmm,” I said, setting down my phone. “Might be easier to break it to her than I thought.” I ripped a paper towel from a roll in the kitchen and threw it on the mess of on the floor. “Alright, Ratfish. You’re no longer my inside eyes. You can’t be. Jebediah knows you. He knows your face. But he still doesn’t know mine. We have to rework this whole thing.”

“Hold up, yo,” Ratfish said. “I’m down to kill this motherfucker. I am. But I’m fuckin’ sore, I’m fuckin’ tired. I need to get home. My girl Chocolate’s probably worried about me.”

“When can you be back? We need to work fast.”

“Later. Evening, probably. Trust me dog, I’m ready to kill him. I ain’t backin’ out on you.”

“He leaves tomorrow morning,” I said. “Hurry back. And give me the gun.”

“Aw, man. You serious? Can’t I just-“

“The gun or the money,” I said.

“Fuck man. Already got kidnapped, tortured, stabbed, almost killed. That’s worth a fuck load more than three hundred bucks. I’m keepin’ the gun.”

“Get some rest, pal,” I said. He was right. He’d been through a lot.

Ratfish left, and I closed the door. I stepped over the puddle of vomit on the floor and sat on the bed. I took out my phone, clicked on Jebediah Black.

Hey JB. Still waitin 4 u. I typed. Tongue’s all wet. Want head? Then I decided to think of a plan.

Chapter VII

          The summer after I graduated high school  I was eighteen and dating the fourth girl I’d asked to prom. Her name was Bernadette. After prom she had let me drink vodka out of her ears, so I made her my girlfriend. She’d applied to a number of colleges around the country, and spent the summer working at a boutique. Also as a waitress, secretary, and shoe making intern.

I didn’t apply to college and spent the first month of summer wondering what I’d do with my life before making it as a poet. My dad was dead and we had to sell his tugboat to keep the family afloat. My mom pushed me to find a job but my poetry wasn’t just going to write itself. A real job would only have interfered with my dream.

          Bernadette’s dad had a boat, and every weekend we’d take it out on the lake and get high until it the sun went down. One night in early July we were experimenting with alcohol and other drugs teens are supposed to dabble in, cruising around Lake Michigan under a light rain. I pulled a poem out of my shorts, something I’d been working on since the last week of school. Coming off my boom box was a song from the mixed tape I’d made, “Caribbean Queen” by Billy Ocean. I got Bernadette’s attention by throwing one of her shoes at her head, which missed and went into the water. As she started to yell at me I began reading my poem. It was about her. It was an outpouring of my teenage heart, glowing emotional expression and sensual eruptions as only a young boy could write. It was a total coincidence, but right as I read the line of my poem that mentioned our hearts beating as one, Billy Ocean sang his line of Caribbean Queen about two hearts beating as one. It must have come off as insincere.

          Already skeptical of my dream to become a professional poet, Bernadette scoffed at the poem. I continued reading and she continued scoffing. It was a war of recital and scoff, a lover’s quarrel on the high seas. Then she laid into me with anger at my laziness and worthlessness. Get a job, she said. Stop writing garbage, she said. Do something with your life, she said. You’re untalented, she said. My poetry hadn’t caused the response I was looking for. We broke up on the boat that day and I had to take us back to the marina while rain beat my face and soaked my hazy eyes. But I didn’t go home. I watched Bernadette walk away from the marina. With the boom box under my arm, still high and a little drunk, I stole a jet ski.

Having only the money in my wallet, a boom box, the shorts on my ass, the sleeveless shirt on my back, and the Reebok Pumps on my feet, I jetted north on Lake Michigan. Crepuscular rays shined down from the clouds as the sun crept toward the horizon to my left, and the waves sent me airborne as I hit them with full jet ski speed. Billy Ocean crooned to me while I sped over North America’s very own ocean.

Fuck Bernadette, I told myself. And fuck everything. I was free.  I’d take my new jet ski to Canada to start a new life as a woodsman poet, living off the land and the lake, climbing trees and sleeping in dirt. The wind and water in my face at full throttle was a thrill unlike anything I knew at the time. It was better than sex with Bernadette, it was better than fighting the kids in my neighborhood. It was even better than my friend Newt’s motorcycle which I rode only once because I took it off a small cliff and got a concussion. I was a jet ski man. This would be my life.

An hour and a half later I ran out of fuel. I saw the coastline but it was distant. It looked like there was a town, but only after three hours of paddling through the night did I reach it. I’d made it to Racine, Wisconsin. My heart still full of angst and post-breakup carelessness, I didn’t want to sleep. Being hungover and exhausted from hours of paddling, my body was in no shape to argue with my emotions, so fatigue won. I left my jet ski by a rocky coast and slept by the front door of a place called Pugh Marina.

Yelling and a kick to my ass woke me up. After I explained my situation to the owner of the marina he sold me some gas and suggested I go home. I said that’s where I was going. I bought an extra jug of gas and some candy and hit the waves. I continued heading north.

By the time I’d run out of gas again and depleted the extra jug I figured I must be pretty close to Canada. It was almost noon and I’d eaten all the candy I could stomach. My face and arms were sunburned and I was ready to start my life as a woodsman poet. My head was full of poems, I just needed the woods. I’d made sure to stay close to the coast this time. There were trees but nothing constituting a forest. There were also houses. I was surprised, as I never imagined they had houses in Canada. I thought bricks and electricity hadn’t made it that far north.

I paddled to the shore and walked through the small town a couple miles. Its quaintness did bring to mind Canada, but I couldn’t be sure where I was. Hours on the turbulent lake had done a number on my stomach. The hangover and the candy hadn’t helped. I puked a couple times on the side of the road. It wasn’t until I met a man in a convertible who stopped to laugh at my sunburn and ask if I needed a ride to a hospital that I discovered I was in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. It was then I decided to give up on my woodsman poet dream, and asked for a ride to Chicago. He laughed at me and went on his way.

When I returned to my jet ski, police were towing it out of the water and dusting it for fingerprints. Hungover, sick, sunburned, and angry, I ran over and asked them what they were doing with my property. That was the first time I went to jail. The handcuffs hurt my sunburned wrists so bad during the car ride I puked all over the back seat until nothing came up but air.

What I learned from my jet ski adventure was that risks are worth taking, and things aren’t always as they seem, and responsibility is overrated, and laws exist. I also learned Lake Michigan was a fuck of a lot bigger than I thought.

As I dry heaved into the sink of my hotel room I was reminded of my ride in the Manitowoc police car. When I closed my eyes I felt as if I were on that jet ski again, speeding over the wild waves of Lake Michigan. I decided it was the poison giving me this sensation.

When the puking stopped I stumbled out of the bathroom shirtless and sweaty, and collapsed on the bed.  A towel soaked in cold water and my blood was wrapped around my neck. My head throbbed with a dull pain. A glass beside the bed was still full with water. I drank it, my fifth glass of water in the past half hour. Most of it just came back up within minutes. When I was sure I wasn’t going to throw up anymore water, I put my shirt back on, pulled my arms through my gun sling, threw my coat on over it, and set my sunglasses slowly over my eyes. Then my hat. I stuffed the gun into the holster and slipped my shoes on. With slow and calculated steps I left my room.

Sweat soaked my hat and poured down my face as I walked through the crowd at the WCW workshop. My collar was drenched. I loosened my tie and was tempted to remove my jacket. The feel of my gun reminded me to keep it on. This was a mistake. I could feel gurgling violence boiling in my guts, ready to unleash itself into the sea of people. Focusing on my next objective was almost impossible. Every face I looked into reminded me I was  worse off than they were. It was like someone had magnified the symptoms of the flu and injected them straight into my brain. I noticed members of the hotel staff walking around with trays of cheese and meats, so I took what I could in handfuls as they walked by, and shoved it into my mouth in hopes food would somehow help the water dilute the poison. But the violence within my guts didn’t want to subside. The music that normally played in my head was now a somber, dismal melody played by piano, or violin. It was downbeat and so was I.

“Excuse me,” a timid voice said behind me, as someone tapped on my shoulder. I spun around to see a redheaded teenage boy.

“Yes?” I said, trying my best not to sound sickly and on the verge of death. “Oh, you.”

“I just wanted to thank you for standing up for me earlier today,” the boy said. “My name’s Harrid.”

“Harrid? Really?”

“Yes. I came to the workshop to work with a poetry group, but Michelangelo and his friends weren’t very accepting of my work.”

“I wasn’t standing up for you, I was standing up for poetry. Fuck that hurricane-haired shit-eater. Michelangelo Maserati. What a shit name.” I felt sicker just picturing the guy in my head. “But glad you got something out of it.” I turned around and continued walking with a slow, struggling gait.

My shoulder was tapped again. I spun around slower.

“You said you write comics?” Harrid asked.

A woman carrying a tray of small sausages with toothpicks stuck through them walked past. I stole a couple, stuffed the sausage in my mouth, and shook my wet head at Harrid.

“Not anymore. I’m done with that. I write poems and-“ I briefly caught my breath so I wouldn’t puke. “And… reports.”

“Will you take a look at my poems? Michelangelo is the first person I’ve shown them to. He hated them. I need another poet’s opinion.”

I felt sorry for the kid, but I was in no shape to be reading poetry. Maybe the professional stuff, but not amateur rubbish.

“Not now, kid. Sorry. I’m on business and really need to find someone.” I wiped the sweat off my face and pulled at my collar. I could feel blood.

“I have plenty of copies. Just take this.” Harrid handed me a few pages stapled together with poetry written on every side.

“Thanks.” I folded the poems and put them under my hat.

“My contact info is on the first page, should you want to talk about any of them with me. I fly back to Wisconsin tomorrow.”

“Okay, Harrid. I get it.” I tipped my hat to the boy and went on my way, drifting  through the tide of the human sea.

A table was aflutter with the musings of poets as I walked by, and another was a low rumble of young talent soaking in the knowledge of their elders, none of whom looked particularly famous to me. I pulled the sunglasses down my nose to peak over the top while looking for Jebediah. My mouth was dry and my face was wet. I kept a lookout for hotel staff carrying water.

I found myself once more standing next to the group of fifteen writers who hours earlier had been discussing adverbs and semicolons. By now, their pompous discussion had turned to naming conventions for primary and secondary characters of novels, and how to create utilitarian, purposeful behavior instead of natural and believable behavior. I hoped I hadn’t missed too much.

There were nearly full glasses of water at these writers’ table so I sat down and started drinking. They were too caught up in arguing to pay me any mind.

As the second glass of water emptied into my stomach, my phone rang. It was Benjy.

“Boss,” I answered, letting the glass fall over and roll away across  the table. “Have I got some things to tell you.”

“Lamborghini, bad news,” he said. He sounded angry.

“Mine might be worse, but go ahead.”

“Gilda and I didn’t make it to the lake. You weren’t around to drive us. Plus, turns out I was right. Ain’t no seahorses in the Great Lakes. We called a cab, had our nets all loaded up, then the driver tells us it’s preposterous to expect to find any fuckin’ seahorses out there. Gilda thinks maybe it’s because they’re winter animals and they hibernate in the summer. Either way, we didn’t go fishing.”

“I’m…” I paused, hoping to find the right words. “So sorry to hear that, Benjy. Really, I am.”

“Whattaya got, Leo? Tell me some news.”

“I’m no longer tracking a suspected adulterer. Now I’m tracking a murderer.” My guts rumbled. I needed to puke.

“And?”

“And holy shit, right?”

“Vivian called, told me everything. I’ll tell ya, Leo, that’s a hell of a thing to deal with. What’s next?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet. So, did you call to-“ the chair across from me slid back, and Harrid sat down. He waved, then started talking to the obnoxious writers arguing about character behavior.

“I just want to say you need to be careful, Leo. Not like last time. You still not using the MacGuyver disguise?”

“Last time was totally… was perfectly alright. The Russian mob really gets a bad rap.”

“But they’re big MacGuyver fans. You couldn’t have picked a worse alias.”

Two of the writers had turned to speak with Harrid. He handed them his poems to read. They appeared to take interest in his work.

“I’ve still got my legs, boss. It was alright. Did you call for a reason or you just want to update me on your seahorse expedition?”

“Were you listening? There was no seahorse expedition. I was hoping you’d have an update. Vivian’s terrified. Tells me she can’t get a hold of you.”

“I was busy. Got into something of a scuffle.” I gagged. I could feel my guts heaving their load upward, looking for escape. “Things are fine now.”

“What happened?” Benjy asked.

“Someone,” I whispered, “someone… died. I, uh… there was a casualty.”

“There was a fatality!”

“Well, yes, but Benjy, she attacked first. I defended myself.”

A familiar fat man teetered up to the table, behind Harrid, eating a piece of pink cake. Daniel Dubs, the literary agent. Still with his fucking cake. It was on his fingers and his lips. He bent over to say something into one of the writers’ ears, the one sitting next to Harrid. The one with the bald head, wearing a scarf in June.

I turned down the volume on my phone.

“What did you do afterward? You call the cops?”

“No Benjy,” I kept my voice low. “She’s been hidden.”

“What the fuck, Lamborghini? Hidden where?”

The behemoth literary agent waddled away, licking cake from his fingers. The bald man with the scarf and the man who reminded me of a totem pole stood up and exchanged some words with Harrid. He stood up and followed them.

“In a closet,” I said. I kept my eyes on Harrid and his two new friends. It looked like they’d taken him under their wings, and I hated their wings, their beaks, everything about them.

“A closet? What about evidence? Are you trying to get yourself arrested?”

My guts burned, my neck bled down my shirt, and my face was soaked in sweat.

“Sorry Benjy, something’s come up.” I hung up and vomited on the table. Burning hot liquid flew out my nose, I gagged, and sprayed another burst onto the floor. I could taste the meat and cheese as it left me. Keeping a low profile had never been easier. I looked up to see the rest of the writers at the table staring at me. Their conversation seemed to be over.

I tipped my hat to them and stumbled away.

“Someone’s had an accident,” I said to a hotel staffer as I passed, pointing backward.

I spotted Harrid and his two pompous asshole mentors getting on an elevator. They’re going to show him how to kiss, I thought. I pictured the bald man pulling the totem pole man closer with his scarf, lightly brushing Harrid’s face with it as their lips danced a Frenchman’s dance. I laughed and felt another quaking inside myself. I couldn’t see Jebediah anywhere. I passed the table I’d first spotted him at. He wasn’t there. I looked for Dubs but couldn’t see him. A man as large as Dubs is hard to miss.

I was worried Jebediah might have left. I checked my watch. It was a little past 4 pm. I decided to stop by the front desk to ask if Jeb had checked out.

“Mister Lamb,” came an unexpected and unwelcomed voice. “The man I was looking for!”

A hurricane-haired shit-eater was walking my way. Michelangelo Maserati held his hand out for a shake.

“It’s not a good time,” I said, pushing his hand away. I could feel my blood trickle down my chest. It was staining my shirt.

“Where you running off to?” he asked, with shit-stained teeth and fecal-scented breath. I wanted to knock him down.

“Was just hoping to dirty up my shoes with some dog shit, and here you are.”

“It seems we got off on the wrong foot, Mister Lamb,” he said, grinning a shit-farmer’s grin.

I looked at my feet. “Then let me use the right one.” I kicked him in the shin with my right foot and smiled. Had he been able to see under my sunglasses, he’d probably have seen my eyes come alive with vigor and excitement. Satisfaction.

He pulled himself away, winced in pain, but laughed it off. “Your temper never quits! Use that! That’s your fuel for writing! It’s a shame you won’t be focusing that emotion into your poetry.”

“Fuck off, already.”

Two blond women approached Michelangelo from behind, and he smiled as they started to touch him. Their beauty was unrivaled in that room, but they became less attractive to me for having Michelangelo’s hands on them.

“My friends and I must go,” he said, never letting his mouth of shit break from a smile. “It was nice to meet you again.” They walked away, and I heard one of the girls mention haikus. I was getting sick again.

My phone rang as I exited the workshop.

“Hi Vivian,” I answered.

“A fucking closet!” she screamed in my ear.

“Come again.”

“ You hid her in a closet? What’s going on? You’re fired. This job’s over. Drop it. Keep the money. I’m done.”

“Hold on. Self defense, Vivian. What’d Benjy tell you? She attacked me.”

“And you dumped her in a closet?”

“Well, I couldn’t flush her.”

“You disgust me.”

“It was Jebediah’s girlfriend. Tiger girl. She’s a murderer. What’s the big deal?”

“Oh, her?”

“Her.”

Vivian was silent for a moment. I heard her breathing but I was in no mood to make small talk.

“So I’ll be going now,” I said.

“No, wait. You need to call the cops. Get them to handle this.”

“Tried that. I told you.”

“You sound sick. Are you alright?”

“Just a little poison.”

“What?”

“That woman poisoned me. She tried to kill me. That’s why her body’s in a closet. I got your message, by the way. You happen to know if Jebediah’s still here?”

“I haven’t  talked to him since the message I left. You’re in danger. He wants you dead. I’ve never heard him talk like that. He sounded like the devil, Leonardo.”

“I kind of like the devil.” I coughed into my hand and noticed blood. “Oh, I’m coughing up blood, now.”

 “Get the fuck out of that hotel! Go to a hospital, call the police! Explain the girl, tell them it was self defense! Everything is fucked, now. You, me, my kids, we’re all in danger.”

“Only one in danger is Jeb,” I let out a little laugh, coughed up more blood. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of your husband.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know yet.” I hung up. Jebediah was probably still around, if he planned to kill me. I’d just have to be careful. I passed the front desk and stumbled down the hallway to my room. I threw the door open and rushed into the bathroom. The poison never quit. I dropped my gun and holster on the floor, and flushed my guts into the toilet, followed by desperate gulps from the sink. I started to think Vivian might be right about a hospital visit.

My room smelled awful, like rotten meat. I guessed it was a puddle of vomit I’d forgotten to clean up. The smell only made me feel worse.  I was dialing the hospital when my eyes caught sight of something in my bed.

A pool of blood stained the sheets, and a head sat against the headboard, facing the door. There was no body. I vomited again, but nothing came out. I fell to my hands and knees and heaved heated spits of fury into the ground. My head was light, I didn’t want to stand up. Minutes later I’d composed myself and stood up. I pulled off my sunglasses and looked closer. The head belonged to Harrid. His red hair was still combed, and his freckled face was vacant, glassy eyed, and lacking color.

It was definitely time to call the police. Boom, a knock at the door. My heart raced, and suddenly I didn’t know what to do. Throw a pillow over the head? Cover the blood with a comforter?

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Police. Please open the door.”

“My fuck,” I said. “What’s happened, Harrid? Um, I’m sorry, please give me a moment. What’s this all about?”

“Open the door.”

I looked through the eye-hole. Two cops stood outside. I kept the chain fastened and opened the door a crack.

“Something wrong, officers?”

“Oh, it’s you,” said Glanton. The other cop from the night before stood next to him. “Should have recognized the room number, I guess.”

“Please open the door,” said the larger cop. He eyeballed me up and down, clearly put off by my less than pristine condition.

“There’s a problem, right now. I – I can’t. Should I just come out there?”

“Sir,” Glanton said, “we’ve  received a report of a disturbance coming from your room. Witnesses say they saw you assault a young man.”

“No, that wouldn’t be me.”

The larger cop took off his hat. “I don’t trust a man who wears a hat!”

“I’m sorry?”  I was confused. I looked at Glanton. “Glanton, pal. I thought we were buds now. What happened?”

“Witnesses say they saw you abduct a young man by the name of Harrid MacArthur. He went missing from the William Carlos Williams writer’s workshop a little while ago. They say he left with you.”

“Oh, no. That’s a mistake. He left, but not with me. With two other writers. A bald man who wears a scarf in June, if you can believe it, and a man who looks like a totem pole.”

“Sir,” the larger man said. “This is what we were told.”

“Do I look like a totem pole to you?” I asked.

“You look like a liar with that hat on your head. Who wears a hat inside?”

“This is ridiculous. Is this a joke?”

“Do we look like we’re joking?” Glanton asked.

“Yes.”

“We’re not, I assure you.”

The larger man stuck his police baton in the door. “Don’t try to shut this door.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Is Harrid MacArthur in there with you right now?” Glanton tried looking past me.

“No. Just me. I’m a little bit sick.”

“We have witnesses who say you and Harrid sat at their table, got into a disagreement and left together. Another witness says he saw you assault Harrid in the hallway, and another party says they heard you and him shouting from your bedroom. Sir, if this is merely a romantic dispute you can let us know. But we still see it as assault.”

Who were these witnesses? “I met Harrid today. I don’t know the fucking kid! He left with two assholes I met earlier. I can’t tell you anything else.”

“What are you hiding from us?” the large cop asked, poking me with his baton. He knocked my hat off my head.

Harrid’s poems fell out from underneath, landing at my feet.

“Aha!” he shouted. The fat man stooped over and picked up the poems. “And what the fuck is this? Poems by Harrid R. MacArthur, huh? Open the door, that’s an order. You’re under arrest!”

“The fuck I am.” I slammed the door shut. I put my hat back on and ran to the window. The police kicked at the door. The hinges didn’t sound like they’d hold for long. “Someone’s framed me,” I shouted as they forced the door open. I opened the window. “How could you let this happen, Harrid?” His dead face didn’t say anything.

The door crashed open and the officers rushed in with their guns drawn. They saw Harrid’s head on my bed.

“And really, I can’t explain that yet,” I shouted, as I slipped out the window. “But it wasn’t me!” I ran off as they yelled at me.

I ran around the front of the hotel, through the parking lot, past the parked police car. I was already out of breath. My insides were at war. The cops ran around the corner, waddling  at mid-pace, guns drawn. Even these mammoth officers would be impossible to outrun in my condition. But I’d try. I ran across the street into crowds of pedestrians who were fine with the smell of garbage in their air. But the smell was only another obstacle for my body and my olfactory senses. Feeling close to death, I turned to look at the cops to gage my necessary speed. They were climbing into their cruiser. This would turn from difficult to impossible in a matter of seconds. I was ready to give up. I was thirsty again, feeling dehydrated and on the verge of collapse.

In an instant, an explosion filled my field of view, and the police car went up in flames, glass and metal and rubber flying through the air. Everyone within earshot screamed and ducked for cover. My ears rang, and the first thing I thought was terrorist attack. The look on every New Yorker’s face in the area said they thought the same. The orange fireball ascended to the sky, black smoke shortly following. When the remnants of the police cruiser crashed to the ground, they smoldered black, covered in flames. There was no sign of the officers.

Then I understood. This wasn’t a terrorist attack. I was supposed to be in that car. That explosion was meant for me. I poked my fingers into my ears as they rang, shook my head, then puked onto the sidewalk. No one seemed to notice. The burning police car stole the show. Then I passed out. The last thing to go into my ears was that wretched country music from the Pickety Stix Hotel.

Chapter VIII

         

When I awoke I wasn’t on the street. I was in a hospital. I checked my body. I was still in my clothes. Every time I wake up in a hospital I have to check. I don't mind nudity but I do hate hospital gowns. There was a tube going down my throat, and bandages were fastened to my neck. A nurse walked into the room, smiled at me, said, “Oh, you’re awake! How are you feeling?”

I couldn’t respond because of the tube.

The nurse said I’d been poisoned. This much I knew. She sat beside the bed and removed the tube from my throat, and told me an ambulance had been called for me because I appeared to be the only person hurt by the explosion—except for the police officers, who were dead. When the doctors in the emergency room couldn’t find any physical abrasions on my body besides the strangulation wounds on my neck, which shouldn’t have caused me to lose consciousness when I had, they gave me a blood test. Ethylene glycol was in my blood. A poison. In addition, they found traces of regular old style sipping alcohol. It appeared I’d been drinking some hard liquor, she said. This much I also knew. My stomach was pumped, she explained, and I seemed to be doing OK because alcohol is used to treat this kind of poisoning. Having had enough of it already inside me meant the poison wasn’t going to kill me. They’d administered a sodium bicarbonate solution intravenously as an additional measure. She said I was lucky to have passed out when and where I did since, judging from my clothes, I didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would seek medical attention. This nurse would have made a fine detective, and I told her that. She laughed and walked out of the room.

My senses seemed to be intact. No longer did I feel on the verge of death, or like I was walking through a slow-motion nightmare where my insides were at constant war. It was like I was at the very end of a month-long hangover, welcoming the dew drops of the first morning free of plagues. But a hint of intoxication seemed to settle in. I sat up in bed and felt for my gun. It was gone. Immediately I blamed New York City, not the hospital. New York is no bastion of personal freedom, I said to myself. But quickly I remembered  my gun was on the bathroom floor of my hotel room. My phone, my wallet, and my keys were also missing. This I blamed on the hospital.

An argument with a young nurse in the hallway led to the return of my possessions in a sealed plastic bag. “Check-out is around the corner,” he said. “Sorry for your troubles.”

I didn’t check out. I left in a hurry. The sun was setting, so I didn’t have time to waste talking about medical insurance and further treatment of my condition. Nothing In this part of Staten Island looked familiar, so I hailed a cab to take me to the hotel. I called Ratfish from the front seat.

“… and the car blew up. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in the hospital.”

“Goddamn, Mister Lamborghini!” said Ratfish. “You think there was a bomb in the cop car? You think Jeb put it there?”

“I’m certain it was a bomb. And it was meant for me. No way to tell if it was Jeb. He’s got others working with him. At least two or three people from the workshop. This ain’t as simple as I thought.”

“But why would they bomb the cops? That’s a sure way to bring more fuzz to the scene. And why would a buncha killers want cops swarming around?”

This was the first smart thing that had left Ratfish’s mouth in the two days I’d known him. He was right.

“You’re right,” I said. I nudged the taxi driver and asked him when we’d be there.

“Soon, man, soon…”

“Ratfish, I’m on my way to the hotel. Think you can meet me there?”

“You think they’ll still be hanging around?”

“Absolutely not. They’ll be at the airport’s my guess. Like you said, I’m sure the hotel’s swarming with cops.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“That’s where my gun is. Meet me in the parking garage, and bring your security badge.”

Ratfish met me by my car after sunset. A snarl was on his face, his  eyes gleamed with the light of revenge. This is what I wanted to see. The bruises on his face were covered by Band-Aids. Chocolate had patched him up alright.

“Brought it,” he said, holding out his security badge. I looked it over and handed it back to him. “And this, too.” He showed me the revolver I gave him. He was even wearing his security sports jacket. Ratfish’s head was in the game.

“You look like shit,” I said. Even with Band-Aids covering his bruises it was clear he’d taken some abuse.

“You ain’t lookin’ so hot, yourself.” Aside from the bandaging around my neck and the blood stains on my collar, I didn’t imagine I looked too bad.

“You noticed the police cars outside. My room’s probably crawling with police. Or at least taped off. I need you to get my gun. Meet me back here.”

Ratfish didn’t ask questions. I told him where to expect the gun, and he got to it. While he walked into the hotel, I could imagine, in another life, a life as a true crime fighter, a true vigilante, having someone like Ratfish as a sidekick. Hell, even his name sounded like a hero’s lesser associate. I’d be Kingfish and he’d be Ratfish. What a team we would make.

I took the back entrance from the parking garage into the hotel to check on the WCW writers’ workshop. What had been a sea was now a pool. The room was clearing out, but a few familiar faces remained. No time to fuck around. I spotted the pedantic cunt with glasses too small for his face and a goatee too big for his chin, who I’d first seen talking about conjunctive adverbs.

“Where’s everyone going?” I asked, after grabbing the pedantic cunt on the arm. “Workshop over?”

“Workshop’s over,” he said. He pushed the glasses up his nose and made a horrific smile like he wanted to be my friend.

“Is the William Carlos Williams staff still around?”

“I really don’t know.,” he looked at his watch. “Probably a few.”

“Got any names?” I asked.

“Huh?” The cunt looked liked I’d asked him how many fingers could fit inside his mouth.

“Names of WCW guys, do you know any?”

“Nah.” He waved me away and started walking.

I looked for the man wearing the scarf and the man who made me think of a totem pole. And Daniel Dubs. These three were the top of my list, after Jebediah Black. I didn’t expect to find either. But a familiar face soon emerged from the thinning herd. Michelangelo Maserati walked with two women on each side, and a third trailing close behind. They were approaching the exit and laughing the way playboys and playgirls do. Michelangelo seemed like the kind of guy who didn’t even light his own cigarettes. I hate those kinds of guys.

The four of them walked into the hall between the convention room and the front lobby. When I made sure no police were present I shoved the girl in back into Michelangelo. Surprised, he and the girls turned around, and I grabbed Michelangelo at the neck, threw him into the wall. I jutted my fist into his ribs.

“The fat man with cake, the man with the scarf, the totem pole looking fuck, and Jebediah Black—where are they?” I grumbled into his face.

One of the girls cried out, so I smacked her and told her to shut her mouth. She and the other girls obeyed. I tightened my grip on Michelangelo’s neck.

“I don’t know… who you’re talking about…” he managed, under forced gasps.

“You got Harrid,” I said. “You won’t get me. Where are they?”

His eyes stared into me like he was holding back, so I threw him to the ground, kicked him in the ribs, and rolled him onto his back with my foot on his chest. The women cowered away and made no sounds.

“Mister Lamb… I know nothing…” He struggled for a moment, then stopped as I put more weight on him.

I had to break him. I wanted every bone in his body to snap under me. “I’m not fucking around, Maserati. I know you work with them, and I know what they’re doing.”

Mr. Maserati swung his legs up to try to knock me away, so I knelt on top of him, my knees pinning down his arms, and both my hands back at his throat. I slammed his head into the ground.

“Clearly you aren’t the killing talent,” I said. “You’re a decoy. Maybe a talent scout? Or a distraction. This fucking suit. Think it gives you that glamorous shine?”

“Black….” He muttered under my wringing hands. “He calls the shots…”

“And where might he be?”

“Leaving town… all I know….”

“Back to Chicago?”

He nodded.

I climbed off Maserati and straightened my suit. One of his girls was walking back into the hallway  from the main lobby with two men tagging close behind: the guy in the scarf, and the totem pole. They froze for a second, looked like they’d seen a ghost. Totem Pole pointed at me and scrunched up his face.

Both jumped at me, but being the superior man I used my fists like a warrior ought to. Totem Pole landed a punch to my ear, but I kicked him in his legs and smashed his face into the floor. Scarf grabbed me by the tie, so I grabbed him by the scarf and shoved him into the wall, threw a fist to his nose, sent my knee into his stomach four or five times, and threw him to the floor. I kicked him once in the side for good measure.

Maserati was standing, had a switchblade out and lunged at me, but his slow, feeble frame was easy to shove out of the way. I crushed his hand with my foot and picked up the knife. My other foot found its way into the side of his jaw.

An audience materialized around our show of violence, composed of guests leaving the workshop. Not one of them ran to get the police.

“You  guys suppose we can have a little talk?” I said, catching my breath, examining the switchblade in my hands. “I don’t want this to get violent.”

Totem Pole stood  up, wiped blood off his lip, and reached under his shirt. “We were hoping the same thing.” He pulled a gun from his shirt, but concealed it enough to be hidden from the audience of middle aged writers who watched.

Maserati and Scarf stood up slow. Scarf frisked me and Maserati took the knife back.

“Let’s go for a walk,” said Totem Pole. “We got a lot to talk about.”

“I guess so,” I said.

The audience dissipated as quickly as it had formed. Interest was lost once the punches were finished.

Maserati and Scarf led the way. We went back through the convention room, away from the police only a hallway away, and left the hotel the back way, into the parking garage.

“You gotta be smarter than your enemy,” Scarf told me while the clicks of our shoes against the ground echoed through the garage. “That’s the only thing someone like you’s got. Outnumbered, out-muscled, all you got left is to outsmart. And you couldn’t do that. That’s why you’re here.”

“I liked you better when you were talking about literature,” I said.

Totem Pole laughed a homeless man’s cackle.

“I liked you better when you were arguing about poetry,” said Maserati. “That’s not saying a lot, because I didn’t like you then.”

“You and I should share poems sometime,” I said. “I’m sure yours are just sentences arbitrarily cut up into lines to resemble a poem. You seem like the kind of guy who’s got no rhythm or musicality about him. Your poems will reflect that.”

Maserati slapped me in the cheek. He didn’t punch me, I need to emphasize this. He slapped me. “And I’m certain your poetry rhymes like a pop song,” he said. “With childish imagery, and platitudinous stanzas and beige prose.”

“Beige prose? You’re the asshole who said to be more like William Carlos Williams. Your shit’s built on a mountain of beige and sentimentality and pretentious imagery.”

“Christ,” Totem Pole said. “Quit.”

“Adverbs are a crutch,” I said. “Remember that? You said that. So you guys are editors and murderers? Is that what you do?”

No comment seemed to be the consensus.

 “Dubs’ll be out soon,” Totem Pole said, his gun making itself known against my spine.

“Black calls the shots, huh?” I said. “Our friend Maserati here told me.”

No one said anything.

“Jebediah Black,” I said.

The gun pushed  harder against my back.

“By the way, do any of you have his phone number? I do.”

“If you were smarter you’d have been gone before this started,” said Scarf.

“Scarf Face, if you were smarter you wouldn’t have blown up a police car in the middle of the day, in front of the hotel you’re staying in.” My thumping chest told me I should quit, but I continued. “How fast did the cops swarm the place?”

“Not fast enough,” said Totem Pole.

“It’d have been easier just to come in my room and shoot me. Or maybe strangle me. You guys have a thing for theatrics, is that right?”

There was, again, no answer. An elevator dinged and a fat man walked out. It was Daniel Dubs. Unbelievably, there was no cake in his hands or his mouth. He approached us and said nothing. He had the walk of a slow-moving hitman; careful, silent, aware. A size such as his would have made him ineffective as an assassin.

“Our friend here’s got a busy mouth and a bad attitude,” said Totem Pole. “Let’s see if he still feels cocky.”

Dubs stopped in front of us and took a deep breath. “Going out with the police would have been an easier end for you, Mr. Lamb.” He paused and looked me up and down as if he might eat me or fuck me. “Or, Mr. Lamborghini, as I understand you should be called.”

“You still feel like joking around?” Scarf said.

When I was in first grade there was an older kid who always showed up at the bus stop after school. He was in fourth grade and his name was Robin. Perhaps because his name sounded so effeminate he was an angry, violent boy with a reputation for pounding us younger ones down for any reason he saw fit. Two friends, John and Reno, got off at the same bus stop with me each day, and we always walked home together. When Robin showed up one afternoon, John and Reno dealt with his intimidating presence the only way they knew how: They were exceptionally nice to Robin, with jovial tones and an air of obvious fear and respect. They laughed and nodded at the things he said, and complimented his shirt. They didn’t want to go home with broken noses. But their displays of fear and fake kindness toward Robin sickened me. I didn’t want to look like them. I preferred a broken nose over sounding like my friends. That’s exactly what I got when I told Robin his shirt was nothing special. More accurately, I got it after telling him I’d heard about the time he attacked my neighbor Luke under a bridge and sent him to the hospital, which I said right after the shirt remark. Robin sent me home with a broken nose. After that I started taking  one of my dad’s empty liquor bottles to school in my backpack.

It was only a week later when Robin showed up again at the bus stop. My nose was still covered in tape and bandaging. He made fun of my nose, and again my friends laughed at his jokes. This time they complimented his shoes. I had the same shoes. Not once had they complimented them.

Robin said I looked like Gonzo, and, having not developed a wit by the age of seven, I had no reply. I shook my head. He nodded and laughed, then flicked me in the nose. The pain was almost worse than when he broke it. I flung my backpack off, and reached inside.  My fingers gripped the neck of the Jack Daniels bottle, and I wasted no time in pulling it out and swinging it into Robin’s head. My first grade arms weren’t powerful enough to do any damage with one swing. It took a few hits before he fell down, and it took a few more to draw blood. He tried to cover his head, so I used that time to whack the bottle against his ribs or his back. Every time I hit, he cried in pain, until the final blow to his skull which both shattered the bottle and knocked him unconscious. Blood was everywhere.

John and Reno had stood still during the entire confrontation and attack,  and only ran home after Robin was unconscious. The adrenaline that made it all possible also seemed to freeze me in place while I nudged his body with my foot to see if he was OK. He wasn’t. A neighbor who never bothered to be out on days Robin was tormenting kids happened to step outside right about the time I began to walk away from Robin. He shouted at me and, to make a long story short, I was sent to a different school and was grounded for a year. But I never saw Robin again.

I could tell Scarf, Totem Pole, and Maserati wanted me to show Dubs some kind of admiration or false respect. They wanted me to grovel, or to kiss his hands, to shower him with praise like he was Don Corleone and I was a desperate wife begging for mercy on my husband’s life. The way Dubs looked at me I could tell he expected it. I had no whiskey bottle to show him the respect I wanted to. We stood without words for what must have been a minute, until Dubs looked at his watch.

“I’ve a plane to catch. Do it quietly, the police and news crews are still here. Make it look like a suicide. Maserati, you come with me.” He and Michelangelo left.

“Let’s find a quiet place to do it,” said Scarf.

They took me up a few levels until we reached the roof of the parking garage. The moon was just coming up over the horizon and the air, for the first time since my arrival, felt cool. I didn’t even notice the signature smell of trash wafting through the Staten Island wind.

Totem Pole’s eyes scanned his gun from all angles. He looked morose. He must have realized he would have to leave his gun at the scene.  No weapon meant no suicide. Though I hated him and the man who wore a scarf in June, I didn’t feel anything besides fear  while they prepared my execution. They say your life flashes before your eyes, but mine never did. Maybe I wasn’t close enough. But it felt close. I could practically smell death. I could feel it creeping up on me, a black shroud on a midnight sidewalk. I didn’t think about the people I would miss. I didn’t think about the things I hadn’t done, or the women I hadn’t slept with. I didn’t even think of the poems I hadn’t written, or the guns I hadn’t fired. I readied myself for a dark eternal void,  and tried to wrap my mind around the concept of infinite blankness, everlasting nothingness in the vacuum of nonexistence. It was a hard thing to tackle. Mild intoxication didn’t make it easier, but it helped me keep my cool.

I hoped Totem Pole would shoot me somewhere in the spine, to render my body numb while I died slow on the ground. Something told me that might be a peaceful kind of death. Instead of instantaneous voids, my dying mind could prepare itself for the great nothingness, the great funeral of being. I wished the moon was higher in the sky so I could stare at it while the life crept out of me. New York’s light pollution meant stargazing in the act of death couldn’t happen. What a cruel city.

“Give me your scarf,” Totem Pole said. He reached for Scarf’s scarf.

“Why?” Scarf backed away.

“To wrap around the gun like a silencer. Go look over the edge, down on the street. Place is covered with cops and news, like Dubs said.”

“A better idea would be to strangle him with it,” said Scarf, with a grin. “What do you think? I’ll do it.”

“Dubs said suicide. That won’t look like suicide.”

“Should I get on my knees?” I said.

Totem Pole and Scarf exchanged glances, and looked at me. They both nodded.

A muffled shot burst out, echoed from within the parking garage, and a red mess exploded from Totem Pole’s chest. Fragments of flesh and bone and bullet missed my head by an inch, but my head still took a spray of blood. He collapsed in a slump with his gun still in his hand. Scarf and I looked in the direction of the blast.

Ratfish walked up the ramp to the top level of the garage, holding my .45 in front of him, his security sports coat wrapped around the barrel, his eyes wide and white. He turned the gun on Scarf.

“No!” I shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

Scarf spun his head toward me just as my fist crashed into his face. I tackled him to the ground and grabbed the ends of his scarf, pulling with all my strength to tighten the scarf around his neck. He hit at me and squirmed, trying with every muscle he could muster to free himself. No amount of fighting would free him. He was mine. This was my second strangulation of the day, and I wondered at his final thoughts as the life left his body. What goes first, the body or the mind? Do they go simultaneously? Maybe it depends on how you die. Psychic powers would have allowed Scarf and me to communicate while he died, and perhaps the insight I gained would have changed me or scarred me. I might have felt differently about what I was doing. As it was, I felt I was doing what was necessary. He said he’d strangle me with his scarf himself.

“I’m strangling you,” I said, as the struggle lessened. I realized how stupid it sounded as soon as I said it, but there was no taking it back. These were the last words Scarf heard before he died. I could have said something like, “This is for Harrid!” but I chose to instead enthrall him the with the obvious.

Ratfish stood above Totem Pole’s body as I sat on Scarf’s corpse.

“I’ve never killed anyone before,” he said, his voice shaking.

I looked up. “Don’t lie. You killed that totem pole looking sack of shit.”

“I mean before now, ya know?”

“It’s not every day I get to see the exit wound from a hollow point. Not as it happens.” I grabbed my gun from Ratfish’s hand as I stood. “What a smart idea, pal.” I pulled his makeshift silencer from around the gun’s barrel. “You think of this yourself?”

“Nah. Heard that guy mention usin’ his scarf as I was comin’ up the ramp. Figured I oughta do the same.”

Ratfish seemed smarter by the minute. “You still have the gun I gave you?”

He pulled it out.

“Put it away. And my holster?”

“Couldn’t get it,” he said.

“That’s fine. Thanks for doing that. And for saving my life. Did you have any trouble finding it? The gun.”

“It was in an evidence bag. Wasn’t hard to take, though. Fuckin’ place is crawlin’ with the fuzz. News vans showed up, too.”

“So I heard. Guess we ought to get out of here before they decide to investigate that gunshot.”

“I saw body bags carried out  on stretchers,” Ratfish said. “Thought you might wanna know this, but they were comin’ outta your room.  102. That’s you, right?”

“Fuck.”

“At least three body bags.”

I recalled the smell in my room that afternoon. It was the smell of decomposition setting in. When Harrid’s head was put on my bed, it was possible the bodies of the three women were hidden there at the same time. Maybe even Odette’s.

“Framing their crimes on me, then having me wiped out. ‘A serial killer in New York City goes up in flames.’ ”

“Smart, huh?”

I ignored the comment. “You find the extra clip?”

“No, it wasn’t in the bag. Or I didn’t see it.”

“I’ve got more in my car. Come on, that’s where we’re heading.”

“Where’re we goin’?”

“Newark Airport. That’s where everyone’s going.”

We went back and forth like this for some time, with short, meandering banter. As soon as it ended I put my gun in the back of my pants, and covered it with my jacket. Then I explored the pockets of our recently deceased comrades.

“You robbing them?” asked Ratfish, sounding both thrilled and surprised.

“No.” I held their cell phones in my hands. Totem Pole had a recent outgoing call to ‘J. Black’. I checked my phone. Same phone number of Jebediah Black. Scarf had a recent incoming call from ‘Jebediah.’ Same number. I typed a text message to J. Black on Totem Pole’s phone.

“Sup JB. Still waitin’ on u. So hungry 4 ur meats.”  

On Scarf’s I typed, “Mmm. Gotta get my lips wet on ur Blackness.”

I sent the messages at the same time.

“Hold onto these,” I said, handing the phones to Ratfish.

“What’d you just do?”

“I sent him a warning.”

Chapter IX

We were racing down the Staten Island Expressway in my Ford Fusion when Ratfish turned on the radio. News of the incident at the Pickety Stix broke. A reporter said something about bodies found in a room, a blown up police cruiser, and a ‘gruesome trail of death’ that called for an extensive search for Leonardo Lamborghini. Though it was something I’d always wanted, I’d never heard my name on the radio before that night. It didn’t feel as good as I had imagined. The same reporter detailed the incidents of the afternoon in an inaccurate fashion, and reported my last known whereabouts as the hospital. Cops were surely swarming the place.

“How they gonna explain the blown up cop car?” Ratfish asked, over the radio’s little lies. “If you’d been behind all this shit, there ain’t no way you coulda set off that bomb.”

“It was rigged to explode at ignition,” I said. “Turn the key, and boom.”

“But it ain’t like you coulda planted it. Not while runnin’ from the cops. You had no time.”

“I’m sure they’ve thought of that. This whole thing is bigger than we know, is my guess. But the police are on the lookout at the hospital, now. Maybe still at the hotel. We’ve got a clear shot to Jebediah and the others.”

“Want me to find out what flight he’s on?”

“You mean with one of those phones? They’re no good. I spoiled them already. That warning I sent back there. He knows his comrades are dead. But that might be better. I want him scared. Maybe he’ll be waiting, ready to tango.”

I’d already turned off my phone. I wasn’t sure if there was any of that GPS stuff in there that would be of aid to the police or the FBI, so I hoped it being off would make it invisible. We had three other phones between the two of us, should we really need one. It’s not as though we could call 911.

Ratfish held the revolver in his hand. As light from interstate lamps temporarily illuminated the car, I saw him examining it from every angle. His eyes darted over it, and he looked out the window like he was looking forward to something. He stayed quiet for most of the drive. The radio was enough to substitute for conversation.

In my day as a detective, I’d had a wonderful partner named Virginia. She was as impulsive as me, and we’d both been mentored by the same sergeant, an impulsive, reckless man himself. But Virginia actually had a Bachelor’s degree in criminal investigation. I let her handle the more social aspects of the work, while I handled what her and I referred to as the “meat grinding.”

We’d been building a case on a doctor we suspected of having a dark side to his practice. More than one informant gave us leads that the doctor was operating in a black market organ trade ring. And not with willing organ donors, but unsuspecting victims, often easily traced back to the doctor. None of the doctor’s victims survived. Hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas, unfertilized eggs, lungs, bones, ligaments, and skin went for a high price. I wanted to “meat grind” my way to some answers with the doctor, meaning I’d play rough and intimidate him into sharing everything he knew, but Virginia insisted  she’d get something out of him with her delicate social skills. The police department had served a search warrant a week earlier, turning up nothing. Virginia’s latest idea was to try an undercover maneuver, pretend to be an interested buyer.

We went to his place of business, a small private practice in Lawndale. I waited in the lobby while Virginia went in to speak with him on the pretense of a routine physical. When I’d read through four magazines in the waiting room, and had grown tired of waiting, I got  up to inquire as to Virginia’s whereabouts. She wouldn’t answer her phone, so I asked the receptionist if she was still in with the doctor. She said no one named Virginia was on the appointment list. I found that peculiar.

I found no evidence that she was still in with the doctor, so I looked around outside. It was behind the building, in an alley closed off by a wooden fence, I found her. I first heard her whimpers from the other side of the fence, and when I hopped over I noticed her crawling away from the building’s back door. I ran to her side and found her drugged out, the tips of her index and ring finger cut off, bleeding profusely. I panicked, I asked her what happened, but she was drooling, her face was blank and her eyes glassy. I pulled her up, slung her arm over my shoulder, and I took her through the parking garage, and set her in the cruiser. In my panicked, angered, absent-mindedness, I told her to sit tight, and I left her. I called for backup, and, blind with venom, I pulled the revolver from my coat and stormed back into the doctor’s office.

“Doctor Meyer!” I shouted, pointing the gun at the receptionist. She screamed, and insisted the doctor had gone home for the day. I refused to believe her, and searched the building, coming up with nothing. By the time I returned to my car, Virginia was dead.

I was reprimanded for a number of violations, first and foremost being  the negligence of another detective’s life. Virginia died because I didn’t get her to a hospital. I had left her to die, too busy thinking about instant vengeance and justice than getting her the help she needed. An investigation into the doctor showed no evidence that we had even been in the building. Virginia’s name wasn’t on any records or any patient lists, and the receptionist and assistants denied ever having seen her in the office. We never found out exactly what happened to Virginia, or how she ended up mutilated and crawling from the back door of the building.

For running into the doctor’s office and waving my gun around, I was also reprimanded. Suspended without pay. Removed from the case against the doctor Virginia and I had spent a month building. The doctor was taken into custody, another search of his home and office were conducted, but he came up clean once again. He kept his records clean.

Thinking about Virginia made me realize the order of priorities I had concerning Ratfish. The desire  for vengeance boiled in both of us, but experience told me to stay on top of my impulsive actions, and be careful. Carelessness in these circumstances could get one or both of us killed.

We looped onto the New Jersey Turnpike and sped through light Sunday night traffic. My heart was racing, and I suspected the same was true of my new partner.

“Careful there,” I said. “It’s loaded.”

He turned to me and set the gun down in his lap. “Think we’ll die, tonight?”

“I wonder that most nights. Fact is, my first priority is to keep you alive. You’re my only alibi, the only witness to Jeb and Odette’s true nature. Not that you’re good for nothing else, but you get it.”

“There’s the video, too. Got me all beat up on there. Pretty clear it ain’t you doin’ the torturin’. Guess it’s in cop hands, now.”

“True. The video isn’t going to get me off the hook, though. Only you will.”

“Guess I should be careful tonight.”

“Truth be told, I think tonight will end without a climax.”

“Like sex with Chocolate.” I didn’t see his face, but I knew he wasn’t joking.

“Oh?” was all I could offer. If I knew was going to have to hear about sex with Ratfish’s girlfriend, I’d have taken Totem Pole’s gun and offed myself back when I had the chance.

“Nothing wrong with her, I mean. I just can’t come. It’s a medical thing. I get hard-ons, just not the climax.”

“That’s awful, but that doesn’t explain the pregnancy.”

“Nah, it don’t. But I know she fucks around on me. Hell, I work nights. That’s when she’s gettin’ down with other fellas. I ain’t stupid. She don’t know I don’t come. She don’t know I know the kid ain’t mine.”

I said nothing for a minute, maybe five minutes. Driving toward what would be total annihilation or total victory, or some mixture of the two, I was now armed with unsettling details of Ratfish’s sex life.

“Yet, you’re marrying her?”

“Aw, don’t get me wrong. I fuckin’ love that girl. I know she loves me. I just can’t please her, so she gets her kicks somewhere else. While I ain’t around.”

“That’s depressing, Ratfish. Sorry.”

He stared out the window again, like he was looking forward to something.

Being suspended without pay didn’t mean I wasn’t involved in my own independent investigation against Doctor Meyer. I kept in contact with our informants, and was able to set up an appointment to meet the doctor and his assistant. He did his business through a network of crime lords and lowlifes I had no interest in. They made the sales, took care of the business. They housed the organs in sophisticated storage facilities. The doctor did the hunting, the cutting. He was the “meat grinder” of the scene.

Under the guise of an organ trafficker looking for a new supplier, I met the doctor and his assistant in the parking lot of a rotting hourly motel. When they were sufficiently satisfied no police cars were within a few blocks, and that I wasn’t wearing a wire, they climbed in my car to discuss offers. The doctor sat behind my seat, his assistant behind the passenger’s seat.

I noticed both men had guns on them, by the outline against their jackets. I’d have to work fast.

Before I made a substantial offer, I inquired about their experience. The doctor told me he had eight years in the trade, and had personally supplied organs from more than two hundred people. The assistant didn’t speak, but the doctor told me he doubled as a bodyguard, and a surgical assistant with no formal training in medicine. I asked if either had ever had any run-ins with the law, and if so, how they hid their tracks. The doctor assured me he was diligent about covering his tracks and no investigation had ever uncovered anything. “Those who snoop too close,” he said, “don’t live to talk about it.”

When I was confident I had my men, I jammed the driver’s seat backward into the doctor’s legs, to temporarily cramp him and restrict his movement, pulled my gun from under the seat, a bullet already in the chamber, and fired a single shot into the assistant’s face. I reared back against the steering wheel, aimed at the doctor just as he managed to yank the gun from his jacket, and fired twice into his shoulder, then his chin. The rear window was splattered with blood, and my backseats were ruined. Vengeance was served.

An investigation by the department resulted in the end of my career, and a single charge of involuntary manslaughter against the doctor’s assistant. But like most cases of Chicago police under investigation for criminal activity, there was no conviction. So ended my run in law enforcement, but such was my first taste of vigilante justice.  And until that night in New York City, I thought it would be my last.