[ This is a tribute to Lee Child, a man I admire. He has accomplished what I cannot do: He makes his living as a writer. Forget a book deal, I can’t even get a literary agent! So I make jokes, instead. Best wishes! – Kevin Feingold ]

 

Cheap Shot

by

Glee Child

           

            I flew helicopters in the Persian Gulf War. Choppers, not fixed wing garbage. That was awhile ago. Now, I climb aboard the 59th Street bus at Huron. A rainy, blustery afternoon in March. I hate this city. Lizard Town they call it. For good reason. I walk down the aisle and take a seat in the back. Where I can keep an eye on everyone. The bus is a Van Hool, manufactured in Belgium. Maximum load, 63 passengers. Droplets of rain dot the window.

            You couldn’t miss her when she gets on board. One of those raven-haired señoritas. Even dressed in a floppy green raincoat, she exudes high drama. Nose in the air. Flashing black eyes. A real Barefoot Contessa, but one whose Bogie has long since given up the ghost. She makes a beeline right for me, but comes up short and flops down on the seat in front. Next to a dude in a Homburg.

            “Señor Ralph,” she wails. “You must help me. I am in bad troubles!”

            My ears perk up.

            “What seems to be the problem?” Mr. Homburg hat asks sonorously.

            “I desperately need a fix, but the crack house on Van Wine has been closed by some bad hombres. I cannot mosey downtown every time I need dope. ¡Cuéntaselo a tu abuela! Do you think I was born yesterday?”

            “Well-l-l, Juanita,” Mr. Ralph replies. “As a custodian of the court, I try not to get involved in turf wars.”

            I wait, expecting to hear more. So does Juanita. Cursing him volubly in Spanish, she rakes the fingernails of one hand across his face.

            “Ow! Ow! Ow!… Shit!” cries Mr. Ralph, shielding himself with his arms.

            I have to laugh. “Can I be of assistance?” I ask quietly.

            Jumping in surprise, Juanita eyes me suspiciously over the back of the bus seat. “You an undercover cop?” she asks.

            “No way, José,” I chuckle good-naturedly. “Just another passenger on life’s existential journey!”

            “Hey, mister! You got a screw loose,” Juanita decides and trounces to the exit.

            I follow her. Get off the bus.

            “You leave me alone, preacher man, or I spray you with this!” she exclaims, aiming a can of Mace at my face.

            “Yeah, okay, ma’am, but my offer to help still stands.”

 

            “Hey, Juanita, where you been? ¡Quehúbole! ” asks a burly Latino, pulling up in a sleek new silver-colored Nissan Altima.

            “They close the crack house on Van Wine.”

            “Yeah, it’s not the suppliers, it’s the middlemen inna neighborhood.”

            “What seems to be the problem?” I ask.

            “Who are you? You a narc?”

            “A disinterested party.”

            “Well, go fuck yourself, disinterested party.”

            Approaching the vehicle, I am brought up short by the snub-nose barrel of a Skorpion 7.62 mm machine pistol. Made in the Czech Republic. Aimed at my crotch.

            “Just trying to help.”

            “Get outta here! Go take a hike!”

            “Maybe he can help, Juan. He pretty big fellow,” suggests Juanita. “I been reading about biodiversity in the workforce. Employ more apes.”

            So Juan, Juanita and I ride around in the Altima while he, Juan, makes some calls on his cell phone. Four calls. Longish. Having no cell phone, I avoid unsolicited enquiries from timeshare companies offering me “free” five day-four night cruises to the Caribbean.

            “Okay,” says Juan, “maybe you cut a deal. I let you off onna corner. You walk down three blocks to Pollard Street. You meet Shorty and Long John. Wiseguys in the Italian mafia. Junkies wanna buy dope. Cartagena wanna sell. Mafioso Don Luigi, he no let us do our business. Maybe you fix. I don’t think so!”

            “Listen, Juan— ”

            “We all watch you walk these three blocks. They search you for a wire. We wanna be sure you no doggie with a long tail.”

            “Listen, Juan— ”

            He nudges me out of the Altima with the muzzle of the Skorpion.

 

            I start walking, Nancy Sinatra wailing inside my head.

“These boots are made for walkin’,

And that’s just what they’ll do.

One of these days, these boots

Are gonna walk all over you.”

                                                                                           (L. Hazlewood) 

            “Hold it right there, shamus,” says the squatter of the two. He looks like an Italian version of Justin Bieber.

            “You must be Shorty.”

            “This is my partner, Long John,” he says. John’s wearing Giorgio Armani. I don’t like him any better for it. Shorty expertly frisks me from head to toe. He has me turn around and frisks me again.

            “Listen, Shorty— ”

            “We’re just the muscle,” he explains. “You wanna talk with the man.” Opening his cell phone, he makes a call. We stand around for three minutes in the entrance to an alleyway. Puddles on the sidewalk. Black plastic garbage bags and metal trash cans. Stray cats.

            “I’ve always been an admirer of Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Cliff and the fiscal cliff,” I tell them.

            “That and $4.50 will get you a cup of regular Joe at Starbucks,” says Long John.

            A white ’69 Dodge Dart pulls up to the curb, scattering the pussies. Sounds like a lawnmower. A smooth operator in a Salvatore Ricci suit with matching tie and Gucci loafers gets out. “It’s a classic,” he tells me, smiling broadly. “Had it refurbished to the peak of perfection. Wassa matter, you don’t like classic cars?”

            “I’m more concerned with the issue at hand.”

            “Ah!” he grunts, waving his hands and laughing. “A negotiator in a hurry! Okay, Mr. Negotiator. What’s your spiel?”

            “His name is Richard Quick,” Shorty informs me sotto voce. “He’s our boss. From California.”

            Richard is facing southeast, toward Mecca, but I do not think him a Muslim. They may call him Dick Quick, but I draw my own conclusions. “Uh— ” I say.

            “When we close down an emporium for want of payment due,” Quick Dick explains, casually taking out a Smith & Wesson .38 Special and releasing the safety, “we get understandably upset to discover the same location wants to re-open under new management. ‘Who authorized the deal?’ we ask. Then we find out it’s a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Dick has his initials hand-chiseled on the stocks of his gun. Flashy.

            I’ve been called all kinds of names. At six foot five and 250 pounds, “Paul Bunyan” and “Hey, Bigfoot!” come easily to the lips of schoolyard bullies. To their endless regret. I’ve beaten up 11-year-olds for less. My elbows are meat cleavers. “What?” I ask. “Don’t you like the Green Bay Packers?”

            Lancing out with my right foot, I kick Richard Quick squarely on the apex of his left kneecap. I’m an ouch potato, not a couch potato. As he doubles over in pain, grasping his leg, I swivel into a roundkick. Traversing 360°, I catch Richard upside the head with my right Dr. Marten. He goes down in a heap.

            Unfortunately, this gives his two gunsels time to extract their firearms and take a bead on yours truly. Shorty gets off one shot with his Sig Sauer, but I am already falling to the pavement. It goes high. Launching myself into him, I twist him around by the lapels on his silk jacket by Hugo Boss. Available at fine retailers everywhere. Long John fires twice, straight at me, with his Glock 31, but both slugs hit Shorty instead. Deadweight, he falls from my grasp.

            I charge into Long John, knocking his gun askew. A muzzle blast by my left ear deafens me. I feel my hair catch fire. Grabbing Long John’s head in a backhanded grip, I wrench downward with all my weight until I hear his sixth cervical vertebra snap funereally.

            I feel like I’m in a Tom Cruise movie. I splash water from a mud puddle on my aching scalp. Pick up Long John’s gun. Stand over Quick Dick. He is crawling around, groaning audibly, scrabbling after his Smith & Wesson. This is the moment of truth. Was Long John the professional assassin he professed to be or just another trigger-happy buff of the Second Amendment? Aiming for the base of Richard’s skull, I squeeze the trigger.

            Long John’s Glock neither jams nor misfires. A .357 steel-capped slug belches from the muzzle, traversing the sodden air and permeating my opponent, splattering his brains in a gray arc over the sidewalk.

            I perform the same coup de grâce on Shorty and Long John. Rifle their wallets. Take the cash. Leave the credit cards and Euros. For bigshot gunmen, they sure don’t carry much money on them.

 

            The police arrest me at the laundromat. Dressed in XXXL sweats and knock-off high-tops from China, I am tumbling my freshly washed clothes in a drier.

            “What’s the problem, officers?”

            “Okay, big boy, the brass want to ask you some questions downtown.”

            I figure the hotel clerk tipped them off. When I checked in reeking of cordite. I bathed, using brown laundry soap. Bought a robin’s egg blue track suit and footwear at an Army-Navy. Was in the process of white-washing the evidence.

            The cops bundle my hot laundry into an evidence bag and drive me to police headquarters. Sequester me in a room. A sharp-faced, well-groomed lieutenant in a Navy blue suit from Men’s Wearhouse (“You’re gonna like the way you look. I guarantee it!”) offers me coffee.

            “What brings you to our version of paradise?” he asks.

            “Just passing through,” I assure him.

            “On your way to where?” he scoffs. “Canada?”

            His name is Jones. It’s none of his business where I’m headed. To the private burial site of angry, misguided Adam Lanza. Just want to put some flowers on that poor boy’s grave. Nobody else will. As Oprah says, we are all victims.

            Detective Jones plops my tattered ATM card on the table. “I could pick you up for vagrancy, but you got $300 cash in your wad and you already booked yourself a hotel room. You’re a clever boy!”

            I made my fortune smuggling the spiral, ivory tusks of narwhal whales from the Canadian Arctic. Narwhals are the unicorns of the sea. Some of their tusks grow as long as eight feet. I made thousands of dollars. The trade’s illegal Stateside. Go figure.

            “I like to think that my military activities,” I tell Jonesy, “contributed in some small way to the demise of al-Qaeda henchmen Fahd al-Quso and Abu Yahya al-Libi, as well as Taliban commander Maulvi Nazir Wazir. You’ll remember that al-Quso was implicated in the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. A speedboat full of explosives rammed the Cole amidships, blowing a huge hole in the hull, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others. That al-Quso had the blood of American servicemen on his hands.”

            “Yeah, well,” replies the detective, “I sent your prints to the FBI. You fought in the Persian Gulf War as a pilot. Officially, that’s all you’ve ever done. So I googled you and, yes, I get it, you are one colorful character.”

            “I like to see myself as a protector of the rights of the common man.”

            “So do we all. So do we all!”

            “I don’t want no trouble.”

            Jonesy laughs. “You don’t get involved in the drug trade if you don’t want no trouble,” he observes drily. “Okay, Cannonball. The telephones have been ringing off the hook.” He leads me through so many corridors, I’m not even sure we’re in the same building. Listen, I was once escorted under guard from Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. Dartmouth’s motto is vox clamantis in deserto (“a voice crying out in the wilderness”). “I’ll come back and get you in 20 minutes. Don’t wander off,” says Jonesy.

 

            A brown leather-clad office with high, barred windows. Fancy gun metal art deco floor lamps depict Grecian Sibyls.  A single, enormous desk. Even the office chair looks high end. It is first when I examine the shelves and find law books, that I understand. Striding to the padded communicating door, I fling it wide. A dark, empty courtroom. Dust moats dancing in shafts of pale moonlight. I’m in a judge’s private chambers.

            A suit comes in carrying a briefcase. Sits down in the plush chair. Crosses his hands. “I’m city councilman Johnny J. Johnson,” says he.

            I look him over. Men’s wear by Raphael Linguini. Rolex. Slicked back black hair. Horn-rimmed glasses. Immaculate pedicure. Windsor-knotted tie. Heraldic crest emblazoning his tieclip. “What’s the J stand for?”

            “Johannes. What’s it all about, Alfie? I understand you’ve involved yourself in the Buckley neighborhood. You are currently domiciled at the Mason Hotel.”

            “It’s a walkup. My room’s on the third floor.”

            “Do tell. There are big plans for Buckley. Major urban development. In a neighborhood currently beset by crime, violence, drug addiction, derelict buildings and homeless people. A six-story community hospital annex is slated to go up on Van Wine. All the houses there are cited for demolition. All. The. Houses. The question now becomes, Big John Henry, steel-driving man, are you gonna be an agent for change or one of those old-fashioned, backsliding strict constructionists of the Constitution? A defender of the status quo.”

            He’s said his piece. Longish. A fly buzzes around the room while I digest what I’ve heard. “What happens to the little people?”

            He spreads his hands helplessly. “They get scattered to the four winds. Good news is, they get top notch hospital care.”

            “What happens to the junkies?”

            “What usually happens to junkies?” he asks. “Either they wean themselves off drugs or they o.d. I fail to see how that affects the issue of urban renewal.”

            “In the military, we say, ‘Find out whose brother-in-law is the contractor and you find out who is in favor of the project.’ ”

            “Nepotism is definitely an issue,” Johnny Johnson assures me. “My entire family looks forward to several years of gainful employment. I can cut you a taste of the action. Deposited in a Cayman Island bank account. Unless, of course, you are an Iranian terrorist sent to the U.S. to spread disinformation regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In that case, all bets are off!”

 

            No sooner do I exit the police station, Juan and Juanita come driving up to the curb in their Altima. “Get in!”

            Dora the Explorer, it feels like old times, tooling around Lizard Town in the shiny silver Altima. Posh leather seats. Music thudding from the bass booster. Not owning a shortwave radio spares me the heartache of experiencing Radio Liberty go off the air. Not owning a television, I don’t have to witness Al Gore’s “Current TV” network get sold to Al Jazeera. “You work for us,” Juan says, driving outside of town to the municipal aerodrome, “the big boys wants to meet chew.”

            Guards toting M-16’s approach the car. They hustle me straightaway onto a private jet. Buckling myself into a seat, I know the score. Over the ocean, they pump you full of chemicals. Turning you into a zombie. Then they throw you from the plane. A Happy Meal for sharks.

            At least yours truly gets to meet his demise in a first-class executive jet with shiny leather seats, a mahogany bar and thick, tan wall-to-wall carpeting. With my own private bartender cum prison guard. A weaselly-faced cretin with a big old blunderbuss tucked into the waistband of his trousers. Probably a 44-40 Colt Frontier Six-Shooter. Something Tom Mix used. Totally worthless in a pressurized cabin. One pull of the trigger, the entire aircraft would peel open mid-flight like a sardine can.

            “What’s your name?”

            “Miguel.”

            “Got any rum?”

            “Sure! Bacardi.”

            “You got any Samaroli? From Fiji?”

            “Oh, so now señor wants haut gout rum.”

            “Yeah. Hogo. Pirate juice. How about some Smith & Cross from Jamaica? 114 proof. Got any batavia arrack from Indonesia?”

            “Atención, señor. We don’t grow sugar cane. ¿Comprendes? We specialize in drugs. You are on the wrong airplane, amigo.”

            Eventually we reach Colombia. They give me a fine, woven sun hat. Cream-colored. Like an old-time planter would wear. They drive me cross country to the plantation of Diego Perez Henao. Of the Los Rastrojos cartel. He and I enjoy cigars in his book-lined study. His yapping Chihuahua thinks she’s in charge. I don’t normally smoke, but you don’t say “no” to Perez Henao.

            “There is big money in the drug trade, señor,” he suggests. Then he waits, looking doubtful.

            I think about it. I have a sister in Toledo. I send her the news clippings and she keeps a scrapbook of my derrings-do. Otherwise, I’m on my own in life. Traveling the highways and the byways. A man who just wants to be left alone.

            No one’s preacher man.

            Josh Preacher. At your service.

 

Chapter 2 

 

            Little known fact. When I was younger, you couldn’t even get hold of me. I was so busy signing autographs and other memorabilia for young ladies. I autographed their underwear. In situ. Those were my salad days. War and life on the road have coarsened me, roughing up my smooth edges. Now I travel the world alone. Mrs. Chase, my third grade teacher, once wrote to the town newspaper, asking if anyone knew where I was. Nobody did.

            The cockroaches still rule at the Mason Hotel. Coming back for my gear feels like a return to childhood. Lethargic, jet-lagged, I sit by the window reading a copy of Business Weekly.

           Gaza Rallies Under Fatah-Hamas Detante

                        Gaza City – After performing poorly for several weeks during rebuilding efforts, following a cease-fire with Israel, Gaza rallied on Friday, reaching new heights on the 48th anniversary of the Fatah political party. Waving yellow Fatah banners, tens of thousands of demonstrators cheered wildly at the rally in Saraya Square. “We may be broke, but once our infrastructure stabilizes,” Fawzi Taleb,  economic adviser to the president, told the Associated Press, “we expect  progress in all sectors of society. Irregardless.”

 

            She knocks on the door as softly as a kitten. I admit she caught me off-guard. “You room service?” I ask.

            She ain’t no room service. Tall. Slim. Formidable. Sexy. She flashes me her shield. “Agent Colfax, FBI !”

            “In that case,” I suggest, “best you come inside.”

            Shutting and locking the door, she scours the room with her glance. “Kind of a dump.”

            “Sic transit gloria mundi, lady. What are you hassling me for?”

            “I’m from the local office. The police filed a query with the regional center. ‘Is that creep back in circulation?’ they asked at regional. ‘Go find him.’ Here I am.”

            I like the line of her jaw, the droopy left eyelid, the crimson petals of her mouth. Her short black hair. Arched eyebrows. Long red fingernails.

            “I don’t hear anything.”

            “I haven’t done anything.”

            “So I noticed.” She marches into the tiny bathroom. Hits the light switch. Opens the empty medicine cabinet above the sink. “Traveling light, are we?” she remarks tartly over her shoulder.

            “What are you grilling me for? I haven’t done anything.”

            “Broken record,” she replies. “I keep hearing the same phrases over and over. Methinks he doth protest too much.” She comes back to me and positions herself at my chest.

            “Either we’re practicing tae kwon do or I can’t be held responsible for what happens,” I warn.

            “I’ll take my chances. If you were any taller— ”

            “People say that about me!”

            “— the altitude would make me puke.”

            Sure, everybody dreams of a sidekick, but never in my life did I expect this. I grab her wrist. Watch her jacket slide up, revealing belt, holster, service revolver. She arches her eyebrows. “Satisfied? Is this a serious shopping expedition or are we just browsing?”

            “You tell me. Where’s your partner?”

            “My partner, Louise, is busy interviewing the cretin at the front desk as well as tenants on floors one and two. That may take awhile.” Rubbing against me, her left arm snakes around from behind her back. The click of a handcuff is as loud as a pistol shot! She’s cuffed my left wrist. I let go of her. “Want to try for two?” she asks. Playfully, she drags me to the bed. Twisting me into a leg lock, she topples me onto the coverlet. Flat on my back. She cuffs me to the headboard.

            “Not very nice.”

            “Oh, I don’t know,” she sings, climbing on top. “Let’s get comfy!” She straddles my waist. Unholsters her revolver. Rubs the barrel along my cheek. Shoves it into my mouth.

            “I hop wa saf-y’s on,” I remark.

            She pulls the gun from my mouth and looks. “Oh yes, it’s on.” Shoves the barrel back between my teeth. “Well?” she asks. “Suck on it!”

            I spend the next two minutes sucking gun metal, my dick all but tearing a hole in my pants.

            She positions her butt over my swollen organ. “This isn’t gonna work.” Removing and holstering her weapon, she undoes her belt. Slides her trousers to her knees. Reaches for the waistband of my track suit. Pulls it down to half-mast. I don’t wear undies. Fully exposed, I’m flying! Hard as a rock.

            Her lacy underpants are awash in tiny white embroidered flowers. Very feminine. Chic. I see her bush. A dark, provocative shadow. My penis pulses with excitement, my right hand tucked behind my head.

            Pulling down her panties, she spits on her fingers and stands there, lubricating herself. Jumps on the bed. Mounts me in a single, mighty lunge. Not without some pain. A little abrupt. Kind of squashed my balls. She rides me like I’m a wild stallion, laughing. White teeth flashing. “I read your files,” she explains. “Those lady DA’s wrote you were a bucking bronco.” Her blue-green eyes stare into mine. Amused. It’s like getting worked over by Catherine Zeta-Jones. “Världens arbetare, förena er!” she declares. (“Workers of the world, unite!” In Swedish.)

            I want more, not less.

            When we’re finished screwing, she takes charge. Immediately. Finds Louise and sends her back to the office. Has me pack my gear. Pay my bill. She hails us a cab. Has him take us to a car rental. Using her driver’s license and my cash, we rent a 2012 Audi. “Where’d you get your money from? Any known sources of income?”

            “Huh?” The car rental agent is busy at the printer. I lower my voice. Obviously I don’t want to talk about smuggling the spiral ivory tusks of narwhal whales, a federal offense, so I just tell her, “I did a dude a favor and he’s put something aside for me in a Cayman Island bank account.”

            “Uh huh,” she jeers.

             Is it my fault that all the small money deals life throws my way are associated with legally dubious enterprises? I always tell folks, “Pay me $250,000 a year and I’m at your beck and call. Otherwise, forget it!” Nobody has ever offered me anything like that. I’ve had to go out and scrape together a couple of hundred thousand on my own. The hard way. Narwhal tusk by narwhal tusk. We’re not talkin’ tiny little diamonds you can hide in the cuffs of your trousers! Those ivory mothers weigh a ton.

            She has me drive us to the parkway. “Subject is known to habitually drive without a license.”

            “Since subject has no fixed address, no state will issue me a driver’s license,” I point out.

            “Boy, you sure do things the hard way!”

            Lizard Town. Oily bronze sculptures of the city mascot festoon the bus depot, the ball park, the entrance and exit ramps to the parkway. Obamadon gracillis, a foot-long dinosaur with white teeth straight as a picket fence. Named after the president by some science dudes at Harvard and Yale. It means “Obama’s slender teeth.” In Latin. America’s first reptilian president.

            Three exits west, she has me pull into a Travelodge on Burke. “Behold,” I marvel, “they have a pool and everything.”

            Using her I.D. and my money, we book a suite for three nights. We sit out by the pool. She smokes a cigarette. She telephones her office and leaves a message. “This is Colfax. I’m taking three day’s leave. It’s a personal matter. Emergencies, you can always get me on my cell.”

            I carry my bag up to the room. Old-fashioned 40″ color TV. Pint-sized refrigerator. Black plastic coffee maker. Enormous twin beds. I open windows a crack in the bathroom and facing the street. For air flow. And I want to hear what’s happening outside.

            “Get ice,” she tells me, handing me the white plastic bucket. “I saw a machine at the end of the hall.”

            She spends the next 24 hours on and in the bed, showing me interesting physiological responses to cold of which my cock, nipples and buttocks were not previously aware.

            “You Gen-Xers think you’ve got the lock on cool, but while you were studying Nostradamus, we Millennials were busy watching Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street,” she claims.

            “Where you been?” I ask at one point in a seemingly endless night.

            “In the bathroom. Taking my pill.”

            “Birth control?”

            She snorts derisively. “I’ve had my tubes tied off, idiot! No, I take Cymbalta for depression.”

            “In your job?”

            “There are laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace. That includes medical conditions.”

            “Come here! Let me see if you have a pulse.”

            Underneath me, she opens like a rosebud.

 

            It’s evening of the next day before we go back down by the pool so she can smoke. We walk outside to the patio. Like a scene out of Mary Zimmerman’s play “Metamorphoses,” the tuxedo-clad body of a middle-aged man floats face-up in the water. “Alas, poor Yorick,” I murmur. “I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest.” I go tell the desk clerk. He calls the police.

            “I can stay. You take the car. Get out of town,” Colfax suggests.

            “You mean after we talk with the police?”

            “I mean before the police arrive, you nitwit!”

            I’ve beaten up 11-year-olds for less. “Won’t that look suspicious?” I ask.

            “With your record, won’t staying at the same motel as a potential murder victim look suspicious?”

            “Who says he was murdered? Breathing in high levels of soot, characterized as microscopic pollution, released by smokestacks and diesel fuel vehicular traffic, can lead to asthma, heart attacks and stroke,” I point out.

            “Whatever.”

            Too late, sirens wail up the driveway. The night becomes a kaleidoscope of flashing red, white and blue lights. Lucky I’m not inclined toward epilepsy. Or disco.

            The men in blue are everywhere. Hands on holsters. They get some pool equipment and reel in the body. Take notes. Seeing a dude lift his iPad in our direction, I say, “Look, mommy, we’re on Candid Camera!” A detective so strung out he could be Charlie Sheen, comes to the side of the pool with a motel printout. His name’s Saputo. His jet-black hair stands straight up, gangsta style. He probably got that suit at Macy’s. He talks, but his right eye keeps wandering off into space. “He was an Iranian diplo. Ran up a bill on pay-per-view. Mostly adult movies.”

            “Yeah,” I concur. “His clothes don’t exactly scream Salvatore Ferragamo.”

            “So where have you been the last 24 hours?” he asks, producing a small black electronic tablet and metal stylus.

            “We— ”

            “Just talk into the pen point. It registers audio.”

            “Also good for poking an eye out, if we lie,” suggests Colfax. She flashes her shield. “FBI.”

            “Oh. Proud to meetcha, ma’am.”

            “We were in the room screwing,” Colfax explains. “Except for breakfast at Ihop and lunch at Subway, you could say we’ve been indisposed.”

            The male detective examines my aching crotch speculatively. Looks up, estimating my height. “Anything’s possible.”

            “That’s my story,” says Colfax, “and I’m sticking to it.”

            “What about you?” he asks. “What’s your take?”

            “I’m just worried that this might be a set-up by the Iranians. To get back at me for offing Saddam al-Tikriti Hussein.”

            “Qué?” asks Saputo.

            “I brought down Saddam Hussein. With some help from Petraeus, McChrystal and the 1st Armored Division, ‘Old Ironsides.’ That was me. I did that. Found him in his spider hole in Tikrit. The Iranians may be bent on payback.”

            “The Iranians,” remarks Saputo, “hated Hussein. He was their arch enemy.”

            “Still, they may want to eliminate me. As a formidable opponent.”

            “¡Cabrón! Talk about paranoid delusions.”

            “I’m just saying…”

            “I would classify Josh’s statement as extended hyperbole, detective,” suggests Colfax. “Not to be taken as historically accurate, if you get my drift.”

            He jots down our names. Takes Colfax’s business card. Hands us his.

            “What kind of name’s Saputo?” I ask.

            “You insulting my heritage?” he demands. “I’m not Indonesian! Don’t leave town.”

            “We wouldn’t dream of it,” says Colfax.

            No sooner is the detective out of sight, Colfax has us load up the rental car and drive to the Indian casino on Interstate 9. I know it well. When the weather’s bad, I hitch a ride out there and parlez-vous with the proprietor, Chief Windfarm. “So where in India are you from originally? Calcutta? Madras? New Delhi? Old Delhi? Kosher deli? Injah, as the British say. World’s second largest population. Forty percent live in abject poverty. Main religion, Hindu. I can understand why you wanted to relocate. I am the reincarnation of a wolf.” We pass the pipe and smoke the evil weed, but the chief don’t talk much.

            He is impressed with Colfax. “A quarter horse. Does she ride well?”

            “She specializes in ridin’, ropin’ and rustlin’.”

            “Then you are a lucky man.” No newlyweds on the premises, he gives us the bridal suite. Colfax and I wrestle in the Jacuzzi.

            “I was beaten as a child,” she tells me, fighting for possession of the soap. “It made me think less of myself. My rebellion was to become stronger than my parents. Now, my folks and I are friends. An adult relationship. In complete denial, they block out any memory of child abuse…”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “Love me,” she asks in a small voice. “Hold me.”

            “I’d love to, but you’re so lathered up, you keep slipping from my grasp,” I tease, shoving my tongue down her throat. No worries. She comes back just as aggressively. Her tongue scours the insides of my cheeks like sandpaper. She squeezes my balls in a vice-like grip. Considering her nails, my back must look like a checkerboard out of Mandingo.

            We dry off. Retire to the bed. Continue our love games.

            “If you’re a chopper pilot, why don’t you talk like one?”

            “Pardon me, ma’am, while I park my crate in your slot.”

            I do. I autorotate into her. Crank to 360 rpm, shaking the stick.

            We fall asleep in the a.m., wrapped in each other’s arms.

            “Goodnight, Archie!”

            “Goodnight, Veronica!”

            Life is good.

 

            Next morning, we drive back to the city. Plunk ourselves in her apartment. She gives me a key. Has me memorize the security code. She also returns Detective Saputo’s call. Drives us to his office. Uptown. To get there, we have to wade through a crowd of demonstrators in down jackets and knitted wool caps. The weather’s turned cold. Their faces are hidden behind stylized black and white masks of Guy Fawkes. Like something out of a Kabuki play. They shout in unison

“Push ’em back,

Push ’em back,

Way-y-y-y back!” 

            I get stiff-armed by a brute as big as me. He blocks our path. “Hey!” he complains. “Where the hell you goin’, dude? Where’s your sense of civic duty? Join our protest against two high school footballers on steroids who broke into Farmer’s Market, raped a sheep and mowed down six dozen chickens using assault rifles!”

            “I support you in this protest!” I assure him, breaking free.

            “The gun laws in this country are insane,” he insists.

            We cross the street on red, dodging traffic. Reach Saputo’s lair. “What’s the beef?” I ask.

            “No beef. Come in. Sit. ‘Scuse the mess. Renovating…”

            “Yes,” remarks Colfax. “Continually since the Peloponnesian War.”

            We have to move stacks of files to sit. He has the grace to bring us hot cups of coffee from the vending machine down the hall. Nice and black, it’s utterly tasteless.

            “How’s the investigation going?” asks Colfax. Seeing her now, you wouldn’t know it’s the same lady I met two days ago. Completely different skin tone. A face awash in freckles. Almost no make-up. Windblown hair that makes her resemble a mermaid.

            The detective gapes at her as well. “He died of a heart attack. Keeled over and fell in the pool.”

            This is the moment I learn to always carry a pocket defibrillator. “Funkadelic,” I tell him.

            “… still doing lab tests. Blood. Stomach. See what meds he was on. See if he was poisoned.”

            “Any reason to suspect foul play?” asks Colfax.

            “No one can yet explain what an Iranian diplomat was doing in Lizard Town.” Sighing, the detective drinks some coffee. Makes a face. “Where did you guys go?”

            “On our honeymoon,” replies Colfax. “Premarital.”

            “Was it fun?” Saputo asks. He and Colfax have that law enforcement officer bonding thing. Personally, I think he’s an idiot.

            “If you like unbridled sex 24-7,” deadpans Colfax, “I guess, yeah, you could call it fun.”

 

            Naturally, the FBI is tasked with solving the mystery of the dead Iranian. Codename: Terry Ran. Or as Colfax insists on stuttering, “Tay-heh-heh-ran.”

            “Life is too short for word games,” I grouse.

            “Oh, is baby having a bad day?”

            “Knock it off!”

            “Less rubeyat, shepki letyat,” says she, Russian for “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

            Without an I.D., I can’t get into her office at the FBI. She saddles me with her laptop, instead. Her screen saver is a glam shot of a bearded Brad Pitt. She travels to the office to use their mainframe.

            Early on, I discover that googling “dead Iranian” generates 183,478 possible matches. When I add the name “Lizard Town,” the number lessens. But on the right side of the screen, the search engine now offers me the opportunity to purchase alligator skin handbags.

            Colfax storms home at lunchtime. “I thought he might be an Iranian terrorist,” she rants. “When we requested a response from the nearest Iranian consulate, they faxed us the reply that Omar Rajasanveh was here specifically to root out and destroy Iranian terrorists. All well and good until it became clear that their def of an ‘Iranian terrorist’ is any opponent of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter!”

            “Try to look at the bright side,” I suggest. “You are gainfully employed. We’re together. The sex is good. Sixty thousand people have died in the last 21 months of insurrection in Syria, but neither side has resorted to weapons of mass destruction. Not atomic, biological nor chemical. And you and I enjoy good sex.”

            “Listen, Sherlock! You can’t be a little pregnant or a little dead,” she rants.

            “Yes, but you and I like screwing each other!”

            “Stop! You’re making me horny,” she says, tearing off her clothes. I race her. We jump into bed and fuck like rabbits. That’s when all hell breaks loose. Bullets flying everywhere. Mail delivery. A telephone call offering triple coverage (“Cable, Internet and telephone for one low monthly price!”) from Verizon FIOS.

            Using a combo of hacking and GPS technology, the Iranians have tracked us to Colfax’s apto.

            “Here, take this,” she says, buck naked, breaking out two Uzi submachine guns, a Winchester .30-06 rifle, a Mannlicher rifle from the Second World War (in mint condition!) and assorted boxes of ammo.

            Loading clips, in the nude, spilling bullets everywhere, including under the couch, I complain, “Why don’t you standardize your weapons? Like 9 mm for both handguns and rifles?”

            “You’ll like the Mannlicher. It has a sniper scope,” she replies, busy peering through the venetian blinds, service revolver at the ready.

            “This is the Iranian consul.” The tinny blast of a bullhorn echoes surreally between the buildings. “Come out with your hands up and we will shoot you.”

            “Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse,” comments Colfax.

            “Put on some clothes.” I throw her trousers and blouse to her. Watch her scramble into them. She’s one good-looking broad, her pendulous breasts reminiscent of green melons.

            “This is your last chance,” screeches the bullhorn. “Come out now!”

            A trad smoke canister crashes through the window and slips to the floor, belching tear gas. Colfax fires off a shot. “Got one!”

            Using my newly-purchased Abercrombie & Fitch khaki jungle safari shirt with the twelve snap-down pockets as a pot-holder, I scoop up the gas canister, waddle to the window and shove it through the splintered glass onto the lawn. “Smooth,” comments Colfax from the adjacent window.

            Hastily, I get dressed. “Let’s get those mothers!”

            Barefoot, Colfax and I plunge into the hall and press the gold-colored brass button for the elevator. By the time we reach the lobby and charge into the street, all that remains of our battle royal is a smoking canister on the lawn, broken glass, empty shell casings, wide black tire tracks and a rich red puddle of quickly congealing blood.

            Brandishing her firearm at the heavens, Colfax screams

                                    “THEN I SAW THE CONGO,

                                    CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK

                                    CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST

                                    WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.”

                                                                                                (V. Lindsay)

            After which, amid the distant wailing of police sirens, she calls in the incident to the FBI. On her cellphone.

 

Chapter 3

 

            Stuck at the inanely long stop light at Potomac & 12th, I look to my right. See Juan pull up in his silver Altima. We roll down our windows, the air thudding with the beat of his bass booster. Gangsta rap.

            “¿Qué pasa? I been lookin’ all over for ya, dude!”

            This is the moment I learn to never stop at traffic signals.

            “Hello, Juan.”

            “Pull over up ahead,” he suggests, waving his 7.62 mm Czech Skorpion at me as an added incentive.

            “Juan, what do you want?” I gripe. Parking the Audi on 12th in front of a wholesale auto parts, I join him in his ride. “This had better be worth the shoe leather.”

            “Such hubris,” he bitches. “Such contempt. It feels like only yesterday! I miss you, old buddy!” Amazing what phrases he picks up from American television.

            “Uh huh.”

            “Yeah. I feel the same way. Listen, Juanita sends her regards.”

            “Where is that bitch?”

            “¡Ay-y-y! ” he laments. “She preggies. So she go into, you know, rehab. Right away, so she can, you know, have a clean baby.”

            “Sorry to hear it. Glad to hear it.”

            “The United States spends more money on immigration enforcement than all other major federal law enforcement efforts combined!” says Juan. “It just keep goin’ up and up. I read that inna newspaper.”

            “Doesn’t sound kosher, but if you read it in a newspaper…!”

            “Yeah. So I get to thinking, here is a business opportunity for the sharp operator.”

            For a Latino punk, on occasion he speaks better English than I do. “I’m not listening,” I tell him.

            “Ever watch a police procedural on TV? Detectives go around the neighborhood askin’ ‘What you know about— ?’ Nuestra casa, everything goes through the patrón, don Pedro. Nobody say nothin’. Otherwise, zzzzzip!” He makes a cutting motion across his throat. “Don Pedro wanta calm inna barrio. Occasionally, this means working together with the policía, with la migra. My idea, we channel all info through a central. ‘Hey, detective, you want information? We got an app for that!’ We’ll be the amazon.com of snitching.”

            “I haven’t heard a word. I gone deaf, dumb and blind. In fact, I only habla Chinese. Nee-how! ” I would move to Beijing, but I can’t stand the air pollution.

            “I want we should be partners, amigo. You and me.”

            “Yeah. You, me and half the barrio.”

            “Well, hokay, you got a point,” he acknowledges, “but only the good half. Catholic archdiocese.”

 

            Juan drives us to the Spanish side of town. To don Pedro’s. King of the barrio. His office is in the back of a fruit warehouse. Crates stacked to the ceiling. Shouts in Spanish. Saw dust. Forklifts. Noise. The armed guards reach into wooden crates and hand each of us a two-pound bag of purple grapes. “Produce of Chile.” The don operates out of a fortified bunker. I check out the steel-reinforced drywall. Hit it with a hammer, the whole place collapses. I expect he knows a little more English than Perez Henao in Colombia. I prep myself to converse en español. I don’t want to seem arrogant or hurt his feelings. Trouble, I don’t need. I eye the firepower on the don’s personal bodyguard. In two brown leather shoulder holsters, he totes the kind of wonderfully decadent .45 caliber silver automatics featured in Baz Luhrmann’s movie version of “Romeo and Juliet.” I love the garishly colored depictions of the Virgin Mary on the stocks. I take a deep breath. Juan and I enter the office.

            The don sits behind a desk littered with bills of lading, manila folders, pens, staplers, an old-fashioned red rotary telephone. I watch as his personal bodyguard approaches him, bends down and whispers discreetly in his ear. Tells him who we are. “Yeah?” says the don, waving him away. He stares at us with jet black eyes as penetrating as gun barrels. “Hokay, amigos. Time is money!” he growls. “What d’you two peckerheads want?”

            I gulp. I start to explain, but Juan steps in and outlines everything succinctly in Spanish.

            The don eyes us. Bursts out laughing. “You mean I can tell the policía, ‘Get outta my office! You want that kinda información, I GOT AN APP FOR THAT’?!”

            “Well,” I say, “yes.”

            “That’s a dynamite idea. You guys get busy setting it up. I get my lawyer to draw up a contract. What we gonna call ourselves? Infocentral? Inforama?”

            Juan looks embarrassed. The don obviously isn’t conversant in apps. “Things the police want to know,” explains Juan.

            Don Pedro gives us a withering look. Like saying “smartypants.” Then he blossoms into a radiant smile. Laughing jovially, he winks and says, “I love the idea. We give the cops a hotfoot. Now get outta my office and get to work!”

            Like coming off a high, Juan babbles incessantly on the ride back. He is a young man in a hurry. “My next project will be an app to punish bullying in cyberspace,” he explains excitedly. “American kids got no manners. We offer a nationwide service that tracks down the perpetrators and teaches them a lesson based on the severity of their behavior. You know, simple flaming versus stalking versus destroying reputations versus full-fledged identity theft. Sort of a ‘Terminator’ for the high school demographic. Like in the Holy Bible, we mete out a punishment commensurate with the crime. Another niche market. People will pay good money for this.”

            Juan lets me off by the Audi, roaring away in a surge of testosterone. Or should I say, what is left of the Audi. What the Japanese would call “remembrance of the Audi.” The chassis is mounted on cinderblocks. Vandals have helped themselves to the side mirrors, doors, headlamps, taillights, front and rear windshields, front and rear bumpers, hood and trunk lid, all four wheels including tires and spinners, front and rear axels, engine block, transmission and car battery. Otherwise, the car is intact. I just can’t figure out how to return it to the rental agency without them noticing slight peripheral damage. Basically, the paint and body work are neither scratched nor dented. This is a point in my favor.

            I walk to the nearest bus stop.

 

            In order to know how much to charge the law enforcement agencies (police, FBI, DEA, Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms), we decide to nail down the potential number of snitches. The first thing we run up against is the skewed demographics of Lizard Town. Down at City Hall, reviewing the 2010 census results, we discover that in spite of an incongruous influx of semi-illegal aliens, population growth is in decline. It doesn’t add up. Who is leaving? To where? “We got to get more information,” complains Juan. “People disappearing makes it tough to calculate pay-per-view based on the totality of the population. I mean,” he bleats, “how big are the tits on this mama? A fluctuation this big, him screw up everything!”

            “I’ll handle it.”

            “Pero — ”

            “I’ll handle it!”

            The three of us meet at the nearest Starbucks. In the world of crime, Juan and Colfax recognize one another by type. We’re all stuck in the mix. Once seated, Colfax leads. “Lizard Town is losing its citizenry at an alarming rate. Obese people especially. This isn’t Honey Boo Boo, but there are plenty of obese people here. The number does, however, seem to be diminishing. Nine out of ten missing persons in the greater metropolitan area are overweight. We’re talking over 1,500 missing person cases in the last four years. And those are only the ones that get reported to the Bureau. How many more go undetected? How deep does this iceberg go?”

            “Makes you wonder,” I interject, “if there’s a physical fitness program on Mars.”

            “Qué?” asks Juan.

            “Alien abductions. One of my hobbies.”

            “I don’t,” Colfax insists, “think we  need to go into orbit for the answer. Solid police work should provide clues.” If she stares any longer at her smartphone, I can imagine her face bonding with the screen.

            We leave it at that. Juan’s not happy, but… I promise to stay in touch. Colfax brings home case file after case file. She and I pinpoint on the map all local disappearances using blue pins for children, teens and senior citizens, yellow for the middle-aged and bright red for the grossly overweight. By the time we’re finished, it looks like our map caught the measles.

            “Biggest concentration here,” she says, nailing a point on Interstate 9 halfway between the Indian reservation and the city. I pull her pointer finger away from the map. We’ve had a lot of fun with that finger.

            “Not cool,” I tell her. “I hitchhike by that truckstop all the time on my way to and from Chief Windfarm’s casino.”

            I go to see Juan. He resembles a three day old toy balloon. Somebody let the air out and he’s puckered. “I prepped an algorithm for calculating price quotes in a fluctuating field,” he tells me, “but, preferably, somebody got to stop the bleeding. We ain’t Argentina under the generals’ junta. People don’t just ‘disappear.’ ¿Comprendes?”

            “I’ll handle it.”

            “Pero — ”

            “I’ll handle it!”

 

            Her boss is named Hoffer. We pencil in a meeting. I’m going in there prepared to speak truth to power. Colfax pleads with me to show a modicum of respect. “They’re civil servants. They think they perform a public service!”

            It’s an uphill climb. The walkway to their office slants 30°. “Saludos,” I tell them. “You guys do acceptable work.”

            Long pause. Sitting around a polished dark wood conference table, they appear disgruntled. “That,” Hoffer says, “is like giving us a PG rating. Not mature enough to be classed as the hard stuff, but too rambunctious for family entertainment.” Dressed in a charcoal gray Italian suit by Tessuto Cerruti with a 1980’s flair, matching vest, pants and a Guard’s tie, he doesn’t look happy. “The subject is missing persons. The Indian casino has a lot of sagebrush out back. Maybe the Indians are involved. Opinions?”

            “And they are mild,” I say.

            “Who are mild?”

            “What? Oh, no, see, that’s a cigarette advertising slogan from the 1960’s. ‘And they are mild.’ ”

            “CAN’T YOU STICK TO THE SUBJECT???”

            “Who, Chief Windfarm?” I scoff. “That crapitalist? Forget it. He’s the most law-abiding individual I know. I can’t even get him to lighten up long enough to accompany me on an Adventure Travel excursion to Mumbai. And he comes from there. Or thereabouts.”

            They all look at me like I’m crazy. I guess the Chief is a proponent of “need to know.” Leaving the palefaces out of the loop regarding the providence of his people.

            “Well,” Colfax declares brightly,” we’re off to a good start. Shall we discuss mission logistics. Tactical and strategic.”

            “We’re going to send a man in,” says Hoffer.

            “Fine,” I tell them. “Let me know when you’re done.”

            “It’s you,” he tells me.

            “Huh? No way, Geronimo!”

          I can’t believe the nerve of this guy, showing off like that. What are his bona fides? Was he a guest at Kate Middleton’s wedding? No. He. Was. Not. There are 92-year-old district commissioners in Thailand. In Asian society, the older you get, the higher your status. Here in America, youth rules! “Duffer” seems young to me. “It’s a sting operation,” he tells me.

            “I hate bees. I don’t want to get stung.”

            “We’re gonna plant you in their organization.”

            “I’m not a flowering shrub. I don’t want to get planted.”

            Eyeing Colfax beseechingly, he sighs. “Okay,” says Hoffer, giving up. “We’ll find somebody else!”

            Good!

 

            Koreatown on the south side is riddled with crime. The local office of the FBI has two Korean agents. Like Colfax, they’re both operational. My New Year’s resolution is to speak only Korean, with the emphasis on the American phrase “Hey, sexy lady!” The two Korean agents think this is a pretty smooth move, but no one else in America can understand me. We go out to dinner “Gangnam Style,” but our horsing around gets us kicked out of the Chinese restaurant. By January 3, I am back communicating in English. I circulate throughout the city, frequenting gay bars and obesity clinics in Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Thailand, Little Saigon, the barrio, Chicanotown, the ghetto, Chigroville and Little Polynesia. I hit them all. At La Buena Gusta Cantina, the mariachi band is playing

“She is just seven-tina

The barrio’s Latina

And the way she look

Scare away rabid dogs

At fifty yarda.”

                                                                                    (J. Rodriguez)

            I admit, it comes across better in Spanish. 

            The FBI’s two stalwart Koreans confront me. “If you continue all this profligate drinking and partying,” they warn in a reasonable facsimile of English, “you risk getting elected to public office.”

            “You misunderstand my method.”

            “YOU HAVE A METHOD?!”

 

            My lovely lady thinks I should hitch out to Mystery Truckstop and case the joint. A rough-looking redneck threesome in stonewashed jeans and black leather motorcycle boots shows up at about 11 p.m., perusing the clientele. “You!” one of them shouts, pointing a carrot-sized finger in my direction.

            “You don’t want to fuck with me, brother,” I tell him.

            “We’re cool. We need help on the rig,” he explains, sidling up nice and cozy. I’ve beaten up 11-year-olds for less. “You’re a big’un. We need help changin’ a tire. Name’s Billy. Wha’ fuck ya think we wanted?!”

            Sure enough, they really do mean grease monkey labor, holding a wrench while they lower the spare and wrestle it into position. “What do you haul?” I ask.

            “We haul ass! Ha ha ha ha,” says Billy. Then stops. Since I’m not laughing.”Naw. We haul canned goods, cranberries when they’re in season, pork loins, poultry… Hell! It’s a 2003 Peterbilt 379-119. Six hundred horsepower! We haul whatever it says on the contract.”

            They must have barnyard critters at the moment, for all the stomping and yammering I hear going on inside the trailer. A rhythmic banging on the side is accompanied by a pitiful voice hoarsely shouting, “Help us! For God sake, if anyone can hear, help us!!!”

            “Those ain’t no turkeys,” Billy chortles, plainly embarrassed.

            “Who’s in there?”

            “Naw, now that ain’t none o’ your’n get-all, if you cotton my meaning.”

            “You mean like ‘Mind your own business’?” I suggest, the wrench dangling in my right hand.

            “Couldn’t o’ said it better m’self!”

            “Why don’t we open the trailer and let ’em out?”

            ” ‘Cause it’s not in the goddam contract is why. Besides, they’ll start vomiting and defecating all over the parking lot. You don’t know dick ’bout trans-shipment. They have to adjust gradually to the light, the cold and the fresh air. It’s none o’ your goddam business, really.”

            “Until I make it so.”

            “Now what the hell,” says Billy. “You gotta feed ’em! You gotta move ’em! You gotta get them to market. As they’re a troublesome, cantankerous and unpredictable lot o’ hooey, they’re worse than beef cattle!” Looking me over, he adds, “Don’t take offense, bud, but your market value is zero. You are just too big! We, however, could use a big lug like you.”

            I give him Colfax’s home phone number. Man’s allowed to live with his girlfriend.

            “We can’t advertise,” Billy laments. “Damn shame, too, bro’! I’d love to paint our slogan on the side of the truck. ‘White’s Slavers! We Sell Slaves! ‘ Cool, huh?”

            They pick me up on a street corner in a dented green minivan. Drive me to one of Lizard Town’s seedier sections. An industrial wasteland, really. East. On the outskirts of the city. Here’s a book title: Warehouses I Have Known. This one’s definitely different. People wearing orange jumpsuits are locked in cages. Portable commodes. Cases and cases of plastic water bottles. Shiny corrugated aluminum trashcans. A set of portable showers mounted over drains in the floor. An enormous commercial washing machine. A dryer. Mammoth exhaust fans in the ceiling. The place resembles a giant hen house.

            “All military surplus, ten cents on the dollar, care of Uncle Sam,” the boss says, coming out to meet me. He shakes my hand. His name is Craig. Mr. Craig White, Esquire. He’s not what I expected. Dapper. Pin-striped suit. Foulard tie. Loafers. A collegiate fellow, he exudes wealth.

            “Reminds me of Guantanamo,” I mumble.

            “You been there?!” he asks, curious, eyes enthusiastically alight.

            “Only passing through as a tourist.” [Publisher’s Note: The Hard-On, 2006]

            As if afraid I’ll think him small potatoes, Craig gives me a sales pitch. “We’re a niche market, but worldwide.”

            “You, too? Everybody keeps talkin’ at me about niche markets.”

            “Times are hard, bro’. Make money where you can. They call it ‘human trafficking.’ I like to think of it as ‘humane trafficking.’ ” Craig leads me through the facility like I’m an intern. I am amazed at his demeanor. I know that what these dudes do, their occupation, is reprehensible. But with their ‘hail fellow, well met’ bonhomie, we could all be friends.

            The back room looks like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. “Ours is a seamless operation from abduction to final destination,” Craig assures me. He’s got a poor schlemiel laid out on a gurney. “Our human subjects go through a process very much resembling grief. Shock. Confusion. Anger. Denial, and eventually, acceptance,” he says, shaking a vial of clear liquid. Filling a syringe, he gives the poor schlemiel an injection. “A tranquilizer.”

            “Help me!” the dude cries hoarsely. “For God’s sake, help me!”

            A moral quandary. Do I jeopardize an entire sting operation to save one man? An obese man with as much blubber on him as a small whale, at that.

            “I like to think of human trafficking as a mentoring process. People learning a new trade,” says Craig, monitoring the man’s pulse. “Foreign travel. Learning new languages. Discovering their previously unrealized capabilities in adverse conditions. Learning to overcome their limitations. Heck, if this wasn’t kidnapping, we could label it ‘True Adventures’ and charge admission! Besides, no one else wants these people. They loathe themselves because they are fat. We give them a way out of all that.”

            Public aversion to obesity is the same equation as America’s emphasis on youth. Young people are slim and lithe. Therefore, slim and lithe people are young. Reductio ad absurdum. Reduced to the absurd.

            “Who buys?”

            “You’d be surprised!” he laughs. “The big money is, of course, Arab sheiks. They are your true homoerotic connoisseurs. They like them fat and juicy. Like our friend here. I’m willing to ship anything and, frankly, we pick them up in this condition because we know that they are going to experience traumatic weight loss between here and their final port of call. We’re really not interested in fattening people up, so much as delivering them to their new owners. We ship the dross to Belize as shark bait. Point?”

            “I don’t know if I can get used to this.”

            “We’re a class operation,” Craig insists. “We’re not the British TV star Jimmy Savile. Or Sandusky. We don’t sexually molest the product. In that sense, we’re not even predatory. We keep on hand the machinery and expertise to administer vaginal ultrasound. Each of our sex slaves comes with a full diagnostic checklist. The buyer always knows exactly what he’s getting. Show me any other human trafficking operation with this level of quality!”

            I laugh in spite of myself. “Quite a spiel!”

            “I’d never hire you,” Craig teases, “except as muscle!” What he means is, stevedore. Manual labor. We drink Scotch whisky in his office to seal the deal. I’m in.

            I get assigned the most menial tasks. Swabbing the decks, fetch and carry, toting out the garbage, driving. The others have their assigned list of chores. It’s like running a summer camp. Jake’s last name is van Gogh. “Go, van Gogh, go!” the others shout as he fries two dozen meat patties at a time on the griddle in the industrial size kitchen. “Hansel and Griddle,” I murmur, making the others chuckle. Billy stands before the full-length polished steel mirror in the corner, proclaiming

“Mirror, mirror on the wall

What have I done to be banished

From the world of Us Weekly?” 

            We have fun! Billy I feel I know. The others, less so. Jake comes closest to Blackbeard the Pirate, his face covered in gingerbread, graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. Biker type. Dennis is a semi-moron. The only true Neanderthal. He means well, but even I, low man on the totem pole, have to constantly chip in and rescue him from some fix. He’s the only person I know who gets himself physically pinned against a wall behind boxes of frozen Salisbury steaks in the meat locker. That kind of malarkey.

            There’s this little blond creature, Jimmie Sue, who shows up once a day. White trash. Flits from room to room like a butterfly. Badgers Craig, her old man, for cash.

            “Oh, yeah, her,” grouses Billy, hauling 50 pound bags of potatoes across the floor. “That’s Craig’s squeeze. His nemesis. Five feet tall if she’s an inch.”

            Watching, my arms loaded with groceries, I see what he means. Hands down the shortest person, physically, in the room. I give her a wide berth.

            “Who are you?!” I suddenly hear her say. She kind of crept up on me.

            “Me?” I reply. “I’m just an errand boy.”

            “Okay,” she says, leaving the building, wads of greenbacks in both hands. What a selfish bitch!

            I’m very much on probation. Somebody has their eye on me all the time. I gotta earn their trust. I don’t march into the arena and think I can solve the entire ball of wax at one go. Our method is incrementalism,  attaining our goal by chipping away at the obstacles. Jake doesn’t trust me? Take him to a weapons expo, my treat. Billy’s angry with me? Buy him a six-pack. Craig needs stroking? Accompany him to a bar and philosophize over the adversities of an ever-changing world economy. “We are somewhat immune to the recession,” he explains, “since ours is, by its very nature, a luxury product being sold to a specialty clientele. Still, there’s no denying facts. Sales are down. It’s hard to interest investors in buying futures in white slavery. Despite phenomenal profits, even venture capitalists give us a wide berth. I love my work! I cannot conceive of another profession as demanding, exciting, lucrative and varied. Half the time, we’re forced to improvise as we go. The only thing I can compare it to in complexity is a moon landing. A million variables. A hundred different ways to close the sale! And ours is only a local operation. Think when we go national!”

 

            “Legally speaking, the all-encompassing charge is conspiracy,” Colfax explains. Her gun lies in pieces on the kitchen table. She cleans and wipes down each part in rubbing alcohol. Using rags from a torn bedsheet. “That way, whosoever benefits from the accretion of ill-gotten gains gets a jail term.” She uses gun grease from a can to lubricate the various components, protecting against corrosion. “Let’s go down the list.”

            I sit with a clipboard in my lap. Pen and paper. “Craig, of course. He’s the kingpin,” I say.

            “Okay. Craig.”

            “Billy, Jake and Dennis.”

            “Billy… Jake… Dennis.” She tallies them up. “And Jimmie Sue Cadillac.”

            “Well, she’s just Craig’s old lady. She’s not operational.”

            “She shares in the profits.”

            “Oh, yeah! Jesus Christ! She spends most of the money. Well, not really. She spends more moolah than anyone else, put it that way. No one knows what she does with it. Buys cars. Jewelry. Race horses. Fucking race horses!”

            “Fine,” Colfax agrees. “Add her to your list. Conspiracy to kidnap, transport and sell human beings to tribal sheiks in Arab countries. Human trafficking. White slaving.”

            I add the bitch’s name to the list.

 

            The bust goes down with a minimum of gun play. Weapons held high in both hands, Colfax and I march through the warehouse, taking them down one by one. Billy. Jake. Dennis. And, finally, in the back room, Craig.

            “What are you doin’?” Billy cries incredulously.

            “Ah, shit! I fuckin’ knew it! Goddam feds,” Jake grouses.

            “Man! Man! Man!” Dennis splutters as we cuff him, unable to come up with a wider vocabulary.

            “What’s up?” Craig asks, half-appalled, half-amused.

            “You are under arrest for conspiracy to commit human trafficking,” Colfax declares, all but shoving her service revolver up his nose. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the court. If you waive that right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”

            “Sure! You’re hot! How ’bout some coffee?” he asks, as I frisk him for weapons and handcuff him to the pipe under the sink in the tiny bathroom.

            “I wouldn’t come out,” I advise him. “We’ll be out front, armed. Break the sink and make a run for it, we will shoot you.”

            “Jesus!” Craig laughs. “I got it, already. What d’ya think I pay that shyster Leibowitz for? He’ll have me free and out on bail straight from the arraignment. I’m not gonna risk my neck. There’s no need!”

            Colfax calls it in. I sit out front. I guess if I smoked, this is when I’d be having a cigarette. Who comes waltzing in but Jimmie Sue Cadillac. They call her “Miss Blue Eyes.” Craig’s girl. Boss’s moll. I know she’s been a source of contention in the gang. We stare at one another. I’m holding a gun. She has Jean Harlow blond hair. Pale white skin. A stacked little body. But I don’t get it. Never having been involved with her, I have no idea why people put up with her. If she’s as insatiably voracious as people say, they should have kicked her out ages ago!

            Now, with Billy and Jake handcuffed to the furniture and Colfax in back securing the evidence, I sit with a gun on my knee, playing baby sitter. Fuck it. I take out a pair of handcuffs and walk over to her. She’s seated in a chair, examining God knows what. On the ceiling. Blue eyes staring up to heaven for… what, salvation?

            “Oh,” she says, finally acknowledging me. “Oh, I don’t need those.” She waves the handcuffs away.

            “Well, I was just thinking— ”

            “Don’t be silly,” she says, fastening me with her gaze. She has the damndest eyes. Jellyfish eyes. Expanding and contracting. Rhythmically. Black Mascara lashes. Sharp as pitchforks. Eyelids painted sky blue. Staring blue orbs. Beseeching. Demanding. Compelling. Willing me to… help her. Willing me to… obey. “You and I should leave now, Joshy,” she suggests in a strangely whiny voice. “Are you here alone?”

            “I’ve got a partner out back.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “FBI agent Lisa Colfax.”

            “Sounds ginchy!” she chuckles, wrinkling her nose. Strange lady. Her voice is so tiny. Yet hard as nails. Quivering ruby lips, always on the point of breaking into a smile. That cute little pointy nose. Those high cheek bones crying out to be kissed. Round little chin the size of a ping pong ball. Tons and tons of thick blond hair encircling her face. Cascading off her shoulders. She’s so small. Such a tiny little body, maybe 5′ 2″. Short. Compact. Built like a brick shithouse. Her eyes grow larger, staring into mine. Sky blue. Brimming with humor. Kindness. “You don’t want me to go to jail, Joshy,” she gasps in disbelief. Her pale white hands dance before my eyes. “You want to help me, don’t you? Of course you do, silly! You know you do!” A mischievous grin lifts the corners of her mouth.

            I had no idea how pretty she is.

            “We should go now. Take Billy’s keys and let’s get out of here.”

            “I’m, uh, supposed to wait for the cops.”

            “Don’t be silly, Josh. Let’s go!”

            Gazing deep into her eyes, I can see she wants one thing. To be my friend.

            So that’s what I do. I save her. The longest journey starts with a single step. Seated In Billy’s convertible, the top down, waving her arms gaily, relieved, she laughs in my face all the way to Reno.

            “You’re kind of a femme fatale.”

            “No, I’m not,” she gasps, giggling. “No! I’m really not! I’m in search of the American dream. I just haven’t found it yet.”

            Such a teenager! She’s so funny. I guess I got it wrong. Maybe she’s not a femme fatale, a troublemaker. Talk about the road less traveled! Everything seems so bright and alluring. It feels like I’ve stepped through a door into another dimension. I’ve never felt so happy in my life.

 

Chapter 4

  

            What if I open a facebook account and no one wants to be my friend?

                                                           

            Paying cash for gas, visiting ATM machines at dead of night, it’s a three-day road trip south and west to Reno, Nevada. Measured neither in miles nor motel stops. Measured in ejaculations. Three on the first night, in a dingy mom and pop locale that provides the basics. Bed. Shower. TV. Lamp. Room key. As I lie on my back atop the bedspread, Jimmie Sue prances around the room doing a striptease, chanting “My man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man!” A verbal tic. Down to bra and panties, she straddles my legs, unzips me and massages me erect. Robustly, her blue eyes shining in the lamplight, a wolfish grin on her face. She gets an enormous wad of toilet paper from the john, returns to business and works me into an ejaculation, murmuring “Man, man, my big truck-drivin’ man.” We sleep for awhile, but twice more in the night, she awakens me. Repeats her rituals. Hand job. TP. “My man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man.” Eruption. “This method is also applicable for those desiring long-term weight loss,” she tells me professionally.

            We shower and go for pancakes the next morning, her pretty blond head buried in local travel brochures. Plucked from the display case at the motel. We cover another 600 miles on our first full day of driving. Stop at a Waco Steakhouse just off the main road for dinner. Use the facilities. Eat, Jimmie Sue regaling me with horrific tales from the white slave trade. “If the sheik wanted a eunuch,” she explains, her school-girlish gestures and angelic good looks totally belying her words, “Craig gave the order, Jake wielded the knife and Billy delivered a eunuch to the shipping company.”

            Jesus!

            We stay at a western-themed motel. Our butts are sore from sitting all day. Inventive, Jimmie Sue has me experiment with various positions. Lying on my stomach, my side, kneeling, standing up. While she dances around me nude, running her fingers over every part of my body. Softly singing, “My man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man.” Leaving no part untouched. Once again, she whacks me off three times in the night, to diminishing returns. Smiling, whispering, “My man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man.”

            Morning. We wake up from that regimen only a little refreshed. Shower. Drive southwest for three hours. Pull into a town and stop at the local diner to eat. I’m sittin’ in the booth. Reading the menu. Jimmie Sue comes from the ladies room. Scoots into the seat opposite me. Picks up a menu. Peers at me over the top and says matter-of-factly, “My man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man!” Right there in the diner. People coming in and going out getting lunch. The damn bell ringing every time the front door opens.

            Henry comes to attention. Enormously. Pulsing. Aching.

            Jimmie Sue eyes me, smiling deliciously, giggling.

            SONOFABITCH! Fucking Pavlovian cunt!

            “Wassa matter, Joshy?!” she asks brazenly, standing up and walking to the soda cooler, ostensibly to pick out a beverage. “Come choose what you want, honey!” she drawls innocently.

            “Uh, just… pick something out for me.”

            Sashaying back to the table, she plops a Snapple in front of me and says, “There you go, my big truck-driving man!”

 

            The only other unpleasant revelation occurs in north Texas. We get pulled over by a state trooper. For speeding. Hollow-eyed, I don’t deny it.

            “Show me your license,” he says, not unkindly.

            I go into a pantomime. Feel my pockets. Mutter. Look at Jimmie Sue. “Damn, honey! Do you have my wallet?”

            “Last I saw,” she drawls, “it was on the dresser bureau at the motel.”

            We go into a whole thing of searching the front seat, the dash, the glove compartment, the floor.

            “You got any registration?”

            “We do! Oh, yes, officer,” Jimmie Sue declares, taking over. Oh, boy! I know that look of hers. Here it comes! She gets out of the car, dances around the hood, approaches the policeman. “We do have it! We do! It’s in the glove compartment. I can get it. Can I… get it? Can… I… get… it???” Nailing him through his wraparounds with the full 1,000 watt gaze of her jellyfish eyes.

            “Why… sure, ma’am. You do that.”

            She gets back in the car. Opens the glove compartment. Amazingly, amid all the junk, Jimmie Sue actually finds Billy’s car registration. Smiling lusciously, she jumps from the convertible, sashays up to the cop and says, “He-e-e-ere!” Hands it over with a school girl shrug.

            “Why, thank you, ma’am,” says the cop, smiling, amused. He reads the card. “William Wordsworth. That you?”

            “If I can find my damn wallet…” I reply helplessly.

            “You don’t have to report this or anything,” sings Jimmie Sue in that playful voice of hers, hands on hips, looking and sounding about 10 years old. “We can just get on our way like we never was here at all!”

            “Okay, just remember,” the policeman tells us, handing me the registration, “respect the speed limit in the Great State of Texas.”

            “Yes, sir, we will!” I promise him.

            “See,” says Jimmie Sue, fifty miles later, when we both have gotten over the shakes. “That’s how it’s done. I cast my net. Like Jesus, I am a fisher of men. I bring them to an exalted state.”

            “Yeah. Whatever.”

 

            We drive to Reno. I feel like John Wayne in “The Searchers.” I want to swing south to Vegas, but Jimmie Sue is having none of that. Terrified she’ll meet old friends. Apparently, Reno is safe, Vegas less so. We book ourselves into a first class hotel right on the strip. Five star. I’m starting to see what drove Craig so nuts. A southern girl who grew up dirt poor, Jimmie Sue has to have the very best. Every time.

            “Man, man, my big truck-drivin’ man,” she tells me almost before the bellhop has gotten his $10 tip and left the suite. This is not entirely fair. She leads me to the bed. Even I have to admit, the place is gorgeous. White carpeting, gold drapes, gold lamé furnishings, gold threads in the coverlet. I check the label. Made in Thailand. This hotel goes first class. Jimmie Sue holds my hand, pushing me down on the bed. “You like me a little, don’t you, Josh?” she asks in her tiniest voice. “I know you do. My man! My man! My… big… truck-drivin’ man!” Whacking me off into a wad of toilet paper.

            Worn out, I fall asleep. As perky as ever, if sleep-deprived, Jimmie Sue heads downstairs to the casino. I sleep until evening. Jimmie Sue comes back to the suite with all kinds of duds she’s bought using my money and her winnings. “Extra, extra, extra large,” she says, having me try on a white sports coat. It fits! A chalk white designer shirt. Pants, Navy blue, with a crease. She has even checked out my shoe size. Bought me name brand Italian shoes. “We have to go to an ATM first thing,” she says. “Currently, we’re cashed out.”

            “Holy shit!”

            She walks up to me, all 5′ 2″ of her. Looks up at my face. Reaches her little arms beckoningly, like a child. I lift her to my face. Scissoring me with her legs around my waist, she French kisses me, sucking the air out of my lungs. I totter backwards into the wall. Totally absorbed in her mega-kiss. “You love me. You know you love me,” she whispers in my ear. “Say it! Say you love me!”

            “I love you! I do love you, Jimmie Sue! I love you so much!”

            “Good. Let’s go to dinner, honey.” She puts on a gorgeous sequined suit. Newly purchased. Has me find a scissors in the desk drawer. Has me clip off the labels. The cut of the suit accentuates her curvaceous legs. Combing out her hair, she is breath-taking to behold. Her hair color isn’t natural. “You have no idea how dirty my hair is!”

            “It doesn’t look dirty. It’s… golden.”

            “Take my word for it. It’s dirty.”

            We eat at the hotel bistro. $30 for an entrée. Potatoes au gratin. Green beans. Sweet potato puré. Steak tartare. Filet minion. Crème brûlée and coffee for desert. “It’s nice,” she says, smiling ruefully.

            “Yes it is, it’s very nice.”

            This is a woman who spends 45 minutes a day putting on make-up. You wouldn’t know it, but she sneaks cigarettes, smoking in the bathroom with the shower fan going. By age 50, she’ll have cancer. But I love her. Helplessly. Hopelessly. Total immersion.

            “We need to go back to the room!” she says, giving me a meaningful look.

            I know what that means. I dawdle over my coffee. I’m too old for this. She’s wearing me out. I’m a wreck!

            “Come on, my man,” she sings, standing and taking my hand. I stumble from the table and meekly follow her to the elevator. “My man!”

            I playfully press my hand to her mouth. Go “Sh-h-h.” Just like a loving couple. People look and smile. Only we’re not playing. Once inside the suite, she locks the door, kicks off her shoes, leads me into the bedroom, shoves me onto the bed, unbuckles my pants, pulls down the zip. Getting toilet paper from the bathroom, she stalks into the bedroom, shouting, “MY MAN, MY MAN, MY BIG TRUCK-DRIVIN’ MAN!”

 

            I’m dead asleep when room service delivers breakfast next morning. She spends the day shopping and gambling. I sleep. Every few hours, she comes upstairs and whacks me off. “If you intend to be involved with me,” she lectures, pulling my pud, “I expect you to go the whole nine yards.”

            “Oh,” I gulp, “Jimmie Sue! That’s what I want, too, sweetie.”

            “Good! As long as we’re on the same page. I once had a boyfriend who entered a monastery. To become a monk. Well, I put a stop to that monkey business! I don’t know where he disappeared to. I think I heard he died of a drug overdose. Poor mixed-up fellah!” Grinning raffishly, she gives me an extra, playful tug. I explode. If the TP didn’t catch it, I think I would have spurted the whole nine yards!

            There’s no denying it, Jimmie Sue’s an angel. Really. She’s sweet and kind and… helpful.

            We have dinner in the suite. I am practically an invalid. Even when I don’t ejaculate, she spends 15 minutes at a time massaging Henry. “That’s all right, big boy!” she coos. “You’re still my big, truck-drivin’ man!”  I’ve got one sore dick, the skin red and inflamed. She buys skin lotion at the hotel pharmacy, starting a whole new chapter in penal servitude. This goes on for three days. Sometimes I’m awake. Usually, not.

            One morning, I’m sitting in a complimentary bathrobe when the boy brings the breakfast cart.

            “Oh, hi!” chirps Jimmie Sue, coming out from the bathroom wrapped in a giant bath towel. Busily, she rubs a hand towel along the strands of her wet hair. “How are you? I haven’t seen you in awhile. I’d give you a tip, but I’d rather give you a kiss!” Which she does. Kisses the room service bellhop. Laughs in his face. Playfully kicks his butt as she shoos him from the suite.

            “Always pushin’ the envelope,” I grouse.

            “Always have!” she sings happily. “Always will.” Over breakfast, she describes in detail her method for beating the system. Regardless of what it is. “Figure out people’s weakness and present what looks like a viable solution. Then keep them hanging on endlessly, waiting for deliverance. Take you, for example— ”

            “Take me! For example,” I agree.

            “You’re panting, dying, longing to fuck me. Instead, I keep you so depleted, you can hardly get out of bed.”

            “Is that what you’re doing? Depleting me?”

            “I hate to tell you, sweetie, but they have a gym here and you need to start using it. Get back in shape. No more sex for you, big boy! Not for a week!”

            “Why don’t you just tip room service? Why does everything have to be a conquest?”

            “What?” asks Jimmie Sue, wide-eyed. “And not have any fun?!”

            We make our umpteenth visit to an ATM. Like every other convenience, hotel management offers it right there in the casino. After holing up in the room, the jangle of the slots and gaming tables sounds deafening. “Another $1,000,” Jimmie Sue tells me.

            “Just like that?” I ask.

            “Just like that, honey buns.”

            I take out another $1,000 and hand momma the cash. She’s in charge of our finances. Hell, she’s in charge. Period.

            Another three days. Eating right. Going for walks in the desert. Alone. Which become short jogs. Longer jogs. Mornings and afternoons, I lift weights in the gym,  work out on the Nautilus. Basically, Jimmie Sue and I never see each other. She’s busy gaming, I’m busy with physical therapy.

            On the seventh day, I get a visit from management. In our suite. I’m sweaty from the gym. About to shower. The doorbell rings. I open the door. A man in a suit. “Mr. Wordsworth?”

            “Speaking.”

            “I’m the house detective,” he intones. Apologetically. “Dave Hunter. May I come in?”

            “Yes. Sure. Come on in.”

            “Can we talk in the living room?” he asks, taking a seat on the couch.

            I pull up a chair. “What’s the word? I believe my… wife… has been paying by the day.”

            “It’s not your hotel bill. It’s fine. You know, here in Nevada, gambling is legal. We try to offer people a diversion. Something they can enjoy. Our business is your pleasure, if you get my meaning.”

            “Okay,” I answer, unsure where this is going.

            “It is a business. Like any business, there are certain rules. A bottom line. We’re not running an anarchists’ convention.”

            “I don’t know,” I joke. “There are a lot of conventions in town. Maybe one’s for anarchists.”

            He nods. Smiles politely. “This woman you cohabit with. Your ‘wife,’ if she is your wife. Understand me, I don’t care one way or the other. But a team of con artists might behave very similarly to the two of you.”

            “Whoa, boss! What’s happening?”

            “Her name’s Jimmie Sue?”

            “Jimmie Sue Cadillac.”

            “That’s her real name?” he asks doubtfully.

            “It’s the name on her driver’s license.”

            “So what’s the deal? She tips the bellhops and room service with kisses. She has the blackjack dealers throwing her tricks. The croupiers hand her stacks of chips regardless of where the ball lands or on what squares she bets. We’re losing money on her. That’s the least of our trouble. Your lady is FREAKING EVERYONE OUT!”

            “I’ll talk with her.”

            “Do more than that. You have until tomorrow afternoon to vacate the premises. Keep her away from the gaming tables and off the slot machines. Swim at the pool. Go see a show. Have another nice dinner, compliments of the hotel, in our Italian steakhouse or Parisian bistro. Have a leisurely breakfast. Pack. Leave. Don’t stop until you’re over the border. Go west. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump. The Nevada Gaming and Hospitality Association has an internal network. Your names and pictures are on it. From tomorrow, William Wordsworth and Jimmie Sue Cadillac are persona non grata in Nevada.”

            “Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

            “Don’t ‘yes’ me, pardner.”

            “Wouldn’t dream of it. Jimmie Sue is definitely out of control. You have a legitimate beef. I’ll take care of it.”

            “Do so. We’re watching.”

            I take my shower. Go downstairs and have a philly cheese steak sandwich in the bistro. Drink a Heineken.

 

            Coming up to our suite from the casino, dressed in her school girl duds, a flushed look on her face, she glares at me. At me, peacefully sitting on the couch reading the newspaper. Now what? “My ma-an,” she chants, locking the door to the hall. “My ma-an, my ma-an, my big truck-drivin’ man!”

            My dog whistle.

            Instantly, I get a major hard-on. Swell up like a blimp. Trudging resignedly to the bed, I lie down on my back. “We gotta talk, Jimmie Sue. A man came up from downstairs. A hotel dick— ”

            Throwing her tote in the corner, she comes to join me. “A dick?” she jokes. “Another dick? That could be interesting!” She climbs on the bed. Positions herself. At my knees. Reaches for my zipper. Unzips me. Yanks apart my jeans. Exposing Henry.

            “We gotta talk,” I gulp.

            Clasping my cock in her busy little fingers, she thinks about that. Smiles. “I’m a fun person,” she tells me in her sing-song voice. “But it’s hard to maintain a sunny disposition when creditors are constantly dunning me and calling me names.”

            “Creditors?”

            “Yes, Joshy. Cre-di-tors! I’m a dog breeder by profession. Animals know instinctively whether you are a nice person. I am! My dogs love me. But some dissatisfied customers accused me of running a puppy mill. Those bastards! I defended myself successfully in court, but my court costs were phe-nom-in-al. Like you wouldn’t believe. I still owe the law firm, like, $20,000. That’s the only reason— ” she explains,massaging my cock with both hands at 30 oscillations per minute, her enormous blue eyes enveloping me in their lustrous glow, white teeth flashing— “I think we’d better, you know, rumble some high roller and take his stake!”

            Ejaculating like a Vesuvian eruption into half a roll of wadded toilet paper, I manage to pant, “W-W-What? D-D-Do what?!”

            “Rumble a high roller. Take his money.”

            “Uh, now wait a minute.”

            “You want to,” she says, busy coaxing my flaccid flesh into sore but semper fidelis re-engorgement. “I know you want to! Otherwise, I would never ask.” Her exclamation point takes the form of a gargantuan French kiss that, like everything else about Jimmie Sue, goes on and on endlessly. Reaming out my mouth with her tongue.

            Coming up for air, I never get a word in edgewise.

            “You’ll do it! ” she rejoices, my penis throbbing to attention in her jiggling hands. Exalting, cackling, bouncing up and down on my thighs, shouting, she celebrates her victory. “YOU’LL DO IT! YOU’LL DO IT! YOU’LL DO IT! I KNEW YOU WOULD!  I LOVE YOU, JOSH!  YOU’LL DO IT!!!”

            God help me, who could say “no” to that?

 

            “I’ve found him!” she tells me two hours later. “You won’t even need to be rough. He’s been staring at me for a week. All I needed to do was walk up and say, ‘Take a picture, it lasts longer!’ You should have seen the look on his face. Especially when I told him I found him amazingly virile. I just came from his room. Ta-ta! ” She holds up a key card. “Trust me, Josh, honey. He… is… primed. He’ll roll over like a pussycat.”

            We walk to the elevator. Go up to the eighth floor. She walks down to room 814. I hang back, examining a cactus in a pot of sand by the elevator. Using the key card, she opens the door and leans awkwardly into the hall. My signal. I come up behind her. We’re in.

            “Hi, baby! Is that you? Did you get the whipped cream?” a man’s voice calls jovially from the bedroom. Followed by the man himself. In person. Dancing buck naked into the living room. “Oh,” he remarks, seeing me. “Oh, shit!”

            “No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m with her, but she’s worn me out. You can definitely have a taste.”

            “If we’re gonna do this,” says Jimmie Sue, “let’s not just go through the motions.”

            “What’s this about, Betty?” he asks.

            “He’s got an enormous stash in the safe in the closet,” she tells me. “Make him open it, Ricky!”

            “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack. Sit,” I tell him. “Baby, go get the man some pajama bottoms or something.” We get him comfortable on the couch, dressed in a bathrobe. “Here’s the deal,” I tell him. “We’re robbing you, yes. But we’ll only take half your stash. Half. So let’s open the safe and get this show on the road!”

            “I won’t do it!” he bleats.

            “I think you will,” Jimmie Sue insists, prancing over to the couch. She sits down next to him. Blows in his ear.

            Annoyed, he straight-arms her, sending her tumbling to the floor.

            I get up, walk over, and bash him one upside the head. “What are you thinking about?” I ask, bodily lifting him and dragging him into the bedroom. Holding him by the scruff of the neck, I kick open the closet and push his face down to the level of the safe. “Who needs violence? Now open it!”

            It’s one of those double lock jobs. You have to slide a credit card and punch in a security code. My lady fetches his wallet. Eventually, we get the safe open. Though I have to rough up our victim some in the process. Like the lady says, a humongous amount of money is neatly stacked in bundles. “That’s a lot of moolah,” I remark admiringly. The three of us carry it in stacks to the coffee table in the living room. Every last dollar.

            “I’ve been lucky at Baccarat. I play this system,” he offers. “I can explain it to you. The reason why I’m super upset is, I filched— ”

            “Yes?”

            “I took my stake from the payroll safe at our company office. I have to return the money when I get back home. See, we pay the employees every fortnight— ”

            “I got it!” I assure him.

            “Don’t be nice to him,” complains Jimmie Sue. “He wanted to tie me up and fuck me. You know, bondage.” She seems to find this a heinous crime. She keeps stomping from room to room, nervously tucking strands of her long blond hair behind her ears.

            He’s got $24,000. Amazing! But $10,000 he foolishly took from his boss’s safe. So we’re down to $14,000. “What are you?” I ask. “An accountant?”

            “Yes, I am an accountant! That’s why I’m so good with numbers.”

            “Seven is my lucky number. We’re gonna take $7,000.”

            “I WANT YOU TO TIE HIM UP! Use this clothes line. He had it in his bedroom to tie up prostitutes who came here to party,” Jimmie Sue rants.

            He’s frightened and I’m laughing. “I know, I know. Bondage!”

            “What are you gonna do?” he asks, visibly panicking.

            “Relax,” I tell him. “You’re good. I’m going to tie you up gently on the bed. Put a gag in your mouth. When we’ve put some miles between us and the state of Nevada, I’ll call the front desk and give them your room number.”

            Jimmie Sue is annoyed. Our victim is relieved. I have him urinate, watching him every second. So he won’t have to go for awhile. I have Jimmie Sue count out our share. Fully aware that she is a sticky-fingered little conniver. Hiding an extra thousand dollars in her panties, another in her bra, a third in the waistband of her trousers. Every large scale operation has a certain amount of spoilage. I have our friend lock the rest of his money in the safe. Then I get him comfortably bound on the bed. Calmly, Jimmie Sue and I leave his suite with our cut in a red sports bag. The kind of thing used for  tennis. I even have Jimmie Sue carry his tennis racket under her arm. “Well, miss! Aren’t you the jaunty one,” I tease. “On the way to the courts for a round, are we? Hoy hoy!”

            “Thanks, Josh,” she tells me as we ride down in the elevator. She reaches up and pats my cheek. “It’s a start, honey.”

            Ah, crap!

 

Chapter 5

  

            I leave her the car keys and I leave. Vamoose. I gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing I ever do. We’ve crossed the border. We’re staying in a motel a stone’s throw from Old Town in Sacramento. This burg has grown since I last saw it. [Publisher’s Note: The Frenemy, 2004] I leave early in the morning. Sunup. Jimmie Sue’s still asleep. Walk out the door with my gear in a duffel bag over my shoulder. Goodbye. Stepping off the curb onto the driveway of the motel, I hear the door swing open behind me.

            “Honey?” Jimmie Sue asks groggily. “I got up to go wee-wee and you were gone! Get back in here, my man, my man, my big truck-drivin’ man!”

            Clasping my engorged penis in both hands, yawning, she eyes me critically as I lie on my back in her bed. Crumpled bedsheets. The sweet smell of her hand cream, so strong it makes me dizzy. Massaging Henry as gently as the pull of an ocean current, she says, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Joshy. You know you love me. I’ll help you get over whatever inhibitions are bothering you, honey. We’re a great team! We’ve all got our quirks and foibles. I’m as compulsive as a bee! You’re mentally ill,” she gasps, eyes huge. “Good grief, honey. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. I am, too. EVERYONE IS! I’ll help you.”

            So for eight more days, I’m her goat, running around doing whatever she says. Robbing convenience stores. Banks. Snatching old lady’s purses. Convinced I’m mentally ill. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. A little lie can carry you a long way.

            I may be on a rampage, but I haven’t lost my touch. I use and discard a lot of different masks, rubber gloves, jackets and tennis shoes. Burying them at various points in the desert. Behind hillocks. In stands of trees just off the main road. Between oil derricks busy pumping crude. The land looks parched. An effect of the drought, California is reverting to desert. I employ different voices and accents for Aquaman, Frankenstein, The Hulk, Wolfman, Guy Fawkes, Cinderella. I even try to walk differently each time for the surveillance cameras. We leave a swath of unsolved cases in Sacramento, Modesto, San Francisco, San Jose, Fresno and Bakersfield. I love Bakersfield! Accustomed to banditos since its inception, you gotta work doubly hard to stay ahead of the law.

            “I’ll help you,” Jimmie Sue says, and she does. Just by staying with me, suggesting targets, she does. “Oh look, a Starbucks. They must have some money in the till! Oh wait, look, in front of Foodsco there’s a black woman loading groceries into a van. Let’s rumble her!”

            Even with computers, it takes the police time to survey the video and put out an APB. By then, we’re on the road again. I have all kinds of tricks for separating the getaway car from the scene of the crime. I park behind wooden fences. On suburban streets. In parking lots unaffiliated with the crime itself. “Suspect got away on foot” is the unifying thread. But with no two descriptions exactly alike, either one giant is committing a rash of robberies or nineteen giants have committed one crime apiece in a random pattern all over the state. With a population of 37 million, anything is possible in California!

            A short, blond woman never enters the equation. With a practiced air of distraction, Jimmie Sue sits reading a magazine in the front seat of Billy’s convertible, either smoking a cigarette or twirling her chewing gum on a single, manicured finger. For an hour, waiting for the return of her man, her man, her big bank-robbin’ man.

            “Let me go,” I plead, holed up in motel number 16 of our odyssey. They do add up. The car parked in the House of the Golden Sun parking area.

            “No. You don’t want that, silly!”

            She’s right, but… “I can’t stand it. I do what you say, but the entire time, I know that’s not me. It’s not who I am. I’m no bank robber! I gotta… return to civilian life.”

            That makes her laugh. As if my Master Sergeant is affiliated with the U.S. Armed Forces. “Fly me to the moon,” she croons, clasping my face in both hands, pulling me onto the bed and shoving her tongue into my mouth. Her thighs churn. Her entire body pulsates with nervous energy.

            Me? I hold on for dear life, heart racing. “What are you doing to me?” I gasp, when she finally gives me a chance to breathe.

            “Jo-o-o-osh,” she tells me, huge blue eyes staring. “It’s called love.”

            Day 21, she needs to see a gynecologist about a womanly complaint. YES! Freedom!… Shit!… She handcuffs me to the bed, ties my legs to the bed posts.

            Bitch.

            Then, three nights later, she has too much to drink and passes out on the coverlet at the motel. I’m out on the highway hitchin’ a ride north within the hour.

            It’s a hard road to hoe but, sleeping in barns and fields, I eventually make it back to the midwest. To Lizard Town. At the moment, the only place I can call home.

 

            “Where is she?” Colfax demands, dangerously angry.

            “Last I saw, I left her in So Cal.”

            “We’ll catch her, you know.”

            “Not my problemo.”

            “You’re sick.”

            “I feel a whole lot better now that she’s gone.”

            “Everybody is out for her blood. Even Craig White turned state’s evidence in the case against her. We got good prints off her toiletries. It’s just a matter of time.” Diplomatically, Colfax turns a blind eye to my role of aiding and abetting. “She also ran a scam on Craig’s List.”

            “What scam?”

            “She called it ‘Screw for the Cure.’ The mark paid her $1,000 to sleep with her, thinking the money went to cancer research. A win/win situation. Then she kept his dough… Is something funny?”

            “$1,000, eh?”

            “What’s so funny about that? Best case scenario, false advertising. Worst case, prostitution, embezzlement and extortion. I fail to see the humor.”

            “Nothing. It was before my time,” I say, confronting Colfax forthrightly. I have to respect her. She is courageous. Unafraid to tell me the truth. Even if it hurts me. Hurts my feelings. I also want to catch up on “Dallas.” With Larry Hagman gone, I worry where the story is going.

            “Give me the license number to the Chevy convertible.”

            “Jesus, ace,” I exclaim, annoyed. “I don’t know! I mean, Christ! Now you’ve got me worried. I never miss anything. I must be having a senior moment.”

            “Fuck!” cries Colfax. “Goddam it! You, too? What is with that witch? That idiot Billy doesn’t remember. Since the plates were stolen to begin with, we’re wallowing in uncertainty here.”

            “I’ll try to remember,” I reply, bathed in sweat. I know JS did a number on me, but this is unnerving! This is triple whammy voodoo. I draw a total blank. “Jimmie Sue’s not stupid, you know,” I find myself defending her. “Knowing her, by now she’s either sold Billy’s ride or ditched it in an orange grove. That’s California!

            “We’ll get her,” Colfax assures me with the cunning vehemence of a cougar.

 

            She seems as inaccessible as a woman in a space suit. I get relegated to the couch in the living room. She won’t touch me. “I don’t trust you!”

            “Well, look, I — ”

            BAM! That’s when she wallops me in the face with a mean right hook. BAM! Twice. Then makes me an ice pack. I’ve beaten up 11-year-olds, but all this soft living is tough to relinquish. I stay put, from inertia if nothing else, rather than decamp to a one star hotel. She goes off to work every day. Brings work home and discusses none of her cases with me. The dog in the manger.

            She gets new contacts and exclaims, “Yipes! I had no idea how dusty this place is!” Luckily, I’m hard of hearing. I don’t hear nothin’.  

            I sense a thaw in our relationship when she invites me to accompany her to City Center to watch ice hockey. Up in the nosebleed seats, I’m a little unnerved to see people eating hot dogs and smoking cigarettes. Then I get it. Concrete doesn’t catch fire. We freeze butt. “How could you run off with that tramp?” Colfax asks, looking sharp in a pink dune jacket, tartan wool muffler and Navy blue beret from Old Navy.

            “She wanted to be my girlfriend. I’m the one leery of commitment.”

            “No, really?! ”

            Our Wolverines trounce the Canadians’ Bobcats. By halftime, we’re so far ahead, it isn’t funny.

            “Ladies and gentlemen, The Great Zamboni!”

            We sit watching the machine trundle around the arena, cleaning the ice.

            “What’s so special? What is great? It’s an ice resurfacer.”

            “The Great Zamboni isn’t  the machine. It’s the driver.”

            “The driver?”

            “He’s an Iraqi war veteran.”

            “Oh. Yeah. Right,” I reply, clueless.

            When he’s finished, the door of the cab opens. The same cheesy announcer shouts “The Great Zamboni!” This clean-cut, young driver jumps down on the ice, bouncing on his robot legs. The crowd goes wild! The kid is a paraplegic. The Great Zamboni, the war hero, gets a standing ovation. Good! War heroes get acclaim. Sports heroes get acclaim. Pop singers get acclaim. Young Hollywood starlets get acclaim. Established super-stars get acclaim. So WHY DON’T I GET ANY ACCLAIM??? Now if I was gay, in addition to being a knight errant… Whole different story! What do people want?! I use Reach dental floss, but don’t know jack.

              I work up a regimen. From 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. every day, rain, cold, sleet or snow, I jog the neighborhoods of Lizard Town. Koreatown, Chinatown, Chigroville. The barrio. Even the ghetto. No one stops me. Hardly anyone sees me. The patrol cars pass, officers eyeing me intently in the fog. Calling it in. “Six-footer in a light blue track suit seen jogging at Madison and 5th.” It’s worse than being a ghost. I’m a statistic.

            We tour the streets of Lizard Town singing Christmas carols. I’ve been a bad boy, this is Colfax’s idea of community service. At least I can stand next to her without getting coldcocked. Our choirmaster is this little old lady from Pasadena named Sandy Hook. A bitch. “Your voice,” she tells me, “is a little… rusty. Would you mind moving your lips but not singing?” Doesn’t she realize that asking me not to sing MIGHT SEEM INSULTING?!

            “I can sing solo. So low you won’t hear me. I can sing tenor. Ten or 12 miles away.”

            “That would be good,” she replies amicably. “Let’s try that.”  

            A Sunday morning talk show on TV. Political punditry run amok. The senator from a southern state that shall remain nameless is, as usual, the guest who outstays his welcome and will not leave.

            “Senator,” host Gregor Pencil asks apropos the fiscal cliff, “how would you remedy the tyranny of health care entitlements?”

            Placing a Glock 17 calmly on the table in front of him, Senator Zero answers, “Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 painting ‘Hot Dog With Mustard’ gives us a blueprint without forcing us into a straightjacket of fiscal restraint.” The senator then picks up the gun and shoots himself in the side of the head, cackling dementedly. Surprise! The pistol is only a facsimile loaded with blanks. Now that’s entertainment!

            A news report. A tornedo has flattened a church. The insurance company won’t pay because it was an act of God. In other news, Obama’s health care initiative provides financial incentive to women who breast feed their babies. Is this a great country or what?! Quiz: Who is the expectant celebrity glamour girl who has invited her fans to join her for a virtual baby shower where they can contribute to UNICEF? Damned if I know, but she’s out there!

            I begin to understand Colfax. Hard as nails, she still purchases her lingerie at Victoria’s Secret. Somewhere beneath the Johnny Rotten hard exterior lies a Christina Aguilera feminine mystique. She takes me to a chick flick. Just what I wanted to see, people making out on-screen. Colfax says she likes art films. “I can’t believe there’s no market in America for a black and white Italian film from 1963 with Vittorio Gassman,” she complains.

            Watching the Miss America pageant in high def makes me want to grab an assault rifle and head for the nearest shopping mall. I’m no longer 20 years old. Miss Maryland’s lips don’t even synchronize with the singing voice coming from deep in her throat. The lady’s a ventriloquist. Can anything be more embarrassing than Miss New York’s clumsy dance number? Or the tap-dancing Mariah Cary? She’s  Miss Iowa, only she’s not that Maria Carey. “Here she comes!… There she goes…!” First runner-up Miss North Carolina looks as cute as Taylor Swift. And she has boobs! So why does Miss New York win?! With a crown like that, Miss America can get a job flipping burgers at Burger King. Listen, burn the sweat-encrusted white Steinway piano. Banish Donald Trump to China. Maybe they know how to curb his enthusiasm for overwrought Americana.

 

            Phone rings during the day, I let the answering machine take it. I’m not about to get into one of those he said/she said arguments over invading Colfax’s personal space. I do telephone the airlines to price flights to Toledo. See Sis. See the sights. Soon as I hang up, ring! ring! brrring! Incoming. I ignore it, getting coffee from the kitchen. “Hello? I don’t understand this at all,” whines Jimmie Sue. “First I get a busy signal and now I get the answering machine. If you’re there, Josh, pick up!”

            I watch my hand hover over the phone.

            “Pick up, Joshy! Oh, man! My man! My big truck-drivin’— ”

            “Hello!”

            “Hello,” she chortles into the mouthpiece at her end. “Thanks for answering,” she gushes. Followed by two minutes of uninterrupted, mesmerizing laughter. “Ha ha ha ha.” Her voice rising and falling. “Hee hee hee hee.” I feel compelled to join in. “Ho ho ho ho.” I chuckle. “Heh heh heh heh,” goes Jimmie Sue. “Buwa ha ha ha ha ha ha — ” I find myself belly-laughing, too, spilling coffee, dear little Henry pulsing maddeningly in time to her merriment. A mind of his own. “No, the reason I called is because I need you to meet me in Chicago.”

            “Where are you?”

            “I’m not in Hawaii,” she gasps. “I’m not Obama! I’m in Chicago. I’ve got the flight times to O’Hare. Get a pencil and paper, honey, and I’ll tell you the flight numbers.”

            “How did you get this number?”

            Long pause. “I got it from Billy,” she answers, confused. “A long, long time ago, silly. When you joined the gang. ‘Josh girlfriend’ and the phone number… To that FBI bitch Iris Colfax.” Jimmie Sue’s voice grows meaner and angrier by the second.

            “I don’t know what to do!” I tell her quite honestly.

            “That’s why I checked the flight numbers! So you’d know what flight to book a ticket on. Fly here tomorrow— ” Just like that. Self-evident. Hee hee hee, come see me in Chicago, Joshy. Well, fuck that.

            “Josh, honey, are you there?” she asks in her tiniest voice. Forcing me to press the receiver to my ear.

            “I’m here!” I reply stonily, shocked at the steel in my voice. Well, it’s been a lo-o-o-ong time comin’!

            “But that’s why I’m calling! I need you to help. You’re obviously unhappy. I can hear it in your voice! There are all these unresolved conflicts going on and if we sit down and dis-cuss… them… Well, I don’t know, Josh honey, I think you de-serve a lot better than me or some bitch from the FBI! You de-serve the best and I just want to re-re-re—”

            “Jimmie Sue!”

            ” — resolve any conflicts between…  we two,” she blurts, openly weeping. “Otherwise, Josh honey, well, I just don’t know, honey buns. I just don’t know!” Sniffling into the phone.

            “I’m coming to Chicago! Tomorrow! There’s no way you can stop me,” I tell her all in a rush, wondering what I’m doing. “It can’t go on like this! We gotta meet and thrash this whole thing out, Jimmie Sue!”

            “Well, I don’t know,” she replies doubtfully. “I mean, it’s your call. I can’t decide something like this for you, Josh. You’re on your own. You need to decide. Which flight you want to take. All I can do is give you the flight info and pick you up at the airport.”

            “Jimmie Sue!” I gulp. “You make it so easy.”

            “I know I do! I kno-o-o-ow!”

            I write down the flight numbers and call the airline. Jimmie Sue’s final salutation ringing in my ear, “Well okay then, sweetie, I’ll see you tomorrow. Love you!” And the phone number where I can reach her. In an emergency. Or if the flights are fully booked. They’re not. I get an 11 a.m. flight.

            “Credit card number, sir? Or you can save $25 by booking on-line.”

            “I’m paying cash at the airport.”

            “There’s an additional charge of $10 for that. Would you like executive seating? Six inches extra legroom.”

            “Yeah, that would be good.”

            “Executive seating. That’s an additional $35.” She sounds like a talking parrot. “Will you have checked bags, Mr. Preacher?”

            “No, just my carry-on luggage.”      

            “There’s no charge for carry-ons. Keep in mind the size requirements,” and she’s off and running, giving me the dimensions in inches and centimeters. “All carry-ons must be stored in the overhead bins or beneath the seat in front of you.”

            “This has been a recording,” I mutter.

            “Sir?”

            “What? No, it’s fine, everything is fine. Book my ticket.”

            “The airline wishes to thank you at this time and make available to you our box lunch selections— ”

            “Please… just… book… the… ticket! ”

            “You are declining a luncheon selection. Fine. Including airport fees and all applicable taxes, the amount comes to…”

            It’s worse than getting a colonoscopy, the way the airlines shove their rate cards up our asses.

            On the short hop to Chicago, I just have time to watch Eli Small’s “Drama Dark Movie Theater.” There’s a $5 charge for headphones. Quite the movie. It’s pure torture. We follow the 10-year mission to nail down net suffixes that no longer end in .com, .org, .gov or .net. Little known fact. Jesus’s father was Jewish, but his mother preferred to think of herself as a devout monotheist without overthinking her choices. Isis. Zeus. Neptune. Jehova. Khan. I give the movie two thumbs up.

            Security concerns no longer allow friends and family to meet passengers at the gate, but once I get past the blue, striped spandex belt dividers and into the terminal, I’m not surprised to see my nemesis, arch enemy and favorite love object gaping at me, eyes wide, nose in the air, her face perfectly framed by her wavy blond hair. Looking about 10 years old. “Josh!” she exclaims, as if surprised to see me. Who was she expecting? Colfax? Gray slacks. Shiny black plastic ankle boots. A chic, sleek black number from North Face over a blood-red blouse. Her golden hair unnaturally curly in ringlets about her head. Bouncing in ways that defy gravity. “O’Hare has become ab-so-lute-ly  im-poss-ible,” she chirps, grabbing my hand and leading me onto the moving sidewalk. “I have to get outside and smoke!!!” Reaching up for my face, she gives me a wet, open-mouthed kiss. “Glad to see me? What a dumb question! Of course you are!” she teases, her face alight, pinching Henry through the cloth of my crotch with a claw-like hand. “Welcome to Chicago!” she laughs, wrinkling her nose. My heart pounds in my chest.

            Drumming her heels on the pavement, tough as nails, no one can miss her. Die Welt ist leben mit Musik. The world is alive with the music of her laughter, the sound of her voice. Over and over, the phrase She’s so much fun! ticks inside my head like a metronome. We can’t stop gazing into each other’s eyes. I hate being here with her. A total betrayal. This sensation of helplessness. Floating on air. A freak, my pants sticking out stupidly a foot in front of me.

            “Did you remember to erase my voice on the answering machine?” Jimmie Sue asks crabbily. All business. A crack in her voice? I love her flaws, they humanize her.

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            “My name’s not ‘ma’am.’ Call me Jimmie Sue!”

            “Oh, yes, Jimmie Sue! I’m sorry.”

            “What did you tell the bitch?”

            “I told her the truth. I’ve flown to Toledo to see my sister.”

            “What a good liar you are, Josh honey,” she whoops. “Ginchy!” Dancing around me in a tight little circle on still another moving sidewalk, she gives me another of her other-worldly French kisses, sucking the air from my lungs.

            Welcome home!

            The rental car is a white Impala. Just wheels, she assures me. No showboat like Billy’s Chevy convertible. “I got $300 for that old turd at a used car lot in Torrance.”

            “Good for you!” And I explain how incredibly hot that car was. Every law enforcement agency in the country was on the lookout for that set of wheels. “That’s what I admire about you, Jimmie Sue. Your intuition. You’re a natural. Always two steps ahead of John Law!”

            “Yeah,” she sneers happily. “Even I gotta admit, I’m pretty good. You can get anything you want if you know how to ask politely.” Paying the parking fee with her credit card, she merges smoothly into oncoming traffic on the parkway. I always forget what a good driver she is. “God, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through!” she tells me, lighting a cig with a yellow plastic BIC disposable lighter. I open the ashtray for her. Overflowing, it hasn’t been emptied since God was a pup. She drives us to an airport motel, jauntily locks the car and has me follow her tight little ass across the gravel, through the lobby and into the elevator. “They’ve got a security camera,” she points out. “Say ‘cheese’!” She gives the camera the finger. Pulling on my jacket, she gives me my third heart-pounding kiss since I arrived.

            I’m beginning to detect a pattern here.

            In her room, door locked, the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob facing the hall, she peels off her clothes and then mine. God! It feels like a hundred years ago since we’ve felt the electric jolt of skin against skin. My mouth goes dry with anticipation. “It’s time,” she breathes in my ear. Latching on to Henry, she leads me to the bed. She pulls back the coverlet, turns back the blanket. “Get in!” Kissing between the sheets, we luxuriate in each other’s embrace. I love the satin smoothness of her skin. In contrast to the rough muslin bedsheets. We breathe in gallons of her exotic perfume. “I’m wearing Amor Amor by cacharel,” she tells me in a voice raspy from cigarettes. “Glad to see me?”

            “Oh, you know I am!”

            Pushing me flat on my back, she expertly mounts me. Sits atop the throne, smiling down at me sardonically. “If anybody had told you six months ago that you’d be fucking Jimmie Sue Cadillac, would you have believed them?”

            “Forget trophy wives. It’s like being in bed with Jayne Mansfield!”

            “Who’s Jane Mansfield?”

            “Every man’s sex dream. Way hotter than Marilyn Monroe.”

            “You love me,” Jimmie Sue remarks, a point in passing. She begins to grind. Southern girl. Never misses a trick.

            “What’s going to happen to us?” I gasp.

            “I told you the day would come when you’d attain your goal,” she exclaims with the certitude of a Chinese fortune cookie. She begins bobbing up and down, riding me “Gangnam Style.”

            As I climax in a kinetic explosion of euphoria, I hear her say, “That’s why it’s time to set a new goal!” I feel like I’m having dynamite sex while eavesdropping on a business seminar. Then, “We should get a place in the country. I want to open a dog kennel. With a roof garden. Dog turds make good fertilizer. We can compost. Grow organic vegetables in an ecologically friendly fashion.”

            “In Illinois?”

            “Wherever we want. Where it’s… appropriate!” she says, back to her usual perky, demanding self. Apparently, sex does that to her. It’s her app.

            Playfully, she slaps my face, bringing Henry to full attention. “Honey, listen,” she says, leaning over me, her shining blue eyes giving me my own private glimpse of paradise. Boy, do I ever love this girl! “I NEED YOUR HELP!”

            Gulp! I’ve never seen her so serious. And I’ve seen her a lot.

            “You know those bastards I told you about? The ones who sued me for running a puppy mill?”

            “Yes, sure!” I say, lacing my big clumsy fingers through her small, slender ones. I can’t take my eyes off her.

            “They were actually competitors.”

            “Qué?”

            “I think you thought they were SPCA or PETA. Such was not the case. Dog breeding is very competitive. I was better at it than they were. Whether my customer was a boy, a girl, father, man, woman, child, I could always close the sale. So they tried to shut me down legally. I defended myself in court. I won the battle but I lost the war. You don’t see any Airedale puppies under the bed, do you?” she sniffles, tears running down her cheeks.

            “Oh, baby!” I cry, cradling her to my chest. “That’s terrible!” Her golden hair, stiff as a wire brush, tickles my chin.

            She sits up, still straddling my waist. Gives me a critical look. Seems satisfied. “The reason I called you was, I’ve found out where they’re hiding.”

            “Qué?”

            “Hiding. In the woods. Having paintball battles.”

            “Other kennel owners are in the woods having paintball battles?”

            “But that’s why I CALLED you!” She squirms atop Henry, an unfathomable expression on her face. Need? Love? “Anyway, let’s book two seats to Boston and we’ll rent a car and drive to Maine.”

            “Maine?!”

            “That’s where they are,” she gasps like a 12-year-old at a horror movie, eyes staring, mouth hanging open in wonder.

 

            A Southern belle, Jimmie Sue takes me to a honky-tonk bar on Chicago’s east side. The moon is a sliver floating in the sky, thinner than the wedge of lime a bartender puts in your gin and tonic. We drink Lichido from the barkeep’s private stock of liqueurs, a blend of cognac, vodka, lychee and guava. The cloying taste gives me a headache.

                                             “Come on, baby, speak to me.

                                              You only need one place to be.

                                               Come on easy, come in close.

                                               You’re the one I love the most!”

                                                                                                     (W. Chester) 

twangs the rail-thin hillbilly singer on stage. His Adam’s apple is the size of a goiter. Left hand busy under the table, Jimmie Sue jacks me off.

            It’s called love.

            We go to see a man who takes pix of us with a digital camera, providing us with fake driver’s licenses. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, you can never have enough fake I.D.’s. What do you get when you cross a Mexican and a Boy Scout? A basement full of stolen merit badges!

            Next, hardware. I ain’t oblivious to what goes on in America. Since the toddler massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, you cannot buy an automatic rifle or 30-round mag on-line. It’s like the Brady law has already gone into effect. Only this time, it’s because they are all sold out. Yes, pistols on Glock’s website require you to back order, but that is standard operating procedure. Demand far outstrips Glock’s manufacturing capabilities. Today, in addition, all those weird 9 mm assault rifles that resemble something out of Star Wars have also been bought up by the hundreds of thousands. There’s a call for Walmart to stop selling assault weapons on-line. That would be good! If Walmart is selling weapons, who will be next? Safeway? Toys ‘R’ Us? Wendy’s? Mickey D’s? “Free submachine gun with every Happy Meal!” As is, everything high-powered is a sell-out. Gun owners want to get hold of them before Congress declares the sale of automatic rifles and 30-round magazines illegal. Get ’em while you can! No one needs that kind of firepower for deer hunting. That’s true, but beside the point! When North Korea invades, we’ll be ready.

            If Obama really wants to make a statement about gun proliferation, he should take the Oath of Office with his right hand on the 103rd edition of the Shooter’s Bible. “More than 7 million copies sold!” it says on the blood-red cover.

            I telephone a man in Boston and arrange a meeting.

            Before departing the Windy City, we go to a steakhouse. Downtown. Upscale. For dinner. We have the wine steward fix us up with a Bourgogne Pinot Noir. Domaine Nicolas Rossignol. The black cherry and mushroom flavor goes with anything, but especially well with meat. Insatiable, Jimmie Sue orders everything on the menu. Her goddam fixation with sides: shiitake mushrooms, couscous, french fried onion rings, even lobster tail (“Surf & Turf”) for an additional $20. “We’re gonna have to ask for a doggie bag,” I realize.

            “No doggie bags. Clean plate club. Eat through the pain.”

            Groan!

            When it’s over and I’m sitting there, hardly able to move, she hands me a little silver-colored cardboard box. Tied with a bright red ribbon. “Open it, silly!”

            I open it. Amid the tissue paper, I find a 2″ X 3½” color snap of Jimmie Sue, head and shoulders, staring into the camera with her enormous blue eyes, a foxy look on her face. “Thanks.”

            “That’s a pocket photograph that you can have with you all the time,” she instructs. “Whenever you are lonely, Joshy, or think of me, pull it out and look at it. Pull… it… out… and look… at…it. Look at it, Joshy!”

            I look. I mean, she looks good. She looks fucking great.

            “Put it in your pocket for later,” she suggests. “You won’t believe how many hours you are gonna spend staring at that photo.”

            I don’t know what to say. Looking up… she’s staring at me! Her eyes keep getting bigger, the wattage more intense. Her face begins to contort into… a snarl of… hate. I quickly look away. When I look back, everything is sort of back to normal. Jimmie Sue seems distracted. “Oh, hello,” she says. “If we’re finished eating, let’s pay the tab and go.”

            Love Jimmie Sue style.

 

            “They know you’re coming,” Torbjorn Rasmussen tells us, amazed at seeing me with a beautiful woman. A blonde at that. I can see it in his eyes. Prophylactic shock. Envy. Good old Raz. Fortunately, this is Boston and in this line of business, large sums of money overcome any obstacle. We’re in the back room of Raz’s Sporting Goods. The door is both closed and locked.

            “I appreciate you doing this, Raz,” I say, depositing a gym bag full of money on the cracked green Formica tabletop.

            “Jesus Christ. Josh Preacher! You my main man. How’s it hangin’, ace? I’ll do anything for old time’s sake,” Raz replies, busy counting out stacks of $50 bills. [Publisher’s Note: S’mores, 2002] Finished, satisfied, he stashes the bag in the storeroom in back and comes out with the pièce de résistance, an old-fashioned M-60 machine gun. Equipped with a prismatic scope, more for show than blow.

            “Nice.”

            “And all for one low price. Package deal,” he says, carrying armloads of ammo belts and gray metal ammunition boxes. He dumps them at our feet.

            Stepping over them daintily, Jimmie Sue sidles up to Raz, raises her arms like a child, grabs his gristled, bearded face in both paws and gives him one of her three-minute French kisses. “Thenk you,” she says in a starchy, fake British accent, letting go of him.

            “You’re welcome!” he barks, grinning, his face beet red.

            Sighing at these needless histrionics, I take the equipment out to the car. This being Boston, we can openly load the vehicle. Raz has had this shop for years. An institution, the Men in Blue charge only nominal rates to look the other way.

            When I return to the back room, Jimmie Sue looks flushed and Raz is lustily smelling his fingers. “Last time I saw you, bro’,’ he says, licking his lips, “you was in the MWR tent in Afghanistan hurling into a plastic cup.” MWR. Morale, Welfare and Recreation. The off-duty hangout at our outpost in the hills west of Kandahar. A rough neighborhood. One time, an insurgent round went through the canvas, shattering a bottle of Stolichnaya behind the bar. “Mujahedin,” Raz surmised. Black ops, officially I was never even there.

            “Watch your step!” cautions Raz. “Word on the street is a Terminator type has come north to wipe out a passel of Georgia pilgrims. They turned in their paintball equipment two days ago. Loaded up on beer, heroin, porno flicks, automatic rifles and about half a ton of ammunition.” Looking skyward, he chews on his lower lip, scratches his beard and says, “Might rain.”

            “Oh, great! Needle Nazis meet the Michigan Militia!” I grouse.

 

            “Where you headed?” asks the 19-year-old, fresh-faced cretin behind the counter at the motor lodge in Millinocket.

            “None of your goddam business,” I tell him.

            “Josh! Don’t be that way,” chastises Jimmie Sue. Radiating warmth and congeniality, she waddles up to the counter, fixing him with her 1,000 watt gaze. “Hi-i-i-i..!”

            He looks like a deer caught in the headlights. Mouth hanging open, a trickle of drool despoiling his orange “Maine is for timber wolves!” T-shirt.

            “I’ll be in cabin… four!” I tell them, examining our key. At least I know he won’t see dick when I unload the car. Eventually, Jimmie Sue wanders in, the clerk in tow.

            “This is Riley,” she explains, hands waving in my face, jumping into my lap where I sit at a table polishing gun parts. “Don’t be a Grinch!”

            “You could have asked first,” I say. I mean, an M-60, ammo belts and ammunition boxes heaped all over the room, do we really want a stranger, a local  teenager, to see all this stuff?

            “I wanted Riley to see what we’re working on,” she lisps. Relinquishing me, she trips up Riley and pushes him onto the bed. They make out like teenagers. Endless French kisses. Dry humping in their clothes. Doesn’t mean jack shit to me. I go on working. Ain’t gonna have a chance to test fire this mother ’till we get to the park.

            “Hey, where is this place? Baxter State Park,” I shout, interrupting them. They look up, hair tousled, with a “Who are you?” expression on both their faces. Hilarious!

            “Oh, it’s big,” Riley replies, clasping my lady in both his spindly arms there on the bed.

            “Big geographically or big as in ‘awesome’?”

            “Well… both!”

            “He’s coming with us!” chirps Jimmie Sue, Georgia Peach, wrinkling her noise. Giggling.

            “No, he ain’t!”

            “Yes, he is!”

            I spend half a day tracking through the park. All kinds of people up here. So I go and get Jimmie Sue, give her the grand tour. Parking aprons, cabins in the woods, campsites, fishermen in gumboots casting flies on the water. “That’s them!” she exclaims, excitedly clasping my arm in her claw-like grip. “Robert Ludlow, Mary Beth Balder, Dan Jorgenson, Tim Cardell.”

            “Cripes! A crew of fuckin’ berry pickers! Look at those yellow plastic buckets. They sure don’t look like homegrown terrorists to me.”

            “Oh, but they are. THEY ARE!” Jimmie Sue stammers, leaning against me, trembling uncontrollably. Yanking me into the underbrush, she seizes my lapels and pulls me down on top of her. Her enormous blue eyes envelope me, the air heavy with dew. She licks my ear, breathing in great ragged gulps. “Oh… Josh… Oh… honey! I hate them. I hate them. I HATE THEM!” she whispers fiercely. Finding my zipper, she frees Henry, pressed between us. I hover over her atop a bed of wet leaves. An acorn bounces off my head. I hear the chatter of a squirrel. “YES!” hisses Jimmie Sue. Squirming out of her jeans and panties, she guides me inside her with a whip-like movement of her hand. Warm and inviting, it’s amazing how my penis perfectly fits inside her vagina. A match made in Heaven. “You love me! I love you!” she gasps, cradling my head and smothering me in kisses. Our faces wet with her salty tears. “Josh… oh, Josh… Josh! Help me!” she cries in a tiny, whiny voice.

            Henry explodes. She clasps me to her, swept up in a storm of emotion. Shaking from head to foot. A curious chipmunk makes a spunky appearance, but Jimmie Sue’s unbridled passion scares him away.

            I find an unoccupied Ranger’s cabin, discreetly break in and set up our base of operations. Jimmie Sue and I drive back to town, check out of the motor lodge, load the car and get a hold of Riley. “You comin’ or not?” I ask him, man to man.

            “Shit, yeah!” He doesn’t even look frightened when I pick up a Jeep. Driving in tandem, we wend our way over to the park. Still no one home in our cabin. We unload the car. I dump it in a ravine. Good riddance! Trek back. Find Jimmie Sue and Riley involved in heavy petting. Oblivious to all the world.

            “Hello-o!” I call out, stomping mud off my combat boots. I pull Jimmie Sue aside. “Two people ain’t gonna get outta this jam. We need somebody to work with. Riley isn’t my idea of a viable candidate.”

            “We’re using him,” Jimmie Sue insists, running a hot, smelly finger down the bridge of my nose. Giggling, she does it again. It tickles.

            “Well, okay then!” I declare, throwing open the cabin door. Pristine woodland. The twitter of birds. The constant drip of dew from the treetops. Maples. The soggy smell of peat. Typical for Maine. “I’ll be back!” Leaving Jimmie Sue and Riley safely in the cabin, the Jeep parked in the rear, I charge into the woods, cradling the M-60 in both arms. Affectionately called “The Pig,” it was a standard weapon in previous wars. Weighing 24 pounds, you have to lean into it, since it bucks like a jackhammer. Payback is such a bitch! Where are these mo-fo’s?

            I find one behind a tree and blast away, his khaki uniform shredding, as blood, guts and white bone fragments spurt in a fountain of gore. “Aaaaaaaugh!” he bellows, poor man, dropping his Valmet M78 Galil semi-automatic rifle with its 30 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and folding stock. A fucking priceless armament! You can’t find ’em anywhere. Another stalker-killer gone from this world, the bastard. The worst kind. A baby-killer. Cresting a ridge at full trot, the sound of my own breath roaring in my ears, I blast away at a party of five.

            Pause.

            Shit.

            Well, okay, this was a family group of mushroom pickers. In North Face windbreakers. Fleece vests. Jeans. The kids in kiddie clothes, their handsome young faces splattered in blood. Those goddam Needle Nazis! That goddam Michigan Militia! Hot tears of remorse spring from my eyes, running down my cheeks, a tattered Hello, Kitty backpack covered in blood at my feet. Kicking it aside regretfully with my combat boots, I do the only thing I can do under the circumstances. Spray them with a final coup de grâce and get on my way. Who’s in charge here? I’m in charge!

            It is hard work, that afternoon, rooting out the bastards, liquidating them one after another. Surely, with the rat-tat-tat of the M-60 echoing throughout the woods, they know what is in store for them. Yet, faster, stronger, better equipped mentally, physically and emotionally for the battle, I am able to make better time. And ambush them at the dirt and gravel parking area by the main highway at the entrance to the park. It is a grimy business, the M-60 running hot in my hands, as I fire belt after belt of ammo. My shots punch bullet holes in Toyota’s, Honda’s, Volvo’s, VW’s, Nissan’s, Mazda’s, Subaru’s, Isuzu’s, Mini’s, Porsche’s (well, one) and Bimmer’s. No Jaguars. Maybe next time. Shattering auto glass in a hundred different directions. Catching people in the head, the hand, the chest, the leg. Finally, exhausted, it is over.

            In the age of cell phones, it is only a matter of minutes before the police will arrive. Dumping the cumbersome M-60 in a creek, I dogtrot back across the park to the Ranger’s cabin. I’ll miss that old “Pig,” it was a trusty friend. Snaking through the foliage, Gerber knife at the ready, I approach the cabin as stealthily as a shadow. Kick in the door. They’re gone! Out back, the Jeep is gone, too, tire tracks still warm to the touch. They couldn’t have gotten far on only one tank of gas. Boston, maybe.

            My weary steps crunch on tree branches, small critters playing in the underbrush. There is no app for mass murder. I amble down a hill to a gurgling stream. Topple in, clothes and all. Relinquish myself to the icy waters.

            Oh, well. She led me a wild chase, that bitch. Brought out qualities in me I didn’t know I had. I guess she panicked. I’ll miss her. Those amazing eyes. Her wily ways. Sultry looks. Impenetrable psyche. Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Thus goes the Sturm und Drang of war. Miscela di caffè macinato per caffè all’americana in atmosfera modificata. Boy, I’ll say! So passes away the glory of the world. Now in HD. Mächten Sie wissen? Jimmie Sue Cadillac was voted best new talent by The People’s Choice Awards. Two-time runner-up on America’s Got Talent. Runner-up for Miss Georgia Peach. Partial share-holder in racehorse Greased Lightning XI. Owner of a timeshare in Hollywood, Florida. Member FDIC. Pièce montée. Pinxit. Definitely the last train to Clarksburg. Prosit!

            Until next time.

            You know, dripping wet but refreshed, I find a country road that leads to ME-157. Still hiking, a farmer picks me up in a rusty, red Ford pickup. “Wanna lift?” he asks. I do. “Been huntin’?”

            “Naw, just power hiking. Good for the cardiovascular system.”

            “Do say? Well, whatever,” he replies in a thick Maine accent. It’s for the good, God-fearing people like him that I am in this neck of the woods. Some trees remain dappled orange, the remnants of Fall color still fading. The rest show the scarecrow pallor of winter.

            He lets me off at a Motel 6. I pay for a room in cash, using my fake plastic Vermont driver’s license. I like the people of New England, relishing my small ability to mimic their fine cadence and vocalizations. In the room, I peel off my camos, pull back the coverlet and fall into bed. I don’t even shower.

            I’m out for the count.

 

Chapter 6

   

            “I cannot believe you did this!” Waylan Pope complains over the phone from Montgomery, Alabama. “You get in touch with Raz and not with me?”

            “Sorry, paisano. Sort of slipped my mind.” I speak to him from Raz’s hunting shack north of Boston. Deep in the woods, Raz and I are totally zonked out on bourbon and blunt. Raz had to dial Waylan’s number on his big, old satellite phone after I tried twice without even coming close. These new levels of tetrahydrocannabinol in medicinal marijuana leave us wasted. And not in a good way. We can’t stop laughing. Or falling flat on our faces. “Whooeeeee! Stoned on THC again, my friend!” It’s like hitting yourself in the noggin with a sledgehammer.

            “I’ve got contacts, for cryin’ out loud,” wails Waylan. “I can throw work your way!”

            “Just passin’ through,” I insist, which is true, even if not the whole truth, as they say.

            “You get your sorry ass to Washington, DC,” insists Waylan. “All these years of making under-the-table campaign contributions to the Democratic Party do bear fruit, you know. I’ll get you a security detail for the Inauguration.”

            Shit! I am tired. I could hibernate all winter. But duty calls. Next morning, I’m hitching a ride one block short of the Worcester ramp to Interstate 90. A cardboard sign drawn in laundry marker says “Wash, DC” next to a smiley face.

            “What’s your game, then?” squawks a ridiculously bespectacled character with a Cockney accent. He’s driving a gray classic Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, the one that looks hump-backed. “Well, get in!” There are two saucy hookers in the back drinking Grey Goose on the rocks, chunks of lime in a china bowl at their feet. “Bit of a caravan, this is,” he chatters. Makes me want to punch him in the mouth. “Not at all what one might expect. You see, these two birds are French and that makes it a bit of a bullocks. Members of the International Set, they speak eight languages and have nothing interesting to say in any of them. They know how to say ‘Please fuck me!’ in French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and Hungarian.  They consider the zloty a worthless currency and can’t be bothered to learn Polish. Still, one does what one can with the material in one’s possession.”

            “Why do you have them with you?”

            “Eh, what? Oh, I do beg your pardon. I thought you knew. They’re my presenters. They read cue cards mellifluously.”

            An arm comes snaking over the headrest, jingling plastic bangles and holding aloft the vodka bottle. Smelling of funk. “You girls been going down on each other?” I guess.

            “Oh, now, ain’t he the gent’man,” they guffaw.

            Our driver’s name is Reginald. He’s heading down to D.C. for the Inauguration. “The logistics are just mind-boggling,” he explains. “A full week out and first you have the permits, then security, then the red tape of getting a line in. We’re not the BBC for God’s sake, but they ought to give us a fair shake. Thank Allah, we have our own kit. You couldn’t hire something, to save your arse. Stanley’s driving the lorry separately. My word!” There’s a magnificently lewd racket from the backseat. I venture a glance. The girls are deep into each other’s panties.

            “You’re a broadcaster?”

            “Well, it’s just a hobby,” he replies, coloring visibly, perched behind the wheel. “I’ve got a one-off contract with Al Jazeera. Just the one show. ‘Mucky goings-on behind the scenes at the Inaugural.’ Interviewing kitchen help. Dustmen. The servant class that makes it all happen. Inequality, you see. In the land of the free. Buy your mother’s birthright for $1, would the Yanks. Money talks. The world listens, appalled!”

            He offers me a brown lunch bag full of black and white cookies. “I have them hand-delivered wherever I go. From the Rockland Bakery in Nanuet, New York. They cost 95 cents apiece retail.” Eating one, I find it’s cookie dough with a quarter inch thick layer of icing that is pure sugar. Instant diabetes!

            Four hours later, we pull into a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Whatever happened to Hot Shoppes? Howard Johnson’s? All I see now are busloads of sticky-fingered, pudding-faced school children. Italian families with oily skin. Sullen Russians. Heavy-set Irish. Chattering Latinos. Jivin’ brothers. Your usual cross-section of humanity. Ignoring the hot dog stand, hamburger pavilion, ice cream parlor, souvenir shop, T-shirt and cotton candy concessions, I head for the Men’s Room. Senses on full alert. “No, I don’t come here often,” declares an outrageous queen, perched at the sinks, pushing on the metal faucets whenever anyone wants to wash their hands. I ignore him, picking out a Nervous Nellie whose face twitches in anticipation as I brush up against him. Hard.

            “Oh! Ah, excuse… me!” he mumbles, all excited. Taking in all six foot five and 250 pounds of me with his Cocker Spaniel eyes.

            Reaching down, I give his crotch a friendly squeeze. Steering him into a stall, I swing the door shut behind us.

            “I don’t want any rough trade,” he squeaks.

            “Neither do I,” I assure him. “This ain’t no Chantilly gun expo. No one’s requiring background checks. Forget the gun show loophole and concentrate on the goods on hand.” Plucking his wallet from his trembling fingers, I extract a $50 bill. We both shake our heads in agreement. Shoving the money securely into my pants pocket, I unbuckle my belt and pull down my jeans. Turning to lean against the wall, I spread my legs, bend at the knee and let the young man get his rocks off. Then I send him on his way. I get cleaned up using great wads of the almost fiberless restroom toilet paper. Dipping it in toilet bowl water as needed. By the time I rejoin the Merry Brit and his lady friends, I’m back in shape and $50 richer. Fortes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the brave. American enterprise.

            “We’re going to use the Sandy Hook recording of ‘Over the Rainbow’ as our theme song,” says Reginald. Tooting his “Colonel Bogey March” car horn as he plows into traffic. “It’s available for download, it’s very pretty and it’s cheap.”

            “I’ve met her. A little-old-lady-from-Pasadena witch!”

            “Actually, my version is by an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut,” Reggie protests diffidently. Yvette and Jacqueline laugh wildly, resuming their tryst. I roll down the window to let out the smell. “You may have seen my piece for South Australian Independent Media. It aired on-line. The scourge decimating the American Chiroptera population.”

            “Must have missed it.”

            “Cave bats. Bakke in Middle English. Nattbakka in Old Swedish. Dying by the millions. A nose fungus. Another fungus is killing the frog population. Worldwide. No offense to the ladies.”

            I check the backseat. They’re fucked out of their skulls. Totally gone. In Nirvanaland.

            “Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts. Catastrophic snowstorms in the midwest, icy California weather killing the strawberry crop in Pasaic. Ice storms freezing Florida oranges on the vine, floods in Tennessee, cities drowning in New York and New Jersey. Enormous calving of the Arctic ice shelf. Global warming, anyone? The end of days, my friend! The planet is dying. Kiss it goodbye! The Floridians have a public contest underway to see who can rid the Everglades of the most pythons.” Turning a craggy eye my way, Reggie insists, “You can never have too many pythons!”

            It takes awhile, but I finally get it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “Cute!” I say.

            “One does what one can. Gallows humor on a sinking ship.” He turns on the radio. I know radio on this stretch of highway. There are dynamite stations in Philly, Paramus and New York. R&B music capitol of the world! Beyoncé. Rihanna. Ke$ha. Lady Gaga. Christina Aguilera. Katy Perry. Mary C. Blige. Justin Timberlake. Usher. So what do we get? Willow.

                                                 “I’m so tired of you,

                                                 What am I to do?

                                                 Boo hoo hoo,

                                                 I’m comin’ back to you!”

                                                                            (Yager/Bevin)

            Fuck!

 

            We reach D.C. and Reginald insists I stay with him, Stanley and the girls at Day’s Inn. Bizarro. “No room at the inn” is the chant of the day, but Reggie has two. Separated by a connecting door which we leave open, doubling our sense of space. Double beds plus double beds. I kid around with the girls, but what to do? They’re not bi—, they are out and out lesbians. Since it’s impolitic to utter the L word, Reg and I pretend all is normal. “We use this bed,” they explain in heavily accented English. “Stanley sleep in that one!” Okay. Four beds = five people. Cool! We go down to the reception area and grab pastries and coffee. Reggie has a lot of phone calls to make, so he unloads the girls on me. Oh, boy!

            I take them to the Holocaust Museum. It chronicles the ravages of World War Two. All over Eastern and Western Europe, the Nazis deported Jews to death camps. They shot, gassed and starved six million of them to death. Leaving a lot of shoes, eyeglasses and suitcases. We walk through the exhibit. Located on three floors, it is harrowing even on a good day. We get to a room full of suitcases. Light brown leather thin as cardboard. Upsetting in their uniformity. People packing to exit this world. “No Louis Vuitton?” asks Jacqueline.

            “This is between-the-wars luggage. Old stuff. Antiques.”

            “Oh.” A little disappointed.

            We get to a room full of shoes, speaking eloquently of lost souls. “No Gucci?” asks Yvette, craning over the railing, searching in vain for a pair of ankle strap chunky heels in pigskin.

            “Ah, they didn’t have distribution rights for Eastern Europe at the time,” I claim,  diplomatically.

 

            As Inauguration day nears and the number of law enforcement personnel grows, who is kidding who? They’ve got cops from all over. Baltimore. Virginia. New Jersey. They’ve got the National Guard. The National Park Service. Civil servants and rent-a-cops of every persuasion. The last thing they need is one more. Me. While Reginald Harwich really needs me. I call Danny Iverson, my contact, and thank him for the invite. “There’s still room for volunteers,” he insists, listing any number of menial tasks I can perform on behalf of the Democrats. I decide to go with Al Jazeera.

            The one thing I never expect is that the girls and I will actually become friends. Innately shy, European, both are cowed by the brash, noisy behavior of Americans. When people shout exuberantly to one another at the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, these girls jump. In fright. On camera. I hold cue cards, amused and impressed by how good they are. None of this eyes moving left to right reading every line. Sharp, Yvette and Jacqueline study the text beforehand. They need only the occasional sexy glance in my direction to remind themselves where they are in the script. A joker, Reggie has me writing double entendres and embarrassing innuendo into every presentation. “Rising 555 feet in the air, stiff as a board and unwavering, a phallic symbol to some, the obelisk that is the Washington Monument truly represents the father of his country. ‘Washington slept here’ is considered a recommendation in American parlance, a popular saying at inns and taverns throughout  the former Colonies. But with whom he slept, no one is telling!

            “Glowering here in his Bat Cave, Abraham Lincoln sits brooding over life’s incontinence, wondering when the metaphorical dinner bell is going to ring. After getting shot at Ford’s Theater, he was never quite the same. Definitely a blot on his copybook. Contemporary reviewers claim that the play itself was fair to middlin’…

            “Lost to all but the hardiest, Thomas Jefferson’s memorial is, like his life, on the other side of the water. A small, round, stiff monument proportioned to fit in the hand, allegorically speaking, this memorial is strikingly reminiscent of other small, round, stiff objects in the third president’s life. Look at that roofline!

            “As with Oprah, Martin Luther King Jr. was larger than life. Reason enough to give him a 30-foot high statue, chiseled in stone. Declaring him a drum major for… well, we don’t know what, as the inscription has been removed. Whitey gets his own back. Clutching in his left hand, a scroll. But again, we can only surmise what dreams it may hold. An enigma worthy of a Chinaman. Who, come to think of it, chiseled the monument out of 41 blocks of granite. Bloke named Lei Yixin. Shipped it from his studio in Changsha, China. Very famous fellow. The King memorial, a glorious example of social realism, the Communists’ preferred style, is perched atop 340 pilings driven deep into the marshland. It shall be interesting to watch this particular statue of King slowly sink into the ooze.”   

            When we finish with monuments, we interview people on the street. Our videographer Stanley is a quick and funny New Zealander whose attitude is, “No worries. I used to film 16 mm black and white for South African Television. The more things change, the more they remain the same.” He loves to tell stories, but occasionally gets so carried away, we non-Kiwis are left panting in the dust.

            We eat half our meals in Chinese restaurants, almost a fixation of Reggie’s. He calls over a waiter. “My good man, Dragon and Phoenix contains what ingredients, exactly?” The girls giggle and press my knee under the table.

            “Chicken and shrimp,” answers the waiter, perplexed that anyone would ask.

            At the end of every meal, all five of us read aloud the printed fortune from our Chinese fortune cookies. All at the same time. Producing a cacophony of gibberish. Saturday night dinner, Reggie reddens, calling class to order. “I wish to read Jacqueline’s fortune. ‘You will have a long and preposterous relationship.’ Here! here!” Jacqueline and Yvette kiss. “Officially, we’re here to celebrate American freedom. So whatever happened to gay rights?!” We’re a strange crew. I’m the only member not equipped with his own Canon digital camera. They photograph each other all the time. Eating. Sitting on the toilet. Sleeping. Lizzies making love. On the telephone. In the car. Conversing with policemen who, naturally, flock to us like flies on cow dung, considering how gorgeously exotic our presenters are. “Uh, can I see your press passes, please?”

            “Of course,” Jacqueline and Yvette smile, thrusting their press passes and their breasts in the faces of the delighted lawmen.

            One evening a flock of at least 1,000 starlings makes a pit stop in the sky overhead. Circling endlessly, they alight in the trees and blacken the sky. Stanley films them, delighted, but the girls and I are freaking out. None of us has every seen so many starlings at one time. They’re in a feeding frenzy, gorging on whatever flying insect has hatched out, before migrating further south.

            Time in the nation’s capital flies with the intensity of a cannonball. We get an invitation to an Israeli-Palestinian seminar that is not J Street. At a university which shall remain nameless. Al Jazeera is there! Us. An indoor amphitheater with flip-down seats like at the movies. The kibbutznik speaks: “I deal with Arabs all the time, in construction, in growing flowers for export. Eventually, I find myself ordering them around. I have become an overseer, looking down on the common workers. I do not like this feeling in myself!”

            A lady from the Department of Education informs us that there are only five bilingual schools, Hebrew and Arabic, in all of Israel. Five! At the same time, 25,000 elementary school children— only 15% of elementary school students— now study Arabic in the 5th and 6th grade.

            A Palestinian woman gives myriad examples of the basic inequality in Israeli life. “People greet me warmly, until they hear my name. I can see their expressions change as they realize that, yes, I am an Arab! I live in East Jerusalem and have fewer rights than an American tourist!”

            “Mea culpa,” say the attendees. “Mea maxima culpa.”

            After all this chest-thumping, it is a relief to get outside to a parking lot covered in black ice. There, the other shoe falls. A university-educated Israeli woman working in the field of neuroscience agrees to speak. On camera. By name.  “American gunboat diplomacy doesn’t scare us anymore,” she exclaims. “We’ve had four years to gauge Obama’s sentiments. A passive-aggressive pipsqueak, he’s scared shitless to come right out and attack Israel. Instead, he condemns us all the time. Settlement building, stymied negotiations with the Palestinians, the Golan Heights, our relationship with Egypt, Syria and Turkey. Obama’s criticism is not the action of a friend. He can whip us with a strand of wet spaghetti all he wants, but it won’t bring THE PALESTINIANS to the negotiating table any faster. Since we don’t have Obama’s support, we have made him superfluous. We’ve made our own arrangements with our true partners in America. They know who they are and we know who they are.

            “Word on the street in Israel is that 100 years from now, there still won’t be a two-state solution. A State of Palestine. That’s why the right wing in Israel is resurgent in the current election. A hundred years from now, the Palestinians will still be dilly-dallying. Hoping to find the magic formulation that will prompt the Israelis to march backwards into the sea! The abracadabra of the Arabian Nights. The Americans will still be pushing the Israelis to come to the conference table. And nothing will have been accomplished! Let’s face facts: The Palestinians want all the land that is the State of Israel. Their school textbooks show a green, dagger-shaped country. On their maps, it’s labeled ‘Palestine.’ On everyone else’s, this particular entity is named ‘Israel.’ 

            “Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi wants Jerusalem to be the capital of Egypt. We Israelis have answered him that the days of Jews getting into cattle cars are over. Any Arabs who want the Land of Israel are going to have to take it over the dead bodies of the Israeli people. With their own dead bodies lying right alongside.”

            Today’s screaming match is tomorrow’s oral history.

            In 1999, the Israelis tired of the stalemate with the Palestinians. The One Israel Party, a new political entity, won the national election. Led by Ehud Barak, their platform was simply to, once and for all, reach an accord with the Palestinians. A two-state solution, along whatever lines were hammered out between the warring factions. In 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Yasser Arafat and his delegation to meet with Ehud Barak and the Israeli delegates at Camp David. In three days of recriminations, caterwauling and bitter concessions from both sides, they reached an agreement. Amazing. It touched on all the issues. Borders, Palestinian rights of return to the Land of Israel, economic compensation, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Further issues to be discussed and settled. Barak signed. He and President Clinton turned to Yasser Arafat and extended the pen of reconciliation.

            “If I sign that,” Arafat told them, “when I return home, I am a dead man.”

            Refusing to sign, he traveled back to Ramallah and called for a general strike, the Second Intifada. Apparently, Palestinian anger knows no bounds.

            The current, conservative Netanyahu government of Israel didn’t come out of nowhere. The Likud party got elected as a direct Israeli reaction to public disappointment in the failed peace process. If the Palestinians won’t negotiate anyway, why bother trying to reconcile with them?

            Having selected Yasser Arafat, a smarmy, sneaky charmer as their leader, the Palestinian people were led by the nose. Arafat was the perennial negotiator, totally uninterested in resolving the conflict. As long as he could keep the ball in play, his countrymen needed him. The power struggles within his own party, Fatah, never end. Should peace ever be declared, he worried that he would be retired emeritus and younger hands would take over. Since he and his wife were milking the treasury for all they could get, the longer Yasser could stay in power, the greater his fortune. After his death, the leadership of Fatah came for his wife Shula, put a gun to her head and said, “Give us the Swiss bank account numbers for the billions you and your husband stole or you’ll never see tomorrow’s sunrise.” She gave them the bank account numbers and the Palestinian Authority was able to reclaim the money.

            Walking away from our interview to the Rolls, I say, “Well, I hope Al Jazeera can use that.” That’s when I see that Reggie and Stanley are grinning from ear to ear.

            “Are you kidding?” Reg replies, barely able to control himself. “Pure gold! What every correspondent dreams of. Here is ‘the enemy’ being as didactic, implacable and intransigent as everybody always says she is!”

 

            Inauguration Day. Uh! I’m only the soundman, shoving the microphone in people’s faces, but I’m on camera. Playing bosom buddy with the general public. While Reggie’s is an unearthly, phase-inverted voice, posing questions from an indeterminate point just to the right of the viewer. One advantage of interviewing the public behind the barricades at the Inauguration is that we have several hundred thousand potential interviewees. All standing within three inches of one another since 7 a.m., stamping their feet to keep warm. You don’t need a weatherman to know your ass is cold. Every 20 minutes, a green and white presidential helicopter clatters past overhead, ruining the sound.   

            Herndon High School footballer: “Lance Armstrong won seven Tour de France competitions all doped up. Now he admits it to Oprah. If pro cycling has a drug problem, why not just have the cyclists list on their jerseys which performance-enhancing drugs they are taking?”

            “What? Wha— ? What?” Mr. Family Man, with two toddlers in tow, responds. Steamed-up glasses and a feather in his hatband. “What are you saying? You stupid jerk!”

            As our young football player learns that public debate is also a contact sport.

            Blond college girl, clean as a schoolteacher’s vagina. Aquamarine dune jacket and bright orange muffler. A warm, white, knitted Virginia Tech cap on her head. “Hey! Tarantino’s Django Unchained has generated controversy? Well, d’oh!”

            Enough with the youth vote. A flinty, graybearded professor with bad teeth and a gleam in his eye. Wearing one of those old-fashioned winter parkas from the 1980’s and brown, stitched gloves. Matchy-matchy, his yarmulke is cut from the same material as his shirt. “Here’s the question. Future shock. If a super-bug wipes out half the population, will the other half still read The New Yorker? And if so, for the writing or the cartoons?”

            Everyone has a voice. Wearing boots from L.L. Bean, flannel pants, a black REI jacket, a pin proclaiming “National Day of Service” and a tan baseball cap with a blue visor and a red donkey, a clean-shaven 35-year old lectures us stoically: “Look how far we’ve come in just FOUR years! Turning around the mortgage crisis. Bailing out the auto industry and the banks. Job creation. The development of green technologies. Liberating Libya. The draw-down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Leading by example, we are a beacon for all the world!” Professionals, we don’t screw around with camera angles or stupid pranks. We merely ask him to hold a party balloon, reminding him that “It is a celebration!” Lots of colors on the silvery plastic balloon and the Chinese character for chán, meaning “greedy.” As Stanley zooms in, it fills the screen.

            A black woman fighting her way through the crowd, away from the ceremony, piques our interest enough for a quick interview. “I really can’t be bothered. I have children at home and a neighbor baby sitting, glued to the TV set. Obama is an idiot. A rope-a-dope ‘nope’ of a president. Hope? Nope! The economy? Nope! Jobs for blacks? Nope! Gun control? Nope! Solving the fiscal cliff? Nope and double nope! Middle East peace? Nope! Stopping a nuclear Iran? Nope! So tell me, dear man, what has this smooth-talkin’ jive artist accomplished? Nothin’!”

            “There’s our lead! We lead off with her!” Reggie muses, greatly pleased.

 

            At the Capitol, the President stands at the podium, lecturing us didactically. Speaking way too dramatically. Any second, I expect him to break out in war whoops. Television channel RT, Russia Today,  dissects Obama’s speech, openly implying that American aggression will not cease. “As long as there are no boots on the ground,” claims their lady commentator, air strikes, drone attacks and political assassinations will continue. “President Obama signs off every week on a kill list.” She concludes that America is struggling with a perception problem. “Just because Obama talks pretty, people think he cannot be aggressive.”

            Beyoncé sings the National Anthem, accompanied by the Marine Corps Band. Thousands wildly wave flags like at a Nurenburg rally. Why not have the Blues Brothers perform the anthem on kazoo?

            At the congratulatory luncheon after the swearing-in, held in the Old Hall of Congress, two blond wind-up dolls in Navy blue military uniforms present American flags to President Obama and Vice President Biden. Like, the president and vice president never received an American flag before, right? Stiff as automatons, looking nervous as Daschunds, the ladies go through their paces, park the flags on a walnut stand and race to get out of there.

            Reggie’s peroration: “If nothing else, this Inauguration makes it crystal clear that Obama has not taken the oath composed by William Tecumseh Sherman. ‘If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.’ This president has run, he has won and it seems that he intends to serve another full four years. Having Joe Biden as Veep vouchsafes the well-being of the incumbent. Nobody wants to switch to that cantankerous old warhorse in midstream.”

 

           The Israeli neuroscientist was a minor coup, but it’s nothing compared to our next exclusive. Care of yours truly. It starts when I call Raz from the Day’s Inn that evening to tell him I’ve landed in clover. He is not a happy camper. “She’s ba-a-a-ack!” he bleats like a goat. “Seriously, bro’, that Madwoman of Chaillot you intro’d me to called the shop askin’ for you. I didn’t give the game away until she says she’s IN WASHINGTON, DC FOR THE FUCKING INAUGURATION! I was ready to puke. The woman’s a sociopath, for cryin’ out loud! First I called a buddy at the Pentagon. Told them to crank up the Homeland Security System to Code Red—”

            “I don’t think they have that color-coded system anymore.”

            “I skirted the details, but I gave him the word ‘on good authority’ and ‘deep background.’ I also told him the truth. That she was the Dragon Lady. Participatory in the Baxter Bang Bang Massacre.”

            “Is that what they’re calling it?”

            “Yeah. Baxter Bang Bang. Sounds like a children’s book. ‘See Spot run. See the madman shoot Spot with an automatic weapon.’ Anyway, your old lady’s not under investigation, as I wasn’t even there. I don’t know dick, so everything I say is hearsay. But I don’t want to turn on the TV and have Brian Williams tell me that the capital of the nation is under siege! You know? Meanwhile, Jimmie Sue Vampire gave me the phone number of this bigtime industrialist and his wife who live in someplace called Kalorama. She said I should tell you or I’d be sorry! She’s threating me!?  And that you should call her or you’d be sorry. I mean, this bitch is threatening everybody ‘cept the president. Miss Mayhem. YOU gotta call.”

            Reggie doesn’t even want to hear this. Tonight there are two Inaugural balls, our big night for interviewing parking attendants, waiters, kitchen staff, musicians, security men, chauffeurs, taxi drivers, chocolatiers and bakeries regarding the prep time they put in to give the Beautiful People of Wealth, Culture and Power still another ‘Night to Remember.’ We catch an hour’s sleep. I clutch Yvette like a teddy bear. Stanley cuddles platonically with Jacqueline. Reggie’s on the phone to Qatar. Then we grab some dinner and work until dawn. It’s no problem finding tired, disgruntled working folks who vent their spleen on camera. A fender-bender, a debutante’s ripped dress, a collision at the coat check, a dropped tray of Baked Alaska and people are irritated enough to sound off. Reggie eats it up. We film the sunrise and return to the motel owl-eyed. Digital, we have ten hours of video on a single hard drive.

            When I broach the subject of Jimmie Sue at lunch, 4 p.m. the next day, Reginald’s hair stands on end. “It’s a Bonnie and Clyde story. She is a real modern-day Bonnie Parker. The mystery blonde behind the Baxter Bang Bang Massacre.” Once Reggie googles it on his laptop, sitting in a WiFi equipped Panera sandwich shop, wild horses couldn’t keep him away. This is his territory. He’s interviewed Nina Hagen and Madonna. Both flamboyant but touchy characters who must be approached with care. First thing he does is put the Cheetah Girls, Yvette and Jacqueline, in the loop. Next, he, Reginald Harwich, sits at the metal table and calls the mansion in Kalorama.  Getting my nemesis on the line, he ingratiatingly proposes giving this Southern belle a chance to tell her story to an international audience. Stroking her, he plays on Jimmie Sue’s libido. “Because you see, dahling, I know someone you know. A very dear friend indeed. Oh, yes, he’s right here, all red-faced and stammering like a schoolboy, poor fellow. Well, of course he wants to see you! Who wouldn’t?! You are the apple of his eye. You hold his heartstrings in the palms of your hands. He loves you, for pity sake…” He arranges a meeting. By now, Reg has a feel for the DC area. We congregate at the marina on the Potomac, adjacent to the Kennedy Center. Less than 10 years old, there are all kinds of cafés and pavilions under-utilized in the off-season.

            From a distance, you might wonder. Blond, short and Southern, nervously smoking a cigarette by a pile of aluminum tables facing the esplanade, Ms. Jimmie Sue Cadillac gives off a tough-lady vibe. Not warm, not cuddly. “Hi, Joshy!” she calls, brightening into a radiant smile. Stanley stands quietly to my right, filming her with the zoom lens. Smiling, Jimmie Sue looks ridiculously pretty. Her blue eyes flash, even from 30 feet away. Literally flash. It’s some physiological abnormality. My cheetahs latch onto my arms on either side of me, Yvette anchoring my right flank, Jacqueline my left. Under strict instructions not to let go. A Turkish waiter comes out to tell us they’re closed. Moving quickly, Reg hands him a $100 bill and says, “I did telephone. Your manager promised us someplace warm, preferably indoors. This particular remuneration is for you, my good man.” After that, we’re able to set up with ease.

            Inside the restaurant, Stan uses a simple spotlight atop his camera for “fill,” the additional light that brings out details in the shadows, under the brows, under the chin. Wearing heavy make-up, her travels have weathered Jimmie Sue considerably.

            “Smoking’s not allowed,” says the waiter, sullenly approaching our table.

            “I’m sure your manager will make an exception!” Reggie declares with such authority, the poor Turk comes trotting back with white porcelain ashtrays. “My dear, such a pleasure!” gushes Reggie. “Our mutual friend… Josh… has told me SO MUCH about you. Your adventures. Your thrilling lifestyle. Your scrapes and near-misses with destiny. Pul-lease! Do tell!”

            “I grew up in Georgia,” my wonderful lady friend drawls, fixing the camera with her gaze. “Life was hard as mah family an’ I was dirt poor. Jus’ as poor as church mice! Why, we…”

            Reggie, the girls and I watch, transfixed, as Stanley’s pants balloon outward until they’re stiff as a tent. “Cut!” calls Stan, and Jimmie Sue’s face falls. “Ma’am, you are wonderful,” he reassures her. And does the one thing that absolutely guarantees the quality of the interview. Approaching her, Stan gets down on his knees and kisses the palms of her hands, nibbling discreetly on the Venus Mound at the base of each thumb, a known erogenous zone. “You are so exciting, I find my hands are shaking! Wait and relax while I go get a tripod.” Reggie is already sprinting to the van. We get the tripod set up. Jimmie Sue simpers at me jovially. Yvette, Jacqueline and I sit in a row in aluminum tube chairs, the Peanut Gallery. Fashion models, the girls sit awkwardly, since each has an arm through mine. Whenever Jimmie Sue looks our way, I feel their grip tighten like steel bands.

Reggie: “My dear, my dear. You are known as an international adventuress,  a participant in some of the most momentous occasions of modern times. How did you enjoy the Inaugural?!”

Jimmie Sue: “Well! For those poor souls who couldn’t get to the Inauguration, let me tell you, Washington is an exciting town. There are two newspapers, The Washington Times which is produced by the Moonies and The Washington Post which is owned by Hezbollah. As you can see, I look a little careworn today, but I was up until 3 a.m. at the Inaugural Ball and after party. I met some wonderful celebrities, who shall remain nameless! Tee hee! No, really, the elite of Washington. It was such a pleasure to be among my peers. The best of the best. Crème de la crème. I did enjoy meeting Johnny Depp. I find him amazingly virile. Don’t you just love men with meticulously coiffed facial hair? Sitting in the VIP section at the swearing-in ceremony, I told Brad Pitt that next time, he should leave the six kids at home. Children are so noisy! I’m so short, Paul Ryan just picked me up and hoisted me in the air as if I was as light as a feather duster. Glorious biceps on that hunk!

            “Of course, no woman can ever forget the grandeur of an Inaugural Ball! When I got to shake the president’s hand in the receiving line, I was afraid he would pet me. Little old Jimmie Sue, I am only 5′ 2″. He’s great big Obama at 6′ 3”. I told him, joking of course, ‘Mr. President, I would look up to you— get it, up?— if you weren’t a Muslim!’ Everyone laughed at that except the stodgy old Secret Service who tried to remove me from the ballroom. ‘Mr. President, hang ten!’ I shouted, so he let me stay. We surfers have that, we’re a cohesive community regardless of what country you were born in. And the dancing! Dancing ‘Gangnam Style’ was the event of the evening.  All those women in their ball gowns hopping around on imaginary horses. Well, I mean, we all have stables. We all keep horses. We all ride. I found the Virginia ladies far more accomplished than the Marylanders. Being from Georgia, I sat that one out.

            “At the after party, this little country girl was in-sulted until people told me that it’s actually cachet to get snubbed by Alec Baldwin! And, of course, Justin Bieber and Psy are always good for a chuckle. Although Justin’s reliance on astrology troubles me. Oh, well. He’s young, he’ll grow out of it! I could have danced all night. And I did! Pretty nearly.

            “There are those who criticize America. Sheer nonsense! Putin won’t let us adopt Russian babies and the Iranians want to nuke the world. Total gobbledygook! Americans are the nicest, kindest, most helpful people ever. I could never vote for Obama because he’s a Muslim and I’m a Southern lady. It is what it is, sweet’ums. But I’ve spoken with the Obama administration and they’ve assured me that Phyllis Clift will not endanger this great country of ours. I’m not sure who that person is, but we will not let her ruin America! All during the Inauguration and the run-up to the Inaugural Ball, at dinner and then after the ball, sitting on the grand stairway waiting for the parking attendants to bring our cars, everyone discussed Phyllis Clift. ‘We’ve got to do something to head off Phyllis Clift… Our taxes will go up unless we deal with Phyllis Clift… We cannot kick the can down the road any longer, time to face facts regarding Phyllis Clift.’ I didn’t hear any answers, but I can assure you the country is in good hands!

            “What else? I do not like sparkling, so I settled for orange juice with Smirnoff. I like to add just a touch of cognac, aged in the cask, so Teddy the bartender and I got along famously. He’s such a pet! You can get anything you want if you know how to ask politely. I handed out business cards. ‘Interior Decorator.’ We all know what that’s a euphemism for. My phone has not stopped ringing. But that’s Washington. Big egos, big bucks, big dicks and big libidos. Tiger Woods called, but my policy is ‘No thanks, Elijah Muhammad, no Muslims.’ I’m Southern. You have to draw the line somewhere! And the looks the other women gave me! Well. If looks could kill, little old Jimmie Sue Cadillac would be nothing more than a grease spot by now!”

Reggie: “Yes! I understand that just recently you had a dire escape from a scene of extreme rural violence…”

Jimmie Sue: “That is correct, Mr. Harwich. The so-called Baxter Bang Bang Massacre. A dear teenage friend of my family, living in Maine, invited me up for a late Fall weekend. We’ll call him… Jamie. James. He’s such a dear boy, but so young, so young! You know what these small towns are like! He and his friends knew that, out of season, the Ranger’s cabin in the woods would be unoccupied. Tired of being cooped-up in the motel, he rented a Jeep and drove us up there. To Baxter State Park. That part of the country is just gorgeous in the Fall! The leaves turning every whichway. It’s a geographically large area. Just as sweet as can be! And popular… Why, we hadn’t been there hiking and wandering and picking mushrooms and tapping trees for maple syrup more than, like, a couple of hours when what do we hear, but this shooting sound. Shocking! It sounded like an entire war going on. Like one of those war movies. Horrible. Rat-tat-tat-tat! I looked at… Jamie… and said ‘Jamie, honey, that sounds… dangerous!… We better get out of here!’ ”

 

            We sit listening, stunned. As usual, there’s just TOO MUCH of whatever Jimmie Sue does. She keeps flirting with the camera the whole time, shaking her head from side to side, nailing Stan with 1,000 watts of guile through the viewfinder. Her neck must be tired. Maybe it needs wringing. Yammering in a cracked voice that both imposes and compels. Stan doesn’t even touch the camera, since he’s trembling to beat the band. Exotic footage. Incredible, really. Pathology at its best. Reginald Harwich, TV production enthusiast, sells the interview to British Television for 50,000 pounds Sterling! Jimmie Sue may get her own reality TV show. Now that the three-minute version on YouTube, mostly about Obama, has gone viral, several production companies have expressed an interest.

 

Chapter 7

  

            There’s a lawyer named Robert Deets. A lobbyist for the dairy industry. Which is a lot richer than most people realize. Everybody drinks milk. Unlike the NRA, dairy farmers come across as Good Guys in the American psyche. Which they are. Deets has an unusual office. Located on Lafayette Square, the panorama window behind his desk faces the back portico of the White House. “Unobstructed view” as the realtors say. The perks of power. Life is good. Deets is a friend to every administration, squeezing the teats of Congress. His mansion is in the District’s totally high end Kalorama neighborhood, practically a Golden Ghetto.

            Even Arab countries need milk, although goat’s milk is their trad source. The Bedouins of Palestine are famous for their spindly black goats. Stunted, they give a disproportionate amount of milk. Of course, in America, goat cheese is the big craze. Even the Israelis export it. There’s a logic to international commerce as old as the Silk Road.

            Saïd al-Alawi makes an appointment.

 

            With a pocketful of loose change, a tattered ATM card and a fake plastic Minnesota driver’s license, I say a fond farewell to the TV crew and decamp to an Econolodge in Falls Church, Virginia. It’s across the street from an animal hospital. Where stray dogs congregate. The French lesbians find it hard to let me go, great fountains of wet, salty tears running down their cheeks in thick, black entrails of mascara. “Grief” as portrayed in a Greek tragedy. Boy George never had it so bad. Hugging me, Yvette and Jacqueline also throw in a little bump and grind action. I lick mascara off their faces, as putrid a taste as anyone could imagine. I have to get them flavored mascara from China! Ah so desu ka.

            I take long hikes, “The Beltway,” I-495, always a monstrous concrete slab above my head or a roaring torrent of cars underneath the pedestrian walkway. Alas, I cannot spend all my time communing with voles. Plucking a Gideon Bible from the motel, I take the Metro into the city, singing aloud psalms of joy to my none-too-pleased fellow passengers. Their faces buried in iPads. A company town, with the U.S. Government the chief employer, DC is a total meritocracy. Nobody cares what your daddy did or how much money you spent on your estate in the Hamptons. “What can you do for me today? Right now! What you got?” people ask. You’d better have a résumé that stands up and shouts. This makes for a very stressful environment.

            I take the Red Line to Union Station, come out at street level and lumber across northeast Washington like a Golem. It’s freezing cold. The sun blindingly bright. I feel like I’m in a time warp. The beginning of a new day. “Well say there now bro’, I wouldn’t ask,” pipes up a scrawny figure with red tufts of hair and maroon-colored skin, dressed in a dilapidated jacket that wouldn’t keep a rabbit warm. His jeans have more holes than fabric. “But seein’ as how we’re both over here by the bus station…” I look up at the street sign. New York Avenue. On the opposite side of the street, some black, metal-clad Orwellian bunker proclaims a future that never was. The letters XL emblazoned on the front. Or it could be an M. The building is extremely large. A block farther down on this side, the Greyhound bus terminal basks in morning splendor. “…so I was thinking o’ takin’, you know, a local bus out to mah crib. Seein’ as how I ain’t been there in two, three days an’ the rats gnawin’ at my children’s fingers just like the hunger bunny gnaws at mah stomach.”

            “The hunger bunny?”

            “Mah tapeworm. My horrendous appetite.”

            “Sweet.”

            “DO YOU HAVE ANY MONEY???”

            Named Derek, he is the Eddie Murphy of street people. We hike to a Mickey D’s where I ply him with burgers, fries and milkshakes. Inhaling his food, Derek is as excited as a kid in a gun shop.

            “Thing is,” he relates, “I wasn’t always this poor. Growin’ up in Ole Miss with my ma, pa, four brothers and two sisters, we had even less. Wash DC be a step up! Step in the right direction. Burp! A thousand pardons,” he says, bobbing his head in a quick bow of apology. “Y’all ‘scuse me now,” he says, heading for the toilet, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

 

            The nation’s capital, you might not expect the city to boast a rich musical tradition. At the crossroads between North and South, Washington has hosted everything. Cakewalk in the 1890’s, ragtime, early jazz and Duke Ellington. More recently, the whites made it the center of East Coast punk while the blacks made it the capital of go-go. Even the Beatles played to a crowd of 8,000 young fans at the Coliseum on February 11,1964. Their first time in America. Coming down from New York after an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Tickets cost between $2 and $4. Now the place is a parking garage. Derek grabs me by the sleeve and drags me to a storefront dive deep in the ghetto, the front window intentionally heavy with grime so passers-by cannot see in. Today’s attraction is The Railfunkers, bush babies with no pretense at prettiness. Raw negro exuberance. Negro, not “black.” This music has its antecedents in ragtime.

“Baby’s got the no-no,

She don’t want t’ go-go,

Baby don’t you know

I love you-ou!”

                                                                                                            (M. Towne)

they wail amid broken tables and hickory hoop chairs. The concrete floor is cracked and pitted. It’s like visiting a nightclub in Beirut.

            “Wha’ choo bring whitey in here fo’?” demands the waitress. Unhappy. “We a respectable club. No slummin’.”

            “He ain’t white,” insists Derek, a fast talker by any standard. “He just a very pale black.”

            She serves us Red Stripe. “I’ll deal with you later, Derek!” she promises, waving a finger under his nose. There are a lot of smells in here. Spice. Cologne. Weed. Sweat. The musky tang of black skin. Dust. The acrid stink of dying solenoids leaking from the sound system. When I pull out a Kleenex, the waitress marches over and says, “You don’ blow your nose at table. Tha’s what we have sidewalks fo’. Y’all go t’ the curb!”

            I go outside and blow my nose.

            “Jeez, I sorry,” says Derek, coming out to join me. “Right bitch!”

            “We’re not finished,” I insist. “Let’s get this party started!” Reefer madness, we go back inside and get wasted. Saddled with “the munchies,” Derek and I eat everything in sight. Ending up good buddies with Daphne, our bossy schoolmarm waitress.

            “Why didn’ you tell me y’all eat pig’s feet?” she guffaws. “I take you down to the Carolina’s, my mama make you some chitlins plum knock yo’ socks clean off!”

            “Yes, ma’am!”

            “Don’ you sass me now!”

            I think it was James Baldwin who complained of being able to look up at the sky and say, ‘Fly that airplane, white boy!’ In the 1950’s, you  just knew it was a white boy at the controls. Things have changed. There are black pilots who can fly a chopper into and out of places you wouldn’t want to visit in a thousand years. Best by test. Sitting with Derek, beers on the table, I’m not too focused amid a sea of black faces. People keep coming up to us, laying a hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye and declaring, “Man, this cat is gone! Um hum.” Hemp, weed, pot, cannabis, dope, Mary Jane, Rascal Flats, joint, doobie, roach, blunt, grass, chronic, witchbrew, whack, it all depends on how you define “medicinal.” Chief Windfarm understands. We’re just about able to walk as we leave the club.

            “Josh! Josh Preacher!” calls a not unfamiliar voice.

            Ah, crap.

            “Some people shouldn’t be allowed out of their hometowns,” I chastise her, but Colfax is on top of me like a flock of angry birds.

            “Spread ’em!”

            Derek, who is short to begin with, gives her a Sammy Davis Jr. smile and says, “Any friend of Josh is a friend of mine. My, my, you are an a-ttractive young woman, I’m sure! Have you ever consider a career in law enforcement?”                                                   

            “You!” she commands, flashing her shield, pinning me against the side of the building. “Leave.” 

“Oh, when the saints go marching in

Lord, how I want to be in that number…” 

                                                    (American gospel hymn)

Derek croons softly as he wobbles his way down the sidewalk, around the corner and out of sight.

            “So you found me!” I say, feigning relief. Not having a cell phone and transacting all my business in cash, I’m a little harder to track down than your usual terrorism suspect.

            “Real smart. If you want to avoid the eye of the FBI, you don’t move to Washington, DC.”

            Never thought of it that way, I have to admit.

            “When you went missing,” Colfax informs me, cuffing my hands behind my back, “your sis and I weren’t the least surprised. The wandering minstrel. The itinerant beggar. Little lost dog. So who should show up on Al Jazeera standing like a lug, holding a big, black furry microphone while his fellow Americans sound off about what a hard time they’re having in The New Normal? The man himself. Mr. Josh Alan Preacher, Esquire.” Boy, is she sore.

            “I like the jacket. Trad black leather with elastic piping,” I suggest as she hustles me to an inconspicuous late model Ford Escape. Shoving me in the passenger side, she bangs my head against the door frame. “Did you buy that jacket at H&M, perchance?”

            “Don’t be so self-centered. I’m not here for you. I’m here for a conference.”

            My ears perk up. “Anything I can do to help?” Considering this isn’t an actual profession, you could call my penchant for helping others a form of “escapism.” All wrapped up in their misfortune, I’m not dwelling on my own inadequacies.

            Colfax laughs, hopping behind the wheel and driving us toward the center of town. “As if I’d tell you anything!”

            “I hear they’re moving the FBI to Prince George’s County, Maryland,” I muse, watching commercial properties make way for one-story row houses. “Any credence to that story?”

            “That’s classified,” she taunts. “It’s only been in every metropolitan newspaper in the country. Including the Tampa Tribune.”

            “Everything can’t be my fault.”

            “Everything,” she insists, “is your fault!”

            “You got to pull over. I’m gonna hurl.”

            “A polite drunk!”

            Once we get underway again, Colfax’s bitterness seems boundless. “I have a prima facie case against Jimmie Sue Cadillac, based on your testimony. What we call ‘a good collar.’ She’s staying with the Morrow family in Kalorama. Major donors to both the Democratic and Republican parties. And I cannot lay a glove on the bitch! I tried to get a judge, any judge, in the United States District Court of Alexandria, Virginia to rule on the merits. Nada. I tried to convene a grand jury. The DA’s won’t touch it. Unlike you, I don’t believe in vigilante justice— ”

            “Be fair.”

            “Fuck off! So, yeah,” she agrees amicably enough. “I do blame you for just about everything. Where you fit into global warming and the bloodbath in Syria, I have yet to figure out. Knowing you, this should not be a problem.”

            Beware of geeks bearing grudges. I expect her to throw me in a cell somewhere, but she has other ideas. Taking the Whitehurst Freeway, we park in a tony neighborhood in Georgetown, around the corner from M Street. “I have friends, too, you know,” she says, marching me up an ornate walkway of inlaid stonework to a massive oak door painted white. It’s not even locked. “Honey, I’m home!” she calls. My heart plummets. A boyfriend? Well, why not? “Where are you, sweetie?” she coos, manhandling me into the living room and plopping me onto the chintz sofa.

            “Could you take off the cuffs?”

            “Go fuck yourself! Where is that goddam lizard?” Eventually she returns from the bedroom, clicking her tongue, holding aloft a horny-skinned green iguana. “Meet Mr. Iguana.”

            “Hello,” I say.

            Looking at me bug-eyed, the iguana holds his peace.

            “No comment? Not even for a member of the working press?” I ask him as Colfax uncuffs me. “Some of my best friends are iguanas.” The three of us sit on the sofa. “Your face is familiar. Have we met before?” An iguana chaperone.

            “Still another visitor from Panama,” Colfax explains. “In this country illegally. Smuggled in with 20 kilos of cocaine. The good stuff. We busted the courier through a tip from an informant. Opened the second suitcase and this guy popped out. He’s in quarantine and incommunicado,” she jokes. “Otherwise, he’d tell you his whole life story. Talk you to death, he would.” She goes into the kitchen to make coffee. “We tried waterboarding him, but he just spit at us.” Eyeing me balefully, leathery pink tongue shooting in and out like a whip, the iguana crawls across my lap.

            “What if he defecates?”

            “Your clothes get dirty!” she quips. “Don’t take it personally, Josh, but he was here first!” Bringing two cups of steaming black coffee, she explains who she is house sitting for. On the coffee table, there’s a pristine, unopened pack of L&M Filter Kings. Cigarettes. On a white label, underneath the presidential seal, it says “Welcome Aboard Marine One.” The presidential helicopter. Should I be impressed?

            We share a bed. It’s like sleeping alone.

            Nowadays, everyone is connected. Colfax gets a message on her facebook page from Reggie Harwich. ” OMG! Pls tell Josh how grateful we R to use a digitized version of same as general commentator of day’s news.” My avatar shows up on YouTube and Hulu.

“I always admired the work of XXXX XXXX.”

The banner identifies me as Josh Preacher,

no fixed address. “Quality never goes out of

style.” 

or, more critically

“Of course I’m worried about XXXX XXXX,”

identifying me as TV pundit Josh Preacher.

“It’s a serious issue facing this great country

of ours.” 

            I admit, being out there gives my ego a much-needed boost. Of course, in this digital age, everyone is their own pundit. Even young girls whose libidinous fingers are more accustomed to caressing the small breasts and supple skin of their BFF’s now tweet their facile opinions for all the world to read. Followers of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, they post playfully suggestive images of themselves on social media. We’re all turning Japanese! With the requisite short attention span. “If I cannot read a new post on a blog site every two days,” Colfax explains, “I assume the blog is no longer active and has died.”

            Everyone I meet, butcher, baker, candle stick maker, wants me to open a facebook account. Put my résumé on LinkedIn. As I travel through this world of ours, a man on his own.

 

            Falls Church is out of the mainstream, but there’s the advantage of refuge when I need time to recharge my batteries and lay plans. I’m not that into living with an iguana. Others may be. Not me. Econolodge, my Fortress of Solitude. The last thing I need in my life is a Jimmie Sue Cadillac. I’m not completely stupid. Whenever there’s hard work to do, she heads the other way. That woman don’t work, she plays. Life is a game. Let someone else do the fetch and carry, pay the freight. Yeah, yeah. “I’ll be beautiful for you. I’ll excite you. I’ll jack you off.” But at what price? There’s a reason prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Some jokers only want a quickie. Jimmie Sue costs the moon! I telephone the Morrows and ask if she’s still around.

            “Now, who might you be?” asks a woman with a Jamaican accent.

            “Uh, Mrs. Morrow?”

            “Well, hardly. Juniper, mon. I be the maid.”

            “Oh. Well, Jimmie Sue— ”

            “You already asked that.”

            “She’s not there?”

            “Oh, she here all right. WHO ARE YOU???”

            “Josh Preacher.”

            “Lawdy, mon! Mr. Josh! Well, well, well…! You wait!” She clunks the phone down on something hard. A marble tabletop. The wait is really long. Big house.

            “Josh! Josh! Josh!” Jimmie Sue gushes. “Wait, honey, I’m still toweling off. I was in the pool.”

            “An indoor pool?”

            “Well, it can’t be outdoor. It’s fucking freezing out, Josh honey.”

            “So, I mean— ”

            “Yeah, I’m still in town. The Morrows can’t get enough of me. I know you wouldn’t think so, but I do have entertainment value.”

            LOL! “I don’t doubt it for a minute!” I tell her. A total chameleon, this is the new, premium model Jimmie Sue Cadillac. Full leather upholstery, wall-to-wall carpeting, sound system, custom steering wheel and walnut dash. Plus a hundred thousand mile power train warranty.

            “You still there, sweet’ums?”

            “Sure! I’m impressed.”

            “Don’t be! It’s all an act.”

            Now, see, there she goes again. Pushing everyone’s buttons. Each of us in turn. “We gonna see one another?” I ask.

            “There’s the thing,” she says. “If you dress up in Brooks Brothers and wingtip shoes, Fred and Janet would love to meet you. Wait! Listen. I’ve described you as a fabulous soldier of fortune who saved me from a major white slavery ring bent on selling yours truly to a sheik in Dubai. And again in a stand-off against a mass killer in Maine, the Pine Tree State. Sound familiar? Dinner is promptly at nine p.m. Continentally late dining. Can do? Do you have the money for clothes? Well, if not, it is Washington. There are a hundred places where you can rent a tuxedo.”

            Typical hyperbole! “Give me the address.”

            “You won’t make fools of us?”

            “Give me the address.”

            “I love you, Josh.” Defined as what?

            “I love you, too, Jimmie Sue.”  

            I take a taxi. Even the driver seems bowled over. A long, meandering cobblestone drive deposits me in front of an imposing Federalist style red brick mansion. I ring the doorbell and Juniper the maid lets me in. “Hello,” says Fred, coming to meet me. He’s wearing a business suit with a blue-gray vest. He shakes my hand. “I saw you admiring the architecture.”

            “Looks like a goddam public library!”

            “Built in the 1920’s,” he replies, greatly amused. “Nine inch brick. Whenever we want to renovate, we have to order special from a brick yard. Today’s standard is seven inch. Dutch bond.” That means every eighth row alternates long sides and short sides to break the monotony. “We totally renovated the interior in Genoa marble. Come in, I’ll introduce you.”

            Speckled white marble floors, speckled white marble staircases, speckled white marble tabletops, speckled white marble counters. Mercifully, the Pub Room is done in solid oak right up to the rafters. The ladies are drinking Campari, the men Grolsch, a strong Dutch beer in old-fashioned green re-sealable bottles with ceramic corks. There are six of us, the Morrows, the Mumbles, Jimmy Sue and me. “Hi, my knight in shining armor,” she sings, which is kind of a mouthful. Grinning wolfishly, she comes over and gives my crotch a squeeze in lieu of a hug. “Did you bring Henry?”

            “He’s around somewhere.”

            “Look,” says Fred. “I don’t want you to get bored. First time guests are eligible for the grand tour. Let me show you our hydroponic greenhouse.” Leading me to the back of the property, he hands me dark glasses. “Pour les lumières,” he explains, using French to soften the blow. There are lamps everywhere, bathing everything in a specific blue wavelength. Very intense. We start laughing.

            “Agh-h-h,” I groan theatrically. “I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw. Everywhere I go, I am chased by the evil weed!”

            “I can’t do it myself because of work,” Fred explains, taking me in hand. “But it amuses me to watch my guests get high. This is Lowryder. Over here is Royal Kush. White Widow. Sour. That round knobby green plant in the corner is peyote. Desert cactus. Water it once a month, but use a whole bucketful. You didn’t really save Jimmie Sue from white slavers?”

            “Well, in a way, I did,” I chuckle. Having seen Fred’s secret, he can now know mine. “I saved her from prosecution.”

            He looks momentarily confused and then bursts out laughing. “She does seem to have a fertile imagination. Her super-ego isn’t nailed down too tight.”

            “Your usual loving sociopath, I can assure you.”

            “She hasn’t seduced the maid or stolen the silverware so far. Let’s go to din-din.”

            The Mumbles turn out to be named Deets. We alternate man, woman, around the dinner table, but Robert Deets gives me a penetrating look and says, “I need you after dinner. I need some advice.”

            Here’s what I’m told. Mr. Saïd al-Alawi, an extremely elegant gentleman with olive skin, wears a gray pinstripe suit that is a little off. Hand-made in Cairo. He comes bearing gifts. A Turkish coffee urn and six tiny ornamental porcelain cups with depictions of palm trees and camels in gold filigree on their sides. The sort of trinkets exchanged by businessmen the world over. Even as Deets thanks him, al-Alawi waves away any gratitude. “Tch!”

            “Well, in that case, what do you want?” asks Deets, getting peeved.

            “May I sit?”

            “Of course. Pull up a chair.”

            “Ours, Egypt, is an extremely poor country with a population of 82.5 million. What we do have are many goats and camels. I would like you to get the tariffs removed on cheese imports to the U.S.A.”

            “Fat chance,” growls Deets. “You’re dreaming.”

            “Then request ‘favored nation status’ for Egypt in the realm of cheese production.”

            “That I can do!” Deets responds, glad to throw the Egyptians a bone. Everyone needs friends. “I’m not guaranteeing I can get it, but I know a senator who could propose the legislation.”

            Long pause. Each man waits, amused, wondering who will broach the subject. The Arab raises his eyebrows comically in a caricature of perplexity. “Backsheesh we call it,” he suggests in a kindly manner. “A monetary gesture to show one’s appreciation.”

            “Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” Deets comments, feeling like a clumsy Westerner. And not liking it one bit.

            “Please!” says his guest. “I am not well-versed in American economics. We wish to hire you. We consider your expertise invaluable.”

            “Okay,” Deets replies, mollified. “I’ll have my lawyer draw up a contract.”

 

            “I don’t claim to know your business, but it sounds reasonable to me,” I assure him.

            “The contract’s not my problem. Nor am I worried about physical security. We got a guard armed with an M-16 in the parking garage. We got an armed guard plus magnetometer plus X-ray at the street entrance. But I figured this guy must rep the Egyptian government. I call the embassy and they don’t know him. Trade mission? I call the U.N. and draw another blank. Sure, his card says Mr. Saïd al-Alawi, Esquire in English and Arabic. ‘Negotiator,’ whatever that means. Telephone, fax, email. A website, Pan-Arabic Investment Trust dot com. Groovy! It’s only one page with a fancy letterhead on a magenta background and no links. I call the phone number and get a saucy stewardess voice inviting me to state my business and leave a voice mail. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?!”

            “Relax! Stop looking so worried. I’ll find out.”

            Which brings me back into Georgetown and a visit to my fave FBI agent. “Look what the cat dragged in!” she howls, shaking her head in mock disapproval. “What? You’ve gone Washington on me? Started wearing suits?!”

            “I picked it up at a yard sale.”

            “I’m really extremely busy. What do you want?” Once I explain the problem, she says, “If this guy wants to do business stateside, he has to register his company. If he’s just traipsing around asking questions, it’s not even a misdemeanor. Once he signs anything, though, that’s a felony. Foreign businesses have to register. With the IRS, if nothing else.”

            “Can you check him in the database?”

            “Oh, so now you want favors? The nerve of some people! You come in here and you don’t even pet Igor.”

            “Igor the Iguana,” I guess. She’s named him.

            “Do you see any other Igors residing here?!”

            When we can’t find anything in the database, Colfax warns me not to become over-excited. He could still be just another traveling salesman putting out feelers. She has me set up an appointment with Deets. Swinging by his office, she introduces herself and has me help her install a video camera on the end of a curtain rod. “We have software for facial recognition. Get him in here and let’s get a mug shot.”

            “I really appreciate this!”

            “Hey,” Colfax tells him, smiling ruefully. “I’m a growing girl who needs her milk!”

            Deets leaves the message. Mr. al-Alawi comes in to sign a first term contract. A $10,000 retainer. Renewable. Before he can sign, Deets leans on him a little. “Who exactly am I dealing with? A private cartel?”

            “Interested parties all over the Arabian Peninsula.”

            “Only I have my reputation to look after,” warns Deets.

            “That’s what brought us to you in the first place,” al-Alawi replies airily. He hands Deets a certified check from a bank in the United Arab Emirates. “How’s the Emir?” asks Deets sarcastically.

            “Actually,” al-Alawi answers, unperturbed, “the Emir is extremely well!”

            Sitting in a lunch room down the hall, Colfax monitors the pixel quality on her smartphone. “Five by five,” she tells me. Even the coffee tastes good. Putting the visuals into the system, however, we still draw a blank.

 

            Even before we meet, Michael Schwartzman is out for blood. “Josh Preacher is not a security officer,” he complains to Colfax. “This is an anti-terrorism investigation. Your guy is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot, for crying out loud.  Very nice. The Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan. I’m impressed. But we’re a different branch of the service. Keep him the fuck away from me!”

            The good news is, the tail we put on Saïd pays off. In spades. He simply leads us straight to the not-so-safe house on Upshur Street that he and his fellow conspirators have rented in… NE! Yeah, northeast Washington! Where a brown-skinned man has to have horns to stand out in the crowd. In Brentwood, site of the famous, devastating anthrax attack of 2001.

            “Schwartzman wants to see you,” Colfax informs me, the two of us sharing her abode in Georgetown now that we’re operational. She knows better than to coach me, considering what a fiasco my liaison with the FBI became in Lizard Town.

            “Listen, jerk!” Schwartzman roars, just seeing me enter the room. “Listen, Howdy Doody! Mayfield! Did it never occur to you that supposed goat cheese producers FROM EGYPT could quite possibly— a remote possibility— a mathematical certainty— BE MEMBERS OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD?! I mean, considering who won the last election and all? Nu? Commentary, please, Mr. TV Pundit.”

            “Oh, so you’ve seen that!” I reply, pleased in spite of myself.

            “God help me, get him out of here, Colfax,  before I do something I will regret.”

            Torn between our friendship and loyalty to a coworker, Colfax shoots up from her chair, pins me in an arm lock and marches me from the conference room. “Wait! There were maps I want to see…”

            “KEEP HIM AWAY FROM ME!” Michael shouts, embarrassing the secretaries, I’m sure.

            However, I get my own back when we discover that the same shipment of checked baggage on Air Emirates that contains the weaponry also includes a Komodo dragon. “Okay,” Michael seethes. “This is a ten foot monitor lizard from Indonesia. Varanus komodoensis. Explain to me what the fuck this has to do with a terrorist attack.”

            “But that’s the whole point,” I explain. “These Arab brothers— ”

            “They are not brothers! It’s the Muslim Brotherhood, you twit!”

            I make a point of avoiding genealogy, calling them by their first names. “Saïd, Anwar and Hosni have financed this little caper— ”

            “It’s a terrorist attack!”

            “Well, okay, terrorist attack using finances accrued through the smuggling and sale of exotic animals.”

            “So if we shoot the lizard, we deprive them of those funds! Colfax. Sign out a shotgun, take a team and kill that lizard !”

            “Wait a mo’, bro’— ”

            “I am NOT your bro’.”

            “Okay, okay,” I plead, backpedaling for all it’s worth. “Let’s be reasonable,

Mr. Schwartzman. See, I’m showing respect.”

            “Have you ever read your file? The classified file you’re so proud of? Have you read it? Do you know what your command— ”

            “GUYS!” Colfax interjects. At her best. “Let’s not have a pissing match. A little less testosterone, a little more brain juice.”

            I clear my throat. “You can’t shoot a Komodo dragon. They’re on the endangered species list!”

            “Who you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me?” Michael exclaims, a vein pulsing madly in his right temple. “Colfax, handle it!”

            We get out of there. In the underground parking garage, as she assembles her SWAT team, I announce, “I’m coming with you!”

            “Look, someone has to stay home and take care of Igor, Josh. He’s good with you. He knows you. Knows your smell. Got your house key? This is an important personal assignment, Josh. Take care of Igor. Don’t screw it up!” So even though I don’t go on the raid, I am still an integral part of the team!

            Unfortunately, too, I’m not there when Colfax needs me the most. In every big operation, there’s a certain amount of spoilage. It’s blankety blank bad luck that Anwar, the youngest of the three, gets off a shot before the members of the SWAT team mow him down in a hail of gunfire. Not really a marksman, Anwar’s one shot goes pretty wide of whatever mark he is aiming at, hitting Colfax in the neck. Above her bulletproof vest. They pressure bandage her and rush her to the hospital. And since Colfax is the designated authority regarding execution of the Komodo dragon, I take over and bring her (it’s a she) back to Georgetown in the backseat of the Ford Escape. A crossover compact. Googling what Komodo dragons eat, Igor and I make a run to the laboratory supply store, bringing back gerbils, rats and white mice in abundance. So far, so good.

 

            The bad news is, Saïd and Hosni are already on their way to Robert Deets’s office. Ostensibly to haggle over an extension of the goat cheese lobby, but in reality to shoot the parking garage guard in the head with an old fashioned Luger and take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Prepared to shoot their way in, they’re flummoxed to find only the Latino cleaning crew. “¡Encargado de la limpieza! ” insists the cleaner responsible for Rm. 412, under the misapprehension that these two Arabs with their cloth sacks are there to take over his job.

            “Five minutes! Five fucking minutes!” the Arabs scream hysterically, chasing him out of there.

            The cleaner checks his watch, holds up five fingers.”¿Cinco?”

            “Yes! Yes! Cinco!”

            “Hokay dokay,” he agrees, shaking his head. He proceeds to vacuum clean the hallway instead.

            Everyone has seen the rocket propelled grenades the Palestinians are so fond of showing off in photographs for the western press. They’re about as powerful as a firecracker. Militants who found their calling at a madrasa, Saïd and Hosni want to avoid that pitfall. They overreach themselves regarding firepower, lugging a Swedish m/48 bazooka up to the office. A 31-pound behemoth like something out of Dr. Strangelove. Range, 1,500 fucking feet! From Deets’s office window to the back of the White House is only 400 feet. Well-meaning, Saïd and Hosni manage to follow their training and remove the plate glass from the office window. Progress is slower in setting up and firing their weapon. They move the desk over by the window. They place the legs of the bazooka squarely in the center of the desk. Cock the weapon. Engage the safety. Swing open the back. Place a high-explosive round in the 3½ ” wide chamber. Close the back. Twist the distance knob to 500 feet. Disengage the safety. Aim.

            An anomaly of heavy weapons’ ammunition is its variable performance based on temperature. Put simply, cold ammunition falls short, warm ammunition flies farther. I mean, if they’d consulted me, I would have told Saïd and Hosni that. And the weather’s been consistently cold ever since the Inauguration. Not a single day above 50°. There’s a temperature compensation knob on the top of the scope. Either the boys don’t know how to use it or, in their excitement, they forget. The fact that they’ve paid $10,000 to strike a blow against “the Imperialist Aggressor” doesn’t bother them. Although they had to sell a lot of wombats and joeys for this opportunity.

            They fire! Ka-ba-blam! The bazooka is from 1948 (m/48). While not that old, the H&E round they use is no Spring chicken, falling short and tearing a major hole in the North Lawn. Major. Like 10 feet across and six feet deep.

 

            I visit Colfax in the hospital. Except for being on her back in bed, full of tubes, she seems cheerful. “I have good news and bad news,” I tell her.

            “What’s the good news?”

            “We got ’em. All dead. Damage to the White House, zero. Our side won!” I exclaim excitedly. I am experiencing what psychologists call BIRG, “Basking In Reflected Glory.”

            “Basta! What’s the bad news?”

            “The Komodo dragon ate your iguana.”

 

Chapter 8

 

            Nothing is as icy cold as a frigidly angry woman. Released from the hospital, Colfax returns to Georgetown to recuperate. In silence. She lets me nurse her, changing her dressing. I cook our meals. I shop. I even clean house! Pretending everything is fine. Which, obviously, it isn’t. She won’t talk. What’s worse, she won’t even play with Henrietta. At 350 pounds, that’s a lot of Komodo dragon to play with. “Listen,” I gently suggest over chicken noodle soup and crackers. “In Amazonian culture, once you eat the brain of your enemy, you inherit his strength. Henrietta possesses Igor’s karma!” No dice. Since commercial dog houses are way too small, I build a custom shed in the pitifully tiny backyard and a circular chicken run. From the fence to the back steps, that ain’t much. Buying stainless steel chain and commercial cow leather, I fashion a leash and harness that puts Abu Ghraib to shame. I’m better at it than they are! I walk my Komodo dragon around Georgetown, impressing the pretty ladies. “Pet her,” I tease. “Whoa! Don’t!” I add if anyone is foolhardy enough to try. Many very sharp teeth has Komodo dragon. I take her to the dog park, where everyone, including the dogs, gives us a wide berth.

            Colfax cries a lot. She sits watching TV, weeping at soap operas, infomercials and Honey Boo Boo. “I don’t have a kid, I don’t have anything!” she wails, having taken up smoking again with her doctor’s permission.

            Giving her a lopsided grin, I say, “You’ve got Henrietta and me. We’re still around!’

            “Nobody was talking to you,” she replies, regarding me with a stare bereft of any feeling whatsoever. Even recognition.

            “Hello,” I coax, “we used to be friends.”

            Nothing. No thing. Not even the purchase of a peace offering in the form of a bootleg copy of punk songs by the Russian girl band Pussy Riot (Pussiraiot in Russian) cheers her up. As soon as she’s well enough, she has me take her to the airport in a rented car. To see her off. Home to Lizard Town. “I guess it’s hard to go back after the excitement of DC!” I joke.

            She gives me her “who are you?” stare.

            “Your work went well at the FBI? The conference?”

            It’s like talking to a wall. I deposit her suitcase at the check-in counter. We walk down to security. I watch Colfax hand over her ticket and I.D. Watch her follow the yellow painted line to the TSA’s totally invasive body scan. Without even a glance in my direction.

            E pluribus unum. Or words to that effect. Not!

            The National Zoo can’t wait to mate Henrietta with their resident males. “We heard there was joker in town with a fertile female. Good to see you!” says the Chief of the Reptile House. Feeling like a white slaver, I sign Henrietta over to carnal bondage. Also, playtime is over. Louis and Margaret have returned from a year’s missionary work in Africa. They move back into their tony Georgetown townhouse.  Thanking me for looking after the property, Louis gawks at the backyard. “What did you have back here, a Bengal tiger?”

            “Komodo dragon.”

            “Wow! Sorry I missed that,” he comments, not even charging me the haulage fee for having the shack and chicken run removed.

            On a whim, I head out to Kalorama. Fred is out front, attired in leisure wear from The Ralph Lauren Collection. “Do you know anything about the Triumph TR II?” he asks, jauntily balancing a can of brake fluid. “The brakes are all squishy, so I bought fluid. I just don’t understand where to put it!” Getting down on hands and knees, I follow the metal tube from a brake shoe to a point under the passenger seat.

            “I think it’s under this rubber floor mat.” Sure enough, as soon as I lift the tan mat, we find a bolt cap. Fred gets a wrench. I unscrew the cap and empty the brake fluid into the tank. Driving up and down the cobblestone driveway, the brakes get tighter with every deceleration. Fred keeps crowing with delight.

            “Where are you staying?” he asks.

            “At the moment, nowhere. I turned in my key from house sitting and I sure don’t feel like returning to the Econolodge.”

            “Econolodge?” Fred asks, eyebrows raised, a smile flickering across his handsome face. “Econo-lodge?”

            “No, come on, I like it! It’s just a little lonely, is all. This ‘Fortress of Solitude’ stuff do get old.”

            That’s how I end up staying with the Morrows. Tinkering with Fred’s six motorcycles and four antique cars. Running the snow blower when it snows. Sitting up until 11 p.m. every night smoking artisanal medicinal marijuana while arguing politics, military strategy as applied to business and the finer points of viniculture. Fred and Janet are good company, although they view absolutely everything as if it comes with a little purple price tag from Sotheby’s. “The largest cost in a modern doctor’s office is liability insurance,” complains Fred. “Sometimes it constitutes half the doctor’s overhead. Every time a doctor gets sued and the plaintiff gets awarded a mucho grande settlement, that money has to come from somewhere. The patients pay! Those costs are reflected in your doctor bills. Forget the Hippocratic oath, nowadays it’s the Hypocritical oath.

            “Of course my money is in off-shore accounts in Lichtenstein, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. American presidential elections are a crap shoot. They have less predictability than the stock market. We need to consult a sociologist to discover why the American people consistently elect duds. My theory is, in a nation of inferiority complexes, we feel more secure when the president is as dumb as we are. There’s a reason why the president takes the Oath of Office twice, the first time behind closed doors. That way, even if he and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts screw up the public ceremony, the man has still been legally sworn in as president.

            “My gardener Carlos used to work for the DEA. He says he loved burning marijuana fields because it gave him an opportunity to surreptitiously inhale.”

            I don’t claim infallibility in dinner table debate, but toking White Widow (a crossbreed of 60% indica and 40% sativa), I point out that I supported the Christine Jorgensen decision. I have to speak quickly, since White Widow gently creeps up on you, leaving you supine and totally speechless.

            “What decision was that?” asks Janet.

            “The individual’s Constitutional right to have a sex-change operation.”

            When I finally get up the courage to ask, without undue drama, they inform me that Ms. Jimmie Sue Cadillac is history. Even Juniper the maid is unsure where she’s gone. Being Jamaican and a maid, Juniper knows everybody’s secrets. She also runs the household. She thinks my profession as a military sharpshooter is hilarious. “Helicopter pilot, that I get,” she assures me. “That’s transportation. What you gonna do with that other stuff, that I just don’t know.”

 

            Richard Jordan  Gatling (1818-1903) was a military  genius and U. S. inventor from Indianapolis, Indiana. He patented his first Gatling gun in 1862. By the time of the Spanish American War, the Model 1895 featured ten barrels arranged in the form of a cylinder. Rotated by a hand crank. A top loader, the brass cartridges were fed by a magazine or drum into the breech, firing an astounding 300 to 700 rounds per minute! Not bad for such an old-timer. The gun assembly was, however, enormously heavy. Weighing 594 pounds including the wooden wagon wheels on which it sat. Fred Morrow, generous to a fault and always searching for the unusual, gives me one for my birthday! “We’re talking full renovation of an original cylinder,” he lectures us happily at dinner, while three rough-looking characters  in overalls roll it into the dining room. “Then, a total reconstruction of every detail. All brass fittings. A steel breech. Gatling used flatiron, but really, that was then and why not have the extra tensile strength while we’re at it? It’s not a show piece, Josh, I do expect you to fire it in. I have not, however, been able to find a firing range that will give us permission. Perseverance! Even if we have to travel as far afield as Delaware!” We all cheer and applaud, me most of all. Chuckling delightedly, Fred winks and says, “You don’t roll a cannon on-stage and then not fire it!”

            I drive the Triumph to Annandale, Virginia. Home of The Emporium, a basement video store run by a clever Jew. It features a brisk trade in pirated DVDs, knock-offs, rip-offs, seconds and illegal downloads. Two movies for $10. Cheap! I want to buy Janet a copy of Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton and Eva Gardner. John Huston’s 1964 ode to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, it’s in black and white. It might help Janet with her Spanish. Or not. These things can get tricky. The human mind is an enigma.

            Reading movie titles, I sense someone standing next to me. I can’t be bothered to look. “Hey, Billy,” she whines, right in my ear. “Why are we shopping IF WE DON”T HAVE ANY MONEY???” I look at her. College stuff. Bitchy. Demanding. Cute. Short, with frizzy blond hair, blue eyes and a pointy nose. My meat! Henry stirs. That’s America. You don’t even need to travel to Ft. Lauderdale on Spring break. Little blue-eyed blond girls are everywhere! I find her fucking irresistible. Wearing de rigeur designer jeans, a jacket from H&M, a dainty pink blouse with a red, embroidered flower on the collar, and Manolo Blahniks. “What are you looking at me for?” she asks, feigning “surprise.” Waving hands with tiny fingers, she whines “DO YOU HAVE ANY MONEY?”

            “Yeah. Yes. I can buy you some movies!”

            “I find generosity attractive in a man,” she tells me, as if she’s ordering pizza over the phone. “Only don’t be a spendrick.”

            “What’s a spendrick?”

            “Somebody who flashes his cash but refuses to spend a dime. I like the American Pie series.”

            “Never heard of it.”

            “Well?” she remarks. “Go ask the salesman!”

            I go to the counter and Ronald the owner listens to my request, smiles knowingly, opens a brown wood cabinet and sells me the entire series. Four films for $20. Carrying my trophies back to the young lady, I hand them to her with a courtly bow.

            “Oh, goody, you got them!” she comments in a single breath. With all the enthusiasm of a dead squirrel. I can see I’m going to need to try a lot harder! She does wave a hand in my face, fingernails bitten to the quick. “You should do something about your pants,” she says, looking down, amused. She laughs. Finally!

            “What… What’s your name?”

            “Don’t go all goofy on me. I’m Robin,” she exclaims, turning away to run her eyes over shelves of DVDs. She has a tight little ass and she isn’t ashamed to show it.

            “We gotta go!” says Billy, a sulky blond college kid with pimples.

            “You go! I’m not finished shopping.”

            “Hey, come on, Robin. We came here together, let’s leave together. Besides, how’ll you get home?”

            Pantomiming, she points at me, points at Billy, points at the stairs up to street level.

            “I’ll give you a ride home!” I blurt.

            “This dude’s gonna give me a ride,” she lisps innocently. Obviously, this happens on a regular basis. A party girl. Saigon tea.

            “I don’t like that, Robin.”

            “Oh, and Billy…?” she asks.

            “Yeah, Robin?”

            “FUCK OFF!”

            Snubbed, his poor little male vanity punctured, he stomps up the stairs and disappears.

            “I like romantic comedies, Twilight, Harry Potter and Ludivine Sagnier,” Robin says, dramatically laying a hand on a pile of DVDs, widening her eyes.

            “Um, yeah… I do, too.”

            “Wha— ?” she guffaws. “Let’s see this car of yours”

            I show her the TR II, explaining that it’s a classic and how unusual  it is to find one in such mint condition.

            “Where do you put the AAA batteries?” she scoffs. “I’m glad Billy left. Your car’s only a two-seater.”

            “It’s a sports car.”

            “Be a sport!” she suggests, hopping in. “Hey, doofus! You can buy me anything!”

            I have this compulsion to help people.

            “You’re not lonely, mister, you’re horny!” she tells me, a college-level analysis containing a kernel of truth. That’s what comes from watching American Pie 1, 2, 3 and 4. Me, I prefer Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series. Robin makes a cell phone call, tells her mom a story. We do an early dinner. Robin says a pank-moleben over the food.

            “You’re Russian Orthodox?”

            “It’s a punk prayer, mister. A punk prayer…?!”

            Back on the highway, I make a suggestion. “I can take us to a motel…?”

            “Why? Are you sleepy?”

            “I could sleep with you!”

            “Oh my God! Don’t stop the car! You’re a rapist!” she cries, hands waving, legs churning at 90 miles per hour. Very neurotic. But cute as a steam bath.

            We stay the night at a motel. This is not a well-organized person. First she’s jerking me off, then she wants a kiss, then she creams all over the sheets three seconds after I touch her. Short attention span doesn’t begin to cover her inadequacies. Love is a many-splendored thing! Even lying next to her, I still feel lonely. I find her quirks endearing.  

            We visit an Ihop in the morning for a late breakfast. Not lunch. It’s the morning of the second day. “If anybody ever needed chinos,” she points out, “it’s you. Your pecker is tearing a hole in your pants!” We dawdle over coffee. She tells me about every boyfriend she’s ever had, going back to 3rd grade. “Terry was sweet, but really young,” she observes, drumming her fingers repeatedly on the table top.

            “Why do you hang around with a slouch like Billy?”

            “Oh! He thinks he’s really hot. Him and his sex claims,” she exclaims. “Are we gonna go shopping now?!”

            I have this penchant for helping people.

 

            Enjoying the fruits of their recent victories, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaeda in Gaza (Jund Ansar Allah), al-Qaeda in Iraq (Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad ), al-Qaeda in Libya (LIFG), al-Qaeda in Mali and Algeria (“al-Qaeda in the Muslim Maghreb” or AQIM), al-Qaeda in Somalia (al-Shabaab), al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) and al-Qaeda in Yemen continue to spawn additional interesting and unique militant enclaves. Proliferating worldwide, month by month they appear in new locations, defending this ever-popular Third World brand. They are what David Gregory calls “al-Qaeda 3.0,” looking to set up shop in any failed state facing internal collapse. Not since Starbucks has mankind experienced such an all-encompassing, adaptable business model. The public is buying what these people are selling! Opening a new branch requires a minimum of paperwork. Financing is available! Taking a page from teen etiquette, anybody is al-Qaeda who says they are. You do get ugly food fights. “This is al-Qaeda in Sana’a speaking!” versus “No! We are al-Qaeda in Aden. We were here first! We represent al-Qaeda in Yemen, not you! We blew up the USS Cole! What have you ever done?! You can’t have both! How dare you attempt to usurp our power, granted to us in battle and us alone by Allah, almighty be he! God is great! May the wrath of Khan be visited upon you! Death to the usurper! Death to the Imperialist Oppressor! Death to America! Insha’Allah!”

            I admit, it sounds more impressive in Arabic.

            These stalwarts overlap with the religious fanatics and cult followers who require leadership in the form of an individual, a person, a human being. We’re talking the diff between Starbucks’ sexy mermaid icon and KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” Colonel Sanders. One was designed at a drawing board, the other was a true historical figure. Business-wise, the supply-and-demand organization and marketing techniques remain identical. It is only the ideology that differs. While he lived, Palestinian terrorists had a fondness for the half-blind cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He founded Hamas in 1987. Iraq is periodically thrown into chaos by the Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who can trace his lineage directly back to the Prophet Muhammad. AQIM in Mali and Algeria is backed by the one-eyed Islamist militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar. You can’t make this stuff up! Why do so many of these visionaries have vision problems? Perhaps the loss of sight has liberated their use of the Third Eye. A fox does not see a brown or white or gray rabbit, he sees dinner. Same difference.

            Welcome to Terrorism 101. What does it take to create a viable start-up? If you can find 400 fanatics who are willing to kidnap people, attack government buildings and go into battle against government troops, choose a cool name and get underway! Less than 400, the movements tend to dwindle into irrelevancy. More than 400 becomes unwieldy. Once you’ve got your cadre, pass out the rifles and ammo, train them, wait for a dark night and you’re in business! It can be done!

 

            Like so many rich Americans, the Morrows and their neighbors outsource their security needs to private firms with fancy electronic alarms, security codes and mobile rent-a-cops. A major windstorm such as a derecho, a hurricane or a tornado, and the notorious East Coast electrical grid is missing in action, out for the count. The fabled “Where Were You When…?” New York City blackout of 1977 has been followed by so many brownouts and blackouts, people have become inured. Putting up with the inconvenience, we have learned to subsist on cold showers, uncooked grains, raw veggies and fresh fruit. TV has taught us to discard any refrigerated food products exposed to temperatures above 50° for more than a day. Modern man is a creature of the Electrical Age. Pull the plug and we revert to living like troglodytes.

            The green van that pulls up at the front door of the house sports a faded commercial logo for al-Arabi Electrical Supply Co. The swarthy dudes in blue denim overalls could be employees or just as easily day laborers. Bearded, lace skullcaps on their heads, they unload duffel bags, green wooden boxes and metal containers large enough to hold a man. They ring the bell.

            “We ain’t ordered nothin’,” snaps Juniper, opening the door. “What you want?”

            “We beg to interrupt this household in the name of Allah,” replies Ahmed “Charlie” Suleiman, their leader, brandishing a Glock 21. Pushing past Juniper into the house, he proclaims, “Allahu Akbar! God is great!” His compatriots fan out, storming across the white marble floors. They catch Janet and the two Pomeranians unawares, shooting the dogs.

            After pulling an all-niter screwing the daylights out of Robin, the least I can do is take her to Crate & Barrel and let her pick out accessories for her bedroom. Finely attuned to what is “in” and what is inadmissible, Robin wants black. Drapes, bedspread, lampshade. A fan of Lady Gaga, nothing less will do. Post-Goth. “And shipping,” she reminds me, although her family lives locally. It’s either that or rent a truck and drive the new bed et al. over there myself. I specify shipping. It’s more anonymous. The young lady store clerk assures us the company telephones in advance of delivery.

            “What are you gonna tell your folks?” I worry. Prostitution is illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

            “You’re my fictitious employer,” Robin chuckles, poking me playfully in the ribs. “My parents are so stressed out, they only want the bare bones of a story. ‘It’s a warehouse job,’ I’ve told them. ‘Mail order.’ As soon as I try to make something up, they interrupt to say how proud they are that their shiftless, ungrateful bitch of a daughter has gotten her lard ass off the couch and begun to make a living.” Dancing around me in a circle, gaily waving her arms and laughing volubly, Robin bears an uncanny resemblance to a dozen other blondes of my acquaintance. I do love the ladies!

 

            Fred gets a telephone call at work. Worried, his secretary puts it through. “This is al-Qaeda in Kalorama,” announces a gruff voice, heavily accented. “We have your wife!”

            “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” Fred asks, smiling, sitting at his desk, feet up. He thinks somebody’s playing a prank. He hears a brief hubbub and a violent discussion in Arabic. He understands enough of the language to distinguish the words “mercy killing,” “ransom,” “make a statement,” “negotiate” and “with sugar, no cream.” He hears nothing about surrendering, releasing his family or making hajj to Mecca and Medina. “What do you want?” he asks, sitting up, shaken, dressed in Jos A Bank, boots by Redwing.

            “Death to the Imperialist Aggressor— !”

            “Now that can be misinterpreted,” Fred interrupts. “Sometimes that refers specifically to Israel, other times you mean America.”

            “America!”

            “Oh, well. That’s good. I mean, at least we’re on the same page. I’m not familiar with your playbook, but I try to respect the boycott. You know, BDS, the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions program of the Arab League. But with so much cutting edge technology coming out of Israel nowadays, you can hardly do business in, say, drones, without the Israelis. Good, bad or indifferent as the case may be. Hello! Are you there?”

            “We have taken hostage your family. We shall be in touch!” says the man, slamming down the phone.

            “Shit!” says Fred, crossing out a number of important meetings for that very afternoon in his Roderick’s of Bayswater Executive Desk Calendar. With Easy-Access™ tabs for business, recreation, shop ’till you drop and golf. Fred calls Securitas. They promise to investigate immediately.

            It’s when I come by to share a late lunch, not dinner, at Bangkok Joe’s, adjacent to the Swedish Embassy on K Street, that I first find out we have a hostage crisis. “Does this mean lunch is out?” I ask. After a quickie with Robin, I’m ravenous. “We can do take-out. Chinese or Thai, you choose!”

            “Come on, soldier of fortune, give me of your expertise!” insists Fred, viewing the situation as a business conundrum requiring solution.

            “How much do they want?”

            “Haven’t said.”

            “How many are they?”

            “Don’t know.”

            “Spring roll or soup?”

            “It’s cold out. Let’s order soup.”

            “Wanton, egg drop or sweet and sour?”

 

            On loan from Securitas Stockholm, Sven Svensson knows a crisis when he sees one. “A Chinese restaurant that has run out of spring rolls?!” he asks in his finicky English. “How is such a thing possible?”

            “It takes all kinds,” I tell him. Typical parochial Swede, he only knows what he knows.

            “We should immediately open a dialog,” insists Sven, telephoning to the house from Fred’s desk in the Henderson Office Properties, LLC building on Constitution Avenue. “Hello! Terrorists? This is Swedish Securitas. Yes. No, I’m just establishing contact. Yes? I don’t know. No, I’m from Stockholm. Of course I know Uppsala! Well, wait, I’ll ask.” Turning to Fred, Sven extends the receiver. “The Keurig individual serving coffee maker. It works how?” While Fred is on the phone explaining the coffee maker, Sven and I peruse Fred’s hasty sketches of the house and grounds. “In Stockholm, every building, even individual family dwellings, is required to have a complete schematic diagram. For fire and safety concerns. Registered at the county courthouse. Accessible by computer. For firefighters. The police. Insurance companies. The tax authorities. This makes it very difficult for the citizenry to hide the illicit distillation of hard liquor.”

            “I’m sure it does,” I tell him, at a loss as to where this is going. “Please continue.”

            “Normally, we put snipers on the roof of an adjacent building. Here, the house sits by itself. We may have to surreptitiously float in a SWAT team using a hot air balloon. Silently, you see. Only the rustle of fabric.”

            “I don’t know, some of those propane heaters hiss pretty loud. How about ground troops?”

            Sighing, Sven acknowledges that I am right. Ground troops are probably best. “Perhaps tunneling…”

            “The soil is porous around here. Loamy. I’m not sure it’s suitable for a Great Escape.”

            “We’ve had good success with gas grenades. Put them all to sleep and march in en masse.”

            “Might work. Here, you want a pancake with that Moo Shu Pork?” I show Sven how to apply plum sauce. Fold it into a pork wrap.

            Within minutes, we have a tactical plan. Sven telephones his liaison on the Metropolitan Police Force and argues for private initiative. Short-staffed, Police Chief Lanier and her people are more than willing to have us carry the baby. They can always come in and grab most of the credit if we are successful. That’s politics! Assuming two units perform equally well, it’s the one that knows how to sweet-talk the press who gets the ink.

            Dressed as a milkman in a starched white, antique Thompson’s Dairy uniform (the dairy closed in 1971), I drive the dilapidated milk truck up the cobblestone drive and around behind the house. “Milk delivery!” I call. What do Arab terrorists know from milk? I see a man with a swarthy Arab face pull aside a kitchen curtain. He watches as I deposit two glass bottles of fresh milk and a pint of cream on the stoop. Watches me return to the rat trap of a truck. Watches me struggle to shove it in gear. Stick shift jumping from my hand, the transmission grinds like a Cuisinart. I drive down the road. Round the bend. Over the hill. Abandoning the truck, I sprint into the woods.

            Stripped down to bare camo and a Gerber knife, I snake through the foliage, almost squashing a box turtle. I pick him up and move him to a grassy knoll. Overhead, two robins make an infernal racket. Pests! Can’t they ever be quiet? I wonder what Robin is up to? That’s one foxy lady. Best I concentrate on the job at hand. It takes 40 minutes of cautious exertion for me to reach the back stoop. Curses! They’ve taken in both the milk and the cream! Thirsty, I proceed with the plan. Scaling the drainpipe to the second floor, I use my all-purpose wire cutter to clip the outside wiring, leaving them powerless. Using my glass cutter, I etch a rectangle in the window to the bathroom supply closet. Removing a 3″ X 5″ chunk of glass, I unfasten the catch and slowly, carefully swing open the casement window. A very old design. Leaping, arms out in front, I manage to secure a grip on the window frame. I hoist myself inside.

            Approaching the second floor Tap Room as quietly as a cow chewing its cud, I spot through the banister several figures on the floor below. I hear voices, the aroma of fresh brewed coffee all but bringing me to my knees. What I wouldn’t give for a hot pastrami sandwich! Potato salad. A fat slice of dill pickle. I wait for my head to clear. Regain my focus. The Gatling gun sits by the bar, a shiny visual delight afternoon as well as evening. Pure gun fetish eye candy! Although even I have to admit, it’s a monster to dust. “Now I’m gonna spend the rest o’ mah life chained to this here albatross,” complained Juniper. And with good reason. Finding behind the bar a large green rag torn from a bedsheet, I meticulously dust off the gun’s firing assembly. Using my pencil flashlight and Fred’s gold key, I open the gun safe hidden behind the bar. These clip magazines are of very old-fashioned design, open-faced on both sides. No pikers back in the day, these mothers hold fifty cartridge rounds apiece. Since money is no object, Fred has had the renovators design and smelt fresh brass-tipped steel bullets based on Gatling’s original specs. Rich people aren’t like the rest of us. They can afford a lot better toys.

            Slowly, quietly, I roll the enormous 594 pound gun over the creaking floor, manhandling it to the top of the stairs. I sink the enormous cylindrical barrel to -45° elevation. Grip the brass crank handle in both hands. Take a huge breath.

            “HEY YOU FUCKING ARAB SCUM!!!” I bellow. As they come running to see what’s happening, I desperately crank the handle. Now I experience first-hand the enormous attraction of a Gatling gun. The brass-tipped steel .30 caliber bullets rain metal death down the stairway, making jelly of the stunned Arabs. Their pitiful Kalashnikovs and hand grenades are no match for the heavy cannonade of American firepower. Shattered white Genoa marble flies everywhere.

            Oblivious to the danger, I jump the shark, leaping down the stairs to finish by hand what my trusty gun only started. Gerber knife flashing, I slash the arm of one bearded terrorist, causing him to drop his rifle. I cut the throat of another as he storms in from the kitchen. His AR-15 clatters uselessly to the floor.

            Racing back up the stairs, I load the second clip. “COME TO PAPA!” I shout as still more insurgents run into the house from outside. Again, not comprehending, they too fall into my trap. Fifty rounds and 400 pounds of shattered white Genoa marble later, I dispatch the leftover kidnappers with my knife. The rich smell and taste of human blood is plainly palpable in the entire downstairs. Including the basement. The interior of the house will require extensive renovation.

            “I ain’t gonna clean up this mess!” declares Juniper vehemently, surveying the wreckage after I release her and Janet from the Furnace Room in the basement. “This be a man’s job.”

            “I suppose Fred will need to hire a contractor,” Janet agrees, going into the kitchen to make sandwiches. “Will bacon, lettuce and tomato be all right? I’ll fry the bacon extra crispy.”

            There’s something macabre about stacking the bodies out behind the house. Everywhere, the white marble is stained red with blood. I have Juniper take over kitchen duty so Janet can go to the study and pull out her address book and gold pen. Sitting at the oak desk, built from wood salvaged from the palisade at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Janet telephones Fred, Securitas and the police. Securitas promises to send a car immediately. Upon hearing that, the 911 operator assures us routinely that “the police will be there shortly.” Whatever that means!

            Thank God for small favors. I telephone Robin’s cell and tell her I’m all right.

            “All right about what?” she asks. “Got time to go shopping? Billy says the Apple Store has gotten in a new shipment of iPad minis. You know, the store on South Hayes. Pentagon City.”

 

Chapter 9 

 

Chance Encounter Reaps Gold Key

            Washington, D.C. – She was running backwards on the Mall, trying to hoist aloft a kite in frigid weather, when she ran into presidential daughter Malia. The Obamas were “out for a walk,” one of those 90-second photo ops the First Family is famous for, before returning to the White House and its iron rules of exclusion and exclusivity.

            “We’ve met before, Mr. President,” piped up the little blonde, a striking figure in a shocking pink ski parka and Carolina blue pants, sporting Manolo Blahnik footwear.

            “I hardly think that’s possible,” the president demurred, giving her a radiant smile.

            “It was at the Inaugural Ball,” insisted the little lady. “I told you to ‘hang ten.’ ”

            Still smiling, the president waved in a friendly fashion before jumping into the presidential limo to take a call from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton regarding foreign policy. With the situation in Mali and Algeria rapidly deteriorating, Clinton needed to know the exact wording Obama desired in her letter of resignation.

            “I remember her,” Secret Service agent Jim Matthews told this reporter. “She was at the Inaugural Ball. You don’t forget someone like her. We had our eye on her, mostly because of the dress. Pink coral with a fluffy white fishnet throw. Not exactly state dinner attire. Chunky heels. She struck us as a firecracker. And then she insulted the president, right from the start, in the receiving line. I still don’t understand who gave the order, but we let her stay.

            “She complained about needing to get home to take care of a sick cat. ‘Leave! Nobody’s stopping you,’ we told her,” agent Matthews related. “Ten minutes later, there she is, out on the dance floor, shoes in her hands, dancing barefoot, alone, until the very end . An amusing kook.”

            The Obamas were not finished with Ms. Jimmie Sue Cadillac, however, as both the presidential daughters engaged in lengthy, animated conversation with the buttery blonde. Soon enough, they were joined by the First Lady and Bo, the First Dog. “We talked about allergies,” explained Sasha. “She’s really knowledgeable. And astrology. She says dad’s presidency was foretold by the constellations. Wicked!”

            Thus, a chance encounter has led to the issuance of a coveted Gold Key to the White House, only the sixth time in the last four years such an open invitation has been proffered. The last Gold Key was issued to Morgan Freeman at the time of his induction into the Kennedy Honors.

 

Chapter 10

 

            I return to Lizard Town. What else can I do? I didn’t just overstay my welcome in DC, I blew it away with high explosives. Of course I feel misunderstood. So what? Last thing Fred told me was, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.” He is filing a humongously large insurance claim. Somewhere in this great country of ours, a yellow winter sun is shining, children are laughing, people proudly go about their business, a smile upon their handsome faces. That’s wonderful! Only it’s not here.

            I’m back at the Mason Hotel. It’s about as far down the list as you can get and still have a roof over your head. Any lower, you’re sleeping amid black plastic garbage bags in an alleyway, under a bridge or covered by a cheap blue plastic tarp in the woods.

            She knocks on the door as softly as a kitten.

            “YOU!” I marvel.

            “I heard you were back— ”

            “Glad to see me?”

            “Bad news travels fast. Each of us comes equipped with his own cliff from which to jump, Josh honey. Jimmie Sue Wacko is yours. You are mine. It’s not like you’re on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.”

            “The night is young.”

            “You got that right,” Colfax exclaims, marching me downstairs. She opens the passenger side door on a classic 1995 Chevy Tahoe. In mint condition. “Get in.” Outside, it’s cold as a monkey’s ass, so I do. She talks as she drives. “I’ve been in therapy. All this time, I thought something was wrong with me. It’s you, Josh. You have a Sir Galahad complex. The knight in shining armor! Ever heard of Crusader Rabbit? That’s you. On a crusade to rid the world of distasteful societal byproducts.”

            “Yes! Scum!”

            “That’s what I just said.”

            So it’s easier for the two of us to reconcile, now that Colfax knows who she is. The car drives like a boat. Even riding shotgun, I can feel that we’re floating.

            “You’re always bitching about how ugly Lizard Town is, but you never even visit its history.”

            “You sound like the Chamber of Commerce.”

            “Lizard Town is a steel town, Josh. Accept it! Where do you think all those bronze lizards come from? That grace our public buildings. Obamadon gracillis They cast them at the Municipal Foundry!”

            “Sounds like a tour is seriously in the offing.”

            “Afraid to take the crud out of your eyes?” she asks tactfully.

            I can’t believe the faded white lettering on the cornice of the four story red brick factory. Real 19th Century shoebox architecture. About 1,000 windows.

American Gun Company 

it says. That’s all she wrote.

            The chubby guard in his rent-a-cop blue uniform and squashed hat leads us down aisles to a room as enormous as an aircraft hangar. It’s like walking out of the shadows into sunlight. “How do you like our light therapy?” asks a young Chinese engineer named Wu. Relinquishing us, the guard returns to his desk and newspaper. Wu wears a white lab coat over a Tajik wool cardigan and jeans. Mock flying boots by Martinelli. His eye glass frames cost more than a year’s rent at the Mason Hotel. “Here’s what put us back on the map,” he says proudly, but I’m not sure what I’m looking at. It’s a paint box with clear glass sides. A miniature arm on the end of a round canister moves rhythmically back and forth over a creamy white object.

            “I don’t get it. What’s it doing?”

            “It’s spraying micro thin layers of polymer, building up the gun part layer by layer.”

            “Polymer. Like a Glock.”

            “Gaston Glock created the concept. We’re taking it from there. We do our own design work. Only the barrel needs to be cast in metal alloy. History in the making. This is the future and you’re looking at it. Vulcan at his forge,” says Wu, laughing. “It’s called a 3D printer.”

            “Fu-uck!”

            “I’ve heard it expressed more eloquently, but I take that as a compliment,” he smiles. “Three years ago in the Stone Age, we were outsourcing our polymer mock-ups and teleconferencing station to station. Now we interface in the cloud. The same team that precisions the schematic, hardcopies the prototype. Doing it all in-house makes us linearly cost-effective. Where we were three-stepping, now we one-step.”

            It’s like talking with Dilbert. The guy is an engineer. He even wears a white plastic pocket protector with some Star Wars type industrial logo in red, blue and green. He has pens, the functions of which I can’t even guess.

            “How long does the process take?” I ask. That’s the best I can come up with.

            “Sorry,” Wu replies, grinning shyly. “Since we’re cutting edge, a lot is proprietary.”

            “That’s five by five,” Colfax interjects. “We’re only tourists.” As usual, seeing her through the eyes of others, I’m bowled over by her Goth punk sexiness.

            Wu laughs. If he puts on weight, I can envision him resembling the Laughing Buddha. I wish I understood him better.

            “I’m going to turn you over to our P.R. man. Roger Teslau. He’ll know how to field your enquiries.”

            “What enquiries?” I ask, but Wu is already halfway across the room.

 

            What an office! Enormous color photographs by Günther Bloch. Military mode. Extremely tall, exceedingly gaunt fashion models wear various styles of camo. Licking, caressing and rubbing between their legs assault rifles of every description. In color! Cibachrome prints from the 1980’s. Pure genius! Some of the guns even I don’t recognize. “Now that is a serious sales pitch for gun proliferation,” Colfax exclaims, greatly amused. “Full frontal fetishism at its most virulent. Politically incorrect but entirely legal! Mazel tov! ”

            “I know what that means!” Roger Teslau replies, delighted. “Come in! Coffee! Cream? Sugar? What’s your poison?” The good host, he points to a small bar in the corner, but only just. We shake our heads. He gets busy on his elegant illy espresso coffee machine instead. “The FBI is always welcome. We gun manufacturers depend on you to keep a good product from getting into the wrong hands!

            “Say what you will about Newtown, Connecticut, our stock price is up. Demand far outstrips production and we’re in the middle of an economic boomlet. Unemployment? Not in this line of work. If we can only make owning a gun as ordinary as owning a car, we can single-handedly get the economy moving again. Don’t forget, America is a light unto the nations! Civic pride. Democracy. A win/win situation. Outlaws will always get a hold of illegal hardware. They’re not the market! The market is Mr. and Mrs. Jones and their two kids! Gun licensing is the roadblock. Every state has its own gun laws. Alabama, anybody can get a gun permit. Anybody! Based on the opinion of the local sheriff! Illinois, you need to prove cause. That means only law enforcement, guards and military personnel pack heat. It hardly seems democratic, but there it is. If we can reach the uniformity in gun licensing we have in driving licenses, we are on our way into the Great Wide Open.”

            “Sounds like a golf tourney,” I suggest.

            “We would love to sponsor a PGA tournament. Maybe have duck shooting and skeet in conjunction with golf. Get it out there. Take away the onus. Right now, the public is terrified of guns. We need to jettison the R rating and get guns back into the PG category. ‘Parental Guidance Strongly Advised.’ Freedom is as freedom does,” he adds for comic relief.

            Colfax howls with laughter. “What a great sales pitch. You ought to bottle it and put it on the market. Happy Valley Gun Juice.”

            Mr. T smiles, writing that down. “Progress!”

            That’s Colfax. She has the knack. Pure blarney.

            “I remember when the announcement of a new model semi-automatic rifle was an occasion for fanfare,” Roger explains, reminiscing. It makes him look about 50 years old. “Like at the National Auto Show, we had pretty girls in mini-skirts.” He shakes his head sadly. “Now the younger generation lines up outside Apple Stores waiting to buy the latest iPhone. Made in China!” Roger becomes so down, he goes to the half-pint refrigerator and brings us bottles of German wheat beer. Entertaining us, he reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a bottle opener shaped like a revolver. We quaff the good, sweet brewski. Nice. “Germans always were militarists!” he jokes.

            “To the Kaiser!” I propose, raising my glass.

            It takes him awhile to come up to speed, but eventually he raises his bottle and declares

“Deutschland, Deutschland,

Alles ist verrückt! “

 

            Having been a good boy, she lets me sleep over. On the couch, but I have the dog for company. When falling asleep, her Scotch Terrier snorts like a pig.

            Colfax has a 32-inch flat screen TV. The senator from our state makes his gun legislation speech. We watch it on C-Span:

            “I think there’s a liberal politician who complained one election cycle about the backward people of rural Pennsylvania and their love of guns and Bibles. They preferred their guns and Bibles to a slick pol from Chicago, and that offended the young man. I think he might be of African descent. Has a name that rhymes with pajama.

            “I’m accused of being in the pocket of the NRA. The gun lobby. Balderdash! I am firmly in the pocket— if that’s an appropriate expression— of my own constituents, the people of our great state who elected me to office. My constituents are evenly divided, it seems, on the issue of guns violence. Evenly divided.

            “This entire federal gun debate with its Biden Commission and its Congressional debate IS A CHARADE. Window dressing. Eye candy to distract and wear down and placate the American people while ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GETS ACCOMPLISHED. Hark to my words! I am not afraid to speak truth to power. Any Executive Order banning the sale of automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons and 30-round magazines will simply get challenged and dismissed as unconstitutional by the Robert’s Supreme Court. Yes, I know, by a 5 to 4 decision, giving the semblance of a cliff-hanger to make everybody feel good about themselves. ‘Well, we tried, better luck next time!’ I don’t buy that.

            “IF YOU WANT A BAN on automatic assault weapons and large capacity magazines, it can only be accomplished in the same way, using the same method, as the marijuana initiative. A STATE BY STATE REFERENDUM where each and every voter who so desires can cast his ballot for or against such a ban. The voice of the people! It’s called democracy. One person, one vote. That’s how we’ll find out what people want. Without Congress or the courts nickel and diming it to death. The NRA is not invincible, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg can tell you.

            “State referendums in all 50 states, proposing a ban on the sale of these high-powered weapons and large capacity magazines. SPEAK, AMERICA! Otherwise, you are being cheated, ruled by an oligarchy of shifty politicians, and the word ‘democracy’ no longer has any meaning. STATE REFERENDUMS NOW!”

            The speech really doesn’t go down well. It makes him something of an outcast in the halls of power. But the American people like it. So they are upset when he gets shot, like Gabrielle Giffords, while campaigning, only this time at an elementary school. Bad luck all around.

 

            I go to the range and practice my proficiency on a slew of different weapons. The M-16. Glock handguns. Kalashnikov. Swedish K. Maxim machine gun. Lewis Light Machine Gun. Bofors howitzer.

            “Are you out of your mind?”

            “No, but I can arrange it, if it will facilitate my adjustment.” My fortune cookie says, “You are always on the go.” Yeah, always on the go to the toilet. The pirated “Guess Your Weight” software on Colfax’s desktop nails it every time. But if you click on the breasts of the lady presenter, she coyly turns away. Showing a tight little ass underneath her fire engine red tube dress. Very oriental. Ripping off her clothes, she turns back, revealing she’s a man in drag. When I show this “Easter Egg” to Colfax, she laughs, unimpressed. “Strictly small bore.” My feelings of inadequacy grow in proportion to her level of frustration. I’m reading the “How to— ” articles in women’s magazines. Trying to get into Colfax’s library, if not on the same page. “Did Lance Armstrong STRONG-ARM Teammates into Taking Drugs?” reads a headline.  

            I shouldn’t read the obits.

“Mrs. Mary Hoffman peacefully padded away

in her sleep to join her husband of 47 years,

the late Arthur Hoffman.” 

            “It’s a misprint,” Colfax assures me. “They mean ‘passed away.’ Don’t be so paranoid. If God wants you, he’ll hit you over the head, not send subliminal messages.” Why do I not feel relieved? Nuzzling me playfully, she says, “I love the shape of your earlobes! The rest, not so much.”

 

            Lizard Town.  As tensions mount throughout the city, Colfax sniffs the air but comes up with no answers. We both feel restless. “Excitement left over from the last election maybe?” I suggest.

            “No… Unlike you Josh, this is my town. When something is catastrophically wrong, I take it personally.” Boy, she sure knows how to twist the knife! We start making rounds, combing through Colfax’s mental Rolodex of informers.

            “Wha’ you want, amigo?” replies Juan, still driving the Altima, now a battered wreck. A mucho Hispanic ride. “You want that kind of información, we got an app for that!”

            Colfax sends me to a warehouse on Albert Street to see Billy. He got a reduced sentence for turning state’s evidence. Currently out on parole. “I don’t know, bub,” he assures me. “Like you, I feel it in the air but I can’t nail it. A shitty winter? Another war? Presidential assassination? I don’t like it!”

            “Can you be more specific?”

            “The times! I don’t like unruly times,” he says, still the same old teddy bear. Rosy-cheeked now that he works the loading ramp of a shipping company. A legit shipping company.

            “YOU!” I gasp, running into Craig White at Starbucks.

            “Oh, wow! Um, Josh! Josh Preacher,” he chuckles. “Sit! Enjoy the view!” This particular location overflows with extremely thin, petite Juanitas from the local factories. “No, I’m really surprised to see you!”

            “YOU’RE surprised?”

            “Yeah, I heard you were a big wanker on CNBC or something,” comments Craig, a little older but as dapper as ever. He shakes a packet of sugar-free, rips it open and juices his Joe.

            “Chemicals!” I warn him. “Those sugar substitutes are pure poison. Use the real stuff in moderation.”

            “Isn’t life marvelous?” Craig enthuses. “You collar me and now we’re sitting together over coffee and you’re giving me dietary advice!” He nods his head and laughs soundlessly. Neither of us watches the other too closely. We’re busy scoping out the talent. The ladies. Who view the two of us sullenly, order their coffee “to go” and leave. Chicks! Babes! Women! You can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em.

            “I did a gig on Al Jazeera,” I explain. “Strictly a one-time-only deal. You know me, Craig. A man on his own.”

            “Always the romantic!” he guffaws.

            “Why aren’t you behind bars?”

            “Don’t take offense, Josh boy, but why aren’t you? Point?”

            “Colfax has me going around asking people if they know anything about Lizard Town’s current state of affairs.”

            “No, see, the thing was…” and he’s busy explaining the technicality his lawyer Leibowitz used to get half the evidence ruled inadmissible and the loophole that resulted in three-quarters of the charges being dropped. “I love our legal system, don’t you?”

            I’m ready to throttle the guy.

            “You know how long I served? Ninety-one days. ‘Time served,’ and I was outta there. It also helped that I turned state’s evidence on Jimmie Sue Cadillac, bless her sweet little ole Southern heart. Bitch ran out on me, you know!” he asks, giving me the crabby look of a man battling Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster. Jealousy.

            “Sorry to hear it. I gotta go,” I say and get out of there fast.

            “Don’t be a stranger!” Craig shouts as I hit the door.

            This encounter leaves me so enraged, Colfax has to take time off to talk me down. “Our criminal justice system is infinitely adjustable, Josh. There is no ‘right and wrong,’ only a moral code. Follow the Ten Commandments and you’re pretty much safe, morally. Grown-ups soon discover that the transgressions of youth continue to dog our steps even in adulthood. People are fallible. ‘The greater good’ of society means making compromises. There are politicians you personally detest, but you elect them anyway because no one better is running. There are cops who are a little bent, but the best on offer. Officials who aren’t very nice, but the public accepts the abuse to get their forms signed. Life ain’t Camelot. Hell, Camelot wasn’t Camelot!”

 

              The one ethnicity I always leave out of the mix is the A-rabs. They don’t seem to fit in anywhere. The Indians run the convenience stores. The Vietnamese have the jewelry shops. The Italians own pizzerias. Latinos run taquerías, food trucks and sell dope. The Arabs are nowhere. They have their own Casbah. They all live on the east side of town, facing Mecca. Even the police never bother to drive through. There isn’t any action.

            Our 20-year-old Palestinian informant is named Fawzi Sadek. Typical hard luck story. Grew up normal to industrious parents. Father owns a rug-cleaning business, mother bakes cookies for the bazaar. In public school, Fawzi seems like your All American Boy. He becomes an exchange student to Sweden. Hoping the Scandinavian girls are as wildly promiscuous as people say.

            They are.

            Fawzi’s possessiveness, however, earns him one too many rebuffs. Angry and stigmatized, he becomes a radical Muslim at the mosque in Brandbergen. A blue-collar housing estate in the suburbs south of Stockholm. What we in America would call “the projects.” Next to a national park. Brandbergen means “burning mountains” in Swedish, commemorating a 1947 fire that devastated half the forest. The cleric there has shipped boatloads of dupes into the maw of radical Islam. Dependent on Arab oil for their long, cold winters, the Swedes grant political asylum to anyone oppressed at home. This results in a foreign community filled with bomb-throwing radicals. Fawzi graduates in the Class of 2011. From Sweden,  he continues to Somalia and trains as an insurgent. The FBI picks him up in Washington, DC carrying a tape measure and a Sony Camcorder, taking measurements and 3-D HD video of the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and McDonald’s. All targets.

            In a typical case of rendition, the FBI ships Fawzi off to a Third World country. Lizard Town. No, they bring him here for so-called soft interrogation techniques.         

           Hoping I’ll learn something, Colfax cons me “Observer” status and parks me in a tiny room behind a one-way mirror. Not even space for a chair. “Listen,” I point out, “you’ve got a camera in the corner of the interrogation room. Up by the ceiling. Can’t I sit in the VIP Lounge, drink soda, eat potato chips and watch the drama unfold on TV?”

            “SHUT UP!” replies Colfax.

            They lead in a bedraggled Fawzi, in chains, and seat him on a metal chair. “Things must be hard for you,” Colfax suggests sympathetically. But doesn’t offer to unchain him. She leaves. Enter Fawzi’s mom. Tearful reunion. It’s working. Next, Fawzi’s six-year-old nephew, one of those gorgeous children with big, sad eyes to break your heart. Fawzi weeps. Finally, Fawzi’s brother, wearing a pictorial T-shirt of Algerian soccer star Abdelkader Ghezzal. Fawzi’s brother is a lanky teenager with a goofy grin, class clown. Let’s go to the transcript, Bob, since my Arabic is non-existent.

Fawzi: “How can you wear a jersey of Abdelkader Ghezzal, you dog?! What about Ahmed Hassan?”

Brother: “Ahmed Hassan is yesterday’s news. You been away. Ghezzal has had an excellent season. Your man sat on the bench mostly.”

Fawzi: “I’ll give you ‘bench,’ you spawn of the devil!”

Brother: “Come again, woman!”

            Once Colfax and her team manage to separate them, they escort the brother out the door. Punching his brother in the mouth seems to have lifted Fawzi’s spirits. He can’t stop smiling. And he’s ready to answer any questions put to him.

Fawzi: “We have dug a tunnel all the way to Canada.”

Agent C: “What are you smuggling in?”

Fawzi: “In, nothing. We use it to smuggle people out. Everyone wants to leave Lizard Town. No jobs. No prospects of jobs. No future. Allahu Akbar! ”

            “The time of the founding of the world caliphate is upon us,” Fawzi announces. “It is not enough to kill the infidel.”

            “Is this a change of strategic goals? Or tactics? Or both?” Colfax asks him, concerned and excited, the two of them hunched over tea and cigarettes in the interrogation room. Fawzi’s chains lie in a heap in the corner.

            “The suicide bomber will always have a place in our hearts. A martyr. A brother. God is great! We soldiers of Islam are called upon by Allah to spread the Quran to the infidels at every opportunity.”

            “Same old, same old,” bitches Hoffer, showing up unexpectedly in my one-way mirror cubbyhole. “Yada, yada, yada.”

            “Is an attack imminent?” asks Colfax.

            “Down with the New Jersey,” shouts Fawzi, losing his composure. They actually need to physically subdue him.

            “New Jersey?” everyone wonders. There’s a certain amount of confusion among the analysts until some bright boy remembers that the battleship New Jersey shelled Druse and Syrian gun batteries south and east of Beirut in February 1984 during the Lebanese civil war. Firing over 250 of the Navy’s 16-inch shells, the New Jersey  knocked out 30 of the artillery and missile positions.   

            “We are not,” Hoffer insists, “re-enacting the Battle of Algiers!”

            Wars, however, do get out of hand. We are no exception. I cling to Colfax to maintain my sanity.

 

            Like most armed revolts, it starts with demonstrations. Angry young men parading in the streets, raising clenched fists, chanting slogans. Part of a long tradition going back 2,500 years to the peasant uprisings under the feudal warlords of China. To ancient Greece and Rome. To the Jacobites under James II of England in 1688. No biggie. Even we Americans have always been in rebellion. The Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock were seeking to escape religious persecution. They voted with their feet. No sooner did the early Colonists get organized than they rebelled against the oppressive policies of King George III. Protest and armed struggle are as old as organized society, as young as the Arab Spring.

            Colfax and I are teamed up. FBI agent and public representative sponsored by a whistle-blower NGO. A round-up detail. Paperwork, pen and clipboard in hand, we drive around Lizard Town plucking informants from the loving arms of their traumatized families. Refusing to be drawn into shouting matches, I ignore the mothers calling me “son of a whore” in Arabic. I stiff-arm fathers and brothers who are busy trying to keep Colfax and me from carting away Rabea, Marwan and Djamal, immigrants from Libya. Mosaab, Balla, Sami and Bakri from Sudan. Mudeer, Nateq and Issam in the Yemeni contingent. The Egyptians Hany, Amr, Hossan, Ibrahim and Wael. Fawzi’s Palestinian countrymen Jamal, Ramzi, Fahed and Murad. For questioning. Nuts! Welcome to my world! 

            Possible book title: Informants I Have Met. No pussycats, one young militant blows himself up right in front of us using a shoe bomb. Bends down in the kitchen of his home, lights his laces with a BIC and… Ka-boom! Right in front of mama and the younger brother and sister. Giving all of us varying degrees of hearing loss. Scarring them emotionally for life and leaving us with lacerations as well. Another, Mustafa, seems exceptionally well-hung until we discover the sausage-shaped item in his undies is C-4 with a micro-detonator. Only Colfax coldcocking him saves us from that nasty explosion.   

            We interview over 50 informants. Belligerents. Fellow travelers. Religious fanatics. Concerned citizens asking “What do our neighbors keep burying in the back yard?” Chatter, chatter, talk, talk, what we unexpectedly discover is that people have been stockpiling small arms for years. Totally unremarked by any law enforcement agency. We never knew they were there! There’s an Underground Railroad floating supplies and materiel across Lizard Town’s East River from the partisan’s compatriots in the south of the state. It suddenly occurs to us that both sides have more than adequate resupply, as the city’s Sunnis and Shiites open fire on one another.

            “Those ain’t firecrackers” Colfax and I hear on the police band radio in her Chevy Tahoe, on our way to collar still another informant for questioning. Colfax downshifts like a rally driver and pivots the car east. “The joy of a 5-speed manual transmission,” she cracks. “Only 113 manufactured.” It feels totally bizarre to pull up on Davidson at East 4th and look down the road and witness a scene out of a war movie. In 3-D high def with surround sound, digital effects plus smell, and the violent percussion of explosions. Too real!

            Back at HQ, I start to feel really bad for the citizenry. “Let me white flag it,” I propose at still another walnut-paneled conference room debate. “Find out from the combatants what it takes to alleviate the carnage.”

            “HIM!” scoffs Hoffer. He gets over-ruled by Regional on the computer uplink. I get to go in.

            “Thank you for letting me be Mercury, the winged messenger,” I exclaim two days later, none the worse for wear. “Bad enough the A-rabs are infighting, they have declared hostilities against Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Baha’is as well.”

            “Yeah?” asks Hoffer. “That’s it? That’s your whole report?!”

            “Wait! There’s more! Tell Hillary. I’ve found the dude who was out walking his dog one night in Benghazi and decided he’d go kill some Americans.”

 

            It’s an eerie feeling at night, standing on the roof of FBI Headquarters, surrounded by snipers in flak jackets cradling high-powered rifles, police helmets on their heads. Block after block, we watch the bonfires, as Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, Freemasons and Jews burn Korans in protest over the war. Bookstores across the state report record sales, people buying new copies daily to burn at night. Take that, Insurrectionist scum! Payback is a bitch. The mayor goes on television to protest the sacrilege. This is good! Who doesn’t like stand-up comedy?

            William C. Mooseburger, an old-fashioned, cigar-chomping four star general flies in from Washington to direct National Guard and Army units from three states. “We have come and we shall win!” he declares on the tarmac at the brief welcome ceremony, a maelstrom of leaves blowing at his feet. “Make no mistake!”

            “All bluster,” complains Colfax, but I like the man’s determination.

            Since the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter isn’t my bird and it’s been awhile, I spend the first three days of the war as a crew chief on gunships. Way out of shape, I’m just about back in trim when Colonel Mackenheimer takes me aside with an enormous grin and says, “Surprise!” At the end of the hangar, a C-130 Hercules crew has just trundled in a refurbished Blackhawk. By evening, we’ve mounted the rotor blades and gone down the checklist. Towing it out onto the field, the brass jovially wish me Godspeed. Proudly, I start her up and fly my first sortie, dropping incendiaries all over the battle field. “Fizz Bombs” and “Liquid Death.” Life is good.

 

            “Cut off the rebel’s resupply!” pipes General Mooseburger, which wins my vote, but our persnickety president waffles as always. “Leading from behind.” Which Henri Queuille defines as “the art of postponing decisions until they’re no longer relevant.” The Prez is terrified of the war spreading downstate. The National Guard cordons off the city on all four sides, yes, but between the tunnels to the north and access to the East River, a lot of stuff continues to get through. A proponent of “shock and awe,” the General calls a press conference and declares “I do not accept a war of attrition.” Standing tall.

            “Nobody asked you,” Colfax comments angrily under her breath. Hunched next to the security guards and me at the back of the room. “It is going to be a long, cold winter,” she predicts.

            Insurgents by definition surge in. I prefer to think of our opponents as Intransigents. Troublesome people in transit. Preferably out of the country if not out of this world. They set up their puny mortars and archaic machine guns on rooftops and street corners. Anyone not manning a weapon becomes a human shield.

            Warm-blooded warriors don’t fight in winter, waiting for warmer weather. It’s amazing what cold air can do. Suddenly we are fighting the Finnish Winter War of 1939. Just going outdoors requires exertion. Running around, we burn off a lot of calories, losing the baby fat. I’m dying for a cigarette and I don’t even smoke!

            Lessons in urban warfare:

            Modern war is impersonal, shooting at each other over great distances.

          Plate glass windows shatter. Brittle, the smallest detonation sends them crashing. Plain glass turns to shards sharp enough to use shaving. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, a safety glass window blows. Crunching on thousands of little glass kernels sets our teeth on edge.

          Once a storefront window blows, the cold air and looters rush in. The location becomes uninhabitable.

          Even pretty teenage girls with snub noses freeze ass and become miserable in the cold.

          Mankind produces prodigious amounts of human waste. Once the sewer system becomes inoperable, the volume adds up real fast.

          Man’s inhumanity to man turns out to be a lot greater than we thought. If you are caught in The Zone and not Arabic, kiss it goodbye.

          When you’re bone-tired, combat is no fun.

          Instincts are the body’s most primitive reactions. Plants that are about to die flower one final time, nature’s attempt to propagate the species. We react similarly. After battle, you either want to eat and sleep or fuck your brains out. One or the other, never both.

          Youngsters’ bodies function like furnaces, burning calories and generating heat. Tucked under the covers, they make great bed warmers.

          Once you turn off the heat, cold changes the inside of  buildings into freezer lockers. Bundled up in parkas, long johns, ski pants and jackets, goggles, boots and gloves, we can still function, but it often feels colder indoors than out.

          The seasonal tilt of the Earth is an amazing phenomenon. Still bright, the winter sun gives very little warmth.

          Feelings of camaraderie don’t dissipate in the cold. Feelings of animosity do. No one can be bothered to make war when everyone’s ass is frozen. Sitting around a camp fire warming our mitts around metal cups of steaming black coffee, we gladly postpone any further hostilities. Indefinitely. Or at least until Spring.

          Surrender is asymmetrical. Whenever one side is ready to concede, the other is out for blood.

          There is an end to violence. Corpses spread over an urban landscape lie as still as death itself.

          Explosions play strange tricks, destroying some landmarks but not others.

          The act of stabbing tires the hands. Constant stabbing leads to carpal tunnel syndrome.

      Cleaning up a shattered city can take years. Ask Berlin, Sarajevo, Beirut or L-T.

 

          “This burg is a modern Stalingrad,” Kylie observes, shaking his head, an amused look on his face. “Who woulda thunk it?”

          As part of my Personal Development Program to become socially adept, I have befriended a lanky young Colonel with a lopsided grin, scars down his cheeks, knobby knees, a winning personality and his own tank brigade. Once the big boys come in with tanks, field artillery and air strikes, our little WW II war drama fades into memory. Even drone strikes seem finicky compared to artillery barrages and carpet bombing. Big orange fireballs as far as the horizon. “How about heavy bombers?” I ask, only half joking. “B-1 Lancers.”

          “Get real. Lizard Town isn’t that big,” Kylie replies, pushing me away rudely with both hands. Lizard Town is that big, but Washington wants to minimize peripheral damage more than they want to crush the insurgency. We’ll have to do it the hard way, on the ground.

          We have some great moments, shooting our .50 caliber M 2 turret machine guns from atop our Stryker armored vehicles. The streets become shooting galleries. “So rad!” exclaim my 18-year-old Minnesota farm boy recruits excitedly. “It’s like a video game!” At least they’ve found a “healthy” outlet for their pent-up aggressions. My boys, they call me “Sarge.” I’m not, of course. I was reinstated with the rank of captain during the National Guard mobilization. With a $2,000 monthly bonus. Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler said it best: “Money for nothing and chicks for free.” Jubilee! Sure feels good to be back in uniform! We’ve been issued great Kevlar helmets that can take a bullet. Even our boots are designed for cold weather conditions. A trillion dollar defense budget buys cool stuff. I make sure my boys take their “Red Devils,” the fat red pill containing aspirin, codeine, caffeine and C vitamin all in one. Keeps ’em sharp! We feel an obvious similarity to the Starship Trooper movies, everyone walking around with giant grins on their mugs, high-fiving each other and shouting “Get some!” Back in the saddle!

          With a billion jagged surfaces waiting to give us cuts and abrasions, tetanus is our greatest danger. “Murderin’ Mohammed” don’t scare us none.   

          “This is the first war fought on American soil in 148 years,” marvels General Mooseburger. Not only is he our commanding officer, he’s our most learned military historian. We depend on him to help us keep perspective. After all, we aren’t savages.

          Steven Spielberg suggests sending a b-unit to film actual war footage for a possible A-list big bucks summer blockbuster to be released in 2014.

          “Maybe later,” responds the General, putting him off. Press is tightly controlled. Those photographs of grief-stricken parents running through the rubble with the dead bodies of their children held aloft toward an uncaring God? NEVER GET TAKEN. At least not professionally. My 18-year-olds have them on their smartphones and helmet cams, and a lot more, but we’re not selling them to the newspapers. Of course, it all leaks out on-line, but that’s not our get-out. Although the General is not pleased.

          Tom Cruise comes to L-T to survey the damage, amazingly warm and caring with the troops. He’s visibly shaken over the wounded and the refugees. Weary, bleary-eyed, we are never-the-less impressed. It’s not all just an act. Lady Gaga and Madonna give concerts on the West Side, far from the battle, plainly terrified. They only regain their feistiness and composure when boarding their Learjets to fly away from Hell. Sardonic, the troops hang a banner at the airfield.

Welcome to the Beirut, Sarajevo,

Mogadishu, Kandahar

Mystery Tour!

          I want to go home, but I don’t know where that is.

 

            See, I’ve taken a Monk’s Oath regarding flirtatious blond vixens. I want to do the right thing. Get back on track. Once again become the American hero I once was. Without necessarily flying choppers out of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Been there, done that. My shiny new leaf is in the making. Even Colfax understands that I am ready to commit.

            “CONGRATULATIONS!” says she. Our celebratory dinner is candle-lit. Flutes of champagne at a high-end bistro. I even wear a light gray jacket by Versace over a cream white shirt and an Yves Saint Laurent tie. Pressed slacks. Weejuns. No socks. Taking both her hands in mine, staring into her smoky blue-green Neptunian eyes, I say “Come on, Colfax, cut the crap! Let’s cut to the chase. Let’s get married. We love each other. We’re both passionate, driven individuals. Both Presbyterians. We enjoy great sex. We’re both in law enforcement. What’s not to like?”

            She’s dressed in Mikimoto pearls and a chartreuse twinset. Gazing into my eyes, she runs a finger playfully over my lips. “You’re not really my type, Josh. I usually fall for your Nordic blond midget. Dudes who are shorter than me. Heavily into skiing and fondue. You never ask me where I disappear to on my vacations. Vail, honey. Skiing. I give our relationship a 4.5 out of 5. But honestly, not once have you taken me out for fondue. I like to think I’m a sociable girl, but we never go ballroom dancing. I always assumed I’d get my tubes unstuck and have kids. Four or five noisy brats running around the house, tearing up the place. As for you, Josh, you beat up 11-year-old bullies on playgrounds. Your elbows are meat cleavers.”

            I consider myself a pretty cool dude. Able to handle any situation. Even I have to admit, though, she’s got me sweating. Has Colfax.

            “The only four things we really have in common are a compulsion to right wrongs, our intuitive ability to solve crimes, a bloodthirsty temperament and, yes, glorious sex. This does not a marriage make! I am being reassigned to DEA, working in Brazil. The place is getting flooded with coke from Bolivia. Maybe I’ll call you when I get back.” She smiles wanly. “It is what it is,” she says. “Don’t think it hasn’t been fun. It’s been fun!”

            I stew, watching her fork pieces of dried bread into a red pot full of melted yellowy cheese. Fondue. I get up from the table. Walk to the entrance of the restaurant. Grab a heavy brown walnut chair on my way out. Stand on the sidewalk, smashing the chair with all my might against a lamppost. Crying aloud, I thud in a circle on the pavement, doing an Indian war dance. Chief Windfarm understands. “Hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya…” Shake my fists at the night sky, black as India ink. Pray for rain. Stare at the small crowd of on-lookers staring at me. “My elbows,” I tell them, “are meat cleavers.” Lizard Town. I’ve always hated this city.

            “Okay then, sweetheart,” I think. Charging blindly through the darkness. Down nameless streets. Eyes blurry with tears. Well okay then.

            I’m nobody’s preacher man.

            Josh Preacher. At your service.

*

SNEAK PEEK AT “Sucky,” THE NEXT JOSH PREACHER ADVENTURE 

<< Some detective agency! The biggest challenge of my day is getting my partner Larry out of the bathroom. >>

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