Moses & Curio & the C--- W/the Funny Hat

MOSES AND CURIO AND THE CUNT WITH THE FUNNY HAT





“The citizens of the great State of Mississippi,” Stuart Whitman loved the sound of that phrase each and every time he said it in front of a television camera, “must be certain that the gaming industry they have voted for is run cleanly, fairly, and transparently.  Beyond the reach of organized crime, answerable to the people.  And as Attorney General, it is my duty to ensure that is exactly how it shall be.  This task laid before me is one of my priorities and I assure all of you, just as I assured the Governor and the state Congressional leaders, this state's gambling will be run cleanly and profitably in this state.  Organized crime elements who may see this state as open for business will find themselves in a perp-walk faster than you can double down.  To those members of outside crime outfits who come here thinking they can cheat and beat our state and our children out of what is ours, I say this…”

He leaned forward and lowered his bass just a tad.  Squinting maliciously and jamming out the forefinger for effect, the Attorney General was pitch-perfect for the sound bite.

“…This is our house.  And our house always wins!”

The crowd consisted mostly of off-duty educators and students from Jackson State and Tougaloo who were bussed over to give the press a crowd to film.  They clapped uproariously to give the well-coifed and attractive young Attorney General a proper finish for his sound-bite.

In private moments of reflection, be they rooting for his beloved Ole Miss Rebels, putting for par on the seventh hole at Annandale or watching one on his fellow citizens gather her clothes embarrassed to have been fooled into thinking he must really have cared to select her out of the masses, he despised the citizens of Mississippi.  He was by far more interested in giving extemporaneous speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate in a few years, after he whittled his political baby teeth into polished fangs, of course.

Whitman was new to the game after all.  Far too in debt to the big donors who funded his ride up from Biloxi to Jackson now; he would have to eat their shit for a while.  It was the process and as a prosecutor, he was superhumanly adroit at process.  But after he nailed a few big cases by the throat, the people would settle down and vote for him rather than his campaign posters so gratuitous jammed by the Party into their front yards.

If he played the cards correctly, they would vote for him for anything.

Maybe he would take over as Governor in a decade or two and ride someone else’s Presidential coattails as a VP up to Washington and live like a king for a while. 

Or maybe just an ambassadorship.  Ambassador to Sweden, Australia or Japan sounded nifty. 

Whitman frequently yearned fervently for such an august title.  To be the official instrument through which the full weight of American could be brought to bear, for better or worse, to a nation, be the face of America in the day-to-day foreign policy tête-à-têtes…it held an almost fantastic appeal for him.

He only threw one caveat to his fantasy. 

No Middle East postings! 

Glad-handing to the Saudis, with all their peculiarities and stringent measures necessary to keep their locals from having a shit-fit over some reference to minute U.S. dealings with the Muslim world was nowhere near as fun as a nice quiet tour of duty in Spain or Australia.

Maybe Brazil? 

A box seat for Carnival had to be a better perk than sitting on a floor eating camel with a bunch of oil-rich sand clansmen.  Hell, they were more racist than those shitpoke Klansmen back home out in Scott County.

All in all, though, Senator Stuart A. Whitman (D-MISS), he liked to imagine that name best.

Whitman concluded his remarks at the Capitol steps and took no questions.  It was November and by chance, Doreen, his press secretary, managed to get him outside on the stump on the nastiest, drizzly day possible.  Holding up the pilgrimage of the Democratic faithful back to the idling busses to take some of Bert Case’s sonorous questions was detrimental to the cause.  His nose was about to start running as he left the dais and made his way back inside.  The crowd was dissipated almost before he hit the door to his office.

Doreen, shrewish, sixty, but sharp as a tack, took his overcoat and the scarf she picked out for him off and primped his suit jacket.

“Man, it’s freezing out there.”  He sniffled and thanked her for a cup of coffee she seemed to pull from thin air.  “It look okay?  Hair good?”

“It’s prime rib for an otherwise meatless Wednesday news cycle, Stuart.”  Doreen backed away as he took up his position behind his desk.  “Should be a lead on JTV and LBT unless Melton gets uppity or something national happens.  It looked good.  The new haircut works.”

“Glad you think so.  Is Cynthia still coming by with that Fed?”

“Two o’clock.  The gambling has their attention.  I’m trying to get someone over there to liaise with this office so we can get whatever mileage we can from future prosecutions.  They aren’t the most friendly bunch over there.  Even the secretary’s look at me like they wanna’ spray Lysol in the air as soon as I leave.”

“Our fair Governor doesn’t share the same letter by his name as the President so you can expect some pushback.  But don’t sweat it,” the Attorney General yawned and leaned back in his chair.

He pressed his fingertips together as if he was making a decree.  “I’ll see what I can do about it with some of our friends on the Hill.  There’s gonna be plenty of meat on the bone when those boats get to docking up around here.  Some of that loot is gonna’ end up in some coffers for sure.  They are going to need me for sanctioning some of it, I’m sure.  A letter to the Director about bitchy members of the staff in the local field office in Jackson should get you some hugs soon enough.”  He shrugged at her as she moved files around on his desk.

“You think this casino business is really gonna help or hurt the state?  It seems an awful risk moving gaming into a state with so many idiots with no money looking for the golden arm to pull.  You really think the mob will try to move in here, too?”

“With that much money to be made it always brings out the carnivores looking for the easy pickings.  It always has.  Somebody will undoubtedly fuck up somewhere and an example will be made with all due expedience.”



         Curio Pheloie’s ears were burning as she lay on an army blanket spread out near Moses’ house.  For nearly two hours solid, the pair was target practicing with a myriad of weapons.  Her shoulder and elbows were sore.  Her nose was frozen.  She was half-drunk and not making her shots count to his satisfaction.

         When Moses bought the land well over a decade prior, he cleared off much of it the rear of the house.  Except for the various decorative shrubs and trees, the yard was opened all the way to the edges of Flechette Bayou, which meandered its way down to Bayou Provost and then eventually flushed itself out into the gulf.

He left a number of the older trees standing and marked their distances.  In the days when Grizzly was in an all-out turf war on the streets of New Orleans, Moses used the cabin as a hiding place.  Other men did the same in other places sprinkled across Acadiana.  Soon enough. Hunters began hunting and occasionally the shooting spilled out away from the city and into lonely cabins and hotel rooms as minions on both sides sought each other out.

In those days, Moses rigged a series of tripwires that ran to chimes in his home that would alert him to a waterborne attack.  If he was ever assaulted by Lavon Moncrief’s minions or got a dime dropped on him and had a swat team come slinking up from that side of the house, they were in for a rude welcome.  The tripwires would result in his firing off the claymore mines he loved to use so much in Vietnam.  Against unarmored targets, they were quite efficient.

         But that was long ago.  He often smiled to himself about how paranoid he had been back in those days.  Wired on speed or coke for days, certain that some detail was overlooked and thus sure to send Grizzly Fontenot’s abundant enemies in search of the man who dealt so many of their brethren a dose of finality, he would sit in the shadows of his house.  Hours he spent listening to the night, his eyes widened by shadows he imagined creeping under the moon.  Always with a finger on a trigger.

Many a varmint died in those days.  A shuffling opossum would send him into a fervent panic and end up shot to hell.  A deer hit a tripwire one evening when he was asleep.  The alarm went off in his ears, two days after he shot two of Fausto Lacombe’s cousins in the back outside of the Hog’s Breath Saloon.  He was certain in that moment Fausto and that pair of idiot sons of his were coming up his rear flank in the dark.  The tripwire was at the hundred-meter mark, close enough for any number of weapons to be brought to bear.  In a half-asleep panic, Moses reached over and clicked the firing trigger on the claymore mine set to blast on that tripwire’s location.

He felt like an idiot for that, but he ate well for a few days on what was left after the buckshot pellets were spat out from the meat.  His paranoia did not allow for many grocery runs.  Venison was a nice lagniappe.

The claymores and the tripwires were a distant memory now.  Age had tempered the paranoia somewhat.  He was after all, off the toot…mostly.  He rarely indulged without Curio to share the feeling.  There were stretches where she would start to snort out of boredom and he was quick to back her away from such things.  He spent a lot of time in a bottle because he grew bored.  It was not a good habit for either of them to start. 

The street war ended and the Atchafalaya Mudbugs were the victors.  There were the Feds and the local law dogs to occasionally deal with, but the days of being a foot soldier in a running series of street fights were long gone.  So where the claymores.

Moses considered himself special ops now.  Strike fast, strike hard. 

And then curl up next to his lover and forget all about it until next time.

At least until she started wanting to come along.  Training her was in itself, a new paranoia.  Things that needed to be known instinctively and done without pause were engraved into Moses’ skull.  Curio, on the other hand, had long ago decided moxie and viciousness could overcome her shortcomings in the mechanics of dealing death.  It was an attitude that Moses found impossible at times to overwhelm.  He loved her, but often scrolling across his mind was a far terser stream of words than he uttered as she trained alongside him.

“You’re still jerking the trigger, baby.”  Moses Holliday rolled over on his side and exhaled his breath slowly as Curio Phelonie rolled on her opposite side to face him.  She pouted and took a sip from an Abita Purple Haze bottle.

         “I’m cold.  I ain’t jerking the trigger.  My teeth are chattering.”

         “She says as she drinks a cold beer on her belly while lying prone on the ground.”  Moses smiled. 

         “You said I couldn’t have coffee.”

         “It makes you pee.”

         “And beer doesn’t?”

         “It doesn’t unless you have a ton of them.  And alcohol calms you.  Coffee churns you up in all kinds of ways.  Bowels, bladder, heart rate, mindset.  It makes you twitchy when you gotta’ be calm.  It’s just a thing that must be learned.  And the only way to learn it is to pull that trigger a thousand more times.  You’re still afraid of that pussy gun’s lil' kick?  One day, you won’t be.  Drink enough beers, you’ll get cocky.  Relaxed, calm.  Even pissed off is better than nervous when it comes to firing a weapon.”  He unscrewed his fifth of Rebel Yell and took a long pull from it.

Curio winced as she saw the bubbles rise from his lips and up the narrow neck of the bottle.  After a bottle of whiskey, it was her understanding that few men were calmed by it.  Moses was a mortal man in that respect.  He was not usually a mean drunk, but growing up as she had taught her there was always that one time waiting around the corner.  In the years they had been together, he never once raised a hand to her, rarely even raised his voice. 

Drunk and rowdy though, the swagger of a loose set of limbs and a drunken perception of insult had waylaid many an acquaintance in a hail of angry friendly fire the drunk may never recall but always regret.

         “You must be super anxious if you need that much calming down.”

         “Call it a lifetime of looking over my shoulder.  Now I gotta’ look over yours, too.”

         “I’ve been good about looking over my shoulder.  No one else volunteered until I met you, Moses Holliday.”  She rolled over on her belly and sighted in the .223 on the three hundred meter target.  “In fact, it’s one thing I think I’ve done a kickass job of doing.”  She inhaled and held her breath, squinting through the scope. 

Moses raised his binoculars to his eyes and watched the silhouette. 

         “Don’t squint.  Both eyes open.  You have to get used to seeing not only the target but also what else may be coming into the area.  Could be a sniper waiting to see your muzzle flash so he put a return round right back ‘atcha.”

         She fired.  Waited.  Fired again.  Slacked and took another breath and re-sighted.  On that exhale, she fired the third round.

         “You got a three-inch group.  Shit yeah!  Very good!”  Moses rubbed her on the small of her back.  “Six more now on the hundred meter.  Faster.  You gotta’ assume someone is running at you.  Might be three ex-track stars coming to stab you in a titty.  Drop ‘em!”

         She shimmied her legs to the left and drew a bead on the closer target.  When she adjusted the scope’s focus, she could see a hand-drawn note clearly written in black marker hanging, taped, beneath the silhouette.  The black target had three tiny hearts drawn in white paint centered on the heart.

         It read: “I LOVE YOU!”

         “You’re too sweet, baby.”  She chuckled and sighted in on the top heart.  Her shots were all dead center.

         “You see?”  Moses grinned at her and stood up to stretch.  “You weren’t thinking about the shot.  You was a-just-a tryin’ to hit the funny spot.” 

Quick as a whip, he drew his .45 and stitched a crooked smiley face in a ten-meter target.  She cursed and rolled away from his spent shell casings as they cascaded on her.

         “Smile, it makes people wonder what you’re up to.” 

He chuckled and removed the empty clip.  She lay on her back looking up at him, her arm a pillow.  Slipping a fresh magazine into the heavy pistol, he picked up the bottle and rapidly fired five shots one-handed into the same ten-meter target, making the single hole he shot for a nose into a wide-open ragged hole.  He downed the remainder of the whiskey and gave the bottle a heave into the air. 

Curio was fascinated to see him draw on the bottle and shatter it in the air.  She had seen that trick a hundred times.  What she was shocked by was after he shot and shattered the bottom of the bottle, he tracked the neck of it after it flew off and shot that as well, in less than two seconds…drunk.

         “You are way too good with guns, dear.”  She finished her Purple Haze and stood up with his long arm offering her assistance.  “You need another hobby. 

He pecked her on her cheek.  “I thought I had one.”  He winked lovingly at his little protégé.  Smiling, she snuggled up to his bare arm.  She was wearing a heavy wool pea coat and long pants but there he stood in a pair of thin jogging pants and a t-shirt.

Damn, you tough old bastard.

He never ceased to endear himself to her.  He was just Moses.  Strong, morally decent in his own perverse shootin-a-sumbitch-who-earned-it kind of way.  He never cried out when in pain, could handle anything thrown at him, had a solid upbringing out in the desert.  Music lover, book reader, playful, strong, indulgent, good fuck….

Many nights since they were thrown together on a crowded French Quarter day, she wondered how she could have found him and he found her.  The thought of what her life may have been had she gone over to Royal instead of Conti touched her from time to time when she was alone and thinking about such things.

All in all, Curio figured everyone often stood looking out of a window in some house they inhabited with someone they met and fell for and wondered, “What if?”  For many, it may bring a tear from the recognition that they damn sure should have zigged for someone else rather than zagged straight into the arms of the asshole they ended up with.  Shrugging that off, she would merely look around and see him smoking his Winston or maybe a joint.  He would be cooking her an omelet or filling up the Jacuzzi tub he bought for the two of them a few months before.  She had merely mentioned in passing she wished she had a bigger tub so he could massage her while she soaked in some bubbles.  It showed up within two weeks.  She was ecstatic.  He was just glad to have something to do.

She would think of him inside her, large and in charge, savoring every taste and instant of him deep within and she would swoon.  Curio never was so happy to have wanted a free cocktail from Cat’s Meow in her life until she realized how happy the days afterward had been for them.  And if she had only made one more block…none of it.

They stood and watched a distant wind sway the Spanish moss coating the trees across Flechette Bayou.

         “Gonna’ get cold as hell tonight.”  He holstered the .45 and laid it on the picnic table next to the small arsenal spread across the weathered planks.  Grunting a bit, he stifled a burp and let it slither rather than roar.

         “You gonna’ make me a fire?”  She laid the Bushmaster .223 on the only free part of the table and bent over to touch her toes.  Their jog up the winding driveway that led to the cabin was paying dues on her calves.

         “You gonna’ make sure I’m not lonely beside it?” 

Moses picked up a battered Marlin .30-.30 lever action and fired a few soft-nosed at the hundred-meter target.  “Damn, I forget how much those softies fall.”  He wrinkled his nose at his bad shots.

         Curio drilled a finger in her ears.  The old Marlin was loud as hell.  “I’m sure we can make an arrangement of mutual satisfaction.  What do you want for dinner tonight?”

         “I was thinkin about some Italian actually.  Would you like to go out for dinner with me?”

         He saw her mouth drop.  “What?”

         “Nothing.”  She waved her hand nonchalantly but her brow was incredulous.  “I just can’t remember the last time you suggested we go out to eat when we wasn’t on a job.  Hell-yeah-please I wanna’ go out to eat!”

         “I know you do.  It’s been a while.”  He kicked out the remaining shells from the Marlin and placed them back in their foam house.  “I think a little run into town sounds like fun.  I’ve been wanting some lasagna from Christiano’s.  Maybe let’s get dressed up and head out a while?  You gotta’ be goin' nuts sitting around out here.  Especially since it’s cold and we can’t sit outside without losing an extremity.” He chuckled.

         She was going nuts.  She was twenty, vivacious.  Stir crazy out in the deep obscurity of some desolate bayou.  No friends, with only a television and Moses to listen to.  She surfaced long enough to accompany her lover on some mission to kill people and then they skulked back to Flechette Bayou or her own place in Thibodeaux.  She often felt as if she had dropped from the world. 

Sure, Moses was good company and the pair had a whale of a good thing going together, but by God, she was twenty and sexy as hell.  Tucking all that away in some quiet house far from the prying eyes of the miniscule amount of neighbors, the closest of which lived a solid two miles away seemed like such a waste.

         “You asking me out on a date?  Fuck, that’s sweet, baby.”

         “If you’ll have me.”

         “Oh, I’ll have you.  I accept your offer, sweetie.  But that’s enough goddamned whiskey.  I ain’t having you shit-faced around me in Christiano’s throwing up on my bread sticks.  Capiche?”

         “Yes ma’am.  It’s a deal.  But before we do…”

         “Yes, I fucking know.” She ejected the magazine from the Bushmaster. “Clean the damned guns.”

         “That’s my girl.”

         They started collecting weapons and putting them into a trailer mounted to a riding lawnmower.

         “Shit, Moses.”  She shook her head as she laid the blanket over the rail to prevent scratches. “Did you have to shoot every gun in the damned house?  I’m fuckin’ hungry!”



         Bertrand Fontenot flipped off the television at 10:25 and snuggled under the heavy quilt and sheets of his bed.  He was a guest of the Fairview Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, an opulent bed and breakfast nestled close to Millsap’s College just north of the government district on State Street. 

After a day of meeting with folks with various degrees of stolid reputation and trying to get his head around where the money in casinos was, he was dead tired.  Trying to get a taste of the casino cash about to be pouring into the state consumed a great deal of his time lately.

         And for naught, he feared.  The men he met with over the last week were old hats at skimming cash on construction contracts.  Comptrollers, county commissioners, zoning committee hacks, state reps, construction contractor honchos…

But to the last man, none of them was much interested in trying to play around with rigging bids or skewing numbers.  Each of them was afraid of the new deputy U.S. Attorney Randall Jowanski and the new golden boy Mississippi Attorney General, Stu Whitman.  The way they figured it, the two of them were dying to catch an old school mobster skimming off of a bid.

There were always a few cuts to make here and there with resources and labor, but the riverboats were stuck on the water and that cut out a lot of real estate speculation cash.  The casinos themselves were run by tightwad entertainment consortiums who expected clean books and a pristine balance sheet.  The Vegas mob put such a bad taste in the mouths of the Feds back in their heyday, it was expected for someone down south to try, and fail miserably, to pocket an ill-gotten share.  Most figured Jowanski already had a RICO indictment written up, merely leaving the defendant’s name line blank until he had a name to pencil in.

         Jowanski was a particular thorn in Fontenot’s side.  He was eager to cut his teeth on someone like Fontenot.  His tendrils spread deep, far, and wide across his judicial domain and more than a few connected people were doing time across the land because of his tenacity.  He only needed to knock off a big fish and he was politically on his way somewhere into the stratosphere.

Jowanski was also bulletproof.  He was straight-laced, not prone to mistakes.  He kept his nose clean, a tough one to get to unless he got killed and that was too much heat for Bertrand Fontenot to wish to deal with.  Heat meant going underground, maybe getting busted when the FBI juggernaut got really down to business.  Those men played for keeps when one of their own went down.

         The Mississippi guy though…

Grizzly closed his eyes and recapped what he was told by a source in the Capitol’s carpool.  Whitman was vulnerable.  It was the women.

Ain’t it always?  Grizzly had chuckled when the driver said that.  Women, women, women.  He knew a thing or two about good men being swayed by womanly charms.

The women provided a crack in his armor.  Whitman was single.  Getting laid for a single good-looking politician in the south was no vice that could not be overlooked.  Sure, the Baptists blue hairs voted in great numbers and they would shun him, but they were already GOP devotees anyway unless they were state or union retirees.

Folks on the jackass side of the aisle just put an Arkansas shit-kicker and clit-licker in the Oval Office just because he played a sax and was down with brown.  One look at his scowling wife and people gave him a sympathy pass if he liked to step out ever now and again.

         Smiling as he flipped off the light and gave his nub leg a scratch, Bertrand Fontenot thought about one of Louisiana’s own shit-kicker and clit-licker governors, Edwin Edwards.  AKA “Fast Eddie” to his ever-loyal constituents and concubines. 

He was a chatty bastard, that Eddie, thought Fontenot. 

“What was that he said that time?” Grizzly asked himself aloud. “Oh yeah!  Funny sumbitch…”

Something about the only way he couldn’t get re-elected was if he found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy…

The thought put him to sleep a few hours later.



Curio nuzzled up against Moses’ neck, sucking slowly on his ear.

“I think I’m the one who’s shit-faced now.”  She giggled, her breath soft on his ear.

“It’s a pleasantry ain’t it?” He sighed and rubbed his full belly.  They sat in a corner booth at Christiano’s in Houma.  White tablecloths, low-wattage bulbs and copious plates of Italian pleasantries were spread across tables laden with coonasses tired of cooking at home.

Moses curled up to her, deferring to her sultry ambitions though mindful of eyes on them.  He would never deny his relationship with Curio to anyone, but the unique job description the pair of them shared was always a secret to be maintained- best maintained if scrutiny was averted.

For Moses, thirty sets of eyes watching an older man and his horny younger girlfriend was an exercise in maintaining a steadfast nonchalance despite an apprehension that gnawed at his throat.  People would see them and scowl.  Some would not but they would wonder.

Their server, Siouxrita, asked a few innocuous questions about what they were doing out later after dinner.  Curio, soused on a bottle of merlot, told her they were holing up at the house and not coming out until spring.  The air was chilly as November crept down into south Louisiana. 

Moses was satisfied with her response.  Curio had a tendency to be chatty with folks.  Chatting meant offering details of one’s background, upbringing, biases, affiliations, intentions, insights, and potential.  He wanted none of those things to register with anyone he met. 

“A ghost should never linger,” Moses often said to her before she began to accompany him on his business trips.  “I try very hard to be a ghost when I’m on the clock and a flea’s fart in the howling wind when I’m not.”

One day when he said it, she recanted, “I can be ghost, too, Tex.”

“You, my dear, are always going to be remembered, especially when people see you next to me.  It can’t be helped.  So when I try to dissuade you from going out with me places, it’s because I love you and I’m doing what’s best for us.  You, though?  You can go out alone anywhere and anytime you wish.  You’re young and you blend in with young people.  But put you next to me and it’s a curiosity.”

“And curiosity…”  She rolled her eyes.

“Shot the pussy cat!”  He shrugged.

Now, she was nuzzling his taunt neck in a restaurant close to where he lived and in front of a crowd of eyes that occasionally lingered on them.  He tried to eat quickly, savoring the dish of lasagna sliced at least five inches high.  It was delectable. 

She did a great deal of the drinking and wolfed down a plate of scallops sautéed in a garlic butter sauce served over angel-hair.

He tried to breathe it away, but the paranoia was always there.  As many times as he tried to smile and convince himself it was just a dinner between a couple in love, he could never completely relax even as he tried to calm himself.

We’re not the first older man- younger woman couple in the world, right?  It ain’t so taboo nowadays.  Hell, they can watch us get in that old Bronco and know she ain’t nailin' a sugar daddy.

For all they knew, she was an escort.  She was wearing a sleek lavender cocktail dress and matching open-toe pumps.  Her hair was longer than it had been in months and she piled it high on her head with a few long tresses dangling astride her dark eyes.  Cursing and tugging the fabric on him, she had forced him into a dapper navy blue suit and shaved his salt-sprinkled hair into a tidier buzz cut than normal.

“You look civilized now, baby.”  She had stood in front of him, brushing away a loose hair or lint as she inspected him. “I can be seen with you now.”

“I’m so thrilled I pass muster.” He turned and played with his cuffs in the mirror.

He was feeling hung-over a bit, too.  The last draw of the Rebel Yell was a long time back.  Now they were fat and happy and dressed to kill in public for the first time in many months.  He forced himself to shrug away his tension long enough for them to finish their dinner. 

There was one card he could always play as she got drunk and he wanted to leave.  He threw it out on the table.

“You need to finish up that wine.  If you keep tasting my ear like you’re doin’ we’re gonna’ end up puttin’ on a show for these folks.”  His hand clasped her thigh just above her knee and rubbed it.

“Kinky!  I love it!”  She half-giggled, half-slurred in his ear and gave it a bite.  “Who knew the ghost was wanting to slime on me on a white tablecloth?”

“Well, I was kinda hopin’ to save that for a more private moment.”  Without flinching, he realized she was serious.  Her hand was reciprocating his rubbing and not at all daintily.  “Perhaps we should get dessert to go.” 

His eyes closed softly, a little smile goading her further.

“Mmm, perhaps we get desserts right now…” She bit his neck and sucked on it.  It made her hotter to feel him shudder.  Her lips on his neck was a delicacy for him and she knew it.  She moved his hand higher up her thigh.  He leaned in with his neck for more of her loving but still kept his poise as he looked around at the other patrons.  She whispered in his ear, “What?  Is Moses afraid of a little PDA?”

He muttered, “Moses would ass-fuck you at the hostess stand right this instant if he and his girlfriend weren’t so damned guilty of a lot of felony charges.”

         “Live wild, baby.  I need some release after all dat shootin' today.  Touch me…”

“You guys ready for dessert?”  Siouxrita’s voice snapped him back to his alert phase.  Curio did not relent.

“…inside deep, just where you know I like you to.”

“Yes ma’am, two slices of strawberry cheesecake to go.”  He grinned mischievously at the slightly annoyed waitress as she tried not to gawk.  Curio kissed him softly on his throat as the woman turned on her heels to place the order.

“And Miss!” Curio blurted suddenly.  Siouxrita paused mid-stride and looked back attentively.  “Tell them extra whipped cream!  I think I’m fresh out at my house.” 

“Attention to detail is a-kinda’gettin' to be her thing.” Moses acknowledged the coy smile Siouxrita flashed at them before zipping away to get dessert boxed up.   

“I think she didn’t like the show.” Moses lit a Winston as Curio retreated and flipped open a compact to primp.

“She’s just jealous, Moses.”  Curio patted his crotch and rubbed it vigorously like it was a faithful collie’s head. “And she doesn’t even know how jealous she oughta' be.”

“You’re too sweet.”

“Not tonight, baby.”

She inadvertently felt a subtle vibration under her wrist and glared at his face. 

The pager. 

The one she suggested he leave at home just that one night.

He sighed and shrugged.  “I’ll have to call, baby.”  He leaned over and whispered softly in his west Texas drawl, “But not until after the whipped cream is cleaned off.”

That soothed the anger, but it did not quite heal her burning.



“Bertie wants you two to meet him up in Jackson, mon cheri.” 

Curio listened to the guttural and very Acadian lilt of Pete Fontenot, smirking and sucking her teeth with the phone on her ear as Moses toweled his back dry at the foot of his bed.  Steam rolled from the bathroom and reached toward him.  She thought it fitting as he stood naked before her, scarred and sinewy, fit for her feast and “to the task,” as he liked to say.

“Any bleeders?”  He looked over his shoulder and she shook her head. 

Occasionally old shrapnel from his exposure to an exploded NVA rocket would burrow its way out from within him and exit his skin.  The shards bled when a decent piece was dislodged after a vigorous scrubbing with a loofah, as he had just gotten from her.  What was left of the whipped cream on him was now long gone.

“And what’s in Jackson?  I was kinda’ hoping to avoid work a while after that last gig.”  Curio rubbed her damp belly as she reclined on a beach towel spread across the ruined bed sheets. “Can it wait until spring?”

“I wish.  It’s time-sensitive, bebe.  He got some hunch-a his.  It’s not y’all’s normal piece of action dis time.  He thinkin’ he wants a horse’s head moment for some sumbitch dat causin’ us problems.”

She winced and cocked her head as Moses flopped across the bed with a film canister in hand.  “Horse’s head?  What the fuck you mean by that, man?  I love horses.”

“The Godfather, Sexy.”  Moses looked at her.  He motioned with a hand as if she should know that by heart. “They put the horse’s head in the guy’s bed?”

“Yeah, he got it.” Pete heard him and acknowledged the reference.  “Only tell him it’s more like that senator in part two.”  She relayed it. 

“Really?”  He sucked softly on her kneecap for a second, then reached down on the floor and picked up the white-dusted mirror from beside the bed.  He dumped a dollop from the film canister onto the plate and began chopping.

“Tell him maybe not as bad as dat.  But we have to see.” Pete answered.

“I will.  What time?  Can it wait or do I need to put my clothes on right now?  We was just about to put my cat out for the night when you called.”

Pete paused.  Curio could almost see him shudder and shake his head at the thought of her naked.  She teased the brothers Fontenot mercilessly when she had cause to be around them, at least since they had began to grow accustomed to her being a part of Moses’ life.

Curio loved to make them squirm.  Flirting with them, giving them the occasional flash of an ass cheek in a short dress.  There was the little oops-didn’t-know-y’all-was-here moment coming out from a shower when the couple had the brothers over to Moses’ house for dinner one evening.

During Mardi Gras, she nearly gave Pete a heart attack by strip-teasing for ten thousand revelers outside on their chartered balcony and never putting back on more than long black stockings, a nipple-less bra, and a garter belt for the remainder of the night in the hotel suite.

         “Y’all don’t mind, right?  It’s Mardi Gras, after all, right?” She had asked them a dozen times that night.  They would look away bashfully from her.  These were men who owned a strip club yet for some reason her nudity was uncomfortable.  Moses had laughed the whole night when she would lap dance for him and boogie her way out on the balcony for all the world to see.  The Fontenots would only drink and look nervously at each other.

The Fontenots, to their credit, leered, which was acceptable and expected, but they never even hinted for more.  She bet more than one of the concubines they had over for some nocturnal emissions was imagined to be a short, dark-featured little package that could at any time come at them with a knife and do them dirty until they died.

It did not bother Curio in the least.  Boys will be boys.  She was enamored of Moses and it worked out well for all involved.  Everyone accepted status quo.

“Saturday morning.  He wants y’all deah fo breakfast about nine.”

“He buying?”  Curio grinned as Moses tapped some powder from the film can on the mirror.

“Yeah, he springing for toast and water fo you, cheri.  Sweet feed and horse pee for yo beau.”  Pete laughed.  “He’s stayin' at dat Fairview Bed and Breakfast place offa' State Street up der.  Downtown, kinda'.  By Millsaps College.  It’s swanky.  You’ll dig it.  No hookah' clothes though.”

“You comin' with us dis time, baby?  For me?”

“You asking Moses dat?  He got dat Texas tic-tac ‘tween his fangas in der?”

“Fuck him.  His skinny ass.” She purred in the phone.  “I been wantin’ me some big love, lately.  I need a man who can put some ass into it when he strokes.  His bony ass don’t do it for me no more, Pete.  You and me though, mmm….”  She groped a breast as Moses giggled silently and scraped the coke pile into rails.  “You and me need to schedule some private time, baby.”

Moses faux-frowned and smacked her lightly across her thighs as he chuckled.

         "Yeah.  I’ll get right on dat.  Y’all take care.  No, I won’t be der unless I need to be.  I gots some things to do down my way.  Be thinkin boutcha' doh.  Adieu!”  He hung up.

“He hangs up so quick when I flirt with him, don’t he?  He always been so shy?”

Curio smiled that gorgeous smile at Moses, that infectious coy beaming that still raced his heart far more than the blow ever could.  Moses delicately laid the goody-mirror in front of her and tossed her a straw.

“Nah.  Pete’s just grateful he might see his dick come out from under his belly tonight because of you.”



“These cheer, deez mah best good friends, Charlie Truitt and Mary Deslaughter, Miss Renee,” Grizzly Fontenot pointed out Moses and Curio to the proprietor of the Fairview Inn, Renee Dickinson, as she passed by their lunch table.  She nodded at them.  Moses tipped his ostentatious Stetson at her and took it off, laying it in the empty fourth chair.

“Good to meet y’all.”  She looked at Mister Fontenot.  “Are these the friends who will be staying with us?”

“You be a-guessin' raht.  Dey come up from down Houston way.  Me and ole Tex Charlie here now, we go way back to when we couldn’t even piss a hole in da ground.  Ennathing' he tell you ‘bout me is a lie, jess so’s you know.  But dat’s only cuz he a-gonna try to woo you way from ole Fontenot first chance he gets.”

Moses smiled at her.  The maven was an easy sixty-five.  Plump around the hips and beholden of the face of an old school marm straight from central casting.  She had reached an age and weight where even speculation of whether she was a looker in her prime was impossible.  She chuckled.

“Now Mr. Fontenot.  You know I’m only on this earth to be beholden to God and you.”  She tapped his forearm lightly in faux affection.  There was a subtle fear Moses could read in her reply.  It was not and overt deference to whom and what Bertrand was, but a respect for what she thought he was. 

The hand tapped on him with a well-faked genuine affection but it spoke scum in the slightest whispering fingertips to Moses.  He wondered if the other two caught it.

“What brings y’all to our fair city?”  She smiled at Curio.  Curio turned from staring at Moses and smiling to face her questioner.  Moses saw Curio go blank as he taught her but also caught the whiff of condescension from the older woman toward her.  As per usual, Curio was simply too pretty to be with either man.  It was a curiousity.

“We all got some business to handle up cheer for ‘bout a week if you got some room for dat long?” Grizzly spoke for them.

“Not a problem at all.  Y’all will be needing three rooms…then?” 

Her eyes cut again to Curio, catching her tiniest of smiles before she straightened her face again.  It told the older lady what she wanted to know.  The spinster seethed inside at the age difference but never wavered from her role.  Curio caught it, though.  The woman-to-woman intuition was unavoidable.  She smiled that much wider, beaming not so subtly at Moses to let the old biddy know she was not one of Grizzly’s whores come to earn her keep. 

Grizzly paused for a split second.  “Yes, ma’am.  Three will do nicely.  These two snore.”

“Outstanding!  I’ll set them up.” She smiled her best hostess smile, but the veiled notion that the young woman could well be indulging both men during the stay was visibly abhorrent.

“Well, I’ll just go set it all up for y’all then!  And it’s great to meet you all. You need anything y’all just ring me directly…‘kay?”

“Thank you.  We will.” Curio said.  Renee turned to leave but stopped short.

“Oh I almost forgot to ask.  Will you all be having supper here?”

“Maybe.  What you got in mind?”  Moses asked.

“I’ve just gotten a load of quail in.  I’m thinking some braised quail with an orange-teriyaki glaze, some dirty rice to make Mr. Fontenot at home, grilled asparagus and squash drizzled in a garlic butter and herb sauce.  And some cheesecake topped with whatever you like.”

“Den we be cheer.  Sounds tasty.  Ole Tex don’t know much bout dem quails.  He just eats dey eggs in the jar when he gonna’ be in a car with me for an hour or hell.” The man laughed. 

“Now Moses,” Grizzly leaned in to his friend condescendingly, “dem quail she talkin’ about, now, dey like leeeetle ole tee-niney biddy chickens done been took from dey mama too quick.  Finding dem wishbones in dem quail like finding God in da reason for a flea.  He in der, but some kinda’ hard to figure out where and why.” 

“I’ve never heard it put quite that way.  But they are marinating now.  See you about six?”  The owner chuckled.

“Six is tis'.”

“Great!  Enjoy your stay.” She marched from the room and they were alone.

“I don’t think she likes you much, boss.”  Curio took a drink from the water glass. 

“She likes my wallet and she repays favors.  And dat’s all I require from the like-a her.  So you two…”

He was about to state the nature of the visit when the owner’s son came from the door his mother left through, carrying a large tray of prepared seafood.  Grizzly had ordered ahead. 

The tall, gaunt son placed the tray delicately in the middle of the white tablecloth, chatting and getting them set up.  All could see the man was ill from something very serious.  He was in his mid-thirties, but looked a skeletal fifty.  A Band-aid covered a place on his temple in a vain attempt to cover a K-S lesion. 

“Lamar, my man!  Meet Charlie and Mary.  Dey friends of mine.”  Lamar nodded and spoke only waiter talk, not venturing beyond cursory replies to Curio’s tidings and acceding to the table’s stated needs.  Curio could see the tan of his face was false.  It was a make-up job to enhance a look of virility but only made him look like an orangey cadaver as he smiled gravely.

She bet underneath his body was pale as the ghost he was certain to give up in good time.

When they had received their wine and beers and were well into devouring the seafood platter, Lamar nodded and walked with obvious discomfort from the room.  They were then the only patrons in the large banquet room.

“That make-up job is shiteous." Curio snickered.  "It sure doesn’t hide his impending doom very well.”  Curio shook her head sadly.  A native of New Orleans, the telltale look of AIDS’ was a familiar one.

“Yeah, he in a right bad way.”  Griz worked the platter effortlessly.  “But I don’t cry fo him.  He was a pervert.  He got hissef caught with a seventeen-year-old boy parked out der behind dat little water park up der by dat lake about ten or twelve years ago.”  Grizzly inhaled raw oysters doused with lemon juice and Tabasco. “I don’t take kindly to that.  You wanna’ diddle with a man, dat’s yo’ business and they got clubs and bars with other men set up fo’ meetin’ dem kind.”

“So why you come here?” Curio broke and sucked at crawfish and wiped the occasional red potato boiled in the spicy crawfish brine across a stick of butter.  Moses rolled a number of fried crab bites onto some French bread and made mini-Po-boys.

“Cuz’ she owes me bigtime for making sure he not dead in prison fo’ it.  I got the charges taken care of.  Of course, she paid fo’ it, but she didn’t have enough to keep dat mama and daddy quiet so I threw in some change.  So she owes me big and even doh she wouldn’t wipe her shit on me for sunscreen, she tolerates me.  I don’t get much up here deez days.”

“You covered for a kiddie raper?” Curio rubbed her temple. “Really?”

Sometimes the Fontenots’ justifications for undertaking some reprehensible feats in order to stay alive and in business were appalling even to her.

And she murdered for him.

“Well, when you put it dat way, lemme' qualify it.”  Fontenot wiped oyster juice from the more salt than pepper goatee he frequently wore.  “When you was seventeen, I reckon you had done a grown man’s peckah in and out and up and down yo’ mouth a coupla' times, right?  Honest Injun?”

Curio shrugged and smiled. “I considered it my own Weight Watcher program.  A girl doesn’t gain weight if she eats a proper meat.”

“Good point.  I’ma hafta’ talk to a few of dem girls of mine down at da Puss-n-Boots about dat.  Dey get lazy about dem love handles if I don’t stay on ‘em.”

“A girl has to have upkeep, right?”

“Yep.  Anyway, ole Lamar der, he was sittin’ upraht in a car seat one night.  And him and dat boy and all, dey was a having at it when dem cops rolled up on ‘em.  At first dey thought it was some high-schoolin’ noodlin’ goin’ on, but when dey sorted it out?  Uh oh!  We gots oursefs’ some homos!” Grizzly wiggled his finger.

“And dat’s a no-no back den.  Now, it’s all a scandal cuz' by law seventeen-year-old-soon-to-be transsexual sons of prominent socialites, dey not supposed to be tongue-ticklin' no older man’s peckah out at two in da morning behind no water parks.  But I reckoned dat boy ain’t got no gun to his head and ole Lamar swears weren’t no money involved.  I kinda’ liked dis old place and I do a lot of bidness up cheer.  So I stepped in, got da old man who used to run da paypah nyah to make dat arrest article tee-niiiiney in dat paper dat week.  And maybe he misspelled da names a little but.  And I got dem parents of his, who looking all distressed and mad at ole Lamar all but knowing dey boy likes dem peters in his mouth already anyway…I got dem all squared away.”

“You’re such a saint.”  Moses shook his head smiling.  He knew Grizzly was capable of far worst.

“How did you know all this was happening up here?”  Curio was puzzled.  It seemed insignificant to a man of his stature in New Orleans.

“He used to fuck her.”  Moses grinned and shook his head.  He knew the story from when it happened.

Curio’s eyes widened.  “No!”  She covered her mouth in amused shock. “Shit, that’s so wrong, man.  Damn.”

Grizzly merely shrugged with a deferring flip of the hand to Moses.

“Damn.  I know you get around and all, Boss.  But her?”  She wrinkled her nose.

“So what’s wrong in Jackson?”  Moses spoke through a mouthful of crab cake.  For him it was better to keep the point honed on what was required of him and Curio rather than dredging some miniscule snippet of history.

Such things often ate at her.  The freshness of the world, however warped it was to her from the moment she was born by her junkie mother, still filled her with wonder and burgeoning notions of how she felt about morality and the way things ought to be.

Moses tried to whittle away such flights of fancy.  Their lives…the life she had chosen after nearly a year of his futilely trying to deter her from joining him in the very brutal business to which he had long ago dismissed as normal operating procedure…were always in jeopardy from a hundred unseen factors.  He needed her grounded, dull to the attention-sapping wonderment of why?  He wanted her sharpened to a finely honed accomplish.  Never the why. 

Her inquisitive mind had only known the dark streets of New Orleans as a child.  Later as an orphaned teenager, living came at whatever lurid toll the city extracted daily from her body and soul to allow her to awaken for the next day of the same. 

A beautiful young woman now, he taught her his crafts.  Love had taken her away from the dank streets and into his sincere, safe and loving embrace.  Moses had shown her much of the South.  They vacationed in distant tropical locales in celebration of jobs well done.  Having sampled the world, she was more self-aware.  But she was now more opinionated, challenging the reasoning of him and their employers.  She was self-assured, even cavalier about being in the peculiar employment of the Atchafalaya Mudbugs.

With the casual swagger she had attained as she and Moses worked, she had grown more eager to see their jobs through in a manner she now found arousing.  For all her eye-rolling and griping when the random page came to them, Curio Phelonie loved to get on the clock. 

Moses loved her moxie, but he was constantly on guard against her over-zealous tendencies.  Even Grizzly and Pete Fontenot, no bastions of defending the ability of women to run with the boys, had come to acquiesce to her as a potent ally.

“What brings you two friends of mine up to dis fine city is a man by da name-a Stuart Whitman.”

“You about to get indicted?”  Moses snapped his head at Grizzly.  Fontenot smiled and shook his head.

“So you know who he is.  I’m impressed, Tex.”

“I watch the election results like most everyone does.  I noticed the name in an article about Fordice getting in here.”

“Dat new govanuh?  Him I might can get around.”  Lamar suddenly appeared with fresh wine and bread baskets and got the party reloaded before sauntering away again.

“Who’s this guy?  For those of us that could give two shits about elections?”  Curio downed a glass of red wine.

“The new Attorney General for dis state.  He’s a real go-getter.  He pretty, too.  He gots dat pretty smile, good hair, credentials, and he smart as a whip.  He cut his teeth locking down hoodrats down in Harrison County.  He done been a member of way too damned many task forces and governor committees and whatnot.  He is one pedigreed sumbitch.  A man like him can ride it out as far as he wants.”

“He got your hand clamped in a jar somewhere?”  Moses asked, chagrined.

The Fontenots had eluded convictions many times.  Sometimes the acquittals had been as a result of a witness disappearing and only Moses Holliday knew where he, or at times she, resided.

“Nah.  But deys an awful lotta’ loot comin’ ‘round nyah with all dis gamblin’ dey got a-goin'.  Dis here new hotshot, he got his eyes on all dem gamblin’ boats.  He layin’ back and he just a-waiting on some shady, scurrilous fella like mahsef to step his mobster ass all up into the middle of a RICO sting.  Half of deez business folks and politicians around nyah, dey either got wires on dey phones already or dey way eager to drop a dime on a fella’ likes mahself.  Dey get to pop somebody, den dey can get some atta-boys from da big man up here in Jackson.  And den dey gets demselves a little ole carte blanche when dey get something else to fall into dey wallets at a later opportunity.  Another side of all dat is he a Democrat.  Der’s a lot of men of means around nyah who ain’t too keen on a man like dat looking into how dey do business so dey didn’t send him a check for his kitty.  Him and others of his persuasion ain’t gonna forget dat.  If dey get a shot at humblin’ a fella who rides da elephant up here to Jackson, dey gonna’ take it.”

“Sounds risky, Griz.  Shit, man, an AG?  That’s major heat…”  Moses tracked ahead of his employer.  Curio saw him stiffen in a way she only saw when a job as related to him was fraught with less than the normal perils they faced on the clock.

“Oh, you ain’t poppin' him.”  Grizzly laughed.  “Hell no.  Shit man, Jowanski would be all over it around here.  He anudda’ dmaned wolf lurking around dis casino business.  Him I can deal with better den dis young Turk doh.  Folks ‘round cheer, dey don’t like dem Federal boys sniffin' ‘round Mississippi.  Dey still got all dat civil rights stuff all up in dey memory.  Dem ole boys runnin’ da show as grey-headed old men today cut dey teeth as young ‘uns in all dat Medger Evers stuff way back when.  Dey still some bad blood around nyah with dem Feds.  Dat’s why deez Southern places all goin’ elephant.  Dem jackasses poked a stick in dey shitpile and dey ain’t forgot it.  And wit’ dis ole boy Clinton bringin’ all dem old hippies who done got law degrees wit’ him up to D.C., dat ain’t likely to change dey opinion down in deez parts.  So if dey can get a play on a fella’ like dis AG man we talkin’ about, dey gonna’ use it.  But of course, ole Jowanski is up nyah, too.  And he probably lookin' fo’ some meat, I gots no doubts bout dat.  I gotta’ tread lightly in Jackson.” 

Fontenot pulled out a huge boiled prawn from the pile and wiggled it like a flaccid dick at Curio, who smirked, “But he ain’t getting’ mah lil' shrimp in his net.”  He winked at her. “No sir.”

“Dat’s because you got your shrimp hiding in that innkeeper’s blue-veined fat roll up right about up in here.”  Moses circled his belly button, guffawing.  Fontenot hooted. 

Curio rolled her eyes.  “Ewww!  Boss?  You into dat wet spot in the flour shit?” She took a swallow of wine to quell the mental image. “Hell, if you a chubby-chaser, is Pete safe around you when you get drunk?”

Grizzly laughed harder at her remark.

“Joking aside.”  Grizzly wiped tears from his eyes as he chuckled.  “Dis fella Whitman, he likes da ladies.”

“So does Curio.”  Moses said.  He could already see far ahead into Grizzly’s mind.  His eyes cut to her.  She puckered her lips at him and gave him a quick tongue flitter between two of her dainty fingers.

“Meow, bitch!” She giggled.

Grizzly looked at her lovingly and then shook his face at the sky as he looked upward exultantly. “Who knew you woulda’ evah hit dat kinda’ motha’ lode, Tex?  You one lucky old cowpoke, I swear.”

“I smile every day.” Moses winked at her.

“Lucky asshole, you.  Anyway, dis here fella, he gots dis one particular woman he takes a shine to.  But she jess a call girl, put as the press will put it.  But dat just a name fo’ a hookah dat ain’t never had to dance at a titty shack and still got all her teeth.  Pete’s been lookin' her up.  She may be stayin’ in the Walthall, but she ain’t start out der.”

Moses rested his jaw in the L-crook of his thumb and forefinger.  “Dead woman or live boy, huh?  You running out of originality, you know.”

Grizzly Fontenot only smiled and caught a crawfish tail in the air.

“Live boy?”  Curio curled her lip in disgust.  “Tell me she ain’t got a kid.”  Both men looked at her, the same condescension evident in the puzzlement on their brows.

Grizzly broke into a silent chuckle and cast a quick glance at Moses that completely read, “Dumbass” to her.  She seethed inside but only gestured with her hands for a further explanation.  Moses rolled his face on his hand-perch and looked at her with bored resignation.

“The esteemed Monsieur Fontenot intends to have a prominent political figure in a conservative state done in by a sex scandal methinks.  He called us, so that means some wet work of the most vibrant kind.”

“What the hell does sex with boys have to do with anything?”

“Man, dey don’t teach civics worth a damn in school deez days.”

“Dey don’t teach much about the bicameral system over in dem flophouses by the river, monsieur.  Dey teach you to keep a knife in your bra and to break your last beer bottle and have it next to you close when you go to sleep.”

“Well, dey say the school of hard knocks passes out da most interesting degrees.  Well, Miss Curio, to enlighten you, here’s some civics dey wouldn’t have taught you in school but I bet you understand pretty good anyway.”

“Professor Fontenot.”  Moses shrugged and stole the last crawfish tail from the platter before Grizzly could stab it.  His speed of hand was amazing.

“Dickhead.”  Grizzly instead rounded up a fistful of Cajun-boiled prawns.  “You don’t know about yo’ former govunah, ole’ Fast Eddie Edwards?  He a party boy but we all are down der where we are and such things like dat, dey not such dynamite in Baton Rouge like dey are up dis way.  Eddie once said dat de only way he couldn’t get re-elected in da state of Louisiana is if he got caught in a bed with a dead woman or a live boy.  And he probably right.” Grizzly shrugged and turned up his longneck.

Moses could see the light bulb pop in her head. 

“Dead hookers don’t go much good on da campaign literature does it?” She smiled.

“Not worth a goddamned.  Dis here AG.  He an up and comer.  Lookin' to bust some balls on some hood somewheres.  Trouble is, I ain’t into Mississippi dat much but I wanna’ be.  All deez casinos coming up dis way and no wop mobsters around fo’ miles?  Shit, a man gotta’ be a damn fool not to see the benefit of making some friends around nyah.  But dis pretty sumbitch.  Da problem with him is dat he good at what he does and he got the advantage of playing defense.”

“And we’re in his backyard.” Moses said.

“Yeah.  He ain’t dumb, he know dat people like me comin' ‘round.  He know dem scams, hell, he probably even knows which of dem fellas are gonna’ do da glad-handing and which ain’t.  Dat govunah up der, now…he’s a builder by trade.  And now he in a position to handle some big issues and make a lil' retirement change after he gets done with his eight years.  I bet dis AG sumbitch watching him like a hawk, since dey on opposite sides.  I get dis bastard on the front page of Clarion-Ledger with a few of Hinds County’s finest leading him into a courthouse instead of guarding him…” Grizzly winked at her. “Der’s some gratitude a-coming.”

“You smoked a joint and went to bed a few nights ago, didn’t ya?”  Moses chuckled and looked at Curio.

“So you basically pulling a prank like some high-schooler, den?” She said. “You basically doin’ some grown-up version of embarrassing some bookworm.?  To look cool in front of your friends?  Like coaxing him into a circle-jerk, kinda.’” 

She felt hot suddenly.  Flushed with spiced food and the quick realization of how the job may unfold, the tell-tale tingling under her panties began.

Grizzly marveled at her interpretation.  “The only difference between the men and dem boys is da size of dey toys, mon cheri.  A lil’ different, the prank I be a-pullin’.  Not exactly trippin’ some egghead with a stack of books in da hallway but I see what you mean.”

Curio dropped her chin a few inches, a look of dark intensity blackening her dark eyes in a manner that sent a chill up the Boss’s back.  The only other time he had ever seen that look, she was threatening to kill both he and his brother and she meant it.

He watched the rise of her upper lips as her tongue licked her teeth beneath.  A smile that hovered just on the sexy side of maniacal broke her lips apart.

“You reckon dis dipshit we talking about likes threesomes?”  She watched Grizzly as nonchalantly looked her up and down as he had many times before.  She knew he was seeing her undressed and maybe kissing feverishly while naked with one of his paid bevy.  Curio gazed at him with her sinister eyes as she sucked a shrimp just a moment too long before it disappeared.

“Who doesn’t?”  Immune to her finally, he shrugged. “Word is, he sure as fuck does.”

Moses only sighed. “Witnesses…” 

Curio only throbbed. “Yummy…”



Steam poured from the open door of the snug bathroom as the latent moisture wafted from her hot shower mixed with the goose-pimpling air of the room.  It coated the mirror at first, as a woman sat down at the chair and dangled her long chestnut hair in front of her face. 

Dragging the fine tines of a boar-bristle brush through her wet hair, she intently checked as much of her mane as possible for split-ends.  Satisfied she was good on a cut for a little while longer, she looked up at her face and upper body as the cold air dissipated the fog on the glass slowly, revealing the regal face of Angelle Pierite.

At the Edison Walthall Hotel, just a few blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, the bored woman looked at her wet body as she sat in a plush chair under the glare of fluorescent lights surrounding the large vanity mirror. 

A white towel draped around her shoulders, covering her breasts as she leaned in close to the glass to pluck and clip around her eyes.  It was routine more than necessity.  Every night before going to sleep, she fastidiously did an eyebrow-sculpt and face hair search if she was alone.  Not knowing where she may end up during her first years as a call girl left her with a nightly checklist: Appearance, money, appointment book.  She never went to bed without making certain all three were ready for the next day.

Before she met Stuart Whitman, at least. 

Her days were still uncertain, but wondering where she would stay and who was next in the appointment book was, for now, taken care of.

It was a nice thing, being taken care of. 

Room service, if she wished, was delivered with a bellhop telling her, “No charge, ma’am.  It’s taken care of.” 

A trip to the spa or the salon was paid for with an Amex whose bill was taken care of. 

There was a used Mazda Miata in the parking garage she owned the keys for that had been taken care of. 

She was a kept woman.  It agreed with her to be taken care of.

The relationship between her and her only john was a Godsend for her.  Angelle was thirty-six, still stunning and svelte, though keeping her body that way was becoming an endeavor rather than a birthright.  She had, however, ample time to spend on the task.  Stuart’s schedule as the newly-minted Attorney General was full most days.  Kept flush with money and swimming in spare time, she spent a great deal of her existence in the maintenance of that body and a lifestyle of being takem care of. 

Her life was a far cry from keeping up dates five or six times a week with any number of rich men, often with venal sexual demands that turned her stomach to recall.  Stuart had a few kinks, but his were tame compared to many and she was thankful for that.

That he was handsome, eminent, and wealthy made her job easier, but she was always cognizant that it was still a job.  One that she had to punch in for, dress for and perform the duties as stipulated.  And that was increasingly the hard part as she aged and looked back during the long hours alone awaiting his phone call.  Never one to waste money, he always made his phone call and he always showed up eager for his appointment.

It was not as nice for her to be in Jackson as it had been in Biloxi.  Her madam worked out of Jackson and while Angelle was put up three hours away on the coast, Twyla Golden got her portion of the registration fee, as Twyla called it, wired to her.  Angelle was left alone, especially after Stuart jealously decided to employ her full-time. 

Now he was in Jackson and she had to meet with Twyla ever so often and catch up on things.  Twyla also was the reason, Angelle thought, that Stuart began the ménage-a-tois.  She could never prove it and she dared not ask, but she knew in her heart that Twyla saw her as past her prime.  Her worth had declined and Twyla was a business woman who did not like a decline in sales.  Like a car salesman who wanted to sell the extended warranty or the server who tried to upsell a patron on call liquor instead of the rotgut, Angelle knew Twyla upsold Stuart by throwing a fresh new product into the market.  Two girls meant two sales.  She knew it could not be coincidence that his tastes had begun to filter toward bringing in younger talent as of late.  The girls were now eager and bright-eyed young nymphets.  They came in all shapes, sizes and colors when they showed up to join them in coital naughtiness in the California-king every so often. 

Like any woman who had a few years on her and an attachment, however malignant, to a man, that tint of fresh excitement she always saw in his eyes as the surrogates giddily or naughtily disrobed while often just sneering at her was humiliating.  From her perspective, it was a potential career killer. 

She was professional enough to do as he asked, and do it with panache.  It was not even all that distasteful; the women he brought in were unfailingly pretty in their own way.  Of course, there were some she clicked with and many she did not, but she and the ladies were professional.  They swallowed their mistrusts, Stuart’s seed, and their attitudes and made the ducats as expected.

It was when she and Stuart would lay in bed alone, that she felt the pangs of her decreasing usefulness and age most.  It was the idle questions he asked that signaled the sea-change she now increasingly dreaded.

Every time she cupped her breasts up to their age twenty-one height in the bathroom mirror, she would hear an innocuous, “What do you think about asking that cute little Piper girl to come over next Friday night?”

And she would remember Piper was all of nineteen-years-old.  Not an inch of tan flesh out of place.  Her big breasts with those ski-jump curves…he always laughed and pretended to ski-jump from those perfect pink nipples with his fingers exclaiming, “Wheeeee!”  Her ski-lift breasts, that did not slouch ever-closer toward her armpits every year on her back.  And would not for a long time. 

Piper, who was without an old c-section scar that vanity kept hidden with a pubic patch that was kept well-trimmed but was never completely missing or concealable. 

Piper who wore a sunshine tattoo on her lower back and a smiling-heart tattoo just above her perennially bald pubis and giggled with that giggly, vapid, blondie-laugh, untainted as of yet by two decades of Capri 100’s. 

Perfect, young, tight, little Piper.

Or Carla.  “Hey, I talked to Carla.  How about the three of us…?”

Or Gloria.  “I’m thinking about some brown sugar, baby.  Would you call Gloria…?”

“How about you and me going down to New Orleans tonight and picking up…?”

“I think you kinda’ liked her tongue going to town on you…I know she sure went to town on me.  I ain’t never had that kinda’ mouth do that…”

Ignorant or simply uncaring about her womanly hang-ups, he ordered the addition of women to his palette as one would add a side of fries to a humdrum burger.  He was upsold so easily.

Men.  Angelle often fumed as she penciled in the waxy allure around her green eyes.  Never grown up, never satisfied, never truly appreciative of a woman’s efforts. Only eager to possess and play with their toys.

Trophies, they placed on a shelf and admired, but only because they had to work to gain them.  But toys?  Toys were bought.  Toys could be left on the floor or kicked under the bed when company was coming by.

And when a toy was broken or another toy came along with some new gadgets or color painted on it, an old toy was at best delivered through Goodwill to some new boy who sneered at some new junk unworthy of its old owner and thus unworthy of him.

Or just tossed into the trash. 

She knew which she was.  If nothing else, she was a dynamite keg sitting in the passageway between his old bedroom’s outgrown relaxations and the political kitchen table’s future feasts of possible-plenty.  And she sweated nitroglycerine now. 

He was the Attorney General now.  There would be far more eyes on him than before.  With only tepid opposition from the GOP, he had sailed into office without a problem.  Climbing a higher rung on the ladder he wished to ascend would mean more people trying to drag him down, with the weight of personal foibles if necessary.

A secret lover hiding and participating in risqué sexual acts if the money was right was one such weight.  Of course he always said he liked the secrecy.  It made it all that more exciting and dangerous. 

As the guest stars in his mental porno shoots cycled in and out of her room every weekend and were rarely told who he was, she came to realize what he liked most was that she played by the rules.  She spoke to no one about their arrangement.  Kept to herself, few friends, no family.  Just a well-kept woman who left through the lobby with a smile for the front desk staff…who kept a great many of the capital’s secrets resembling hers.

But, still, Angelle realized she was now more risk than reward to him.  At thirty-six, she was replaceable with a younger model, a wife even, though he swore he would never marry lest he have to give up his preferred lifestyle, which he could control and enjoy controlling. 

Publically, he dated socialites at various functions.  She would see pictures of him smiling with some debutante in the society pages while she toweled herself off after brutal workouts at Gold’s Gym.  The gym came out of her pocket, of course.  He would sometimes come to her after those social mixers, reeking of single-malt scotch, cultured pussy and high-end perfume.  And she would indulge him.  Pretending to be horny as she waited for him and only him to rub elbows with his own kind.  The kind she could never mingle with, despite her beauty and poise.

Angelle finished fixing her face and scrubbed her hair with the towel.  Her unpainted face looked back at her when she was finished.  The fog had lifted from the mirror and the age was there.

Her hair was long and wet, hanging straight and drooping, needing attention that night in the cool November air.  She was in no mood to give it as much attention as it begged for most nights.

Why should I fix it?  Just to pick up some whore I don’t know and eat her out with him clapping and playing with himself, trying to orchestrate the scene when if he would just shut the fuck up, she and I could probably manage just fine?  But, hey, it’s all just work, ain’t it? 

Her call came at six on a Friday night. 

How about a threesome! 

She had rolled her eyes and shook her head, mouthing swear words as he droned on about how much fun it would be.  She copied the specifics on a notepad as he spoke.  She was to pick up the girl at the Amtrak station and bring her back to the room.  Per his instructions to Twyla, the girl was young, brunette and petite.  She would be dressed in a form-fitting leather suit.  Twyla Golden, the madam to the Jackson elite, assured him she was at his total disposal and she had “just the thing!” 

And when he said he could hardly wait to see them having their fun for him, she swallowed her bile and replied that she couldn’t either.

As the moment arrived for her departure, she pulled out her suit he requested- a white leather form-fitting body suit intended to match the new girl’s.  For effect, she also threw on a white leather fedora atop her pinned-up hair and cocked it to the side.  The hat had a festive peacock feather jammed in its band.

She was five eight flat-footed.  The new girl was supposedly short, so in the interest of trying to match her, she wore flats instead of heels. 

One last look in the mirror…

Angelle Pierite dabbed at her hair, drooping one long tress out from the fedora across her left eye and gelling it firmly in place.  She tidied up the mauve lipstick that fit her pale complexion best, powdered away a freckle that sneaked out from beneath her base, told her reflection that she was still one sexy bitch…and if one day Stuart Whitman tried anything too dumb against her she would burn his glass house to the fucking ground.

One more quick glance and she snatched up her purse and stomped from the room to go pick up a woman who was cutting in on the profit and perhaps sinking the business.



Curio Phelonie waved a sly toodle-loo and blew a kiss to Moses Holliday.

“Be careful!”

He pointed at her and rolled up the window of the rental car. 

Covered in the blackness of the night in the rear section of the Jackson Amtrak station’s parking lot, he drove away with a black-leather-clad young hooker named Debra Somethingorother.  The dead girl was a twit who eagerly walked with Curio to the hidden corner of the parking lot to do some blow before they met their john.  Curio merely said she was a last-second stand-in for the woman who was supposed to be picking up Debra and that was all the proof the poor girl needed.

Moses drove away to pick up Pete and stash the body.  Curio quickly walked back to the front of the station, dropping a few halved Q-tips containing Debra’s fresh blood into a film canister demurely into her handbag as she sauntered by passengers and those meeting the arrivals and hugging the departing.  Clutching her bag, she shuddered as she heard the easily distinguishable rustle of a Ziploc bag inside.

“Just to make sure the water is good and muddy, baby.” Moses had said as he dropped the baggie in her purse.

She was dressed in a tight black-leather body suit.  Noticed by everyone around her, it could not be helped as she was the only pretty lady dressed as such.  She noticed there were no pretty people in the station at all.  As Moses always warned her, she stood out and was noticed.  As she noticed people noticing her, she knew what exactly he had meant.

Her hair was cut short into a pixyish bob with tiny barettes adorning small sprigs of black tresses spread around her head.  Her brown eyes painted with a fierce, almost-Kabuki-like red stripe that somehow morphed her soft features into something more primal.  The shapely breasts jutted smartly from beneath the leather.  It took an hour of Moses’, and later both Grizzly and Pete’s, insistence that her ass looked exquisite in the tight leather before she was certain. 

Moses had laughed at her breasts. “Looks like you got two aliens coming out of your craw, baby.”  But he felt them up all the same and kissed her. “Firm, though.”

“I’m not channeling that Ridley Scott movie,” she chuckled. “I’m trying to look like that Daryl Hannah chick in Blade Runner.”

“You ain’t never gonna’ be that blond.”  He smiled at her.  “Now remember, baby.  You gotta’ be a man, tonight.  It’s a stretch, I know, but you gotta’.”

“Call me Clint, then.” She cupped her crotch like a jock. “Hang ‘em high, bitches!”

The urge to ask for a cigarette was over-whelming.  Curio was a recovering thus-occasional, menthol smoker.  Despite her eager dedication to the task at hand, she was a bundle of nerves.  The urge to bum one from a stranger and risk a conversation nearly overtook her.  She nearly worked up the courage to approach a group of smokers milling around the door to the station when a red Miata, the same make and model as her own Mazda back home, pulled up with a raffish screech.

The drop-top flipped back. A stunning older lady in a white but otherwise identical leather getup to hers nodded in her direction. 

At first all Curio could see was a lady’s head covered with a ridiculously angled white hat with a garish peacock feather jutting from it.  An inch-wide blade of hair aimed like a knife blade across her eye from below the fedora.

“”What in the fuck is on her head?” She shook her head as she walked up the car.

The bodysuit was probably hot on the older lady when she stood up, but crumpled into folds as it was as she sat scrunched behind the wheel, Curio’s first notion was that she looked like a shiny maggot wearing makeup and a stupid hat. 

At least she’s thin, Curio grinned inside.  Otherwise, that suit would make her look like the Michelin Man. 

And again, bitch, what the fuck is up with dat hat?

As she approached the car, Curio’s first instinct was to laugh without mercy at the hat but caught herself.  She walked to the passenger door and got in.

“You Debra?”  The woman asked.

Who else would be waiting for a working girl dressed like a leather grub worm? 

“Yeah, I’m Debra.  Who are you?”  The funky sounds of Prince singing “Let’s Go Crazy” blared from the speakers.

The woman’s face bore sheer old-bitchdom across her brow.  In an instant Curio felt peculiarly fifteen again.  She could almost smell the perfume of those upper-crust old biddies from Uptown or the Garden District that would cut their eyes at her as she sat smoking on some stoop in the Vieux Carre and then whisper to each other about the poor ragamuffin.  Two words from the woman’s mouth and the look of loathing were all it took to blow an ember Curio rarely felt glowing within her to a red-hot coal of indignation.

“My name’s Angelle.”

Ahnn-jell...?  You mean Angie, doncha baby?

Curio scowled inside at the pretentious emphasis on the syllables.  Something about the way the woman looked at her immediately raised red flags.  It was indignation that immediately melded with condescension as the woman looked Curio up and down.  Curio knew that whatever the deal was between Stuart Whitman and this woman was at the outset, she was not a part of what the older woman signed up for now.

And you don’t know the half of it yet, you stuck-up…old…cunt!

Curio slung her over-sized purse into the back seat and parked herself inside.  Angelle looked her over, her impatience evident.  She smacked some spearmint slowly as Curio got set and closed the door.

In the span of thirty seconds and one gaze from the other woman, any lingering second thoughts, any smidgen of regret about having to do the job on some poor hookers because it was the job to be done, or some passing empathy for some poor old call girl that was to meet her end that night went away, carried off into the brisk November air as the drop-top enclosed them inside the Miata.

Curio was amazed at the immediacy of her hatred for a total stranger, a woman no less.  By the time the tiny Mazda rode up Jefferson to I-55 and turned north, all Curio Phelonie wanted to do was fuck that old cunt in the funny hat and really, really kill her.

“So, Debra.  Let’s get down to brass tacks.  The guy you were sent up here for…” Angelle began her spiel.

Curio threw up her hand.

“Is some political big-shot up in this shit-kicker state.  I know that already.  I got my own brass tacks, honey.  You and me gonna’ get along here?  I’m sensing some straight-up bitchy-bitch right off the fuckin’ bat here.  That’s hardly the way to be before we start fucking each other for a few dollars.”  Curio snapped, turning to face the woman.

Angelle’s mouth was open with a retort frozen behind her teeth.

Curio’s eyes narrowed, derision dripping, “I mean, look.  We’re both just working girls here, right?  This dick is just some bigwig up here.  And yeah, yeah…he’s got your twat on retainer and all that shit.”  She clapped her hands mockingly.  “Good for you, girl.  Of course, you may be put up in this fancy hotel and all, but clearly the cooter’s kinda’ dusty or Mister Business Suit wouldn’t be subcontracting his nut-bustin' to all the outside talent, right?”

Angelle looked at her in angered shock, “Hold up, girl!  Ain’t no dust now, nor has there ever been on my moneymaker!”

I can’t believe you said that you little bitch…

She sniffled and turned her eyes to the road.  “The man is just kinky and likes two girls at a toss is all.  We’re getting paid good dollars to do this and you and me need to work some bullshit out right now, it looks like.  First off, you go by Debra or that a fake?”

“Debra is what’s on the license, Angie.”

“Angelle.  Two L’s.”

“Whatever.”  Cunt.

“Listen, this guy, Stuart?  He’s a power player in these parts.  He likes to be lusted over and all.  He likes two girls to play with him more than each other but anything’s game.”

“Don’t they all?  What kinda’ shit does he like?”

“We’ll have to suck him together.  He likes two on top of him, too.  We’ll have to eat each other out of course.  You clean, I hope?” 

Oh hell no she did not…! 

Curio tried to unclench her fists as fast as they balled up but could not.

“Fuck yeah I’m clean!  I just hope you are!”  Curio looked Angelle up and down, bobbing her head for effect.

“I am.”

“You are?  Shit.  He’s the one who better be.  Motherfucker keeps tossing some strange into the mix from out of state all the damned time you gonna’ end up fucked-up  pissing fire one day.  Of course, his sorry ass’ll be fucking blaming you.  Don’t you ever think you the only one he’s fuckin’.  If he’s bringing in guest stars you know about, who’s to say he’s not shooting a load all up in some crack whore every other day of the week?”

“I know him, Debra.  We’ve been together a long time now.  Crack whore’s ain’t his style.”

“You know him?  Girl, you know the him who fucks you.” Curio sneered. “But you just the official hired pussy.  He might have one for every weekend.”

“He doesn’t.  I do just fine with him.”

“Please.  You just a working girl, same as most women who hitch themselves to some asshole and call it love.  We women can’t never know them.  Us whores know them best because we know them at their dumbest and their worst.  But we ain’t never fooled by them like all them dumb housewives who get took fast by their bullshit.  I know him and I ain’t even met him.  Surely you ain’t that naïve.”

“Not all men are like that.  I know things about him.  He depends on me for a lot of things he could not get if he was married to some smiling sorority sister.  That’s why me and him do so good together.  I know the score.  He’s got money and he deserves to be spoiled by a woman who knows how to and doesn’t mind doing what he wishes for me to do.”

“Whatever.  You can always depend on the wishes of a rich motherfucker to be a rich motherfucker who does as he wishes.  Never mind the whore.  She just a toy.  It pisses me off.”  Curio stifled a grin as she acted the part and noticed the woman’s scowl ebbed.

“They must seem so strange to a younger woman like you.  You can’t let this biz get you too jaded, Debra.  There’s probably a guy like mine for you out there somewhere.”

“Fuck that, I’m gay.  I don’t need no man wantin’ to use me like he wants.  What the fuck does that mean?  Spoiled by a woman?  You mean spread your legs and tell him it’s yours, not mine?  Have some pride, man.  Damn.” Curio saw her gape slightly. 

“Hey, I’m just lettin' you know where I stand, Ain-jell.  Men are some lowdown sorry motherfuckers who think they own everything they see and can piss on.  They ain’t nothin’ but fuckin’ dogs…every sorry ass one of them.  They can’t own my heart though, cuz’ it don’t fit in their wallets and I ain’t never lettin' one on them piss on it.”

Curio smiled to herself as she thought about how much lying she was doing.  She was totally given to Moses’ whims.  But ever the doting lover and partner, he never so much as hinted at doing anything she did not usually beg him to let her do for him first.

The car exited from the interstate.  Curio cut the radio down a notch.

“So we gonna’ be cool?  I don’t mean to come off like a crazy psycho bitch, but there’s just somethin’ I see in you.  You jealous of me, ain’t you?  I think you living in some hooker La-La land.  You think he cares about you and all, but then one day all of a sudden he done seen a stretch mark on your titties and started calling in the younger chicks.  I get it.  You been put up in some swanky joint.  He got you this cute little car and all.  I bet maybe he even put a mink coat on you and took you to a few of his parties with all them Shriner wannabes.  But I bet you half the cash I get for fucking you that he kept you close so he could do all the talking, didn’t he?”

Angelle did not speak.

“See you, but don’t hear the dumb hot chick, right?  We’re just hired pussy, girlfriend.  Don’t think because he signs a check a while he’s gonna’ keep doing that forever.  Surely you worked the phone-me and fuck-me circuit long enough before you hit your little dick-sucking jackpot to know they ain’t never leaving their wives…or gonna’ set you up in Miami or whatever pipe dream all those Pretty Woman-watchin’ idiots think happens if they find Richard Gere.  They come on us if we’re lucky and shit on us if we ain’t.  If you think I’m gonna’ smile and tolerate that bullshit as a way of daily life just to be at some rich dickhead’s behest, you are way fuckin’ mistaken.”

“I don’t assume anything about my relationship with Stuart.  He doesn’t own me.  He rents me.  I accept it.”

“Good for you.  Hope that works out for you.”

Angelle had to admit she grudgingly liked the matter-of-fact spunk in the dark and lovely character staring her down. 

She would have to ask Twyla what the girl’s damage was later, though.  There was a distinct menace in the glare of those dark eyes, the red eye paint layered on her adding to the fury.  The older woman felt a growing sense of apprehension.  The eyes were cold, impassive. 

Angelle had seen many girls who had been abused by the system, by their men.  Women with souls shredded by their miserable lot in life, but none with the fury in their eyes such as the woman seated next to her.

Debra’s eyes aimed to kill her.  She would do so and not bat one hair of her thick eyelashes.  Angelle could sense it.  Her very appearance, the red band across the dark eyes, the form-fitting leather suit that seemed to be a second skin.  The tiny braids that seemed to be a tribal adornment that declared war upon her.  The young woman was feral.  Beautiful, but untamed. 

Who in the hell did Twyla send up here? 

She felt a shiver crawl up her spine as they crossed State Street and soon made the turn into the Edison Walthall’s parking deck.

Angelle put the car in park and turned to face Debra.

Curio would have given anything for Angelle to slap her.  All she could see was a pathetic old woman who leased to a rich playboy what she could give for free.  Albeit she would give it to a man who would perhaps only love her far too dearly and maybe would only give her some mundane existence, a quaint life and cozy home somewhere.  Maybe raise some fine kids. 

But, the woman believed she was somehow above it.  All of the high-end tail was that way, as far as Curio had ever seen.  Vapid, insecure, all-too-eager to have some man handle her affairs for her at the low-low price of some sex and dignity. 

Curio realized she had Moses, but she was more than capable to handle his business and since she had a few years of work and tutelage behind her, Moses let her be. 

For years as a teen on the New Orleans streets, Curio had to live by her wits and occasionally by her sex.  But doling out her sex was never as a first option or a option into which she did not try to work her own pleasures if at all possible.  If it had to happen, it did.  If a night had to end in the arms of some woman or man, she would damn sure try to make sure they were at least hot and hope they had a clue about how a clit worked. 

Just spreading the legs for any man with two gold pieces to dangle in her face, though? 

Curio ground her teeth as she thought of the lack of self-respect a woman had to have to accept being coddled through finance rather than any real emotional commitment. 

Fuck no!  Lazy old cunt!

Curio fondled the leather sap Moses placed in her purse as she awaited any provocation that pushed past the razor-thin line she mentally laid between them. 

The plan was designed for Angelle to be found in the room dead but there was something about the woman that boiled her blood.  She wanted the provocation.  Something, anything, to bring the bitch’s neck into her furious hands and end the night.  She only wanted some tiny instigation so she may tell Grizzly and Moses when she was questioned about the whole thing going to hell in a hand basket in the front seat of a Miata. 

After all, Stuart Whitman’s paws were all over the woman, were they not?  There had to be a trail for the cops to follow that led to him.

She turns up dead in her car, people start asking about her.  He couldn’t cover himself that well.  It would still dirty up that shiny teeth fake bastard enough to make him political dead meat…and I won’t have to pretend to like having this bitch fuck up eating my pussy while that rich jackass huffs paint, burns his nuts with wax, and shits himself while he watches.  Or whatever the fuck he does.  Christ almighty, the shit I do to get paid.  Hell, maybe I shouldn’t judge what she does when I compare jobs.

         “Stuart and I have an understanding.  We’ve had that understanding for a long while now.  One day, if you stay turning tricks, I hope you find one that indulges you like he has done for me.  You may think you got us all figured out.  You probably don’t.  And I personall don’t think you could.”

         “Look, I don’t know and don’t care.  I’m here to get paid and I’m good at what I do to earn a living.  It may not be honest work and I might not have a hotel and a goddamned direct deposit account between your legs that he spurts…” Curio mimicked jacking off.  “…his trust-fund money into.  Or maybe his come looks like a creamy fuckin’ ATM dropping the rent on your belly?  Shit, I bet it does, don’t it.  I do what I gotta’ do, same as you.  But, I also don’t have to live with the fear of some sugar daddy getting tired of me and tossin' me out into the gutter so he can fuck some chick like me for half the price.  No man gotta’ holda' Debra.”

         Angelle nodded in agreement, acquiescing for the sake of harmony.  Truth be told, she could give a damn about what the girl’s opinion was.  She was sure as hell going to cuss out Twyla as soon as they were done.

Debra’s words did hit home though.  She hated that. 

At the age of thirty-six, how could she be so transparent that some young girl barely old enough to drink could see through her and cut to the core of her existence with a surgeon-like wielding of her tongue in less than five minutes?

“Fair enough.  Listen, we got work to do.  He’s a nice guy.  Not too kinky and at least he ain’t rude.  But he likes to be in charge...”

“Oh honey please!”  Curio held up her hand.  “If there’s one thing I learned early about guys in positions of power, when they got some tight lips and a firm pussy on ‘em, they don’t want to be in charge.  They like me in charge.  Let’s go get paid.”

Curio opened the door and got out.  Angelle followed. 

“You been spreadin’ yo legs on cue too long.” Curio pointed at her from across the car.  “That’s why he’s gettin’ tired of your ass.  You say, ‘oh yes baby, whatever you want,’ too fuckin much.  You fucking said it so goddamned much he takes it for granted.  But you watch this shit, Ain-jell, we gonna’ teach his ass a fuckin’ lesson tonight!” 

She stomped off toward the door leading inside.  Angelle stood and watched her leave her behind, Debra’s tight ass swishing in black leather as her stride took her forward.

“Ohhh shit,” was all she could mutter as she locked the Miata’s door and followed Debra inside.  There was just a sliver of wonder in her stroll toward the door.



Stuart Whitman stepped from his pristine ’77 Jaguar and brushed his hands across his suit out of habit ten minutes later.  Hoisting two bundles of flowers under his arms while fumbling with a bottle of Dom Perignon, he idly whistled Steamboat Willie aloud and checked his hair in the side mirror.  Taking two steps toward the door that led from the parking deck to the entrance of the lobby, he was startled to see a behemoth of a man in a dark suit, wearing a scowl on his brow and whispering into a cufflink.  Curious, Stuart approached and readied his access key.

“Sir.  If you would, could you please go around to da front entrance?  I apologize for asking, but we have someone who needs dis entrance secure until dey make der departure.”  The bouncer-type had a strange accent.  Whitman thought it was maybe Jersey or NYC.

“Mister, I’m the Attorney General for the state of Mississippi.  If you need a proper security detail, I can arrange it.  Who are you contracted for tonight?  Anyone I need to know about?”

“I’m about all da proper security detail necessary here, sir.  Please don’t make a scene.  Just this once, can you please go through the entrance located in da front of da building?  I would appreciate yo’ cooperation, sir.  Jess dis once.  Thank you.”

“I don’t see the need for…”  Whitman let his annoyance slip into his tone.  His annoyance immediately deferred as the security man blasted at him.

“Hey Fuckhead!  I don’t give a flying fuck who da fuck you say you are!  Take yo scrawny loverboy ass around da front or I’ll bust yo fuckin face open down to da fuckin’ white bone!  Now fuckin’ vamoose, prick!” 

The behemoth produced an unseen asp-club with the flick of the wrist and began walking toward him.  He mumbled quickly into his cufflink. “We’re a hold.  We’re a hold.  Standby.”  He began to strike the asp in the palm of his hand.  “I swear some assholes don’t speak English in dis here state.”

         The Attorney General retreated in a hurry.  “It’s cool.  It’s cool.”  He walked toward the secondary exit and made a note to find out who was staying there that rated such a security detail.

         Gotta’ be out of stater.  Maybe a celebrity? 

He shrugged as he exhaled his nervous heartbeat down to normal and entered the lobby.  A cherubic front desk attendant nodded to him as he passed through on his way to the elevator. 

         “Good evening, Mister Whitman!”  Stuart swallowed hard and forced a smile and a wave to her.          “How are you tonight?”  She gushed.  Obviously she was hired to be a pretty and exuberant first impression for new arrivals.

         “I’m fine.  Thank you!” He pushed the ‘up’ button and the door opened mercifully immediately.  He nodded at her again and smiled as he hurried into the car.

         “Shit!”  He made a note to put the thumbscrews to whoever made him divert through the lobby like that.  His presence was not unknown in the hotel.  He even speculated that most, at least those in the know, knew he was there to see Angelle.  The scandalous nature of his visits, however, he hoped were not yet the subject of gossip.

         The car opened on the fourth floor.  In moments, he was sliding the room key in the slot.

         “Hello, Stu!”  A sprightly little woman in black leather snatched his tie gruffly and dragged him inside, kicking the door shut with a slam.  One of the bouquets fell to the floor as he struggled with keeping his balance.  She slung him out in front of her and he made a show of flopping on the bed, rolling over, and staring her down coquettishly. 

         “Hello, yourself!  Ain’t you the feisty one!  You Debra, I’m guessing?” Stuart gave her his best campaign poster smile.

         “Oh yeah, I’m Debra.” She nodded her head to her right. “And that’s Angelle.”  He looked as Angelle walked from the bathroom and slapped a cat-o-nine tails in her hand, smirking in a ruling manner the likes of which he had never seen.

         “Hi, Stu.”  She sidled up next to Debra.  “Glad you could join us.”

         In that instant, watching the pixyish Debra unveil a set of real handcuffs and Angelle slapping her palm with the flails, Stuart Whitman realized he was in some trouble.

         When they descended upon him with the full sexual fury of two women scorned, it was then that he realized it was the fucking best kind of trouble.



         Moses picked up Pete Fontenot as soon as he saw Stuart Whitman enter the lobby.  The short hurry from the parking garage winded the big man.

         “Christ almighty, Pete.  How in the hell you not have a heart attack a-screwin’ all them women when you cain’t shuffle your ass forty feet down some stairs without busting a blood vessel?”  Moses chuckled and flipped him a Kleenex. “Jesus man, you look like you just outran a Kenyan in a marathon.” 

         Pete wiped his brow, loosened the tie around his neck and unbuttoned the collar on his shirt as he wheezed.

         “I let dem get on top when I screw ‘em, Tex.”

“Thanks for the mental picture, big boy.”

“You more than welcome.  Ya’ girl in der, she got dis thing done up?  She ain’t used to workin’ without you.”

         “She’ll do fine.”  He gave the Cutlass some gas and scooted down Capital Street, making the block to an adjacent hotel where they had a room with a view of Pierite’s window.

“She up to knocking dat hookah woman down like a man would?  You and me, we both know dat ain’t too damn easy to pull off if dat other girl puts up a fight.”

“She’s got it in her, Pete.  Quit ya’ worrying.  Curio knows what to do and knows how it has to look.”

“I’m just worried about getting’ her out unseen by some bellhop dropping off some asshole’s club sandwich when she is done up in der.  Dis shit is chancy, Tex.”

         “She’s gonna pull the fire alarm on the way out.”

         “You didn’t say nothin' bout no fire.”

         “Change of plans.  I hoping the crack hotel staff is as prompt and well trained as I think they are.”

         “What about dat other dead girl?”

         “We tossin' her out over here at the Silas Brown Bridge.  She’ll be found right quick, I reckon.  The water’s down.”

         “I’m way over-dressed for dumpin' dead hookahs, Tex.  Damn.”

         “You’re over-dressed for prison, too, you coonass hog.  Let’s get this done.”



         Five hours, two Stuart Whitman orgasms, three Debra orgasms, and even a single legitimate orgasm for Angelle to match the two she faked later, Stuart Whitman finished smoothing his hair in the vanity mirror and straightening his tie.  With a satiated sigh, he looked at Debra as she looked at him and stroked Angelle’s auburn hair, letting tufts of it slip through her fingers as the older woman curled up in a fetal position on the mattress to get warm in the cold room.

         “I must admit, I didn’t expect that.”  Stuart peeled out a wad of bills from a money clip hidden in his jacket packet and laid out the fee.  When he had the right amount, he made sure to make a show of laying down a few hundred more as a tip.

“Anytime you wanna’ show Angelle her wild side, you tell Twyla to send you back over here.  You two make a good team.” 

He exhaled and concluded their session with a soft kiss for each of them as they writhed around naked together for show.

         Curio made a show of fingering herself with one hand, biting her lip at him, playing submissive now after taking complete control of him.  He was aware of scratches on his covered parts; she was careful not to scratch his face but did slap him repeatedly.  There were deep ruts cut by her nails in his forearms and chest.

         She watched him blow them both kisses and then leave, looking cautiously for passersby in the hall before slipping out. 

The clock was now running. 

Idly, she began smearing his semen trickling from inside her on a washcloth and passed it to Angelle.

         “Your boy shoots a hell of a load when you tickle his fancy ass just right.  Here, girl.”

         Angelle nodded and sat up, wadding the rag between her legs as his seed ran out.

         “He’s gonna’ fucking expect that every time now, I guess.”  Angelle spoke aloud toward the door.  Her head bowed.

         “We gave him something he likes.  Why the hell wouldn’t he ask for it again?  He’s fuckin payin’.  I say he found his product quality to be above average.  It’s money well-spent!”

         “Look, it was fun tonight and all?” Angelle turned and threw up a hand.  Her eyes were angry. “But it ain’t my thing and you ain’t welcome here no longer than it takes you to get your shit and go.  You got your money and I’d appreciate it if you would get your shit and get the hell out.”

“Really?”  Curio smiled with all the giggly silliness of a thirteen-year-old geek being told by the stud QB she was cute. “You don’t say!” She twirled a curl in her hair. 

Curio smiled.  Spiteful bile and the hot blood of the hunt suddenly mixed in her veins.  For hours, she had played the pair off each other like Rock-em, Sock-em robots.  Neither had laid a hand on her with near the malice with which she had lavished upon their flesh in the name of procured bliss.

Eager and wet for the ever-so-releasing kill, she reigned with the whip, the tongue, and the derision for him that came so naturally.  He was the literal law of the land for the state of Mississippi.  Maybe in the future, a President, a Federal judge, who knew where the dynamite in the head of his soaring rocket would explode.  Yet she had him in the palm of her hand, literally.  His proclivities were his downfall and it was the young former runaway from New Orleans that held him by the cock and would lead him in that direction.  The command she wielded over both him and his scowling old cunt was as intoxicating as any drug she had ever known.

The man could literally put a needle in her arm…and Moses’ arm as well.  That fact brought out the stinging of his ass with the whip that much more distinctly.  It made her almost crazy with lust.  Her sex was boiling over long before ever allowing him to actually touch her.  He had complimented her on the ferocity of her wetness and the raw heat of her lips.

Angelle had started getting into the scene after realizing Stuart wanted her to comply with the domination of him instinctively.  Curio was a sultry, surly Gephetto with blowjob lips and outright contempt for them both.  She went into the bathroom to wipe herself clean of his seed and heard Angelle remark to him that she had a chip on her shoulder.  He replied that he didn’t give a fuck.  She was awesome.

He bought into Curio’s snide carnality hook, line and pecker.  Angelle’s own contempt for the situation stirred within her the need to make him pay for his humiliation of her.

Was it enough that she played the part of the silent love doll for all those years?  For him, never.  She caught the look of genuine lust he gave to Debra as she worked her charms over his manhood.  When they took turns lavishing their mouths upon him, he frequently pulled his prick from her lips and offered it more willingly to Debra.  She plied him with her scorn, but generously devoted her body to him when the time for his physical wants was paramount. 

Angelle was just an extra mouth, a pair of breasts and a spare vagina in the room. 

When she and Debra actually copulated, it was only because he wished to see his new lady play with the old one.  There was no affection, only a fetish for watching women dabble.  Clearly, he wanted to see one best the other and be the recipient of the victor’s commodities.

That especially bothered the older woman.  When he was literally licking Angelle’s feet graciously on his knees at Curio’s command, Angelle had looked at Curio with the same cold sneer that Curio had hated when they met.  The lady thought Curio might not have seen it as she closed her eyes in bliss while flailing the whip across his back while he sucked at Angelle’s toes greedily. 

Curio did see it.  She missed nothing.   

Angelle looked over her shoulder as Curio rolled over toward the nightstand.

           “I’m glad you found it fun to beat the hell out of my meal ticket but you’ll never get to see him again if I got anything to say about it.  I’m the one who’ll have to put on that kinda’ show every week with some other weird bitch du jour from now on.  But I’ll be damned if I do that with you again.  Stu and Twyla can both go to hell.”

You are sooo right about that, bitch!

“We kinda’ turned his rich ass out though, huh?” 

Curio stretched, wiping a semen smear with the back of her finger down the headboard.  The bed was not bolted and painted to the wall like at some normal no-tell.  It was an actual bed and frame.  She made sure her slick fingers made smears on the back of the varnished wood.

“We didn’t do shit but make him get off.  You think you did something?  You’re just a flavor.  You’re nothing but green peppermint or fuckin’ orange sherbert when he gets chocolate mousse royale everyday.  He liked fucking you.  So what?  Someone else will be here next time.  He’ll like fucking them, too.”

“You sure?  I thought he kinda’ liked what I brung to the table.” Curio discretely slipped a pair of leather gloves on her tiny hands as Angelle went into the john and peed.

Close the door, bitch!  Yuck.

“He likes to come.  So what.” Angelle said from the throne. “He can do that with anyone.  He’s a guy.  News flash.  Guys like to come.”

“I think he kinda’ appreciated the extra touch, Ain-jel.”

         Curio’s hand clasped around the narrow base of a thin, metal lamp, also not bolted to the wall.  The Edison expected no one dropping three bills a night would be hocking the amenities.

Angelle walked out and sat at her vanity, her face turned toward the door.  She sighed softly.  “He don’t know what he likes.  He’s a fuckin’ man.  He likes it all.”  Her face turned slightly toward Curio with her back still turned.  “You need to get going.  I can call Twyla and she can come get you.  Or get a cab, you’ve been well-paid.”

Better than he ever paid any of those other bitches he’s ordered over here…

“I do need to leave.  No doubt about that, Ain-jel.”

Lightning-quick, the lamp swung and connected against the right side of Angelle’s head.  The blow was solid.  Curio heard the bone crunch.  Angelle was driven to the left, her left temple smacking the headboard abruptly. 

Curio was up in an instant, trying to coil up the flailing electrical cord in one hand as she brought the lamp down on the woman’s head a few more times.  One blow sent the tan shade flying across the room in a hail of broken light bulb glass.

The woman was incapacitated after the second blow.  She never even screamed.  Curio flipped the lamp onto the bed and straddled her.  Angelle’s head was bleeding from two cuts above the brow.  Curio set about strangling her to death with her bare hands.

“Remember, it’s a crime of passion, baby.”  Moses instructed her as they drove to kill the real Debra.  “She can’t be stabbed or shot.  Attorney Generals don’t do that kinda’ thing.  It’s a-gotta’ look like she got uppity or somethin’.  Tried to blackmail him or whatever.  He gets pissed, ain’t thinkin right.  So he hits her hard.  He sees what he done, know she’s really pissed or really hurt.  Or both.  He cain’t have no pissed-off pussy a-running around the Walthall screaming police, right?  So then he gotta’ finish it, clean up best he can.  Can’t look too pro or too quick.  Most people don’t know how to strangle or hit a motherfucker upside the head in the right place to kill ‘em.  They fuck it up.  You gotta’ fuck up enough to make it look hasty, but not like a woman done it.  Remember, the idea is that a pissed-off and later scared-to-death man done it.  It’s important.  You gotta’ be hard and you gotta’ be perfect.  If you miss and she starts a-screamin’?  Then you go to prison for ten years.  The bad thing about it is it is his woman.  He swings a stick and he’ll swing it far and wide to make sure everyone involved goes down withhim.”

She squeezed her tiny hands around the unconscious woman’s neck.

“Most people, they use a pillow to smother someone.  Takes too long.” Moses, speaking to her from a year before sprang into in her mind.  Whittling, she remembered as she squeezed and grunted, a long spear tip from a piece of Osage- orange he managed to get his hands on somehow. 

“You either gotta’ tie off the neck with a tourniquet.  A ligature, I think the proper name is.  Or you crack that hyoid bone in the neck and both it and the swelling of the glottis around it fills up the top of the windpipe and stifles the airflow.”

Curio was painting her nails as he spoke and whittled, but listening to every word.

She ground down with all of her weight and strength, watching the woman’s lips turned blue beneath the smear of blood after a while.

“You gotta’ be sure.”  Moses warned her as they approached the train station.  “Take your time when she’s down to make she don’t get back up.  Oxygen deprivation is a funny thing.  Unfortunately, miracles happen with it sometimes.  You think, shit.  I done been choking out this bitch for five minutes.  She’s dead as Hitler.  Blue mouth, red eyeballs.  Limp as the Pope’s dick.  But you fuck up and don’t be completely sure…and then the paramedics find her?  The next thing you know, she is all droolie and twitchy, sitting in a motorized wheelchair in a witness booth just a-pointing that twitchy-ass finger at you and boy doggie!  She got one helluva story to tell about you and how you tried to kill her.  She’ll be sure to throw what a miracle it is that she is still alive and how she found God and all that good shit.  She might even toss it in that you and him concocted it together if he don’t pay her off good enough to shut her up about him.”

“I got it.  Pushing up daisies in hell, sir.  Right away, sir.  To the task, sir!”  She saluted and smirked sexily at him. 

“Don’t fuck up then.  That’s an order, sexy.” 

“No problem, baby.” They kissed when they pulled up at the train station.

Curio was amazed at how tired she got exerting the focused pressure of her hands.  Never before had she wished she weighed twenty pounds more, but she would gladly have traded some cottage cheese in her arms to have that much more power in her press.  Angelle’s face turned blue, almost purple.  The shoulders convulsed slightly, as if Angelle was trying to shake out of a sleep. 

Curio cursed under her breath and kept up the pressure unimpeded.  Adrenaline kicked in and she realized her thumbs were several inches deep in the throat.  She felt cartilage crumbling beneath them.

After a while, she was bored from it but pressed on.  The twitching stopped and she watched for any further sign and received none.  With one hand still wrapped firmly, she felt for a pulse and got nothing in the neck.  She released and stood up, panting as she wiped sweat she had not realized was pooling on her brow. 

Suddenly conscious of time, she rushed to the window and threw open the curtains.  Not knowing which room of the adjacent hotel Moses and Pete were in exactly, she nevertheless knew they were watching intently.  Waving and smiling, she cupped her breasts in her hands and rocked from side-to-side.  A flashlight flashed for a moment from a third floor window.

Checking for signs of life one more time and finding none, she pulled the semen-tainted washcloth from where it had fallen from between Angelle’s closed legs and threw it in the bathroom to be found later.  Pulling one of the Q-tips with the real Debra’s blood, she rubbed the swab across the edge of the bathroom sink, just enough to get a smear.  Wincing, she pulled a Zip-loc baggie from her purse.

“Day-um…Ewww!”

She fanned herself in repulsion as she pulled out the real Debra’s pinkie fingertip.  Retching and wincing as she worked, she stuck the tip to the toilet seat, the countertop, the doorknob and the sides of the Kohler.  Dancing in place and shrieking, “Ew!” repeatedly, she tossed the fingertip into the john and flushed it away.

She did not worry about her own fingerprints as Moses worried about his.  There were not many surfaces she touched that would hold a latent, anyway.  She was careful about it, but not meticulously so.  Her fingerprints were a constant source of worry but under the circumstances, they could not be helped.  She had been careful about what she touched and tried to limit it to flesh or fabric.  Supposedly, her prints were not on file anywhere, except perhaps in some case files somewhere under the name “Unsub”.  Police for “unknown subject.”  As long as she was never arrested and had her prints sent up to Quantico for a database comparison, she was merely Unsub to a great many paunchy detectives around the South.

Hurrying, Curio slipped into the leather bodysuit, admiring the fit in the mirror as she preened her hair quickly in the dead woman’s vanity mirror, just as Angelle had done so before picking up her murderer five hours before.  Her compact came out and she painted herself up again after scrubbing away the red eye paint with a wet washcloth that went into her purse.  Curio applied a pale shade of base, dragged a black pencil across her eyes and outlined her lips.  A quick brushing of eye shadow and neutral lip balm and she was ready to be public.

From the nightstand, she picked up a book of matches and arranged a match to burn as a fuse toward its counterparts.

“Shit!”  She forgot the nails.  Glancing nervously at her watch, she fumbled for a cuticle knife in her kit and found it.  Some of Stuart Whitman’s chest skin was bundled up beneath a few of her nails.  Working over a pad of hotel stationary at the vanity table, she delicately scraped her nails clean onto the white paper.

Carefully, she got on her knees next to the corpse and set about jamming the bits of skin far up under a few of Angelle's nails with a match.  The rest of the fragments she carried into the bathroom and flicked them into the washcloth.  She closed the bathroom door to try to preserve the contents within in case no one came to snuff the fire too soon.

Straining, she rolled the body onto the bed, laying her on her side so the arms would hang over the side of the bed, ostensibly to preserve the skin in the nails as much as possible.  Curio figured it was a long stretch, but if the investigators could get a sample to work with, so much the better.  Getting paranoid of the timeline, she rushed to get away formthe bedroom.

Holding the champagne bottle with a sheet, she popped the cork and let it spray all over the bed and body.  It would make it look all the more amateurish.  Only a frantic idiot looking for any possible accelerant would use champagne.  Again, she hoped for the swift actions of the hotel staff to get the fire out.  She took a long swig from the bottle and doused the naked body with the rest. 

She slipped the whip into her purse and looked around one more time for anything left of hers.  Taking a long deep breath, closing her eyes, she tried to rethink anything she might have fucked up and came up empty. 

Looking at Angelle's bare ass one more time, she shrugged.  The woman was holding up well for thirty-six.

“I did you a favor, bitch.  You died before you sagged.” 

She stuffed the matches in between the mattress and box spring and dangled a corner of the comforter over the area where the combined ignition of twenty-four matches would erupt as the lone match burned into them.

“A few years from now,” Curio leaned over the dead woman’s face, “you woulda' just been some old whore complaining about how everything drooped and jingled.  You woulda’ been having to pick up middle-tier sales managers over at Ten oh One for a hundred a toss and a few free Tom Collins again.  You loser cunt, you.”

Curio Phelonie flicked a Bic flame under the match head, snatched up the pile of hundreds Stuart Whitman left behind and jammed them down her bodysuit, and walked away from the room.

She was barely descending the second floor stairs of the parking garage when the alarm went off.  Crossing the street, she eased nonchalantly into the back seat of the big Cutlass, giving Pete a thumbs-up and blowing a kiss to Moses' gaze in the rearview mirror as they pulled away.  Pete nervously asked how it went as he saw her sweating and fanning herself.

Cocking her head, she shrugged and said simply, “It occurred to me when I was doin’ it, that y’all can keep the insurance, the fringe benefits of this shit really, really, kick ass sometime.”  She fanned her groin, “Man!”

They made their way across State Street.  A steady stream of midnight traffic leaving the clubs heading for the Reservoir for late-night libations or heading home hid their car in street-lit anonymity. 

Before they were across the bridge into Rankin County, the frantic staff had forced the door open in room 454.  Panicking, two men dragged the barely-burned body out into the hall.  The burned face was a ghastly sight, but they still tried to perform CPR as best they could. 

Their efforts were for naught. 

The bubbly front desk clerk started her wigging-out just about the instant one of the rent-a-cops doused the smoky mattress fire with an extinguisher.

         As the trio drove north on I-65 to pick up Grizzly, Curio reached into her bra and pulled out her lagniappe from Stuart Whitman.  Her eyes grew wide.

         “Shit fellas!  I’m in the wrong line of work.  Anyone wanna' make a trip over to Vicksburg?  I’m buyin’!”

 

         Four days later, a scathing rant by local TV commentator Frank Melton described in detail the murder of a local woman in the Edison Walthall as heinous and barbaric.  He insisted that whoever perpetrated the crime be tried for capital murder and wished the Jackson Police Godspeed in seeing to it that the victim received a swift and unflinching justice.

         The next morning, Doreen passed on a courtesy call from the local NBC affiliate, which Melton owned, to her boss, Stuart Whitman.  Hearing the list of questions aimed squarely at him, Whitman knew they had been dropped into the reporters’ laps by whoever killed Angelle.  It was a setup job, one that he knew he would not nor could not recover from.

When the Governor himself requested Stuart attend a private meeting with him, his Chief of Staff, the Hinds County District Attorney and the head of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations some twenty minutes later, Whitman politely said that would not be necessary.  Kirk Fordice, not a man to be stiff-armed, asked why that was. 

Stuart gazed at himself shaking hands with various politicos in the past few months.  It had been a great run, but alas, all mere mortals were flawed in some way, he sighed.

“You should get your short list together, sir.” He told Gov. Fordice. “And watch that you don’t trip over your own dick, either.”

And with that, he hung up on Gov. Kirk Fordice.

         Attorney General Stuart Whitman raised the window of his seventh floor office, shaking his head in resignation.  Not believing his luck and cursing his fallibility, he made one long gaze across the skyline of the capital city of the state that should have been all his to rule one not too distant day. 

Closing his eyes, he jumped out without a word.  His tumble managed to kill both himself and a middle-tier sales manager below him.

The unlucky human landing pad was just in from Tupelo, walking hurriedly on his one-hour lunch break to see a working girl named Justine…who was enjoying a three-day weekend on his dime over at the Edison Walthall and wondering if she could cajole him into something more permanent along those lines if the guy’s expected promotion came through as he hoped.