I stepped back and pulled out of her.
She straightened. “Just a minute.”
She walked into the bathroom, her ass and legs a symphony of smooth white muscle. The water ran, and then she returned to kneel and wipe me off with a warm wet washrag.
“There,” she said.
I pulled up my pants when she went back into the bathroom. There was the sad domestic sound of her washing herself. She came back into the bedroom and took her panties from the bed and stepped into them, added her skirt and blouse, brushed her hair. From time to time she looked at me, not directly, but in the mirror.
Lizzy ran her hands over her clothes, smoothed out the wrinkles. She looked like a runway model dressed as a top shelf business executive. She took up her oversized leather carry-all that served her as a purse, the $9000 one she’d bought in Paris at the House of Gucci, opened it up and took out a thin book.
“I bought you a present, Jimmy.”
I took the book. There was a picture of shattered ruins on the front, Indian, maybe Thai or Cambodian. REFUSING HEAVEN by Jack Gilbert.
“What’s this?”
“Poetry. I saw some on your shelves…I thought you might like this.” She seemed embarrassed. “Here. Listen…this one reminds me of you…
THE MAIL
What the hell are you doing out there
(he writes) in that worn rock valley
with chickens and the donkey and not farming?
And the people around you speaking Greek.
And the only news faint on the Armed
Forces Network. I don’t know what to say.
And what about women? he asks. Yes,
I think to myself, what about women?
Her voice was high and tremulous. I’d never heard that in her voice before.
“I think you’ll like it,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Her face was an expressionless mask; the only movement that deep, deep ripple in her blue eyes.
“You’re welcome, Jimmy,” she said.
And she left, closing the door softly behind her, leaving behind only her scent and the smell of stale semen.
Interlude
What about women?
What about the solace of flesh, the intimacy of glance and gesture that only happens between a man and a woman after an investment of years?
I’d never had that. I'd only bought moments of it. High priced moments purchased for the semblance of fidelity.
Some of the men I’d worked with had it. Sweethearts became wives became mothers; a base to return to, warm ports in the storm of war.
Those men had someone to leave the lights on for them.
Outsiders peering into my world see the streak of misogyny, the homo-erotic appeal of men banded together against the world. In our world, women would always be outsiders. They never saw the keen loneliness that we felt. Not all of them. Some of us were truly wedded to the art of war and faithful only to their brothers in arms and their weapons. But I always felt, and suspected to be true, that somewhere in there, those men too longed for moments when they could lay in a woman’s arms, arms that weren’t rented, arms that opened only for them.
Those were one kind. There were other kinds: the ones that married young and forever, went and warred and came home to their women and children, Odysseus to their Penelopes, always faithful, always loving. And then the men like me, with a long succession of women who came and went, brief inhabitants in the rooms of our days, marriages that didn’t last.
We told ourselves we were better for it. But we never give up. We return again and again to the altar of the Divine Feminine, looking for the woman that will make us complete. Sometimes we're lucky. Or our karma turns in our favor.
Or we don’t. And it doesn’t.
Mostly, it doesn’t.
Chapter 3
Nina Capushek looked at the bartender. “What the fuck are you looking at?”
He sized her up. Felt her anger like an overworked heater in a Midwestern winter. “Sorry,” he said.
“You like my nose?” She tapped her callused right forefinger on the broken sprawl of cartilage. “I like my nose. I like it just fine.”
“You’ve had enough, and so have I,” the bartender said mildly. “Time for you to take it someplace else.”
Nina reached under her black leather jacket and drew out a Glock 21 .45 automatic, grip reduced to fit her hand, and set it on the bar-top. With her other hand she took out her cred case and flipped it open to her badge.
“I’ll go when I want to, sweetheart.”
The bartender stuck to his story.
“I’m sorry, officer. I can’t serve you any more.”
“Fuck you.” Nina holstered her pistol, felt the snick as it settled into the CTAC speed scabbard. She picked up her creds, slid off the bar stool and wavered for just a beat. “And this faggot bar.”
The bartender smoothed the close trimmed hair that rimmed his mouth, looked around at the few other patrons in the bar. The few following his discussion turned away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, careful to let just a hint of regretful apology into his tone.
“Faggot,” Nina said. She gave him her back and took her time walking out the door. She never looked back. But then, she never did.
Outside, afternoon fell into evening.
Nina scowled up at the sky, wished for a cigarette. Drinking did that to her. She scratched the bridge of her broken nose, where the knitting cartilage still itched. Eventually, she’d get the surgery, but part of her rebelled at that. She’d earned that nose.
Her friends, and especially her partner Herbie, back in Minneapolis, had all urged her to get it done. They found it jarring, that sprawl of scar on a face that most agreed could have been on a magazine cover. Nina had never thought much about her looks, though she knew and understood the impact she had on men.
She wielded it like a weapon, just as skillfully as the big Glock on her hip.
And she liked her nose, and how she’d gotten it.
Nina ignored two big teens shambling by her, white niggers from the suburbs dressed up in an expensive approximation of ghetto style. The tactical part of her brain calibrated distance, trajectory, deception and surprise, and she smiled, openly, a beautiful gash beneath her broken nose, at what those two wannabes would think right before she shot them in the face.
Assholes.
She crossed the street and got into her G-ride, a dull blue Taurus. Turned up the radio and exhaled into her hand, sniffing her breath. Took a Clorets from a pack on the dashboard and popped it in her mouth. Started the car and pulled out into traffic, ignoring the horns blaring at her.
Went out looking for the man she wanted to kill.
Interlude
I’ve never known any women warriors. Heard of them, heard men I trusted speak respectfully of women cops, women operators with CAG or the CIA’s MPU, or some of the other alphabet soup agencies, women federal agents…
I’ve never known any.
I heard a friend tell a story about a woman cop he knew, an open lesbian who was a stone pro shooter and had dropped the hammer on a dangerous human. She was in The Club. It was her opinion that women were better than men at the interpersonal stuff, at reading the situation better, and, until after they had kids, just as good at being violent if properly trained. But something happened to them after they had kids. They weren’t as fast to get hands on, to clear leather, to drop the hammer.
Something about bringing life into the world.
I didn’t know anything about that. But I could write a book about taking lives out of the world.
I’ve wondered, sometimes, what it would be like to work with some one you could fuck. Or even make love to, if you wanted. What would that be like? I knew all the arguments about women in combat – that men would be distracted from the task at hand by the sight of wounded women, that they would take actions that they wouldn’t take to protect a man to protect a woman…<
br />
That was true of me, I knew.
That always seemed part of it to me, part of being a warrior is to protect the women and the children of the tribe. There’s something primal that rises up in a true warrior when he hears women and children screaming in pain or fear; something primal that makes us run towards that sound. Good cops, good firemen, good soldiers, good men, they all have that gene.
But then, maybe some women did, too.
I’d never seen it.
Yet.
Chapter 4
“Automatica Kalashnikova,” Irina Komarov said. She stroked her manicured finger slowly back and forth on the oily barrel of the AK-47. “You like?”
“I like,” Steep Ride LaRue said.
Irina fucked him up. But then a six foot tall Russian beauty queen in spiked Manolo Blahniks and a body hugging black Armani pants suit, ivory blonde hair swept up in a beehive straight out of the 50s, would fuck up any one, especially a Lake City gang banger with a 95 IQ. It doesn’t take much IQ to pull the trigger on a drive by, which was Steep Ride’s specialty. The AK was his tool of choice, folding stock only, handy for getting in and out of the car.
“How you say that shit?” Steep Ride said.
“Automatica Kalashnikovaaaaaa,” Irina drew the words out. She handed him the weapon, incongruous in her manicured hands, the fingers long and white and clean, like bone. Steep Ride worked the action, shouldered the Kalash, scanned left and right, then folded the stock down. He took a bungee cord out of his Dickie’s jacket pocket, hooked the loops through the metal stock where it folded under, then looped his strong arm through the bungee cord and thrust the rifle out. The taut cord at full extension held the rifle almost as steady as shouldering the stock would.
“Yeah, this my bitch,” he said. Challenged her with his eyes, looked her up and down the black pant suit that clung to the long muscles of her body.
“And that’s mine,” Sergey Komarov said from behind him.
Steep Ride laughed, turned slowly and looked at the bulky Russian standing behind him, immaculate in a tailored suit. “Just playing, Sergey.”
“How many units today, my friend?” Sergey said.
“Ten.”
“Cash and carry? As usual?”
“That be the way I do bidness.”
“And that’s the way we do ‘bidness’, my friend,” Sergey said. “$900 per, correct? That is what we agreed on?”
“$9K. That’s right.” Steep Ride reached into his inner pocket, paused with a knowing smile at Sergey, slowly pulled out a bulky envelope and tossed it to the Russian. “You want to count?”
“Always,” Sergey said. “It avoids misunderstandings, don’t you find?”
Sergey took his time flipping through the bundles of bills squeezed into the envelope, nodded, smiled.
“Do you need some help loading?” he said.
“I gots my boy,” Steep Ride said.
“Then shall we?” Irina said.
Steep Ride let his new AK slip off his shoulder into his hand, extended the stock, slipped it back into the oilcloth packing sheath and placed it on the table with the other rifles. He took a cell phone out and pushed the radio talk button and said, “We ready.”
The door opened and a tall slim black man dressed in a loose fitting hoodie and sweat pants slouched in. Sunglasses and the close drawn hood buried his face. Without a word, he gathered up an armful of sheathed rifles and went out, returned a moment later to get the rest.
“Good doing ‘bidness’ with you all,” Steep Ride said.
“Any time, my friend. We look forward to seeing you again,” Sergey said.
Steep Ride stood and looked Irina up and down, then at Sergey. “I be looking forward to seeing someone. Later.”
He gave them his back and swaggered to the door.
Irina turned and smiled at Sergey.
“When it’s time,” she said. “I want to kill him.”
“As you like,” Sergey said.
Her blue eyes gleamed with delight. She skinned her lips back. Her front incisors were crooked, one just slightly discolored.
“I like.”
***
“That’s their warehouse,” Deon whispered to me. “And that’s one of their regular customers.”
I was flat on my stomach. I braced my elbows so the night vision binoculars wouldn’t wobble. The bulky black man in the Dickies jacket paused beside the Cadillac Escalade and asked his companion in the hooded sweatshirt something I couldn’t hear.
“What did he say?” I said.
Deon whispered without shifting his grip on his parabolic mike, “We gots what we want.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“How many you reckon?”
“Ten. Pretty sure it was ten.”
“You doing business with these people?”
“Will be, oke. Will be.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got good sources for the hard to get, oke.”
“Like?”
“Like those full auto AKs they walked out of there.”
I laughed. “Oh, hell yeah. Just straight up security, right?”
Deon smiled. “I never lie to you, Jimmy.”
This is how it goes down: you never do a deal without a recon first. Check the players out, know the ways in and out of the meet -- the front doors, the back doors, the fire exits, the places where if it went to shit you could drive a car right through the wall, where the shooters would hide -- then we’d know where we’d put our shooters, cover the meet under our long guns, bring the deep serious heavy shit down on them when -- and if -- we decided to do it. Lurk in the bushes, watch how they do business, keep track, look for any changes.
Then you set up the meet so that everything is stacked on your side.
That’s the only way you last long enough in this business to get gray hair, which was something I aspired to.
So while Deon toted enough hardware to equip a 3rd world army, he still needed a set of eyes with a skill set to watch his back.
That would be me.
Security.
Especially with Russian arms dealers.
The Komarovs had a rep. Nothing flashy, nothing dramatic. Just if you fucked with them, you disappeared. Not right away, though I’d heard that someone had once tried something dramatic. Sergey Komarov showed that individual something dramatic from his whispered about military service in the old Soviet Union Army Special Forces, the Spesnatz.
Or so I’d heard.
But in the regular course of business, you’d just…disappear.
One of the disaparacidos, as my Argentinian friends would say.
The Komarovs were people to be dealt with cautiously, with respect, even if you were a known player like Deon.
And that’s just what we were going to do.
Since we were going to steal from them.
Interlude
There is no honor among criminals.
That’s a romantic notion drawn from noir novels and Hollywood movies.
Edge dwellers, for the most part, think only of themselves, and, sometimes, their closest friends and families.
But the truth is that most would sell out their friends and families in an instant if it came down to that “me or them” moment.
Some like to comfort themselves with the illusion that they’d never roll over, never give up their friends -- and there were some, not many, but some, that would stick to that. Most of them were more motivated by fear than honor, though…fear of reprisal, against them or their families, fear of what might happen to them inside if they were known as rats.
The edge dwellers live in a world where strength, measured by the ability to do harm to others, was the prime virtue. Honor was a fantasy indulged in comic books and movies.
The ones with honor were dangerous.
The ones who lived by a code were even more dangerous.
The other might mock them, maybe even, if they had the guts, to their faces. But whether they ac
knowledged it or not, there was a grudging respect, often anchored to a deep resentment, because in their encounters with those who held on to a concept of honor and a code, they had to look at themselves.
And where they fell short.
Chapter Five
Lizzy Caprica sat with the erect posture of the trained dancer in her make up station in the back of The Trojan Horse. The other dancers chattered among themselves but their conversation washed over her. She studied her face in the cracked mirror. Said nothing. Thought nothing.
In her station, between the neatly arrayed jars and tubes and brushes, there was a small framed photograph of a white Hindu goddess dancing. Surrounded by leering demons with multiple arms reaching out at her. The goddess’s face was still and serene.
Lizzy studied her face.
Like a broken gong, be still, be silent.
The steady bass and drum beat from ZZ Tops Legs filtered through the thin walls.
Lizzy stood up, her red satin robe open over her sleek body, her breasts high and proud, the ripped line of her belly, the low cut of her thong.
Smiled, licked at her red lipstick, a dart of her pink tongue.
It was time.
***
She opened with Christina Aguilera’s Dirty.
Her regulars lined the runway. Her following seemed to grow every night, and Lance T., the owner, liked to half-joke that he’d have to open a new club just for Lizzy. When he said that, she just smiled, said nothing.
She was a quiet woman when it came to words.
She let her body talk.
Her customers loved to watch her enter. She’d stand, still and small, in the deep part of the stage, while the DJ set up her CD and announced her: “…and here she is, Ms. Lizzy!”
She liked how Christina led into the song, and her body followed it, she dropped the red satin dressing gown in a bloody pool at her feet, threw back her shoulders and flung her long hair like a red wing across her milk white skin, strutted out and kicked into her routine, carefully choreographed with the help of her friend Katey, a professional ballerina…sexy, hot, jazzy, but with lots of kicks and bends to show off her long limbs -- and everything else she had.
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