by Layla Wolfe
Tobiah got to his feet. His spindly legs, clad in burgundy velveteen pants, seemed hardly strong enough to hold up his beak, much less his skull. “That’s it, egghead! I know you borrowed my gladiator harness without asking and stretched it out. I thought we agreed no play time with Tracy unless all three of us are present? Yet I go to put it on, and it looked like Dolly Parton’s been wearing it!”
“Ha! Don’t you think that should be up to Tracy? Maybe she wanted to play Gladiators and Gals without you. Let’s just go see her and ask her what she thinks.”
“Ah,” said Lytton, “that’s the whole point here. I don’t think anyone asked Lavinia Dock what she thinks. Unity. Did she ever complain about Tutti?”
Unity shrugged. Next to her, Tobiah and Wolf were shoving each other with the tips of their fingers. “She mentioned the usual stuff you’d expect. He was always in his lab, never took her anywhere. But she was very excited about her wedding. I was a bridesmaid, and it was just a nonstop party. Tutti seemed excited. You should’ve seen the ring he bought her. And his vows to her brought tears to our eyes, even though another bridesmaid privately mentioned it was plagiarized from Foreigner.”
“Which foreigner?” asked Lytton.
Unity grinned, dimpling her diamond studs. “The hair band Foreigner.”
“You fucking trekkie!” shouted Tobiah. His shoves were having barely any impact on the larger, more solid Wolf, so he’d moved to shoving with his entire palm. Still no effect. “Tracy didn’t even want to go to FurCon with you in that slutty Lola Bunny costume!”
“Oh yeah?” blared Wolf. Just one of his palm shoves sent the skeletal CFO stumbling back three feet. I fully expected them to start bitch-slapping each other. “Shows how much you know. She wanted to crop the tank top even higher! It turns her on to exhibit herself.”
Tobiah’s eyes flashed. “Fuck you, you toolbox! Tracy’s much too ladylike to expose herself to anyone other than me.”
Wolf shoved Tobiah harder. This time the financial whiz did fall and spin on his ass. “Whatever happened to ‘us,’ you fucking pencil-neck? I thought we were all in this together. All for one!”
When Wolf went to straddle Tobiah’s high-tops, I stepped in. I grabbed the remote Wolf still brandished like a club. He didn’t even glance at me.
“Wolf said the last texts were Sunday,” I said. I clicked the “next” button and got a couple of generic texts, friends talking about a TV show and the like. “We need to find out Lavinia’s response to his invitation to go hiking. Seems way too coincidental, a Sideshow Barbara talks about her falling off a cliff, and he invites her hiking on a cliff.”
“Definitely,” said Unity. “Keep clicking. This is just Whitney talking about The Walking Dead.”
We had to step aside a little as Lytton finally stood and got between the two combatants. We raised our voices to be heard over their argument.
“Okay, here we go,” I said, as Lavinia’s response was revealed.
King Tut, that’s a very lovely invitation. But I think you must have forgotten you asked me to drive Corey down to the University of Arizona on Monday, remember? You said he had a delivery to make. Love, Your Lovey
“What the fuck?” I muttered. “They were bringing fentanyl to the U of A?” It had slipped my mind that Lavinia Dock was married to one of the biggest criminals in Arizona. I’d never really envisioned what they did with the stuff he concocted, other than bring it to sideshows to sell. But of course, it figured that he had bigger clients. It just hit close to home that they were poisoning the minds of students with it. The U of A in Phoenix had a College of Medicine I’d been thinking of applying to. I know, I know. An old guy like me, a doctor. I’d be over fifty by the time I got my MD. But I’d gotten a late start in life, wasting ten years in Club Fed just to cover my worthless brother’s ass.
Unity said, “Worse things have been known to happen with that shit. So, Lavinia told him no. It’s not likely he forced her to the Grand Canyon.”
“Who’s this Corey person?” I asked.
“I’ve heard her talk about him. He’s some kid who assists Tutti, makes deliveries. I don’t know why he wouldn’t have a car, though, why she’d have to drive him to Phoenix.”
“Let’s find out who he is.” I clicked “next” some more, but like Wolf had said, the last texts were Sunday. That was it. “Lytton,” I called over to the ganjapreneur, who was still holding his palms out against the two red-faced techies. “Did the Bare Bones ever fire Tutti? I mean, has there been an overture toward getting rid of him as a vendor?”
“What? Oh, no. We decided to keep him in the dark about our plans until Lavinia pops up. Listen, Tobiah. Get back to your research on the Sideshow Bob email.”
“Sideshow Barbara,” Tobiah huffed as he clambered back into his desk chair. Snorting and running his fingers through his bowl haircut, he clicked back into action. It was amazing how quickly he turned into a lively gameshow host when discussing his work. “It was sent from gmail, which only traces back to Google’s IP addresses.”
“No duh,” sneered Wolf.
Tobiah carried on as though he hadn’t heard the heckling. “So, I traced the public IP address assigned to within a mile of downtown Flagstaff. But that covers a lot of ground, including a couple of FedEx Offices where the person could’ve rented a computer and paid cash.”
Wolf scoffed. “So you found nothing.”
“Not necessarily. I did a reverse search on all social networks—nothing. Sideshow Barbara is a ghost.”
Wolf said, “Then what do you mean, ‘not necessarily’? Sounds like a bunch of dead ends.”
Tobiah proudly turned his beak to the ceiling. “I was able to narrow it down to one of the two FedEx Offices by eliminating one of them. It was definitely sent from the one on Beaver Street.”
Wolf couldn’t resist chuckling. “Beaver Street,” he muttered. “As if.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
Tobiah practically levitated from his seat with pride. “Because the other one a mile and a half away was shut down for a few hours during the time the email was sent due to a shooter threat.”
“Oh, God,” Unity groaned. “Welcome to the modern world.”
I was glad I hadn’t mentioned to Unity that I’d asked Wolf to approach the Bare Bones about getting me an untraceable piece. If we were really dealing with a murder, I’d need it.
“Well, listen,” said Unity. “I’ve got to get to that blindfolded blunt rolling contest in downtown P and E.”
Wolf said, “Oh, are they having that again? You won last year.”
It was Unity’s turn to stand proud. “I sure did. I rolled the finest smokable blunt in under two minutes. Beat out all those other lame HempCon so-called competitors.”
“That’s a thing?” I asked.
Lytton said, “Yeah, it’s at my dispensary on Bargain Boulevard if you want to come down, Tanner. Whole block is cordoned off. Award-winning extraction artists, a master bud competition—“
“Which of course you’ll win,” said Wolf.
“—which of course I’ll win, costume competition, and I’m running a workshop on how to grow your cannabusiness, so I’m blazing.”
Lytton did blaze, so Unity and I followed his path to the front door. We’d driven up the mountain separately because I knew about the carnival, and I did have some other personal issues to deal with. Weed was fine with me—for other people. My teen years had been so chockful of drugs and miscellaneous mind-altering products, I couldn’t help but think it had a lot to do with the legal mess I’d wound up in.
I walked her to her Harley and dared to suggest, “After your contest, why don’t we have dinner to discuss our next steps?”
“Oh, it turns into a giant party. I’ll just be eating street food with my friends and the people I see at these events. How about breakfast?”
Breakfast it was, and as I turned to stride to my rental car, I noticed something out of place.
A guy in his twenties with spiky, dirty blonde hair stared directly at us with the most shocked, piercing gaze I’d ever seen. It was almost as though he’d busted us walking out of our own friend’s house, and he was surprised to see us. Lytton’s spread was huge, but most of it went down the hill toward Mormon Lake. Still, the main road back to town was forty yards uphill, and there was no reason for the guy to be there, way too old to be riding an old clunker bicycle. But he was.
Unity and I shared glances, our brows furrowed. Lytton didn’t grow any pot near his house, so the kid wouldn’t be there to steal anything of that nature. Eventually, because the guy pedaled back off down the main road, we just shrugged and went on with our day.
We kept up an even pace down the road side by side, me in the rental car and the stoner biking. He was hauling ass, and he kept looking over at me. It wasn’t my imagination. He was unafraid of me.
I wouldn’t find out until later the significance of any of this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unity
“I have a proposal for you.”
Tanner and I were walking down Substitute Street toward Bargain Boulevard. One of Lavinia’s friends had told us there was a Barbara Stanford on Substitute who could be the Sideshow Barbara we were looking for. We’d knocked, but nothing, so we were going to try later.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘proposition.’”
Tanner grinned warmly. He’d been doing that more lately, and I liked it. He was what some would call a “handsome devil.” “I’d never dare, not around you. You might die of capture myopathy. No, listen. I’ve been thinking about self-harm.”
I rolled my eyes. He sure was into my cutting.
“These two opposites—pleasure and pain, grooming and cutting—create similar results in the body, so identical that some folks seem to get them mixed up. Tearing, cutting, and chewing are still in our gene pool because they’re on the same level as grooming, like two apes picking nits off each other. This keeps our anxiety under check. Do you feel relief when you cut?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, stopping in front of Lytton’s A Joint System dispensary. People were still sweeping up from yesterday’s blowout, and I waved to a few employees, August the ganjier, and June, Lytton’s wife. Tracy, an irrigation expert up at the plantation, was even down there, choosing to work downtown instead of dealing with those two eggheaded maniacs she was having a ménage with. “It’s a psychic sense of relief, feeling I’ve done something about the problem, if that makes any sense.”
“It does.” We walked on past the dispensary. “That’s why I propose to groom you.”
I put a hand to my chest, to my anchor. “Groom . . . me?” Like pick nits off me?
“Just like it sounds, darlin’.”
He’d never called me darlin’ before, but I supposed it was some West Memphis type of thing. I’d found out that’s where he’d grown up, where he’d committed—or not committed—whatever crime had led to ten years in the Tucker Unit. “A friend of Maddy’s owns this beauty parlor that doesn’t open ‘til eleven.”
“Yeah, I know Elsa. This is where I go, because it’s close to my apartment. But how are you going to groom me?”
“I used to do someone else’s hair all the time.”
“Your sister?”
“No, I don’t have a sister.”
“So let me get this straight. You propose to wash my hair?”
“Yes. Like one animal would groom the other.”
“Strictly between animals.”
He held up his palms to me. “Strictly.”
I couldn’t believe my mouth was saying those words. “Okay, you’re on.”
Tanner surprised me, how much his face lit up. “Seriously? Okay, let’s carry out this experiment.” He yanked some keys from his jeans pocket and shuffled among them.
“So I’m an experiment now?” I pretended to protest, but honestly, the idea of this sensual brute of a man rubbing my scalp with his fingertips . . . well, my pussy lips were already blooming, filling with blood, actually throbbing as though a little heart beat there.
He got us inside the salon but didn’t turn on the lights, instead going to a rolling caddy full of plastic smocks, shaking one out.
“Sit, darlin’.”
He had me sit in a shampoo chair—that he already knew what one was made me suspicious, although he didn’t ping a single gaydar cell in my entire reality—and he even tucked a towel under my neck. I felt miles better already. My hair stunk like smoke from the to-do the day before, especially when he took off the headband that held all the braids in place. First, he had to remove the waxy rubber bands at the tip of each braid. He did it slowly, with barely a tug. I’d had men do my hair before, but I’d never tingled with excitement thinking about it. The men were either flamingly gay, or just didn’t do it for me.
Tanner did it for me.
“You’ve got a beautiful ashy stripe,” he said. “Why would anyone want to obscure that?”
I shrugged. “I try different things. I try not to look the same for too long. Photographers want a different look all the time.” He was hosing my scalp with warm water, and I was settling into it just fine. I was shocked and offended when his phone went off, and he stopped what he was doing to read the text.
My scalp cried, come back! You’re not done! I hated whoever had texted him, whoever was important enough to ruin our idyllic time. Even though I was lying nearly flat, I could still see this person annoyed him, and he slid the phone into his back pocket without responding.
I squirmed out of sheer horniness when he squished detangling product on my hair and returned with the warm water hose. My nipples under the push-up bra stuck out like bullets. My body advertised its wares without consulting with me.
But the first millisecond Tanner’s rough fingertips slid across my scalp, I wasn’t sure I could take it. Especially when he got near my nape with his firm but tight little squiggles, unnecessarily circling over and over the same most sensual spot, well, I actually felt a drip roll down between my thighs.
Talking would fill in the uncomfortable erotic void. “Who texted? Seemed to be someone important.”
His body heat at crotch level slammed me in the shoulders. He stroked my scalp with long, drawn out and almost painful slides of his fingers.
“Joy,” he muttered.
“Who?”
“Joy. Ex.”
“Oh!” It was hard to describe at that moment how my heart sank lower than the curb.
Of course he had an ex. He may have been locked up for ten years, but he no doubt more than made up for it when he got out of the big house. “You’re . . . trying to stay away from her?”
He snorted, and now I felt the tension through his fingertips. He was rinsing my former braids, smoothing them out between his fingers as one would feel spun gold. I had the most boring dark brown hair color, so I’d always jazzed it up with at least highlights, sometimes giant curly swirls of pigtails that looked to have been made over beer cans.
“Like Tesla tried to stay away from Edison.”
I just knew that Tesla was a car, so I said, “Like Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”
“Good one.” He sounded like he was grinning as he disentangled the last of my braids. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, thinking of what was next.
The shampoo.
The moment might be too sexual if I didn’t talk over it. He seemed to be back there, sniffing products, selecting one. “Why are you trying to stay away from her?”
He didn’t answer right away, not until he found the correct scent. I heard him sensually mush two palms full of the stuff, and the scent wafted to my nostrils. Sort of a grapefruit and amber. He plunged his hands into my hair and rapidly began rubbing my mastoid, behind my ears. Tanner’s hands were so close to my . . . neck.
“Why’d you tense just now?” he asked. “Don’t like your neck being touched?”
“Exactly,” I croaked, an obvious lump in my throat.
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br /> “Ah,” he said, as though he knew Gary Gregario had habitually enjoyed “breath play,” a cop-out way of describing strangulation. I hadn’t asked Lyric if he’d done that to her. Details had a way of bringing everything back. It was enough that I’d helped save her. “I’ll stay back here, around your skull. How’s that?”
I smiled with satisfaction. “So, Joy is texting you, wanting to get back together?” I tried to sound casual. Lord knows I did. But my overt interest sang out like an aria.
Tanner politely pretended not to notice. “Yeah. I have no interest in that.”
“Oh, she broke up with you the first time? A bruised ego is hard to mend.”
He didn’t answer right away. Boy, he was a hard nut to crack. “I guess now I’m a hairdresser, I need to gossip like the rest of them.”
I dared to speak my mind. “Well, don’t fall for it again. You can never go home, right?”
I can’t even describe how great Tanner was making me feel. His fingertips made squiggly, soapy circles on my skull. Each sexy squirm zapped my inner pussy, making me tremble to the core. It was like jumping in a cool stream after a sweaty hike—refreshing, rejuvenating. Why did life bother waking me up? I could just float at the mercy of Tanner Principato’s hands forever.
“Did you love her?”
Tanner snorted, an erotic caveman sound. Was it my imagination, or was his dick plumping up? The heat near my shoulder seemed fit to burn me. He always had a nice, beefy package anyway. But now I had the instinct that I could turn my head a couple inches and be faced with a juicy cock. I had better not turn my head. “Yes. That makes it harder to leave, doesn’t it?”
Was he asking me a question? The image of Evan’s face flashed through my brain. I fucking hated when that happened. Evan was a professional photographer I’d run into at HempCon. Glamor photographers were just giant sleazebags, but Evan seemed different. His intimate sessions with me made me feel special, like he wasn’t into it just for T and A. He draped me in items that actually covered my nipples, for example. “Yes. I was in love once. I hope it never happens again.”