Donna Joy Usher - Chanel 01 - Cocoa and Chanel

by Donna Joy Usher

  The real trouble came when I tried the magic carpet. The aim for this move is to make yourself horizontal on the pole. You lie back with your legs out straight and hang on with one hand and your thighs. The other hand is raised elegantly above your head. Well that’s the aim anyway.

  My magic carpet didn’t quite work out that way. I got into the horizontal part, but I was having trouble maintaining my grip with my sweaty palms. One second I was horizontal and feeling pretty proud of myself, the next I lost my grip. Immediately my body tilted backwards and my legs pivoted upwards till I was hanging upside down on the pole.

  The girls above me were holding their magic carpets perfectly as I found myself speeding head first towards the ground. Panicked, I threw my arms out and caught myself in a perfect handstand. All my schoolyard playing paid off and I flicked through a cartwheel till I was in a standing position. I stuck my arms out as if I was an Olympian gymnast and put a huge smile on my face. I was guessing by the way the crowd broke out into a huge round of applause that they hadn’t heard my terrified shrieks as I’d slid down the pole.

  Then I pranced and twirled around the pole while Ronnie sang and the other girls danced and finally, finally it was over. I staggered off the stage and collapsed at the bar, too buggered to care that I still had on the stupid outfit.

  Bruce handed me a drink, a huge grin on his face, and then rushed off to serve other customers. I pressed the icy glass to my forehead before taking a gulp.

  ‘Dang girl,’ Bianca said, ‘that was some serious shit. I thought you was gone for sure.’

  ‘I was expecting a trip to the emergency ward.’ I skolled the last of my drink and then looked down at my bare legs. ‘I’m going to get changed.’

  Martine was in the change rooms helping the girls with their costumes. She was wearing a longer skirt which helped hide her third leg. ‘The real Imodium’s finally kicked in.’

  ‘You all right to go on?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll stay in the background and make sure I don’t cast a shadow.’

  ‘Good luck,’ I said and went back to the bar to enjoy the show.

  They had been good when I first discovered Dazzle, but under Mum’s tuition they had improved and I realised that they might be in with a chance to win the competition. Obviously I had no idea what the other troupes were like, but they would have to be excellent to beat the girls – that was if my stunt hadn’t ruined it for them.

  We didn’t get home till it was almost sunrise. I took Cocoa out for a toilet break and then crawled into bed with him. It was almost too hot to cuddle, but I held on to him and tried not to think about the terrifying few seconds when I’d thought it was him on the bonnet of my car.

  My mind switched to Roger as I was sliding off to sleep, and I had confusing dreams in which I fled from a shadowy figure while searching for Roger and Cocoa. I woke exhausted after the sun had risen, kicked off the covers and managed to fall into a dreamless sleep.

  ***

  ‘No,’ I said into the phone, ‘not until you’re better.’

  Roger had rung me to try and convince me to come round to his. I knew what he was after, and even though I desperately wanted it too I was determined not to intervene with his body’s attempts to heal.

  ‘What if we meet on neutral ground?’ He was persistent.

  ‘Define neutral.’

  ‘A restaurant.’

  I thought about it for a few moments but couldn’t come up with any reasons why we couldn’t do that. ‘Which restaurant?’

  ‘Fook Yuen.’

  ‘Well there’s no need to be rude about it.’

  He chuckled softly. ‘It’s a Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I jotted down the address and the time, glad I only had to wait a few days to see him. Work seemed like a rainy day without him there.

  ‘I miss you,’ he said.

  I flushed with pleasure and looked around to see if Dave and Daniel could hear me. ‘I miss you too,’ I whispered. I hung up and went to the toilet to give myself time for the pink of my cheeks to dissipate.

  ‘Ahh, young love,’ Dave said when I came back out.

  Damn, so he had been able to hear. ‘Fook Yuen,’ I said.

  He let out a whistle and nodded his head. ‘Flash. Make sure he springs for the Peking Duck.

  Before he could say anything else Bob stuck his head through the door. ‘Dave, need you out the front.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief as he left to help Bob.

  ***

  I ran into Marty when I got home. He was coming down the stairs from his apartment.

  ‘Urrr hi,’ I said. Things were always hard with Marty, but for Martine’s sake I put in a good effort.

  ‘Hi,’ he said in his dull monotone voice.

  ‘Um so ahh, how long did it take for things to return to normal.’ I looked pointedly at his crutch.

  ‘Next morning,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘You meant well.’

  ‘Well, better go get Cocoa,’ I said, shuffling to one side.

  He moved at the same time and we found ourselves still blocking each other. Then we both moved the other way. Great, like things weren’t awkward enough.

  Waving an arm to the side I said, ‘After you.’

  I made it to my floor before I heard Mum’s voice filtering down the stairs. ‘Ooh Joe, you shouldn’t have.’

  I sighed and hurried into my apartment before I heard more than I wanted to.

  Cocoa was excited to see me, jumping all over me for a few minutes before running over to sit beneath his lead. I clipped him on and went down to the park where Bruce was waiting.

  ‘When do you find out about the comp?’ I said, taking a seat next to him.

  ‘End of the month.’

  ‘Do you think I screwed up their chances?’

  He laughed. ‘On the contrary the judges loved the comedy act.’ He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said the last bit.

  ‘Comedy, thy first name is Chanel,’ I said.

  ‘Coming down tonight?’

  ‘Nah. Need a quiet night in.’

  ‘Don’t answer your door to anybody and keep your mobile with you.’

  ‘I’ve started bringing my gun home,’ I whispered.

  He stared at me for a second. ‘You can do that?’

  ‘We keep them in lockers. No-one checks.’

  ‘But you’d be in trouble if you got caught.’

  ‘With my current track record I’d be kicked off the Force.’

  ‘Better that,’ he said.

  I swallowed as I imagined my body lying in an alley, throat slit, soaked in my own blood. Yes, better being kicked off the Force than that. Hopefully they weren’t my only options.

  ***

  It’s a sad state of affairs when you find yourself deliberating between two minute noodles and curry in a hurry, but that’s what I was doing when there was a knock at my door. I grabbed my gun from the kitchen table and peered through the peep hole. It was Mum. I hid the gun in my handbag before letting her in.

  ‘Want to go out for dinner?’ she asked. Her perfume wafted into the room ahead of her, heavy and expensive.

  ‘Weren’t you out with Joe?’

  ‘Just a drink. Thought it would be nice to have some one-on-one time with my daughter.’

  ‘Bruce told you about the rabbit.’ It was a statement not a question.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Not as worried as I am,’ I mumbled.

  ‘My shout and you can fill me in.’

  I had never said no to a free dinner and now didn’t seem like the right time to break that tradition. Besides, it would be nice to share my burden. I hadn’t told her because I didn’t want to worry her, but now that she knew, I found I wanted to tell her everything.

  I had never noticed the restaurant she took me to. A small Italian pizzeria tucked away between a hairdresser’s and a butcher. The smells coming out
of it made me realise how hungry I was.

  I told her everything. About finding the cigars and then Rosie being killed, about Lizette coming to see me but running away before I could help. About the tobacconist and the fire and Roger being burnt, and finally about the horror of the rabbit and the personal threat.

  She knew a lot of it already, but it was good to tell it as a cohesive whole. It put it all together for me, making it seem more real and less of a nightmare.

  ‘So this Roger,’ she said, ‘what’s the deal there?’

  I grimaced. ‘Not sure, early days.’

  ‘But you like him?’

  ‘I like him too much,’ I admitted. ‘He makes me feel…’ I paused while I tried to put a finger on it. ‘Alive,’ I finished.

  ‘Alive is good,’ she said as she put some money on the table. ‘Let’s try and keep it that way.’

  We were half way home when her mobile rang. She pulled it out of her pocket and glanced at the screen before answering.

  ‘Speaking,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, who is this?’

  She was silent as she listened. Then she held a hand up, pulled a sorry face and moved further up the road to talk in private. I leaned back against the building and watched her as I pondered who she could be talking to.

  That was why I didn’t see the man walking up the road until he was right in front of me. I let out an instinctive yelp and jumped away from the building getting ready to defend myself. The man stopped walking and looked at me.

  I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling the racing beat of my heart and said, ‘You scared me.’

  As he watched me I realised it was a bit warm to be wearing the black jumper he had on, especially with the hood up. His face was shadowed by it as he stood ominously, quietly. And then he said, ‘Chanel?’

  ‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ I backed away into the wall of the building and glanced up the street, but Mum had her back to me, waving an arm around as she spoke into the phone.

  ‘Chanel Smith?’ The words were laced with danger.

  The light of a passing car illuminated his face under the hood for a split second, burning the image into my mind. Piercings covered him; multiple bars through his eyebrows, a ring through the middle of his nose, and another each side of his lower lip. A tattoo wrapped around his neck and trailed up onto his left cheek. But that wasn’t the scary part, that wasn’t the part that had me rifling blindly through my handbag searching for my gun. His eyes burned black and hard. Hatred and rage and pain mingled together as he glared at me.

  ‘Lizette told me about you,’ he said, stepping towards me.

  A vision of Lizette as I had last seen her flashed into my head and I let out a shriek. My right hand dug desperately into the contents of my bag, feeling and discarding object after object in its search for cold metal.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ I panted, wondering what it would feel like to have my throat slit.

  ‘Or what?’ His voice was hard and angry.

  My hand closed on cold and hard, but it wasn’t my gun. I pulled it out of my bag, yanked off the lid and squirted him in the eyes with my perfume.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he shrieked, clutching his face. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Chanel number five,’ I said as I kicked him in the balls. He dropped to his knees, one hand on his face, the other on his crutch.

  ‘Don’t move a fucking inch,’ Mum said.

  She was standing with her feet shoulder width apart and her arms stretched out straight. There was a gun clasped tightly in her hands.

  ‘Where the hell did you get that from?’ I said, staring at the gun. It was huge.

  ‘My handbag.’ It wasn’t the answer I was looking for but it surprised me anyway. How had she managed to fit that thing in her clutch?

  ‘Pyscho bitch,’ the guy gasped. ‘I just wanted to talk.’

  ‘Yeah right.’ I pulled my cuffs out of my bag. ‘I’ve heard that one before.’ I hadn’t really but I enjoyed saying it. Made me feel like I was a character in a movie and not being stalked by a real life serial killer.

  I read him his rights and pulled his hands behind his back while Mum kept her gun trained on him. ‘You better put that thing away before the cops get here,’ I said, pulling my phone out.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’ve got a licence.’

  Holy shit, what parallel universe had I slipped into? My mother had a gun licence?

  ‘When did you get that?’

  ‘About twenty five years ago.’

  The significance of the timing was not lost on me. Mum had gotten a gun licence while still pregnant with me. One of these days we were going to have a really, really long talk.

  I called the station and spoke to Jake, and he promised a car was on its way.

  ‘I didn’t do nothin’ wrong?’ Tattoo Face said.

  ‘You realise that means you did something wrong?’ Mum said to him. ‘The correct statement would be I didn’t do anything wrong.’ She turned to me and shook her head. ‘I don’t know what they teach kids in schools these days.’

  I was still a bit freaked out. Some guy had tried to attack me and my Mum was carrying a gun.

  ‘What is that thing?’ I said, pointing at her gun.

  ‘44 Magnum. Same as Dirty Harry.’ She smiled broadly.

  Correction, my mother was carrying a 44 Magnum. The only Magnums I’d ever carried were covered in chocolate.

  True to Jake’s word the boys in blue arrived a few minutes later. Dave climbed out of the passenger’s side.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Extra shift.’

  He looked at Tattoo Face, who had assumed a cross legged position on the ground. ‘Jesus Chanel,’ he said, ‘you’re some kind of weird shit magnet.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Mum said. ‘You should have seen the losers she used to date.’

  ‘They were bad boys, not losers,’ I said.

  ‘Hmphhh. The only thing bad about them was their haircuts. I think that’s why she was drawn to hairdressing.’

  Dave had a huge grin on his face. ‘You must be Mrs Smith.’

  ‘Ohh, please call me Lorraine.’ And then she fluttered her eyelids at him. It was a bit hard to tell with it being so dark but I was almost certain he blushed.

  I had a hard look at Mum. I had managed to ignore the fact for quite a while now, what with her being my mother and my inability to see past the creature I had known for most of my life, but I had to admit that the woman she was now was smoking hot. Chin length red hair, a polka-dot black and white silk blouse teamed with knee length pants that hugged a rockin’ body and fire engine red heels that matched her Magnum-holding clutch.

  Yikes, it was possible I was being out classed by my mother. I hadn’t changed my hair colour for months and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even window-shopped. Granted, I’d been a little preoccupied with the serial killer in my life, but that was no excuse. The stakes had been raised and I was going to have to step up to the mark.

  Once Dave and his partner, Rick, had taken Tattoo Face off to the station, Mum and I continued our walk home. We didn’t speak and a lot of the time we were looking backwards, not forwards, but we made it home safely. Mum came in and collapsed on the couch, much to Cocoa’s delight.

  ‘That was intense,’ she said. ‘You need to get a gun.’

  ‘I had one,’ I said.

  ‘Well why the hell did you spray him with your perfume?’

  ‘I couldn’t find it.’

  She looked at my enormous handbag. ‘Say no more. What are you carrying?’

  ‘Glock.’

  ‘The one you were issued with?’

  I nodded my head.

  ‘It’s good to know you’re packing, even if you couldn’t find it.’

  ‘Ahh Mum,’ I said, ‘how do you know these things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘That I was issued with a Glock.’

  ‘Google.’

  ‘Oh.’ I
didn’t know what I was expecting, certainly not something so rational.

  She patted me on the arm. ‘Got to get my beauty sleep, got a date tomorrow night.’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to shoot you.’ She laughed and hopped up off the couch.

  ‘I’ve got a date as well,’ I said.

  ‘Roger?’

  ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to spray you in the face with my perfume.’

  She chuckled and then kissed me on the cheek. ‘Stay safe,’ she said as she left.

  Stay safe. I really wanted to. I was tired of being scared all the time. There was, however, a possibility we had just apprehended the killer.

  I felt a small measure of relief at the thought, and also at the knowledge that by the time I got to work I would have more information. But still I tossed and turned in my sleep, pursued by a shadow man thirsting for my blood, and I was glad when my alarm finally went off in the morning.

  12

  Some Days Aren’t Worth Getting Out Of Bed For

  I was surprised to see Trent out the back making a coffee when I got to work the next morning.

  ‘Drug dealing not working out for you?’ I said as I put my bag on my desk.

  ‘Cover got blown.’

  ‘By me?’ I squeaked.

  He let out a deep chuckle. ‘No. We made a bust last week, got one of the major players but my cover was blown. I’m filling in here till Roger’s back.’

  ‘Oh well congrats and commiserations,’ I said.

  ‘Been meaning to apologise for the shit you got into when you arrested me.’

  ‘Apologising for making a lousy drug dealer?’

  ‘No.’ He paused. ‘Well, it was unfair what happened.’

  Everyone kept saying that. Everyone except Ramy. And he was the only one whose opinion mattered.

  I shrugged a shoulder. ‘Just don’t do it again.’

  He snapped a salute. ‘Yes Maam.’

  Oh great, a smartass.

  I made myself a coffee and was surprised to find him sitting on the edge of my desk when I got back. He was so tall that the desk was almost uncomfortably short for him as a perch.