Pinkish-orange sodium vapor light strips details from the mural, and color, leaving only suggestions of flowers, gestures toward bees, the dark curl of the boteh over the shut-tight overhead door, and it blows out the brightness of the limousine turning the corner, leaving only a faintest blush to tinge the ungainly length of it slowing to a stop along the loading dock. The rear door pops open on jewel-toned neon and a thumping beat, a blazing fire, that’s getting brighter, don’t need nobody here that don’t believe in me. Gloria in shorts and a blank white T-shirt wrestles out her empty gown, hauling it over her arm as Melissa half-falling follows, and a chorus from within of byes and love yous and see you next weeks cut off by the closing door. Gloria slaps the roof. The limousine smoothly pulls away.
Up onto the loading dock, Gloria losing an armload of gown for every armload she gathers back up. “Need a hand?” says Melissa.
“I got it,” says Gloria, chin propped by the precarious pile.
Melissa opens a smaller door there by the large overhead. The warehouse within is quiet, dim, lit only here and there by this lamp still shining from a stall, that trouble light hung low, but mostly by the warmly golden glow of the great tub out in the middle of it all. Gloria turns about, chasing a trailing drape of skirt, turning about again at the sound of footsteps hastening close, “Chatelaine!” cries someone, Charlichhold, approaching. “Let us help you with your burden.”
“Don’t call me that,” mutters Gloria. “Wait a minute.” Melissa’s headed off toward the unlit stage, where the shadowy bulk of the Buggane’s sat, “Hey,” says Gloria, setting off after her. “Hey!” Melissa leans to take the weight of what the Buggane lightly offers, her tremendous greatsword in its bulky scabbard. “You didn’t have that with you?” Gloria says, an ell or more of her slithery gown trailing the concrete after her. “Why did you leave that here?”
“I was supposed to put it in my pocket?” says Melissa. “Strap it to my back and just, waltz through the gate?”
“What if somebody,” says Gloria, yanking her armful of gown away. Charlichhold’s trying to gather up the draggled skirts. “What if somebody went and pulled something? What were you gonna do, exactly, to keep me safe, without,” twisting to yank again, “without,” says Gloria, and then, blinking, blankly flat, “you weren’t there for that at all.”
Melissa shrugs, and a clink of the fittings about the scabbard’s throat.
Gloria shoves the pile of gown at Charlichhold, who scrambles to catch it. “Her majesty didn’t tell you to do a goddamn thing, did she.”
“If I came to you,” says Melissa, “if I said, hey, can I come out with you, and your friends, just to get out of here, for a night – would you have said yes?”
Gloria leans into an exasperated shrug, eyes wide, “Maybe!”
“Cleaned and mended by morning, ma’am,” says Charlichhold, peering about a satiny fold of the heap of gown in his arms, “as well as ever it was.”
“Whatever,” snaps Gloria, stomping away.
“Hey,” calls Melissa, “hey!” But she’s looking to the tub, where someone’s stepped up, blue robe and a great steel bowl. “You take what you need, right?” Hefting the scabbard up on her shoulder. “You really need that much?”
Past those murmurous, half-lit stalls, under and through the pitch-black arch, out into the stark fluorescence of the stairwell, up and up to the landing at the top. A brief hall, double doors to the right, to the left a corridor at this end and another at the other, paralleled, the both of them sparsely lit by brand new sconces, set in patchworks of wallpaper samples. Head down, Gloria heads down the one at the far end, but not too far along, to open a door on a room indifferently revealed by streetlight glaring through flower-shapes painted on the window-glass, a credenza there, and a high thick mattress laid upon the floor, piled with sheets and pillows rendered monochromatically pale, and the shadow rolling over in them, to sit up on an unseen elbow, “Gloria?” says Big Jim. She sits herself on the foot of the mattress, kicks off a shoe. “Did you,” he says, and a throat-clearing rumble, “have fun? with your friends?”
She leans down to pull off her other shoe. “Fun,” she says, “is for the bourgeois. I,” she sighs. Lies back on the pale sheets. “I think I’m having an idea.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, no,” she says, rolling over on her belly, shaking her black-haired head. “Not yet. Not yet,” pulling herself handful by handful of rumpled sheets toward him, “because,” she says, and an edge to her smile, “I am going to give you such a kiss,” closer still, “that you are gonna rise up and fuck the daylights out of me, and then we’ll go to sleep, and then we’ll wake up, and we’ll have ourselves some breakfast, and then, maybe, maybe I’ll tell you. If it’s ready.”
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Those sheets fall away from his furred belly, his bare hips. “I await my lady’s pleasure,” he says, and Gloria starts to giggle.
•
Starting awake, a hand to her temple, Jack on his back beside her, snoring into an upflung elbow.
Out of the tent a rustle of mesh and canvas-flap, grommet-clink on pole. Crouched, hands clenched in close-cropped grass, listening. Flubbery snort from Roy, a dozing pool of impossible moonlight. Jack’s snore tucked behind her, slowly gentle.
Silent to the wall of junk and up, black jeans, bralette, bare foot on cinderblock, fingers gripping sideways plastic crate to haul herself up top, laid flat, listening again. The schuss and whuff of distant traffic.
Twisting over and down, clatter abbreviated tink and click a thunk as something shifts, crackle of tarp she presses back against the junk-wall, shadowed, holding herself quite still. Once more listening. Waiting.
Further along the mound of junk, across grass lit indistinctly by a far-off blaze of parking-lot lights, a pale slice turns in the shadow of an abandoned sedan, opening out a white shirt-front that snaps into focus the negative space of a black black suit, scored by a skinny black tie, and she sighs, stands, steps out, “Hey,” she says, and he jumps, black sleeve yanked up, across, a hand to his heart, “Jesus,” he says. “Don’t do that.” And then, “You aren’t Johanna, are you.”
“That’s,” says Jo, “not, what it’s short for.”
“I, ah,” he says, “I’m Mr. Loudermilk, and I’m looking for Johanna Draper. She has something,” lifting his voice over the rising rumble of an approaching plane, “she has something she, ah, shouldn’t have? And I’m pretty sure,” looking to the mound of junk as the plane roars blinking overhead, and another shadow, enormous, shapeless, dislodges to swallow Mr. Loudermilk, crashing tangibly against the fender of that sedan as the plane dopplers away, struggle and jerk, a blow, a yelp, a brutal thump, “Hey!” Jo steps out onto the somewhat lighted grass, hands empty, ready, as the shadows resolve themselves, Mr. Loudermilk in his black suit held back against someone much larger, a swaddled bulk that barely registers his pushes and his strains, “Let me go!” slumping in that implacable grip. “I’m not gonna,” he says, looking to Jo, “hurt anybody, but he? Needs to let me go.”
“Oh, but Jasper’s not with Bambi,” says someone else. “He’s with me.”
Suddenly starkly lit, Mr. Loudermilk’s white shirt a-dazzle, Jasper’s matted hair a tangle over his scowl, and the man somehow in the midst of them all, sharp-honed smile beneath the brim of a big black hat. The flare fades, leaving the wire-wrapped hilt in Jo’s hand of a leanly tapered poignard, and Danny Moody bursts into laughter, “Lucinda!” he shouts, “you perfidious bitch.” A step toward Jo, her blade up, free hand by it, elbow a bit too high. “Neat trick,” says Moody, “but you forgot something.”
“Excuse me?” says Mr. Loudermilk, and a strangled yelp as Jasper shakes him, once.
“I would’ve sworn,” says Moody, “you swore a mighty oath never to do this kind of,” a gesture, for her crouch, the blade in her hand, “work, again. Not for them. Not for anybody.”
“If I could just?” says Mr. Loudermilk, and Jasper shakes him again, “How the fuck,” Jo’s saying, hands still up, that knife, “how is it you think you have any idea what I said.”
“But I was there?” says Moody. “With you, and King Long Gone, and dear old Daddy Hook?” Slipping a hand in the pocket of his surplus jacket. “Whatever. There’s another thing you forgot, which is what it is they say about knives,” and he pulls something out, “and gunfights. Bambi, I’m telling you,” pointing it at her, “you can’t leave something like this,” a stubby squared barrel, sprouted from his fist, “lying around where just anybody could think of it.”
“Honestly?” says Mr. Loudermilk. “If you would,” and then, peevishly, “stop that,” to Jasper. “Look. All this?” A futile wave from a pinioned hand. “This is Agile Saffron business. Whole different ops profile. Now. I don’t know where Dr. Uniform is,” looking about at them all, “but me? I’m on a milk run. So if you’ll just,” but Moody whips around, dragging the mouth of the pistol with him, and the flash, the flash is quick and bright enough to show them all again for an instant, the pop an echoless crack, an afterthought, and Mr. Loudermilk jerks once in the wake of it. “Oh,” he says, struggling to lift himself, sunglasses askew, “that wasn’t,” but he’s already shriveling away, black suit collapsing into itself with a mildly disquieting rustle and pop! Jasper, blinking, lowers his empty arms.
“Huh,” says Moody. Pistol still pointed where it had shot. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
“Danny,” says Jo, “you didn’t have to – ”
“Sorry,” he says, lifting his free hand, without looking away from what’s no longer there, “Jasper, but,” shifting the gun, just, “for this to work, you know,” he says, “we have to have a body.”
Another flash, lighting up Jasper’s scowl as it becomes astonishment. Another crack, too loud, too quick. Jasper sags against the fender, and the patter of the blood leaping from his chest to his swaddled lap, and the slowly oozing of a second overflowing pump, and then.
“You didn’t,” says Jo, and then, “why.”
“Okay!” shouts Moody, a matador’s whip away in the barely light, and Jasper slumped against the sedan. “Step three? Call the cops!” He lets the pistol drop to the grass between them, and lifts a hand to his ear. “Or maybe I already did?” Smiling, sharply, at the thready, distant siren that’s wailing louder, closer. “Be seeing you, Bambi.”
Jo sinks to her knees. The gun there flat and black before her, barrel of it not much longer than the trigger-guard, grip wound about with glossy tape, and just visible in the darkness letter-shapes that say Kel-Tec, stamped in the pebbled metal.