Gareth’s voice was almost inaudible as Loris’ fingers smoothed their way outward from his vertebrae. He was floating, but Kenny insisted on talking, so he talked. “It’s like a family reunion,” he said. “Look who’s around: Nicholas Cage, John Milius…”

“I’m just glad Talia Shire isn’t here,” Kenny said with an overacted shudder. “She gave me the creeps in the Godfather series.”

“The scary one is little Sofia. Won an Oscar for a goofball script and she isn’t even a stripper.”

“This is just a dude ranch for the starfucked,” Kenny pronounced darkly. “Put in a jillion quarters and get a ride on Nick Cage or Buck Henry or whoever. Take pictures home.”

Loris paused from tenderizing Gareth’s shoulders and looked at him reproachfully. “Why would you be so negative towards a business that pays your rent, Kenny?” He tried to avoid her, but she caught his eye. “It’s a beautiful artform when you see it from out here. It adds fun and wonder to our lives, so of course people are going to want a little piece of it for their mantelpiece, keep little autographs that connect them to the magic.”

Kenny stared at her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anybody defend Hollywood. How gauche could you get?

Loris turned her attention back to
mayancalendargirls.comGareth’s knotted trapezius but added, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ll get inside some day.”

Kenny stood up with effete dignity and stalked out of the gazebo where she’d set up her massage temple. But he did a drama queen turn and pointed dramatically to the dock on the creek. “Just don’t go fishing with anybody named Fredo.”

Winston sat on the rail of a rustic Meiji Meets Tarzan bridge, sharing a bowl with Nick Cage. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he said after a soulful exhale. “Guy like you, quirky, funny, offbeat. Moonstruck, Raising Arizona: just these righteous, unique films. Then they make you into an action hero with butch guns and blowing shit up.”

“It’s part of the process,” Cage shrugged, carefully blowing ash out of the bowl and lighting it again. “Career trajectory. Plus I get to buff up and impress chicks.”

Winston laughed and took back the stone Indian pipe for more inhalation therapy. “So if they have to make humorous hearthrobs like you and Banderas and Willis into Rambo clones, why do they take the genetic muscle guys like Arnie and Diesel and Ice Cube and turn them into wimps getting their asses kicked by kindergarden brats?”

“Career trajectory cut both ways, Grasshopper. If I do one more role with no shirt and killing a million guys I have to do one where I’m a pregnant househusband. The cinema gods have a harsh karma of their own.”

Winston nodded sagely, tamped the ash out into his hand and rubbed it onto the leg of his shorts. “Tell me this, then. Godfather III. You’re Sofia’s cousin in real life, right? And family of like half the rest of the cast. So why’d they get Garcia to play the nephew instead of you?”

“Well, it was working with a Who’s Who of industry greats and playing opposite Sofi, or making something where he’d wear a headband and two hundred pounds of firearms.” Cage stood up and stretched, drinking in the pristine valley below the bridge. “So we flipped and I won.”

Gareth’s daily sessions with oXo continued to frustrate him. He knelt on a cushion in a draped pavilion under a sunburst of bougainvillea and stared through those glassy pupils and saw facets of nothingness. He turned to Copper and Curtsy, who were watching him curiously, hoping for something dramatic in the way of kosmic trooth transmission, and snorted in exasperation.

“I’m just not used to talking to crystal heads.”

“I sure am,” Copper said from her hammock. “You should have tried communicating with this boyfriend I had in Bakersfield. My TweakGeek from hell.”

Gareth broke his gaze into the echoing profundities of oXo and looked at her. “Crystal? Oh, you mean, speed? A meth head? Why would you hang around somebody like that?”

Look who’s talking, Copper thought. You live and work with the pissiest little queer in captivity. She said, “How much do you really know about tweak? Effect on human beings?

“Uh, not much I guess. Kenny did it a few times when he couldn’t score coke. Ended up crawling around with his nose in the carpet.”

“Know how long an eightball lasts when you shoot it up? Like all day and half the night. Did you know it’ll keep your dick hard that whole time? And that it makes women horny, pliable and crazed. Not to mention multi-mega-orgasmic?”

“Okay, I didn’t know that.”

“So now you do. What was your question again?”

Curtsy stared at her, eyes wide. “Yikes, girl.”

Gareth suppressed a shudder and dropped a piece of embroidered Guatemalan cloth over oXo’s stare. “There,” he said, “You can hide your Mayan eyes.”

Whatever qualities had made Xchab apprehensive about Copper (her looks, her insinuating confidence, her foreign–even exotic–appearance, her talents, her attitude, her unabashed fuckability) were far surpassed by her take on Aphra. Here those qualities were amped up to a feral, carnivorous, gleaming sensuality that led the Mayan girl to regard her much as a rabbit would view a neighboring cobra. Even her skin. In Mexico, where white is ascendant over dark in a sort of racial caste system–thus dumping Xchab at almost the untouchable level–Copper’s milky complexion topped her dusky umber like an ace played on a three. But Aphra being darker yet didn’t drop her into the cellar: it elevated her to a status she’d never seen before. Uncharted, alien, a black hole through the Newtonian physics of Xchab’s dermal world. And her she was, looming a head taller, wet-shining naked, standing a half meter away. And smiling with sharp, white teeth.

Xchab was trapped in the bathroom of the still-somewhat-under-construction family units that Coppola himself had shown the girls to and bid them welcome. Which might have had something to do with Bannock proffering some sort of payment, or perhaps the earnest conversation he’d had with Town Hardley, but was probably just a measure of the man’s apparent generosity and boyish invitation to all things novel and beautiful.

None of which was at issue as she stood with her bare brown butt against the warm, wet amber tile and tried not to stare at Aphra from carmine-tipped toes to exploded dandelion hair. Much less the thrusting breasts, musky groin, and enveloping arms.

There had been no conversation at all. She shut off the water, turned for the towel, and was startled by Aphra standing there naked, fixing her with that hungry, commanding stare. When she stepped back against the wall, the negrona had followed her, and turned the warm water back on. Now she was soaping up a washrag.

Highly unaware of complications and roads less traveled in the sexual wilds, Xchab still had a very nervous feeling that something was happening that she would either not like one little bit or worse, might like a lot. She had to do or say something but couldn’t think of much to do against this anthracite amazon. So she said, “Please. I am already clean.”

Aphra gave a wolf grin and said, “And no sooner you do, it’s time to start getting all dirty again.”

She extended the sudsy washcloth to Xchab’s shoulders and did a surprisingly gentle mopping motion, watching the soapy water run down the smaller girl’s breast and drip from her nipple. Xchab opened her mouth to protest but just couldn’t think of what to say. The washcloth ran down the side of her left breast, across her tummy with a little digital dipsy-doo at her navel and ended up in a soft, but pressing, swipe across her almost hairless crotch.

“Yo, dark meat. Put down the candy and move away from the child.”

Xchab’s eyes darted past Aphra’s shoulder and she was humiliated to see Copper lounging in the doorway, still wearing the bikini bottom she’d been swimming in with Black and Milius and a couple of the paid conferees. Aphra squeezed the cloth out on her other shoulder and watched the milky water again trickle town to its nipple cascade. Then turned to Copper and said, “The more the merrier, red meat.”

Copper laughed and shook her head, “Nope, redheads are the Other White Meat. But look, why don’t you pick on somebody your own disposition? And weight class? And orientation?”

“Well, you put it like that…” Aphra turned to face her, spreading her legs, putting her fists on her hips, and squaring her shoulders back to hammock up the mass of fine titty. The effect was spoiled as Xchab bolted past her, almost knocking her off balance, threw a look of total confusion at Copper, and dashed past her out the door. Aphra called out, “Bye, ya, Maya. Looks like I gotta buy ya to try ya.”

Copper turned back, hooked her thumbs in the bikini bottom and said, “I think I was saying I’m kind of bi-curious.”

“Curious, huh?” Aphra snorted. “That what killed the pussy.”

“Yeah,” Copper continued. “I’m always curious why so many men hit on me and so few women. Don’t you like redheads?”

“Redheads?” Aphra guffawed. “Shit. You claimin’ colors here?”

“What, want me to flash my bush so you know I’m not cheating?”

Aphra waggled a noncommittal hand. “I could live with that.”

“Fair’s fair. I just wanted to see yours first, make sure you weren’t just passing.”

Aphra smiled and raised a single red-taloned finger to beckon her in under the water. “Careful,” she said. “Don’t want to get those pants wet.”

“Too late,” Copper said, sliding the bottoms off and back-kicking them against the wall. She nodded at the bar of lime soap on the rack and said, “Who gets to do the honors?”

“You offer your honor, I honor your offer,” Aphra said, reaching for the soap. “And all night long I be on her and off her.”

“Now that’s a script I can work with.”

Aphra spread her hands wide and curled her lip in a defiant snarl. “Come and get me, Copper.”

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Loris rose from the green water, slid upward naked and glistening like the storied blade. It was not so much dark around her as green. A crowding, hustling green. There was a dim light in the water below her and she knew she needed to return to that light. In fact, the thought made her feel soft and dizzy with anticipation. She continued to rise out of the dark water, hovering upward, water falling from her pointed toes now, making ripples the gold color of the light below. She floated sedately upward through veils of green.

It was vegetation: broad leaves and clambering vines of primordial jungle that broke the daylight up into shifting camouflage patterns of yellow and green shades. Like layered veils over the water below. The tangle fell past her eyes as she rose, an avalanche of seeking greenery trailing tendrils into the water at the bottom of the big natural well. She rose past more veils: green scrub, red-green streaked leaves of trees. She lifted slowly past the canopy, seeing only miles of more treetops in a circle around her, a horizon of jungle striving upward.

That horizon fell away as she continued her ascent, revealing the sea in the distance. Not that far, she thought. Not so far at all. She rose further, could make out the emerald necklace of cayes along the reef.
mayancalendargirls.comThen she was high enough to see the outer slopes of the reef, falling away like mountain foothills under the clear water. She was miles high by then, passing white wisps of cloud, brushing through one wispy cool wipe as she rose higher.

She could see the sweep of Caribbean coastline then, unmistakable. The inland cayes to the north, Guatemala’s coves to the south. She knew exactly where she was. She raised her hands above her head like a ballerina, linked her fingers together like a little girl at prayer. Then she fell.

Loris slid smoothly into consciousness as usual, white wisps on blue sifting before her eyes, then dissolving to a view of Bannock, lying on his back with his right arm stretched out as if reaching for her. She lay watching him, storing the dream away and scanning it in the light of her waking life, as she always did.

She’d been big on dreams since childhood, had made a cult of it for awhile there and was still a strong believer in their power and message. What she’d never believed in much was Men. And with plenty of reasons. Now she regarded the man who was currently sharing her dreams.

Not much to look at, but that had never meant much to her. A legitimate tough guy and she didn’t yet know if that was better or worse than the guys who pretended to be tough. But there was this: he had brought her here, where her dreams had beckoned her. He had brought oXo thousands of miles, perhaps to where he belonged. He seemed to respect and like oXo and didn’t seem to mind being a vehicle for the wayward skull, rather than trying to use it’s powers for his own gain. Well, other than the two hundred thousand. It would bear some thinking about.

She had the strong impression that Bannock was alone in the world, but that he wouldn’t mind changing that. She knew what that was like. He seemed like a very odd choice for the first man she could trust and believe in, but he might do.

She rolled softly onto his outstretched arm and without waking he curled it, drawing her to him. She moved her leg over his body and lay listening to his breath and breathing his scent. She wondered what he was dreaming.

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Francis Ford Coppola was the last one to walk out on the balcony of his Edenic retreat and gawk at the sleek white helicopter that was carefully working its way up the narrow valley and slipping in under the rain forest canopy to approach the lawn in front of the main lodge. He sized up the sexy frame of the 902, mayancalendargirls.coma man not without professional experience of military helicopters. Characteristically, he didn’t view the noisy intrusion of the chopper as some fresh hell barging into his lovingly created paradise, but as just one more invitation to view something weird with wonder.

The rest of the invitees to his film conference had different takes on it, though. The muffled chop of the rotor had busted up the afternoon seminar on independent script development, the conferees stumbling out into the blaze of mid-afternoon sun to squint at this rather flamboyant intruder.

Most of the paid attendees huddled together on the porch, or leaned over the lashed cane railing for a better view into the tinted windows. Nicholas Cage and Marty Bregman were joking about the chopper, John Milius calling out over the rising roar, “Hey, Francis, what is this? Apocalypto Now?”

Shane Black rejoined, “If they start shooting, better look around for Andy Garcia.”
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Bannock motioned for Loris to go around the corner of the house–which she ignored–and moved towards a stone stele that might offer a little cover it things got as messed-up as they often did when Navy helicopters show up without tickets.

Kenny and Gareth stood somewhat apart from the rest, a condition they had experienced–and despaired of–from the first. The collection of filmdom’s heavy hitters at the lodge had been more bemused than impressed by the entourage that Black had termed the “Jerque du Freak”. Bregman had been taken by Copper’s flame art, Cage had snuck off for a splif or two with Winston, and Coppola himself had expressed admiration for Xchab’s sheer Mayan-ness, but mostly they were seen as a road company publicity stunt. Loris was winning hearts, minds and musculature with her massage treatments, but nobody was taking the Burbank Bros. seriously and flaunting oXo did little to improve their shot at support. Kenny had been increasingly frantic as the first day of conference moved along; the helicopter was about to push him over the edge into babbling paranoia.

Winston turned his back to the propwash and lit a doobie.

Then the ship set down right on the front lawn of the main house, bouncing a tiny bit on its pontoons. A uniformed pilot opened his window and waved.

Silenced and nonplussed, the guests and speakers (and gypsy camp followers) watched Townsend jump out and look around, every bit the central casting action hero. He reached up to help a Diana Ross type out of the front door while a beautiful, bouncy blonde swarmed out the other side followed by a hunky Mayan kid. Then an Asian beauty, handed down from the cabin by her vaguely Asian retainer.

None of this did anything to unstun the watchers on the porch.

Gareth was first to speak, slapping Kenny on the arm and chiding, “I told you we should have brought a cameraman.”

Kenny returned a limpish slap and said, “And I told you we don’t have the money. FYI, it’s the blonde and Noble Savage from that dump in Tulum.”

“Oh, right, and the black babe. Christ, how’d I forget her?”

Coppola heard them from the deck above and leaned down, “You know these people?”

Gareth took a deep inner breath, shook ‘em and rolled ‘em. “The film I was trying to tell you about? That’s the cast.”

Kenny nearly fainted from the sheer audacity, but recovered quickly enough to add, “The rest of the cast. It’s multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-sexual. It’s… you know… The Yucatan Lives.”

Coppola looked back at the new arrivals. “Interesting.”

All right, Kenny thought. He thinks it’s interesting.

Oh shit, Gareth thought, anything but “interesting”.

Denny grabbed his hat as the copter lifted off again, doing a fancy backflip and blitzing away much faster since the pilot knew the route, and studied the group on the porch. Curtsy and MeiMei gave shy waves and smiles, Aphra cocked a hip.

Tuan recognized Coppola at once and tipped his sun hat in tribute. MeiMei took in Copper and Xchab and Loris, all looking pretty cinematic, and the Burbank Boyz, who looked genetically Hollywood. “What are they doing?” she asked Tuan, “Making a film here and now?”

Tuan looked around, said, “Do you see a camera?”

“No,” she replied quickly. “And nobody gets to see mine.”

“I gathered that. Well, shall we go mingle?”

“You bet your butt we mingle. I can’t believe I have a chance to meet the man who wrote ‘The Conversation’.”

Tuan gave her an amused sidelong look. “But what he really wants is to direct. It’s always weird seeing people like this in real life. He looks so…”

“So patriarchal?”

“So real.”

She turned and put on a supercilious expression. “Where have you been? Sorealism is like totally dead.”

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One’s moving away from you on a road that only leads one place, the other one you’ve been chasing for weeks is coming toward you. Which signal do you follow? Eenie, meenie, mo, catch a negress by the toe.

No decision at all, Aphra decided. She’d felt the slight buzz of her tracker and pulled it out for a look. Ought to keep the thing tucked in my thong, she thought, let that vibration do some good. She read the little touchscreen, frowning, then broke into a shit-scarfing grin. Her little sender was heading straight towards her, and at a really good rate of speed, sending steadily now, not the little dribbles it had doled out to her for day after hair-tearing day.

Almost as frustrating as trying to vet that ditzoid Curtsy on what happened to her raid. Goldilocks in the back seat now, you could almost smell her brain burning while she tried to put her junque back together. Or as together as she ever had it. And her pet MayaBoy just sitting there, staring out the window like he’d never been in a car before. She almost thought of Ganzo’s take on travel as “like a little boy”, but not quite: there was that solemn gravity about him. But pretty well just along for the ride.

All she really had was that the boat was long gone, there were pictures of the jade skull but God knew where they were, and that MeiMei was last seen being dragged off naked by some goons. Well, that little chinadoll could take care of herself.

And since the sender in the camera seemed to be coming out of the cold, she evidentially had. Unless somebody else had it now. In which case they would have to be spoken to. The slim Detonix .380 she’d brought incountry inside a lead-lined radio/clock had been under her seat all the way and she was almost wishing there would be somebody to shoot up. She was fed up with this whole gig. She took one more look at the screen, the green dot coming right toward the Chetumal lagoon, and grinned again. “Yeah, baby. Come on to Mama.”

The Navy chopper zoomed in low over the lagoon and hovered over the military pier for two minutes before skipping sideways to set down beside the municipal dock, where several fishermen gave it dirty looks and unappreciative hand gestures. Aphra stood at the edge of the dock, looking for all the world like a tourist, one hand in her stylish Biaggio purse–handy to the grip of the pistol and a few other devices she lumped into the “rotten surprises” category–the other holding up a little digital camera, taking pictures of the nifty little helicopter sitting on pontoons in the middle of a self-created storm like a tempest in a washing machine. She moved the camera away from her eye to admire her shot, thus scanning the read-out identifying its position in the Mexican armed forces and Jane’s abstracts… and a taint of DEA. Hmmph, she sniffed as she resumed “shooting” to conceal her face behind the camera: honkies in the woodpile.

The slick white MacDouglas popped back up and skittered sideways to land on the city pier. And she saw why it had hit the water first, the big, finned, black pod she’d seen between the floats was now revealed as a kayak, bobbing in the water with a guy paddling it in towards the boarding float. He had a hat brim to big to see his face, but looked Mexican. And she got a piece of the picture, right there. Her cute little transponder had been paddling south for three weeks! She just hated these third world scenes.

But wait, who’s crawling out of the helicopter now? Well, on the side toward her, some clown wearing a trench coat. Seriously, a trenchcoat in the tropics. And a Bogart hat to go with it. Now handing out a cute little señorita… whoa, there! What was her name? Yullia or something. Worked in the damn museum. Aphra was getting that feeling.

Looking under the aircraft, she could see a man’s legs on the other side, then a pair of female calves. Something familiar about them, too. Got a feeling…

Then the aircraft just hopped straight up in the air, but leaned towards her a little. She saw the pilot giving her the eye, and a thumbs-up of approval. So glad I pass your checklist, sucker. Then she looked down at the passengers and couldn’t decide whether to do some sitcom double-take or whip out the pistol. MeiMei fucking Chiang and Townsend fucking Hardley, standing there staring at her!

She pointed the camera and took advantage of the fact that it could actually take a picture when it wanted to. This was a keeper moment, for absolutely sure.

She wanted to hold a cool pose until her quarry and nemesis walked up to her, but she heard the door of the Bora fly open like there’d been a bomb inside and the pitter patter of feet running toward her. No need to make the obvious guess: Ms. Mayflower also started running toward her, and now both deserters from her crack commando team were yelling and squealing like sorority girls at homecoming.

But she was paying attention only to Townsend Hardley, stalking up the pier towards her like a gunslinger coming after the blackhat and not amused. She had her gun and whatnot, but Christ only knew what he was packing. Probably some button he could push and she’d get taken out by a hotty-seeking missile fired from an NSA death star. She stood and waited for him, while Lluvia and Denny’s eyes were ponging back and forth from the laughing/crying/hugging girls to the classic showdown poses of their mysterious coffeehouse chum and the Grace Jones lookalike over there. Who also drew the incurious gaze of Ganzo, sliding out of the car and taking it all in.

Not to mention Tuan, who had tied up the kayak and come up the ladder to see the two spies stop and eye each other with a palpable truculence. What went through his head was; Draw, podnah. He saw a simmer that was quite likely to get ugly and realized who Aphra must be. He looked at MeiMei, jerked his head toward the embattled beeatch in question, and got a confirmatory nod. Combined with a touch of trepidation. He knew she had the camera, snapped into one of his waterproof gadget boxes, in the little kangaroo pouch around her waist. And that she’d been pretty clear about not surrendering it to anybody at all. He walked over to the two snoops and tipped his floppy sunhat.

“Hi. I’m Tuan, but you can call me OB. Hope everything’s okay here?”

Town ignored him, but Aphra pulled her dagger-stare away and actually smiled at him. “Oh, yeah, the Flipster. I think I got it now. She made it back to you, you grabbed your canoe there and headed south. I’m not as clear on how you hitched a ride here, but we got time, right? Glad to see the Doc’s OK, by the way. We were worried about her.”

Tuan nodded empathetically and she could read his unspoken attitude even through the semi-Asian inscrutability. Along the lines of: Yeah, sure, you lying niggah ho who obviously had a bug on her all this time and is just interested in getting your hands on the jade. It was nice to be understood sometimes.

Meanwhile, the lying, etc. had been doing some fast thinking. Along the lines of: Gonna be a bitch getting into Belize with Curtsy not having identification and Ganzo, near as I can tell, not even having an identity. But here’s my main man with a chauffeured government helicopter. She looked back at Townsend, who was obviously pissed, hostile, and–whether he knew it or not–hurt. Kind of touching, actually. Despite all the weirdness, and him being on the wrong side of the sexual fence, she had a hard time not feeling a certain fondness for the guy. She looked him right in the eye, spread her hands in a disarming/apologetic way, and said, “Look, we should get along.”

He stared at her, apparently entertaining mixed emotions, and she motioned for him to walk beside her as she strolled towards the far side of the pier. He fought it out, then followed her. Whatever the hell else she was, she was still The Key.

She topped at the edge of the dock, peered down into the murky water. Said, “Hear me out, okay? I know where it is. The skull.”

She took in Town’s netural expression saw it wasn’t just a studied mask: he really didn’t know, did he? He had MeiMei, but didn’t know what it was all about. “What you’re after, right? What we’re both playing for.”

“If you say so.”

She smirked knowingly. “Fine, play it that way. But you got any questions, ask the good “Doctora” there, would she like to hook back up with the talking skull.”

Townsend turned on his heel, went and did just that. When he came back to Aphra he had to turn twice to motion MeiMei to wait where she was and not run after him.

“Okay. You know where it is.”

“That’s right. I got a trace on it.” She pulled out her receiver and held it up. “‘HomerBoy’ here’s all over it. And you didn’t get to sneak in and diddle this one.”

“Didn’t have to. I tumbled the one you’re holding. All cc direct to me.”

“Nice try, whiteboy. We all virgin on this end, dig. So you wanna play? Or you want me to go cop the real goodies on my own?”

Townsend seemed to have frozen up, running the parameters and trying to rule out his own feelings. She stepped closer to him, gave him a little of the eyes. “Listen here. She trusts me. Well, more than she trusts you, anyway. Maybe we can both get what the fuck we’re after and look good, huh? Or maybe one of us can get well and leave the other one SOL. All’s fair, and all that shamizzle. But why can’t we be buddies?”

She looked up at him, a portrait of inner conflict and incredulity. She laughed and tapped his upper arm with her open palm. “Look, I figured out you didn’t know about my mama and your daddy. So that’s all cool. Sorry to kick you out of bed. Oh, and I did the math.”

She left it hanging, but could see he knew what she meant.

“There’s almost no chance we’re related.”

“Great,” he finally said. “Peachy keen. I feel better already.”

“But look ahere. Maybe whoever put you on this knew about our folks? Didn’t happen to mention it to you?”

Townsend glared at her some more, then looked away down the lagoon. He seemed to suddenly unclench, looked back at her and said, “Oh, it’s even more humiliating than that. My old man says they probably picked me for my looks and my way with women.”

She stared at him and broke into a big, wide laugh. “Way with women? So much for their grade of intelligence. And you think that’s humiliating? Listen, I got looks and have my way with women. And the last thing I feel about it is humiliated.”

“Well good for you.”

Aphra waved it off, smiling at him earnestly. “I just think we could be friends. Who knows what sides we’ll be on for the next gig? Meanwhile, I got off on talking with you. We should do lunch.”

“You mean we can still be friends?”

“Oh, no.” She got it then, and almost felt like patting his cheek, giving him a hug. “I get it. Well, that’s extremely flattering. But it wouldn’t work out. We have some pretty big differences. I mean, you’re Baptist and I’m Rastafarian.”

She saw a trace of smile and stepped closer to him. “Let me tell you something else, sugar. I like you. And I liked you even when you were dicking me. Not a common occurrence. So maybe you can take a little ego from the fact that a stone cold dyke finds you attractive.”

“Whoopee. Can you send me a letter for my commendation file?” He stopped and looked down, kicked a scuzzy lead weight into the water. “But yeah. Buddies. Let’s do lunch. I’ll buy.”

She beamed at him, and meant it. “We’ll dutch it. I don’t have many men friends.” Don’t have many friends, period, come to that. “But first let’s scamper up there to the Godfather’s and see can we get to the bottom of this shit.”

He thought it over, then nodded, He stuck out his hand for a truce shake, but when she reached for it, he jerked his hand up and smoothed his hair.

She laughed and moved past him, towards the helicopter. “Too little, too late, homeboy. That copticopter got your hair so blown out, you might need to borrow my pick.”

The pilot had wound down the big Pratt Whitney turboshaft and stood beside the cockpit door, staring blissfully at this little gathering of international pulchritude. When Town asked him about heading for inland Belize he grinned and said, “Totally illegal and a violation of international law and airspace sovereignty. When do you want to leave?”

“As soon as I can herd all these cats. Mind lifting us all?”

“Of course not, I can’t stand being in small spaces packed full of beautiful women.” He seemed reluctant to add, “But we won’t all fit. I’d suggest leaving all the men here.”

“Don’t count me,” Denny said. “I got paid as soon as Ms. Chiang made that phone call.”

He moved off towards the land end of the dock, where a fairly large crowd had gathered; fishermen scowling, joggers ogling, and tourists snapping pictures. Aphra noted the way Lluvia had brightened when he said he wasn’t leaving (and that he was getting paid) and the way she held his elbow as they said adios and walked away. When the Mexican girl passed her she winked broadly and said, “Did I say you could do better than that Luis fool, or didn’t I?”

She slinked up to the helicopter, whose rotors were starting a slow, lazy rotation, and nodded at Tuan when he offered her a hand into the cabin. He’d heard most of Curtsy’s blurted and fragmentary tale and smiled as he handed her up over the pontoons to the deck. “Why are you the only one of these Angels that doesn’t show up naked?”

“Oh, she does naked when it suits her,” Townsend griped from inside. “She’s just not as upfront about it.”

The pilot looked over his shoulder and got a better load of Aphra. “Does she want to sit up front?” he asked innocently. “Much better view.”

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