Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Devon Marshall. All rights reserved worldwide.

No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

About The Author

Devon Marshall is the author of ‘The Vampires of Hollywood’ series, published by Untreed Reads E-books, and of various short stories and articles.

More information can be found at http://devonmarshallwrites.weebly.com

Cover image Ó SergeyPeterman@bigstock.com 

The Lives and Loves of The Modern Goddess

“ Let me tell you about Erika.

Erika was a goddess.

A living, breathing, modern-day goddess, and I would have done anything for her.

Anything.”

This is the story of the beautiful, mysterious, and addictive Erika, and four of the people whose lives she enters and irrevocably changes: Marcie, the disgraced cop whose troubles with women culminate in a deadly encounter with Erika; Sloane, the son of a Mob enforcer, who kills for the love of Erika; Carl, the obsessive bounty hunter, who refuses to give up looking for Erika; and Kris, who lives in the shadow of her overbearing mother until her chance meeting with Erika aboard a sinking cruise ship. As Erika moves through the lives of these people, each will come to see a part of themselves mirrored in the modern-day goddess.

Table of Contents

Copyright

About The Author

1.  MARCIE

2.  SLOANE

3.  CARL

4.  KRIS

1.
MARCIE

Everything about Ellie Pierce had been night without the promise of dawn - all darkness and no visible light anywhere. And that was precisely what made her so attractive to someone like me. Even when it had all begun to head straight to hell in a handcart, I resisted letting go of that wild ride. I was still stubbornly resisting when Niemeyer called me into the big-ass corner-of-the-building office that she occupied because Niemeyer was The Boss and bosses always get the best offices. Niemeyer called me in for the inevitable come-to-Jesus meeting. She sat behind a desk - Niemeyer, not Jesus - just a bit smaller than a football field, and she regarded me over the tips of fingers that formed a perfect steeple. The gesture reminded me of that creepy childhood rhyme: “ Here is the steeple, here is the church, and here are the people inside all crushed to death when the roof and the steeple fall in on their fucking heads.”

Niemeyer started with:  “ Goddamn it, Marcie! Ellie Pierce is a fuckup careening towards a tragedy. You know that. I know you know that. You have got to be at least that smart?”

In fact, I did know it. But as I was listening to Niemeyer’s pitch, all I could think about was how much the carpet at my feet looked like woven vomit. I sure as hell wasn’t giving any weight to her words of wisdom, or warning, or whatever they were. Even then, I still didn’t want to admit that just maybe it had been a thing on the wrong side of dumb getting involved with Ellie Pierce. What I’d done instead, I’d stared at that horrible carpet, and just chewed on my own anger and humiliation, until Niemeyer sighed and told me to please beat it out of her sight. The boss needed time to figure out what to do about…it. ‘It’ being Ellie’s Big Adventure that turned into My Biggest Mistake. I should never have tried to cover up what happened to the senator’s daughter - I should never have imagined the senator’s daughter didn’t know what the fuck Ellie was trying to do. Thinking about it gave my guts a good twist. So I didn’t think about it. I beat it like the boss told me to.

Unfortunately for all of us, before Niemeyer could figure out what to do to make it go away, events took on a momentum of their own and before anyone knew anything else, it was too late for doing anything other than duck and cover.

And so, as part of my ducking and covering, there I was barreling down a dark highway after midnight on a weekday, in a tomato-red Dodge Ram 3500 acquired from a guy who wouldn’t be using it for fifteen-to-life. The rainstorm to end them all was teeming down, and great silvery swathes of water planed on either side of the Dodge as I floored it dangerously. Water sluiced down the windshield faster than the wipers could keep up with, and ran off the hood to make a fine misty spray in the powerful headlights.  I was headed to someplace I didn’t know where. As I drove, I thought pointlessly self-flagellating thoughts, half-hearing the rain beating on the roof of the truck, wondering not for the first time what gene I’d inherited caused me to be so dumb around women? God knew it had to be inherited: my father had been a sucker for a good pair of legs and some nice tits, and my mother was exactly the kind of good-looking slap-ass crazy bitch that I now seemed unable to resist. My father was a cop, too, and he also went off the rails because of women - well, women, booze, pills, and greed for kickbacks in his case. He ended his life by blowing his brains out in a motel room, with a bunch of criminal charges and prison time hanging over him. My mother found religion after that. She was still slap-ass crazy, but she now had God and the local preacher to tell her that her craziness was a mark of sanctity. 

About forty miles back I’d blown through a one-stoplight town. Didn’t see much of it, didn’t want to see any more of it. I saw enough to assure me the place was a decrepit, half-abandoned, one-time industrial pesthole and that it probably didn’t have a single establishment in which you’d want to risk eating. Up ahead on my right, through the rainy murk, I spotted a blurry bright glow - neon lights signaling a little oasis of warmth and dry and humanity right smack in the middle of no-place. A roadside diner. Just seeing the place made me realize how hungry I was. I started to slow down, ready to make the turn-off.

A cop car, roof-rack lit up like Christmas and siren howling, emerged out of the darkness and rain, and blew past me going the other way, headed back toward the ragged edge of the town limits. Probably on their way to break up a bar-fight between a couple unemployed and pissed a-plenty good ole local boys. Typical Friday night in Nowhereville, USA. The cop car was the only traffic besides myself that I’d seen since passing through the decrepit little town, like all the traffic had just disappeared into another dimension, or maybe people saw the place, gave up, and headed back the other way.

I turned off the highway into the diner forecourt. The place was called Ma’s Eats & Gas. On closer inspection I could see the unlit outline of the missing ‘L’ that would’ve made it Mal’s Eats & Gas. Either way, it worked. Ma’s was as unprepossessing as its name suggested, but big enough to handle all the trucks and station wagons you could shake a gear stick at. There was a two-pump gas station attached to the diner, probably one of the last non-chain gas stations along this stretch of highway. The diner itself was a one-storey redbrick building with a flat roof, big panes of glass along the front wall, and that neon sign above the door, curly blue letters winking and fizzing. The whole thing looked like it had wandered out of the 1950s and got lost in the 21st century. I fell in love with it on sight. I parked at the end of a row of vehicles, as close as I could get to the diner’s entrance without driving the truck all the way inside, and killed the engine. Then I spent a moment gathering the small amount of my personal shit together, reached up and behind my head to flip the hood of my sweater, a grayish-green thing with “Hi CSI” and a great big fingerprint emblazoned on it, faded and saggy now from being worn and tossed in the laundry, worn and tossed in the laundry. Ellie had bought it for me because I was a big fan of the TV show, and well, given my job…It had all been A Big Joke to Ellie. Yeah. Ha ha, who’s laughing now? Not fucking me. Not Ellie either. And certainly not Niemeyer.

Out of the truck, I made a run for the entrance, and barged through the door, hearing a bell chime above my head as I did so. Real-world warmth suffused my cheeks and chin, and took away the freezing sting of rain. Clouds of steam puffed from my wet clothing. A warm and fuzzy sensation tickled my insides at the welcoming sound of the bell and the warm and clean and inviting sight of the brightly lit interior. A Wurlitzer jukebox stood along one wall, squeezed between two rows of booths with red leather banquettes. The jukebox was silent for the moment, but it was lit up, inviting someone to come play something. I cast it a sidelong glance as I walked up to a long service counter. Maybe I’d get a handful of dimes from the waitress, put some tunes on. Just pray the thing wasn’t stocked with Jimmy Rogers and Patsy Cline and nothing else. Last thing I felt like right now was listening to how someone’s gal had left, their dog died, and the entire sheriffs department was after them for a crime they didn’t commit. Some things just hit too damn close to home. More booths and red leather banquettes ran the length of the front wall and little round tables with red leather-topped stools were dotted around the middle of the floor. It was all a little slice of Homespun, USA, yessir. The smells of coffee that’d been percolating for twelve hours and frying cholesterol from the kitchen in back, punched me in the nose and the gut simultaneously, and reminded me that I’d been driving since the day was young and had last eaten about that time too.

Despite the row of vehicles parked outside, the place was nearly deserted, save for one old geezer sat on a revolving red leather-topped chrome-legged stool at the counter, his scraggly ass in a pair of workingman’s jeans that hung half off his narrow hips. He was hunched over a cup of coffee, Coors gimme-cap tilted back on his grey head, lumber jacket unbuttoned, scuffed and dirty work boots that looked like they had actually seen work, propped on a chrome bar ran the length of the counter. He didn’t even turn his head as I walked up and took a stool at a respectful distance from him.

A lone waitress moved toward me behind the counter. Even she was American Classic. On the ungenerous side of fifty, hair a shade of red not known in nature and done up in a beehive to rival that gal used to date Mick Jagger - I forget her name, assuming I ever knew it. Red wore a powder blue uniform had her name stitched on the left breast. I couldn’t quite make out the fancy script, it was stretched kinda tight and distorted across a frame already headed down that slide into middle-aged plumpness, and I didn’t want to start squinting too hard, get off on the wrong foot with someone could spit in your food if she thought you were being rude. She turned to me with a smile that looked world-weary but not unfriendly, started to ask  “ What can I get you…” and then she got a look at my lanky six-one frame and my rather flat-chested square-jawed appearance, and I could see the indecision ticking behind her eyes. That’s okay. I get ‘sir’d’ quite a bit in public places. Red took the safe option, tacking on a completely generic ‘hon’ to the end of her sentence. I liked her for that. She also had nice honey-brown eyes. Too bad the rest of her face was knee-deep in makeup. No telling whether it was nice or nasty.

I said:  “ Coffee would be good, please.”

Red moved away again to the other end of the counter to pour my coffee. She picked up a bored-sounding conversation with Old Geezer, like it was some routine conversation they had a version of every night. I looked around the place again and could almost imagine it full of hip teenagers - boys in red leather jackets with their hair combed into slick quiffs, girls in pastel skirts and tight sweaters. Maybe there’d be a local cop slumped in a corner booth, shoveling apple pie into his mouth and filling out the racing page, a weary blind eye turned to the teens. The Big Bopper would be loud on the jukebox. Conversations would be all about Elvis and Jimmy Dean. Not that I had a hankering for the ‘fifties or anything, you understand. I just could picture it, was all.

“ You like something to eat with that, hon?”

I pulled my attention back into the present, the Big Bopper and the girls in their pastel skirts fading abruptly from my mind’s eye as I smiled easily at Red and asked what was the special of the day? 

“ Meatloaf,” she told me. A corner of her lips ticked upwards in what I guessed was her weary version of a wry smile and she added:  “ It’s always meatloaf.”

“ Then I guess I’ll have meatloaf,” I told her.

Whilst I waited for my food to be got together by an unseen whistling cook in back, my thoughts turned back to Ellie Pierce, the fuckup careening towards a tragedy. Not that my thoughts ever really got far from Ellie Pierce. Had it been love? Or had it simply been lust for a killer body and slap-ass crazy, that irresistible combination scrambled my brains every time? Either way, Ellie had been a place where logic and peace of mind went to die. Every time I thought the craziness had found a plateau, that ever determined ole crazy found another ledge to climb higher on. By the time I realized how downright fucking insane things had got, the wheels had already come off and the whole shebang was skidding to a loud and undignified stop, and I didn’t know come-here from get-away about my own mind when it came to my feelings about Ellie. But I did know I was knee-deep in shit and bother that was all Ellie’s goddamned doing, and which Niemeyer had tried to warn me about. Only I hadn’t listened to Niemeyer. For a long time I had told myself that I got involved in crazy situations, with crazy people, because I didn’t want to live the life of stifling banality that most people do. But that was self-deluding bullshit. Whatever my reasons for involving myself with crazy people and their crazy situations, it wasn’t because I craved excitement. I could’ve taken up extreme sports for that. Truth was, I just liked dancing over the abyss. And if I could find a good-looking partner to dance with, I liked it all the better.

Niemeyer extricated me from the wreckage of the Ellie situation. Ellie was already beyond help by that time, not that Niemeyer would’ve helped her anyway. After that senator’s daughter thing, Ellie’s fate was all but sealed in Niemeyer’s eyes. The boss had shaken her head after she’d told me to get as far from here as possible, don’t ask, don’t look back - and for fuck’s sake, don’t ever tell. Her eyes electric with anger, she’d added:  “ I don’t even know why I’m hauling your worthless ass outta this fire, Marcie. Ain’t like I’ve ever really liked you.”

“ Then I guess you’re just a real humanitarian,” I had said, in no mood to fight or even care by then.

“ There you go, hon.”

The present inserted itself once more into my world. Red put a huge plate of food down in front of me. There was meatloaf and gravy, and some kind of mushy green stuff could’ve been creamed spinach or really over-boiled cabbage. Red added a complimentary glass of water , then gave me another of those smiles from the corners of her lips.  “ I put a little extra on there. On the house. You look like you could do with it.” 

I started to nod thanks. Then I really looked at what was on the plate, and felt some of the saliva dry up in my mouth. The nod came to a slow stop. Still, hunger drove me to stab my fork gamely into a shapeless lump of grey matter I vaguely suspected of being meatloaf lurking beneath the noisome gravy. It took a bit of pushing before the lump yielded a piece of itself and the whole time I was half-expecting the tines of the fork to break off in it. I brought the lump of food to my mouth, forced it between my reluctant lips, and began chewing on it. Not much taste - be thankful for small mercies - but getting the rubbery mass to actually go down was a whole other battle. I entered into a brief but bitterly fought skirmish with my throat, which I ultimately won. But it was a hollow victory. The lump of meatloaf thudded into my stomach and just sat there where it actively gloated until it could make its reappearance later in the form of some very bad heartburn.

The bell chimed above the door again as someone else entered. My, but the place was getting busy tonight! Rain and freezing air blew in the open door. Red and Old Geezer didn’t react but I swiveled my head around, an instinctive reaction, hand not holding the fork coming off the counter and dropping automatically to my hip before I remembered what it was reaching for was no longer there, just an old habit dying hard. I put the hand back on the counter, and gave my undivided attention to the person had just come in.

She was average height, but she carried it well - that was the first thing I noticed. I’m an economy-sized package myself, so I tend to notice height first of all. I don’t care for small people. Sorry, shoot me for being prejudiced. It won’t change a thing. I just don’t like ’em. She was slim, too, had a kind of tomboyish build but you still knew she was all female. Dark chestnut hair, shoulder-length, and gently curly. She was dressed in the tightest pair of blue jeans must ever have been manufactured. Looked like they’d been sprayed on out of a can. A red leather jacket, half-unzipped, tan leather desert boots that looked new, not like they’d seen much work in the outdoors, but those jeans - oh man! They hugged her hips like a lover. When she turned her head, I saw that she had luminous green eyes and alabaster skin, with a cute button nose and a smattering of freckles. Beautiful, in a way that made your eyes hurt just to look at it, but hurt in a way that you could probably stand for a long time. She could’ve stepped off the pages of any 1950’s teen mag, the latest all-American goddess to grace the silver screen. Right down to the red leather jacket. I blinked because I was sure it was an illusion, but she was still there when I opened my eyes.

I was staring, whether it would hurt my eyes or not, couldn’t help it nor stop it. The Goddess didn’t seem to have noticed my staring, however. A gust of wind spattered rain hard against the window behind her, like a fistful of grit thrown by a malicious child, and she glanced sharply over her shoulder at the sound, a little tension entering her posture but only for a moment. Then The Goddess shook the rain from her hair, and her shoulders, and with it she seemed to shake off whatever had spooked her. She walked up to the counter without so much as a sideways glance at either me or Old Geezer, cool self-possession now radiating from her.

“ I’d like some coffee, please.”

Low voice, cultured, trace of a Deep South accent which was kind of interesting. I thought maybe Georgia, or thereabouts. Up close you could appreciate the fine cheekbones and the perfect cupid’s bow of her lips, the slight almond shape of her eyes. I made her for being younger than me. Ellie had been younger than me, too. That’d been another of Niemeyer’s warnings upon our not-so-sweet parting. She told me to: “ Stay the hell away from the young stuff, it’s goddamn dangerous. Next one could be the death of you.”

I thought about that - about young women and death - and it led me to thinking about how my eyes were bone-dry ( no pun intended ) when I’d knelt down at Ellie’s grave after the funeral was over and everyone else had gone . I’d stayed there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, kneeling on the ground, pants getting filthy unnoticed, staring sightlessly at the carved white slab of marble marked her final resting place. My eyes were devoid of moisture, my heart devoid of emotions, but my mind had positively fucking churned with thoughts. The flowers I’d brought were held loosely in my hands, their heads all a-droop, stalks warm and bent. I’d knelt there, clutching those flowers, and wondered after a while why I was there at all? Then the low grey sky had been threatening rain all that day, finally opened up and poured forth an ocean of water. Cold, stinging, it had fallen on my exposed head and shoulders, quickly plastering my hair to my scalp. Droplets fell from my hair into my face, tumbled from brow to nose and cascaded down my cheeks like substitute tears. Within moments the black suit I’d borrowed for the occasion was soaked through and clung, cold and unpleasant, to my skin. The rain soaked into the freshly dug earth around the grave and brought out a pungent loamy smell that made me want to sneeze. The damn flowers, bedraggled and battered into submission, dangled loosely in my cupped hands, and I looked down at them, trying to place that in some meaningful context. It had to possess some meaning, right? The goddamned heavens opening up like that when I couldn’t seem to cry for Ellie, so the heavens were doing it for me.

Or maybe it had just been shitty weather.

Red fetched coffee for The Goddess, gave her a polite nod but no words, just a couple wondering glances as she poured. I would’ve bet the farm and all the holdings that Ma’s didn’t often attract customers of this caliber. So naturally, Red might wonder where this one dropped in from. The Goddess perched her ass - shapely even from my sideways perspective - on a stool, and she leaned forward with her forearms on the counter, and sipped at the coffee. An ice princess, oblivious to the adoring gazes of the commoners around her. I forked tasteless rubbery food mechanically into my mouth, needing nourishment even if the form it came in was probably mildly toxic, eyes slanted to one side as I considered the possibilities. And the whole time I was trying not to hear those words of warning from Niemeyer. What the fuck did Niemeyer know anyway? Ellie wasn’t the rule, Ellie was the exception to every rule that ever got laid down. That’s what I told myself anyway. It was something to get me through most nights. Maybe it would get me through this one, too.

After a few more sips of coffee and staring at the wall behind the counter, The Goddess put down her cup, and rose from her stool, walked over to the jukebox. I discreetly swiveled a little way to the right to get an eyeful of the rear view. The tight jeans clung to her buttocks in a way made poetry in motion out of her ass. Truly, something like that oughtn’t to be allowed out in public without an armed escort. I kept watching out of the corners of my eyes - another old habit of mine that was dying hard, being a watcher - as she took a cell phone from the pocket of her Jimmy Dean jacket and frowned prettily at the glowing screen. I figured someone she expected to call, hadn’t called. The pretty frown gave way to a pretty sigh as The Goddess tucked the phone away in its pocket again, snug against her right hip. I bet she did everything prettily. Well, except the things she’d do dirtily. Like all good ice princesses, The Goddess would only be cold until you got her underwear off, and then she could smoke holes in steel. The thought made me smile out loud a little. Just sitting here watching her ass move in those jeans, I had some smoking thoughts of my own going on.

She leaned over the jukebox, forearms planted along the top, sleeves rolled to the elbows, intent on making her choice of tunes. The movement caused her jeans to pull taut across her buttocks, making a work of art out of poetry. I sighed silently. I also pushed the plate of barely-eaten food away, no longer hungry, or not for food anyway. I swigged the dregs of my coffee to rinse the unwholesome taste of the lumpy meatloaf out of my mouth. The Goddess’ first jukebox choice fired out, not too soft that you had to strain to hear it, not too loud that it intruded on the conversation either. It took me a little by surprise that she would choose a jazz number since I’d had her pegged for a folk music type. Of course, you already know that my judgment is less than stellar when it comes to all things women. Shit, I could almost hear Niemeyer’s half-hysterical laughter.

Which reminded me of another pearl of wisdom from the harshly truthful lips of Niemeyer:  “ Your whole criteria for a woman, Marcie? Does she have a pulse and a good body? Not necessarily in that order.”

Harsh, yes. True, also yes.

The Goddess walked back to her stool, perched her shapely ass there, and resumed drinking her coffee and staring at the wall. Her face was filled with a mixture of consternation and vulnerability which - put with the gorgeous face and the killer body - was something I had the hardest time resisting. It should’ve triggered my get-the-fuck-outta-here alarm, would’ve done so in any normal soul, but in me it tripped something different entirely. Niemeyer would’ve understood why I didn’t just get in my brand-new tomato-red truck and drive away. She wouldn’t have liked it, but she would’ve got it. I asked for a refill on the coffee instead and settled in at the counter, elbows planted, and let my eyes cut left every few seconds. My mind was feverishly dreaming up scenarios, witty and charming ways to introduce myself to The Goddess, my heart bumping against my ribs, and a new warmth spreading outwards from the pit of my stomach that had nothing to do with the meatloaf still sitting down there.

I thought again of Niemeyer who, after critiquing my shallow predilection for a good female body, had told me:  “ So you understand why I’m doing this for you, right? Sticking my own goddamned neck out for you. City’s gonna be all over this mess like white on rice, and your name is gonna be at the centre of the shit-storm erupts from it. I don’t care for that situation. You know too damn much, and not just about that whole Ellie Pierce debacle either. So I’m helping you to get out from under in order to help myself. And you’re gonna accept that help. Otherwise I’ll find a way to throw you to the wolves. And I’ll sit there with a butter-wouldn’t-melt look while your ass gets eaten alive. You hearing me?”

Oh, I heard alright. And realizing I had run out of options, I obeyed when Niemeyer told me to get the fuck out. Now here I was, contemplating doing all over again the very thing had got me into this fine mess in the first place, like I hadn’t learned shit at all from the Ellie Pierce Experience. But then again, who said The Goddess in the red leather jacket had to be another Ellie Pierce? I sipped my coffee, fast going lukewarm despite the refill. I could picture Niemeyer shaking her head in despair, could hear her sneering about how I was kidding myself if I thought that package over there wouldn’t just be so another Ellie Pierce. Trying to take some advice from Niemeyer for once, I told myself that far as The Goddess was concerned, I no more existed for her than Red or Old Geezer or the nameless, faceless chef clanging pots and whistling in the kitchen. She was off somewhere in her own private universe where the air was too rare for the likes of me to breathe. I told myself that, and to let it the fuck go.

Only it wasn’t working, all that trying to take Niemeyer’s advice. It wasn’t working because I was hooked. Had been from the moment The Goddess walked in. Of all the joints in all the world...  

Then The Goddess put down her coffee cup, and she leaned forward, addressed a question to Red in a voice loud enough to carry down the counter to me:  “ Excuse me, Miss? Where’s the restroom?”

Red blinked and pointed, in a hesitant kind of way, like she was either unused to being asked where the restroom was, or being called ‘Miss’. The Goddess smiled as she stood, and edged around the stool, not apparently in any hurry. As she turned, her gaze skidded off mine for the first time. We made eye contact made for less time than it took to breathe out but it was long enough to convey her message loud and clear: come get me. So much for her not even noticing that I existed. She had noticed me, for sure, and probably for all the wrong reasons.

And oh - what a very, very bad idea it was that I go after her. Yet I couldn’t think of anything I would like to do more right now. My skin was already heating up, like the blood running beneath it had just turned to liquid fire. A sensation like hundreds of tiny, exquisitely sharp needles danced across my lower back and hips. I watched The Goddess walk in the direction Red’s finger had pointed, and disappear through a door marked ‘Restrooms’ that a bind man hanging wallpaper could’ve found without directions. Of course, she hadn’t needed the directions either: she’d been giving me a message. The soft whoosh of the door closing behind her marked a turning point in my life, one at which I could get the fuck out now, or never. I imagined seeing a big sign at the side of a dark highway - Keep Going Straight For Hell. I should take the first exit, boogie on outta there, but for some reason I didn’t want to think about, all I really wanted to do was keep on truckin’ forward, right into the gaping maw of Hell. Just for the hell of it, so to speak. Digging into my jeans pocket, I brought out a handful of bills, more than enough to cover the meatloaf and coffee with a little bit leftover for a tip. Waitressing wasn’t an easy job and Red hadn’t spat in the food, so why not tip her? Come to think of it, the food might’ve tasted better if she had spat in it.

As I got up, I caught Red’s eye. Something both wistful and uneasy in the woman’s expression told me that she - with a few decades shaved off and a few pounds shed - might’ve understood better what I was about to do, but that right here and right now she thought me and The Goddess were trouble on roller skates. She didn’t apparently want to get in the middle of anything could complicate her life, however, evidenced by the way she pointed with her chins toward the rear of the diner.  “ You know, I guess it could be time for my smoke break,” she said.

“ Guess so,” I agreed.  “ Have a nice smoke.”

I walked across the floor, past the jukebox which was playing something country now, and I straight-armed the door marked ‘Restrooms’. I stepped through, aware I was also stepping over a figurative line, and then I was in a short corridor with green tiled walls and floor, and I put that line way far behind me. Again. A mop and bucket were propped up in the far corner of the corridor. Two doors lined up on the left, the women’s and the men’s restrooms respectively. I turned unhesitatingly to the first door, into an over-lit white-tiled echo chamber, the door banging off the wall behind, loud and sudden. A row of stalls stood to my left, a row of sinks with a half-length wall mirror above those to my right, and some hand dryers and paper towel and condom dispensers straight ahead. Place smelled like all public restrooms did - like piss and disinfectant. It was clean enough though. I wondered if Red did the cleaning, or whether some immigrant Mexican woman came in around at dawn every day and mopped and buffed and emptied and replaced so that white ladies could do their business without being offended by the detritus of their own bodies. The Goddess was over by the sinks, eyeing her reflection in the mirror there, touching up her hair in that jabbing-at-it-with-two-fingers way women do and which I have never seen make the slightest difference to rain-bedraggled or windblown hair. The slamming of the door made her green eyes snap to the side. She caught my reflection looming in the mirror glass. I was staring at her so she couldn’t have got anything but the right idea about the wrong things I was thinking.

“ Hey,” she remarked. A little crook of a smile tugged at a corner of those exquisite lips. She was a cool one, no mistake. I was liking her more and more.

“ Uhn-huhn,” I responded noncommittally. I walked up to the next sink but one from her, turned the faucets on, and began the little ritual of washing my hands for something to do that wouldn’t seem too threatening. The sudden proximity of her, the catching of her scent - a delicate blend of jasmine and something fruity overlaid with the warm smell of wet leather - set off a craving that itched in every cell of my being. Or maybe, I reflected, I was inventing an itch just to have something to scratch? I tilted an eyebrow at the mirror glass.  “ Hell of a night, whatcha think?”

“ So far, but it could always improve,” she responded. She meet my eyes fully for the first time, letting me really see the luminous green color of her irises. Long dark lashes swept her high cheekbones as she blinked rapidly.

“ Do I know you?” she inquired.

I tilted my head into a question mark, smiled a little to take the edge off a raw thought had just popped into my head. Yeah, she knew me, just like I knew her. We were kindred spirits.  “ I’d remember you if we’d met before, even if you didn’t remember me so well,” I told her.

That got her delicate, pale pink lips curling upwards and those fine eyebrows dancing a quick jig.  “ Okay. Do I want to know you?” she asked shrewdly.

“ Well now, that would depend,” I replied.  “ On whether or not you want to know someone will likely not bring you much good but they will bring you about as much bad luck and trouble as you can handle.”

The fine eyebrows jigged a little more.  “ That’s…honest of you,” she said.

I shrugged, and turned the faucet off. I shook my hands over the sink, sending little glistening droplets of water flying hither and thon.  “ I figure you’re a grown-up, you can take it,” I said. I walked over to the paper towel dispenser, yanked a couple free to dry my hands with. The Goddess kept leaning on the sink counter and watching in the mirror. She had one hip cocked, and her head tilted to the left. She was one fine piece of ass. And no doubt as dangerous as every other fine piece of ass I’d ever involved myself with.

She said:  “ I need a ride.”

I didn’t even blink.  “ I can do that. Any place in particular that you want to go?”

“ I, uh, left in a bit of a hurry tonight. Didn’t really stop to think about where I was headed.” She dropped her gaze briefly, bit down on her lower lip, bringing a rush of blood and color to it that fascinated me in a terrible, fatal sort of way. I dropped the damp towels into a wire waste basket beneath the dryer, walked back to the sinks. I stood there facing her, waiting, not rushing her into anything, just letting her volunteer it all. She said:  “ I kind of had a disagreement with someone tonight and I stormed out. Hitched a ride as far as here.”

I nodded again.  “ That who you were expecting to call you?”

“ Yes. Guess they don’t want to talk to me, huh?”

I shook my head.  “ Guess not. You don’t mind my saying so, their loss is my gain, so pardon me if my heart doesn’t bleed about it.”

And The Goddess smiled. That one little facial gesture, a simple upturning of the lips and crinkling of the eyes, it gave birth to a host of new sensations in me, and a legion of old, familiar ones too. Not one of them likely to lead to anything remotely good or pure.

“ I’m headed for Canada,” I told her.

She nodded.  “ Canada is good for me. So now that you know my story, how about you tell me yours?” she asked.

“ Nothing to tell,” I replied with a shrug. I didn’t know her story yet, because she was lying. She was lying about walking out on a disagreement with someone, she was lying about waiting on a call from that someone. She might even be lying about there ever having been a someone, although I suspected that at least were true. But I would get to know all of it, and then I’d wish I hadn’t. But right now, she had what she wanted - my attention. And I was content to give her that much.

I moved forward cautiously, made the distance between us less. The Goddess had her eyes on mine, maybe wondering about what exactly I thought I knew. I could taste my own pulse, metallic and sharp, in the back of my throat. I waited until I was within easy reach of her and then I brought a hand slowly up toward her face. I didn’t want to spook her, so I paused and let my eyebrow go up in a question: may I? She frowned but she nodded. I brought my hand back, tilted my thumb sideways, licked it, then reached out again and used the wet thumb to wipe the little smear of blood from the side of her face.

I’d noticed it soon as she walked into the diner. Not everyone would’ve noticed it. Very likely even she didn’t know it was still there. But to me it was a neon sign. You became that way in my line of work. All the little things ordinary folks told themselves they’d taken care of, those were right there and someone like me noticed them. I glanced at the reddish-brownish smear now transferred to my own flesh, and I felt the sharp twist in my gut, the rush of warring emotions and sensations that went through me, and I wondered why I loved it all so much. If I was even vaguely normal I’d have been horrified by what I was feeling, what I was thinking. The Goddess was watching me, her expression avid but scared now, too. That surprised me, and it gave me a moment’s pause in which I thought that maybe her brand of dangerous was different to the rest I’d known. I wondered, too, could I be the one who would ruin her? Then I brought the thumb to my lips, poked my tongue out, and licked the blood smear away. The whole time I kept my gaze locked on hers.

She let her expression smooth out. Gave me a frank-eyed shrug, and said:  “ Paper cut.”

I nodded.  “ I’ve seen a few of those before.” I had. I really had.

Her green-eyed graze stayed locked onto mine, not a waver in it, as she stepped in real close to me and took my hand that I’d just used to wipe the smear from her chin, guided it to the super-tight crotch of her jeans. I felt sweat pop on my forehead and under my arms. My chest hitched.

Then she said:  “ My name’s Erika, by the way. With a ‘k’.”

I nodded again. Smiled, too. My face felt all tingly and hot.  “ Nice to meet you, Erika with a k. You can call me Marcie. With anything you like.”

“ Any particular reason for me to call you Marcie?” she asked, and amusement flashed in those gorgeous green eyes of hers.

I smiled.  “ Because it’s my name,” I answered.

And then she kissed me. It was a longish kiss, and a hungry one, and at some point during it, her jeans got unzipped and my hand found its way inside her pants. She was hot and wet and her sex clenched around my exploring fingers in a way got me just as hot and wet as her. I didn’t get to play for long though before she pulled back with a smile that teased and promised all at once, but the taste I did get left me in no doubt there would be smoke, and fire to go with it in our mutual near future.

“ You know where I’ve always wanted to go, Marcie?” Erika said and she was looking at me again with those green eyes of hers all aflame. I swear I would have lain down on the ground and let her use me as a doormat if she had asked right then.

“ Where?” I asked.

“ To a deserted island. Just me and -well, me and someone special, a boat, and a shack on the beach,” she told me.

“ Sounds idyllic,” I responded. I gave her a lopsided grin that tried its best to appear modest and yet cockily hopeful all at once. I added:  “ You got any ideas about who that ‘someone special’ might be?”

She looked straight into my eyes and lied to me again.  “ Could be that it’s you, Marcie. But let’s just get to Canada for now.”

I didn’t believe it, not for one second. But I was willing to go along with the lie just for the hell of seeing where it would lead. I kissed her again and then we walked out of the restroom together.

Red was back out front and she watched us walk across the diner, no hint of surprise in her face, just that same wistful little thing in her nice honey-brown eyes. She bid us both goodnight, and take care too. Like she knew where it was headed. She probably did. Only place that highway ever led. To the place where bad things happened.

At the door, Erika hesitated. Her eyes went to the window as a vehicle came down the highway, and her gaze tracked the progress of the silvery splash of headlights through the blurry murk of the glass. Her shoulders had gone up, her breathing got quicker, and a web of faint frown lines blossomed on her perfect forehead. When the vehicle continued on its way without slowing, the tension went out of her again, but I had seen it and I couldn’t un-see it. What was the vehicle had made Erika so nervous? It was a cop car. Maybe the same one had blasted past me when I arrived at the diner. I stopped myself from thinking about it, put the subject away. 

“ You’re sure about this?” I asked her.

Erika blinked hard once, sucked in a breath, then let her features smooth out into a relaxed expression. She swiveled a smile to me.  “ Yeah, I’m sure. How about you?”

Niemeyer’s warning about how the next one might be the death of me rang again in my mind. Hell, surely there were worse things to be than a sucker for a good pair of legs and some nice tits? There sure seemed like a hundred worse ways to go into that last long goodnight than in the company of a good-looking female. And what the fuck made Niemeyer such an expert anyway?

See? There is always a way to talk yourself into doing bad things. Always a justification for any action if you just turn over enough rocks and look for it hard enough amongst all the detritus.

“ Never any doubt,” I told Erika and I reached for the door.

The mook coming across the rain-swept forecourt stopped me in mid-action. He was moving at a rapid clip but not so rapid that I didn’t have time to spot the hand canon he carried with him. I stepped back inside, closed the door. Not that it would stop him for long. Glass and bullets are a one-sided fight. Erika had seen the mook, too, and she’d lost a lot of the color out of her cheeks. I looked a question at her, and she sighed.

“ My ex-employer thinks I have something that belongs to him,” she said.

“ Do you - ?” I asked.  “ Have something that belongs to him?”

“ Maybe.”

“ So what should we do about that?” I asked.

Her answer was to reach into the red leather jacket and take out the gun she had stashed there. I had noticed that, too, way back soon as she walked in, but it was knowledge I found easy to file away someplace I didn’t have to examine it closely. Guns aren’t something that scare me easily. Hers was a little snub-nosed thing, a .22, but efficient enough to get the job done. We walked over to the counter together and I took the gun from her there, standing with her in such a way that the gun was concealed around her back.

“ Do you trust me?” I asked.

She smiled.  “ Not even as far as I could probably throw you.”

I turned toward Red and Old Geezer. They’d seen the gun and were both looking at us, faces colorless and wide-eyed with alarm, like they fully expected to get robbed. I tried on my nicest, most reassuring smile. I don’t think it worked the way I’d have liked because Red started to shake.  “ Relax, honey,” I told her.  “ I’ll take care of this asshole and then we can all go back about our business.”

“ We should call the police,” Red began but the mook chose that moment to shoot the door out and the deafening crash of shattering glass cascading to the floor first drowned her words and then turned them to screams of terror.

Old Geezer started to turn on his stool, but he didn’t get far before the mook raised the hand canon and shot him through the back of the head. There was a lot of blood and some brain matter, a good deal of which splattered the front of Red’s uniform. Her screams stopped abruptly as her mouth fell open and formed a perfect silent O. The coffee pot she was holding onto slipped from her fingers, crashed to the floor where it shattered and spilled scalding hot coffee over her feet and ankles. Not that she seemed to notice. She was too busy with noticing the blood and brains on her uniform and the gun had put it all there. Old Geezer, dead, fell off his stool and lay on the floor in an untidy sprawl.

“ Erika,” the mook said. He grinned at her with a mouthful of teeth had obviously never known the pleasures of Colgate. I hate it when people don’t look after their dentition. It’s just plain laziness.

I didn’t think about him any further than that, however. I said,  “ Hey, asshole!” and he turned to look at me with a kind of disinterested malevolence. I raised the gun from behind Erika’s back and I shot him in the chest. He staggered, but he didn’t go down immediately, and so I shot him again. This time my bullet took off most of one side of his head. His blood and brains sprayed the ruined door and the window alongside it. A clump of blood-matted hair became impaled on a jagged shard of glass sticking out of the doorjamb, like a fleshy, hairy little flag. The mook went down then alright.

I did what I did because I guess at some point I’d decided to abandon all common sense and sanity, and to just go full throttle and fuck-it along this highway-to-hell instead. I could always put it all away in the mental file I’d long ago marked Don’t Think About This Shit, Marcie. It would have plenty of company there.

I looked around at Red. She had gone glassy-eyed and slack-jawed with shock. She managed to look at me but I don’t think she was really seeing me.  “ It’s gonna be okay,” I told her. It was a big fat lie, of course. I knew it. She knew it. But she nodded anyway because when you’ve just watched two people get shot in the diner you work at, you want - you need - to believe everything can still be good and fine in the world. I told Red: “ Wait an hour or so, let us get a head start on this, then call the police.”

She nodded again. She started to say,  “ I should…” and then she gave up on whatever she’d been going to say she should do and settled for another nod. Nodding was just easier for her right now.

“ Are we all good here then?” I asked Red. I got another nod. When I raised my eyebrows to Erika, she also nodded. But at least she added a smile. I knew we were decidedly not all good, that we were in some very bad shit indeed. But I was lying to myself now as well as to Red.

The jukebox chose that moment to spin Erika’s second choice of tune: Etta James doing ‘At Last’. I looked at Erika in some surprise since I hadn’t figured her for a bluesy kind of gal either. She gave me a shrug, laughed.  “ Who ain’t a sucker for the blues now and then?” she asked. She looked away from me for a moment.  “ Besides, my mama used to sing this when I was a kid…” And then she stepped up close to me, put her arms around my neck, and pulled me into kiss. It was an even longer kiss than last time, and it really wanted to go to those other fiery places. I would have let it, too, except there were some dead people around and I don’t know about you, but I tend to find that dead people spoil the mood. Not to mention we might embarrass poor Red, who’d already had a traumatic enough night. So I reluctantly moved out of Erika’s embrace.

“ Who ain’t a sucker now and then,” I agreed.

~~***~~

It was still raining when we left Ma’s Eats and it continued raining the whole time whilst we drove to the Canadian border. We drove until we were close enough to the border to feel safe about stopping for the night. There’d never be completely safe again, not for either of us, but we needed to rest. We picked out a motel looked suitably enough rundown that it wouldn’t be likely to attract people fussy about their neighbors. Someplace that the folks in charge wouldn’t ask too many questions nor bat any eyelashes at the answers they got to the ones they did ask. The night clerk did not even look up from his skin mag let alone bother to look at our signatures when we checked in. He simply snatched the cash from my hand and shoved a key on a big wooden fob at me in return. We could have written ‘Minnie Mouse and Olive Oyl’ on the register and he wouldn’t have noticed, nor I suspected, given a shit. Our unit was at the furthest end of the long leg of an L-shaped block of identical units. We parked, went inside, and in our shabby little temporary home, I got to see just how much smoke and fire me and The Goddess could create between us. And it was considerable.

Afterward, lying naked and sweaty and tangled together in the cheap, slightly greasy sheets, Erika confessed to me that there never had been any phone call.

“ The phone was a ruse to get my attention, huh?” I smiled.

She nodded. Her green eyes glinted with mischief.  “ Worked, didn’t it?”

But the blood was real, I pointed out and that wiped the smile from her face. She nodded.  “ Yeah, the blood was real. I had - a bit of a run-in with someone earlier.”

“ Another one of those mooks with the big guns?” Erika nodded again. I tilted a curious look at her.  “ Who the hell did you steal from?”

“ A not very nice man named Big Leo.”

Big surprise.   “ He gonna keep after you?” I wanted to know not because the thought of more mooks making clumsy attempts to assassinate me gave me an ulcer or anything, but because these days I find that I like to know at least a little bit of what is coming for me.

“ I would imagine so,” Erika admitted. She rolled on top of me and added:  “ But there are no mooks here right now. There’s no one but us.”  She also slipped an exploratory finger inside my aching, raw sex and would you believe it, she managed to get my juices flowing again? Of course she did. She had that much talent.

I grabbed her perfect ass and pulled her against me as she added a second finger to the first and pressed her thumb against my clit. I groaned, ready to come right then, but she held me off, the bitch.  “ So shut the hell up, and fuck me,” I growled at her.

“ My pleasure,” she told me. But it was mine really.  

In a while, Erika got up to go shower, and I threw on some clothes and went out to find a gas station. I filled up the truck’s tank and I also bought a notebook and a pack of pens and laid in some junk-food supplies. I wanted the notebook to write everything that had happened in, so that Niemeyer would know how it went down. I needed for my ex-boss to know that I entered this situation with my eyes wide open, and that I had not a care in my heart except to spend some time with a beautiful woman. I had known how it would end for me as soon as The Goddess walked into that roadside diner. At that point I’d calmly accepted my own fate. I’d accepted that Niemeyer was right all along, that the next one was going to be the death of me. Frankly, it was best it be that way, and I needed for Niemeyer to understand that, too. I didn’t need for her to mourn me or my stupidity, although I suspected she wouldn’t do much of that anyway.

When I could write no more without my hand falling off, I slipped the notebook under my side of the ratty, lumpy mattress and switched the television on, turned the sound down, and found a local news channel. We’d made the news, Erika and me, for our escapade at the diner. I didn’t need to hear the commentary from the blonde anchorwoman - I knew what went down, I’d been there. There was a mug shot of the dead guy, and a name: Sammy ‘The Source’ Fontaine. Yeah, that sounded like a name you’d associate with a mook carrying a big hand canon. I wondered what Sammy had been the source of, then decided I didn’t care. I switched the television off again as Erika came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a white threadbare towel that barely covered any of the salient parts of her. Not that I was complaining.

Later, after we had made love again and Erika was asleep, I took the notebook and pen into the bathroom with me and there I sat on the closed toilet seat with the single bare bulb above me casting its weak, appropriately piss-yellow light on the pages of my brand new notebook, and I wrote feverishly in there for nearly two hours without stopping. My hand was in a cramp by the time I’d dredged it all out. I included the truth about what happened to the senator’s daughter, and whose fault it really was. Finally, I scribbled a quick note to Niemeyer which I folded and slipped inside the notebook cover. I’d also bought a large-sized Jiffy envelope from the gas station to seal it in. Amazing, isn’t it, the sheer variety of shit you can buy at gas stations these days? I wrote Niemeyer’s name on the outside of the envelope and an ‘Eyes Only’ note, and then I crept back to bed, hid the notebook in its envelope under the mattress, and curled up next to Erika. She made a contented little sound in her sleep and draped an arm over my hip. I fell asleep with her spooned against me.

In the morning I woke alone in the bed, and alone in the room. I knew she was gone as soon as I opened my eyes. The room just had that empty feel to it. I got up and went to the window, pushed an edge of the cheap threadbare curtain aside, and looked out at the forecourt.

The truck was gone.

I had expected it would be. I’d have taken the truck, too, if I’d been her. It was why I’d filled the gas tank, because I wanted her to have her shot at getting far from this place, from whatever her life had been before she met me. I let the curtain fall back, went to take a shower. I turned the water to scalding and stood under it for as long as I could bear, as though hot water and steam could somehow erase everything I’d done. More self-deluding bullshit, of course. I got out of the shower, my skin red and raw, and dressed. There were some chocolate bars and a couple soda cans that Erika hadn’t taken and I ate and drank those for breakfast. She had also left the gun, I noticed. It lay on the nightstand, looking right at home there against the chipped and scarred cheap-ass fake wood. Beside it, was a note from Erika.

Dearest Marcie, it read, I’m sorry to run out on you like this. But I think you and I both know that we aren’t what each other needs right now. I hope things work out okay for you and you find peace. It was signed, Love, Erika. I put the note aside, then sat on the bed, and spent an hour going over in my head what I’d written in the notebook last night. Then I got out my cell phone and I called Niemeyer.

She led with: “ Where the fuck are you, Marcie?”

I told her. She made a sighing sound that conveyed the extent of her weariness with my shit and nonsense.  “ I’m hearing such a lot of godawful stuff about you right now. Tell me none of it is true?”

“ Wish I could do that, boss,” I said.

“ They’re coming for you,” she told me.  “ You stay the fuck where you are and don’t say a goddamned word until I talk to you, and maybe we can both still come outta this shitstorm with our dignity intact. You hear me, Marcie?”

“ I hear you,” I told her. Then I hung up. I looked at the little .22 sitting there on the nightstand. Had Erika left it behind because she knew what I needed to do?

I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t sad either. I guess you could say I was resigned. I did wonder if Erika would go and kneel at my graveside in the rain and cry whilst the flowers she’d brought wilted, but I only wondered that for a moment. Of course she wouldn’t do any such fucking thing. She’d shrug off my absence from her life as if it were of no greater importance than the loss of a pair of worn-out tennis shoes, and she’d move onto the next someone in line. Because that’s who she was. Knowing that she wouldn’t mourn me didn’t really make me sad either. Why should something you never expected to happen make you sad when it doesn’t happen? I actually hoped that Erika would succeed in evading her ex-employer’s mooks and manage to find herself some peace of mind, maybe on that idyllic faraway island, with someone who really did love her and who could deal with her past and all her flaws without those flaws being a mirror to their own shit and nonsense. Whatever had happened in Erika’s life to turn her into the con she was now, last night I had sensed there was still a kernel of the sweet, simple Georgia girl that existed deep inside of her. I hoped one day that girl would find her way to the surface again. Maybe Erika would find that someone she was searching for who could help coax the Georgia girl back to the surface. That someone who just wasn’t me.

I heard sirens wail in the distance. With a deep breath, I picked up Erika’s little gun and brought the muzzle to my head. But I couldn’t pull the goddamned trigger. I tried, I really did. I gave it every ounce of will power I had, but I just couldn’t squeeze that trigger because the thought of a bullet zipping into my brain, snuffing me out like a candle, scared the hell out of me. I knew what the alternative was: a long spell at the Gray Bar Hotel. For a cop - even an ex one - that’s no picnic, believe me. And yet that scared me less than dying did.

I got up, walked into the bathroom, and there I took the lid off the toilet tank and dropped the gun into the water. It sunk straight to the bottom. They would search and find it, but with luck the water would have destroyed most of the usable forensic evidence before that. I replaced the lid on the tank, and went back to sitting on the bed, with Niemeyer’s envelope beside me, and I waited for the cops to come get me.

2.
SLOANE

Let me tell you about Erika. Erika was a goddess. A living, breathing modern-day goddess, and I would have done anything for her. Anything. I’ve met plenty of beautiful girls, and had my share of passionate encounters with them, but Erika was different from the rest. Erika was the most beautiful girl in the world, with green eyes and cascades of dark brown curls, and the cutest little upturned nose you ever saw. She even suited the freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks. First time I met Erika was in a student bar and she was wearing sheer black hose, heels, a black leather skirt that was as tight as it was short, and a low cut white blouse. I thought of her as The Goddess from that moment on.

She always knew just what to do. In bed, or on the rug in front of the fire, or in the shower, or even behind the tennis courts at college. She knew exactly what to do to turn me on. And to keep me coming. It wasn’t only in matters erotic either that she knew just what to do. No matter what the difficulty that we got into or the puzzle that needed to be solved, Erika knew instinctively what needed to be done to either make it go away or make it seem like someone else’s problem. She was…well, she was sly, I guess. It’s not a word I generally like to see applied to women, and I’m cringing at it being in the same sentence as Erika’s name, but truthfully -? I just can’t think of a better word to describe how she was. Erika was a woman with secrets. You could tell that she had A Past, you know, the kind of Past that needs capitalization.

Ours was a chance meeting, or so I thought then. My gaze met hers and sparks flew. She gave me a smile that conveyed a variety of possible corruptions to be explored and she introduced herself as Erika Tanner. I told her my name was Dale Sloane.  “ But everybody just calls me Sloane,” I added. She asked why was that? I told her I couldn’t remember, which was true. We had a couple drinks together standing at the bar, we did a bit of eye-fucking, and the chat got a whole lot more personal, so we moved to a table by ourselves in a quiet corner and let it get very intimate indeed. At one point Erika grabbed my hand beneath the table and pushed it up under her skirt.

“ I’m not wearing any panties,” she whispered into my ear.

My fingers grazed the edges of her stockings, and then I realized that she really wasn’t wearing panties, and that she was damp and warm and ready. My eyes went wide. All at once I felt like I might bust the zipper out on my jeans.

“ I live just a couple blocks from here,” I told her hoarsely.

We made it back to my rented room and there we did some fucking of a more physical variety. I woke up next morning with her in my bed, and I felt about as warm and happy and proud as I ever had in my life. I was kind of amazed that she hadn’t snuck away in the early hours, sobered up and horrified to see the loser she’d picked up. I guess that was it for me - I fell in love with her.

Because our foresight is rubbish, I didn’t see it coming, but hindsight gives us perfect twenty-twenty vision, and looking back, I can see that Erika engineered the meeting. She took me for a mark from the get-go. Knowing this hurts. Nobody wants to think such an awful thing about themselves, do they? The fact that Erika was so damned beautiful, and I’m - well, I’m average in the looks department - led me to think all my birthdays and Christmases had come at once when she even deigned to talk to me, which effectively stopped me from questioning when I ought to have.

What is it they say - love is blind? Yeah, well, take it from me that it’s deaf and dumb, too.

I don’t know if Erika ever loved me. I’d like to say that she did - in her own strange and detached way - but if I were being brutally honest with myself I’d have to say no, she never loved me at all. I might even go so far as to doubt that Erika was capable of loving anyone. She told me that she loved me. Usually at the point of a screaming, thrashing, whole-bedroom-shaking orgasm, which kind of devalues it, I know, because women say shit like that at moments like those just as much as men do. But I loved to hear her say it. Or scream it. Or gasp it out, peppered with filthy curses. She never said it at any other time, always managed to dodge the issue somehow, but it was enough for little old loved-up me.

What a loser. That’s what you’re thinking, right? No, go ahead. It’s no worse than some of the things I called myself in the immediate aftermath of Erika. Before I realized I got where I did by my own volition, stopped blaming it all on her, and forgave her instead so that I could forgive myself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was during our first Christmas together that a large, unfriendly man with a gun burst into my apartment. I know, sucky timing, huh? Anyway, Christmas it was, there was snow on the ground outside, and Erika and I were full of plans for making Christmas Day dinner. It would be just the two of us. There was no question of paying a visit to either set of relations. I hadn’t spoken to my mother since I moved out to go to college. She kind of blamed me for my father’s death, which is a bunch of hooey since my father was an enforcer for the Mob and that was what got him killed, but since when have mothers had to be sane or even reasonable? Erika claimed that her relatives were all either dead or too distant to matter. I sometimes wonder if that was bullshit, too, if in fact Erika has a mother someplace who worries about her wayward daughter. Or maybe Erika poisoned all of her relatives long ago. It’s not out of the question.

Erika had popped out to do some last-minute gift shopping and I stayed home to cook a turkey. Yeah, I cook. I bake, too. What can I say - I’m a modern guy. My student apartment wasn’t much, but it had a better kitchen than Erika’s place which gave terms like ‘rat-hole’ and ‘fire hazard’ whole new meaning. I prepared traditional turkey and vegetables for our holiday-dinner-for-two, even made these little, sticky flour dumplings that my mother used to make for Christmas dinner. We had decided that we would get all the festive cooking out of the way beforehand and freeze everything, ready to simply heat up in the microwave oven on Christmas Day, because who wants to be slaving over a hot stove all day on Christmas, right?

I had to rub flour off my hands onto my jeans legs when the doorbell chimed because I’d mislaid the dishtowel amidst the chaos of the kitchen. I assumed it was Erika returned home, her door key forgotten, and that was why I didn’t bother to even glance at the spy-hole before I opened the door.

You know what? You should always use that spy-hole. That’s what the fucking thing is there for. So that you don’t accidentally let psychos into your home.

The guy who barged his way inside was big and ugly and dressed in a cheap suit fit him like a straitjacket. Oh, and he had a gun. He pointed the gun at me and told me in a startlingly pleasant voice that I was not to make any noise or fuss, not to try to run or to do anything else could be taken for dumb and might result in his feeling the need to shoot me.

I said:  “ Okay.”

Just that. Okay. I listened to him tell me in his pleasant voice to calmly walk back inside and sit down on the couch, please. He actually said ‘please’. And ‘thank you’ when I did as he bid, without noise or fuss or anything else that he might think was a dumb move. And that way I lulled him into a false sense of just how not-dumb and how very cooperative I was. That was his first mistake, trusting me. He pointed the gun at me once I was seated and demanded to know where was Erika?

“ She’s out. Doing some last minute shopping,” I told him.

He mulled this over for a moment. Then he asked when did I expect her to return?

“ I’m not sure,” I told him with perfect honesty.  “ Erika likes to shop. She can spend hours shopping. Spends a lot of money, too.”

He stared at me like I’d just spoken to him in Swahili, or some such language incomprehensible to men of his ilk. Oh, he might speak with a cultured accent and have a mellifluous tone to his voice, but he was an ignorant mook all the same. That cheap suit? Those mashed-up, off-center features? He was no Cary Grant, let me tell you.

“ She has expensive tastes,” I explained. I smiled.  “ Very fucking expensive tastes. Sometimes I wonder where she gets the money to support her expensive tastes.”

This was the truth. I might’ve have been blindly in love and not questioned all the things I ought to have, but I had wondered about some things. Like the profligate spending. I just figured Erika had a shopping addiction which she used credit cards to fuel.

The mook wanted to know how expensive were these expensive tastes of Erika’s? I had his attention now.

I told him about how last month, just when the insurance was due on my car and the utility bill had come in higher than I expected it to be, Erika gone out and had blown six hundred dollars on shoes.

“ Shoes?” he repeated.

I nodded.  “ Chanel shoes. And there was a handbag to match.”

“ And you needed money for your car and to pay to heat your - ” he looked around at my decrepit hovel and frowned. “ Your place?”

I nodded again.

He sighed.  “ That sounds like Erika, yeah.”

Oh, we were talking the same language now. I tilted a curious look at him.  “ You seem to be familiar with Erika.”

He nodded. Gave me a tight little smile owed absolutely zip to humor.  “ Oh I am. I know all about Erika. Especially I know about her love of money.”

“ Is that right?” I asked.

“ Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

“ And how do you come to be so familiar with Erika?” I wanted to know.

“ She had a connection to my employer,” he told me. He sniffed the air suddenly and frowned once again.  “ Is that food I smell? Turkey?”

I nodded. The mook squinted at me.  “ Were you cooking food?”

I would hardly have been cooking works of art now, would I? I refrained from sarcasm and simply nodded.  “ I’m quite a good cook,” I added.

“ Cooking’s for girls, and sissies,” the mook growled.

There were a dozen retorts I could have made to this, but again I exercised great personal restraint in remaining silent. The mook gave his head a bewildered shake and then he asked:  “ Say, what’s your name anyway?”

“ I’m Sloane,” I told him. I smiled and extended my hand to him.

“ You can call me Mickey,” he responded and he took my hand to shake it.

That was his last mistake. I gripped his hand around the wrist and yanked him forward off-balance. At the same time I launched myself out of the couch and head butted him hard under the chin. I’m not a big guy, by any means, I’m average height and kind of skinny, but people say I’m as tough as a boiled shoe. I know how to take care of myself, anyway. And what do you know - Mickey had a glass jaw! He toppled over backwards and thudded to the floor, like a massive felled tree, and his eyes rolled up in his head. I bent down and picked his gun off the floor. A Glock. Always a good choice, a Glock, they’re sturdy and reliable guns. This one had been modified to fit a homemade silencer. That was prescient of Mickey.

“ You stupid shit, Mickey,” I said to his unconscious form. Then I shot him between the eyes. Direct hit. I’m a very good shot.

I suppose I could have spent a little more time chatting with Mickey, got to know more about his employer and what was his connection to my beloved Erika. Mickey’s employer obviously had some manner of grievance with her. You don’t bring a Glock to a reunion unless you have some mighty big scores to settle. But I loved Erika and I didn’t want to see her shot, and so I made the decision to remove Mickey from this world without getting to know him better or what his employer’s grievance with Erika might have been. Besides, if I’d spent the time chatting to Mickey, things mightn’t have gone my way. He who hesitates is usually fucked. And I intended to ask Erika about those ‘other’ things, although I had made some educated guesses already. Erika must have worked for the Mob, or for some kind of mobster. No one legitimate sent a mook to kill you for stealing from them. Decent people called the cops on your ass. I wasn’t too worried about Erika having been mixed up with the Mob. I grew up around mobsters and mooks.

Unfortunately, shooting someone in the head is a messy business. There was some blood and brain matter, and other stuff you don’t want to hear about, that had got on the rug. Blood is a notoriously difficult substance to shift from your soft furnishings. It doesn’t matter how many times you wash it, or what industrial strength cleaner you use, the stain just never quite comes out. The rug was ruined. I was going to lose some of my deposit on that, which was Erika’s fault really. After all, Mickey had come here looking for her, not for me. He was just unfortunate enough to arrive at a time when Erika was out and I was in. I wrapped Mickey the Mook up in the ruined rug and cleaned up the rest of the bodily bits and fluids as best I could with bleach and scrubbing brushes. Then I went back to finish my sissy cooking. It would’ve been a shame to waste all my effort and all that good food just because some mook had been rude and inconsiderate enough to barge into my home, waving a gun, and to get himself splattered all over the rug for his efforts.

Erika came home just over an hour later and as soon as she walked through the door she smelled him, because human bodies begin to emit certain smells as soon as death kicks in, and Christmas cooking can only cover up so much of that. Then she saw him, all wrapped up in the bloodstained rug, and she stopped just inside of the door and frowned. The tune she’d been humming died on her lips. I think it was an old Etta James number. I’ve never been a big blues fan. Erika loved the blues. Jazz, too, and a little bit of country.

“ Well, shit. Who’s that?” she asked.

That was one of the things I loved most about Erika. Nothing ever fazed her. I mean, nothing. She had just walked in on a scene straight out of a bad film noir, and all she did was raise an eyebrow and ask who was the bleeder? No hysterics, no fuss, no question of calling ‘The Authorities’. Just calm acceptance of whatever shit and nonsense life threw her way. I loved it about her but, in retrospect, I should probably have been at least a little bit suspicious of it, too. I mean, most women would be screaming and running in circles if they came home and found a big-ass dead man wrapped up in the rug and their boyfriend calmly cooking sticky flour dumplings. I wasn’t freaked out because I grew up with shit and nonsense like it happening all around me when my father worked for the Mob, but I should have asked myself how come Erika was so unfazed by it? But I didn’t ask myself that. Did I mention how truly, madly, deeply, and fucking blindly in love with her I was? Maybe you should add ‘stupid in love’ to that list after all.

“ His name is Mickey. He’s a mook. He busted in here with a gun which I took off him,” I explained. 

“ Oh dear,” Erika said calmly.

Then she walked into the kitchen and helped herself to a taste of my flour dumplings which she pronounced to be ‘exquisite’. I thanked her with a kiss. No chaste little peck on the cheek either. I had her backed up against the kitchen counter - it still all smeared in flour and turkey grease which she didn’t seem to mind - and I removed just enough of her clothing to enable me to turn her oven up to maximum. And the whole time Mickey The Dead Mook was leaking into the rug and getting riper by the minute.

“ We need to do something about him,” Erika murmured whilst my mouth was busy tasting her cherry pie so that I could only nod.  “ He’s starting to smell,” Erika added.

She didn’t need to tell me. I was closer to the floor. I could smell him loud and clear.

“ Tomorrow is the last garbage collection day before Christmas. We could put him out with the garbage,” I suggested. It seemed a fitting end for Mickey.  “ He’ll lay on some giant trash pile over the holidays and probably be mulched into landfill next year.”

“ Sounds like a plan to me,” Erika agreed. Then, with a moan, she advised me that a little lower and to the left might be the best place to go. I did as bid.

Later that night we wrapped the rug, with Mickey in it - and his gun too, carefully wiped for prints - in several layers of plastic garbage sacks and secured it all with duct tape ( seriously, what in the world would we do without duct tape? ), and we carted our unwanted guest downstairs to the big Dumpsters out back. We chose one three quarters full and pushed him down nice and snug amongst the burger wrappers and used condoms and cartons still half-filled with sour milk and all the other detritus of the average student life. The garbage collection trucks usually rolled in around five or six am. It would still be dark at that time, so the chances of anyone spotting Mickey amongst all the other garbage were slim.

We were filthy and smelly by the time we’d finished getting rid of Mickey, so we took a shower together. Why waste water? And it was kind of erotic, getting naked and wet and slippery with someone with whom you’ve just shared the experience of dumping a dead body. Erika found an inventive use for a sponge, which she said was my reward for the tasty dumplings I’d slaved all day to make. If she did that every time as a reward, I’d make the fucking dumplings every day, I swear.

Later again, lying in bed with a couple chilled glasses of wine and the three-bar electric fire going, and Mickey’s lingering scent just about overpowered by air freshener, I told Erika that our unwanted guest had come to see her.

“ Me?” Erika frowned. I nodded. She shrugged.  “ I’ve never seen the guy before. I don’t know him. Why would he be here to see me?”

“ I don’t know. Have you pissed off any of the types of people would have a mook like Mickey working for them?” I asked her. I was teasing.

“ No,” Erika told me. She was lying.

“ You do spend a lot of money. Maybe you ran out on a gambling debt or something,” I joked.

“ Credit cards,” Erika explained with an evasive shrug.

I sighed.  “ Stop lying to me, Erika. Mickey said you had a ‘connection’ to his employer. I’m assuming his employer was a bad man. What did you do to incur the wrath of a bad man?”

Erika gnawed on her lower lip for moment, looking off toward the window and watching the snow was falling outside. It was a going to be very white Christmas. I thought that should’ve been romantic, except a tiny bit of the romance had been tarnished by the whole Mickey episode. Then Erika said:  “ Okay, I won’t lie about it. I did work for a not very nice man a while back. His name was Big Leo. I stole money from him.”

Now we were getting somewhere. Men who call themselves ‘Big Leo’ generally aren’t the sorts who set the cops on your ass. Instead they set mooks like Dead Mickey on your ass.  “ How much money?” I wanted to know.

“ A couple hundred grand,” Erika confessed.

“ There can’t be a lot left of it, the way you buy shoes,” I remarked dryly.

She sighed.  “ Not much. But enough to get us both away from this place. I thought by coming to Canada I’d be safe, but I guess Big Leo has a long reach.”

“ I guess he does. Men like that often do. Where do you propose we should go?” I asked.

Instead of replying, she lifted the small gold four-leaf clover necklace that she always wore from her chest and she stared at it.  “ My daddy left this for me,” she said suddenly. It was the first time she had ever offered something tangible of her past to me. I listened.  “ He skipped when I was a kid…but he left me this in my room. I always kind of wondered why he did that?”

“ He wanted you to know that he cared,” I offered.

Erika looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded.  “ I guess so,” she said. Her gaze became wistful.  “ I thought an island - somewhere off the beaten track might be the place to go. I have this fantasy…it’s silly, but I’d like to find an idyllic paradise island somewhere, just me and you, buy a little shack on the beach and a boat, and just forget about the world.”

“ That sounds - lonely.”

“ Not if we had each other.”

I should have given what she was proposing a good deal more thought, and then I might have figured out she was holding something back. But I let it go. Mostly because Erika chose that moment to dribble chilled white wine all over my chest and stomach and that got my nipples in an uproar, and other parts of my anatomy too, and when she started licking the wine off, slowly, I stopped thinking about Mickey The Dead Mook or anything else except what Erika was doing to me.

The next morning and the garbage collection came and went, and Mickey went with it. Christmas arrived and we spent it eating, drinking, fucking, watching cheesy festive movies on my little portable black-and-white TV, fucking a bit more, eating some more, and drinking a whole lot more. And then it was next year and never had we heard a word about any dead guys found in Dumpsters. Then Erika brought the subject of the desert island up again in mid-January.

“ You remember that guy came to see me before Christmas?” she announced over breakfast at her place.

I nodded as I shoveled pancakes into my face.  “ Mickey,” I said around a mouthful.

“ Right. It got me to thinking - life is short, Sloane. We really should spend it together, someplace nice. Nicer than here. Like that island, I mentioned.”

It got her thinking, eh? As I recalled it, she hadn’t been the one facing down Mickey The Mook’s gun. It really should’ve been me thinking about life being short and all the nice things I wanted to do with mine before someone snuffed it out. But maybe Erika was feeling her mortality by proxy.

“ That idyllic paradise island, that the one you mean?” I smiled.

“ Yeah. I was thinking the Caribbean,” Erika replied. She turned the full force of her green eyes on me.  “ Just you, me, a shack on the beach and a boat, remember?”

Let me ask you - could you have resisted a plea like that? Well, if you could, you’re a stronger person than I am.  “ Just get away from all the shit and nonsense, eh?” I said, and Erika gave me a nod and a wistful little smile.  I nodded, too.  “ Okay. So lets do it.”

Besides, a warm tropical island sounded way better than cold, snowy Canada, and I can be impulsive, too. But you probably already figured that.

~~***~~

It took us just three weeks to arrange. We found an island in the Caribbean that we both liked the look of and we bought a boat and took ourselves off there. When we arrived we sold the boat to help buy a shack and a smaller boat that would do for fishing and local island-hopping.

And for a while it really was paradise.

Then one day I came home from collecting driftwood along the beach and I found another mook in my living room. This one didn’t introduce himself like Mickey had done, however, he just pointed one of those big silencer-equipped hand canons at me and demanded to know where was Erika? Tell him, or he’d shoot my kneecaps out, he added. Really, this was becoming a tiny bit repetitive.

But I do like my kneecaps - I find them useful for keeping me upright.  “ Erika is giving reef-diving lessons to tourists,” I told this new mook. It was the truth.  “ She’ll be home by about seven. You can wait, if you like. What’s your name, by the way?”

He scowled like I’d just asked him the hardest question in the universe. What is it with these guys? They miss out on even the most basic education so that they don’t know what to say when someone asks them the simplest fucking question? At least I can say my father was an enforcer with an education.

“ I’m Sloane,” I said. I plastered a big smile onto my face and I extended my hand to him.

This one was stupider even than his predecessor. This one switched his gun to his left hand so that he could give me a proper right-handed shake. Jesus, what a dumb-ass. I almost felt sorry for him when I put him on the deck. I picked up the hand canon, stood over the felled mook, and pointed the gun at his head. He scowled around his broken nose at me. Confusion reigned supreme in the flat, empty little world was his brain.

“ What is it with you guys and Erika? Your employer is going to chase her to the ends of the earth all for a couple hundred grand?” I asked him. Because this time I intended to get some answers before I killed anyone. Erika had lied to me when I asked her. I did not intend to be lied to by this mook.

For a moment it seemed that he might not answer me at all. I had to wave the gun at him to remind him who had the upper hand here.  “ She owes Big Leo a lot more than a couple hundred grand,” he said grudgingly.

Okay. That was unexpected.

“ How much more?” I asked.

“ Eight million and change.”

I laughed until I realized that Mook Mark II was serious and then I stopped laughing. So she had lied to me about that, too, and it was a pretty damned big lie. If you stole eight million and change from someone called Big Leo, you could fully expect to be fending off the mooks for the rest of your life. A person caught up in that kind of action by accident could get tired of such shit and nonsense. I felt hurt, and a twinge of resentment too. Could my Goddess not have seen her way to giving me even just a little of that eight million and change to pay my fucking utility bill with? She had showered at my place quite often, after all. She used my stove, my three-bar heater. I had cooked those flour dumplings for her.

“ Did you ever know a guy named Mickey?” I asked Mook Mark II. He screwed up his face in the effort to remember which, believe me, did not make him any prettier a sight.  “ Guy did the same job that you’re doing now,” I prompted and he nodded. I smiled.  “ Well, Mickey’s dead. I shot him.”

Mook Mark II looked worried for the first time as the enormity of his situation began to penetrate his flat, empty brain.

“ You know I can’t let you hurt Erika,” I said.  “ I’m going to have to shoot you the same way I shot Mickey. Sorry. It’s nothing personal.”

“ What are you, her personal bodyguard?” he grumbled.

Nice to see that he had a sense of humor after all. I shook my head.  “ No. I’m just someone who isn’t impressed by an asshole like you.”

“ My name’s Tony, by the way,” he said.

“ Nice to meet you, Tony,” I responded with a smile.  “ It’s still nothing personal.”

I shot him. Right between the eyes. Just like Mickey. Then I sat down and waited for darkness to fall, and under cover of darkness I lugged Dead Tony out of the beach shack and down to the water. Our shack was far enough from what passed for civilization on the island that I wasn’t too worried about late-night strollers catching me lugging a dead body down the beach. I dragged him to a spot where the land shelved away suddenly to deep water and I rolled him into the surf. We’d had a shark problem around the island for a while - a couple tourists and one careless local had been attacked, which of course had sent people into a frenzy of thinking they were just like Robert Stack’s character in the movie Jaws. It never seemed to occur to anyone that the presence of the sharks might be a result of all those tourists diving on the reefs and feeding the fuckers, causing them see us as a food source rather than as another predator. But I hoped the shark problem would help me get rid of Tony.

That done, I went home and cleaned up another mess of blood and brains, and then I waited for my Goddess to come home. I kept the late Tony’s hand canon with me because I intended to make Erika explain to me about the eight million and change, and why she never used some of it to pay a single one of my fucking utility bills.

Except the funny thing is, she didn’t come home. I waited until nearly 2am before I began to figure something wasn’t right and walked over to the next beach where the dive shack was. Erika had bought the business from an elderly islander who was ready to retire to a life of fishing and drinking and not pandering to the whims of asshole tourists. She needed something to do, that’s what she told me, but I think she was really on the hunt for a new mark. Erika wasn’t at the dive shack either, and I wasn’t as surprised by that as you might imagine. The boat she used to take divers out was also gone. I went home and didn’t sleep all night. Next morning I found out from an irate tour guide that Erika hadn’t been at the dive shack all day yesterday, and that she owed this guide’s clients either a dive or their money back. I pointed out that since the boat was gone and the shack closed up, her clients were going to have a hard time getting either.

“ Can’t you open it up?” The tour guide glared at me. Now I knew why the old guy had retired from this shit. But I opened up the shack, found that Erika had been kind enough to leave enough money in the safe to keep me afloat for a little while, and I used some of it to get the irate guide and her clients off my back. Then I went home to figure out what to do next.

I figured Erika discovered that another mook had caught up with her and she just took off - hopped in the boat and sailed out of my life as mysteriously as she had entered it. She had eight million and change to help her make another new life someplace else, maybe with some other sucker who would defend her from the mooks. I guess that said everything about how much Erika loved me.

I don’t regret my involvement with Erika, and neither do I bear any malice toward her. Maybe I felt a little sorry for myself for a while initially. I’d been taken for a mark, seen as gullible, and used accordingly, and who wouldn’t have a little sniffle over something like that? But I didn’t feel sorry for myself for long. I realized that Erika was an expert in the art of the con, adept beyond imagining at picking out guys like me who would be bowled over by her and do anything for her. I hadn’t been a chump - Erika had just been a really good con artist. There was no need to feel sorry for myself then.

I decided to stay on the island, and I made out pretty good. I sold the dive shack and used the money to buy into a little beach bar that turned out to be a goldmine. Eventually I bought a bigger beach shack to live in and a bigger boat, too. I even met someone who didn’t see me as a mark. The deaths of Mickey and Tony, I did regret those, but in a mild way. I’d have preferred it not to have been necessary to shoot a couple guys I didn’t even know, but it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We do crazy shit for people we love and whom we kid ourselves love us back.

I don’t know where Erika went to. At first I thought about trying to find her, then I decided I didn’t need that kind of grief lingering on in my life. I don’t own a TV, or a computer, and the radio only picks up the local island channel, which is exactly how I like it. I could’ve gone to the library, got on the internet and probably found some kind of news report, either about Erika or either of the mooks that I shot, but I didn’t do that either. Like I said, I made myself a nice life on the island. There was no need to go looking for any Erika-shaped grief to bring back into it. I did purchase a reconditioned typewriter because I had notions of maybe trying my hand at being a writer. I’ve always liked to scribble down my thoughts and little anecdotes about my experiences, so why not turn it all into a book, I figured? That’s why I put the story of Erika down on paper: I definitely have to make that part of any book I end up producing. I even have a title for it: The Lives and Loves of The Modern Goddess. In honor of the woman who inspired it.

After all, I think Erika and my involvement with her, defined who I am more than anything or anyone else ever had, or ever will. Erika made me realize that life really is short, and that we should be careful about how we choose to live it, and who we choose to live it with.

3.
CARL

Let me tell you about me. My name is Carl McCrae and I’m a bounty hunter. At least, that’s what it says I do on my tax returns. I do other stuff, too, the kind of stuff that you wouldn’t want to go through proper channels to get done, if you get my drift? Often, the people who hire me to do this other stuff are the kinds of people who have accumulated their wealth via means not blessed by the government, and they use me to sort out their problems because I’m fast, efficient, and discreet. And I’m as unlikely to involve the Proper Authorities in my business as they are in theirs.

My last client hired me to find a woman for him. You would be surprised to know how often my clients want me to find a woman. Women have a singular talent for leaving pissed-off people of ill-gotten means behind them. I don’t say that to sound sexist or anything…I say it because it’s been true in my experience. Or maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised by it, depending on what has been your experience. Anyway, this client was called ‘Big Leo’ so that might give you an idea of what kind of person he was and what sort of business he was in. Big Leo hired me to find a woman named Erika Jones. A gorgeous woman, Big Leo told me. A goddess, is how he put it. Apparently she was not a goddess on the side of good or the angels, however. This goddess absconded with eight million and change of Big Leo’s ill-gotten gains.

I admit I was impressed by that number. I gave Big Leo a quick eyebrow raise and asked him what did this Erika Jones woman do for him to come into contact with that kind of money?

He smiled, but believe me, there was nothing humorous in that smile.  “ She gave people whatever incentive they needed to invest in my various business schemes.”

So Erika was a high-class shill then. A con artist. Must have been a pretty accomplished one, too, good at playing the long con. because according to Bug Leo, she got to his money by seducing his eldest son and then wheedling the combination to daddy’s safe out of the poor dude. I admit I was skeptical at first. I just didn’t think it could have been that easy, not even for an accomplished shill, but then Big Leo showed me a picture of Erika. The woman in that picture could have wheedled just about anything out of  pretty much anyone with eyes to see and a pulse could be made to beat a little faster. She might even have been able to wheedle me, and I don’t wheedle easily. But I could see the attraction in the dark brown shoulder-length curls, the startlingly bright green eyes with the long dark lashes, and the unbearably cute freckles. Oh, and she had the kind of body you can only look at and wonder what pact she made with which devil to obtain it. And who did you have to bribe, beg, or bond your soul to, in order to enjoy the carnal delights that body could surely deliver you unto? She wasn’t a conspicuously bosomed woman, but there was plenty enough to let you know they were there, and I was copacetic with that. Besides, she had a fucking great ass.

“ So why don’t you find her yourself?” I wanted to know.

Big Leo gave me another of those dark-humored smiles. You don’t ever want a man like Big Leo to smile at you in that way.  “ Oh, I’ve tried sending my guys after her,” he told me. He shook his head. “ But this bitch is tough. And she’s slippery as a bag full of eels. She either evades my guys or she kills the poor bastards. I’m tired of losing my employees.”

“ What makes you think I’ll have any better success?” I asked. I smiled sourly at him.  “ I don’t fancy winding up dead myself. I like my life.” 

Big Leo told me that he had heard good things about me, and that he had faith in my abilities, which was touching in a scary sort of a way. He wanted me to find Erika and then he wanted me to make her disappear again - permanently. I told him I could do that, but only for a price. Let’s say, eight million. And I’d forget about the change. You might think that’s a steep price, but it’s a hard and dangerous job I do, at great personal risk, and clients who can afford to buy my services expect to pay big bucks for it because they appreciate that I’m taking all those risks on their behalf. And I liked the humor in my offer. Apparently Big Leo was not a man completely devoid of humor, after all: he appreciated my humor, too.

“ You bring me that bitch’s head and you’ll get your eight million, and maybe a bonus if I‘m in a real generous mood,” he promised.  “ I got a few things might help you to find her.”

Big Leo had been able to obtain some letters and notebooks, written by some of the people Erika had conned, and in which Erika featured heavily. I didn’t ask how Leo obtained these things and he didn’t offer to tell me. I didn’t need to know anyway. The marks who had written about Erika rhapsodized about her at length. I read every word these journaling marks had written. The devil is often in the detail and I like to know the devil I’m dealing with. First thing I found out, she didn’t restrict her marks to just men. Occasionally she liked to find another woman to munch carpets with. I was copacetic with that, too. I did figure that she had type, whether she found it in a man or a woman: average-looking and emotionally susceptible. I wondered what she’d make of me - I was neither average nor susceptible. That Erika would likely not give me a second glance caused me a twinge of disappointment even then. Still, by the time I’d done reading, I almost admired Erika for her ingenuity and her balls. I also found it interesting that two of the people whose notes I read had called Erika a goddess. She really could burrow that far under her marks’ skins. One guy had even written a book, a fictionalized account of his time with Erika, and titled it The Lives And Loves of The Modern Goddess. It was a good book. Made me LOL in quite a few places.

It was obvious to me that Erika - goddess that she may well have been - was also a con artist who’d been honing her skill for a long time. Her act was so polished you could see your face in it. But a con is a con, is always a con and nothing else. Even if they were a fiendishly clever con like Erika.

That’s what I told myself at the beginning. 

Despite the writings - and my own innate ability to put myself inside the heads of people like Erika - it wasn’t an easy case from the get-go. Some of the work that I would take on was so simpleminded that your average internet-savvy average twelve year-old could probably have accomplished as much as I did, and in half the time. But my clients were the kind of people who liked others to their bidding, and I was happy to take their money. But at times there were certain tasks that tested my ingenuity and my staying power, and finding Erika was one of those tasks. It took me a couple months just to get a solid lead on her. She moved around frequently, used different last names - although tellingly, she always used Erika as a first name which made me think it was probably her real first name - and was always being careful not to leave a paper trail that couldn’t be erased or obscured in a hurry. Once I did get a bead on her, however, I was able to find out who she really was, and I admit, it came as a bit of a disappointment.

Her real name was Erika Wilson. I mean, Wilson - it’s just not very glamorous, is it? I guess I was sort of expecting a Devereux or a LaSalle or something a bit fancy. She had started out her life in some Podunk town in rural Georgia, which would account for the odd Southern twang that two of her marks - Dale Sloane and Marcie Tanner - described. Erika Wilson was born to a waitress and a truck driver. The latter bugged out permanently when the little con-artist-in-the-making was just six years-old. Without daddy’s trucker’s pay, momma was often short on the rent and she took to selling her ass to make the payments. That took its toll on momma’s sense of self-esteem and self-respect and within two years she was taking everything she earned from her ass and putting it back into her veins via a needle. After that it was the usual sob story: loss of job, loss of house, total meltdown, involvement of social services, Erika in care, momma in prison. Which was where momma died of a shank to the liver after she got caught trying to steal another inmate’s drug stash.

Maybe I should have felt sorry for Erika, but I didn’t. Lots of people start out life with stories so heart-rending it’s like Gone With The Wind on crack, and they don’t wind up conning people out of money and into killing other people for them. Erika might’ve had an unfortunate early life, but hell, she made her own choices. She didn’t deserve my feeling sorry for her, or anyone’s feeling sorry for her.

Anyway, once I knew who Erika really was I started tracking down who and where Erika had been since she left state care in Georgia. That took me down a whole mess of twisty, winding roads - both figurative and literal - but what the hell, Big Leo was paying me eight million dollars to devote this much of my attention to the case. At a very long length, I came to the point in Erika’s life when she hooked up with the first of the compulsive journal-keepers, disgraced ex-cop Marcie Tanner. Poor Marcie had her share of women troubles even before Erika crashed into her scene, so it would be fair to say Marcie was already out there on the edge. She decided Erika would be the last bad woman to encourage her into doing bad things and tried to blow her brains out in a motel ten miles from the Canadian border after Erika and her wound up there, only poor mixed-up Marcie couldn’t pull the trigger. The cops arrived and Marcie was arrested for crimes she committed and others she didn’t but insisted on taking the rap for anyway. Dumb bitch. Personally, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that kind of misguided chivalry. No one ever thanks you for it, so why ruin your life doing it? Erika stole Marcie’s truck and dropped off the map again.

I’m not sure why I did it, but I paid a visit to Marcie Tanner at the Club Fed prison where she was a guest for twenty years. It was Marcie’s ex-boss who wangled the easier venue for her erstwhile detective, even though Lieutenant Helen Niemeyer had no discernible goodwill toward Marcie Tanner. Maybe Niemeyer was just a real humanitarian, after all.

It was an unhappy visit. The Marcie that I met with was a beaten-down, sad sack of a person, and she had nothing to tell me that I didn‘t already know, or couldn‘t have figured out on my own, without dragging my ass all the way to a Gray Bar Hotel. First thing she told me was that Erika hadn’t been in touch with her.

“ Erika’s probably forgotten that I exist,” Marcie Tanner told me sadly.  “ I wish I’d had the guts to pull that trigger, instead of living with knowing that.”

“ So why didn’t you? Pull the trigger?” I asked her.

She gave me the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen on a human being.  “ I guess I was hoping Erika would come see me. Maybe just one time. I couldn’t die without seeing her again. Maybe she will come yet. What do you think?”

I thought Marcie Tanner was pathetic. I left her quietly humming that old Etta James’ blues number, ‘At Last’, deep inside of her own fucked-up head poking through whatever stuff she kept piled up there with a garden rake, and I got the hell out of that stinking hellhole of despair and destroyed lives. I continued to pretend that I didn’t know why I’d gone in the first place, but the truth was, I knew alright. I knew I’d gone because I wanted Marcie to tell me something about Erika that wasn’t in her notes or her letter to Lieutenant Niemeyer: what was that elusive x-factor made Erika so damned special? But even then I also knew that Marcie wasn’t the means by which I could find that out.

I visited Dale Sloane for much the same reason. I used the details in his book to figure out which Caribbean island he was living on and I took myself off to visit with him there. I heard firsthand from Dale Sloane ( “ Everyone calls me Sloane,” he told me with a self-effacing grin.  “ Even now, they still call me Sloane.” ) all about how he shot a couple of mooks named Mickey and Tony, both of whom Big Leo sent after Erika, and how Erika had cleared off with their boat and her money, leaving Sloane to his own devices in a lost paradise.

“ But it turned out okay,” Sloane shrugged.  “ I have a nice business, and a nice girlfriend. I wouldn’t have had that without Erika’s encouraging me to up and move here.”

“ Sounds like you still have a soft spot for her?” I asked.

Sloane looked to where his nice girlfriend was making up little bowls of nuts and crackers to put out on the bar, and smiled softly, shook his head.  “ No. I don’t bear her any malice, but I don’t think about her either.”

“ You shot two people for her, left your life behind for her, and you’re telling me that you don’t think about her - not ever?” I made a face reflected my skepticism. But Sloane just smiled and shook his head one more time.

“ It’s not like that, Mr McCrae,” he said.  “ I realized a long time ago that I loved the idea of Erika, but in reality I didn’t want any more of her shit and nonsense in my life. Not ever.”

I was kind of proud of Sloane for how he’d made the most out of the life that Erika had foisted upon him, but I still thought he was a sap for getting in so deep in the first place. Sloane had grown up the son of a Mob enforcer, for Christ’s sake, so he should have got a clue and bailed after Mickey. It proved just how adept Erika was at picking her marks and playing the long con. Neither did he tell me what I wanted to know about Erika.

I’m no shrink, okay? Fact is, I don’t trust anyone would take money off folks to tell them what is wrong with the insides of their heads and then pretend to ‘fix’ it for them. It seems an even less honorable way to earn your living than my way, and ain’t that saying something? But for what it’s worth, I don’t believe either that people get all their troubles from not being breastfed by momma, or having their lollipop taken away by daddy. No, sir. I think some people are plain born evil, some are born stupid, and some are born world-class suckers. It’s like some kind of law of nature that there must be variety in those types of human beings born into the world, just like there has to be some blue-eyed people and some brown-eyed people, some blonde people and some brunette people. People like Erika are predators. They know how to find their prey and how to hunt it down. Are they evil, these predator-people like Erika? I don’t think so. I think they are what they are, born that way. Just like the marks and the suckers are born that way.

I think Marcie Tanner was a regular shitstorm long before Erika waltzed into her life. Marcie was looking for death, or at least she wasn’t making it too hard for death to find her. Her own dark passion drew feckless, dangerous women to her because that was the vibe she put out into the world. She wanted these women to use her. She wanted to give herself a good excuse to put that .22 to her head and pull the trigger, just like her daddy before her used his troubles as an excuse to do the same. Sometimes, when you court death that hard - just like a woman - when you get her, you find that she isn’t the seductive mistress you thought she was, and you don’t want her anymore. Only, unlike her daddy, Marcie couldn’t pull the trigger on herself because she wasn’t as in love with death as she’d thought. At least Marcie was right about one thing: she would have been the one to ruin Erika, and not the other way around. I was intrigued - more than I was surprised - to learn that Marcie had likely been a little too rich meat for Erika’s blood. Marcie liked ‘slap-ass crazy’ in her women. Erika was a con, but she wasn’t crazy. So maybe Marcie did teach me something about Erika, after all. Just not the thing I really wanted to know.

And Sloane? Well, Sloane had choices. He could have disabled Mickey, tossed him out on his ear with a warning, and then lit out of there without the deadweight of Erika. I think Sloane made some stupid choices, probably because he was thinking with his little head and not his big head when it came to Erika. But even so, Sloane wasn’t at all the person that Erika defined him as, and at least it worked out okay for him in the end.

So I didn’t feel too sorry for either Sloane or Marcie, or any of Erika’s other anonymous victims who I supposed were also the kinds of people prone to making dumb decisions and then blaming it all on others. Violence, I have found, most often grows from one of five basic roots: lust, anger, envy, avarice, and vengeance. Erika’s violence was the result of her avarice for other people’s money. Marcie’s and Sloane’s violence was the result of their lust for Erika. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time or my energy on feeling sorry for Erika either. I needed all my time and energy to find Erika, kill her, and bring the proof back to Big Leo. Then I could collect the rest of my eight million and that bonus Big Leo had promised me, and start thinking about retiring to my own idyllic island in some far-flung paradise. Maybe I’d open a beach bar there and serve cold drinks to hot women all day. I’d cherry-pick the women I liked and take ‘em home at the end of the night for some hot, wild tropical sex and then never have to see them again.

Shit. My fantasy and Erika’s didn’t seem all that far apart, did it? I even imagined what would happen if you put the two of us together. I could see us in the kind of relationship where we argued and fought just to create our own kind of combustible atmosphere, and when it did inevitably combust there’d first be physical violence and then some violently physical make-up sex. I’d never get too invested in Erika though, because I’d know that someday a better mark would come along and I’d be a footnote in her history book. Unless, of course, I grew tired of her shit and nonsense in my life, just like Sloane, and I killed her first. Or would the wily and talented Erika recognize me for what I was - someone not so unlike her - and avoid me like the plague? She hadn’t survived doing what she did for this long on her looks and abilities in the sack alone. She had to be plenty smart, and a good deal cunning. That meant she probably had an in-built radar set to ping whenever someone like me came along.

I continued to look for Erika and the whole time I did so I kept telling myself that it was only a job. I started writing everything down and I told myself that was just research, a way of keeping track of a complex case and a wily subject. But all of that was hogwash.

I was obsessed with Erika.

As part of my search, I had all kinds of complex and complicated computer programs set up to alert me any time the name ‘Erika’ was mentioned anywhere on the Internet. I had some parameters worked out, including limiting the name to Erika spelled with a ‘k’ because that was how she had always spelled her name and I couldn’t see her changing that. Everyone needs something familiar to cling to. Then one day, I got a ping: a news story about a luxury cruise liner, the Silver Princess, out of New York. The luxury liner had gone down somewhere in the South China Sea during a big storm, and from the testimonies of the three hundred and eighty-three crew and passengers survived this catastrophe out of just over one thousand people aboard, investigators were able to piece together a scenario.

The storm caused two off-course fishing vessels to crash into the Silver Princess, one right after the other ( now there was some shitty luck ), and both of these wandering vessels managed to tear separate holes in the liner’s hull. The cruise ship captain was drunk and in the company of a young lady - it was suspected - and so the evacuation was left largely to a crew who spoke about twelve lines of English between them. Which made it kind of remarkable that over three hundred souls survived at all. Hope was dwindling for the one hundred and twelve passengers and crew members still listed as missing ten days after the ship went down. One of the lifeboats had not been found either.

I’ve always hated the idea of being on board a ship in the middle of some vast expanse of very deep water - probably teeming with sharks and prone to God knows what all kinds of temperamental weather conditions - stuck there with over a thousand other people most of whom I’d probably cross the street to avoid back on shore. It’s not for me.

But anyway, my search pinged because of a name on the passenger list published by the shipping company.

Erika Sloane.

Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit…Erika Sloane. Wasn’t that interesting? She’d used Sloane’s name the same way she’d told him that her name was Erika Tanner. It was too cute of her. I ran some searches on ‘Erika Sloane’ and came up with a bunch of stuff that meant nothing. I was pretty certain, however, that the Erika Sloane who’d been aboard the doomed liner had been my Erika. Call it gut instinct honed over many years. Of course, if she were my Erika, that meant she was probably dead, gone to a watery grave twenty fathoms deep in the South China Sea, assuming she didn’t become shark food first. It was a sad ending to Erika’s life. I mean, it could be taken as romantic and adventurous, I guess, if you find that kind of thing romantic and adventurous. I didn’t find it in the least bit romantic or adventurous.

I had to be sure. I had to know for one hundred and ten percent certain if that Erika Sloane really was my Erika Wilson.

The Silver Princess had had an official photographer on board. Most luxury liners do have official photographers these days. Busy pictures of happy people doing fun things aboard ship help to sell these ultra-expensive cruises in the glossy brochures and on Internet sites. By a happy coincidence, the photographer had survived and so had many of his photographs. I tracked him down and convinced him to let me look through the photographs from that ill-starred cruise. He was reluctant because it was still a fresh nightmare for him, but it’s amazing how two hundred thousand dollars can soothe a person’s nightmares.

So I spent three hours combing through Mr Henry Camber’s photographs. I used sophisticated enhancing software and I used an old-fashioned magnifying glass. And I found her.

She’d been pretty careful to avoid the ship’s photographer, but good old Henry had managed to catch her at the periphery of a shot taken near one of the ship’s themed deck bars. She was facing directly toward the camera, so there was no mistake that it was her: the dark brown curls, the luminous green eyes, the body to die for. She was dressed in cut-off blue jeans and a midriff-baring white top that I just wanted to peel slowly from her. I sat there and looked at her in that photo for a long time whilst I sorted through my feelings.

I was sad that she was dead, that I’d never actually get to meet her. But I was relieved, too, in a strange way, or I tried to tell myself that I was relieved she would never need to come to an inglorious end. I’d have hated to see her caught by the authorities and put on trial, sent to some god-awful women’s prison - not the Club Fed that Marcie had gotten away with. They’d throw the book at Erika, make an example of her, and in prison she’d become the bitch of some bull-dyke lifer with ugly tats and no teeth ( okay, so that was one of my less attractive Erika fantasies ). Or worse, she’d be killed by someone who discovered her gig and decided they didn’t want to let even a goddess away with that kind of shit and nonsense. I was even relieved, I told myself, that no one like me could come along and take her apart for the eight million payment of a man like Big Leo.

Mostly though, I was disappointed that I’d never meet the legendary Erika.

I went to Big Leo and reported to him that Erika was dead, gone down with a sinking ship. He wasn’t sad or disappointed at all. He gave me a million dollar bonus and thanked me for my diligence, and the good news.

I said that I tried to tell myself it was for the best. Not long before the news story pinged, I had gone out and splurged a good deal of cash on a high-class escort girl. I went to one of those specialty outfits, the ones who charge more than the others because they allow their clients a little more leeway with the girls, you know? I brought a dark brown curly wig and green contact lenses for my girl to wear and I asked her to speak with a slight Georgia twang and call herself Erika. Then I put Etta James on the portable CD player I’d brought along, and I spread a couple thousand dollars on the bed in the hotel room I’d rented, and we fucked amidst the crinkly, snappy brand new green. I pretended that I had finally snagged the real Erika and I was banging her right on top of the money I’d earned for hunting her down as we thumbed our noses to Big Leo before we did a vanishing act together to our idyllic paradise island. There was a point during this session that gave me pause: when my ‘Erika’ was on her back on the bed, bills crackling beneath her, and I was down between her spread thighs, letting my mouth enjoy every cent of what I was paying for, I wondered if all this were not a bit weird? Then I slipped the full eight inches to her and rode my makeshift Erika into the home straight whilst she obligingly screamed my name and begged for more, and weird became just another relative concept.

My obsession with Erika was out of control.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about her, and the more I thought about her, the more convinced I became that she wasn’t dead after all. In my mind I kept coming back to the missing lifeboat and connecting that to Erika’s name being on the list of those still missing, albeit presumed dead. I thought about how there had to be thousands of uninhabited islands throughout the South China Sea, and how a resourceful girl like Erika could probably make herself quite at home on any one of these islands. There might well have been other survivors with her.

These thoughts got to me so bad that a few weeks after I’d told Big Leo about Erika swimming with the fishes, I bought a boat and some of the best maps of the South China Sea that I could lay hands on. Then I spent several days working between the maps, and the Internet, researching the South China Sea, and picking out islands most likely to sustain life for a resourceful castaway. I plotted the likely course that a drifting lifeboat would have taken, given tides and weather conditions in the days after the ship went down, and I narrowed my choices of potential islands that survivors could’ve landed on to just six. It was still a lot of ground - well, technically, a lot of water - to cover, but it was a start.

If Erika were indeed alive and on one of these islands, I intended to find her. But I wasn’t going to bring her back to Big Leo, nor to anyone else. Because I had finally admitted to myself what I hadn’t been able to back when I visited Marcie in prison and Sloane in the Caribbean: that I had fallen in love with Erika Wilson.

I paid off the owed rent on my home, sold my business, and closed out my bank accounts. I told no one where I was going, nor what I intended to do. I purchased several passports in fake names, and a digital camera with which I could take photos to put in these passports. I also had some fake birth certificates made up in the same names. But no credit cards. I left my California base in the middle of the night and I never looked back. I was on a mission. A mission to find Erika, and to take her away from whatever hole she was in. And after that I would build us both a new life in some far-flung part of the world where cash still ruled and people didn’t poke their noses into other peoples’ business.

That’s what I was going to do. Yes, sir indeedy.

As I sailed out of Catalina Harbor on my new boat, I took from my shirt pocket the picture that I’d been able to convince Henry Camber to sell me and I smiled at the image there of the green-eyed goddess in the lickable white shirt.

“ Don’t worry, Erika, your love really has come along at last,” I whispered,  “ and I’m coming for you.”

4.
KRIS

I spotted the yacht by accident. We had been on the island for just three months when it appeared over the horizon. The next day would have been our three-month anniversary, in fact. At the beginning there had been three of us, but Sam had been gone for a while by the time the yacht appeared and there were only Erika and I left. It had been a while since I’d last looked with any purpose for passing vessels, and seeing one so unexpectedly took me by surprise. I almost didn’t believe my own eyes. I stood up from the bleached white carcass of a log upon which I’d been sitting, and I walked slowly down the beach, one hand shading my eyes from the sun’s glare as I squinted out to the horizon. The yacht hove into view, and dread rose in my throat, tasting sour and metallic there. Sweat that had nothing to do with the heat popped on my palms and on my forehead. A pulse thumped in the left side of my skull. I sucked in a deep breath to calm myself, and I watched as the unexpected, and unwelcome, vessel loomed closer to the island.

Closer to us.

Suddenly my feet were moving with a purpose as I ran to the cooking fire burning a few feet from our beach encampment. Frantically, I kicked sand over it to put the flames out. It would take a while to get the fire built up again, but there was no way I could risk that yacht seeing the smoke. Of course, we had always known that one day a vessel might come and people might discover us, and we knew also that one day we would have to return to civilization. We couldn’t stay on the island forever, no matter how much we might wish to. One of us would get sick, or be injured, and without proper medical care, die. But I wasn’t ready to leave yet and just thinking that someone might be about to discover us, sent me into a panic.

With the fire out, I retreated back into the line of palm trees that formed a ragged green and brown border between the beach and the jungle, and from there I continued to watch the yacht’s progress across the blurry line of the horizon. I held my breath for every second until I was sure it wasn’t going to come close enough to be a threat. When it turned away from the island, I let out a long, hot sigh of relief, but still I waited, watching, until it had sailed around the headland, out of sight.

I returned to my perch on the skeletal log, my happy little bubble of existence disturbed. Although I picked up the coconut shell I had been whittling at before that damn yacht came casually thee-ing and thou-ing its way into my little world, I couldn’t hardly concentrate on whittling, or anything else except the possibility that our existence might be shattered sooner rather than later. I tried to whistle a tune to cheer myself up - Etta James’ ‘At Last’. I’d picked it up from Erika. She hummed it all the time around the island.

Little did I realize as I sat there, whittling and whistling, trying not to think about the implications of the yacht, that just one day later we would be forced out of our little island paradise home.

~~***~~

“ Stay well clear of that one, mark my words.”

Thus pronounced my mother when first she noticed me paying attention to the good-looking American woman who sat at our table aboard ship. My mother’s words, and the sneering tone in which they were delivered, let me and everyone else know what she thought of this American woman. I shrugged her snobbery off. I’m used to both my mother’s disdain for the vast majority of her fellow human beings, and her uncanny ability to know what I am thinking - sometimes before I know I’m thinking it - and I no longer allow myself to be bothered by either. But I did play my expected part, which was to turn to her with a look of wide-eyed innocence and feigned interest in her opinions, and pretend to listen whilst she ranted on.

“ A woman like that - ” my mother’s furry upper lip curled, giving it the look of a giant caterpillar sat in the middle of her face - ” is good for only one thing.”

“ And what would that be, Mother?” I inquired dutifully, whilst I envisioned myself with my hands around her neck, squeezing the life out of her, lovingly of course.

She thinned her lips.  “ A woman like that is only good for getting other people to do whatever bad things she wants them to do!”

I sincerely hoped this were the case because there were a myriad of very bad things I would love to do with that woman.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not some weirdo, given to forming fascinations with random women. And although my experience with women may not be of the broadest, neither am I some trembling virgin awaiting her princess to wake her with her first kiss. However, there had been something about this particular woman that drew me into vivid fantasies from the first moment I saw her. She was cute and sort of tomboyish but also very feminine, and she had amazingly green eyes and long lashes, and dark curly hair that I wanted to run my fingers through, and she had a mouth that held the very shape of sensuality. And - miracle! - she was alone on board. I was determined to meet her, and determined that my mother’s overbearing shadow should not cause this relationship to wither and die in its infancy. I have a fairly reliable gay-dar and it had begun pinging like mad the first time I saw the American woman. 

To have agreed to a three-month world cruise with your ageing and impossible parent might make me seem like a masochist, but my mother was paying for the trip and I had recently been made redundant from my job. With no immediate prospects of finding another job and little desire to sit at home watching brain-rotting daytime TV, I accepted the invite to go on the cruise. Of course, less than three days into the voyage, my jaded bigot of a mother had already berated everyone from the Japanese to the Turks via the French, with frequent trips back to the Americans, and I had already begun to question whether sitting at home and poking myself repeatedly in the eye with a pencil might not have been time better spent. I very, very much wanted to kill my mother.

But since murder wasn’t a viable option, I resolved instead to ensure that her every single moment of every single day aboard this floating tub of living death were fully occupied with some event or pastime. Anything I could sign her up to in order to keep her out of the way of my pursuit of the beautiful American woman.

So, with my mother safely tucked away playing Quoits and learning to Salsa, I began ‘accidentally’ bumping into the American woman wherever and whenever I could. And upon each of these engineered encounters, I would smile and utter a charming: “ Good morning! Lovely day again, isn’t it?”

My efforts were rewarded with vague smiles and murmured responses from the modern-day green-eyed goddess. Please don’t all rush at once to buy us matching drapes and flatware. At least I could reassure myself with the knowledge that she wasn’t paying attention to anyone else either. I saw plenty of guys hit on her, but she rebuffed each of them with a polite smile and a shake of her head when they tried to buy her drinks.

The closest she and I came to having a real conversation occurred when I followed her to one of the numerous themed bars dotted around the ship. There is a reason that cruise ships have so much food and alcohol available on a 24/7 basis - how else could they ensure that over a thousand people don’t all throw themselves overboard through sheer screaming insanity caused by being forced to live on top of one another all day and night, the whole time surrounded by nothing but sea and sky? The Goddess and I exchanged a whole three minutes worth of conversation as we stood at the bar, sipping luridly colored drinks that sported more fruit than Carmen Miranda’s hat and little paper umbrellas that tried all the time to poke you in the eye. We chatted mostly about cocktails and the weather. Wow, I know.

“ So, um, how are you enjoying the cruise?” I inquired at length.

She gave me one of those vague smiles.  “ It’s an experience, isn’t it?” she responded enigmatically.

Even so, I was encouraged to ask what enticed her to take a cruise?

“ It seemed like a good way to get away from all the shit and nonsense,” she told me. Then she took her cocktail and turned away, bidding me a good day as she departed. I had another drink by myself, and went over in my head every word she had spoken to me, analyzing each nuance, searching for meanings hidden between the lines. Sad, isn’t it?

We had entered the second week of the cruise ( by then it felt to me like the second year of it ) before I really came to the notice of The Goddess. I came to her notice by careening into her as the ship made a lunging roll to starboard and disgorged a large number of terrified, screaming passengers into the ocean on that side. We were sinking. And fast.

The ship had come to grief during an un-seasonal storm in the South China Sea, colliding with not one, but two fishing vessels thrown off their own designated courses by the storm. It was very unsporting of the weather to do these things, I thought, as I joined my fellow passengers running blindly around, screaming, and generally just panicking. The first collision holed the ship below decks - which mightn’t have been such a disaster by itself - but the second collision ripped another gash in the hull. I mean, seriously, how can one ship have so much shitty luck? Within a frighteningly short time the electrical system had failed, plunging the whole ship into darkness, and we had taken on so much water that the lower starboard decks were submerged.

Not a soul of the passengers or crew appeared to have a single clue as to what should be done in such an emergency as this. Instead, things degenerated quickly into a free-for-all of unchecked panic and chaos. I lost sight of my mother when I was knocked down in the stampede from First Class and had to spend several terrifying minutes crawling in darkness and a foot of freezing water between a swarm of moving feet, all the time assaulted by bits of furniture and fittings. By the time I struggled upright again, my mother was nowhere to be found and I was someplace other than where I had started out. People rushed around me on all sides, bumping me, jostling me, spinning me along, until I felt sick with disorientation and near-mad with panic.

Then I fell into a blessedly deserted side corridor, away from the stampeding feet and rushing water, and I let out a huge sigh of relief. I didn’t even care that I was alone. I found my feet and, dazed, I leaned against the canted wall for a few moments to catch my breath. Then I began staggering along the corridor, feeling my way along the wall, which I realized belatedly used to be the ceiling. Occasionally the red glow of an emergency light would wink out of the gloom and I would stop, try to get my bearings by its meager illumination, but really, upside down and in darkness, a ship looks nothing like it was ever meant to. After a while I didn’t care any more where I was going, so long as it was out, and I didn’t get trampled before I got there. Of course, I was so turned around that I could’ve been headed straight for the flooded bowels of the fucking ship without knowing it. As I stumbled my way along - and occasionally cursed aloud as I barked a shin, stubbed a toe, or whacked an elbow against something should have been someplace else - I vowed that if I did get out of this mess alive I would never again complain about leading a dull existence. I would embrace my own dull fucking existence, in fact.

At one point I grabbed a lifejacket out of the water flowing around my ankles and I thrust it over my head. I suspected the jacket had come off someone already dead, but I didn’t think too hard on that because what was I going to do - risk drowning because the thought of wearing a dead person’s lifejacket gave me the creeps? Fuck that noise. Unfortunately, lifejackets were meant to be worn in water, not in a dark, upside down ship, and it turned out to be a bit of a nuisance, getting snagged on objects and obscuring my vision. Once, it even hung me up on a broken light fixture and I had to spend several panicky minutes de-tangling myself as I listened to water gushing somewhere close by. I actually considered ditching the fucking thing then, but I reasoned with myself that if I made it into the water, I would probably need it, and I shoved the thing out of my face for the umpteenth time and carried on my way.

And then a hand grabbed me out of the darkness.

I freaked out. I started shrieking and struggling and swatting at the hand and the darkness and the stupid lifejacket.

A voice yelled at me out of the darkness.

“ Hey! Calm down, for Christ’s sake, it’s just me! We met at the Irish theme bar, remember?”

The voice belonged to the hands that clutched me by the stupid lifejacket, but at that moment I had no recollection of ever having met either the hands or the voice. Fortunately, one of those infrequent emergency lights glowed out of the darkness and I saw her: the American woman whom I had spent the whole cruise chasing fruitlessly after. The Goddess. I was stunned. And not a little overjoyed, although I know that being overjoyed was probably inappropriate to the circumstances. It doesn’t matter, I was over-fucking-joyed to see that she was alive and to know that she recognized me. The mindless, gibbering panic receded a little way.

“ Yes!” I gasped. My head bobbed frantically enough to make the bones in my neck groan and crack almost as loudly as the ship tearing itself apart.  “ Yes, I remember.”

“ Great,” the Goddess said. She tugged on my lifejacket.  “ Now can we get the hell out of here?”

The ship was going down fast. Everywhere was the sound of rushing seawater and metal being shredded under pressure. There really was no time for any of the usual polite social do-si-do-ing. I simply nodded and allowed The Goddess to grab my arm and half-drag me through the upside-down ship as though she actually knew where she were going. Perhaps she did, or perhaps we just got lucky, but either way we turned a corner and came to a doorway. Forcing our way through it, we burst in a tangle of legs and arms onto a rain- and seawater-lashed deck that looked unnervingly close to the sky. It had to be the portside deck then, because the starboard deck was under several hundred feet of water. I couldn’t have cared less which damned deck it was - port, starboard, or the deck of the goddamned Starship Enterprise - I just wanted to get off this doomed fucking tub.

The chances of my doing that seemed suddenly b6etter because, directly ahead of us and swinging precariously from the divots supporting it, was a lifeboat. Two crew members were manhandling passengers into it. I took a moment to think about how all the babbling of the health-and-safety experts will go straight to Hell in a real crisis. Who has time to do things the correct way and be mindful of not throwing out their back when the whole fucking world is danger of imminent death? I say fuck that noise, too.

The deck was damn near vertical so that we had to make our way, very carefully and with painful slowness, by grasping the deck rail and bracing our feet against the deck itself. It was freezing cold, wet, and dark, and my mind kept circling back to sharks. There were sharks in the South China Sea, weren’t there? Probably dangerous ones. Man-eaters, given half the chance. I wasn’t sure whether I’d prefer to drown, or be eaten by the sharks, although it was more likely that I’d freeze to death first, or die upon impact with the water. These cheery thoughts kept me company as I inched my way toward the lifeboat and the two crew members who shouted encouragement to us. This wasn’t as helpful as it might sound. In fact, it was downright distracting. At least these two spoke English. The crew had been culled from disparate parts of the world and their command of English was…variable, shall we say. It had made for some interesting dinner table conversations.

We were almost to the lifeboat, with less than three feet to go before the crew members could grab us and haul us in, when the ship made a sudden greasy lurch downward and we were thrown back on our asses. We skidded in a tangle of arms ands legs down the wet deck, and slammed bodily into the metal bulkhead. I think it was the First Class Smoking Lounge. Well, it was the non-smoking Smoking Lounge because nowhere is safe from the anti-smoking brigade these days. I cracked my head pretty good, and a little burst of brightly colored stars came out and danced for me. My ears rang like the ship’s bell. Over the ringing I heard The Goddess screaming at me  “ No!”  She also loosed a string of such curses as I’m sure most of the sailors on this doomed ship would never have heard. It was a strangely erotic experience, clinging to that listing deck, not sure which bruise to rub first or whether I should bother since I was apparently going to die anyway, seeing her all soaked and bloodied and disheveled, and hearing her curse like that. I do wonder about myself sometimes. Truly, I do. Then I followed the direction of her wild-eyed stare and all the erotic went out of the moment as I realized that her screaming hadn’t been meant for me at all.

The lifeboat had torn free of its moorings when the ship lurched and now it swung wildly from a single divot. The people already inside were clinging for dear life to the sides. Some lost their grip, fell out, and disappeared from our horrified sight into the water many feet below. I didn’t even hear the splashes they must have made over the shriek of wind and metal. Then the lifeboat snapped free of the last divot and plunged after the passengers. The Goddess and me both watched in numbed horror as the two crewmen disappeared over the rail also.

I moaned:  “ We’re gonna die!”

The Goddess looked at me with such a grim determination in her face that I was struck silent by it. She shook her head.  “ No, we are not,” she insisted. She grabbed me, pushed me away from the wall to which I clung, and I went slithering down the wet, vertical deck at a rapid clip. I flailed, screamed, and then I made a wild grab for the rail as I skidded toward it. My fingers closed around the cold metal cylinder of the lowest rung. The Goddess came sliding toward me, her descent a little less uncontrolled than mine, and I grabbed her belt as she came parallel to me, and held on. We hauled ourselves to the edge of the deck, and looked down at the black, roiling water below us, as uninviting a prospect as stepping into the mouth of Hell itself.

The Goddess shouted at me:  “ We have to jump!”

I stared at her. The mindless, gibbering panic of before was back. I looked into the water again where I could see the figures of other passengers being tossed helplessly, like so much shark chum, and I shook my head.  “ Are you out of your fucking mind?” I screamed back at her.  “ We’ll die if we do that!”

Of course, if we stayed on the ship we’d die anyway. It wasn’t exactly a win-win situation for us.

The Goddess’ green eyes glittered. She grinned at me. All wet and bloodied and disheveled, and grinning like that, she was sexy as hell. I was back to the wholly inappropriate erotic thoughts in an instant.

“ What’s your name?” she asked.

“ Kris,” I told her.  “ Kris with a ‘K’.” As though it mattered.

She gave such a cute laugh then that I decided if I died without ever hearing another sound, I could die happy. 

“ Mine’s Erika. Erika Wilson - also with a ‘k’,” she said. She winked.  “ If that isn’t fate, Kris-with-a-K, you tell me what is?”

And then, without waiting for my reply, she pried my hands from the rail and pushed me over the side. I felt the freezing, needle-sting of rain and sea spray against my flesh and cold air rushing past me, plastering the wet clothing to my skin and sucking the breath from my lungs. I heard a thin, high-pitched screaming which I was shocked to realize was coming from me. I wondered how in hell I could be making that sound when I couldn’t even seem to breathe properly. I did have the presence of mind left, however, to brace myself for impact with the water but when I did hit, it still felt like I had slammed into something solid and living that wanted nothing more than to smash me into little pieces. I experienced a single moment of sheer numbing terror and pain, and then I lost consciousness.

~~***~~

I had no recollection of being in the water, nor did I have any recollection of being hauled into the lifeboat. Neither do I don’t recall spending that first night spent adrift in the lifeboat because I was feverish and unconsciousness, half-drowned and bleeding from the head wound I’d sustained when I gave myself a whack against the First Class Smoking Lounge bulkhead. Apparently I spent that first night lying in Erika’s lap, with her tending to me, which makes me mad not to be able to remember it. I could only hope that I didn’t do any weird raving, or behave otherwise inappropriately. You know how you can get when you have a fever and a head wound and are convinced that you are going to die. You say stupid shit pops into your head.

I blinked groggily awake what felt like weeks later but what was really in the hours just after dawn after the ship going down, when the sun was a pale yellow, indistinct dot trying to break through a grey-white sea mist. Much calmer waters than last night lapped at the sides of the lifeboat. I flushed both hot and cold at once, shivering in my clothes that were still damp and stiff with salt. The lifejacket that had irked me so much last night had probably helped to save my life, and it was now gone. For a moment I actually missed it. I forgot about it a few moments later when I had to scramble for the side of the boat to do the big rainbow yawn into the water. Husked out, my gut and throat aching, dizziness catching up to me, I collapsed back into the Goddess’ lap. Erika smiled down at me.

“ Well, hi there. Welcome back to the land of the barely living,” she said dryly.

Erika. With a ‘k’. Just like I was Kris with a ‘K’. She’d said it was fate. I remembered that, too.

Pain made itself known to me, in my back, and my shoulders, in my legs and my arms, but mostly in my head. I felt like I had spent too long trying to use my body to batter down a building, leading with my head. I could hear other voices, muffled and indistinct, and I could see blurry faces in the background. Erika and I weren’t alone then. Others had survived. That gave me a small pang of disappointment. The idea of being alone and adrift on a lifeboat with Erika was just too damned alluring not for me to be a little disappointed. Then the pain forced its way back into my consciousness and I started to reach up with one hand to feel my broken head, to assess the damage, only Erika stopped me by gently placing her hand on mine. 

“ You gave your skull a good whack,” she explained.  “ There’s a gash. I cleaned it with seawater and some rags, but you’d best not touch it. We don’t want it getting infected.”

“ Thank you for that,” I croaked. I had no previous experience of being shipwrecked but I figured that open wounds and drifting in the middle of the ocean were not a good combo. I also wondered if we had any fresh water to drink because I had a raging thirst. Apparently reading me mind, Erika turned to someone out of my sight to ask for some water. That person turned out to be one of the crewmen who had gone over the rail just a few moments before Erika and I. His name was Sam, he was from the UK, but he had been working so long for the shipping line that he was now as fluent in the languages of his fellow crew members as he was in English. He explained all of this to me whilst I sipped from the plastic bottle of water that he provided. Never had tepid mineral water tasted so good. All I needed now was a toothbrush and some Colgate.

“ How many of us made it?” I asked.

“ Six in all,” Erika told me grimly.  “ There were nine originally, but two died from their injuries during the night, another one died this morning from…Well, the guy just jumped overboard.”

I blinked in horror.  “ He just jumped? Why?”

Erika shrugged.  “ Who knows why people do crazy things in bad situations?”

I shook my head, but that made everything hurt worse, so I stopped doing it and just lay quietly in Erika’s lap. Is it terrible of me to confess that I was kind of enjoying lying in her lap? Well, I was. You can feel free to judge me. I don’t care. Then Erika asked if I knew anything about navigation?

“ No,” I said. I looked at Sam, who had moved away to tend to a woman raving and bleeding at the other end of the end of the boat. She looked like she might be the next one to depart our company. I didn’t want to think about that.  “ What about him? He’s crew. Doesn’t he know how to navigate?”

Erika blew a sigh.  “ He’s crew, yeah, but he’s entertainment crew. He knows more about the ship’s cabaret schedule than he does about navigating a lifeboat.”

I closed my eyes.  “ So, we’re pretty much fucked then?”

Erika patted my arm.  “ Pretty much.”

“ I don’t suppose anyone managed to rescue a flare gun?”

“ Nope. Sorry. No radio either. Not even a damned flag that we could wave.”

I don’t know why I did so, but I started to laugh. Maybe it was some kind of survivor guilt, or just the sheer hopelessness of the situation, but something triggered a bout of hysterics. Whatever it was, it quickly infected Erika, and Sam too, and soon we were all rolling around our little lifeboat in the middle of the godforsaken South China Sea, laughing our doomed selves silly. No radio, no flare gun, not even a fucking flag. Oh, we were hip-deep in these alligators alright!

Eventually we sobered up and began to think seriously about our predicament, about how we might survive until someone came for us. Presumably someone would be looking for survivors. The Coast Guard, or whatever equivalent patrolled in this part of the world. I rather hoped they would send out the Royal Navy. I trust the Royal Navy. My father was in the Royal Navy. That reminded me of my mother and the fact that she had likely not survived. I should have been more upset by this, but I just couldn’t spare too much time or emotion on the ranting old bat when I was fighting for my own survival - and for Erika’s survival. I had decided I would do everything in my power to keep Erika safe and alive.

How very gallant of me, I know. Especially since I was pretty sure she could take care of me with far greater efficiency than I could look out for her.

Erika was already making some effort to take charge.  “ Okay, what supplies do we have?” she asked.

Sam recited a meager list that included a few suitcases of clothing, some blankets, eight chocolate bars, three tins of peaches, six bottles of fresh water, a knife, four life jackets, some damp blankets, a tarp, and some bandages and a tube of antiseptic cream.

It wasn’t much but it wasn’t nothing either, which would’ve been worse. Still, toothbrushes and Colgate would’ve been really, really good.

“ How best do we make eight chocolate bars last between six adults?” I asked.

“ Don’t forget the bandages. We could be reduced to eating those,” Sam added dryly and that raised another round of laughter.

“ We’ll make it,” I said firmly. I looked up into Erika’s luminous green eyes and I was pleasantly surprised to see her regard me with a newfound respect.

~~***~~

We drifted for eight days. I kept count of the passing of time by the rising and setting of the sun. Two more of our little band had died by the fifth day - the woman who’d been bleeding and ranting, and a gentleman named Giovanni. We heaved the bodies overboard after Sam had said a short prayer for the deceased. We had no other choice - with the heat the bodies would rot quickly and the smell would attract sharks to us. Already we had seen the ominous gray triangular fins circling in the water a few feet from us. So far the beasts were keeping their distance but that wouldn’t last if we began to perish. As we grew progressively weaker, the sharks would grow bolder and venture closer. I didn’t doubt that eventually they would begin nudging the lifeboat with their powerful snouts in an attempt to put a hole in it.

There was also the matter of the smell that would be horrendous. Let’s not forget that.

The worst times were during the night when the temperature dropped and it became perishing cold in that open boat. Under the dim glow of the moon, watching the sharks swim around us, the terrifying reality of our predicament was driven home to us. I was glad to have Erika to hold onto. And yes, I do mean in that way. During our sixth night aboard the drifting lifeboat we progressed beyond being mere friends.

The few blankets we had at our disposal were always slightly damp - from the spray of seawater and the occasional tropical rains that fell - and hence they didn’t quite keep out the nighttime chill. It made sense to huddle up together for warmth then. On that sixth night Erika and I were wrapped together in one of these thin, damp blankets, lying in the bow of the lifeboat with the moonlight glittering on the dark water ( and glittering on the gray fins ), with no one else near us, and we were as close as two human beings could physically be. Everyone was asleep. By then ‘everyone’ were Sam the crew member, and Brenda, a middle-aged woman from the UK who’d come on the cruise with her husband and lost him when the ship went down. Brenda was getting sicker with each passing day.

Erika wrapped her arms around me and pulled me tight to her underneath the blanket. Her breasts pushed against mine and I could feel her nipples through the thin material of her t-shirt. When she pushed her hand down my pants and worked it inside my underwear, I initially jerked away in shock.

“ What’re you doing?” I squeaked.

“ Don’t tell me you that weren’t expecting this to happen,” she murmured, her face so close to my neck that her breath tickled the flesh just below my right ear.

I swallowed, shook my head.  “ I wasn’t.”

But it was a lie of sorts. I mightn’t have been expecting it but I’d been hoping like hell for it ever since I first saw her on board that doomed ship. Still, I put Erika’s sudden desire to get physical with me down to survivor’s guilt mingled with the sheer exhilaration of having come through danger and tragedy alive. It makes people horny.

Not that I was complaining or about to tell her to stop either.

When she began to rub my clit, I damn near exploded. I dug my nails into the flesh at her shoulder blades, and held on to her as she slid one finger sliding back and forth with a slowness and gentleness that was as exquisite as it was maddening. I felt myself swell and throb with impending orgasm.

“ Touch me, Kris,” she murmured.

I had to unzip her jeans, they were so figure-hugging. The rasp of the zipper going down seemed unbearably loud in the night and I held my breath, but no one woke to the sound. Erika gently lifted her hips and ass off the bottom of the boat to allow me to push the jeans, and her underwear, down her thighs far enough that I could touch her unimpeded. She sighed quietly and pushed forward to press her warm, wet crotch into the palm of my hand. I moved the heel of my thumb against her clit, and she began to breathe faster.

The urgency, and the need to be near-silent and stay still, made our lovemaking all the more delicious and memorable.

“ I think I might be in love with you,” I whispered to her afterwards. I didn’t expect her to tell me the same in return.

But Erika smiled and kissed my neck and said:  “ I think I might love you, too.”

Of course I figured she was just being polite.   

On the following day - with our already meager supplies running low and no sign of rescue in sight - Brenda became the next person to succumb to death. Her thirst had driven her to drink seawater which made her sick and delirious, and finally killed her. That was a dampener on my ardor. It also left just Erika, Sam, and myself as the sole survivors.  I figured we would heave Brenda’s body overboard like the others, only Erika made a suggestion first.

“ We don’t have much left to eat,” she said and Sam and I both looked at her warily. I think we both knew what was coming. Erika folded her upper lip over her lower one, looked away from us, and swallowed hard before she spoke again.  “ We won’t last much longer. We need to - eat something.”

“ Are you suggesting that we - that we eat Brenda?” Sam choked the words out. His eyes were wide with horror. A shudder of revulsion rippled through his thin frame. He shook his head hard.  “ No. Absolutely not. It’s - it’s indecent.”

I wasn’t nearly as horrified at the idea of eating a fellow human being as I would have been under any normal circumstances. But stranded in the middle of the ocean, with our supplies about to run out, well, that was not normal, and it’s amazing what you might be willing to do to survive. Still, I played Devil’s advocate.

“ She is dead,” I pointed out. Erika nodded. Sam stared at me like I’d just taken off all my clothes and declared myself to be a chocolate Easter bunny. Actually, I could quite picture Erika taking off all of her clothes and declaring herself to be a chocolate Easter bunny…I would certainly eat her if she insisted. But that’s beside the point.  “ I think Brenda would understand,” I added.

“ We can’t eat a - a person,” the poor crewman whispered. He swallowed convulsively a couple times.  “ And it isn’t like we could - cook the flesh. We’ve nothing to cook with. We can’t eat raw human flesh.”

“ So we should just starve slowly to death?” Erika demanded.

“ I won’t be a party to it,” Sam insisted miserably.

But he was out-voted. We held onto Brenda’s body for as long as we dared to, consuming what we reasonably could consume raw of it, and then we got rid of the remainder. I was surprised that it didn’t make us sick, eating a raw human being. The human body can adapt to many things, I guess, given the right incentive, and survival is a mighty powerful incentive. Sam did vomit up his first mouthful, but I think that was more to do with his continuing aversion to the idea of eating a fellow human being than any physiological reaction. I won’t go into how the flesh tasted, or its consistency, because it was done out of sheer necessity, not as a novel culinary experience, and therefore the details do not need dwelled upon.

Sam said his usual words over the remains of Brenda’s corpse as it sank out of sight and the gray fins dived after it.  “ Rest in peace, Brenda. Let’s hope your sacrifice will not be in vain.,” he added morosely.

On the ninth day, we spotted land. It took all of us some time to realize that what we were seeing was real and not some desperate hallucination brought on by lack of food or fresh water. Then, elated out of our exhaustion, we used our hands to steer the lifeboat toward shore. Thankfully, we caught the tide running in the right direction and that helped to carry us where we wanted to go. Gasping, with our cramping muscles screaming in agony, all three of us together dragged the lifeboat onto the sand just far enough that it wouldn’t drift away, and then we collapsed there, faces to the sky, breaths heaving in and out, looking and sounding like three landed fishes. Even in my exhaustion, however, I felt elated, and I think the others did, too. After eight days and nights at sea, any dry land was a miracle. I would’ve cried except my body hadn’t enough moisture left in it to spare.

When we had regained our breaths enough to sit up, we looked around ourselves in wonderment and we saw golden, feathery sand, and a green fringe of trees with silver barks so bright it almost hurt the eyes to look at them after days and days of seeing nothing but sea and sky.

“ Where are we?” Sam asked.

I shook my head. We could be on the Moon for all I knew, or cared right then. I looked at Erika, but all she could offer was a shrug.

“ Paradise,” she said.

I couldn’t argue with that.

~~***~~

After we had recovered from the effort of dragging the boat and ourselves out of the water, we reasoned that we should probably build a fire first of all, both for warmth and to alert any passing ships to our presence. We used the old Boy Scout method of rubbing sticks together to create a spark.

“ Maybe you two ought to rub something else together and create the sparks that way,” Sam muttered, giving a wry grin to Erika and I.

I blinked, felt myself blush.

Erika just laughed.  “ Guess our little secret isn’t such a secret after all,” she remarked.

Well, shit.

She turned out to be quite adept at using sticks and stones to make sparks, and at building shelters with the large palm-like leaves of the trees and strips of bark. I was a good climber and fetched coconuts and mango-like fruits from the same trees. In those first days we dined a lot on coconuts and the mango-like fruits. Then Sam managed to whittle a crude spear and we added fish to our diet. We had shelter, warmth, food to eat, and a means of boiling sea water to make it drinkable by using the half coconut shells. We even constructed a latrine, roughly following the ancient Roman model, and situated it a little way along the beach from our encampment, because who wants to shit where they eat, right? And I’m happy to say we discovered ways of brushing our teeth without Colgate or proper toothbrushes. You can have no idea of how civilization is defined by dental hygiene until you don’t have access to the basic tools of the same. 

Eventually, Erika suggested that we ought to venture further inland.  “ No one seems to have seen our signal fire yet,” she pointed out.  “ If there are any other people living here, we might need to go to them if they can’t see us.”

“ We shouldn’t all go,” Sam argued.  “ In case a ship comes, or something happens.”

We left Sam then to tend the fire and to keep a lookout for rescue ships - which we still expected to arrive imminently in those days - whilst Erika and I explored beyond the trees. 

Pretty soon we had found a fresh water lagoon fed by a waterfall that cascaded down from the low mountains ringing the interior of the island.

“ Think those are volcanic?” Erika asked, indicating the towering, dark-colored slopes of the mountains.

I gazed up at them, then shrugged.  “ It’s possible. We’re in the South China Sea, right? There are a lot of volcanic islands there.”

“ Great. I wonder if this one is active?” Erika muttered.

I preferred not to think about that. The lagoon was fresh water and better then for bathing in than the sea because we didn’t have to scrape the dried salt off our bodies afterward. Erika and I stripped off and dived in, swam around for a bit, and of course that led to other things. Neither of us seemed inclined to talk about what it all meant. Hell, we were stranded on a deserted island. Any, or all of us could get sick or injured at any time, and the chances were good that we’d die before rescue came. What fucking point was there in talking about our feelings then? We just went with it.

Around the lagoon, we also found some good stones and pieces of driftwood that could be fashioned into crude tools, and  there were fruits and nuts growing on the trees around it. Erika figured those would be safe for us to eat because the birds were eating them.

“ Isn’t that a myth?” I asked dubiously.

“ I don’t know.” She shrugged. Then:  “ Let’s see…” and she popped a handful of pieces of the mysterious fruit, and a couple of the nuts, into her mouth and chewed them quickly. I gaped at her, my heart racing, feeling sweat that had nothing to do with either the sun’s heat or her proximity to me, pop on my scalp and my back. I wanted to scream at her to spit that shit out, but she had already swallowed the mouthful.

“ You’re crazy,” I told her, shaking my head.

She grinned at me.  “ We’ll see, won’t we? If I die, I’m crazy. If I don’t, I’m a fucking genius.”

It turned out that she was indeed a genius, and the fruits and nuts became another part of our staple diet.

I’m condensing a lot of our early days on the island. Much of what we did was simple surviving. One day we awoke to find that some stuff from the ship had washed ashore: luggage; flatware from the ship’s dining room; a few stray tins of food had escaped the crushing jaws of sharks; and several bottles of champagne. Erika took those and hid them, because the last thing we needed was for anyone to get drunk on the island. Heaven only knew where that might lead. Amongst the luggage I found a collection of blank notebooks and some ballpoint pens and I decided to keep journals of our experiences.

“ Gonna write a bestseller once we get home?” Sam asked me, and I sensed that he was only half-kidding.

“ I’ll split the profits three ways,” I assured him dryly. But it didn’t seem like a bad idea. I had visions of doing interviews on Oprah and Conan O’Brien. 

Erika’s gaze drifted when we joked about this, and her expression became flat and pensive.  “ Money isn’t always everything,” she told us wistfully.

Unfortunately, none of the washed-ashore booty included a first aid kit. We learned to use an assortment of nature’s provisions to heal simple cuts and wounds, although I did still worry a lot about any of us getting really sick or being injured in some much more serious way. Death just seemed so inevitable. Then, as time went by and it didn’t happen, I found it easier not to think about it, and instead took each day as it came.

I derived a huge amount of enjoyment from being with Erika, I admit that. We shared a shelter whilst Sam had his own little hut a couple hundred yards away, and we acted like the ‘couple’ we had turned into, and Sam didn’t seem to have any problem with that. After our first week on the island, it began to dawn on us that rescue may not come and we talked instead about loading the lifeboat with provisions and setting sail in it, taking our chances navigating by the sun and stars. Sam was the most vociferous advocate of leaving the island. Each time the subject came up, however, either me or Erika would find a way to talk him out of it. I don’t think that either of us really wanted to ever leave the island. Neither of us had voiced the thought, but I know it was in my subconscious, and I think it was in Erika’s mind too, even then.

Then, during one of the storms that infrequently blew up and raged across the island by night, the lifeboat was torn loose form its moorings. It drifted away from the beach and became dashed to pieces against some rocks in the bay. That, of course, ended any further discussion about setting sail from the island. Sam dropped into a despondent funk after the lifeboat was lost, and his attitude toward Erika and myself cooled somewhat. I happened to be collecting shells from the beach close to the spot where the lifeboat had been tied up - I wanted to make a necklace for Erika with the shells - and I noticed that the rope by which it had been secured was not frayed, as I would’ve expected had the damage been caused by the storm, but apparently slashed cleanly through, as with a knife. We had only one knife on the island, however, and Erika was in daily charge of it.

I remembered how during that stormy night Erika had gotten up and left our hut to use the latrine. She had taken the knife with her, telling me that she needed to cut more leaves for toilet tissue.

Did I suspect her of cutting the lifeboat loose? Perhaps I did, in my deepest subconscious. Did it matter to me that she might’ve done so, thus destroying our only chance of getting off the island? No. Hell, no.    

Not long after we lost the lifeboat, I had taken my turn tending the signal fire whilst Erika and Sam went foraging for food and supplies, and when they returned, Erika looked - well, she looked perplexed, is the only way I could put it. When I asked her what was wrong, she would only shake her head, and mumble that it was nothing, but the wary glance she shot Sam’s back made me uneasy. I held my counsel until we were alone later that night and then asked her again what had happened? Erika sucked a big breath in, closed her eyes, and then she informed me - with great reluctance - that Sam had acted inappropriately toward her during their foraging mission.

I was shocked. I mean, I was seriously shocked.  “ Sam?” I asked dazedly. Erika gave me an unhappy nod. She had her head resting on my chest and her hair tickled my bare shoulder.  “ I can’t imagine that,” I added.

Erika turned a reproachful glance up to me.  “ You don’t believe me?”

“ Of course I do,” I assured her. And I did believe her. I believed that she wouldn’t make something like this up. I remembered, too, Sam’s little joke on our first day on the island, and how his attitude toward us had cooled lately, and I began to wonder how innocent any of that really had been.  “ What should we do?” I wondered.

“ I’d prefer to let it go for now. It might’ve been a one-time thing and I don’t want to embarrass him or make life awkward for us all,” Erika said.

I agreed. Actually, I was relieved that she didn’t want to make a big thing out of it. Hell, we were marooned on an island, and were going to be for God only knew how long - it would’ve been a miracle had at least one of us not gone a bit weird. So we let the Sam incident go, and for the next few days everything was fine until I was awoken during the night by the sound of Erika screaming and Sam shouting outside of our hut. I bolted out of my crude blankets and dived outside, still groggy, attired only in my underwear, and I ran full-tilt toward where Erika and Sam were apparently fighting a little way down the beach. I barreled right into Sam and knocked him down, winding him. I stood over the fallen crewman, panting, yelling at him to leave Erika the fuck alone, not even sure yet what had happened. My right fist was raised, ready to strike if Sam so much as moved. He had the good sense to stay down and to stay still.

“ What happened?” I demanded when they both had stopped making noise and I could make myself heard.

“ I couldn’t sleep so I came out for a walk on the beach,” Erika explained and her voice hitched with emotion. I clenched my teeth as I glowered at Sam where he was sitting on the ground. His expression was unreadable, his whole body still, only his eyes ticking slowly back and forth between Erika and I.  “ He must’ve followed me. He grabbed me and got me on the ground. He - I think he was going to rape me!”

My blood came to a slow boil. I tried to remain reasonable, to put myself in Sam’s shoes and understand that a young man like him might be unable to resist a beautiful and capable woman like Erika, but it didn’t work. I just wanted to kill him. I held my temper in check with great difficulty.  “ Is that right, Sam, is that what happened?” I asked.

He looked at me, then at Erika. I thought I saw hurt flash in his eyes. I had no time to wonder about it, however, before Sam shook his head and stated in a flat tone of denial:  “ No. That wasn’t what happened.”

“ Why would Erika make it up?” I demanded tightly.

Sam looked at me again and I saw pity in his eyes. That shocked me, puzzled me too. He said:  “ She’s a con artist, Kris, and lying is what she does. You should be careful of her, too. She’ll take what she needs from you and then discard you. She’s dangerous.”

Right at that moment my mother’s words came back to haunt me: a woman like that is only good for getting other people to do whatever bad things she wants them to do. I heard those words - heard them spoken in my mother’s cawing voice - inside my own head as clearly as the day she had uttered them. I stared at Sam, wanting to believe Erika, wanting my mother and the crew man both to be wrong. Sam looked calmly back at me, and he shook his head in a sad way.  “ So what’re you going to do with me?” he asked. His eyes were on Erika as he added:  “ I’ll leave the camp, how about that? Take whatever I need to build myself a new camp and go to the other side of the island. You need never see me again. And if any ships comes around to my side of the island, I‘ll go with them but I won’t mention either of you because I don’t think you want to be rescued, either of you. How about that, do we have a deal?”

And so on the following day I helped Sam to carry some stuff over to a bay on the other side of the island and I stayed for a few hours to help him build a new shelter there for himself. We never discussed what had happened with Erika. I don’t think I wanted to discuss it for fear I might hear something I didn’t like, and Sam, for his part, just didn’t know what to say to me.

Life went on. I thought about Sam for a while, wondered how he was getting along by himself, but then I stopped doing it so much. I know that sounds selfish and uncaring, but it was just so easy to put things out of my mind if I didn’t want them in there. I had Erika to keep me occupied. She was mine now.

It was what I’d wanted all along, wasn’t it?

~~***~~

We settled into a nice routine. We even began to think of the island as home and named it Silver Island. I would never kid myself that in the real world someone like Erika would look twice at someone like me. But this was not the real world, or at least not the one we’d been used to. It was a New World, and one that only we two shared. Maybe I was a consolation prize for Erika. Maybe she was the kind of person needed to always be with someone and, with no better prospect on the horizon, she had settled for me. On the other hand, of all the people she could have grabbed out of the darkness of that sinking ship, why was it me? Fate? Coincidence? Or design? Or maybe I was just over-thinking it.

I used to do that sometimes, over-think things, back when things seemed to matter.

One day Erika went to the lagoon alone to bathe, and she found Sam there. He was dead, floating facedown in the water, his arms and legs spread out, and there was a nasty gash on his head. It looked like he had slipped on the slimy rocks around the lagoon, knocked himself unconscious, and fallen into the water where he drowned. Erika came back to fetch me and we fished him out together, carried him back to his own beach, and gave him a nice burial at sea. As we watched his body float away on the tide, I suddenly asked Erika:  “ That day, on the ship, when I asked you why you’d come on a cruise…you told me that it had seemed like a good way to get away from all the shit and nonsense. Does that mean you’ve had a lot of shit and nonsense in your life?”

She nodded. Her gaze had gone distant again, same way it had when the subject of lucrative book deals had been discussed. Then she turned to look at me and I blinked at the anguish in her expression.  “ More than you could imagine. I did a lot of bad things once upon a time, Kris.”

“ What did you do?” I asked tentatively.

Erika looked away from me. I reached out and took her chin between my thumb and forefinger, drew her gaze back to me.  “ I stole money,” she confessed.  “ I stole it from my employer. Eight million and change.”

“ Oh,” I said. I shrugged.  “ Stealing isn’t always so bad. At least you didn’t murder anyone.”

Erika closed her eyes. Pain etched itself into her features.

I swallowed.  “ Oh shit. You killed someone?”

“ Yes. And other people committed murder on my behalf, too. There was this one guy - Sloane - he killed a couple of my ex-employer’s hired thugs who found me.”

Okay, what concerned me right then - more than someone having killed for Erika - was that my gay-dar had failed to pick up on her bisexuality. I know, pathetic, right? I gazed at her profile: at the perfect shape of her nose and chin; at her carved cheekbones and the long, thick dark lashes that framed her deep green eyes. I took a moment to process how I felt about the things I’d just learned, beside the fact of her bisexuality which I could learn to live with. And I realized that I loved the way Erika’s muscles rippled beneath her smooth, tanned skin; I loved the deft movements of her hands and fingers; and I loved and the way that her hips swayed and her buttocks flexed when she walked.

I loved her.

I put my arm around her muscular shoulders, feeling the flesh there warmed by sitting on the rock in the sun, smelling the faint salty tang of the ocean on it, and I gently drew her to me. She didn’t resist.  “ It doesn’t matter. None of it matters,” I told her.  “ It’s all in the past. This is our life now. It’s all that matters.”

She sighed.  “ I could hardly believe it when I ran into you the night the ship sank, you know. I thought it must be - fate or something. I didn’t talk to you just by accident that day at theme bar either, Kris. I knew you’d been following me around the ship and I wanted to talk to you. I liked you. I was just a little afraid to approach you… I mean, your mother wasn’t very impressed with me, was she?”

I burst out laughing at the memory of my perennially disapproving mother with her furry upper lip always cocked in a sneer at something or someone.  “ No, she didn’t care for you,” I agreed. I shook my head.  “ But she rarely cared for anyone, so you shouldn’t take it personally.”

Erika considered this.  “ The thing is, your mother was right about me,” she said and when I tried to protest, she shushed me with a finger held to my lips.  “ She was right that I wasn’t a very nice person. In fact, I was a pretty bad person.”

Then Erika confessed that Sam never actually had tried to touch her, or rape her, or do anything else inappropriate with her. She had simply wanted him to go away and leave the two of us alone. Sam had figured her out as a con artist, and Erika was afraid he would tell me about his suspicions, turn me against her.

“ How did you get to be that - a con artist, I mean?” I asked.

Erika frowned.  “ My dad left when I was just a kid, and my mom got into…well, she got into a lot of bad stuff. I ended up in care. I suppose that experience taught me how people will fuck you over if they can, so I decided to be the one doing the fucking-over instead.”

That was an honest way of looking at it.

Then Erika gave a small, uncertain laugh.  “ The funniest thing is, I’ve always had this dream of finding an island someplace, and living there with someone I could actually love and trust.” She looked at me.  “ And now I have that. But to get it I had to cause another person’s death.”

“ You mean Sam?” I frowned.

Erika nodded. Regret filled her green eyes.

I wanted that regret to go away, and the only way I could think to make it go away was to make love to her, so that was what I did. Right there, on the beach that had been Sam’s beach, with his body washing out to sea, and the sun making our mingled sweat sizzle, we made love and Erika grew happier again, which meant I was happy again.

“ I wish we didn’t ever have to leave here, Kris. Ever,” she whispered.

I felt as though a great rock that had been balanced on my shoulders had just been lifted away. I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed down into Erika’s face.

“ Are you serious?” I asked.

She nodded.  “ I mean, I know that one day we will have to leave…or one of us might die…with no medical help -”

This time it was me who hushed her with a finger held to her lips. I felt the warmth of those and my insides melted.  “ We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, okay? First thing we need to do is to stop lighting that goddamned signal fire. I’m getting really tired of kicking sand over it every time I think I see a ship.”

Erika burst into laughter.  “ Yeah. Me too,” she agreed. She laid her head back against my shoulder, her hand on my thigh, my arms wrapped around her waist, and we lay there, watching the birds wheel over the ocean until the sun started to fade and we made our way back to our own beach. I knew then that although one day we might have to leave Silver Island, we would never leave each other. We would always find another idyllic island paradise to share. Just the two of us.

~~***~~

Then the yacht appeared.

I told Erika about it when she returned. She’d caught some rats which we could cook for dinner. The rats were plentiful on the island and they tasted like chicken. I wonder, is there anything that doesn’t taste like chicken?

“ Do you think they saw us?” she asked dubiously.

I shrugged.  “ I don’t think so, or else they would’ve come right to the island.” I brightened as I remembered something.  “ Hey, did you know that tomorrow will be out official three-month anniversary on Silver Island?”

Erika looked at me in some surprise.

“ I was thinking maybe we could do something special to mark it,” I added and she smiled.  “ We could do dinner - and dancing under the stars. We could even dig up a bottle of that champagne drifted in off the ship…see if it hasn’t turned to vinegar yet.”

“ Sounds perfect,” Erika sighed. She leaned her head on my shoulder, and let her arm snake around my waist as she added:  “ I love you, Kris, you know that, right?”

“ I know. And I love you too,” I told her.

But of course, we didn’t get to celebrate our anniversary. Because the yacht came back, and this time it came all the way to the island, arriving during the night whilst Erika and I were asleep. We were awoken by someone kicking at our feet and ankles and telling us to:  “ Wake up you two. Time to rise and shine, lovebirds.”

I awoke to find a gun pointed at my face. I don’t know shit from chocolate cake about guns. All I knew was the gun was big and the guy holding it looked like he knew how to use it and would be entirely willing to do so.

The gun owner said:  “ You two should sit up nice and not move. My trigger finger is kinda twitchy.”

Erika, who was obviously more accustomed to having guns pointed at her and wasn’t struck dumb with terror by the experience like me, glowered at him and demanded:  “ Who the fuck are you?”

He smiled, this intruder with the big gun. A palm-oil torch burned within the hut and we could see him clearly in the fiery-red illumination. He was tall and broadly built, but athletic rather than stocky, and he had black hair and pale blue eyes. Not unattractive, if you liked your attractive a little on the hard and cruel side.

“ I’m Carl McCrae,” he said. Then Carl McCrae razored a look at me.  “ Who are you then?”

“ Kris Feldman,” I told him. I didn’t like his expression. There were knives in his eyes when he looked at me. Worse, there was lust in them when he looked at Erika.

Carl McCrae looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he nodded.  “ I saw your name on the passenger manifesto, Kris Feldman. You were on that cruise with your mama, right?”

I nodded.

“ Bit pathetic - taking a cruise with your mama,” Carl McCrae sneered. He widened his eyes suddenly, as though he’d just remembered something of great importance.  “ Hey, did you know that she survived? Your mama.”

“ No, I didn’t know that,” I responded woodenly. I was glad for my mother that she’d survived, but the news meant about as much to me personally as hearing that a seagull had shat on a car somewhere.

McCrae nodded sagely.  “ Of course you didn’t know. How could you have? You’ve been living on this little island for - what? Must be three months now.” He turned his attention back to Erika, and I just wanted to take one of those burning logs from the fire and smack the expression right off McCrae’s face with it. The bounty hunter said to Erika: “ I’ve been looking for you for a long time, my darling. I never gave up on you, not even after you were reported missing presumed dead. Oh, by the way - they decided that the ship going down was the captain’s fault…he was drunk and with a woman when he should have been running the fucking ship. Wasn’t you, was it?” McCrae laughed but I could see a serious edge in his eyes.

Erika scowled.  “ No, it wasn’t me.”

Although I was keeping my attention focused on McCrae, out of the corner of my eye I saw Erika’s scowl turn puzzled.  “ Why have you been looking for me?” she asked.

McCrae tilted his head to one side.  “ Well, I’m a bounty hunter, see? But sometimes I do other things for people. People with lots of money and an ax to grind, if you follow? Big Leo had an ax to grind against you, Erika, an ax that was worth eight million and change to him. You remember Big Leo, don’t you?”

Erika sucked air through her teeth. Her hand found mine and we twined our fingers tightly. McCrae saw the movement and he frowned. 

“ Hey! Less of the hand-holding there - ” he waved the gun for emphasis. Erika and I dropped our hands obediently. McCrae nodded.  “ Better. Like I said, Erika, I’ve been looking for you for a long time - ”

“ And now you’ve found me,” Erika interrupted. She was angry now.  “ So what? Are you going to drag me back to Big Leo - let him do whatever he wants with me?”

I didn’t like that idea one bit. I started trying to figure out a way to get that hand canon away from Carl McCrae.

But then the bounty hunter said:  “ Oh no, I have no intention of giving you up to Leo. I told him that you were dead. Went down with the ship.”

Something cold awoke in my gut and squirmed there. I stared at the bounty hunter, my heart thudding greasily in my chest, sweat popping on my forehead and under my arms. This wasn’t going anywhere good.

“ But I never believed that,” McCrae added and he waved the gun in a way that made me cringe.  “ I know you’re too wily to die, Erika. See, all the time I was looking for you, I got to know you pretty good.” McCrae was smiling now but there was nothing humorous or friendly in that smile. His gaze slithered all over Erika’s naked body like a wet, sticky tongue. The bounty hunter was unstable, that much was pretty fucking obvious. He kept the gun aimed at a point midway between Erika and I as he explained what he intended to do.  “ I realized something, too. I realized that you and me are soul mates, Erika. We belong together.”

“ Really?” Erika said dryly.

McCrae gave a happy nod, oblivious to Erika’s sarcasm.  “ I’m going to take you away from this shitty little island, and we’re going to live together on another island. A better one than this, of course. We’ll have TV at least, and hot and cold running water to shower under.”

Forget unstable. Carl McCrae was all the way to out of his fucking gourd and gone. I risked a sideways glance at Erika, but she was keeping her gaze trained on the insane bounty hunter. She said:  “ You’re crazy if you think that’s gonna happen. I don’t love you. I don’t know you.”

“ You’ll have plenty of time to get to know me,” McCrae told her.  “ And you’ll learn to love me. I can be real sweet when I want to be.”

Oh, I would just bet. Sweet as poison. I looked around for something - anything - with which I could whack McCrae upside of his deranged head.

Erika shook her head.  “ You love whatever idea of me you’ve formed. You don’t know the real me.”

I decided it was high time I put in my dollar’s worth. I gave the bounty hunter my best game face and told him:  “ It’s not going to happen, you know. She loves me.”

I don’t know what I had hoped to achieve with my bravado. But to my annoyance, the only reaction I elicited from Carl McCrae was a laugh.  “ You know what she is, don’t you?” The bounty hunter gave me a pitying look and flicked the gun toward Erika.  “ She’s a professional con artist. She’s made her living by convincing people like you of exactly what she wanted them to think - whatever best served her purpose. You know how she managed to steal from her employer?”

I didn’t. I hadn’t asked. I didn’t care either. I hoped I was conveying this to Carl McCrae with my glare.

“ She seduced Big Leo’s son,” the bounty hunter told me. Apparently he hadn’t got my message that I didn’t care.  “ She got the combination to daddy’s safe out of that poor guy, and then she took the money and fucked off with it.”

I shot a look at Erika. Her face was crimson with anger and humiliation. She gave me a miserable little nod.  “ It’s true. I did that. And I’m sorry that I did it. I hurt that guy. But I hurt a lot of other people, too, and you know how I feel about that, Kris.”

“ I do,” I said.

Erika jutted her chin.  “ Big Leo can have what’s left of the goddamned money. It never made me happy anyway.”

McCrae shrugged.  “ That’s as maybe. Like I said, Leo thinks you’re dead. And I have no intention of disabusing him of that notion. It’s you and me now, sweetheart. But you know what? Enough chit-chat, kiddies. It’s time to go.” He pointed the gun at me.  “ You first, sweet cheeks. On your feet.”

I rose and stepped past the bounty hunter, moving slowly because I didn’t want to do anything that might spook McCrae, and because I was stalling to give myself time to think of a way of getting that damned gun away from him. Outside, on the beach, I waited whilst McCrae had Erika get up and walk outside. We were both naked in front of a crazy-ass stranger with a gun, which should have made us self-conscious, I suppose, but apparently we’d passed self-conscious a long time ago. Besides, worrying about being naked when a crazy person is pointing a gun at you is kind of redundant.

“ It’s gonna be so great, sweetie,” the crazy bounty hunter enthused as he followed Erika outside. He was grinning - a big, slack, glassy-eyed grin.  “ Where would you like to go? Any island in particular you’d like to visit?”

“ I like this island,” Erika responded dully. She frowned again.  “ How did you find me, anyway?”

McCrae’s grin vanished in an instant.  “ Everyone else has given up looking. They think the missing are all dead - shark food. Like I said. But I used a whole different set of criteria to find you. I put myself in the position of a born survivor like you on a drifting lifeboat and took it from there. I’m good at that, putting myself in other people’s heads. And you know what - you’ll adapt to another place.” McCrae gave Erika a little prod with the gun to get her moving. He fell in behind us both as we proceeded down the beach.

“ You see that dinghy?”

We looked and saw a dinghy beached on the shore. The yacht that I’d spotted earlier was anchored further out. For the first time I noticed that the slight blood-warm breeze off the water carried with it the familiar scent of salt and seaweed, and the less familiar one of motor oil. McCrae must have cut the engines far out enough that we wouldn’t hear anything whilst we slept, and then rowed in the rest of the way to the shore. That showed dedication. Crazy, insane dedication.

“ Only two of us will be leaving,” he said.  “ Can you guess which two?”

I tripped over my feet, fell to the ground. I lay there, moaning and immobile, on the sand at McCrae’s feet. I heard him snap  “ For fuck’s sake!” and felt a foot prod at my side. I made myself remain still.

“ She’s hurt, can’t you see that?” Erika cried.

McCrae loosed a string of fruity curses. From the corner of my eye I saw the bounty hunter step toward me, and lean down, his hand not holding the gun outstretched to grab me by the hair and yank me to my feet. Only he didn’t get that far. As he bent down, Erika stepped behind him and kicked him hard in back of the knees. McCrae stumbled, his legs tangling, and he pitched forward onto the sand.

Immediately I rose up, and swung the piece of driftwood in my hand that I had deliberately fallen on top of. I swung it straight at McCrae’s face where it connected squarely, smacking him across the nose and mouth. I heard bone break and cartilage snap and McCrae gave a mushy howl. The gun dropped from his hand as he made an instinctive grab for his ruined face. Blood spurted through his thick fingers and pattered onto the sand as I dropped my makeshift weapon and snatched the gun away from him instead, jumping to my feet and dancing backward with it. I kept it pointed at the bounty hunter, who kneeled in the sand and clutched both hands to his nose. He glared at me over his bloodied fingers.

I smiled.  “ Guess you’re not so good at putting yourself in other people’s heads as you thought, Carl. You never saw that coming, did you?”

“ Ad godda kid du!”

I frowned at Erika.  “ What’d he say?”

“ I think he said he’s going to kill you,” Erika explained.

I smiled again at McCrae. The gesture made my cheeks feel stretched and taut with cold. I don’t think it was a nice smile either because the bounty hunter’s eyes flashed with unease.  “ Big talker - for someone who isn’t holding the gun now,” I said.

“ What do we do now?” Erika asked. She looked out toward the moored yacht, then back to the bounty hunter.  “ How do we get rid of this fool and his boat?” 

“ First of all we need to tie him up,” I decided.

We had learned to make rope from tree bark and Erika used that to tie the bounty hunter’s hands before we marched him up the beach and sat him down until Erika bound his ankles together.

McCrae turned his head and spat blood onto the sand. He glared at us from anger-reddened eyes.  “ Du bade uh bab bishtake.”

“ We made a big mistake, did we?” I translated. I waved the gun.  “ That would be why we have the gun now and you’re hog-tied on your ass, right? Shut up, you fucking lunatic. We need to discuss what to do about you on a more permanent basis.”

We retreated inside to put on some clothes and to talk about what we should do with this lunatic who had intruded upon our solitary idyll.

Erika shook her head.  “ Jesus, I’m sorry about this. I really know how to attract the nut-jobs, don’t I?”

I gave her a wan smile.  “ Does that make me the exception?”

Erika laughed. She ran a hand through her hair, closed her eyes for a second.  “ We could put McCrae on his boat and cast them both adrift?” she suggested.

I shook my head.  “ He’d come back. That kind always come back. They’re too deep inside their own obsession to give up on it.” Erika gave me a shrewd look and I shrugged.  “ I used to read a lot. It’s not that I know these things personally or anything.”

“ Uh huh. Says the woman who followed me around a cruise ship.”

I snickered.  “ Okay, so maybe I have a wee bit of personal experience.”

We looked at each other.

“ Do you miss it?” Erika asked me suddenly.

It took a moment for me to realize that she was talking about reading books and watching TV and all those other trappings of civilization. I started to shake my head. Then I sighed and nodded instead.  “ Sometimes I think about it, yeah. Sometimes I miss stuff like toilet paper and TV and books too, yeah. I’m sorry.”

“ No, don’t apologize for being human - ” Erika smiled. She glanced through the open doorway of our little hut to where Carl McCrae sat on the sand, hog-tied and fuming.  “ We could leave him here. Take the boat and go someplace else. Maybe someplace where there’s toilet paper and televisions.”

“ And books,” I added, smiling.

Erika nodded.  “ And books, yeah. What do you think?”

I thought it was probably our only realistic option. Carl McCrae would pursue Erika to the ends of the earth, he was that obsessed with her. The only way we could rid ourselves of him was to leave the crazy bounty hunter at the end of the earth.

“ We should probably go as soon as it gets light,” Erika said. Her voice was sad and, when I looked up at her, I saw her glance around our little home with such a deep regret that it tore a hole in the center of my heart. She didn’t want to leave. But what else could we do?

“ He’ll still try to find you,” I fretted.

Erika looked at me. Sighed. Nodded.

I knew what I had to do. I grabbed the bounty hunter’s gun and stood up with it.

“ Kris, what the hell are you doing?” Erika asked. She scrambled to her feet and stepped in front of me.

I gave her an even look.  “ I’m making sure that crazy bastard can never come after us and hurt either one of us.”

Erika shook her head. Her eyes were wide and stained with fear.  “ No! I’m not going to let you do that - ” she put a hand on my arm.  “ I know what it feels like to kill people, Kris. I’ve done it, remember? It doesn’t feel good. It - it haunts you. And you don’t want that. You’re a good person, Kris. You’re not a killer. You don’t deserve to be saddled with that kind of guilt, or the self loathing goes with it. I won’t let you be, not on my account. We’ll find another way.”

I looked down at her hand on my arm. Sweat glistened on her smooth brown skin. That simple sight filled my heart with more love for her than I thought I could stand. I laid my hand on top of hers.  “ There isn’t another way. He will never stop pursuing us.”

Then I gently disengaged her hand from my arm. My heart was a hot, hard lump burning in my throat.

“ You’re not a killer,” Erika repeated.

But she was wrong. I was a killer. I was the one who had killed Sam.

I hadn’t been sure if he really did try to rape Erika or not, but I’d decided I didn’t want to take the chance. I didn’t like the idea of him even being around, out there somewhere on our island, not when I was aware that he could try to hurt Erika again. I didn’t want to kill him, however, and I didn’t plan to do so. I went to the lagoon one day and Sam was there, washing his shirt, hunkered at the waterline with his back to me. Before I knew quite what I was doing, I had a rock in my hand and I had crept up behind him. I bashed his head in with the rock and then I pushed him into the water. I think he was still alive when he went in to the water. Unconscious, but alive.

I had no intention of telling Erika about my killing Sam, however. She really was a different person now than the person she’d been when she took that fateful cruise, and she loved me. I did not want to risk destroying that. I’d rather live alone with the burden of knowing I’d killed an innocent guy. There was simply no need for Erika to have to spend the rest of her life picking those snakes out of her head, too.

Carl McCrae was grinning through his bloodied, busted nose when I stood in front of him with the gun in my hands.  “ I heard the two of you in there,” he said, and he snickered. He’d managed to clear some of the blood and snot from his busted nose so that his speech was a little clearer. “ Very touching. And I believe that you, Kris, think you meant every sappy word of it. But her - ?” Carl sneered, shook his head.  “ She’s playing you, sweet cheeks. Once a con, always a fucking con. You just can’t see it ’cos she’s got you all tangled up in her game. She’ll turn on you soon as a better mark comes along.”

“ Shut up,” I grated from between my clenched teeth. I had to keep them clenched or they would’ve been chattering out of control.

Carl shook his head again. Droplets of blood flew from his busted nose.  “ I think you’re a sad loser, Kris. No offence. It’s just my opinion. But you don’t need to do this for her. Not that I think you can do it anyway - ” the bounty hunter’s blue eyes glittered malevolently at me.  “ I think you’re too big a coward to kill someone.”

“ Wouldn’t be the first time,” I muttered.

Carl McCrae frowned. Then his eyes went wide.  “ Well, butter my ass and call me  a biscuit,” he said with a bloody grin.  “ Maybe there is more to you than meets the eye, little loser Kris.”

I tried. I really did. I tried to keep the gun pointed straight at McCrae and not let it jitter all over the goddamned place. I tried to make my finger exert the pressure needed to pull the trigger. But I just couldn’t do it. With a sharp curse, I finally lowered the gun in defeat, and McCrae started to laugh.

“ Give that to me. I’ll do it.”

I whirled around. Erika had followed me outside. Now she stood with her hand outstretched. I stared at her. Behind me, Carl McCrae had stopped laughing. I shook my head.  “ No - ” I began.

Erika cut me off.  “ You aren’t a killer, Kris, he’s right about that. But it’s not because you’re a coward. It’s because you’re a better person than that.” Erika put her hands over mine holding the gun and gently disengaged it from my grip. She gave me a grim smile.  “ But I’m not such a better person. So let me do it.”

“ Wow,” McCrae said and we both looked at him. He was grinning, but with a little less confidence now.  “ Maybe you two aren’t so very different after all. It’s hard to tell who’s gaming who here.”

I ignored McCrae. But I wanted to argue with Erika. She just didn’t give me the chance. She raised the gun, pointed it at McCrae, and I heard the safety disengage. Oddly, I felt a momentary burn of embarrassment. I hadn’t even known enough to realize the fucking safety was still on.

“ No one is gaming anyone here. Not anymore,” Erika said.

The boom of the gun going off was much louder than I had expected. My hands flew instinctively to my ears as the concussive blast rolled over me, and I stumbled backward, doubling over as my ears rang and my vision blurred. I turned my head away from the sight, but not before I had witnessed McCrae’s left knee explode like an overripe watermelon. McCrae first screamed, and then began to make the most hideous, animal keening sound of pain that I’d ever heard. I knew it would take a long time for me to either forget the sight of his knee exploding, or the sound of his pain. I threw up on the sand.

When I turned around again, Erika was using a corner of her tee-shirt to wipe the blood spatter from her face and hands.  “ Sorry you had to see that.” She gave me a grim little smile.

My ears were still ringing a little. My throat felt raw and my stomach sour from vomiting. Erika finished wiping herself down and then she stripped the t-shirt off and threw it to McCrae.

“ That’s all you get,” she said, raising her voice over his howls of pain.  “ If you survive your injuries and somehow find a way off this island, fine. But if you come after us again, next time I will fucking kill you. Do you understand? Nod if you do, Mr McCrae.”

The bounty hunter, tears streaming down his face, creating white rivulets in the blood there, managed to nod once. He grabbed at the t-shirt and held it against his ruined knee. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t survive an injury like that, not here on a desert island, with precious little hope of rescue. No one would be looking for Carl McCrae because I was sure he hadn’t told anyone what he was doing, or where he was going.

“ We need to get out of here,” I said hoarsely. I looked at the crying, bleeding bounty hunter. He seemed close to passing out. Maybe that would be a blessing for him. It’d save him hours - maybe days - of agony before he died. Then I looked sadly back at Erika.

She took my hand, smiled as she said:  “ It’s time for us to leave here. Go someplace there is electricity and cars and doctors and hospitals in case someone gets sick. You heard what McCrae said - Big Leo thinks I’m dead. That means no one else will be coming after me. We can go someplace and set up a new home there. You know what they say, Kris, home is where the heart is. My heart is with you.”

Then Erika wrapped me in a tight embrace.  “ I love you. I told you that, didn’t I?” she murmured to me.

I nodded, spoke into her shoulder.  “ I love you, too. Now, let’s get to that crazy bastard’s boat, and get out of here.”

~~***~~

And so we left our island, and we left the crazy bounty hunter there, too, despite the fact that he pled for mercy the whole time we were packing up. Erika dug up the bottles of champagne and gave those to McCrae.

“ What the fuck am I supposed to do with these?” he grated.

Erika shrugged.  “ Drink ’em. Get drunk so you don’t notice the fact that you’re injured, bleeding, alone on a desert island, and probably going to die. Or you can clean your wounds with ’em. Hell, you can smash the bottles and use ’em to slash your wrists with for all I care.”

“ You’re gonna regret fucking with me,” McCrae growled. His eyes were red with anger and pain.  “ If I get out of this hellhole alive, I will find you and I will fuck you up so bad that you’ll wish you had gone down with that goddamned ship. Both of you.”

“ Best of luck,” I told him.

On the boat, Erika indicated my journals, which I’d brought along.  “ Do you really intend to publish those?” Erika asked me, indicating the journals with her chin.

I shrugged.  “ Who knows? If nothing else, they’ll always be a personal record for us.”

We said goodbye to our home - or our first home, as Erika said. We would make a new home wherever we ended up.

“ Where should that be, d’you think? The Caribbean is nice,” I suggested.

Erika winced.  “ Maybe not the Caribbean. I kind of left someone there and I doubt he’d be too happy to see me again.”

“ Okay. Not the Caribbean then,” I said agreeably.

“ McCrae was wrong that I’ll leave you soon as a better mark comes along,” Erika said suddenly, and she gave me such a frank look that I could have hardly not believed her. I touched the side of her face gently, felt the soft flesh rub against my palm as she shook her head.  “ I’m never going to go anywhere without you, Kris.”

I took her hand in mine and gave it a brief squeeze. Then I saw her glance at the charts and maps spread out across the control panel of the yacht’s bridge.  “ When you sail anywhere, don’t you have to file a sail plan with someone?” she asked.  “ You know, like aircraft pilots have to file a flight plan with the FAA?”

I wasn’t sure whether the same rules applied to sailors, but I didn’t think anyway that Carl McCrae would have filed her plans with anyone, and I told Erika why I thought this.  “ He was coming here to kidnap you…to hold you hostage as part of some sick love fantasy he had. I don’t think he would’ve wanted anyone knowing about those plans, do you?”

Erika grimaced.  “ No, I guess not. I’ll go check out the rest of this tub. Can you get us underway?”

I said I’d figure it out.

The yacht was middle-sized but well-appointed. And it was fully fuelled-up. We could get quite far, I reckoned, before we might be forced to put into land. I heard Erika come up behind me and I explained this to her without looking around.  “ So we better choose our course carefully,” I added ruefully.

“ Ah, maybe not.”

I turned around.

Erika held a black briefcase up in front of her.  “ This might be a game changer,” she explained, and laid the briefcase on the table in front of me. She unsnapped the catches on the lid and flung it open with a triumphant flourish.

The briefcase was filled with banknotes. Used banknotes, in small denominations. I stared at the money, my jaw unhinged with shock.

“ Untraceable, I bet,” Erika said softly.

I tore my gaze away from the briefcase full of money to gawp at her instead.  “ Did that belong to McCrae?” I asked.

She nodded.  “ I guess so.”

“ How much do you reckon is there?”

“ I’m going to take a guess at about eight million and change.”

I let go with a long, low whistle. It was just too poetic. I pointed to the collection of what appeared to be notebooks and letters tucked into the briefcase along with the money.  “ And those?”

Erika lifted a journal out, flipped it open, read a few lines, then winced.

“ What is it?” I asked.

She handed the journal to me.  “ This belonged to one of those women I told you about. Christ! I didn’t even know that Marcie had - written anything like this. She went to prison for me, Kris - ” Erika shook her head disconsolately.  “ Rather than give me up, she went to prison.”

I flipped through some of the pages of the notebook in which Marcie Tanner had written.  “ She was a cop,” I murmured. For a cop to go to prison for someone…I swallowed as I slapped the notebook shut and thrust it back at Erika.  “ Marcie must’ve loved you,” I added in a choked voice.

Still shaking her head, Erika dropped Marcie Tanner’s notebook into the briefcase, and the pile of letters with it, and closed the lid.  “ We can go anywhere now, do anything. You understand that, right?”

I looked questioningly at her.  “ You once said that money isn’t everything.”

She sighed.   “ We need to survive on something, Kris.”

“ Okay.”

“ There are passports and birth certificates in a variety of names in here, too.” Erika grimaced again, shook her head.  “ McCrae really had it planned out.”

We sailed the yacht out into open ocean and then we killed the engine and disposed of anything we could find that officially connected the yacht to its erstwhile owner. Then I found the autopilot function and let the boat steer itself so that we both could stand on the rear deck and watch as we sailed away from Silver Island.

“ Au revoir, our first little home,” Erika told the island as it slid from our sight beneath the horizon. I put my arm around her and she leaned into me.  “ And God rest everyone that we’ve lost.”

“ Amen,” I murmured.

Whilst Erika took a shower, I left the yacht in autopilot and sat down to read through some of the letters and notebooks left behind by the people whose lives Erika had entered and then left. I ended up feeling sorry for most of them. I agreed with McCrae, too - as much as it pained me to admit it - that Marcie and Sloane, and probably many of the others, had been troubled people long before they came into contact with Erika. She simply had brought out a hedonistic - and ultimately fatalistic - element in their natures that had likely always lurked there. Erika, I decided, had been as much their victim as they were her victims.

I had just finished reading the first few chapters of Dale Sloane’s book when Erika reappeared: naked, wrapped in a white fluffy towel, her curly hair dark and wet, dripping on her bare shoulders, she stood behind me and put her arms around my waist. Her hair smelled of whatever shampoo she had found to use. It was a shock to smell anything from her besides sweat and salt and the coconut milk we had learned to use as a crude skin conditioner. My senses felt momentarily overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the smell.

“ You smell…different,” I told her.

She sighed.  “ I’d forgotten how good hot running water could feel.”

“ I could do with a shower myself.”

“ We could take one together?” Erika suggested, kissing my neck.  “ A girl can never be too clean - ” she ran her hands over my breasts, down my sides, making me shiver with pleasure.  “ Or too dirty, I guess. So, where are we headed anyway, Captain?”

I smiled, eyes closed, enjoying the sensation of her fingers on my skin.  “ I figured we’d go south.”

“ South sounds good to me.” Erika moved one hand from my waist down to my crotch. I sucked air in sharply as she stroked me through the thin material of my shorts. Between her clever fingers and the heady smell of the shampoo, I was wet and throbbing within seconds.

“ Maybe we could go below decks and you could find your way down to my south seas?” Erika suggested.

I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do more.

Below decks, as I explored Erika’s south seas in depth, I heard her murmur above me:  “ Here’s to forever and us, babe. It’s just you and me now.” 

Would it last between Erika and I, now that we had left our magical island and were headed to shores unknown to bump up against civilization once more? I didn’t know. I decided not to over-think it either. I was no longer the person who over-thought everything. I wasn’t that timid, self-flagellating little loser Kris, always in the shadow of her overbearing mother. In the three months had passed since the ship went down, I had changed in ways I could never have imagined. I had survived against a whole lot of odds. And I had fallen in love.

What was there to over-think?

I kissed Erika’s inner thigh and told her: “ Here’s to forever - for as long as forever lasts.”

~~***~~

That was eight months ago.

Erika and I are still together, and we’re still happy. We’ve been living under false identities, making use of the papers that we found in Carl McCrae’s briefcase. We use cash as much as we can and try not to leave a paper trail that we can’t erase - some habits die harder than others, as Marcie Tanner might’ve put it. We destroyed Marcie’s notebooks and the copy of Sloane’s book that McCrae had obtained from Big Leo, but I continued writing my own journals and incorporated much of their stories into those. I wanted to remember how I came to know Erika, the chain of events that led her into my life, and since Marcie and Sloane, and Carl McCrae too, were a big part of that, I felt the need to record their stories.

Speaking of McCrae and of Big Leo…We like to check the news from back home on the Internet every now and again. We haven’t seen or heard anything about the deranged bounty hunter, and certainly no one has filed any missing persons report on him, nor placed any classified ads in Craig’s List asking for details of his whereabouts. I can’t picture McCrae ever having had anyone in his life who cared enough about him to do that, which is kind of sad. We rather assume then that he perished on Silver Island from his injuries just as we expected he would.

Big Leo, on the other hand, made the news. Apparently he suffered a fatal heart attack whilst golfing with some buddies. Call me cold-hearted but I didn’t find that sad at all. In fact, after reading about it, Erika and I went home and cracked a bottle of modestly priced champagne and toasted Big Leo’s demise and our freedom.

We’re pretty sure that any vendetta against Erika died with Big Leo, but we’re not taking any chances. Right now we are living far from US shores and, presumably, from the reach of anyone who might succeed to Big Leo’s grudges, and so I’m not going to reveal where in the world we are right now, nor what names we live under. I’m just going to say that we are happy, and safe, and best of all, we are together.

I guess love came along at last for both of us. 

Table of Contents

Copyright

About The Author

1.  MARCIE

2.  SLOANE

3.  CARL

4.  KRIS