Page 101 of Kiss of Wrath

Some days you’re the hook, some days the hooker . . .

Two days with Roger and Company, and Miranda felt as if she’d fallen in with a bunch of nutcase criminals.

Roger, an antacid-popping Nervous Nellie, kept looking over his shoulder, expecting the demon beasties to come after him. For all Miranda knew, they might.

In the meantime, Roger had her velvet handcuffed to the headboard in one bedroom. Linda came and went throughout the apartment, the darling of all the visitors (aka prostitutes). Roger, on the other hand, had the paternal genes of a gnat.

Roger still claimed he was going to kill Miranda, but she was beginning to think he didn’t have the gonads for the job. To avoid any detection of his friend Clarence’s disappearance, Roger had taken over Clarence’s pimp business. Imagine Don Knotts as a pimp and you got the picture.

Carlotta, on the other hand, was a vicious, greedy witch who kept harping on Roger to do “the job” so they could zip off to the Bahamas with all of Miranda’s cash. Miranda had news for Roger and Carlotta. There was no cash, or little of it, and the house was tied up in a thirty-year mortgage that would take months to sell in this depressed housing market. In truth, she was probably upside-down on her mortgage.

If only she could get hold of a phone, Miranda would call for help. To Darla, whom she could only pray was all right. Last time Miranda had seen her, her friend had been lying on Miranda’s hall floor, blood flowing from a head wound. Or she could call the police, who must surely be searching for her and Linda. No. The one she would call first would probably be Mordr.

And, by the way, where was her favorite Viking anyhow? She’d thought Mordr was supposed to be her protector. You’d think he would have traced her by now. Surely, the showdown with the demon vampires was over. In fact, Roger had devoured the local newspapers the first few days, looking for news about the missing Clarence, and what he’d found was lots of missing folks in and around Las Vegas, leaving behind clothes, jewelry, watches, wallets, and nothing else. In still other places, piles of strange, smelly slime puzzled the authorities. FBI and other authorities were flooding the city, seeking answers, none of which they’d shared thus far with the public. Alien aficionados were having a heyday, claiming an invasion from another planet.

Roger came in with a lunch tray for her then and said, “I know that you know more than you’re telling me. Who or what are George and Ginette? I mean, did you see them turn into those fucking animals? And Clarence just dissolved into a pile of nothing.”

Miranda chewed on her pizza—the usual fare here above Luigi’s. “Demon vampires,” she told him, not for the first time. “That’s what George and Ginette are. They live in a place called Horror with a king named Jasper and they come hunting for bad guys like you.”

“Yeah, and I’m a fucking acrobat,” he replied with his usual disbelief, stomping off to work on his pimp duties.

A subdued Linda came into the bedroom then. She was getting a stomachache from all the junk food she was eating, thanks to her ladies-of-the-night friends. Candy, sweet soft drinks, cupcakes, and the like. “My tummy hurts,” Linda whined until she finally fell asleep on Miranda’s bed. With her hair teased and sprayed into some hooker’s idea of what a little girl should look like, and her fingernails and toenails painted a scarlet color, and her lips tinted with pink gloss, and her eyelashes mascaraed into black smudged fans, Linda looked like a caricature of a mini-adult, like one of those entrants in a child’s beauty pageant you saw on TV.

Miranda leaned down and kissed the little girl on her forehead, brushing some of the waves off her face and behind her ears. Soon, she promised. Soon we’ll be out of here, honey, and back home where we belong.

With or without Mordr? she wondered.

Well, that was irrelevant for now, Miranda decided. She had more important issues to deal with. Like, she desperately wanted a shower since she was beginning to smell her own body odor, especially when she perspired day and night with the heat from the pizza ovens down below. AC ran nonstop but didn’t accomplish much of anything.

Carlotta came in next and put the capper on Miranda’s crappy day. “I think Roger should put you to work.”

“As a psychologist. Yeah, I can see how some of you people need my help. Hookers Anonymous meets in my office once a month, if you’re interested.”

“Not as a psychologist, bitch. As a working hooker.”

Miranda burst out laughing and couldn’t stop for so long that Carlotta stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Later that day Linda walked into the bedroom playing with a handheld game. “What’s that, sweetie?” Miranda asked.

“Nothin’,” Linda answered sheepishly.

“Linda?” she inquired, recognizing child guilt when she saw it.

“I dint take it,” Linda said. “It was just sittin’ on the counter.”

Miranda took the electronic device from her to see exactly what it was and realized she was holding a cell phone. Quickly, before anyone could catch her, Miranda punched in some numbers.

“Hello, who is this?” a male said in a questioning voice, not recognizing the caller ID.

“Some protector you are, Mordr! Where the hell are you?”

“Sweetling?”

“Don’t you sweetling me. Get your butt over here before I die.”

“Die? Oh no! Did that bastard shoot you?”

“Idiot! Die of heat stroke.”