Fire and Rain Page 3

  “It’s great to see Burly again,” he said. “We don’t get together much.”

  “Why here and now?” I asked. “This doesn’t really seem like Burly’s speed.”

  “It’s not really my speed, either. But one of our buddies used to date one of the strippers. She dumped him for some guy from another club. She’s got a thing for bikers.”

  “Lots of women do,” I offered hopefully and smiled.

  “We thought we’d come and see if Johnny was telling the truth,” he said. “They are pretty hot.”

  “Which one did he used to date?” I asked, my mind struggling to focus on my work.

  Cody Sherrill shrugged. “Can’t remember. But she once threw a boot at him and nearly put out his eye.”

  “Oh,” I said, “In that case, he was dating Roxy.”

  He nodded. “That’s it.” We reached the outer doors. “Sure you’ve got to go?” he asked. “Because those girls are good dancers and all, but I prefer my women tall. And clothed.” He waited a beat. “At least at first.”

  “A sense of humor,” I said. “I like that in a man.”

  “Got a number?”

  I gave it to him.

  “Want to get together?”

  This time, I really gave it to him. With all I had. Sometimes you just have to let your lips do the talking.

  It was a good enough answer for him. When we came up for air, he grinned. “Please tell me this is all cool with Burly,” he said.

  I grinned back. “I’m sure it is,” I told him, hoping with all of my might that Burly had seen us swapping spit and was seething with jealousy.

  “See you soon?” he asked hopefully.

  “Soon,” I promised.

  As I turned to go, reluctantly leaving the lovely chemical sphere of one Cody Sherrill behind, the lights dimmed in anticipation of round two of the Tinajero sisters. The crowd sent up a huge roar and the boys from Fort Bragg started a chant. Even though they were so drunk they were propping each other up, I was pretty sure they were chanting, “I like it little! I like it little!”

  Cody and I burst out laughing and I took the opportunity to flee on a high note.

  As I emerged into the cool night air, free from the smoke and the madness, I knew only one thing for certain: men can be absolute idiots sometimes, but I love them anyway.

  Chapter Two

  I spent my evening doing all those things women do when they suspect they’re about to take their clothes off in front of a new man. I dug my lace underwear out of the bottom of the hamper, where they had long ago fused to the wicker, washed them and hung them up to dry. I bought two pounds of cottage cheese and vowed to eat nothing until the extra weight was gone. I shaved my legs for the first time in three months and hoped the hair in the drain would not clog the entire Durham County sewer system. And I actually dusted under my bed in case Cody Sherrill fell off it in the middle of hijinks and landed with a birds-eye view of the dust bunnies beneath it. Then I foraged for my high heels in the back of my closet. Watching the Tinajero sisters had left me with a yearning to be as tall as possible.

  I went to bed feeling good. I rose a solid eight hours of hot dreams later, intent on eating nothing but cottage cheese and coffee for breakfast. I had a new man in my life.

  I lasted until eight thirty, when I passed Krispy Kreme on the way into the office.

  The “HOT” sign was on.

  Oh well, it’s a scientific fact that the calories do not count if the Krispy Kremes are still warm.

  I was finishing my fourth doughnut and contemplating an insulin chaser when I reached my office in downtown Raleigh and discovered both Tinajero sisters perched on Bobby D.’s lap, cooing into his delighted ears. There was plenty of room on his lap for them both, by the way. Hell, my boss has enough room for adult quintuplets on that lap of his.

  “Good morning, Ms. Jones,” Bobby rumbled as I pushed through the door. “How nice of you to join us. Look what the cat dragged in this morning. Two delectable morsels, fresh from The Pink Pussycat.”

  The Tinajero sisters giggled at his compliment. Even Roxy had traded her rage for what looked to me like mindless delight at his absurd compliments. How does he do it?

  Now, I love my boss, all 360 pounds of him. I love every inch of his gleaming metallic polyester shirts... the gold medallions... the bad toupee... the leisure suits left over from 1979. I even love him when he’s wearing his breakfast and lunch, which is often. I wasn’t sure, however, that it was possible to love Bobby D. when he was wearing two tiny topless dancers. Especially since they were dressed in miniskirts, low-cut body skimmers, and sexy do-me pumps. They were as cute as cute can be. I looked like the Incredible Hulk next to those two.

  “I see you’ve met Roxy and Candy,” I said, brushing past them all, leaving them to drink in the inimitable vanilla and lard scent of my Krispy Kreme essence.

  “You got doughnuts?” Bobby asked, recognizing the smell like a coon dog on the trail of a possum. The one thing that will make Bobby forget women is food. Especially Krispy Kremes.

  “Ate ‘em all.” I threw my knapsack on a chair and walked back to the front room. “Next!” I announced dramatically as I gestured toward my office door.

  The Tinajero sisters hopped off Bobby D. with a flurry of cheek pats and rumpling of his plastic hair, causing his toupee to slide to one side. As Bobby adjusted it back in place, he looked disappointed that the show was over.

  “Maybe if you’d tipped them?” I suggested.

  Roxy retaliated by grinding her high heel into the top of my foot as she flounced past. The little bitch. I had to admire her for it. She was the Energizer Bunny of hostility.

  “What can I do for you ladies?” I inquired pleasantly, rubbing the top of my foot in cheerful defeat.

  “We got this late last night,” Candy said, eyes wide. She did a good lady in distress. It might make for a good act, I thought, especially if they got some bare man flesh on that stage with them, a little something for the women in the audience. Maybe a couple of male strippers who looked just like Cody Sherrill?

  “Casey,” Roxy demanded. “Are you paying attention?”

  “Sure I am,” I lied. I pulled the letter across the table to me.

  I read it with a growing sense of foreboding. The author meant business. “This is pretty harsh.” Which was putting it mildly. The letter threatened to kill both sisters, dismember them, stuff them in a barrel, set them on fire, and roll them down the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming freight train. Talk about overkill.

  I turned the envelope over, searching for a return address. Nothing. Damn crooks these days. They were always so uncooperative.

  “Was this hand-delivered?” I asked.

  Candy shrugged. “I guess. Someone left it leaning against the stage door late last night. It’s just horrible.”

  The stage door was hard to find. That meant the kook was local. Or knew the club well. Or, possibly, was very close to the sisters.

  “I need both of you to lay low,” I said. “I want to bring the cops in on this.”

  “No cops,” they answered in unison.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s bad for business,” Candy explained apologetically.

  “I thought all publicity was good?”

  “It’s what the sicko wants,” she pointed out. “Attention.”

  “I have to bring the cops in,” I said firmly. “I’ll call in a favor. They’ll keep it quiet. But you need someone to watch over you and I have a few things to do today.”

  “Like what?” Roxy demanded.

  “Like talk to your parents.”

  The girls paled.

  “They do know what you do?” I asked again, pretty sure I had covered this last night.

  “Yes,” Candy said. “It’s just... they hate being reminded.”

  “But they tolerate it?” I asked.

  “They have no choice,” Roxy said. “They need our money.”

  “Why do you have
to talk to them at all?” Candy asked.

  “Because this situation is very, very personal,” I explained. “And correct me if I am wrong, but you have pretty much spent your adult lives going from town to town, taking off your clothes, shaking your booty, and moving on. Am I right?”

  They nodded.

  “Not too many roots being put down anywhere. Am I right?”

  They nodded again.

  “Okay, then. Maybe all this is stemming from when you did have some roots, when things were more personal. From your past, ladies. Capiche?”

  They stared at me blankly.

  “Let me just eliminate all the possibilities we know about,” I said crossly, “before we go pursuing the unknown. Bobby is following up with your manager. I’ll cover your parents. After that, we’ll think of something else.”

  “Whatever,” Roxy said and I resisted the urge to backhand her across the office. “Whatever” is my single least favorite response in the world.

  “Where are you going to be today?” I asked them.

  “I have a date this afternoon,” Roxy said. “With my boyfriend. He’s riding back early from a rally in South Carolina to see me.”

  “I have a date, too,” Candy said primly. “With an acquaintance. I just need to make some costume repairs first.”

  Well, weren’t they just a hell of a lot more popular than me?

  “Fine. Stay in your hotel rooms until it’s time for your dates.” I looked them over. “Stay in your hotel rooms for the dates, too, if that’s an option.” Roxy looked like it definitely might be an option. “Then go straight to the club tonight. I’ll meet you there.”

  They hopped off my visitor’s chairs and headed out. I watched them go, amazed that they stopped to shower Bobby D. with more attention on the way. He basked in the glory of their superficial sexuality. I don’t know how that man does it. I suspect he has identified some sort of previously unknown catnip-like substance that works on female humans and bathes in it each morning.

  “They seem like nice girls,” Bobby D. offered as we watched them sashay down the sidewalk in their twin miniskirts and high heels, turning heads all the way down the block. Of course, Bobby D. applies the term “nice girl” to any woman who isn’t actually holding a knife on him at the time.

  “Is that why you were fondling them on your knee?” I asked.

  Bobby D. looked offended. “They’re the ones who hopped on me.”

  “Maybe you should think about getting some office furniture?” I suggested.

  He grunted and unwrapped a package of Hostess Sno Balls. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a spoilsport, Casey?”

  “All the time,” I admitted. “All the damn time.”

  ●

  It didn’t take me long to track down Ma and Pa Tinajero. The girls had given me the address and I took a back highway out of Raleigh, soon leaving the suburbs behind. Nothing but acres of flat and often barren fields surrounded me as I sped through the heart of eastern North Carolina, a place that has managed to resist modern times far longer than most. It can be a desolate place, with red clay and sand, instead of the rich loam of the Piedmont, and it has a disturbing propensity for drought. It’s a wonder soybeans, tobacco, and cotton were still being grown on the farms I zoomed past. I knew how much work even a small farm took—I had grown up on one—and it was amazing to me that there were still people willing to put in all of those long hours for so little reward.

  I reached the Tinajero childhood home in the early afternoon. It wasn’t much to look at. The sisters had been raised in a modular house about eighty miles east of Raleigh, surrounded by drab fields that looked too tired to grow anything except weeds. It was a step up from a trailer, the kind of prefab wooden home that hardworking rural people live in without apology. The kind of home young people flee in droves.

  No wonder the girls had stripped their way out of town. This was rural North Carolina at its most mind-numbing. The only nightlife appeared to be a Bojangles fried chicken franchise two miles down the road, just past a crossroads anchored by a tired-looking convenience store and two gas pumps. I could only imagine what being different had been like for them, surrounded by strapping farm boys and the tough country girls who married them. I’d once fled a similar patch of country myself, deep in the Panhandle of Florida. Like the Tinajero sisters, I wasn’t big on going back.

  I parked my battered old Porsche by a silver Crown Victoria that was at least fifteen years old. A license plate screaming “conservative parents” could not have done a better job of explaining why Roxy and Candy were reluctant to have me drop their dirty laundry off at this particular doorstep.

  The front door was decorated with a dried flower arrangement that had faded in the Carolina sun to the same drab gray as the surrounding fields. I knocked. Within seconds, it opened mysteriously—no one was there.

  Remembering my clients, I looked down. Aha. Mom was even shorter than her daughters. She looked like someone had thrown Church Lady in the dryer and forgotten about her until it was too late. She was wearing a prim flowered dress, heavy stockings with sensible shoes, and her hair was sprayed into a respectable bubble so brittle you could have bounced quarters off that fine Christian helmet right into the Sunday collection plate. I didn’t need the painting of a giant Jesus in the front hallway to tell me that I was entering god’s country. The woman reeked of religion.

  As always, when in the presence of fundamentalists, I suddenly felt very slutty, as if I were poised on the very precipice of Hell itself. I was wearing a low cut red tank top under an oversized men’s shirt and Mamma Tinajero was staring at my boobs like they were Satan’s minions struggling to escape so that they could get at her and drag her down into the unholy fires.

  “Can I help you?” she asked in a disapproving voice, still staring at my chest. She had some nerve ogling my boobs. Her own breasts were enormous in proportion to the rest of her and she wore a high-necked flowered dress straight out of the 1930’s that did nothing to minimize their size.

  I explained who I was and why I was there. Her eyes widened at the mention of the threats against her daughters but she opened the door and let me in.

  “I need to go get my husband,” she apologized. “He’s out back. I think he should hear this.”

  “You mean Roxy and Candy have told you nothing about what’s going on?”

  She clutched the cross that hung around her neck and stared at me, frightened. “Only that they... dance.” She looked with longing toward a distant back door. “Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll be right back.”

  She did not offer me anything to eat or drink, which told me she was flustered indeed. No respectable Southern woman would have let such an opportunity go by otherwise.

  The living room was pink and white, with bad reproductions of Baroque religious paintings, a pair of huge overstuffed armchairs, and a sofa that swallowed me up in its very pinkness the instant I sat on it, sending wafts of spray-on fabric freshener up my nose, no doubt filling me with enough chemicals to shrink what was left of my ovaries. It was like being trapped in a douche commercial with no way out.

  Firm footsteps signaled the approach of Mr. Tinajero. He was not what I had expected. Dad was a strapping six footer plus, and a rather handsome dude to boot, if you liked short dark hair slicked back, piercing blue eyes, and polyester pants pulled high over a knit golf shirt. The eyes I liked. A lot. But the rest of his look fit him badly.

  “I’m Robert Tinajero,” he said, extending a hand. “This is my wife, Lavonia.”

  Lavonia Tinajero bobbed in a weird half-curtsy, the kind of thing subservient women do to signal their presence even though they’ve just ceded the entire responsibility for communication to their husbands and are basically standing there like obedient dogs. I had stumbled onto the Little House on the Prairie, Twin Peaks-style.

  I wondered how this pair of stiffs had spawned the topless dancing Tinajero sisters. The genetics I got—mom was clearly a little person—but w
hat about their willingness to take off their clothes in front of strange men? Where had that come from?

  “Lavonia tells me Roxy and Candy might be in trouble,” Mr. Tinajero said. He had perfected the art of perching on the very edge of a pink-flowered armchair to avoid being swallowed in chintz as I had been.

  I explained about the threatening letters as best I could, downplaying their seriousness and lying my ass off when I promised them that the police were watching every move their beloved daughters made. In truth, my friend Bill Butler on the Raleigh Police Department had not yet called me back in response to my message on the subject—and I wondered if he ever would. He and I had never been serious, but he’d been rather abruptly dumped from my bed when Burly appeared in it. That I had, in turn, been dumped by Burly, and Bill had even married someone else since, had not softened Bill’s aloofness toward me. He held a grudge longer than I did. Each time I ran into him, he’d been as cold as an Eskimo pissing outside on Christmas. It would be a bummer if that was why I’d not heard back from him. Bill was the best. In so many ways.

  “I have begged and pleaded with my girls to find a better way to channel their talents,” Mrs. Tinajero said faintly. She sat on a hassock the size of Mount Fuji. The furniture was so immensely out of proportion to her body that her feet barely touched the floor. “The girls are quite intelligent. They would benefit from college.”

  “Lavonia,” Mr. Tinajero said. It was only one word, but it held the weight of all Ten Commandments. I suspected years of conflict was behind that single word.

  Mrs. Tinajero clamped her lips shut and remained silent, her Christian suffering permeating the room like a thick fog.

  She was good, I had to give her that. She had not said a word in reply and, yet, her martyrdom would have made Joan of Arc feel unworthy.

  “Lavonia and I are both devoted to doing God’s work,” Mr. Tinajero explained. “She runs a modest Christian charity administering to the spiritually lost and I help lost lambs find their way back to the land of the living.” I didn’t think he was referring to farming, but he offered no other details. “We do a great deal of good,” he continued, “but our salaries are small. What Roxy and Candy contribute to the family is significant. We could not get by without them. We have certain large expenses that must be met.”