P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 02 - Exile on Slain Street (7 page)

He smiled back at me and moved on to the next contestant. I wasn’t sure why I was trying so hard to make an impression because I knew I wouldn’t be eliminated, but it was better to blend in convincingly. Plus, with an opaque can of beer, I could drink slowly. I saw that both Cookie and Tina were already halfway through their cocktails. Topaz was taking her time with the martini, for which I was grateful. She’d admitted on her video that she could be a mean drunk, and she and Tina had already aligned themselves against me and Cookie.

By the time all the women had drinks, Patrick had been whisked away by Wolf and the producers, but no one was sober enough to mind. Some of the women gravitated toward the stripper pole and were taking turns on it, much to the delight of the camera crew.

I wandered out to the pool area to look at the water. My beer tasted good. I could see Angel Island, but I wondered what was happening in South Park. I almost forgot about the camera guy and the sound guy standing right next to me.

Cookie walked out with her second cocktail, a margarita. “Damn. I was hoping Patrick was out here.”

“No such luck,” I replied. She may have been the only one who cared.

“Wolf’s kinda cute, too. I like that protective vibe, and what he said was pretty deep.”

I sipped my beer. “About the rooster in the garden?”

“Yeah — Patrick’s the rooster, and we gotta respect that. Deep.” She nodded solemnly.

I wasn’t ready to call Wolf the next Dalai Lama, so I just let that one go. I thought the camera guy snickered.

Kevin walked up behind us, as we were the only ones who had gone outside. “Hey, why don’t you guys have a seat?” he suggested, guiding us over to a cluster of seats by the pool. Soon, he had Lorelai join us. They moved Topaz, Tina, and Andi over to a patio table. Stacy and her rhyming posse were at their own table.

I overheard Kevin say to Greg, “These are our constellations. Let the other women fall where they choose.”

Greg asked, “Do you think Stacy’s going to make out with Tracy?”

Kevin leaned back to check out the scene, “God, I hope so. Keep a camera on them.”

I tried not to laugh. I was tempted to catch Kevin’s eye, but he was the ultimate professional. Just once, he looked at me and nodded, like he approved of my decision to align myself with Cookie.

I sipped my beer while Lorelai talked about her experience on
Bikini Girls Ahoy
. She didn’t quite realize that Cookie and I were zoning out as she discussed the importance of product placement in reality television and encouraged us to drink Major Rager as much as possible to stay on the show. Luckily, she took a breath when she finished her drink, and she offered to get me and Cookie something from the bar. I declined, telling her I didn’t want to peak too soon.

“Looks like somebody’s going to peak too soon over there.” Lorelai pointed and giggled. Stacy, plus Tracy and Casey, had decided to sit with Tina and Topaz’s crew, and they were rooting Stacy on as she took shot after shot. I noticed Greg discreetly placing buckets around the back yard, just in case someone needed to boot and rally. He was chuckling to himself.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Those three… Jesus. They’re like the Inebriated, Triple-Headed Hydra,” he giggled.

“That’s pretty good,” I agreed.

“Eliminate one, and surely another drunken ditz will spring up in her place,” Greg said. “I think I’m going to need more buckets.”

The three began swarming from corner to corner, smooching each other, trying to rub noses with strangers, picking fights and drinking from cups that weren’t theirs. They stopped only after one of them tripped over a paving stone in the garden, sending all three of them tumbling, but it wasn’t long before they got up again.

When the camera crew became bored with their drunken display and went elsewhere for more footage, Stacy stood, walked right up to me, took my beer out of my hand, and drank from it.

I reminded Stacy that the beer did not belong to her. She slurred, “Oh… yeah. And what the hell? Booze is booze!”

I had to resist the temptation to shove Stacy away. I was hired to prevent fights, not start them. At that moment, my primary concern was to make sure no one spilled beer on me or threw up on my nice boots. As I looked over the scene, with the women playing on the stripper pole, mixing drinks or collapsing into piles of flesh, booze and silicone, I realized that what transpired on reality television was actually boring. All the decadence got old after a while.

Patrick emerged from his lair with Wolf in tow. He must have had to brace himself somehow before re-entering the fray.

“Where’ve you been hiding?” Tina shouted out. She dragged him into a corner of the yard, shoved him down onto a wicker bench, and gave him a lengthy lap dance.

Patrick responded with a stifled yawn. Luckily, Tina was so absorbed in her own performance that she didn’t notice.

Lorelai had wandered off somewhere, possibly in search of more camera time. Without even making a formal pact, Cookie and I decided to stick together. I noticed her drinking steadily, building up her courage to talk to Patrick. “You’re as good as Tina is,” I told her. “You’re a professional.”

“I am. I was a gymnast, too. Anything she’s doing now, I can do with my legs behind my head.”

“You oughta show him!” I said. Encouraging Cookie had several pluses. First, it kept me blending in with the other women. Second, if Cookie did something outrageous, it would take heat off me. Third, it would annoy Tina and many of the other women I didn’t like.

The only issue with that game plan was that Cookie could be a chatterbox. Even though we’d only met that day, I already knew about her five-year-old son, how he wanted to dress as Charlie Brown for Halloween and how he was getting As in spelling. I also knew that she had an occasional twinge in her back from a stripper pole move gone wrong. Her favorite color was fuchsia: not pink, not purple, but fuchsia. And her boss gave her hell for leaving her gig at one of Houston’s finer gentlemen’s clubs to be on the show, but the boss gave in because he liked the Nuclear Kings almost as much as she did and wanted her to bring back some autographs from Patrick. Only after all that did she take a breath.

Cookie grabbed my hand. Somehow, she had managed to keep an eye on Tina while delivering another soliloquy. “I think she’s done! It’s time! You ready?”

I nodded. “Let’s do it.”

She led me over to the back of the house, far away from Patrick and Tina. I wondered why we went there, but then she dropped my hand, hiked up her denim dress, and launched into a series of cartwheels and backflips across the grass. I gasped. She tumbled all the way to Patrick, and I was worried that she would slam her foot in his face, but she landed perfectly in front of him, right between his legs and just inches from his crotch. “Hello,” she said, her voice breathy.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Wow!” Meanwhile, Tina picked up her cocktail glass and trotted back into the house. Her lower lip jutted out because Cookie had wiped her from Patrick’s memory.

“Wanna see my special trick?” Cookie asked, bending over.

He leaned in, and the cameras swarmed on the scene. “Honey, I cannot imagine what you can do to top that.”

Cookie’s display left me speechless, but I could not say the same for Topaz, who was lurking on the sidelines. I heard her snap, “Special trick? Please. He ain’t gonna be interested unless it involves her blowing bubbles out her — ”

Cookie heard Topaz running her mouth and said, “Excuse me, but I’m talking here.”

I cringed, trying not to imagine anyone blowing bubbles out of anything. Meanwhile, Cookie stepped away from Patrick and put her hand into a fist. At first, I thought she was going to pull a martial-arts trick, but then I saw her fist move toward her head. In one swift motion, she managed to stick her entire fist in her mouth.

“I don’t stand a chance,” I said aloud.

Tina, who had returned with an open bottle of booze, took a spot by Topaz. She snarled, “I hope that nasty thing washed her hands first.”

After the display, Cookie pulled her fist out of her mouth as quickly as she put it in. She smiled, and her jaw didn’t appear to be dislocated.

Patrick applauded and gave Cookie a long, lingering kiss. She fell back in rapture and surprise. Her eyes almost rolled back into her head. She sighed. “It happened.” Her reaction to the kiss made me wonder just how far she’d go to get another one.

She staggered back, and Wolf, who was among the camera crew, darted forward to catch her. He put an arm around her and fanned her with a paper plate. If Patrick was impressed with Cookie, Wolf looked like he would throw rose petals and gold dust at her feet. “Any time you need your foundation rocked, I will pour the concrete,” he announced.

Cookie gazed back at him, strands of her thick hair wrapping around him, almost like a spider web. “I totally get what you’re saying,” she replied.

Wolf didn’t say anything; he just guided Cookie to another wicker bench and kept fanning her with the plate.

With Cookie safely in Wolf’s hands, Patrick stood and spun around like he was going to cross to the other side of the pool area, but then he paused and looked at me. “So, what’s your special trick?”

“Me?” I asked.

“Standing around looking like a bumpkin,” Tina muttered. I ignored it. But how was I going to compete with Cookie? Or even with Andi’s magical boob-twitching?

In moments such as those, I usually asked myself, “What would Muriel do?” By this point, Muriel probably would have punched several of these women in the face and then dragged Patrick off in the corner for a make-out session. That would make for an amusing moment, but an extremely short reality-show season.

Then I noticed the booze bottle in Tina’s right hand. I could tell it was rum by the shape of the bottle.

“Do you have a light?” I asked Patrick.

“Yeah,” he replied. He pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket and gave it to me.

I held up my finger so he would wait. I tore the bottle of rum from Tina’s hands and took a swig, but I didn’t swallow. Then I took the lighter, flicked it on, and spat the rum right into the flame, creating a fireball that shot out over the pool and came perilously close to singeing the eyebrows off the faces of a few crew members. All their faces were illuminated in the light, reminding me that, despite the crew’s all-black outfits, their cameras weren’t hidden.

“Whoa!” Patrick clapped. “Now I haven’t seen that in a while! Well done!”

Tina snatched the bottle back from me, but she didn’t have anything to say.

“I can do it, too!” Andi, who had arrived from the bar, chirped. She ran up to Tina and tried to take the rum bottle from her.

Tina quickly pulled the bottle away. She may have been rude, but she had solid parenting instincts. “No, honey. Stick with the stripper pole. That’s your talent.”

Then, as if the shiny object dangled in front of her face had been removed, Andi shrugged and walked toward the woods that were just behind the pool. She bumped into a tree.

I felt a hand on my arm. It was Greg, wagging his finger. He pulled me away from the other women.

“Aw, c’mon, man!” Patrick protested.

Once Greg had me out of earshot and away from Patrick and the cameras, he screamed, “Do you realize what kind of problems there would have been if someone caught fire? It’s all fun and games until someone gets a third-degree burn!”

“Have you ever watched
Jackass
?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips. “I would be happy to tell viewers not to do that at home. Besides, that was minor based on what I’ve seen on other television shows. And I think Patrick liked it.”

“The least you could have done was tried your stunt with a can of Major Rager,” Greg grumbled.

Then I looked around Greg and saw Kevin standing watch in the corner. He looked right back at me and shook his head “no” slowly. I guess he needed me to turn it down a notch, and he was right, but I had to admit that I wanted to impress Patrick. And my skill didn’t involve anything related to a stripper pole or an unusually roomy mouth.

I almost walked off and left Greg flapping his gums, but he said, “Let’s get some on-the-flys. May as well do it now. Stay here.” He motioned over the chubby, placid sound guy and the skinny, jumpy cameraman who seemed to have adopted me for the night. Those two reminded me of the Tortoise and the Hare.

Next, Greg motioned to Tina, who was walking past. “Hey, Tina, c’mere, we gotta get a reaction from you, too, okay?”

He had Hare, the camera guy, aim right at Tina, and Greg started firing off questions. “What would you say is your defining characteristic?” Greg asked.

“I’m classy!” Tina said. She turned around to show off a tattoo of the Miami Heat basketball logo on the back of her shoulder.

Greg caught the cognitive dissonance between Tina’s stated “classiness” and her tattoo. “Okay, then,” he said. “Tell me about your ink.”

Tina patted her tattoo and replied, “Let’s just say I wanted to remember a very special night with some very special men.”

When she walked away, Greg stared at her butt and mumbled, “Who needs roses after group sex when you can have a team logo tattoo?” Then he turned to me. “Your turn.”

Hare started rolling, and Tortoise waved a mic in my face, but Greg struggled to find something to ask me. “I just don’t know your storyline,” he told me. “Tina, she’s the centerfold, Topaz is a fighter, Cookie’s the stripper, Dawn’s the innocent, Andi’s the resident bubblehead… what are you?”

Greg was right to be puzzled, as I didn’t know who I was supposed to be myself. The research I did for my cover did not include developing a larger-than-life character, complete with tattoos that represented my personality and after-dark preferences.

Looking at me closely, Greg scanned every detail, and then he settled on the cowboy boots. “Redneck,” he said. “Rednecks never go out of style.”

I glanced at my boots and recalled how I’d stepped on a few toes when I was trying to get to the bar. I was the farthest thing from a redneck imaginable. I was born and raised in Massachusetts. I went to boarding school. But, as a detective, I had chased after many a redneck in a trailer park, an environment ripe for divorce and cheating cases. Maybe I could swing it, I thought.