Author's Note: Most names and times have been changed. Some of this is true. And yes, the title was inspired by that old Guns n' Roses song.
*
The phone rang, shaking me out of an afternoon doze. Still tasting the Jack Daniel's from this Friday's "lunch", I answered it as I untangled the wire. This was a few years ago. Phones had wires and plugged into the wall back then.
"Dave?"
"Who the fuck else would it be?" I recognized the young woman's voice, but saw no need to be polite. Michelle was my ex-fiancee's roommate, and she was fucking gorgeous. Five seven, a fucking smoking-ass body that scored a dress size two, a natural 34D, and she had the statistically unusual combination of raven-black hair and blue eyes. This was all topped with a sweet Southern drawl that was the voice of a horny angel. The problem was she couldn't have been harder to get if she actually did have wings and a halo. First, she was nice enough, but was a major cokehead with an out of town boyfriend. Second, she lived with my psychopathic ex. I still got crazy-girl ex-sex now and then, and didn't want to fuck that up by striking out with her friends. Joan had become more obnoxious since we split, but her clandestine taste for submission and masochism had grown as well. With her antisocial paranoia cutting into her social options, she still came back to me to get it. With a year left of college in a town I hated surrounded by fifteen thousand people I hated worse, I wasn't going to fuck up the one outlet I had here in town for my more unusual desires, especially as the shiny new toy called the Internet showed me new things to do to her. Joan had actually taken ninety percent of my gear when she moved out of our apartment with the excuse "she'd paid for it", forcing me to covertly build up a second set for a Northwest Airlines stewardess Joan didn't know about. I'd met her in an AOL chat room and caught up the road in Memphis on her layovers.
Back to Michelle. "Can you come over for a while?"
"Uh, I don't feel like dealing with your roommate."
"She's up in Memphis for the weekend." Huh, so she was still banging the manager from our old casino on the side. Probably the plain vanilla style, since I knew the guy was too lazy to get into BDSM. Still, Joan could give amazing blow jobs even when she wasn't cuffed so I could figure why he'd put up with her.
"OK, so what do you want? Last I knew you had a boyfriend to kill spiders for you on weekends."
"That's what I want to talk to you about."
"I am not playing fucking relationship doctor for you two again, and I have better things to do than sit there while you watch afternoon Seinfeld reruns and want to talk during the commercials. We tried that once, and I didn't care for it no matter how little you were wearing."
"Ummm, I want to talk to you about that too."
"Fine, I'll be over there in a few minutes."
Just on the odd chance Michelle was going for another good cocktease, I rationalized it as cheaper than a trip up to Memphis and the strip clubs even if I'd never get a lap dance out of her. I showered, threw on clean clothes, and grabbed my old leather flight jacket on the way out the door. The sun was going down, and the cold would come early this fall afternoon. It also covered up the cocked and locked Colt 1911A1 I wedged in my jeans behind my right hipbone. Michelle and Joan's townhouse was pretty close to where a couple frat-boy coke dealers lived, and I'd been having a disagreement with them. It was a guns-had-been-drawn-before type of disagreement. I didn't buy the stuff or use the stuff, but I didn't care for loudmouth kids who thought they were tough and who'd tried proving to me unsolicited that they were tough, so I wasn't going over there unarmed. I also had my usual four knives tucked various places from my cowboy boots to my pockets to a sleeve.
It was a fast drive. Everything in Cambridge, Mississippi was a fast drive except on football game days, and the Confederates were playing at South Carolina this week. I pulled my car in to a space at the vet's office a couple hundred yards away, and looked carefully before I got out. That black BMW was nowhere to be seen up the road.
I knocked, she answered. Her hair was messed up, and her bathrobe was tied tight. I could give a shit why she was wearing a bathrobe at three in the afternoon, I just would have been happier if it was hanging open. On the other hand, her eyes looked normal and she didn't seem twitchy. She handed me a can of Mountain Dew straight off. I took it with my left hand, scanning the room as I entered with my right hand straying back toward the Colt. She was never this nice. She was being nice enough I half expected Johnny to have given her an eight-ball to lure me in for a half-assed ambush. Fucking dipshit college kids. I'd spent too much time in the last six years bouncing bars, chasing bail jumpers, and working for psychotic Vietnam vets in the National Guard to buy the farm on account of a goofy white kid from the suburbs of Nashville who thought he was Tony fucking Montana. I made sure she was locking the door behind me, then I checked the kitchen and dining rooms for unannounced guests.
"Dave, sit down please. I really have to talk to you and you being paranoid is going to totally ruin the mood."
I sat, now keeping my eyes on her. "Your fucking dealer buddy showing up would ruin mine. I made a big gesture, by my standards, coming in to town from my little hidey-hole apartment in the woods."
"I know. I would have come out there except I never could have found it."
"Ask Joan."
"I don't want her to know about this."
"You have about three minutes to start making sense." I even looked down at my watch. I had a reputation as an unpredictable ex-military nut to keep up.