Fritz and Clint Folsom were sitting on a banquette, teasing each other through the folds and openings of their clothes in the dimly lit club and listening to the fat lady sing. This wasn't the Cologne leather club, Chains, where Fritz was the bouncer, though. As a reward for saving him twice from being fucked to death during that Rhine River cruise, Folsom had brought Fritz home with him for a week on the town in the Big Apple. The German had been like a little puppy dog—well, a St. Bernard, really—a St. Bernard in heat. He'd polished Folsom's apples repeatedly since they'd returned to Clint's New York apartment. And he practically had Folsom undressed and swinging on his prodigious dong right here in Francine's, where the American had brought him to try to get some relief from nonstop screwing in the sack.
Francine was the fat lady singing on stage. Francine and Folsom went way back to her early days, when she had to keep this club a secret. Now she was the toast of the Village. No one messed with Francine anymore.
One of Clint's favorite waiters wafted by in a tight little cocktail dress, blew the police detective a kiss on his way to another table and gave him that "just a minute, I'll be right back, Hon," wave that he did. Folsom liked Reggie. He had a dick long enough to reach your tonsils, and the two sometimes went off into one of the club's back rooms on nights he wasn't too busy and the detective was bummed out from a particularly nasty homicide, and the sassy waiter would swab Folsom's tonsils for him from the inside and make him forget about the job entirely.
"So, who's the hunk, sweetie?" he rasped at Folsom in his Bette Davis voice when he came back by the table.
Clint introduced him to Fritz, relieved at the release of pressure on his package, as Fritz offered a hand to Reggie and Reggie took her sweet time returning it.
"Francine's in rare form tonight," Folsom said to Reggie, as Reggie stared into Fritz's blue eyes and did very suggestive things with the German's beefy thumb. While Fritz and Reggie were exchanging meaningful looks, the detective took a look down on the stage. He'd seen this act of Francine's before. She did it frequently. She came out decked out in bolts of shiny satin material and big pearls and sang her best Aretha Franklin impersonation, while two comely young men slowly unwound the material until she was down to just the pearls around her neck, two gigantic pearls hanging between her thighs and big black dick to take your breath away—and her act ended with "her" doing both of the young men right there on stage at great length and with astonishing variety. All the time flashing the face of a beautiful woman and the cock of a horse. She was only half unraveled and two thirds of the way through "Respect" when Folsom gave her his attention this evening.
"You've been gone, Clint, my pet," Reggie murmured through pouty lips, "Or you would have known that Francine's retired from the stage part. She's only performing tonight because that bitch, Clarice, didn't show up for her two spots. Francine's doing this one and will repeat it later."
"Why's she stopped performing?" Clint asked. "She's still in magnificent shape."
"She's in mourning. Eddie and she have split. She says she can barely get it up anymore, let alone trot it out." Reggie leaned down into Fritz's face with her own and gave him a big, sloppy kiss while Folsom absorbed this information of the breakup. She moved the German's hand to the mound of her cocktail dress, letting Fritz know what was on offer.
Folsom had always thought that Francine and Eddie were a mismatched pair—but he'd also always thought they'd be together until one or both of them got killed from indulging in their nefarious activities. Francine was a gigantic black queen given to opulence and sweeping gestures, and Eddie was an undersized—but well-decked out—blond street punk who would forever look like a twink and would steal your balls and have them pawned in ten minutes flat if you didn't hang onto them when he was in the room. Together, they both had barely stayed on the unjailed edge of the law and just a few steps ahead of the competing neighborhood gangs for years. But as badly matched as they looked, Folsom always thought they were devoted to each other, that they'd kill for each other if they had to.
Fritz brought Folsom back out of his thoughts by pawing him roughly and intimately and trying to pull the American up on his lap between the banquette and the table. Reggie was gone now, but the waiter had revved up Fritz's engine and Clint was the one who was at hand—and well covered with hands.
Folsom liked being pawed by Fritz, though, The German had those bouncer hands all over Clint while he inhaled the American's lips with his. He had Folsom's pants down close to his knees, and a big palm under his butt with a forefinger buried someplace Clint found real interesting. And he was lifting Folsom up and over toward his lap when the couple felt the presence of someone else standing by the table.
"So, you decided to start without me?"
Fritz and Clint both looked up, and both smiled sheepishly. The missing corner of the trio that had arrived here this evening had returned to the table. Ralf. Folsom's beautiful blond Australian hunk from the Rhine River cruise.
"Yah, yah," Fritz responded good-naturedly. "You vere gone so lange, ve had given up on you."
"It's a long way to the men's room," Ralf replied with a laugh. "Past some very interesting rooms and some pretty inviting tail."
"So, I guess you're just too tired now and ready to go back to your hotel," Folsom said, teasing him.
"Not a chance, Clint," he shot back. "You promised me a good time when my cruise ship returned to port, and I'm calling you on it. Besides, you still owe me for the mistaken identity."
Folsom conceded that Ralf was right. Clint had completely misjudged—actually, misidentified Ralf—back on the MS River God when that African potentate had almost finished the American detective off. Of course it was Ralf's own fault. He hadn't bothered to tell Folsom that the third of the trio of bartenders on that cruise, Pieter, was a spitting image of Ralf himself, down to similar tattoos high on their thighs. Ralf's was a scorpion and Pieter's a crab. It hadn't been a coincidence that they were almost identical and were both bartenders on the River God cruises. They had originally joined the cruise company as a "twin" sex act, but they hadn't seen eye to eye on how slavishly to follow the lead of the men controlling the operation and had parted ways as an act. Ralf had kept some control over what he would do for the operation, while Pieter, along with the other bartender, Sven, had sold out entirely to the company. It had been Pieter, not Ralf, who had attacked and doubled Folsom with the African chief—and who had no trouble seeing the nosy American detective killed in the effort.
