A Twist Of Noir 103 - Alec Cizak

PATIENCE - ALEC CIZAK

I didn't normally go for blondes. I liked the dark-haired girls. Didn't matter what ethnicity. Asian, White, Latina, whatever. But this broad, she walked in, sat down right next to me. I could tell by the way she was dressed she was hookin' for a living. That didn't bother me.

"My name is Patience," she said. She shifted her legs in her sparkly little skirt. She did it slowly, making sure I noticed.

I did.

She stuck out her hand in a dainty manner.

I offered a sloppy shake, attempting to feign disinterest. "Stan Dillon," I said.

"Stan," she said, scooting as close to me as possible, making sure her legs brushed against mine, "what's a stud like you doing all alone on a Friday night?"

I laughed. "Nothing better to do, I guess."

"You a cop?"

I nodded.

"You on duty?"

I shook my head.

"You guys make a lot of money, don't you?"

I howled. "Hey Travis," I said to the bartender, "Patience here thinks I'm rolling in the green."

Travis offered up a hearty laugh and went back to counting change in the register.

"I'll bet you make enough to satisfy me," Patience said.

"Is that right?"

She nodded and leaned in close, breathed fire into my ear and whispered, "How'd you like to get down with two girls tonight?"

Wouldn't have been nothing new for me. In fact, my wife left me precisely because I had been caught up in a scandal with some online call girls. A jackass investigative reporter busted in and snapped pictures of me and two Korean hookers from the west side. At least, that was the reason the court didn't give a damn about my side of the story.

"Sure," I said.

"My friend Finesse will meet us at the Ramada on Wilshire."

I finished my drink and pretended to think about it seriously before agreeing to go with her.

*

We were on the road for five minutes without any conversation. Finally, I said, "So when'd you get to L.A.?"

"Why do you ask?"

A light rain made me concentrate more on the road than the conversation. I shrugged. Then I said, "I've never seen you at the 4200 before."

"Oh, yeah," she said, "Finesse just told me about that joint. Said there were Johnnies there who were cool with girls like us." She pulled a make-up kit out of her fake leopard skin purse and touched her face up quickly. My cop instincts started ringing.

I looked at her. She seemed familiar. "Have I busted you before?"

She shook her head, emphatically.

"It's just that sometimes I arrest a girl and she tries to get revenge by setting me up. I gotta' be safe, you know?"

"Relax, honey," she said, "I just want to have some fun." She put her hand on my leg.

I didn't protest.

She ran her fingers up and down my thigh. My cop instincts quieted down.

I decided I didn't have much to worry about. She was tiny. If she tried to pull something, I could overpower her easy enough, drop her if I had to and dump the body in an alley. Nobody would notice. Nobody would care.

Whenever I got to thinking like that, I thought about how much I wanted to just kill myself. I had seen enough human garbage and enough humans being treated like garbage that I had lost faith in the idea that anything in this world was good.

I focused on Patience's legs. She couldn't have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The only threatening signs of age were the lines on her hands, just barely announcing their presence. In two years she would be, in the eyes of shallow, materialist Los Angeles, way over the hill.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

I shook off all the negative ideas in my head. I looked at her and smiled. "I'm wondering how much I'm going to enjoy tonight." As soon as I said it, I believed it.

She rested her head on my shoulder, just like she was a regular gal or something.

*

Patience made sure I brought my handcuffs with me when we got to the hotel. That didn't bother me one bit. As soon as we were in the room, she was all over me. Clawing at me like a monster.

"Get this out of here," she said in a panting, overly-desperate voice. She nearly ripped the buttons off of my shirt.

"Alright, alright," I said, pushing her away so she didn't ruin my clothes. I took my undershirt off and threw it on the bed. I tried to remove her skirt but she slapped my hands away.

"You first," she said, tugging at my pants.

"Where's, ah, your friend?"

"Finesse will be here when it's time."

Had she not been running her hands in and out of my boxers, I might have investigated that last statement.

"Let's go!" she said as she dragged my shorts to my ankles and then shoved me backwards onto the bed.

At that point, I was laughing. The whole thing was absurd. This little woman, pushing around big bad Johnny Law. She yanked my socks off and then jumped on top of me.

Gently squeezing my waist between her thighs, surrounding me with her warmth, she snaked down and almost kissed me. I reached for her with my lips but she raised back up and, without my taking much notice, grabbed my wrists and guided them behind the steel bars at the head of the bed.

And then the cuffs, my cuffs, were around my wrists.

"Hey, baby," I said, "I'm, you know, at quite a loss here."

She put her finger over my mouth, gently. "Give me a second, lover."

I didn't protest as she used my socks to tie each of my legs to the posts at the foot of the bed. Then she walked in a slinky, sexy corkscrew to the bathroom. I could hear her talking to someone behind the door. She spoke in a soothing, tender voice.

When she came back out, she had a jar of peanut butter and a spatula in her hands.

"Whoa," I said, "I'm thinking this is gonna get pretty kinky."

"You're thinking right, mister," she said, as she sat on the bed next to me. She opened the jar and scooped out a heap of peanut butter.

"What's the plan?"

She smiled. Then she smeared the peanut butter all over my chest. It was sticky and warm and, to be honest, didn't turn me on all that much.

"Really, Patience, what do you have in mind here?"

Then I heard it, in the bathroom. Something moving around. "That your friend?" I asked, nodding towards the door.

"I told you, Finesse will be here when the time is right." She continued spreading peanut butter all over my body.

"I sure hope you got a clever way to remove this," I said, using my chin to point at the sea of brown covering me.

She stuck out her tongue and winked at me. "I told you this would be a night you would remember."

When she was finally out of peanut butter, she put the jar on the floor with the spatula inside it. Then she stood up and pulled the blonde hair off of her head. Underneath, wouldn't you know it, she was a brunette.

"You remember me?" she asked.

I closed my eyes and asked a God I didn't really believe in how I could have been so stupid. "No," I said, still not looking at her, "when did I arrest you?"

"You didn't."

I opened my eyes.

"When I was thirteen, you offered me a ride home from school. Virgil Junior High, on Vermont."

One of many sealed capsules of guilt opened up in the pit of my stomach. "Jesus," I said, "that was, like, fifteen years ago."

She nodded.

"I forgot all about it."

"I didn't," she said, "hard to forget losing your virginity to a flashlight."

At first, I failed to recognize that I had started to cry. Maybe I knew things were about to get much, much worse. "Sweetheart," I said, "you can't hold me responsible for the way I acted back then..."

She hissed, loud enough to shut me up. Before I could regroup and protest once more, she slid her panties down her legs from under her skirt and stuffed them, firmly, into my mouth.

"It's time for you to meet Finesse."

When she returned from the bathroom, she had a cage with an animal jumping around it in frantic, maniacal twitches. As she got closer, I saw that it was a rat. A big Los Angeles rat. The size of a goddamn rabbit.

"Finesse hasn't eaten in two days," Patience said. She set the cage right on my chest. The rat pecked at the peanut butter oozing up between the thin bars.

It tickled at first. Then I felt its tiny teeth scraping at my skin. I tried to scream but the panties stifled my voice.

Patience put her hand on the latch to the front of the cage. "You two will have the place to yourselves for the next three days," she said. "Good luck." Then she opened it and quickly rushed out of the room, making sure to hang the 'Do Not Disturb' sign outside as she shut the door.

I struggled for a while, whipping my body from left to right, throwing the rat, sometimes getting enough momentum to send it clear off the bed. It always found its way back.

Eventually I lost my will and passed out.

*

When I woke up, I saw that the rat had chewed a hole into my belly while I was unconscious. It was picking and choosing which elements of my intestines tasted best with the peanut butter.
Oddly, what I thought about at that moment was that once upon a time I had the opportunity to stick my gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. I always figured choosing to live was noble. The 'right decision,' as those chumps on daytime talk shows would no doubt have stated it.

BIO: Alec Cizak is a writer from Indianapolis.