Saturn in Retrograde I 1:8

Part 2

Eight

What we have not made clear in the preceding narrative was a peculiar series of events that led up to the tragedy that was the cornerstone of the national headlines. What happened was terrible enough, but can anyone doubt that the fact that some one as young as little Lindsey Lavender was involved made it all the more ironic, and horrifying? Lindsey had been sleeping peacefully, innocently; her dreams a reflection of the distortions of the day. In her dreams she was often accompanied by a friendly Dwarf she thought of affectionately as "Skimmy." Skimmy was little, cute, and had a wagging dwarf beard. Skimmy could walk through walls, talk to animals, and do all sorts of things that real dwarfs obviously cannot. So let’s establish the fact, from the get-go, that Skimmy is not some form of supernatural intervention.

Jill Lavender was pacing furiously downstairs, making more racket than she, apparently, had intended to. She was waiting desperately for the sitter, and the sitter was taking her time. She walked into the kitchen to noisily crash dishes around in the sink, all the better to make the unwashed dishes seem like a smaller, tidier pile. Clutter. Crash. Bang. Lindsey Lavender was suddenly jolted awake from a very promising dream involving a man in a blue Dalmatian suit with a little blue Dalmatian cap, and a large, blue-spotted Dalmatian. It was a furious rip from the land of dreams, and in coming to, she realized that she now was not going to be able to go back to sleep anytime soon. (In such moments of sheer solitude, the imaginative faculties of children oftentimes are able to conjure certain imaginary companions to help them cope, and give them comfort. Lindsey Lavender, as we mentioned before, had just such a companion, Skimmy the Wonder Dwarf. She looked out at the darkness of her room, felt the aloneness of her young life, rolled over on one arm, and conjured Skimmy in the way that only little children and the schizophrenic are capable of.)

“Skimmy? Skimmy, are you there?” A hunched little shape seemed to creep up from the swirling shadows of the carpet. “Hey there Lindsey. Long time no see. Have any cookies for me?”

Lindsey frowned.

“No, Skimmy. I’m sorry. Mommy forgot to go to the store.” Skimmy huffed, and Skimmy puffed, and Skimmy did a little angry spin and stamped one foot.

“You mean the bitch forgot our cookies again! Damnit, now I’m going to have to creep up on her and steal her breath when she sleeps.”

“No!,” Lindsey hissed sharply.

“She’s my mommy Skimmy. You can’t steal her breath. She...just forgets things sometimes.”

Skimmy’s face suddenly grew very grave.

“I bet I know who made her forget. It was him, wasn’t it? He did it to her. She was a good mommy before she met him, wasn’t she Lindsey?”

Lindsey nodded, and then she began to weep.

“Oh, hey there Lindsey, no need to cry. We can fix him. It’s no big deal. I’ll creep up on him when he’s drunk, or stoned, or just too lazy to wake up and work. And when I do, I’ll take this short sword here, and I’ll shave off his mustache. He’d look pretty stupid without that mustache, wouldn’t he Lindsey? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

And Lindsey began to laugh a little, and agreed that, in fact, Bruce would look pretty stupid without his mustach. Skimmy bent over close to her. His breath smelled remarkably like rotten meat. Lindsey didn’t like it. She wrinkled her nose and coughed, but Skimmy said, “Sorry. I just got done eating a dead cat. Tell me, Lindsey, how would you like to help me play a little trick on Mommy?”

Lindsey thought that that sounded neat. Lindsey thought that that sounded a darn sight better than just going to sleep and waking up to the same loneliness and boredom that Sunday always promised. Skimmy said he would be right beside her all the way. Skimmy told her to get a couple of dolls and make the bed up like she was still sleeping in it. Skimmy said that when Ronnie came upstairs to check and make sure she was asleep, she would think that Lindsey was still laying there. Skimmy said he would meet her downstairs, and that she should sneak out and hide in mommy’s car. Skimmy said Mommy would think that was funny. “I’ll meet you in the backseat. Remember, you have to scrunch down in the back behind mommy’s seat, so she doesn’t know you are there. But I’ll be with you, and I’ll know. Okay? See ya downstairs!”

Skimmy quickly turned, walked to the window, snapped his fingers, and disappeared in a funny little sparkle. It looked like the sort of sparkle Santa Clause might make when he was coming down the chimney. Lindsey slowly got up, rubbed her eyes, and looked out in the gloom. More quickly, she went to the closet and began to paw through her doll collection. Bruce and another one of mommy’s boyfriends had actually bought her some here and there, to try and get in good with mommy, and some of her dolls were pretty decent. She selected the one with the blondest hair, took it over to her bed, and with the aid of a pillow and some careful organization, just managed to get everything looking right enough. Then she crept to the door, and cracked it open. She could here mommy downstairs, still rattling dishes. She had to time this right, did Lindsey Lavender. She couldn’t let mommy see her sneak out. But she wasn’t too worried. She knew Skimmy would help things out.

***

The table looked like it was drowning in suicidal refuse. It was a health nut’s worst nightmare: overflowing ashtrays, empty beer bottles, half an eaten pizza. Assembled were a strange mixture of friends and complete strangers. But nobody was a stranger at Beowulf ’s.

Drink.

Drank.

Drink.

Drunk.

And Sabrina paid for all of it with the help of a stolen credit card. Tanner’s head was bigger than a basket ball. It was amazing that his liver hadn’t decided to crawl out of his body and beg for mercy. He wasn’t even walking on the ground anymore. He was floating. Patricia Ireland had managed to become surrounded by a group of older grizzled biker types, and was busily telling them, in confab style, the details of her so-absorbing existence.

Milt Seebaum had quietly turned a whiter shade of pale, and had put his head down at the long table, the sleeve of his expensive jacket soaking in a long trickle of spilt beer. Bodies came, went, sat down, got up, made unintelligible conversation and blew away like chaff in the social wind. Every once in awhile he would poke his head up and take a massive swig of beer. He had been through three very dark, strong beers already. And he wondered, in his inebriated state, if it might not be a good idea to just get stoned later for old times sake. Upon entering, he had stayed very close to Tanner, feeling the camaraderie in both being hostage to the whims of a gun-toting psychopath and not, really, knowing what to do about it. The most perplexing exchange happened when the had both taken their seats at the top of the hour. Hour? What hour, exactly it was, could not be established. “Tanner...Tanner, what time it?” Tanner considered. Here was the same difficulty that he had run into earlier, that he had dismissed as a result of simple shock. Now, it had reared it’s ugly head between them, and demanded to be dealt with. “I don’t know Professor...my watch stopped hours ago.” He suddenly looked very grim. Or, at least, a much greater form of grim than could have been attributed to him before the odd revelation concerning the enigmatic flow of the evening’s chronology.

“So has mine apparently. I asked someone a minute ago, in the men’s room. Tanner...” He trailed off. He looked over at the bar. No clock. Amazing. How could there be no clock?

“It must just be my imagination. Maybe I’m going crazy.”

“No. No sir, you’re not.”

“Tanner...Am I fucking dreaming this?” Tanner’s mouth fell open in shock. He had never heard Milt Seebaum use the F-word before.

Alcohol flowed. Tears flowed.

“Flow my tears”, the policeman said, and then departed because even an off-duty cop really didn’t deserve to be hanging out in a place as retro-cool as Beowulf ’s. It was not a prescription for promotion.

A limbless drunk was stationed at a nearly-empty corner of the table, bent over, bawling. It was Tanner Benjamin. Sabrina, who had been busily working the hanging-meat market of worthless men, all standing with their eager groins pressing tight against their faded denim jeans, spied his meager, beaten frame out of the corner of her eye. She did an abrupt about-face, and left Peter Davenport rather more than disappointed, standing like a massive oak in the middle of the bar aisle surrounded by his buds, who must have realized the irony in having the girl he was trying to score with brush him off in favor of a weeping shorty. Nonplussed, he tried to make it look cool. He sauntered over to the long table. He would try to put on his Mr. Goodbuddy face, the face that sometimes got the chicks. He heard the asshole Sean Patterson say “Yeah, look at him go. I’m betting on the crying guy.” That was okay. They were both on the football team. Well, Sean just might get his ass kicked in the locker room come next practice. Just might, if he didn’t keep his mouth shut from now on.

“Hey...everything all right over here?”

He smiled. He had a big, broad smile roughly the equivalent of Richard Kiel's “Jaws”character in the James Bond movies. He thought himself quite the dish.

***

It was across the bridge, closer to campus. The house was very old, and packed to maximum capacity. Music (not very good music, we might add) rumbled softly from within the walls. Several people sat out on the front porch, smoking and drinking, They were an odd assortment of young men and women. Very hip. So. Every once in a while the front door would open, and someone would stumble out. Every once in awhile somebody or a group of somebody’s would amble up the sidewalk and stumble in. It was a continual flow of traffic in and out. This was a band house. And that meant party house.

“Yeah...I’m fucking rock and roll.” Biff Speedo (as he was officially dubbed that evening) sat on the couch next to Laura Larue. The small, busted coffee table in front of them was completely covered in alcohol bottles, ashtrays, food wrappers, CD covers, and what-have-yous. Around them, in an increasingly mesmerizing combination, people came and went and stood and smoked and walked in and stood in little groups and danced in their own pathetic way. Most of these people took it for granted that the main objective in life was to be thought of as tragically, pathetically cool. Biff had managed to poke a safety pin through the piercing in his left ear. He had drank an estimated twenty bears, and had some very cheap, disgusting wine. “Hey, does anyone have any cough syrup?” The skinny blond jerk came through the kitchen door, looked down at him, and then handed him a bottle of Dimetapp Elixir.

“Does this shit have codeine in it?”

“I guess.”

“Are you lying?”

“I dunno.”

The skinny blond jerk picked up his battered guitar, strummed a few chords. The living room began to empty out only slightly. The smattering of conversations was confusing, but continually punctuated with the epithet "like." The all- encompassing expression. The word for every occasion. The word for all times, and all crimes. Biff Speedo opened up the Robitussin, thought better of it, and then set it down on the coffee table where it was perched precariously next to several empty beers and a phlegm wad. “I am, like, so fruckin’ drunk, maaan. So fruckin...”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, what the fuck was up with that little bitch at the show? Was she, like, on some kind of fucking, I dunno...was that bitch ragging?”

Laura Larue, otherwise known as Danielle, sort of rotated her prodigious posteriors to the side, and cut secret wind. Danielle Laura Larue was attractive in the way an overgrown alterna-girl teenager can be. Her hair was a fire-engine red that would have caused much surprise and consternation a decade ago.

“Fuck if I know, she just comes up to me all of a sudden and she’s like ‘your boyfriend and his band mates are a bunch of fucking dickheads’, and I’m like ‘bitch, step back before I tear you a new asshole’ and then all of a sudden she acts like she’s gonna make a move and then I’m on her. Bitch better recognize.”

She laughed, took a drink of beer, belched, and put her not inconsiderably meaty thigh on Biff Speedo’s skinny leg. She was sitting on him...oh god, tonight might be the night. The skinny blond jerk said, “I hate when that sort of thing happens when we play. It’s a real distraction.”

He bent down and examined his guitar. He was the serious one. Several people walked in, said, in various ways, ‘you guys fucking rocked the house tonight man’, slapped some hands, and took various positions. “It sucks the turnout wasn’t any bigger. But...we did okay. Well, ‘cept for Joey.”

“Aw, that shit’s not even gonna fly...” Said Joey. Joey was a very small, exceptionally bucktoothed young man that had quit college to become a successful drummer in a campus bar band. He perpetually carried the same ignorant grin when under the influence of some mind-altering substance, and sulked and said nothing when not.

“Hey. Do you guys get into Saturn in Retrograde?” The skinny blond jerk looked up. “If you mean that corporate sellout band, hell no.” There was a thin, pale young flower of maidenhood standing before him. Her regulation bobbed black hair was perfect. Her slender hips looked as delectable as any had seen that night, at the bar or otherwise. Smoke wafted around her pretty form, making a sort of decorative frame. Her tee shirt read: CORPORATE ROCK STILL SUCKS. Easy mark.

“Hey, I kind of like them, okay. I’m just like a real asshole when I get done with a gig.”

“You’re a real asshole all the time, Lance.”

“Shut up”

Someone said very loudly, “I was swinging the mother fucker like this, and he was screaming, and then I let him go.”

This was followed by a very unsteady demonstration of said swinging. A Puerto Rican national exchange student cum bass player plugged a bizarre video game into the cheap-looking television. It alternated flashing colors. A marijuana pipe was produced and passed amongst those willing and eager. It was Saturday night. The young maiden took a regulation hit, coughed, and wandered out of the room. Biff Speedo turned to his band mate and said, his voice dragging like rubber, “doesn’t she know who we are?” The pot took effect quite quickly. All of a sudden, the skinny blond jerk felt himself relax. Get into the groove of the moment. Let his mind wander. During these moments, it seemed like magic lights exploded behind his eyes, and he had visions of himself and his band doing their thing. Letting loose. In empty bars across America. In the darkened, dank, density of booze-infused moments, when sweat and coolness and a desire to stay eighteen and poor forever was all that mattered in life. Righteous ones.

He was, however, thirty years old.

A small skinny woman with a hook nose walked in and said, “I just saw Crazy walking down the sidewalk. Apparently he’s dropping by.”

The woman was a university prof. She doubled as the lead singer of Poison Betty. At night, sometimes, she crocheted.

“Well I didn’t fucking invite him.” Sounds seemed warped, warbly, like everything was dragging by at half-speed. Crazy was the mutually agreed upon moniker of one Kevin Hickman, a veritable vegetable who had refused to quit talking. When under the effect of one of two various psycho-affective medications, he seemed, for a short period, to be somewhat lucid. But, somehow, always touched in a way that any “normal” person could glean after merely seven hours of acquaintance. He was also a physical mutant; no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t be out of shape. Have you ever in your life met someone like that? Who was naturally gifted with the physique of a bantam-weight boxer? Kev had had problems his entire life. To begin with, it had started when he was twelve and had sniffed glue with his favorite cousin Ernie. That had been the beginning of a long painful road: special classes, rehab, institutions. Sniffing glue can have a lasting, permanent impact, it would seem, on the psychological faculties of the sniffer. It had had such an impact on Kev. But he was handsome, in his own way. He managed to get more pussy than a toilet seat, and much of it for a single night. One particular young lady had liked him very well for a time a time and two times, until he told her about the way the television talked to him. The things that it said. What it commanded him to do. It had been almost a year since he had last set eyes on Tanner Benjamin. No, actually that’s not quite true. Maybe it had only been several months. At any rate, the last time had been real eventful. In fact, it had been in this very house.

He had busily stolen the same girl that Tanner had been chasing for a month. It had been easy, what with his mutant physique and his lack of social graces, he was a born lothario. Tanner had managed to take the whole situation in stride; he knew he didn’t want to have to fight Kev. He didn’t have any medical coverage. It had been a night of not inconsiderable alcoholic intake, and Tanner and Kev had hit the town in the loose-cannon fashion of “aw shucks big brother” that Tanner was so used to by now. They had seen a show, the same band that they had seen fifteen other times, and then they had gone back to the Saturn in Retrograde house to party with everyone. It had amounted to Kev stealing Tanner’s girl that night. Tanner’s girl was an exceptionally cold-hearted attractive young woman with not an once of caring whether or not she ripped out Tanner’s beady little heart and stepped on it under the heel of one regulation Doc Marten boot. In that respect, she was fairly typical. Tanner had drank himself into the proverbial stupor, had wandered around the house, much of it cleared out by this point, and had finally been whisked away in the piece-of-shit car owned by Kev back to Kev’s place. With the girl. It was all a part of the ritualistic torture of Tanner Benjamin. The place was a monumentally ancient, decrepit structure that seemed to be beyond the human capability of comprehension. It had roughly the architectural layout of the infamous Winchester Mystery House in California. It had been busted down into student apartments. Kev, at this time, was attempting to identify himself as a student. Somewhere, in the drunken vicinity of the brain of Tanner Benjamin, it had not been conveniently put together that this was, in fact, a house of separate apartments. But he thought that, in fact, it was simply one house. Tanner followed the budding young couple through the battered side door in one of the many odd abutments of the structure, and fell into a kind of ultra-dismal mental vegetation. Goodbyes were quickly said, and the two trudged up the immense staircase, disappearing into a the maze-like structure of the upper floors. There was little doubt about what was going to occur in those passionate morning hours. For Tanner, though, there was the comfortable downstairs area, which was wide and vacant and dim in the wee hours of the morning. He felt his buzz become sluggish. He wanted another beer. The windows were long in the way that windows were over a hundred years ago. The place must have, in it’s hey day, been a manse for some wealthy family. Tanner, not realizing that the present state of dilapidation suggested not that it was a single residence, but a plethora of residences, wondered, exactly, how in the hell Kev managed to afford it. (It will be noted for posterity that Tanner Benjamin had only known of the existence of Kev a fortnight hence, and so, in consideration of this fact, he can be forgiven for being ignorant of the details of so many of the facets of the so-charming man’s existence) He wandered into the kitchen, which was long and unhygienic looking, and very bright due to the fluorescents. He suddenly had the first few stirrings of uneasiness as he padded about, looking in the various empty cabinets. Tanner had just read the novel American Psycho by the writer Brett Easton Ellis. The novel portrays a very rich young Wall Street investment broker with the odd habit of relentlessly and brutally killing his dates. Tanner, in his own powerfully drunken way, was beginning to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Kev seemed to have money, always. Maybe rich parents. He had this big, creepy house. An inheritance? He was always with young women. Well, he was attractive and charming in a strange, repulsive way.

Then, they were never seen with him again...

had been drinking some, too. And he had had some pills. He was trashed, and he wanted to be more trashed. He had seen him curled like a little baby in a puddle of spilt beer at the farthest table. And damn, he was with the hottest female that Kev had laid eyes on in quite some time.

“Hey Tanner, what the fucks up man?”

Tanner looked up at him blearily. He looked like he had been dragged over five miles of rough road. Kev backed away, mumbled something, and then proceeded to initiate brainwashing on the very hot young lass that seemed to be hovering in circles around Tanner. “Hey, weren’t you in my freshman comp class? It was with Rudolf ?” He sized her up quickly, decided that boyish and stupid would be the best way to operate. Sabrina looked at him, nonplussed, and then said, “Hey, I don’t think so. I know you do look familiar though."

“Maybe it was at one of my karate tournaments. Do you get into karate? I have two black belts.”

“No.”

“Well, thing is when I lived with my dad out in Cali, I use to run around with this guy that was in the Eight Ball Posse, and he shot this guy who was in a rival gang, and you know it was kind of a... like a guilt with association type thing. So I started learning some moves, and I got good enough at it to start competing. But then I got all fucked up. Coke. I had to split. Came here. Now I’m clean. Except for when I smoke grass.”

This was the one that always worked. He started talking faster, building the intense magnification of his personal charisma to that fine, white-hot point that always reeled them in and left them begging for more. (Well, the dumb ones, at any rate.) Sabrina turned on her heel, and considered the options laid out before her. To one side Kev, to the other Peter Davenport (who had leaned quite far into the bar now, was sighing, and looking up and down the length at whoever and whatever seemed to have attached itself to a stool and a mug), and, below and slightly to the left, a very drunk, remorseful Tanner. ***

Milt Seebaum became that rarity at Beowulf ’s: the righteously, shit-faced academic. He swayed, nearly colliding into a few other patrons, into the filthy, foul-smelling cubbie marked "men." Unfortunately, a four hundred pound biker was busily occupying the only existent stall. His copious bowel eruptions only added a seasoning of repulsion to the entire effect, and suddenly Milt bowed before a piss stinking porcelain urinal and erupted into a veritable geyser of gushing red and black streaked beer vomit. “Ya doin’ all right, buddy-row?” The four hundred pound biker asked, erupting once again into a gastric raspberry, and Milt felt what was left of his sanity and self respect come up with his lunch, dinner, and four glasses of Stout. He was crawling now. There was a half-inch of scum on the floor, certainly a mixture of mud, dust, boot grease, urine, and saliva. It slimed the palms of his hands with it’s miasmal grit, and as he held his head up like a wagging dog, he realized that the lavatory, though it had been spinning before, was doing less so now. Driblets of puke streamed from the corners of his lips, and one nostril. Undignified, damn undignified, was all that he could think. Patricia Ireland had not vomited, but her tolerance to inebriates was much higher. In fact, she had spent the ensuing hours getting rather busily acquainted with several free-floating groups of people. She had managed to convey, to all of them, the epic saga of her life story, in fleeting bursts and to quickly turning backs. “And so, you know how it is, I was alone, and so I decided that I would...oh, he’s rude.”

“Yeah he’s like that. What did you say your name was?”

“Patricia. So anyway, like I was saying, I decided that I just couldn’t deal with all the Betsy Homemaker shit, and so I told Dan that he could take his offer, and ya know, shove it, and I decided that I wanted to go after my Masters, and so...”

Various surly, unimpressed men had already decided, based on the two red fully-blown pupils that exposed themselves during this confessional that (a) Patricia had been smoking a lot of grass, (b) She was probably more annoying straight than stoned, and, consequently, not much worth the hassle unless you were really desperate. Tanner, suddenly, had let loose. He began to bawl in the inimitable Tanner fashion, his head cradled into the crook of his arm. He sobbed in loud, guffawing gasps, and heads popped up and turned. Kev was suddenly very disgusted. He grabbed Tanner by the sleeve of his little leather jacket.

“Tanner!...what the fuck is wrong with you? What the fuck is wrong with you, man?”

He began to jerk Tanner around like a ragged doll. Several people popped up with, “he’s drunk man leave him alone.”

He pulled Tanner out his seat. Sabrina jumped into action. She began to pound Kev on the side of one meaty arm, and grabbed the other sleeve of Tanner’s jacket. Now they were involved in a taffy-pull. It was ludicrous at best. A row of beer glasses toppled across the bar, soaking various laps. Muttered cries of profanity and disgust erupted from bearded and fuzzy lips. Peter Davenport thought it was hilarious, to say the least, but thought that he would add, “aw hey man, don’t do that to the guy man. C’mon, he’s a little guy man.” He lifted not a finger to help. He no longer really considered spending the evening with the crazy bitch to be in the realm of real possibilities.

“Let him go, mother fucker!”

“Nah, I’m taking this son of a bitch outside and teaching him a lesson! You’ll like him better, afterwards. I promise.”

Tanner began to laugh. Really, really laugh. Suddenly, a four hundred pound biker stepped up behind Kev and politely told him that, if he didn’t stop what he was trying to do, the four hundred pound biker would make sure that Kev couldn’t have children anymore. Tanner was hastily let go, Kev turned around, began to apologize, to the biker, to people with wet beer lap, and finally to Sabrina. Tanner, by the force of backward projection, started to twist out of Sabrina’s grasp. But they managed to find him some stability, and he made it to his feet. A bartender walked up to Kev, got very close to his face, and told him he was kicked out on a semi-permanent basis. That had been half an hour or so ago. Maybe.

***

He walked up onto the porch, finally able to see, in the damp light coming from the door, a few faces seated around on the ledge outside, smoking cigarettes and hefting bottles. “Party here tonight?” He tried to sound hopeful. Nobody answered him. He quickly opened and shut the screen door, walked inside to find Lance from Saturn in Retrograde. The living room was trashed, but the living room was always trashed. Biff Speedo and his girlfriend had passed out on each other.

“Where’s Lance? Hey”.

No reply.

He walked into the kitchen. It was typically dirty. Where was everybody? Didn’t they realize he would be over?

***

She had never tailed anyone in her life, but she realized she had a special aptitude for it that night.

He was damn drunk though, much too drunk to be behind the wheel. He was shooting the line, weaving in and out, and barely stopping at signs and lights. He started suspecting, she knew, that she might be a cop. She could picture him, his gradual sense of unease mounting. DUI was too stupid an offense for him to tolerate getting pulled over for, especially since he had a hot piece of ass he had just paid to lay. She wondered how long it would take him to realize that it was his “old lady’s” car. He began to take odd turns, go down roads she wasn’t familiar with. Where was he going?

***

“I think we got a pig on our ass, baby. I’m gonna try to lose him”. He veered wildly, letting the steering wheel run smooth through his fingers. He knew what he was doing, He used to be a stock car driver.

“Hey baby, did you know I use to be a stock car driver?”

“No.”

She answered demurely. She was a little nervous now. She couldn’t afford to get busted again. She didn’t like jail much. She could never find anywhere to apply her makeup. He sailed through neighborhoods, down avenues, past playgrounds, through backyards, and over small critters. But she had a bead on him. She would hang his balls around his neck tonight, or she would die trying. In the backseat, crouched low and shivering with cold and fright, her ten year old daughter tried hard to maintain conversational telepathic tones with the ever-enigmatic Skimmy. Boom. Rattle. Clatter.

Skree!

Now, it was almost a chase. Now she could feel her blood pressure rise. It was well past midnight. It was the hour of the wolf.

“Oh shit. That’s no cop, baby. Know who that is?” She breathed, inwardly, an intense sigh of relief.

“Who?”

He smiled.

‘It’s my fucking sister, man.”

***

Saturn in Retrograde by Tom Baker