The Lady And The Tiger 5

Harleen Quinzel was used to being understood. It was like her superpower. She could make people see her vision, her understanding of the world—share in it, support it, believe in it enough to get it just a little bit closer to reality. She was sure she’d been only a little ways off from getting enough people to believe in Contaxx.

And now she couldn’t even get this… person… clearly her mental inferior… to believe in… she didn’t even know. Anything, she guessed. Her. He just kept rushing onward, pushing past everything she was trying to tell him, her ordered sequence of events, into some chaos of unvarnished… misleading… facts.

Through the curtain was a hallway. The walls were wood paneling, unlike the plaster of the sex store. She heard music thumping through the ceiling, filtering along the walls. Were they in a strip club now? Maybe under one—the hallway was slanted at an angle. Steep enough to make Harleen glad she wasn’t in a wheelchair.

“I guess you really believe in this crap, if you put in so much money that you can’t get it back out again,” Jason commented idly.

“I do! I don’t!” Harleen corrected herself. “You think I’d pay for office space if I didn’t have a product I could stand behind?”

“You don’t have a product,” Jason reminded her. “In here.”

He got the door to her. They went through into a booth the size of a cubicle. One stool stood before a collection of CRT TVs. The big kind that Harleen remembered rich kids having before televisions went HD. They were stacked together, wired to form a single image, and when she saw it, Harleen blushed and averted her eyes. Two women—beautiful, underdressed women—standing together, cuddling a little, touching each other in a far too friendly manner.

Jason sat on the stool. He patted his knee. “Here. Saved you a seat.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Suit yourself.” Jason took a dollar bill from his pocket and started smoothing it out on his pantleg. “This Ph.D of yours… don’t you have to be smart to get those?”

“I am smart!” Harleen protested.

It was all too much—too much of a reminder of when people stopped understanding her. After she’d spent so long being so convincing, it was like all at once, no one believed her. No more loans, no more dinners, not even a smile or a handshake. Felt like she’d been stricken with some medical malady. And here Jason was, giving it to her again.

“Everything was going just fine! It was all Eddie! He embezzled the money! I could’ve paid Scarpetta back if it weren’t for him!”

Jason fed his money to a slot in the wall. “Shh. The show’s about to start.”

And now he didn’t even want to hear the truth; one more man who couldn’t be bothered with the facts if they were coming from a strong, brilliant woman.

“Hi, I’m Honeysuckle,” said the brunette on the screen.

“And I’m Pussywillow.”

Jason snorted. “They had to have been last in line for stripper names. Why didn’t you tell Scarpetta about ‘Eddie’?”

Harleen watched as Honeysuckle began undressing Pussywillow. Absurdly, like they were actually in the room with her and Jason, she didn’t want to shame them by staring. Yet it was hard to look away. They seemed to enjoy what they were doing both on its own terms and how they were playing to their audience. So even without participating, Harleen felt like she was part of the performance.

“He wouldn’t believe me,” Harleen tried to explain, her eyes flicking back and forth from Jason to the screen, the life-size women who looked like they were just behind speckled glass. “Eddie and I started the company as partners, but that was years ago, he was a silent partner ever since. I was the face of Contaxx. So to Scarpetta—he’s the smartest man—it’ll look like I took his money. Which I didn’t! It was Eddie! He had all the codes, all the banking information—I didn’t even know he still kept track of those things! He always used to let me handle the finances…”

Now Harleen couldn’t look away. Her blood was coursing faster: it made sense when she was watching the screen, but turning to Jason with her heart going a mile a minute made her feel like she was hyperventilating. She watched the buttons of Pussywillow’s jacket come open, one by one, in Honeysuckle’s hands.

Pussywillow wasn’t wearing a bra. Her jacket opened up. Her breasts were well-formed, massive—Harleen wanted to bury her face in them, as enclosed in that voluptuous flesh as she would be lying on a waterbed. Then she thought about what she’d thought and blushed furiously.

“So Eddie has the money.”

Harleen whirled on him. “Yes!”

Then she craned her neck to look back at the screen, just to keep track of what was going on, and saw Pussywillow undoing the catch to Honeysuckle’s painted-on jeans. She watched Honeysuckle intently, astonished at how open the woman’s face was, how it gave away everything she was feeling. Harleen could almost feel those sensations herself as they ecstatically passed over Honeysuckle’s face…

“Where’s Eddie now?”

Harleen didn’t register what he’d said. Jason tugged on the pocket that hung down under the cuff of Harleen’s abbreviated shorts. Harleen gave over her attention like she was being mugged.

“What?”

“Where’s Eddie?”

“I don’t know!” Harleen threw her hands up. “I wish I did! I would tell Scarpetta! I would kick his ass myself! He has no right to that money, none! He says I was living it up? Fancy restaurants, expensive clothes?! I was working! Wining and dining investors! I’d like to see that little goblin get one cent for the business!”

As she ranted, Jason put an arm around her waist. The stool put him at just the right height for it. He pulled her in close, so her ass was against his shoulder, while his hand ended up on the front of her opposite thigh. Harleen squeaked. Honeysuckle and Pussywillow were taking off everything, caressing all that bare skin—even if Jason’s touch wasn’t anywhere near as forward as that, it felt like a microcosm of their lovemaking, a little pinprick that let in some of all the immense passion they were expressing.

“Tell you what,” Jason said. “After we fuck, I’ll drop you off at the cop shop. You can tell the boys in blue all about how Eddie robbed you and Scarpetta is threatening you. I’m sure they’ll be happy to arrange a meeting…”

She wasn’t wet exactly. Harleen was too… knotted it for her body to progress to that point. It was more like she was tensed at the top of a roller coaster, knowing that the only way down was to hurtle to the bottom. Her fear was equal to the rush she was being offered—maybe greater than. It pissed her off, her own nerves, that she was even being presented with this sexual intimidation in the first place.

“I can’t talk to the cops, you cretin! Don’t you get it!? The books weren’t exactly in perfect working order—that’s how Eddie was able to get the money out!”

“You cooked the books,” Jason said.

“Cooked the books!” Harleen repeated derisively. “You’re talking about things—you have no idea! I wasn’t defrauding people, I didn’t promise anything I couldn’t deliver, I just had to buy myself some time! Eddie, Eddie was the one who took advantage of me! Everything would’ve been fine if he could’ve just kept his cool, but he took the money and ran! Leaving me holding the bag! With Scarpetta! What a gentleman!”

“Yeah, he’s a real piece of work.” His fingertips skated under the cuff of her shirts.

Harleen gasped. Now he was tracing the waist of her panties. Teasing her by shifting them up and down, like at any moment, he would be pulling them off…

“Tell you what,” Jason said conversationally. “You promise me a finder’s fee, I’ll get you Eddie. Say, everything you don’t owe Scarpetta.”

Harleen guffawed. Oh, it was just too perfect. She owed Scarpetta everything. Jason would get maybe two cents before the banks foreclosed.

Sure, she’d be broke herself, but at least Eddie would be in the same boat. And she’d be alive.

Except…

“You don’t know where Eddie is, you couldn’t possibly know.”

“He took the money this morning?” Jason asked.

Harleen nodded.

“He’s at the train station.”

“The train station?” Harleen repeated dubiously.

“Uh-huh. Storm’s coming in. The airports are shut down, the roads are hit or miss. Train’s the only reliable way out of town. You point him out to me, I’ll do the rest. Of course, we won’t have time to catch the end of the show…”

Honeysuckle moaned. Harleen turned to look at her. Pussywillow’s hand was cupping, massaging her breast. The sight set off an answering sensation within Harleen. She felt like she was being caressed herself. And when Honeysuckle’s hands insinuated themselves under Pussywillow’s pubic hair, Harleen drew in her own belly as if she were on the verge of being touched herself.

“Oh my God… is it legal to show this? We’re practically in public! Anyone could walk in off the street and just…”