Chapter 2

Harry is hovering over me when I come to. His big bushy hair leads down into his big bushy eye brows that connect to his big bushy beard. The hand extending a glass of cheap booze is covered in thick black fur. I don't remember his real name.

I don't want to ruin his sofa, so I decline the drink. Harry sets it on the coffee table. I sit up and shake the cobwebs out of my head. The fog doesn't lift from the room.

Through the haze and his thick mane, I can see that someone paid Harry a visit, too. It looks like he went to the zoo and tried to measure the bottom of an elephant's foot with his face. I don't know if the rules allow me to bruise, but if they do, he's probably thinking the same about me.

The ape in a suit sat down in one of the armchairs across from me. I don't know how I missed him until now, but in the other armchair sits a long, thin, oily grease ball of a man. His face shines and sparkles in the light. His slicked back hair has more lubricant in it than most cars. Red rimmed, bug like eyes protrude out from his face over big floppy jowls. He gives me a crooked tooth smile so slick that my ex could have used it for an oleo substitute. I take the glass off the table and hold it.

Harry introduces me to Slimy. I don't bother remembering his name. Slimy apparently hired Harry to find the salesman, that's how Harry found me. The greasy looking bastard extends his hand. I just nod. I don't like him.

"Your wife's back in town," Harry says. I hope that neither of them notice that the sofa is wet behind my head. I put the empty shot glass down. "She paid me a visit," he continues and points at his purple face.

I don't correct Harry that she's not my wife. How did he recognize her? I died before I could tell him that she'd changed.

Slimy speaks up. He tells me that he's looking for a man only known as the collector. The man I'd shot was a protege of the collector. I already know that. I didn't know the name of their connection, but I don't really need to. The only information I need is that they were connected.

He and Harry suggest that Slimy and I team up. I'd rather they tie my shoes together and push me down the stairs backwards. I don't object, though. We leave Harry's office and get in my car.

Not too long ago, I had a hot dame riding shotgun next to me. Now I wonder if I'll ever be able to get the slime off the seat from my new passenger. Maybe I would only hate him if he rode next to me in silence, but he never shuts up.

Theories and conspiracies pour out of his mouth like ice cream down the sides of a cone left out in the sun during a record heatwave in the middle of the summer by a 4-year-old whose face is covered in the uneaten gooey chocolate smear and hands drip with its remnants. I get sick just hearing them. The one that irks me the most is he thinks the collector let me find the salesman. He says that the collector wanted the salesman gone.

According to Slimy, my killer is so uptight about things that he shits diamonds. Sloppy hack jobs like Angel and Lucky's office piss the collector off. So, he used me to get rid of his disappointing student.

So much crap comes out of Slimy's mouth, I don't know how much is true or how much he actually knows. Any information, no matter how contradictory, he treats as Gospel. I'd hate to be one of his choirboys.

I pull us into the only place with a lead left, the office the salesman had worked over. The secretaries should still be there and I hope to get something out of them. Slimy knows they're there, too. The twinkle in his eye and boy scout troop in his pants tells me he wants to get more out of them than I do.

The secretaries roaming the halls aren't the one the salesman changed. Dressed up in knee length skirts, blouses and vests, they all have their hair done up in neat buns. They wander about in a professional manner. The salesman would have never left them so functioning, or so plain.

Lucky's roaming the halls as we pass through. He doesn't recognize me. He has the content aura that only someone married to Angel could have. Lucky bastard. I don't say anything to him.

We burst into the boss's office. His secretary is yelling at us that he's in an important meeting and that we shouldn't disturb him. Following us in, she turns red when she sees the meeting in progress. She flees the room and closes us in.

A living blowup doll is getting handed to it from behind. She looks like someone's failed recollection of Marilyn Monroe. Her bust is way too big, like they could double as beach balls on warm summer afternoons down in Santa Monica. Her hair is way too blond, like the shade of the sand that the beach balls bounce off of. And her eyes way too vapid, like they were filled with the air that somehow wouldn't fit into her overinflated beach balls.

Slimy licks his lips and leaves an oozing trail of saliva on them that glints in the light. I can't wait to be rid of his company.

He goes over and interrupts the happy couple. He starts roughing the guy up, demanding to see the rest of the girl and pounding him for information. The girl starts humping her fingers and moans for someone to pound her.

I ignore them all and walk over to the side door in the office. The door might as well have a neon sign pointing at it saying "All Nite Nudes" it reeks of sex so much. Opening the door reveals a room full of crawling flesh. Girls identical to the one out in the office squirm about the floor. There's more than half a dozen of them. All of them are naked and outlandishly proportioned.

Two are reversed over each other so they can pleasure their partner orally at the same time. They lick their lover's tender spot while intermittently moaning. Four others have them beat as they all do the same thing, only this time forming a circle instead of a sixty nine. The remaining two aren't using their mouths, settling with ramming fists into each other.

A rank smell hits me and knocks me back a step. The odor of sex, unwashed bodies, and things unmentionable to even the most risque and loathsome of men and women trolling downtown befoul the air of the room. I don't know which makes me want to vomit more, the stench or how horribly the women have been destroyed.

They aren't even human anymore. They can't eat or drink. They can't sleep. They can't talk, unless pleas for intercourse count. That's the [i]only[/i] thing they can do. If I'd shown up a day later, they'd all be dead.

I can see the lines dangling off all of them. They're faint and broken. Maybe the salesman wasn't finished, maybe he was planning on coming back and giving them the ability to survive and that's why the strings were broken off like they are. I'm not experienced enough to know, but I doubt it. The salesman wasn't the type of guy to care about that. He'd just left the stands untied and went about his day and got shot.

Glancing over them, I can tell who was changed first by how little is left. The first girl's all but gone. I inspect the remains. There's nothing new there. It's worthless.

Her original mind is gone. That's not true. It's all there. It's all intact because of his sloppiness. She's just gone insane. What she's become has destroyed her old self. I coax bits and pieces of who she use to be to come out and to take the disappearing strand. No transformation like Angel's will take place, but she'll live. She can survive.

She can make her way downtown and make a living now. She'll never be mistaken for a conversationalist, but at least now she understands the fundamentals of society and living. Maybe she can pleasure men at night. Maybe she'll find some rich john to take care of her for the rest of her days. She has that much now.

The rest of the girls are just as bad off as she is. None of them are capable of doing what Angel did, some of them come out more functioning than the first, but they don't stray far.

I'm more than halfway through fixing them when Slimy comes and joins me. The greasy stains on his shirt are joined by blood. I don't know if he left the boss alive or not. Neither would surprise me.

What does surprise me is the second Slimy steps into the room, I can't see anymore. I can see, but I can't [i]see[/i]. The lines vanish like so many bottles of scotch in my office after a long day of reminiscing about my ex. That's how I notice that the fuzzy I'd felt ever since waking up in Harry's office wasn't from the blows to my head. It's Slimy.

He ignores the girls I've finished. They're laying about, exhausted and dehydrated. He strips and takes two of the ones that I haven't gotten to yet. He sits down and one of the girls mounts his hard member. She rides him up and down. He sticks his right hand in the other girl and pumps in time with the girl sliding on his shaft. Looking around the girl on his lap at me, he gives me a wink and a smile.

The smug bastard. He knows he's affecting my vision. I rage. I bound over and push the girl on his lap off. She tumbles into the space I just vacated. Slimy pulls his hand out of the other girl to bring it up and protect himself, but he's too slow. I slug him in the face.

Apparently he only likes to be the one giving out the blows. He looks at me with eyes burning with the promise of death and murder. What do I care? I'm already dead. I give the pompous prick a good look at the bottom of my shoe and wipe the look off his face with it. One more strike and he's out cold.

With his consciousness goes the haze. I can see again. I don't know how much longer I'll have. He could wake up at any second. I finish healing the girls as best I can and head back into the office.

The last of the former secretarial force is trying to get a rise out of the unconscious or dead body of her former boss. Her line is the strongest. The boss had special plans for her. She used to be his secretary and he'd harbored a resentment for her ever since she'd spurned his advances.

He'd paid the salesman good money to keep her mind intact so she didn't go insane. But the sudden tearing of the cord had loosened a lot of the protections and there isn't enough left to restore her to her former self.

She is far more capable than the rest of the girls. An idea comes to me. I don't let her shape herself. Holding on to the strand, I take the parts of her that I want. I take her matriarch temperament. I take her maternal instincts. I take her business sense. I take her personality and flame what's left of her self-worth.

The girl I create isn't Angel. No one can be her, but the girl I make is almost as spectacular. She lets go of the man who destroyed her life and heads to the sex room. Her presence dominates the other women. The newly birthed brothel madame readies her charges for their journey downtown and their new lives.

I leave her to her business and step out of the office. There's no one in the hallways now. It won't be long before the cops arrive. Slimy can explain everything to them. I'd rather not get tangled up.

Leads exhausted, I plan on going back and waiting in my office when my wife steps out into the hall in front of me. Not my ex, my wife. I stop and look at her. She's beautiful.

My wife is sitting at the kitchen table. She's reading one of her magazines. I recognize it. I recognize her clothes. This is a day etched into my memory. Tomorrow, I'll be framed by my partner and my life will fall to shambles. I'll be kicked from the force, my wife will leave me, and my only friend will be a liquid Scotsman. This is my last happy memory.