Chapter 1

Jon Chladek looked on helplessly as the hooker he'd picked up a few minutes before peeled out of the little piece of cloth that passed for her dress. He couldn't imagine how she got out of it that quickly -- there had to be some sort of hidden quick-release setup, but he couldn't see how it was done. Not that he cared, because any curiosity he may have had was washed away by the sight of the gal, who was wearing a white corset and fishnets, with no bra or panties. The white of the undergarments made them stand out in stark contrast against her dark black skin.

Just perfect, he thought. It was just how he liked his women -- dark black, short, shapely, and mostly undressed. "What's your name, honey?" he asked as she sidled over to him, the dark areolas and hard nipples on her firm and shapely breasts drawing his attention.

"Tonia," she smiled, reaching out to unbuckle his belt. "I'm going to give you a ride you won't forget," she continued in a sexy voice. "What do you want to do first? Your money, your choice."

"Do you do cowgirl?" he smiled.

"Honey," she said in a sultry voice as his pants fell to the floor, "I can do anything you ask and more than you can dream of. No kissing, though."

"Why no kissing?" he asked innocently, although he knew the answer as she pushed him back onto the bed.

"That's just not how it's done," Tonia replied lustily as the phone went off. Jon ignored it; he had better and more enjoyable things to do than let himself be bothered by some pushy salesman on the phone. While Tonia was getting him all turned on, the phone rang again and again.

Finally, the answering machine gave an awkward click. "You have reached 448-8466," they heard the mechanical, computerized voice say. "You have thirty seconds to identify yourself, and leave a number where you can be reached."

"Jon, Tanisha," they heard Stan Warshawski's voice say. "Quit fooling around with each other and pick up the phone. This is unbelievable."

"Oh, shit," Tanisha said, the mood ruined just that quickly. She'd been just about ready to impale herself on her husband. "Now what the hell?"

Jon's half-sister Crystal had once commented to a group on a river trip -- Jon and Tanisha were part of the group -- that from all evidence the two of them got way more sex than most people. Neither of them were likely to deny it; "way more" might have been an exaggeration, but in the years the two of them had been together neither had ever had any cause to complain about not enough. Variety is the spice of life, and they had plenty of variety. They liked mixing their sex with role playing, and "Tonia" was Tanisha's hooker persona, only shown to Jon while they were role playing sex games.

Sometimes the play got a little realistic; Jon had actually picked his wife up off the street a few minutes before, but that wasn't anything outrageous. They both worked with a woman who occasionally did a long weekend at a Nevada brothel; with her connivance, Tonia had once been picked out of a lineup there by Jon for an hour of very intense sex. You couldn't get much more real without it being real.

"Beats me," Jon said as Tanisha got off of him and reached for the bedside phone.

"Yeah, Stan, what is it?" she asked as her husband contemplated just how sexy his wife was in that outfit. Damn, that looked good. That corset really did look dynamite on her; so did the fishnet stockings and the spike hooker heels, all she was wearing. It was nice to be able to afford such stuff these days -- they'd gone years when it had been way beyond their budget.

"Turn on your TV, you won't believe this," Stan said. "My God."

"What channel?"

"Just about any of them," Stan said. "We'll talk later, I've got other people to call." The phone abruptly clicked off.

Neither Jon nor Tanisha were much for watching TV in any form. It had probably been a month or more since they'd turned on their little portable, and if Jon recalled correctly, that had been to watch a porn tape -- not for the sake of enjoying it by itself, but to set the mood for a different set of roles. "He really sounded jacked up," Jon said, their fantasy just about evaporated. He was still seriously turned on -- that outfit she was wearing, at least what there was of it, was doing a number on him. A perfectly good buildup shot to hell.

"I suppose we'd better go see," she shrugged, making it clear from her tone of voice that she was no less disappointed than he was.

The TV was in what passed for their living room downstairs. Without bothering to get dressed any they headed down to it. In fact, Tanisha kicked off the high heels -- she didn't wear them enough to be comfortable with them going down stairs. That they were dressed for sex didn't matter; their curtains were drawn against the warm Phoenix afternoon sunlight. "I wonder what's got Stan so worked up," Tanisha said, all traces of Tonia gone now except for her clothes.

"I guess we'll find out," Jon shrugged as the picture and sound began to come up on the little TV.

"We still can't see Southern one-eleven from here," said a young woman speaking into a microphone on the screen. "Southern one-eleven is now on a long final approach for the main runway here at Keesler Air Force Base, still a few minutes out. From what we can make out over the emergency channel, things are proceeding normally. In case you're just joining us, Southern one-eleven out of Mexico City was hijacked about an hour ago. The passengers were able to regain control of the airplane, but the flight crew was severely injured in the attack. A woman business jet pilot who happened to be on board is now flying the airplane. We're told she's a very competent pilot but has never flown anything as big as this Airbus 300. Let's listen to some of the traffic over the emergency channel."

"Keesler, one-eleven," a familiar-sounding voice came through the speaker as the picture focused on a little portable radio with half a dozen microphones clustered around it. "Speed one four zero, localizer centered, coming up on the glide slope. Rate of descent now seven five zero. Runway in sight."

"Could not be better," a man replied. "We now show you eight miles out."

There were several seconds of silence. "They're a little over three minutes out," the young newscaster said into the microphone. "It's very hazy here today, and we haven't been able to pick the plane out ... oh, there it is!" On TV sets around the world, including the one in Jon and Tanisha's Phoenix living room, the scene changed to a tiny silver dot that rapidly grew closer. "If you didn't know better you'd think it was a normal landing," the young woman continued. "Neither Jennlynn Swift..."

"Holy shit!" both Jon and Tanisha yelled in unison. Jennlynn was their best friend, their sometime boss -- and the part-time prostitute who had set up their role playing at the Redlite Ranch Bordello in Nevada.

" ... nor Colonel Hadley in the tower here at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi sound excited in the slightest. Just very smooth, very professional, but they are both professionals, even though Swift has never flown an airplane of this size before..."

There were a few more exchanges, sounding very professional if a bit cryptic. "Inner marker," Jennlynn said as the aircraft was very close to the runway. The gear was now down, and they saw the nose rise a little as the wheels felt for the runway.

"Looking good," Colonel Hadley said. "Looking good ... almost there..."

With the Airbus' nose high, the main gear hit the runway, and the nose started to drop. They could see the airplane slow in what looked like a normal landing. In a few seconds, it was just taxiing down the runway. They could hear the microphone from the plane come on, and, over a background of cheers from the passengers, they heard Jennlynn say, "Keesler tower, Southern one-eleven. I'm a stranger here; you're going to have to tell me where to park this thing."

"Oh, brother," Jon said. "When the media finds out about Jennlynn's hobby, they are going to collectively shit!"

"That," Tanisha replied, "May be the understatement of the century."

Jon and Tanisha spent the next hour glued to the little portable television set, not even bothering to get any more clothes on in the process; Jennlynn was a friend, and for a long time she'd been almost their only friend. It was clear this was going to turn into trouble for her, and maybe trouble for them, too, by extension. They knew what it was like to feel uncomfortable in public, for they often felt that way themselves -- while their color difference may not have been an issue for them, it was for a lot of other people. Still, after the horror of the twin towers going down in New York the previous September, it was a good feeling to know the good guys had won one for once, and their friend had been a big part of it.

There wasn't much more to see for some time, except for repeated reruns of the same thing, interspersed with views of the plane sitting on the runway and vehicles clustered around as the passengers slowly filed off. Finally a network newscaster came on and said there was going to be a news conference with the principles in an hour or so, and until it started they were going to cut back to their regular coverage. "Well," the mostly unclad Jon said to his nearly equally unclad wife, "We might as well pick up where we left off."

"Yeah, sounds good to me," she smiled. "Let's just skip the role playing, though. I'm not sure I can get into that spirit again this afternoon."

"Me, either," Jon shrugged, and stirred to get up, made slightly more difficult in that he'd had his arm around his nearly nude wife for most of the past hour as they sat snuggled together on the couch. "Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted. We'll have to try it again sometime."

Jon lagged behind, to follow his wife up the stairs, mostly so he could have a good view of her bare butt, one of his most favorite views of her. The curve of black skin entranced him now, as it had done since the first time he'd seen it years before. It was round and firm, not too big, not too small -- a little too big for some, perhaps, but to Jon's Middle European tastes just about right. It was not the slender fanny of a skinny teenybopper, but just perfect as far as he was concerned, just like everything else about her.

Once again he marveled at how lucky he was to have her, that the winds of chance had brought them together, because once they'd gotten together they'd stuck like high-quality glue. The two of them spent most of their time together, on the job and off, and both of them liked it that way just fine, thank you. Despite coming from two very different backgrounds -- or perhaps partly because of it -- they preferred to be together and soon got uncomfortable if they were apart too long. The standing joke around their office was that to see one without the other was to know there was a bathroom involved. The longest time they'd been apart in years had come the previous May, when Tanisha had twisted an ankle slightly while on a raft trip down the Grand Canyon, and had stayed back at the raft while Jon had gone on a hike for a couple hours.